The History of Sound (Oliver Hermanus, 2025)

Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal in The History of Sound

Cast: Paul Mescal, Josh O'Connor, Molly Price, Raphael Sbarge, Chris Cooper, Hadley Robinson, Emma Canning, Emily Bergl, Brianna Middleton, Gary Raymond, Alison Bartlett, Michael Schantz. Screenplay: Ben Shattuck, based on his stories. Cinematography: Alexander Dynan. Production design: Deborah Jensen. Film editing: Chris Wyatt. Music: Oliver Coates. 

Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Ben Shattuck work hard to keep The History of Sound being smothered by the genre in which it inevitably falls: the doomed gay romance movie. We know from the moment Paul Mescal's Lionel meets Josh O'Connor's David in a bar with a male clientele in 1917 Boston, that as attractive and compatible as the two men are, things won't work out for them. They're separated by the war, into which David is drafted (Lionel is exempt because of his eyesight), and from which he returns an outwardly unscathed but inwardly mutilated man. They reunite for a musicological tour, collecting folk songs in rural Maine, and then they part forever. But Lionel doesn't know that it's forever, and we follow him through the rest of his life as he's haunted by this past love. It's not enough of a story to hang an entire feature-length film on, and Hermanus and Shattuck aren't able to give the film a satisfying shape and ending. But as a mood piece it benefits from the wintry ambiance of Alexander Dynan's cinematography, the melancholy beauty of a soundtrack full of traditional British and American folk songs, and most of all the performances of Mescal and O'Connor -- the latter is especially good at showing the war wounds that linger in hiding.

The Clockmaker of St. Paul (Bertrand Tavernier, 1974)

Philippe Noiret in The Clockmaker of St. Paul

Cast: Philippe Noiret, Jean Rochefort, Jacques Denis, Yves Afonso, Julien Bertheau, Jacques Hilling, Clothilde Joano, Andrée Tainsy, William Sabatier, Cécile Vassort, Sylvain Rougerie, Christine Pascal. Screenplay: Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, Bertrand Tavernier, based on a novel by Georges Simenon. Cinematography: Pierre-William Glenn. Production design: Jean Mandaroux. Film editing: Armand Psenny. Music: Philippe Sarde. 

Murders have more victims than the person who is killed. That's the crux of Bertrand Tavernier's debut feature, The Clockmaker of St. Paul. In this case it's Michel Descombes (Philippe Noiret), the father of the man accused of murder, who suffers the onslaught of publicity following the crime, the opacity of the police, the indifference of his friends, and the manipulations of the justice system. But most of all, he is tormented by his own ignorance of his son's life and character. He manages to cultivate a relationship with Guilboud (Jean Rochefort), the inspector in charge of the case, but even that is more frustrating than productive. Noiret's performance is the solid core of the film, which gets its rich texture from its setting, the city and environs of Lyon. Tavernier's avoidance of melodrama will frustrate anyone who wants pat resolutions to a story, but as a searching glimpse into other lives, the film is a quiet triumph. 

Full Moon in Paris (Éric Rohmer, 1984)

Pascale Ogier and Tchéky Karyo in Full Moon in Paris

Cast: Pascale Ogier, Tchéky Karyo, Fabrice Luchini, Virginie Thévenet, Christian Vadim, László Szabó, Lisa Garneri, Mathieu Schiffman, Anne-Séverine Liotard, Hervé Gransard. Screenplay: Éric Rohmer. Cinematography: Renato Berta. Production design: Pascale Ogier. Film editing: Cécile Decugis. Music: Jacno, Elli Medeiros. 

Éric Rohmer's Full Moon in Paris tells the story of a relationship we can tell is doomed from the first scenes, in which Louise (Pascale Ogier) tells Remi (Tchéky Karyo), the man she lives with, that she wants to keep the apartment in Paris she's refurbishing as a pied-à-terre. They have a nice place in the suburbs, but in setting up her business as a designer she needs to be where the action is. She'll only spend the occasional day and night there, and take the train home to him. Once we see the bleak new modern suburb we know that Paris will win. From then on, it's a matter of talking it out, as characters in Rohmer's films always do, a few missed connections and missteps, and the not terribly well-intentioned advice from Louise's friend Octave (Fabrice Luchini). This is one of the series of films Rohmer called Comedies and Proverbs. The comedy is bittersweet, and the proverb is "He who has two women loses his soul. He who has two houses loses his mind." Rohmer displays his usual skepticism about the relationship of sex and romance, maintaining a fondness for romance in key with the film's title without descending into sentimental clichés. 

