Le Crabe-tambour

1977, France, directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer

A compelling film on several levels: the colonial backdrop is convincingly sketched, while the film's structure, filled with flashbacks to several different time periods, plays with the viewer's sense of time in ways that ensure you are constantly on your guard. Despite the obviously constructed aspect to the story, there's also a realism that's at times almost literally queasy, since the film's present is set on board a naval vessel patrolling the stormy waters off the Newfoundland coast. Best of all, though, are the performances -- Jean Rochefort in a performance of extraordinary restraint, even by his standards, but with fine support from both Claude Rich and Jacques Perrin, the latter playing the kind of character who would seem to belong to high mythology if it weren't for the fact that he's based on a real French officer.

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa

2013, UK, directed by Declan Lowney

A rare big-screen adaptation that works rather well, mostly because Steve Coogan's character works so well in any format -- radio, TV, film -- since his monstrous self-absorption and complete obliviousness to the rest of the planet remain intact. The plot, of course, is entirely absurd, purely a vehicle to place Partridge in circumstances that allow him to confirm exactly what we already know about him, but the pace of the jokes is all that really matters, and the quality control in the form of writer Armando Iannucci, whose work has served Coogan so well through his career, is very much in evidence here.

World War Z

2013, US, directed by Marc Forster

Like almost all such films, this is much more effective in the sections where it reins in the scale -- the CGI set pieces look exactly like CGI set pieces, whereas the sequences with a limited cast and a cramped setting are taut and nervy. Those sections, and the dilemmas they portrayed, linger surprisingly long in the memory -- it's still a blockbuster in scope and execution, but there's something more ambitious at the core.

La Maison des bois

1971, France, directed by Maurice Pialat

Pialat's 1971 television series is an immersive, all-encompassing work, set in a small French village during the Great War and using the experiences of a handful of Parisian children sent to live with a rural family as a means to sketch French society of the time. The format is perfectly suited to Pialat's expansive, quietly observational style -- there's ample space for the privileged moment and for scenes to unspool in unhurried fashion, whether it's the lazy Renoir-esque summer picnic (with it's comedy interstices) or the tableau of weary, homesick soldiers passing through. Pialat finds ways to insert all of the key elements of wartime village life -- the home guard, the church, the school, even the local aristocracy. It's only when the film leaves the rural setting that it stumbles: the seventh and final episode seems awkwardly tagged on, undercutting the poignancy of what came before. I've read online that Pialat himself didn't like the episode, though can't find a source for that; whatever the reasons, it feels like the work of another, with far less of the subtlety that makes the remainder of the work so compelling.

Bartleby

1976, France, directed by Maurice Ronet

An intriguing film, originally made for French television but then given a cinema release, that does a fine job of imagining the Herman Melville short story at feature length. The original plot is very straightforward, perhaps best suited to short length, but Ronet expands by giving us more insight into the life of the narrator, Melville's employer (beautifully played by Michel Lonsdale, in what seems like a tailor-made role for one of such lugubrious appearance). The overall mood of ennui really gets under the skin -- it's a film that becomes more distressing the more you allow it to leach into your own emotions. Until I came across the adaptation, I had no idea that Maurice Ronet, whose piercing blue eyes enlivened so many films in the 1960s, had done any work behind the camera, but he's absolutely assured in his maintenance of tone here.

Le Cave se rebiffe

1961, France, directed by Gilles Grangier

A straightforward crime caper, but the level of professionalism on both sides of the camera ensures that it's never less than a pleasure: Gilles Grangier is no great stylist, but he keeps his story in crisp forward motion and Michel Audiard's script, if not quite as pearl-filled as in something like Les Tontons flingueurs, still has great fun with criminal argot (you really need to tune the ears in to pick up the sense at times). Gabin apparently refused point blank to leave his beloved Normandy estate for the tropical location shoot where we were supposed to first meet his character, yielding some unconvincing South American decor, but he's otherwise in fine form. Jean Gabin was only 53 when the film was made, but he plays much older -- he was never really afraid of embracing his changing physique and the roles that came with it. And Bernard Blier, perhaps because he was prematurely bald, never seemed young to start with -- whether he was playing a student in the 1930s or a rumpled policeman in the 1970s he looked remarkably similar.

