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).

Le Dos au mur

1958, France, directed by Edouard Molinaro

I mostly know Edouard Molinaro for his 1970s and 1980s work in a comic vein, so his much darker debut feature came as a surprise (Molinaro also uses the generally light-hearted actor/director Gérard Oury in an unconventional role). It opens in arresting fashion, first with a single-shot credits sequence and subsequently with an extended (15+-minute) wordless segment that narrates the aftermath of a crime. There's a definite Poe vibe mixed in with the overall Gallic noir tone, and an astringent bitterness to the view of human relations. And there's Jeanne Moreau...

Des gens sans importance

1956, France, directed by Henri Verneuil

A compelling, moody picture, from Henri Verneuil, one of the strongest directors to work with Gabin in the later period (the actor made plenty of weak films, but the Gabin-Verneuil pairing was a notable success, also yielding Un Singe en hiver and Le Président). Gabin is at the limits of the taciturn here, somehow managing to navigate life largely surrounded by silence despite his work and garrulous family. Indeed, on a number of occasions he refers to the (pleasing?) silence of his job, driving across France in a series of apparently interminable journeys (Verneuil's ability to convey the monotony without boring the audience is quite the trick -- reminded me, perhaps incongruously, of Raymond Bernard's extended dramatization of the pounding of artillery in Les Croix de bois). The film also struck me as being especially modern in the sense that it anticipates the nouvelle vague -- location shooting, characters who are not always admirable, a great deal of sensitivity to tone, even if structurally there's no innovation.

Sicario

2015, US, directed by Denis Villeneuve

A fairly effective genre picture, with a fairly quick setup and a smooth visual style that's much more attractive than the shakycam aesthetic so prevalent in recent years. Roger Deakins's work is very fine indeed, including in the set-piece that uses at least three kinds of footage (aerial, night-sight, "normal"), with the transitions being used to ensure greater rather than less clarity, again at odds with much recent action direction style. Interesting to encounter the film so quickly after reading Robert Andrew Powell's fine book This Love is Not for Cowards, given the Juárez setting, though there's a certain moral queasiness in watching the filmmakers milk that city's pain for cinematic effect, even more so when it purports to be strictly contemporary while really representing a short-lived, especially bloody peak in Juárez's history.

The Martian

2015, US, directed by Ridley Scott

While Ridley Scott's output seems to me uneven in the extreme, I rather liked this, not least because it does something I like a lot, setting up its premise with quite wonderful brevity, quickly moving the viewer to the meat of the story. To my mind, it also had some interesting solutions to some of the technical problems a story like this poses -- like whether or not to have the character speak or remain silent when alone -- while it also does a fine job of avoiding blocky exposition in favour of smooth narrative flow. That's a little harder in the second half, where more elements crowd together, but by then you've either bought in to the story or not. Plus, there's a nice seam of humour, something I don't always associate with the director.

Voici le temps des assassins

1956, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

A successful reunion for Gabin and Duvivier, who had not worked together since 1936. Like most of Gabin's more successful post-war turns, he's in buttoned-down mode (at least emotionally -- the character is not an especially silent type). Gabin plays a chef in Les Halles whose life is upended by the arrival of a quasi-relative, resulting in a profound change in circumstances (and in tone). The restaurant scenes are especially enjoyable -- not only does Duvivier make terrific use of the restaurant set to stage deep-focus action, but there's a vivid sense of the running of the business, with a cast of regular customers and an agreeably brisk rhythm. The film blends sets and location work very successfully, too.