MOST WANTED

"Passages" and "Lady Killer."

- ANTHONY LANE

There have always been strange fish floating around on the big screen. Darting to and fro, and obeying behavioral patterns of their own devising, they represent a species unknown to science. The leader of the shoal is Peter Lorre. Other examples include Harpo Marx, his soundless mouth opening and closing like a grouper's, and Klaus Kinski, a danger to everything else in the tank. Now we have Franz Rogowski, who stars in Ira Sachs's "Passages."

You may have noticed Rogowski in Michael Haneke's "Happy End" (2017) and Terrence Malick's "A Hidden Life" (2019), or as the leading man in Christian Petzold's "Transit" (2018) and "Undine" (2021). Last year, in Sebastian Meise's "Great Freedom," he played someone imprisoned for homosexuality in postwar Germany. All in all, Rogowski is not a performer to be ignored. Note the pause and lunge of his movements; the chewy lisp of his voice, which gives the impression that, even in mid-rant, he is not so much addressing other people as letting them into his thoughts; and the dark, unsleeping fervor of his stare. It is as if someone were stoking a fire inside his head. As Tomas, the protagonist of "Passages," he rubs his hands over his scalp at moments of distress, trying to put out the flames.