Mr and Mrs Smith

2005, US, directed by Doug Liman

Although the film was conceived before Brangelina infiltrated our supermarket checkout consciousness, it's quick to exploit our offscreen sense of Brad and Angie's charms, with the opening scene asking them uncomfortable questions in the guise of marital therapy - and leaving us with the same image. Given that we are dealing with a couple of professional assassins the film also manages, in it's own extremely strange way, to provide us with a surprisingly clear-eyed portrait of married life and the challenges of keeping a relationship fresh (not unlike the ways in which P.S. I Love You and The Break-Up shed some unexpected light on modern relationships).

Of course, ultimately it's impossible to reconcile those insights with the idea that these people could have any semblance of a normal emotional exchange given the nature of what they do and the callousness with which they do it: as much as the film has fun with the idea that Brad and Angie, or their gun-toting alter egos, might live in the suburbs and drop over for drinks, it can't do much about the fact that in the end we know there's not a whole of overlap between our lives and theirs.

A Serious Man

2009, US, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

Notwithstanding the setting in a close-knit midwestern Jewish community - not unlike, one is tempted to conclude, the community in which the Coen brothers themselves came of age - the concerns of A Serious Man might prompt nods of recognition from many an African filmmaker, or indeed African viewer. The film dramatises a very fraught balancing act between tradition and modernity, a theme that's at the heart of so many films from Africa, with the eponymous serious man, Larry Gopnik (a great performance from the unfamiliar Michael Stuhlbarg) navigating the alarming shoals of social change in 1960s America.

I'm not suggesting that there's anything conscious in these parallels, simply observing that the film's concerns - exploring ideas about how we conduct ourselves in life, and how we choose to behave when confronted with a concatenation of distressing events - are often those of another form of cinema rather than those of the American mainstream, even though the brothers also manage to have their usual fun with shot choices (looming shots of people in positions of authority), oddball character parts, and elaborately weird dream sequences (at one point Larry asks whether an incident took place the night before, and neither we nor the characters are entirely sure of the answer).

The 1960s is no accident given the way that the decade has come to be seen as a particular moment of change in American society, when a series of long-held values, or at least practices, was called into question. The Coens add to that another, specifically Jewish layer of spiritual questioning, as Larry attempts to reconcile his life experiences with his Judaism, consulting a series of rabbis without ever being entirely convinced of the utility of consulting rabbis. There's a beautiful moment when our expectations are upended as an older rabbi resolves a situation with unexpected grace, revealing his understanding of change more effectively than those who are at least nominally more in touch with youthful concerns.

The Informant!

2009, US, directed by Steven Soderbergh

The source material for The Informant!, Kurt Eichenwald's excellent book on the price fixing conspiracies involving the conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland, plays like a fairly straightforward corporate thriller, structured to reveal information sparingly and chronologically, not unlike Soderbergh's earlier Erin Brockovich and similar tales of corporate malfeasance.

The movie adaptation gives the game away almost immediately, though, using music and a breezy tone to imply that all is not what it seems with Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), the ADM executive who turns whistleblower. From the opening scene, we're privy to Whitacre's rich interior life, revealing both his Mitty-ish view of his role at ADM and his frequent oddball observations on more or less anything in his path (indeed the exclamation mark signals that the approach is likely to be rather different before the film ever begins).

It's a little jarring, then, that the rest of the characters seem to have been shipped in from a different film. The other ADM executives and the FBI agents who work with Whitacre are played entirely straight (Scott Bakula is particularly good as the main agent, Brian Shepard, who seems like a genuinely good guy on both paper and film) in contrast to the comical image of Whitacre, whose moustache is in keeping with the overall presentation. Within the world of the film, though, no-one seems to perceive this dissonance until it's much too late. Still, the film never presents itself as a detective story, and simply turns the tables: Eichenwald revealed a story which seems utterly absurd in retrospect, and Soderbergh simply presents it in straightforward terms to force us to ask questions of everyone who missed what appear to have been alarm bells of the highest order.

As always in Soderbergh's films, the casting is impeccable, with the smaller roles emphasizing, once again, the extraordinarily deep pool of memorable American character actors (it's nice to see Thomas Wilson, Biff in the Back to the Future series, back on screen, for instance). Just like in Erin Brockovich or Out of Sight, Soderbergh is able to craft a moment in which each actor gets a moment to shine - a skill that presumably also came in useful when constructing films with eleven, twelve, and thirteen thieves.