Rosa Luxemburg (Margarethe von Trotta, 1986)

Barbara Sukowa in Rosa Luxemburg

Cast: Barbara Sukowa, Daniel Olbrychski, Otto Sander, Adelheid Arndt, Jürgen Holtz, Doris Schade, Hannes Jaenicke, Jan Biczycki, Karin Baal, Winfried Glatzeder, Regina Lemnitz. Screenplay: Margarethe von Trotta. Cinematography: Franz Rath. Film editing: Dagmar Hirtz, Galip Iyitanir. Music: Nicolas Economou. 

An unconventional woman gets a too-conventional biopic in Margarethe von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg. The tragedy of the Rosa Luxemburg played by Barbara Sukowa is that she's a humanist among ideologues, an idealist among power players, and most damning of all, a woman among men. I kept wanting von Trotta to amp up the feminism of her portrait, which is full of scenes of Rosa surrounded by graybeards who are armored against her passion for the struggles of the proletariat. It's a film that should have been a documentary, if only because most of its viewers today are not quite up on the who's who, the where's where, and the when's when of the struggles of European Marxists in the first two decades of the 20th century. Rosa Luxemberg works mainly as a spur to further study: I learned more from scanning the Wikipedia article on her than I did from the film itself, though that's a frequent failing of biopics. Still, if you're armed with a modicum of background knowledge, von Trotta's film is a good introduction to an extraordinary person.  

Motel Destino (Karim Aïnouz, 2024)

Nataly Rocha and Iago Xavier in Motel Destino

Cast: Iago Xavier, Nataly Rocha, Fábio Assunção, Renan Capivara, Fabiola Liper, Isabela Catão, Yuri Yamamoto, David Santos, Jupyra Carvalho, Bertrand de Courville. Screenplay: Weislan Esmeraldo, Karim Aïnouz, Mauricio Zacharias. Cinematography: Hélène Louvart. Production design: Marcos Pedroso. Film editing: Nelly Quettier. Music: Amine Bouhafa. 

Karim Aïnouz's Motel Destino borrows from The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946; Bob Rafelson, 1981) and gives it Brazilian color and rhythm. Heraldo (Iago Xavier) wakes up locked in a room in a sex hotel where he has spent the night with a woman he met in a bar to find that he's been robbed. He bargains with Dayana (Nataly Rocha), who runs the Motel Destino with her husband, Elias (Fábio Assunção), to let him out, leaving his identification card with the promise that he'll return to pay for the room. He's already deep in trouble: The delay in getting sprung from the room means that he's missed a crucial assignment by his gangster boss, a woman known as Bambina (Fabiola Liper), in the course of which Heraldo's brother, Jorge (Renan Capivara), has been killed. Desperate to escape the wrath of Bambina, Heraldo returns to the Motel Destino, where he arranges with Dayana to hide out. He winds up being employed by Elias, who takes a fancy to the young man. Dayana takes a bit more than a fancy, and before long she and Heraldo begin to plot a way to escape from Elias's control. The lurid setting, in which we hear the motel's clientele rather than see them, gives the film a sweaty intensity, and the three principal actors are up to the demands the script makes on them. Hélène Louvart's near-hallucinatory use of color turns this neo-noir into a neon noir.   
 

La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)

Emmanuelle Béart and Michel Piccoli in La Belle Noiseuse

Cast: Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, Emmanuelle Béart, Marianne Denicourt, David Burzstein, Gilles Arbona, Bernard Dufour. Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Jacques Rivette, based on a novella by Honoré de Balzac. Cinematography: William Lubtchansky. Production design: Emmanuel de Chauvigny. Film editing: Nicole Lubtchansky. 

No matter how much critics and theorists of art may insist that it's about sublimation and pure form, nudity is inevitably about sexual desire. No film demonstrates that fact more clearly than Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse, in which the actress Emmanuelle Béart bares her body on screen for the better part of four hours. Her character, Marianne, is persuaded by the aging artist Édouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) to pose for him in a variety of tortuous positions as he strives to paint what he hopes will be his final chef d'oeuvre. While Frenhofer and Marianne labor in his studio, his wife, Liz (Jane Birkin), and her lover, Nicolas (David Burzstein) wait and fret, both tacitly suspicious that more than just the process of creating art is taking place behind closed doors. Liz was once Frenhofer's model, so she knows the possible outcome of a working relationship between artist and model, as does Nicolas, himself an artist. But it's to Rivette's great credit that the film finesses the issue of eroticism. We come to accept the essential role that Marianne's naked body plays in the formation of a work of art, and to understand the frustrations of turning the artist's fleeting vision into permanence. We see the hand of the artist -- actually the hand of Bernard Dufour when the rest of Piccoli's Frenhofer is out of camera range -- transforming flesh into line and pattern. Does Frenhofer create a masterpiece? We never know, because we don't see the finished product. He chooses to literally wall it off from other eyes and to show the public a rather banal painting in its stead. Art for the artist's sake, if you will. La Belle Noiseuse won the Cannes Grand Prix, and while I don't think the narrative content justifies its length, it's an exceptional film. 

