The Avengers

2012, US, directed by Joss Whedon

I spent much of the running time here musing on how godawfully loud this would have been on the big screen, which is probably not what the makers were going for. It's not a standalone film, but the capstone for a series of adventures of generally marginal interest to me, so I suppose it's never going to work for me as intended, but more disappointing is the fact that it has very little of the sense of fun I associate with Joss Whedon -- there are a couple of enjoyable scenes of barbed dialogue but otherwise it's one long battle sequence. Bang, bang, bang.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

2011, US, directed by Brad Bird

Exhibit A, I'd have thought, in any effort to show that a major summer blockbuster can still be made with a dash of intelligence and more than a little humour while still delivering the thrills expected of the genre. Though Brad Bird seems entirely at his ease in the live action format, he imports several of the tricks of his animated background, not least the focus on tiny details scattered throughout the frame that make watching a picture like Ratatouille such a continually rewarding experience, while also finding an easy mix between light-hearted dialogue and action that eludes many other pictures, not least Tom Cruise's prior effort.

Utu

1983, New Zealand, directed by Geoff Murphy

That rare film that arguably makes a genuine difference to historical understanding of its particular time period, without actually being historically accurate, Geoff Murphy's "Kiwi western" ended up being screened for a couple of generations of New Zealand students as part of their history syllabus -- part of a wave of historical revisionism that also saw James Belich's book The New Zealand Wars become a somewhat unlikely local hit.

Murphy's aim is not so much to clarify the actual events of the mid-19th century as to give a sense of the cross-cutting motivations, conflicts, and interdependencies of settlers, Maori (who had far more than a single agenda), and the British army. The various actors come into strikingly close contact at times: these people often knew each other intimately whether they were on friendly or unfriendly terms, and the film is especially strong on giving virtually everyone (save the British commander) considerable nuance of character.

It's also highly assured from a technical standpoint, in contrast to the patched together qualities of Murphy's Wild Man, and Murphy finds some stirring beauty in the New Zealand landscape years before Peter Jackson altered the field; the sequences of horsemen crossing the sun-dappled land recall Breaker Morant, another film that did its utmost to rework our understanding of the British colonial record. And all this without sacrificing thrills and spills, whether it's the set piece attack on a settler home or the iconic Kiwi cinema moment when Bruno Lawrence raises his quadruple-barrelled shotgun for the first time.

Rolling Thunder

1977, US, directed by John Flynn

The core idea here is to see just what happens when you push someone to the edge, and then right over -- classic exploitation stuff, but handled with considerable skill, and, until the finale, a surprising degree of tact in terms of how to show, or not show, scenes of violence. Indeed, much of the tension comes from the idea that we're not quite sure which direction things could go. Politically, the film remains a little muddled -- it's clearly critical of the ways that veterans of Vietnam are treated, and is somewhat ahead of its time in the focus on PTSD, but it never really delves into the fact that virtually all of the "bad" folk are non-white, across the border or overseas, even if a token Anglo creates further confusion. William Devane and, in a smaller role, Tommy Lee Jones are both very strong, depicting men desperately trying to hold it together in a world that has moved on and papered over the experiences that have become central to their lives.

Heaven's Gate

1980, US, directed by Michael Cimino

I'd never read Steven Bach's chronicle of the making of Heaven's Gate (or at least the parts he could recount, since his fellow executive David Field and director Michael Cimino withheld their cooperation), and revisited the film before cracking the spine. Even as a film, never mind as a financial endeavour, the picture has its problems, at least if you approach it hoping for some of the conventional pleasures of Hollywood -- a clear storyline, reasonably well-developed characters, and so forth.

Although I'm by no means averse to cinema that takes its time making a point, or even taking time to be the point itself, the mix of epic, technically impeccable staging and almost interminable point-making here seems awkward at best. While the prologue is designed to give the film a greater resonance, rather than condemning it to the then-unfashionable Western genre, I found it so unengaging that I almost gave up before the film proper had begun; John Hurt, a favorite performer, can't do a whole lot with a character who has virtually no development, and his opening scenes seem especially thankless in that respect.

And yet, the film casts a strange kind of spell -- partly, I think, because there's something genuinely beguiling about the idea of Hollywood committing serious money to an artistic take on class warfare in the nineteenth century west (even if it's junk as history). And partly, too, because on an individual scene level much of the film is quite masterful -- the choreography of players and cameras is remarkable, whether in the relative intimacy of a barroom, the public arena of the roller rink (unlike other segments, they're not a second too long), or the astonishing, brutal finale on the battlefield.