Up

2009, US, directed by Pete Docter & Bob Peterson

Like the previous Pixar film, WALL•E, the opening fifteen minutes or so of Up are so strong that the rest of the film almost seems like a letdown; the filmmakers set the bar so high that you forget the standard for other movies is much lower. The first segment is also the most "adult" portion of the film, a clever and poignant account of a life, and a marriage, that then segues in a late-in-life adventure.

Those opening minutes spring from a lovely homage to the newsreels of old, before the talking stops and the images take over, with wonderfully clever moments like the succession of ties that signifies the passage of time through a working life, or the repeated breaking of a rainy-day jar as dreams cede to domestic obligations. It's extraordinary just how much the filmmakers manage to squeeze into that sequence without distracting us from the emotion of their story.

As with all of Pixar's movies, there's exceptional attention to detail, with the richly textured backgrounds popping with objects that tie in to the story - a pair of tickets to a far-flung destination, for example - but there's also plenty of room for the animators to indulge in flights of fancy, whether it's the steering mechanism for the floating house that's at the center of the film, or the wildlife encountered as the story evolves. Those details, though, are always in the service of a broader story, anchored by two wonderfully engaging characters (voiced by Ed Asner and Jordan Nagai) whose relationship, begun under duress, gradually evolves into a winning partnership.

The Hurt Locker

2009, US, directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Although Kathryn Bigelow's filmmaking often attracts attention for her direction of action scenes, The Hurt Locker derives as much of its visceral force from the tension of what might happen as from the action itself. There's an exceptional sense of the reality of each day, the dust, the sweat, the boredom and then the adrenaline of the soldier's life in a combat zone (themes that are also central to the underrated Jarhead, which narrated events in 1991), although the film inevitably glosses over the less dramatic interludes in favour of perfectly paced sequences of bomb disposal or engagement with a sniper.

Despite the emphasis on day-to-day realism, it's a film of almost complete abstraction from current events, without any overt commentary on the actual Iraq war but fascinated by the minutiae of the experience of war in a more general sense (I couldn't find anything in the film to prevent it from being set in Afghanistan or during the first Gulf war, for instance).

The Hurt Locker has some similarities with Claire Denis's film Beau travail, which focused on a group of French Foreign Legion soldiers in Djibouti, again without much context for their presence in that African outpost. As in Beau travail, the details of movement and of the ways in which the men relate to one another through their actions are central to The Hurt Locker, while both films feature men (played by Denis Lavant and Jeremy Renner, respectively) who seem spectacularly ill-suited to life in their home countries - and who, at the same time, aren't fully functional human beings in military life, either.

On the technical level, the parallel with Denis's work seems equally explicit: both filmmakes pay exceptional attention to sound design, with sound - and sometimes the absence of sound - frequently taking the place of dialogue. The ending of the film has a strange symmetry with the beginning of Abderrahmane Sissako's wonderful La Vie sur terre, a film which channels something of the same spirit as Denis's work. In both films, a scene of abundance in a Western supermarket underlines the protagonist's alienation from the place where he lives. With all that in mind, it's hardly surprising that The Hurt Locker wasn't a more financially successful endeavour, for its conventions are more frequently those of the art film than the Hollywood war flick; narrative is relatively unimportant, despite occasional captions that mark the progress of time, with atmosphere much more critical to the film's effect.

I was struck by the use of a handheld camera throughout the film, apparently to denote documentary realism (a pretty common visual shorthand). The handheld camerawork doesn't translate into careless framing (Jim Emerson has a nice post on Bigelow's shot choices), but the placement of the camera sometimes seems to undermine the attempt to convey the impression of being there, since we see things either from an angle that wouldn't work in reality (no documentary cameraperson would stand in a sniper's line of fire) or the camera is already in place before the characters arrive (after a particularly trying day, there's a camera waiting for Jeremy Renner's character, William James, before he walks into a bathroom to rinse away blood). Perhaps the intention is to deliver a form of "enhanced reality," showing us the mud and the blood and the beer from perspectives we wouldn't normally have access to, but at times it seems to belong more to the highly manipulated storytelling of "reality" television.

I Was Born, But...

