The Crying Game (1992)

I’m shocked how the numerous reveals of “The Crying Game” still build on me, that I find hints never noticed before: Side characters, motivations, phrases with new meanings. Stephen Rea is IRA “volunteer” Fargus, who takes part in the kidnapping of a British soldier (Forrest Whitaker) and as he guards the prisoner, foolishly befriends the man. The soldier knows Fargus’ motives are crumbling and pleads, “Go to England, find my girl, and tell her I love her.” Fargus goes and finds Dil (Jaye Davidson) and follows her, attracted and intrigued by her world, stage presence, and an aura that leaves him curious. Soon, though, our hero’s IRA accomplices (Adrian Dunbar and Miranda Richardson) return and are intent on putting our man though a suicide mission. If he fails, Dil dies. That’s only a portion of Neil Jordan’s film, which also is about an entirely different matter altogether, including how Fargus will not fight for his own life, but will kill a man for insulting his lover. Rea is fantastic, complicated, confused, then sure, and Davidson constantly turns the tables on what Fargus expects and wants, and what we expect and want. A

Spider (2002)

David Cronenberg’s “Spider” is a somber-as-ash take on a man bowed by schizophrenia that dares to not provide a miracle ending with “Big Movie Climax!” stamped in red ink. There is no escape here from the dark. We first see Dennis Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) deboard a London train, alone, shuffling, mumbling, his vital possessions – money and directions to a boarding house – stuffed in a sock. Dennis was raised in the neighborhood of his new home, and there he wonders – in his mind, for real, one does not know for sure – back to his 1950s youth with a mercurial father (Gabriel Byrne) and dotting mother (Miranda Richardson). Here’s where the spider’s web starts to form as we, through Dennis’ barely functioning mind, piece together a murder. In present day, the murk darkens as the dead mother seems to live on. Fiennes never budges from Dennis’ inner turmoil, his every move made with fear of punishment, and it’s a brilliant performance. Cronenberg traps us in Dennis’ world, itself trapped inside London’s dark-as-hell industrial gas district, which seems to exist in the same realm as David Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” another story with a narrator not only unreliable but quite mad. A-