Le Plein de super

1976, France, directed by Alain Cavalier

A film very much of its particular historical moment, France in the mid-1970s, both on a self-conscious level, with director Alain Cavalier and his actor/collaborators seeking to capture the language and attitudes of the time, but also in terms of a new permissiveness of content that saw far more adult fare on French screens. The spirit of the café-théâtre collaboratives of the time, with the same people writing and performing, is also very much in evidence, though the quartet of actors here came from a more classical training (at least three of them attended the same acting school).

The road movie is especially well-suited to Cavalier's aims, with the format allowing for a multiplicity of incidents and asides that can nonetheless be tied to the central overnight car journey from the north of France to the southern coast. The heart of the film is the extended conversational riffing between the principals, on everything from the state of France to the state of their relations (not always relationships) with women, with the boredom of the journey, not to mention lack of sleep, slowly taking their toll. Like Les Valseuses and La Maman et la putain, this is a very male take on The Big Questions, and women have a far more peripheral onscreen presence here, too; that, though, is part of the point, with Cavalier ultimately suggesting, I think, the insecurities on display rather than endorsing the blustery assurance of the characters themselves as they banter in their exclusively male environment.

The Wolverine

2013, US, directed by James Mangold

We'd seen all the previous X-Men and related films on the big screen, and couldn't resist taking advantage of some free babysitting to continue the streak. As expected, the film follows a fairly straightforward formula, albeit with a good deal of back story, leading up to a CGI-heavy confrontation, but there's a good deal of pleasure to be had in the middle section, which is less effects laden and with some degree of character development. It's also refreshing that many of the fight sequences involve actual human beings carefully choreographed, presumably in partial homage to the samurai films of the picture's Japanese setting. Despite the star-centric title, there's still room for others to make an impression: Rila Fukushima is especially good as Wolverine's self-appointed "bodyguard." 

People Will Talk

1951, US, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Somewhere online I came across the comment, in reference to this film, "people will talk...and talk...and talk," and that's certainly the abiding memory after a gap of a few weeks. The plot, or rather plots, are complex to the point of absurdity, and thus necessitate an extraordinary amount of explanation, entirely at odds with the brisk storytelling that I tend to enjoy in classic Hollywood. Though I'm normally a fan of Cary Grant's particular charm, his performance, or perhaps his character, left me cold here: there are far greater riches in the supporting roles, particularly Hume Cronyn as a weaselly academic, Walter Slezak as Grant's avuncular best pal (the bit where he helps himself to sausage and sauerkraut defines scene stealing), and Finlay Currie as Grant's oddball friend/manservant. Early on, and strangely uncredited, there's also a terrific appearance from Margaret Hamilton, best known as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz: her sparring with Cronyn perhaps best captures what the film might have been.

A Band Called Death

2012, US, directed by Mark Covino and Jeff Howlett

Two parts family portrait, one part fascinating glimpse of musical history, with a dash of insight into the world of the hardcore record collector, the documentary takes us back to Detroit in the early 1970s, where a trio of brothers decides to start a hardcore rock band in deeply unpromising circumstances. The driving force behind the band was the now-deceased David Hackney, who came up with the Death's concept and musical direction, and who refused to compromise even when success seemed to hinge on just that. Despite his death in 2000, David is a huge presence, both because of the wealth of archival material -- we get to hear his voice and read his words -- and because his brothers never attempt to steal the spotlight from him.

The film starts out as a portrait of an unusually close-knit group of collaborators, but as the story unspools Death's status as far more than a footnote in musical history starts to assert itself. Some of the celebrity talking heads are a little bland, there principally for their fame rather than their insights, but others make fine contributions, while Jello Biafra has a priceless scene. The documentary style is a little distracting at times, manipulating family photos in a rather repetitive stylistic gesture, but the raw material ultimately overwhelms these fairly minor niggles, and the story of how the music itself was re-discovered is quite remarkable.

Crin-Blanc

1953, France, directed by Albert Lamorisse

It's not clear to me whether Lamorisse consciously intended his film as a "children's film," but children certainly respond to the picture particularly well: like his subsequent Le Ballon rouge, there's almost no dialogue, and even a very young child can easily follow the action and become quite caught up in the attempts of a young boy to tame a wild horse on the Camargue (the whole film is shot on location, and there's considerable anthropological interest to the portrait of a society that has, presumably, changed quite considerably in the interim). That said, I did have a little trouble explaining the slightly mystical ending, though fairly quickly the request to replay the film overrode any lingering concerns.