1932, Japan, directed by Yasujiro Ozu

As in Tokyo Story, made the previous year, Ozu combines here an acute sense of time and place with a deep appreciation of the emotional challenges of family and social life. Even when he's constructing careful visual jokes, we remain constantly aware of the slightly shabby setting of the film, a rather dusty suburb that's most notable for an accumulation of train tracks, and the upward striving of the film's father figure; there's something Tati-esque about the importance of the physical setting.

The film is constructed around a series of rituals and obligations, two boys going to school - or sometimes avoiding it, in one lovely afternoon of mitching - and their father heading out to work. The trio start their day together before going their separate ways, their paths often re-intersecting late in the day, with the boys slowly gathering a sense of their father's place in the social hierarchy - a traumatic discovery when their interactions with the other neighborhood boys largely consist of assertions along the lines of "my father's better than yours!"

The humour emerges often from the cuts from one space to another - a tracking shot down a row of school desks that becomes a row of office workers, equally beholden to the figure at the head of the classroom, and a beautiful articulation of the way in which schools help to create good adult citizens. Indeed, Ozu's camera seems to be constantly on the move here, following the gangs of boys as they roam near the train tracks, or within the confined spaces of homes and offices.

Passage to Marseille

1944, US, directed by Michael Curtiz

Passage to Marseille offers further proof that Casablanca wasn't so much the happy accident of Hollywood legend, but rather a film undergirded by a very fine, witty script (by Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch). Although this film reunites many of the players and the director with another story of conflicted wartime loyalties - the Marseillaise playing repeatedly in the background - the script, by Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt, is far less subtle, and the writers struggle with the story's structural challenges, piling flashback on top of flashback. The framing story, too, is an awkward device that's far less interesting than the substance of the flashbacks. [Update June 7, 2011: David Bordwell has a fascinating piece on flashback-filled films, including a discussion of this movie; I see his point on the use of such a structure to create suspense, although I still find some parts of the film much stronger than others, unbalancing the complex architecture].

The story takes us from airfields in England to pre-war France and on to Devil's Island, of Papillon fame, where Jean Matrac (Humphrey Bogart) a fine French patriot has been interned for his seditious views. Curtiz creates a wonderfully sweaty atmosphere in those central sequences, tense and fetid, with superb camerawork from James Wong Howe, particularly in the sequences inside the dimly-lit barracks.

Despite the star billing, it's Claude Rains who ties the story together - as an absolutely upright man in uniform on this occasion - bringing us back through time and across the Atlantic to his own first encounter with Matrac, on board a French ship which serves as a microcosm of Free French/collaborationist views (Sidney Greenstreet playing Rains's quasi-fascist opposite number). He's superb, and the opportunity to hear that wonderful narrator's voice of his almost makes up for the film's structural awkwardness. Bogart has less to do - his character is sullen, silent, and stoic for the most part - and so it's the character actors who have to bring the thing to life. Granted free rein, Greenstreet and Lorre steal for all they're worth, and Philip Dorn also has a nice part, though the usually compelling Michèle Morgan is saddled with a thankless role as Matrac's pining wife, with few opportunities to show her range and strength.

Inglourious Basterds

2009, US, directed by Quentin Tarantino

Beyond all of its glorious cinematic flourishes, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is ultimately about the power of film to construct new worlds - even worlds that seem to deny the reality from which they emerge, rewriting history as casually as they introduce new characters or move from scene to scene. That Tarantino reworks the Second World War for his own dramatic ends isn't evidence in any sense of a failure on his part to grasp the reality of the war: for instance, he's absolutely clear on the pernicious, person-by-person nature of the Holocaust for many of its victims.

Rather, it's an indication of his belief in the power of storytelling to rework, redeem and grant catharsis even while acknowledging that this is ultimately a fable, an attempt to make sense of the world by moving the pieces around. While we can take exception with whether presenting the story of a band of murderous Jews is an appropriate table-turning catharsis, I don't think that Tarantino is in any sense unaware of the import of what he's trying to do (it seems equally obvious to me that your view of his moral standing in this regard is liable to impact any assessment of his film's artistic merits).