Cat People

1943, US, directed by Jacques Tourneur

A genuinely strange film, an intense psycho-sexual horror that doesn't seem to have raised the concerns of the Production Code despite it being unambiguous that the plot revolves around a (married) couple debating whether or not to sleep together because of the woman's unusual beliefs about her ancestry as one of the titular cat people. Thwarted passion is the order of the day, against a backdrop of increasing tension and atmospheric staging (most obviously in the nervy stalking scene on a dark city street, but more subtly and insistently within an apartment that comes to seem like a deadly trap). The storyline is something from a fever dream, but it's acted out and directed with enough conviction that it starts to convince -- or at least to convince that the characters are convinced of what they are experiencing. Still, what's most unsettling is not the horrors that the film puts front and central but rather a story that is unironically predicated on finding a method to dispose of one wife to free a man so that he can be linked up with the one he was always destined for; no-one quite seems to notice how creepy this is (such logic is hardly unique in films of the time: Pillow of Death could excuse a grave robber/stalker his misdeeds just because he's in love).

Les Sous-doués

1980, France, directed by Claude Zidi

As an undergraduate, I did a project on French comedy films -- the kind that never get exported, but which make a mint at home, and sometimes elsewhere in continental Europe. I watched a ton of the big hits before I had ever really had a proper education in the broader swathe of French cinema, and going back now to some of my subject matter is a little dispiriting: a great many of the comedies of the late 1970s and early 1980s, in particular, are desperately flat, carelessly shot and with little rhythm. This film, most notable perhaps for an early Daniel Auteuil appearance, feels like a subpar set of sketches in the café-théâtre format; it makes you yearn for an earlier generation of comic filmmaker, a Gérard Oury or an Edouard Molinaro, directors with a much stronger sense of structure and pace whatever their other flaws.

Criss Cross

 1949, US, directed by Robert Siodmak

Though Burt Lancaster was a more experienced actor by the time of this second collaboration with Robert Siodmak, I prefer him in The Killers: I could never quite believe him here as an armored car drive back in town after two lost years, quickly back in the saddle of his old job and his old obsessions.

It doesn't much matter, though, given the film's many other pleasures -- a whiplash plot that requires serious attentiveness on the part of the viewer, some exceptionally fine location work in and around Los Angeles (often in parts of the city that no longer exist), equally alluring interior photography that showcases Siodmak's skill with unexpected and striking framing choices, and a brutally cynical ending that's surely one of the bitterest in all of noir.

The Killers

1946, US, directed by Robert Siodmak

I went on a little run of Siodmak pictures over the last couple of years but never found the time to re-watch some of his best-known films, including especially the pair he made with Burt Lancaster, who made his debut here. There are two films here, the first a little jewel of a short in which a pair of hired killers waltz into town in search of Lancaster's character. Virtually the whole sequence takes place in the confines of a diner, shot in ways that make the claustrophobic space seem far larger than it is, and the story climaxes with a shooting. The second film is a procedural, replete with carefully dovetailed flashbacks that provide us with the back story for the shooting; while the structure is familiar from latter-day TV shows like Without a Trace or Cold Case the execution here is wonderfully calibrated in its careful drip of information. Siodmak's mastery of pace and visual tone is as expected; much more surprising is the fine use of location footage, particularly for a precisely choreographed heist.

The Selfish Giant

2013, UK, directed by Clio Bernard


Something of an object lesson in how to film an impoverished community without being either sentimental or patronizing -- with the very obvious precursor being Ken Loach's near-peerless Kes over forty years ago, and not just because the two films happen to feature young protagonists. Bernard clearly knows her milieu, never flinching from depicting the details of tough lives on the margins but also avoiding wallowing in the struggles she depicts. Her two central characters are troubled and yet also rounded, resourceful lads buffeted for the most part by adults who are generally at their wits' end psychologically or financially (often both). The young boys seek validation where they can, and there are moments of great tenderness here and there despite the rough backdrop in which they live -- and honour from unexpected sources. While Bernard's storytelling is resolutely realist in tone she's also adept at finding visual beauty in unpromising settings, and when she very briefly departs from the realist mode late in the film, in a wonderfully judged sequence that parallels the opening of the film, the moment has a rare punch.