Hammett

1982, US, directed by Wim Wenders

The troubled production history of Hammett seems to have overshadowed most assessments of its qualities, and while it can be hard to figure out whether the overriding sensibility is that of Wim Wenders or heavily-involved producer Francis Ford Coppola, I still found much to like in the final product, however compromised it may be. Given my love for studio cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, I loved the richly detailed sets, even if Wenders seems to have preferred a location-based approach; the obviousness of the settings somehow enhanced the sense of a plunge into a past time, which perhaps says much about how the movies have influenced (my) perception of the reality of those decades. Frederic Forrest is excellent in a rare lead role, bewildered by many of the narrative twists in fine noir style -- what would The Big Sleep be if you could actually understand it? -- and the support is top-notch: Elisha Cook Jr, Jack Nance and, most startling, Roy Kinnear are among the highlights, though some of the other survivors of old-time Hollywood got unfortunately short shrift in the reworked film, which is a pity. You do wonder what other footage might be out there in a vault somewhere, ripe for the Special Feature picking.

Badlands

1973, US, directed by Terrence Malick

Not for the first time, I'm struck by the way in which the felicities of timing can affect how I see a film -- whether it brings other, recent viewings to mind, or whether it triggers more distant memories. I suppose you could argue that if I'm making such mental connections, I'm not really absorbed in the film at hand, but that's just the way my mind works, particularly if it's a repeat viewing. Others have made the connection between Badlands and Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, which seems especially obvious in the middle section where Malick's protagonists, played by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, create a rural idyll for themselves, though my thoughts turned most insistently to a pair of Australian films, Wake in Fright and Walkabout.

All three films share an outback setting, but also a kind of dreamlike quality -- anchored in Badlands by the off-kilter mental states of the main players. Sheen and Spacek are both extraordinary, finding an almost hypnotic state of ennui in their performances, with Spacek's voiceover providing further illustration of her character's dissociation from the events we see onscreen. There's a particularly black streak of comedy to be found in some of her observations; Malick mines some of the same territory in Days of Heaven using another very unusual performer, Linda Manz, though the narrative stakes are different in that film.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry

1945, US, directed by Robert Siodmak

The tricksy ending does rather mar what is developing as a hard-nosed bit of bourgeois dissection, though with a little imagination the viewer can imagine what might have been had the movie ended a minute earlier. As much as one might be loathe to imagine an eternally disconsolate George Sanders, it would have made for a bitter little film indeed: the confrontation between Sanders and his sister (Geraldine Fitzgerald) near the conclusion is chilling stuff, with Fitzgerald fulling embracing her character's desire for the final word. Siodmak shows himself to be surprisingly assured as an analyst of small-town life, finding much provincial seaminess beneath the bucolic surface, while also puncturing the snobbery of the town's leading family; he gives full rein to his gliding camera in the family home, too.

Sanders can't suddenly discard his urbanity or his purr, yet he manages to tamp down his playboy image quite successfully to inhabit the skin of the titular Uncle Harry, hemmed in by the restrictions of his life and yet ruminating on an alternative once he sees another future unspool. As ever with Siodmak in this period, the pacing is brisk, with much plot squeezed into the 80 minutes, but he also takes the time to add texture to his portrait of the town -- the mill that dominates working life, the local drugstore, the women's softball game, the church congregation, the mens' club all give a sense of the rhythms of Corinth life.

The Spiral Staircase

1945, US, directed by Robert Siodmak

A ripe slice of Gothic melodrama, that throws together a hodgepodge of stock elements -- a mute in peril, an old dark house (with a storm blowing outside, naturally), serial murders, sibling rivalries, an ailing matriarch, a drunken housekeeper, and a smattering of romance -- to quite good effect. At times, it's hard to keep up with the quick switches in tone, whether it's the transition from a bit of domestic comedy to a brutal killing, but Siodmak is entirely aware of the silliness of many of the components and focuses for the most part on maximizing the atmospheric effects. The staring eyeball of the murderer, itself something of a convention, acquires a peculiar malevolence here with the image used in screen-filling closeup at times, while we're kept effectively off-balance by the constant introduction of red herring characters who might, just might, be the murderer.

Bambi

1942, US, directed by David Hand (supervising director)

I missed out on a great many of the classic Disney films when growing up -- they didn't play on TV, we didn't have a VCR, and trips to the cinema were intermittent when we lived in the countryside. Shay's arrival is looking like the perfect opportunity for us both to get our introductions to the classics. Where he was absorbed by the antics of Bambi and Thumper, especially in the early going, I was bowled over by the extraordinary artistry, especially of the backdrops. DVD seems the perfect way to appreciate these gorgeous paintings, filled with beautiful shadings and exquisite details. I was aware that the film featured a reputedly traumatic sequence, but Shay barely even noticed: it's not played up to any great degree, and is immediately followed by one of the film's most comical sections, where the various animals succumb to spring fever. By contrast, he found the fire sequence impressive though not, I think, overly frightening; he did ask for some clarification during the scene featuring a chase by slavering dogs, but never took his eyes off the screen, and giggled no end during the aforementioned spring fever sequence.