Perhaps in keeping with the film's more ambitious themes, Inglourious Basterds is also Tarantino's most assured bit of filmmaking: he seems most acutely aware here of what he wants to achieve, and is able to deploy his skills in the service of those aims. This, rather that the subject matter, marks Inglourious Basterds as a mature film: the director is aware of his strengths - among other things, an ability to create rhythm across often very lengthy scenes, a tremendous skill with words - and constructs his film with those in mind. As others have commented, the overall architecture and individual scene composition are very carefully considered, the pieces clicking together for an immensely satisfying structural payoff, while Tarantino has a sense of filmed space so clear that even when a character is offscreen we're aware of exactly where he or she is; it's an awareness he exploits to very tense effect.

It's also a film that revels in the spoken word: virtually every scene is either an extended conversation or a kind of performance: Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) are in many ways mirror images of each other, the one a smooth polyglot, the other an unapologetically brutal man, but they are both supremely confident in their abilities to talk their way into and out of situations. The difference, ultimately, may be that Raine is aware that words are just words, and not a substitute for action - something Landa is distraught to discover.

As in all of his previous films, Tarantino's casting is exemplary. He's acutely aware of the need to find the right person to savour and speak his words, and he's assembled an extraordinarily eclectic cast here, with pitch-perfect and frequently multilingual performances from actors like the remarkable Landa, Mélanie Laurent (as the Jewish heroine), Daniel Brühl, Michael Fassbender (who has had a pretty remarkable run in the last year or so), and, in a cameo, Mike Myers.

Shutter Island

2010, US, directed by Martin Scorsese

While The Departed veered perilously close to self-parody, Scorsese demonstrates an ability to harness melodrama to surprising subtle ends here: it's easy to miss the details of the dense psychological portrait that emerges from the broad strokes of a pleasurably overheated film. Similarly, it's easy to overlook Leonardo DiCaprio's fine work in the central role, given that he's competing with Robert Richardson's stunning visuals, a welter of filmic reference points, and a score that occasionally threatens to overbalance the enterprise (an early scene where DiCaprio arrives at the Shutter Island asylum lays on the musical emphasis especially thickly).

Shutter Island is also a picture that's very much about the artifice of film itself, signalled very deliberately in the opening scene on a boat, with back projection that evokes 1950s Hollywood, perhaps most obviously Vertigo, another film about a man lost in the web of his own memories. The atmosphere on the asylum itself channels any number of old dark house films, although The Haunting is referenced both in terms of plot - the constant interplay between imagination and reality - and in a sequence involving a precipitous climb up a wrought iron spiral staircase. Those homages, though, are very much in service of Scorsese's overall aim of penetrating the mind of one man, through a structure that only retrospectively comes to seem an immense puzzle, ready to be worked through again on re-viewing.

Action in the North Atlantic

1943, US, directed by Lloyd Bacon

A fascinating bit of wartime propaganda, Action in the North Atlantic was apparently authentic enough in its sailing and battle sequences that it served as a training film for the merchant marine, whose work it celebrates. Even if it hadn't been technically accurate, though, it would surely have provided something of a morale boost to any sailor about to ship out.

Although the narrative zips along fairly briskly, with most of the running time on the high seas, the construction is a little awkward, flipping between tense, violent confrontations with German submarines and scenes of banter over cards or dinner that seem drawn from a rather looser film. The shifts in tone aren't as jarring as in Bogart's earlier wartime flick All Through the Night, although those more lighthearted sequences could certainly have been tightened.

As propaganda, the film is most successful in depicting the scale of the war effort and its international character: the script by future-blacklistee John Howard Lawson emphasises particularly the cooperation between Americans and Russians. The sequence of a truly multinational fleet in port in Canada is genuinely moving, capturing the sense that many individuals had of participating in something far bigger than both themselves and the flags to which they generally paid allegiance.

Although there's little distinctive in most of Lloyd Bacon's filmography, save perhaps the ability to keep the action moving swiftly along, he handles the scenes of combat extremely well. There's real nervous energy in the nighttime scenes as the freighters move through dangerous waters, while he emphasizes the often horrific character of war at sea. The cutting back and forth from freighter to U-Boot is especially effective, while the extended chase sequence by a German "wolf pack" ratchets up the tension. Despite the propagandistic tone, the Germans in that sequence are surprisingly human, depicted as a highly professional crew whose suffering is both real and distressing, as if implicitly trying to distinguish between "Germans" and "Nazis" (interestingly, the film has all of the German characters speak their native language, and does not translate their words). Bacon does a good job, too, of capturing the claustrophobia of life both above and below the waves, with several striking shots, particularly one of Bogart moving through a shipboard corridor that Bacon holds an extra second or two.