Quai d'Orsay

2013, France, directed by Bertrand Tavernier

I've been fond of Bertrand Tavernier for years: he's a remarkably adaptable director, moving across genres quite effectively, with a very crisp, straightforward style and while some of his films don't quite succeed -- L'Appât, in particular, seemed just a touch too generically anodyne -- there's always a great of interest in his filming choices. Indeed, his interviews about the making of Quai d'Orsay are fascinating in their own right, because the film was based on a graphic novel yet Tavernier abandoned many of the elements of the source material, particularly the lead character's sci-fi fantasia. That seems, to me, very much to the film's benefit, for there's at least as much scope for absurdity and oddity in the reality of one young man's experiences as a consultant in France's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Tavernier's other great bit of wisdom is to grant full rein to Thierry Lhermitte, who has perhaps never been better than here. He's in scintillating form as the minister himself, delivering a wonderful whirlwind of a performance (sometimes literally, given his propensity to sweep through his office); the only downside is that it makes you wish he'd given as much of himself to many of his earlier roles (or that the raw material was rather better).

Pain & Gain

2013, US, directed by Michael Bay

I make no claims for its profundity but the real-life material and Michael Bay's style are well-matched here -- excess is all his characters can think about, and the onscreen action is surprisingly true to the actual events behind the film, which barely bear thinking about. The problem is that any social insight is undermined by Bay's tendency to amp up Every Single Moment, whether it's with camera swirls or unexpected angles or color saturation (or all of the above and a bit more) -- he's too committed to showing us every trick in his box every time to really dig beneath the glossy surface.

Stir

1980, Australia, directed by Stephen Wallace

Bryan Brown was a busy man around 1980, moving from smaller parts to the big time with Breaker Morant and this very fine prison film, based on an actual prison riot that took place in Australia in the 1970s. Like Short Eyes a few years earlier, the film is written by an ex-con and it's very good on some of the small details of prison life, particularly, in this case, the fine gradations of power not just between prisoners and guards but within each of those groups; also like the American film, there's a bluntness about sex, particularly in the prison context, that's refreshing by more recent standards. Brown sometimes comes across as a rather lazy performer, coasting on his charm rather than pushing himself, but here he's fully committed in a role that's by turns magnetic and unsympathetic.

Othello

1952, USA/Italy/Morocco/France, directed by Orson Welles

Othello is a tough play to love, even by the standards of Shakespeare's tragedies: there's a fascination in seeing unsympathetic characters collide, but it's hard to become entirely caught up in their self-absorption since it is, self-evidently, their own. That, for me, makes Othello himself a particular challenge: he sets himself apart from other men, and when things begin to go wrong for him, even through betrayal by an intimate, it's difficult to make the emotional journey toward sympathy. In some ways, Iago is easier to identify with since his feet are so manifestly of clay. Micheal MacLiammoir does wonders with what is a very difficult part, where he must convince the other characters that he possesses virtues that the audience knows quite well to be entirely lacking in his makeup. Even more dazzling is Welles's ability to maintain a unity of tone across the film's multi-year, peripatetic shoot: while the actors' appearances vary through weight loss/gain or changes in makeup, they appear able to seamlessly draw on the same performances, and Welles makes remarkable use of the various locations in support of his actors. One extended conversation between Othello and Iago gains immeasurably, for instance, for being shot in a single take as the two men walk slowly down an apparently endless set of battlements, while elsewhere the castle interiors taking on the brooding tone of a noir city, where one senses that loyalties can swiftly be exchanged for personal gain.

L'Inconnu du lac

2013, France, directed by Alain Guiraudie

Formally fascinating, with Guiraidie filming at just a single location -- a lakeside cruising spot -- and using only natural sound. The action is pared down to a series of repeated interactions as each day blends into the next over the course of a week or so of summer, the passage of time marked mostly by the arrival and departure of cars and the greetings that punctuate each morning. The film is also a very personal meditation on gay sexuality on the part of the director, with Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) something of an avatar for Guiraudie, torn by his desire for another man despite his knowledge of that man's actions.

I'm not familiar with Guiraudie's past films -- the clips I've seen suggest a broad, even comic sensibility very much removed from the spare, controlled approach here -- but the evidence of L'Inconnu du lac suggests a director fully in control of his means, carefully orchestrating suspense by revealing just enough of his characters' motivations to create alarm in the viewer, while cleverly exploiting the semi-privacy of the apparently idyllic location so that we're uncertain of what might be hidden at any given moment. The finale departs from the apparent realism of the rest of the film, suggesting instead something of the force of a parable; I found it less satisfying as an outcome, although entirely in keeping with the actions of a character whose essential function is to represent danger, unlike the other more rounded and, in most ways, more interesting participants.