Phantom Lady

1944, US, directed by Robert Siodmak

Unusually redemptive in tone for a noir, Phantom Lady has some gorgeously atmospheric passages as well as an extraordinary moment of jazz drumming as sexual frenzy -- though the implication of the scene is that the drummer can't keep up with the vixen after whom he lusts. The storyline is pretty absurd, relying on an exceptional bit of opportunism grafted on top of a stroke of luck, but for the first hour or so Siodmak makes it work very effectively: the wave of guilt creeping up on an old bartender, Tell-Tale Heart style, really gets under the skin, as does Elisha Cook Jr's aforementioned drumming, while there is some exceptional set work on an elevated train platform and in the rain-soaked streets of New York. Indeed, there's a real sense of sweaty summer place -- the city as a friendless nightmare where a man might be condemned for want of an honest word from a stranger.

The Suspect

1944, US, directed by Robert Siodmak

Siodmak had quite the run of films in 1944, from Cobra Woman to Christmas Holiday, and this little gem seems to have been largely overlooked as the years have ticked by. Set in Hollywood's version of London in 1902, it's not quite as tight an affair as Christmas Holiday or Lang's Scarlet Street (which also features Rosalind Ivan as an extraordinarily shrewish wife), with the tone wobbling from time to time between bleak noir and romance. Siodmak is on stronger ground with the darker material, and makes atmospheric use of the London cobblestones on more than one occasion. The supporting cast as about as authentically Cockney as I am myself, but Charles Laughton is doughily effective as a man whose plans spiral well beyond his control, and there's a delicious supporting turn from Henry Daniell as the rotter next door.

Bucking Broadway

1917, US, directed by John Ford

I'm not at all familiar with Harry Carey's silent work -- this was one of a series of films featuring his Cheyenne Harry character, an affable, sometimes comical fellow. While it's mostly a pretty straightforward fish out of water story (or rather a double fish out of water story, with a city slicker's visit to Wyoming later matched by Harry's comical trip to New York), there are some beautiful touches in the first half particularly, capturing the beauty of the west and affording Carey several surprisingly subtle scenes, most notably when he has to ask for the hand of his beloved. The villain is drawn in broad strokes, and city living as a whole gets a bad rap, with the "genuine" country folk obviously to be preferred. I won't presume to see the hand of the future Ford at work here, except to note that the film is smartly paced, with ambitions that are occasionally hemmed in by technical restrictions (the camera can't move to capture the antics of a bucking bronco, with the result that the action disappears offscreen for several seconds at a time).

Wild Man

1977, New Zealand, directed by Geoff Murphy

The title might not be strictly biographical, but certainly it's difficult to imagine a leading man better suited to his rambunctious role. This is the legendary culmination of the peregrinations of Blerta, the Bruno Lawrence's Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition, a musical/theatre collective that criss-crossed New Zealand in the 1970s. Bruno, one of the most idiosyncratic stars any cinema has produced, embodies the "Wild Man of Borneo," a travelling attraction that we encounter on the muddy west coast of the South Island, where the "wild man" and his handler challenge the locals to fights.

It's not hard to imagine a certain overlap between the reception afforded Blerta and that experienced by the various wandering entrepreneurs onscreen here, and Geoff Murphy gleefully explodes any lingering myths about the genteel early years of (white) New Zealand life: the townsfolk here are generally drunken buffoons, divested of most traces of civilization in their muddy backwater. The film is a rough and ready draft for more successful future film outings by the Murphy-Lawrence pairing, with some dated humour effects, relying too often on silly speed-up effects or sub-Monty Python anachronisms, though there is some striking camerawork and a very vivid sense of the tawdry small town background.

Stagecoach

1939, US, directed by John Ford

Already rich in its own cinematic history, Stagecoach assumes its small place in the history of our family as the first full-length film that I watched with Shay, at the tender age of two-and-a-half. I highly doubt he picked up on the cinematic finer points -- the wonderful shot that introduces John Wayne, crowning him a star in the process, the richly detailed characterizations in the crowded stagecoach, the creation of many of the myths of the screen Western -- but he seemed to find the story absorbing. As befits the obsessions of a toddler, he was concerned every time the horses were offscreen, and needed not just reassurance that they would indeed be back but also information on where they currently were and what they might be up to.