On land, the greatest interest is an appearance by Ruth Gordon, then in the second, very brief, phase of her screen career: after Action in the North Atlantic she disappeared from movie screens until her late-1960s/early-1970s renaissance. The real-life daughter of a sea captain herself, she's quite good in her brief appearance as a captain's wife, a sequence that emphasizes the comfort and stability of home in quick, subtle strokes.

Film Preservation Blogathon

Bar Harbor Movie Queen (1936)

The camera is unsteady, and the editing is brusque, but the face of Vera Sleeper, a newlywed from Bar Harbor, Maine, still has the capacity to light up the screen when she flashes a smile at the audience. She's the star of Bar Harbor Movie Queen, one in a series of films made by the elusive Margaret Cram (Showalter) in the 1930s. Cram would take her camera to a New England town, find a local beauty and film the same plot every time: the lovely lead actress, ostensibly a Hollywood star returning to her humble roots, would admire the town's stores before being "kidnapped" by a gang of heavies played by the town bigwigs, and then rescued by a handsome local hero. As soon as the reels were in the can, Cram would return to Boston for processing and the following week she'd project the unedited film to an eager local audience, many of whom were there to see their own performances.

Free Radicals (1957)

At the opposite end of the scale of cinematic accomplishment, perhaps, are the brief films of Len Lye. Painstakingly constructed over many months and often involving laborious drawing or scratching on individual frames of film, Lye's films are just one facet of an extraordinarily diverse artistic output across three continents, with a tremendous sense of space and rhythm - the relationship between sound/music and image is critical in most of his work - and a constant experimentation with colour or, later in his career, its absence.

Road Bowling (1957)

In another category again, there's something like Pathé's brief report on a road bowling meet in Cork in the late 1950s, a bit of ephemera fascinating both for its subject matter - even though I grew up in Ireland, I've never seen road bowling - and for the way in which the British filmmakers present the material, with (bad) imitations of the Irish accent or a throwaway reference to the Irish and gambling.

There are dozens of other examples, all of which underline the richness and diversity of film culture. What's important about these three is in many ways the simple fact that they have, happily, survived. The preservation of Margaret Cram's films is an ongoing labour of love for Northeast Historic Film, an organization that has received grants from the National Film Preservation Foundation, among many others, and which focuses on work from and about New England. On the other side of the world Weta Digital, part of the Peter Jackson empire, was responsible for repairing and transferring Lye's Free Radicals, one of his most challenging works, to digital form to ensure its long-term survival, part of an important project of reclamation of an artist who generally worked far from New Zealand (David Bordwell has a great piece on the special challenges of preserving certain avant-garde or experimental films). British Pathé has worked, rather admirably, to ensure the preservation of its own archival materials, recognizing the value in the vaults.

That, to me, is only the first part of the story, however. If such films survive but are invisible to a wider audience the preservation effort seems to serve little purpose, except perhaps for the academic researcher (Kristin Thompson has a lovely anecdote about watching a Len Lye film in a refrigerated room at the British Film Institute, but unfortunately few of us can enjoy that experience). People have worked hard to ensure that these films, once preserved, are made available to as many people as possible, whether through organization of exhibitions - the way I saw the beguiling Bar Harbor Movie Queen - or transfer to DVD (a new book on Len Lye will include a DVD of his films), or the creation of an Internet archive, as Pathé has elected to do (with preview copies of every clip available free of charge).

That impulse, to preserve and present, is of a piece in many ways with the vast explosion of material on a site like Youtube - making available what is hidden or what doesn't exist in any other format. That and other sites indicate to me that we have an enormous desire to see and share images, to tell a friend, to understand our world through what we see - whether it's a clip from an acknowledged classic or a brief moment of more local interest.