Newsfront

1978, Australia, directed by Phillip Noyce

Newsfront feels like two films uneasily stitched together: a compelling portrait of the Australian newsreel teams of the postwar, pre-television era that is interspersed with a schematic set of domestic interactions that introduce moments of melodrama on a predictable schedule. The domestic dramas are sometimes used to provide some commentary on the broader social changes at work in Australian society (such as the challenges of reconciling Catholic values with new social mores, or the uneasy relationship with the United States), but on other occasions they feel trite and distracting from the real meat of the film. The most engaging moments are all related to the actual business of making the newsreels: Noyce intercuts actual footage with some remarkably well-staged recreations, particularly of the 1955 Maitland floods, but also, in a more light-hearted vein, the long-distance Redex motor trials or the coming of television, which surely must have been seen as a greater threat than the film suggests given that the Australian newsreel industry would have been well aware of the medium's impact in the US.

Goodbye Paradise

1983, Australia, directed by Carl Schultz

A terrific showcase for the wonderful Ray Barrett in a relatively rare lead role, Goodbye Paradise is also engaging as a tweaking of noir tropes. The film opens with Barrett in voiceover, sounding suitably world-weary as he casts his eye over Surfer's Paradise, on Australia'a Gold Coast. The genre elements are front and center in the early going: Barrett plays an alcoholic former cop trying to complete a book while fending off his landlady's financial demands, and spending his evenings in some of the town's more down at heel haunts (apart from its other virtues, the film must surely have some considerable value as a snapshot of its particular time and place). The almost genial initial tone gradually shifts as Barrett begins to sense something increasingly sinister at work behind the political scenes, with the film suggesting that the Gold Coast's seediness is grounded in something more profoundly rotten (rather characteristically for this period of Australian-New Zealand film, the nefarious threat emanates at least partly from the US).

The Glass Key

1942, US, directed by Stuart Heisler

A convoluted noir that frequently gets bogged down by excessive talkiness -- the rhythm is off, with neither the zip of the gangster movies of the 1930s nor the zing of the best noir dialogue (a zip that could often prompt the viewer to overlook the plot holes). One extended sequence, in which Alan Ladd tries to manipulate a thug played by William Bendix, is symptomatic: aside from the set-up being frankly incredible, there's no good reason for the scene to unspool at such length, and neither Ladd or Bendix does much of interest with their lines. Admittedly, Ladd isn't really my cup of tea to start with; his boss, played by Brian Donlevy, is much more fun to watch.

The Glass Key was another of the films banned by the Gold Coast censor in 1947, this time primarily because of the possible implication that "crime on a large scale pays handsomely and is in itself to be admired." There's certainly an element of truth to that, even if the film takes care to ensure that those responsible for the worst onscreen crimes are indeed brought to book; the attempts to ally political and backstreet muscle do escape prosecution, though since there was no democratic process in Gold Coast at the time, it's not clear whether this would have been a major source of concern for the censors. The sultry presence of Veronica Lake may have worried them rather more.

Pillow of Death

1945, US, directed by Wallace Fox

The final in a series of low-budget chillers, this isn't a bad illustration of what you could do when you had even the limited resources of a big studio behind you. Despite the film's B status, it has some excellent old dark house sets, and a few lovely mobile shots, particularly using the crane, which makes an appearance in just the second shot. A couple of shots later, there's a nice composition from below, immediately casting suspicion on one character -- the kind of atmosphere that the film milks quite capably for an hour before revealing its shock, though I couldn't help but think that the film gave its creepiest character a free pass.

Another of the films banned by the Gold Coast censor in 1946, Pillow of Death was condemned on the basis that "During the first five minutes of this film no less than six murders are committed. Elsewhere the film contains numerous scenes of horror and violence and also a good deal of matter very unsuitable for illiterate audiences." The description of the opening minutes is wholly inaccurate, since the entire film doesn't have six murders, and they are generally shown quite discreetly. It is possible that the censor was describing another film -- the censorship board commonly reviewed several films in a single evening, usually by watching only selected reels from each picture -- but also possible that the writer mis-remembered the film or chose to exaggerate the violence in the early going. The film contains scenes of spirit communication and the moving of a body, the kind of fare that the censor often assumed would be problematic for African audiences, and that may have counted more against the film than the body count.