Unsurprisingly, Shay found the central fight between a raiding party and the stagecoach hugely exciting, but he also found Andy Devine's voice and demeanour very amusing, and quickly picked up on the fact that Wayne was top dog in this particular microcosm. The long sequence at a rest house was a good deal more challenging for his limited patience, but he never gave up on the film and was most intrigued -- as many of us might be -- by the arrival of a baby when there was no obviously pregnant woman in the travelling party. In other words, my toddler son was baffled by the restrictions of the Production Code years before he ever heard of such a thing.

The A-Team

2010, US, directed by Joe Carnahan

The plot, and many of the action scenes, are almost incomprehensible, but there's the occasional pop of visual interest -- the sudden appearance of a face in closeup, or a bit of aestheticized carnage -- and intermittent amusement from either the references to the silly TV source material or, most often, the antics of Sharlto Copley's Murdoch. Like the vast majority of action comedies, though, this can't figure out a way to marry the sometimes brutal violence of the set pieces with the jokey tone of the connecting material, failing to note that what helped the original series carry off this trick was the fact that the violence was considerably less terminal in nature -- resulting in bruises rather than bodybags.

Minnie and Moskowitz

1971, US, directed by John Cassavetes

Released the same week in December 1971, Cassavetes' film gives Harold and Maude a serious run for its money in the unlikely-screen-couple stakes. The early going introduces us to the leads in parallel -- Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel) is a New York car park jockey who decides, for no particular reason, to head west to LA, where he eventually encounters Minnie (Gene Rowlands), a museum employee dealing with both the unrealistic romantic expectations she feels the movies have given her and the attentions of, among others, an abusive, married man.

As mismatched as the pair seems -- they seem to be at odds far more than they are in agreement, though this may well be an accurate reflection of the Cassevetes-Rowlands union -- the individual interactions are wonderfully authentic: the indelible crazies of the New York night, the wine-soaked girls' outing that reveals some of Minnie's deepest concerns, Moskowitz's caffeinated take on everything from ordering a hot dog to parking a car (the bull-in-a-china-shop impression has much to do with the clash of coastal cultures). It's a high-wire act at times, too, particularly in the sequence where Moskowitz hopes to take Minnie dancing: an argument seques into a transcendent moment when the couple dances to the sound of a car radio, before the wheels come off again. Best of all, perhaps, is the moment when Moskowitz's moustache, which should have its own credit, unexpectedly and hilariously becomes a plot catalyst.

What Richard Did

2012, Ireland, directed by Lenny Abrahamson

In terms of current Irish directors, at least on the feature front, Lenny Abrahamson is in a class of one in turning out consistently insightful work. While What Richard Did is very different from his two previous films, Adam and Paul and Garage, in tone and milieu it shares with its predecessors a desire to explore some of the darker side of the Celtic Tiger. The storyline is loosely lifted from Kevin Power's novel Bad Day in Blackrock, in turn based on the death of Brian Murphy outside Annabel's nightclub in the summer of 2000, though Abrahamson replaces the novel's often artless, ripped-from-the-headlines qualities with a much quieter, more deliberate pace and abandons the narrative trickery that upends the conclusion.

Occasionally, Abrahamson's style is a little too on-the-nose -- the grey, metallic colour schemes and constantly blowing wind foreshadow the titular act, and are a touch obvious in their suggestion that all is not well in this world of privilege. The film's elliptical style works well, though, in economically sketching in patches of narrative -- a burgeoning relationship, the events of an extended party, the aftermath of a tragedy -- while also preserving a strong sense of naturalism. Where the oddball humour of Abrahamson's previous films is almost completely absent, his eye for the minutiae of Irish life continues to be very much in evidence. Indeed, having come of age on the fringes of this private school world, it was occasionally uncomfortable to watch: the film captures the rhythms of speech, the customs, the confidence of its particular world with anthropological accuracy, presumably a partial result of the extensive rehearsal process in which Abrahamson drew on the language and behaviour of the fine young cast.

Falsche Bewegung

1975, West Germany, directed by Wim Wenders (aka The Wrong Move)

Sandwiched between Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road, this feels only nominally part of the same road trilogy. It abandons the surprisingly warm black and white of the other films for a damp and chilly colour, and despite the unifying presence of Rüdiger Vogler in all three films, it comes across as an entry from an entirely different filmography -- a Godard film shot across the border with Germany, with an array of literary allusions, strange narrative turns, and that flat affect that's so disconcerting across Godard's films, from Week End to Nouvelle vague. It's a considerably more difficult film as a consequence -- the characters are consciously opaque, struggling with profound questions about their own ennui as well as Germany's history, but with little of the humour that makes the companion films so instantly engaging.