It's an extraordinary way to spread the word, although it comes with the problem that watching someone's upload of a Len Lye film, for instance, doesn't contribute much in a direct fashion to the preservation of Lye's films. Like virtually everyone else, I've watched dozens of clips, and entire short films, on Youtube because it's easy and often the only place to find something unusual, and I worry that I've started to accept the blurred images and the seventeenth-generation copies. I'm hopeful that those in the film preservation community can somehow harness our enthusiasm for online watching as they seek to resuscitate and distribute our filmed heritage, perhaps especially because many of the most-ignored films - the avant-garde experiments, the newsreel clips, the local histories - are so well-suited to archiving and distribution online given their brevity.

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This is my contribution to the Film Preservation Blogathon; you can follow all of the contributions here or here, and I would encourage you to also visit the National Film Preservation Foundation to contribute in very concrete terms to the aims of this blogathon. the Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.

Update (June 7, 2010): As the Siren has revealed, the funds raised through the Film Preservation Blogathon have had a very practical and happy impact - the preservation of an early silent film, The Sergeant (1910), shot on location in Yosemite. The National Film Preservation Foundation has a clip online.

Adventureland

2009, US, directed by Greg Mottola
Despite its apparently loose construction, one carefully-honed sequence blending very casually into the next, there’s a striking narrative momentum to Greg Mottola’s film: in just a couple of deft set-up scenes, he paves the way for his central character, James (Jesse Eisenberg), to spend the summer in a slightly down-at-heel amusement park while also giving us a sense of his college past, his parents, and his burgeoning dreams. Those preliminaries dealt with, we cross into Adventureland, on which the outside world seems to barely intrude until very close to the conclusion of the film, in that way that youthful summers seem to have of creating their own sense of apparently endless time and self-discovery.

Mottola made use of a similarly episodic structure in his previous feature, Superbad, except that here he has a stronger sense of when to bring each vignette to a halt. As in Superbad, each member of the extraordinary gallery of actors has a moment or two in which to shine but the timing is considerably tighter. That’s underlined in a brilliantly funny sequence where the park manager (Bill Hader) intervenes when James is about to receive a beating: there’s not a wasted second as Hader stalks out, catching, mid-stride, a baseball bat thrown by his wife and flipping a hair-trigger switch to deal with the threat only to put away his game face with equally impressive speed.

Although that sequence is a little more in-you-face than the rest of the film – a change of pace that Mottola exploits very cannily – it’s typical of the care with which each of the vignettes is constructed, leaving you with the mood of the previous scene still lingering in the mind, and deftly moving between the film’s more serious and light-hearted moments.

The script is also acutely perceptive of the nuances of twentysomething speech and interactions. There’s a lovely scene, for instance, where James tells the object of his affections, Em (Kristen Stewart), his plans for the future. Mottola captures not only the oblivious pretension of James’s career ambitions seen from the perspective of an older-and-perhaps-wiser viewer but the sincerity of another twentysomething’s reaction. The conversations between James and Em, and James and his theme-park friend Joel (Martin Starr, excellent) have the consistent ring of truth about them; there’s an awkwardness about these interactions that underlines the way the three characters’ attempts to navigate their way to adulthood, and that gives the film a terrific warmth (underlined, particularly in the scenes between James and Em, with a lighting scheme that seems to make Kristen Stewart positively glow).

Election

2005, Hong Kong, directed by Johnnie To

Beautifully controlled and steering a wide berth around the standard tropes of Triad gunplay, Johnnie To’s film focuses on issues of loyalty and empire-building, and the constant tension between tradition and modernity in a world which pays lip service to the former while embracing the neon dollars of the latter. The narrative centres on a literal passing of the baton – an object that grants power to the Chairman of the Wo Sing organization for a two-year period – but also more symbolically on a progression from one generation to the next; the “Uncles” may be consulted but they are no longer in power, and they disappear from the screen as the new boss consolidates his power in increasingly brutal fashion. Where other Johnnie To films are filled with carefully staged gun violence, here he emphasizes hand-to-hand deaths that are both more personal and more violent, extending over several minutes and drained of any glamour. This is success at the price of humanity, with the multiple plotlines, so carefully interwoven earlier in the film, finally pared down to a revelatory tale of Shakespearean ambition and ruthlessness.

