Une Nuit

2012, France, directed by Philippe Lefebvre (aka Paris By Night)

A solid French thriller set over the course of a single night, with a possibly corrupt cop doing the rounds of the nightclub circuit. The rhythm is intriguing, with moments of adrenaline interrupted by deliberate longueurs as the characters spend time in the car on the way from one place to the next; there's a real Melvillian echo to the central character, a single-minded individual with his own morality. 

The Face Behind the Mask

1941, US, directed by Robert Florey

Terrific crime melodrama, with Lorre in top form as a new arrival in the US dealt a terrible hand by fate after he is disfigured in a fire. While there narrative gets a touch overheated by the end, I was struck most forcefully by the depiction of the US as an immigrant's nightmare, very much in opposition to the usual narrative of opportunity and success. 

Man Up

2015, UK/France, directed by Ben Palmer

Begin Again

2013, US, directed by John Carney

Whiplash

2014, US, directed by Damien Chazelle

Impressive on every level: performances, construction, visuals, and with a final payoff that's intense and emotionally fraught (the almost unspoken depiction of a kind of masochistic self-abnegation, both in pursuit of success and in terms of the willingness to submit to the Svengali-type, is quite exceptional). Chazelle also orchestrates an enjoyably percussive editing style, with brisk conveying of information. 

Er ist wieder da

2015, Germany, directed by David Wnendt (aka Look Who's Back)

When I was in Berlin last year, there were posters everywhere for this but I couldn't make my schedule work to take it in; I'd heard of the book, which posits Hitler inexplicably awakening in modern-day Berlin, and read mixed things about the success of the film, though it's certainly worth a look as a curiosity and a muddled commentary on modern German pop culture (as well as the continued efforts of Germans to deal with their country's past). The land of Goethe and Schiller has no equal in its ability to plumb the depths when it comes to reality TV culture, and the film makes a good deal of hay with this, but what's most notable is the exceptional commitment of Oliver Masucci as Hitler, staying in character in the unscripted, public sequences to a quite extraordinary degree. Obviously, there's a debate to be had as to whether you can effectively use Borat-style tactics when you're dealing with an actual historical figure rather than an invented Kazakh lunatic, but there's an unfakeable discomfort that comes from the bizarrely warm embrace with which "Hitler" is met in so many quarters.

Guardians of the Galaxy

2014, US, directed by James Gunn

Now You See Me

2013, US, directed by Louis Leterrier

Gueule d'amour

1937, France, directed by Jean Grémillon

No great surprise that I liked this a lot: Gabin, Grémillon, 1930s. To my great surprise, though, I discovered afterwards that it was filmed in Germany, like Grémillon's later L'Etrange Monsieur Victor, though in 1937 this was a good deal less unpopular in terms of audience perceptions. The extent to which this telegraphs the postwar Gabin persona is quite fascinating -- he manages to occupy both the handsome young buck and embittered older man within a single, quite brief film. The film taps into that vein of poetic tragedy that so marked the French 1930s, though the finale is more brutal than I expected, perhaps again foreshadowing what was to come in the postwar years.

La Marie du port

1950, France, directed by Marcel Carné

Marcel Carné takes the helm of a film that in many respects establishes the post-war Gabin persona -- world-weary, still magnetic but with the years having taken their toll, and less laconic than an American tough guy might have been. Although Gabin was only in his mid-40s at this stage, you'd take him for a man in his 60s, and indeed the film is based on the idea that he's an older, successful business man (who owns a cinema among other things, which allows for the occasional, quite fascinating glimpse into the workings of a small picture house). The film doesn't reach the heights of Carné's pre-war and wartime work, though there are certainly passages that recall the best of the collaborations with Prévert, and Gabin is excellent -- very much the focus of the film both visually and emotionally.

Nos femmes

2015, France, directed by Richard Berry

Another film seen on a plane, which I was drawn into on the basis of the cast: Auteuil! Berry! Lhermitte! The middle man also directs what is supposed to be, I think, a farce along the lines of Francis Veber's chamber pieces like Le Dîner des cons. Based on a play, the underlying premise is distasteful in the extreme: Lhermitte kills his wife and the trio discuss, in extended comic riffs, how to deal with this situation and what it says about their friendship. Of course, French cinema has a pretty long history of men behaving badly, in particular with respect to women (much of Bertrand Blier's oeuvre, for instance), but there's something acutely offensive at play here and all the zip in the world can't fix it. Berry has very little to offer, either, as director and some of the material is the worst kind of filler (Berry dancing to a rap song). Auteuil has one strong scene, an extended, increasingly frantic monologue, but that's about it. Berry also undercuts the performances by cutting back and forth between the actors rather than allowing them to react in the same frame (I had the same objection to a much older piece of filmed theatre, Fric-Frac, with Michel Simon, Arletty, and Fernandel).