Make Way For Tomorrow

1937, US, directed by Leo McCarey

Though very different in tone -- elegiac, if not tragic at times, rather than comic -- Make Way for Tomorrow has the same remarkable facility with tone, McCarey making the smoothest of transitions between emotional registers such that he gives the sense of packing a much longer film into a brief running time. It's not as though the pacing is breakneck, either: McCarey is perfectly happy to linger over a scene, allowing it to reach the proper emotional climax, before moving on. Thus we get wonderful sequences like that between Victor Moore and Maurice Moscovitch, two old guys reflecting on their lives, or the scene in which a group of bridge players reacts to Beulah Bondi's phone conversation. And, most of all, the long farewell that concludes the film, and moves nimbly from sentimental to amusing to desperately sad. Bondi was just 48 when the film was made, but she plays older so effectively that I found it hard to believe her character was only supposed to be 70... In her rather quieter way, she's like a female Michel Simon, entirely convincing in roles decades her chronological senior.

Le Ballon rouge

1956, France, directed by Albert Lamorisse

My two-year-old son regularly asks us to switch on the TV in the evenings. Occasionally, we oblige and he sits still for all of three or four minutes in front of some children's programming and we switch the box off again. He's perfectly capable of devoting a significant amount of time to a single activity, but thus far TV is low on his priority list, and that's fine with me. Imagine my surprise, then, when he sat on my lap through the 35 minutes of Albert Lamorisse's beguiling film, entranced by balloons, dogs, buses, children, bakeries, staircases and all the rest. Perhaps without quite intending to do so, Lamorisse created one of those wonderful films that can be enjoyed equally by adults and children. On first viewing, the adventures of the little boy with the red balloon command the attention, but the film's documentary qualities, capturing so much of what has disappeared from Paris's streets, are ultimately just as captivating. Those adventures were surely among the inspirations for the Goscinny/Sempé Petit Nicolas tales, which began to appear a few years later.

Aujourd'hui

2012, France/Senegal, directed by Alain Gomis (aka Tey)

Gorgeous to look at, Alain Gomis's film is an elliptical, occasionally confusing take on how one man spends one day of his life -- his last, as the opening sequences inform us, though there's no clear reason for this, simply an accepted-by-all interaction between the worlds of the spirit and physical reality.

The central character is played by the American actor Saul Williams, who barely speaks, presumably because he's not adept at the languages of Senegal, and yet his near-mute progress through the day is very effective, giving the sense of a man drinking in every sensation for the final time rather than getting in the way with his own commentary, while Williams finds other ways to communicate his emotions. His face in the early sequences, where his character is alternately celebrated and lambasted, is quite remarkable, morphing from a prideful glow to abject humiliation; later, he transmits a kind of exhausted, brittle happiness that's deeply affecting.

The film's most remarkable scene is a sequence where Williams's body is ceremonially "washed," a preview of what will happen following his death. His body is manipulated and arranged in practiced gestures by Thierno Ndiaye Doss (in his last role; one of his first screen appearances was as Guelwaar in Sembène's eponymous film). It's a hypnotic sequence, reminiscent of the scenes in Claude Sautet's Un Coeur en hiver that feature Daniel Auteuil repairing violins -- skilled craftsmen absolutely sure of each movement.

Psycho

1960, US, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Testament to the continued impact of Hitchcock's film, which is so strikingly modern in many respects: it silenced the hip/hipster audience at the Brattle. Sure, those assembled for the late screening guffawed knowingly in the early going, most especially during the blackly comic sequence in Marion Crane's office as Marion deals diplomatically with both Pat Hitchcock and the attentions of a lecherous customer, but they fell utterly silent as the film began to weave its peculiar spell. The shock moments clearly retain their power, if one can judge by exclamations alone, though what makes them work is the tension created in between, with every interaction fraught with worry. Even now, despite countless pale imitations, Norman Bates is one hell of a villain, played to innocent perfection by Anthony Perkins.

Alice in den Städten

1974, West Germany, directed by Wim Wenders (aka Alice in the Cities)

Thematic similarities abound, unsurprisingly, with the later entries in Wenders' road movie trilogy, but especially with Im Lauf der Zeit. It's not hard to imagine that Rüdiger Vogler is playing literally the same character, notwithstanding the change in name, as though this film's Philip ended a chapter of his meanderings in Bavaria before wandering on as Bruno a couple of years later. The same geniality and willingness to go, for the most part, with the hand dealt are essential to both characters; also present here is the striking warmth of Wenders' take on the world notwithstanding the ennui at the heart of both films.