District 9

2009, US/New Zealand/South Africa, directed by Neill Blomkamp

Although Neill Blomkamp’s film is a rather confused apartheid analogy – black South Africans have become part of the system of oppression of an alien race, while Nigerians are characterized as primitive, superstitious, violent people in much the same way as South African blacks were and sometimes still are – it’s a terrific bit of visceral cinema that makes striking use of actual human settlements to make sharp points about the way we treat those different from ourselves. Blomkamp uses the trappings of documentary and news footage – often presented in “raw,” unedited form – to construct the background to a series of forced evictions from an alien settlement outside Johannesburg, with a shadowy private firm stepping in to take on the task of legalizing and enforcing the evictions in much the same way that apartheid governments insisted on a veneer of legality for their actions.

That’s the jumping-off point for a much more personal odyssey, following a previously bumbling bureaucrat, Wikus Van De Merwe (an extraordinarily physical performance from Sharlto Copley, in his first feature film), who finds himself forced to seek allies among the previously despised alien population. Notwithstanding the sometimes confused politics – particularly the uniformly negative depiction of Nigerians, although Afrikaners don’t get a great rap either – there’s still a jagged emotion to Blomkamp’s work that underlines how raw these themes remain in South Africa; it seems no accident that Johannesburg’s residents have been grappling with their “alien problem” as long as real-life South Africans have been trying to carve out a post-apartheid legacy.

Dead Man's Shoes

2004, UK, directed by Shane Meadows

Shane Meadows’ direction and Paddy Considine’s lead performance almost make up for their underwritten script, which transcribes the single-mindedness of a slasher film to an apparently bucolic slice of the north of England – an illusion that Meadows and Considine shatter on virtually every level as the film progresses. As compelling as the narrative may be, it’s lacking in much psychological depth: while we can perhaps understand the protagonist’s motives of vengeance and regret, there are only vague hints at what triggers his behaviour while the other characters lack any nuance. While they generate moments of terrifically black humour, played absolutely straight, it’s hard to feel much for them as human beings given that their actions largely torn from long-running British debates on “yob” culture and anti-social behaviour legislation; that said, there’s not much sense of the greater political and social context, unlike in Meadows’s subsequent This is England. Still, the film is constructed with great skill, building relentlessly to a deeply uncomfortable crescendo that’s nothing like as cathartic as the hymnal music might imply.

The International

2009, US/Germany/UK, directed by Tom Tykwer

Although the ending has an unexpectedly sour note, Tom Tykwer's film isn't to be taken too seriously as a meditation on the international financial system; the villains, a group of nefarious bankers, are timely but never seem quite as mundanely careless as those who made themselves notorious as the financial system teetered toward collapse a year or so ago. Although it might have pretensions to something more, the film is a retooled James Bond outing, with Clive Owen's Agent Salinger very Bondian in his desire for action over desk-bound analysis, as well as his tendency to skip from one location to another quicker than a flash, although Tykwer dispenses with the carefully-timed romantic interludes and plays up the moral ambiguity that's been a feature of the last couple of Bond films.

Tykwer also has a more developed visual sense than most Bond directors, stretching out the frame at times by placing his characters at extreme ends of the screen, and creating careful contrasts between warm night-time tones in New York and harsh, grey office environments in Luxembourg. Although he's still capable of whipping up excitement from little more than an actor on the move and an electronic soundtrack, his pacing is closer to the more considered atmosphere of Winterschläfer than the insistently caffeinated action of Lola rennt, allowing the characters just enough room to develop into something more than ciphers (although Naomi Watts has to wrestle with some clanging lines of dialogue).

La Carrière de Suzanne

1963, France, directed by Eric Rohmer

The second of Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," this film begins in almost exactly the same way as the previous entry, La Boulangère de Monceau, with a careful geographical situating of the action on the Boulevard St Michel. As Rohmer himself acknowledged, the films are variations on a theme, and so it's no surprise to encounter the characters enacting similar scenarios - pursuing one woman "for the time being" while planning the next conquest, or spending the night talking about relationships rather than beginning one (an idea given much more elaboration in the subsequent Ma Nuit chez Maud). What interests Rohmer is the idea of characters learning to become moral beings, with a moral compass, although not everyone will, it seems likely, acquire such a sense of self-awareness. Although the film is occasionally choppy on the technical level - the phone conversations often seem misaligned, and the use of post-recorded sound is often rather distracting even though it was pretty common at the time - Rohmer's compositions are often compelling, particularly in scenes which juxtapose conversations in the foreground with action further back.