American Hustle

2014, US, directed by David O. Russell

Zips by with considerable verve (something of a David O. Russell hallmark, of course, even if this is nothing like as as frenetic as, say, Silver Linings Playbook), despite virtually all of the characters being pretty unsympathetic as human beings (the excellent Louis CK comes across as the most likeable person, and he's barely in the film). Still, the immersive experience of the time and place is quite beguiling and the top-of-the-poster performances are fiercely committed -- and there's absolutely no doubting Jennifer Lawrence's star magnetism when she's on the screen.

Le Soleil des voyous

1967, France/Italy, directed by Jean Delannoy

Another Gabin film, this time partnered with Robert Stack; Stack grew up partly in France and his French, though accented, is impeccable (he speaks in French throughout). The picture is an old buddies/one-last-big-heist affair, with a great deal of emphasis on the procedural detail (justified in part by the presentation of Gabin's character as an especially meticulous planner). Goes down easy, but not especially noteworthy despite a solid if strictly to type performance from Gabin. A few intriguing bits of location backdrop, nonetheless.

The Imitation Game

2014, UK/US, directed by Morten Tyldum

For years, I've been fascinated by the work at Bletchley Park, especially on the Enigma decoding program, but this is a bit of travesty in terms of the actual work done there, and bizarre in that it seems to go out of its way to make its protagonist (i.e. Alan Turing) less likeable than the historical record suggests was the case (though the details of his near-marriage were surprisingly faithful to reality). There's also a rather severe case of anachronism in the way that it presents Turing as being autistic in ways that those around of him would never have conceived in the 1930s/1940s. Scrupulous on the production values but otherwise disappointing.

Steve Jobs

2015, US, directed by Danny Boyle

I've little time for the deification of Jobs, and this film doesn't participate in that but I doubt it provides much in the way of insight into the man, either. I'm no great Danny Boyle fan but I will say that he knows his strengths -- he can handle a set-piece with technical skill even if it's a rather empty experience (no surprise that he was behind the Olympic opening ceremony, then), and the film is essentially three extended set pieces, each a variation on a theme, with the repetitiveness and the rhythm, as well as the heavy-handed symbolism of recurring characters, that this suggests. Not a bad film, necessarily, but a pretty hollow one.

99 Homes

2015, US, directed by Ramin Bahrani

While Ramin Bahrani has been moving closer to the financial mainstream of late, 99 Homes retains a good deal of the spirit of more independent cinema, including in its focus on people and experiences generally neglected by big-budget cinema. The protagonists are a hard-nosed real-estate guy and one of the victims of his push-the-envelope financial strategies, who ends up on the sidewalk after he fails to make payments on the family home. There's an obvious artificiality to the setup, and at times the speeches seem quite contrived, while the ending certainly strayed too close to poetic justice for my realist taste, but in between there are some very impressive things going on here -- there's an anger at social injustice that really burns, and a sense that you are in a fully-realized and yet little-known corner of human experience. Andrew Garfield is surprisingly good, and Michael Shannon is terrific, a shark on two legs yet also credibly human.

Absolutely Anything

2015, UK, directed by Terry Jones

Absolutely awful.

They Live By Night

1948, US, directed by Nicholas Ray

The big screen was a nice way to fill this gap in my cinematic knowledge, with the large-scale image especially notable in the opening sequences with its terrific helicopter shots. The doomed lover plot is a delicate structure around which to build a film, requiring a genuine delicacy of touch to avoid slipping too deeply into melodrama, and obviously Ray pulls the trick off -- while some of the local colour scenes are just terrific, especially the offbeat wedding scene...

Les Fugitifs

1986, France, directed by Francis Veber

The third and final of the films that paired Gérard Depardieu and Pierre Richard, this is to my eye the tightest of the trio, and also the most pleasing to the eye, but it's also pretty heavy on the sentimentality, as so often with films featuring children... Still, both leads are solid on this occasion -- Richard's status as an inheritor of de Funès seemed especially clear on this occasion. There's also an enjoyable cameo from one Michel Blanc, the same year as he and Depardieu set things alight in the far superior Tenue de soirée. 

La Veuve couderc

1971, France, directed by Pierre Granier-Deferre

Granier-Deferre, Simenon, Signoret and Delon combined to generally good effect. The film departs fairly radically from Simenon's source material, but Granier-Deferre shows, again, that he's particularly good on atmosphere and a strong sense of place/time (in this case an almost hermetically-closed community in rural France of the 1930s, with all this implies in terms of mistrust of the stranger, in the form of Delon).