Like so many films, one of the major themes here is the creation of one's own family -- often unlikely in composition, and yet somehow seen as more authentic than one's inherited family simply because there's a degree of intention rather than accident. Where the American scenes are about the obliteration of anything authentic under a blizzard of soul-destroying advertising and consumerism, the German sections are suffused with a sense of loss of the past, the paving over of places of youth in the interests of progress -- with perhaps small remaining window to change direction before the American way wins out, though by the time of Im Lauf der Zeit Wenders suggests that the American way may have had its subconscious victory already.

Christmas Holiday

1944, US, directed by Robert Siodmak

Watched as a small tribute to Deanna Durbin, who died last week, this is very much the atypical film in her roster. She made the picture specifically to give her a more adult image after the juvenile fare that made her name (and her studio's fortune) in the 1930s. Both Durbin and Gene Kelly are effective against type -- Kelly is even further away from his normal persona, and it's a clever casting choice, finding the dark side in the actor's charm. Still, the film is very much Robert Siodmak's: he's at play with atmospherics in locations as diverse as a brothel and a cathedral, and looks considerably more at home with the noirish inflections of this tale than with the Technicolor silliness of fare like Cobra Woman.

I'm fairly sure some enterprising blogger made the screen capture used above, but I can't figure out the original source as it has been used by numerous sites at this point. Apologies for perpetuating the theft... Durbin is in tears numerous times during the film -- carefully aestheticized tears at that, with one glorious shot in the cathedral where a single tear appears as a pinprick of light against Durbin's silhouetted form.

Im Lauf der Zeit

1976, West Germany, directed by Wim Wenders

For a film that is in many ways about alienation from modern life, especially modern German life, this is a strikingly warm and often humours piece, in which Wenders weaves big ideas about society and social relations into a portrait of two men on the road. The interaction between character and idea is far more natural here than in later work like Wings of Desire, which never quite worked for me -- it seemed to signal its own perceived importance, notwithstanding individually successful elements.

That's not to say that every scene here comes off: the sequence with the bereaved man and that in which Robert (Hanns Zischler) reunites with his father are both a little on the obvious side, though each has passages that are successful even if the overall execution lacks subtlety. But those scenes hardly set the overall tone, of constant, elegiac movement in which we're always aware of the end of the journey even as it might seem to unspool to infinity.

Wenders provides us with a very different look at Germany: there's little about postwar recovery and economic success, but instead small towns that have seen better days, and the abandoned countryside (in which both central characters are complicit). The film celebrates much that has been lost in Germany's recent history -- whether it's old vehicles or disappearing skills like cinema projection, printing, even rowing across the Rhine (Wenders and Robby Müller show that they've not forgotten much about how to create gorgeous black and white images, though).

The central characters might be expected to embrace the modern given their complicated relationships with their personal histories but they are instead driven to revisit the past in an attempt at understanding. That process of understanding also relates, of course, to understanding where they stand as Germans born after the war -- the the chill, never verbalized, that descends when the Third Reich is mentioned takes the smile off the face of even Bruno (Rüdiger Vogler), that most good-natured of characters.

Der Räuber

2009, Austria/Germany, directed by Benjamin Heisenberg (aka The Robber)

Even by the standards of the existential crime film, this is stripped down stuff, never touching on the central character's motivations except to suggest that his compulsions are somehow innate and not subject to any form of self-regulation. He does what he does because he has to, and he does what he does well, though without any obvious pleasure, whether the activity in question is marathon running or robbing banks. The apparent lack of depth, though, is deceptive: it's precisely by the absence of apparent motivations that the viewer is drawn to psychologize and provide explanations where none are offered. There's nuance, too, in the robber's halting relationship with an old friend, their awkward early interactions reinforced by Heisenberg's clever blocking -- much is transmitted just by the ways in which these two people negotiate the same space.

Quartet

2012, UK, directed by Dustin Hoffman

Julien Duvivier took a story about a retirement home for actors and produced La Fin du jour. Dustin Hoffman, armed with a tale about a retirement home for musicians, produces Quartet. Much as I'm loath to snidely dismiss any project that consumes months or even years of the participants' lives, there's no danger that La Fin du jour will be eclipsed as a work of art on the strength of this contribution. Quartet is thin gruel indeed -- you'd have imagined an actor of Hoffman's standing would wish to give his remarkable cast rather more to do.