(I wonder if the shot of a mask on the wall, a striking image, was consciously or unconsciously picked up by Sembène in La Noire de... although in the latter film the shots of the mask serve a much more fundamental purpose).

La Boulangère de Monceau

1963, France, directed by Eric Rohmer

After Eric Rohmer's death earlier this week, I returned not quite to the beginning but to the first entry in his "Six Moral Tales" series, the sequence of films which first made his name. This initial entry is a short, just 22 minutes long, made at a time when Rohmer had difficulties raising funds for his projects as his first feature, Le signe du Lion, made in 1959, was a commercial failure. Although La Boulangère de Monceau is a relatively slight entry in the "Six Moral Tales" cycle, it displays many features of Rohmer's later cinema in nascent form, perhaps most notably his characters' taste for self-examination, with the narrator discussing, in voiceover form, his differing attractions to the eponymous baker and another eye-catching woman from his neighborhood. The narrator's commentary is notable for its careful self-justification, a cast of mind that Rohmer returned to time and again as his characters tried to navigate between conflicting desires and their own sense of right and wrong (a sense that is still developing in this student narrator).

Rohmer is careful to anchor his film in a very real Paris: the narration opens with a description of the exact locations of the film, and the camera frequently flashes to street signs so that we know exactly where we are on the map. We quickly gain the sense that the characters live in a very circumscribed portion of the city, such that the narrator can wander up and down the same section of street in search of the woman who is occupying his interest (the still above shows him pacing; Rohmer zooms in on him at one point, narrowing our field of vision just to the individual figure). The film also has considerable offscreen interest: the actors include Barbet Schroeder, an important figure in 1960s French cinema, not least as Rohmer's producer, and Michèle Girardon, recently returned from her stint on Howard Hawks's Hatari!

The Nanny Diaries

2007, US, directed by Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini

The presence of American Splendor directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini is probably what gives The Nanny Diaries a jolt more interest than I expected, especially in the early going, even if they're forced to comply with genre expectations by the conclusion; indeed, their initial injection of off-kilter material makes the wrap-up seem all the more forced and obligatory.

The film uses the conceit of an anthropological field trip to tell the story of a nanny's summer in an Upper East Side family of excessive wealth and privilege, and the opening scenes with Museum of Natural History-style dioramas skewer the local tribe's behaviour in amusing fashion (perhaps I was more willing to swallow the conceit, too, after a Fall semester of anthropology). As the film progresses, however, the directors are uncertain of the tone to adopt, and where they were able to give a nuanced portrait of the unusual and compelling Harvey Pekar in American Splendor here they resort too easily to simple stereotypes so that Annie's employers rarely ring true; that's especially true of Paul Giamatti's irredeemable Mr. X, although Laura Linney is able to do more with the brittle, sad Mrs. X. However, the swings from romantic comedy to lacerating marital battles are so brusque that we're never certain if we're watching a romantic comedy or a bitter drama.

I've Loved You So Long

2008, France, directed by Philippe Claudel (Original Title: Il y a longtemps que je t'aime)

Although Kristin Scott-Thomas gets the showier role in Philippe Claudel's first film, as a woman emerging from a 15-year prison sentence, I was equally impressed by Elsa Zylberstein, who plays her younger sister Léa, and who I hadn't seen on screen in some time. Indeed, as good as Scott-Thomas is in conveying a convincing sense of Juliette's weariness and slow adjustment - perhaps never more so than in a short scene where she makes clear that she's not yet ready for a relationship, a note of genuine regret in her voice - in some ways Zylberstein has the more difficult task: she doesn't get to grapple with the more compelling back story but gives a performance equally redolent of her own character's very different experiences of work and family, and of the emotions that she has needed to conceal for nearly half her life.

Although Claudel's film is a little too dependent on coincidence - a character who just happens to have experience with prisoners - and on a resolution that seems rather too neat, he has a strong sense of how to shape his narrative, cutting from scene to scene at often unexpected points, as if he wants to avoid taking us to each scene's obvious conclusion in order to keep the focus on the characters' emotional development rather than their actions. He has a nice sense of framing, too - a close up on the face of a police officer where we become aware there's something more than a bureaucratic transaction occurring, or the careful structuring of two shots in which Juliette reads to Léa's older daughter, capturing a gradually changing relationship, with one character in sharp focus and the other blurred in the background.