Other Films Seen in 2019 (36)

Le Grand blond avec une chaussure noire (1972, France, Yves Robert) January 11, 2019

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, US, Michael Curtiz) January 11, 2019

Destry Rides Again (1939, US, George Marshall) February 1, 2019

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019, US, Dean DeBlois) March 10, 2019

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018, US, Peyton Reed) March 30, 2019

The Jane Austen Book Club (2007, US, Robin Swicord) April 5, 2019

Crazy Rich Asians (2018, US, Jon M. Chu) May 17, 2019

Wonder Woman (2017, US, Patty Jenkins) May 31, 2019

Braqueurs (2015, France, Julien Leclercq) June 11, 2019

Always Be My Maybe (2019, US, Nahnatchka Khan) June 19, 2019

Snowpiercer (2013, South Korea, Bong Joon-ho) June 21, 2019

Arrival (2016, US, Denis Villeneuve) June 23, 2019

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016, US, Bryan Singer) July 1, 2019

My Cousin Rachel (2017, UK/US, Roger Michell) July 29, 2019

Runaway Jury (2003, US, Gary Fleder) July 29, 2019

Step (2017, US, Amanda Lipitz) July 30, 2019

Booksmart (2019, US, Olivia Wilde) August 2, 2019

Widows (2018, US, Steve McQueen) August 3, 2019

X-Men: First Class (2011, US, Matthew Vaughn) August 11, 2019

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, US, Quentin Tarantino) August 15, 2019

The Mule (2018, US, Clint Eastwood) September 9, 2019

Paris is Burning (1990, US, Jennie Livingston) September 23, 2019

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018, US, Desiree Akhavan) September 25, 2019

La Beauté du diable (1952, France/Italy, René Clair) September 26, 2019

Smallfoot (2018, US, Karey Kirkpatrick) October 11, 2019

Downton Abbey (2019, UK, Michael Engler) October 13, 2019

Mississippi Grind (2015, US, Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck) November 9, 2019

The Killer is Loose (1956, US, Budd Boetticher) December 5, 2019

Klaus (2019, Spain, Sergio Pablos) December 8, 2019

Love in a Fallen City (1984, Hong Kong, Ann Hui) December 17, 2019

Knives Out (2019, US, Rian Johnson) December 22, 2019

Parasite (2019, South Korean, Bong Joon-ho) December 23, 2019

The Irishman (2019, US, Martin Scorsese) December 23, 2019

Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936, US, H. Bruce Humberstone) December 24, 2019

The Old Man and the Gun (2018, US, David Lowery) December 25, 2019

Frozen II (2019, US, Jennifer Lee & Chris Buck) December 30, 2019

The Sleeping Tiger

1954, UK, directed by Joseph Losey (under the pseudonym Victor Hanbury)

As so often, a viewing choice inspired by David Cairns, this is an enjoyably ripe melodrama, over-stuffed with plot and challenges to logic, but Dirk Bogarde does good sleaze, Losey directs with great energy, and the climax has a nice bit of visual poetry to it.

The Man Who Cheated Himself

1950, US, directed by Felix E. Feist

A pretty classic, B-level noir, in which Lee J. Cobb's cop is bewitched and betrayed by a femme fatale, again a classically misogynistic trope of the genre. Cinematically, it's worth a look, with some striking shot choices, especially as the film reaches its climax, while there's surely a nod to Hitchcock's Suspicion in the prominent appearances of several glasses of milk. There's also a nice mix of San Francisco location work and back projection shots.

Tanzania Transit

2018, Netherlands/Tanzania, directed by Jeroen van Velzen

I came across this when searching for the film Transit; it's a documentary filmed aboard long-distance trains in Tanzania, and the filmmakers manage to get exceptionally intimate access to the key players, ranging from a woman who's the definition of a survivor to a preacher/scammer preying on those a little further down the pecking order than himself. It's very engagingly filmed, with camerawork that gives a sense of an expansive rather than enclose world on board.