Django Unchained

2012, US, directed by Quentin Tarantino

A disappointment, and in many ways a mess -- not only is Tarantino's thinking on matters racial entirely muddled, to be charitable, but his film has little of the structural finesse of his earlier work, whether it's the interlocking stories and alternate versions of a Jackie Brown or the careful block-building of Inglourious Basterds. As Jim Emerson observed in his comments on the film, Tarantino constructs a terrific early set piece in a bar and never comes close to that level of skill and suspense in the remainder of the film (I did like the opening, too). Indeed, in retrospect, the entire first half of the film comes to seem motivated almost entirely by the need to acquire a bankroll for the subsequent search for Django's wife, and yet that search is absurdly attenuated that it undercuts almost everything that came before.

Side Effects

2013, US, directed by Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh is surely one of the most intelligent of current mainstream directors, wrestling with interesting conceptual problems -- not least how to tell certain kinds of stories -- while delivering satisfying narrative entertainments. There's a satisfaction in the neat, finely-honed outcome here that's complemented by a fascination with the intricate putting-together of the overall puzzle; you want to re-watch the film immediately to figure out what you could have known when, and just how the director signals certain ideas (through colour scheme or shot selection, for instance) or conceals little pieces of information from the viewer. And yet it's not just an exercise in careful narration, or for that matter in trickery. Soderbergh makes especially adept use of the interiors in which these characters live, work, and play. The spaces in which their lives unspool -- spaces of privilege, for the most part -- come to function as important adjuncts to the characters, and there are a couple of exhilarating shots where he takes us around Rooney Mara's apartment in quite deliberate fashion to give us a sense of the proximity of a number of key events. He also has a knack for working with fine casting directors -- the smallest parts are always worth looking it in a Soderbergh picture, with cops, janitors, co-workers all neatly sketched.

Clueless

1995, US, directed by Amy Heckerling

One of the great teen films, along with Heckerling's own Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Heckerling manages to retain our sympathy for her characters despite their uniformly privileged status. It certainly didn't hurt that the 1995 audience was fresh from a decade of Beverly Hills, 90210 melodrama, and indeed several of the gags make reference to that show. The film feels considerably less episodic than Fast Times: there's never a free moment here to indulge in a scene for its own sake, partly because the focus never strays from Cher (Alicia Silverstone).

Indeed, I can't recall many Hollywood films that have no scenes whatsoever that don't involve the protagonist, even if on a few occasions her presence is over the telephone. Cher comes across as a very canny young woman, eagerly manipulating her ditzy image but absolutely in control of her actions: in her own way, she's a surprising avatar for girl power, with no one, save a street punk with a gun, likely to put one over on her.

Pitch Perfect

2012, US, directed by Jason Moore

Entertaining, but quite honestly ten days later I can't recall the details well enough to post anything insightful, except to note that the film tries to include a couple too many supporting characters and then can't manage the logistics of giving them each something unique to do -- a point made rather flagrantly when they are dismissed as individuals in a scene where they are supposing to be opening up about their unique traumas.

The Day of the Jackal

1973, UK/France, directed by Fred Zinnemann

The 1970s were very strong on the big screen police procedural, and this to my mind remains near the top of the heap, partly because it's really two procedurals in one -- the criminal at work and the police on his trail, with the structure lifted from Frederick Forsyth's detail-heavy/character-light novel. The central character, played by Edward Fox, is quite deliberately a cipher, a point underlined a touch obviously in the coda, but this does remove the need to give him much in the way of depth; by contrast, the very occasional suggestions of actual real lives for the other characters are quite welcome even if left mostly undeveloped.

As a piece of film construction, it's deeply impressive, bringing together multiple sources of information efficiently and clearly -- even when we're switching locales, we're always aware of where we are and why it matters, and Zinnemann establishes his locations with minimal fuss, with none of those ungainly and often-parodied datelines. More awkward are the many different accents -- both because of the actors themselves and individual performance decisions, some nominally French characters speak in flawless British accents whereas others add hints of local colour either because they are, say, French or because they somehow feel as though adding a Gallic burnish helps their credibility.

At times, it's what Zinnemann doesn't do that's at least as important: unlike in many of his earlier films, or in Hollywood filmmaking generally, he avoids musical emphasis designed to amp up the emotional impact, for instance -- a decision that seems to parallel the Jackal's completely emotionless killings. The silence, or the use of background noise alone, is especially effective in the film's final, extended set piece, which uses a real parade as a backdrop for the climax, Zinnemann's often mobile camera especially good at picking up little details of the Parisian streets to lend texture to the central narrative. Those sequences reminded me, of all things, of Maurice Pialat's L'Enfance nue, of all things -- that film also opens with a real parade, albeit on a different scale, but it, too, serves to anchor a carefully constructed narrative with an air of authenticity.