The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024)

Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice

Cast: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Martin Donovan, Maria Bakalova, Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick, Ben Sullivan, Mark Rendall. Screenplay: Gabriel Sherman. Cinematography: Kasper Tuxen. Production design: Aleksandra Marinkovich. Film editing: Olivier Bugge Coutté, Olivia Neergaard-Holm. Music: Martin Dirkov. 

Ali Abbasi's movie The Apprentice doesn't have a third act because we're living it. It just ends, with the future a glint in Donald Trump's eye, and whether it will be a tragedy or a comedy remains to be seen. Trump is played splendidly by a porked-out Sebastian Stan, who deserved the Oscar nomination he received for not making such a familiar character into a collection of mannerisms. Stan's Trump is vicious but vulnerable, easy prey for a reptile like Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong with the sinister greed of his character in Succession turned up to 11. By focusing on the relationship between Trump and Cohn, Gabriel Sherman's screenplay becomes a reversal of fortune story, with Trump rising and Cohn falling when Frankenstein loses control of his Creature. The film is at its best in the first half, portraying the shady real estate dealing in 1970s New York City with the relish shown by Scorsese and Coppola in their gangster sagas. It's less successful at giving us a sense of the family background that bred the narcissism and megalomania of the Trump we know today, with only a few glimpses into his relationship with his father, played by Martin Donovan. Sherman's depiction of Trump's sexual cruelty and vanity, including his alleged liposuction and scalp reduction, is drawn from his marriage to and divorce from Ivana (Maria Bakalova), but these scenes stand out oddly from the story of how he rose to power. There will probably never be a successful biopic that gives us the complete Donald Trump, but The Apprentice is a good rough draft of one.  

Typhoon Club (Shinji Somai, 1985)

Cast: Yuichi Mikami, Youki Kudo, Tomokazu Miura, Yuka Onoshi, Yuriko Fuchizaki, Tomiko Ishii, Shigero Benibayashi, Tomoko Aizawa. Screenplay: Yuji Kato. Cinematography: Akihiro Ito. Production design: Noriyoshi Ikeya. Film editing: Isao Tomita. Music: Shigeaki Saegusa. 

Shinji Somai finds a catalyst and a correlative in the storm that animates Typhoon Club, a portrait of adolescence that takes place half a world away from the one found in John Hughes's The Breakfast Club, which appeared the same year. The teenagers of Somai's film are middle schoolers, younger than the ones in Hughes's, and Typhoon Club has a more serious tone, but both acknowledge the perils of a period through which many of us fail to pass unscathed. No wonder that filmmakers constantly turn to it for inspiration to produce movies that range in tone from amused, like Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993), to brutal, like Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl (2001). In Somai's film, the typhoon is the catalyst for acting out, as a group of young teens are trapped in their school while the storm rages. The consequences range from pranks and making out to rape and suicide. The passage of the storm leaves damage that is both physical and emotional. Typhoon Club deals with so many characters, including some adults, that it's sometimes as noisy and confusing as the storm itself, but Somai maintains steady control throughout.  

Graduate First (Maurice Pialat, 1978)

Cast: Sabine Haudepin, Philippe Marlaud, Annick Alane, Michel Caron, Christian Bouillette, Bernard Tronczyk, Patrick Lepcynski, Valérie Chassigneux, Jean-François Adam, Agnès Makowiak, Charline Pourré, Patrick Playez, Muriel Lacroix, Frédérique Cerbonnet, Fabienne Neuville, Aline Fayard. Screenplay: Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Pierre-William Glenn. Film editing: Sophie Coussin, Martine Giordano, Arlette Langmann. Music: Voyage. 

The baccalauréat, or the bac, is the French rite of passage into adulthood referred to in the title of Maurice Pialat's Passe ton bac d'abord, or Graduate First, a docufictional slice of life centered on the 19-year-olds of the town of Lens in northern France. Pialat employs a mix of professional and non-professional actors to suggest that this emergence from the crucible of secondary school and adolescence is not exactly the joyous event it's celebrated as, especially in a place like Lens, an economically depressed former coal mining town. The choices for post-graduate life boil down to marriage, marginal employment, the dole, or escape, and Pialat's film views all of those options with a melancholy eye. Graduate First is not without its comic moments, especially in its view of the clumsiness of adolescence and the incomprehension of elders, but the attempt to tell too many stories makes for a scattered film.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Guy Ritchie, 2024)

Alan Ritchson and Henry Cavill in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Cast: Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Eiza González, Babs Olusanmokun, Cary Elwes, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Henry Golding, Rory Kinnear, Til Schweiger, Freddie Fox, Henry Zaga, Danny Sapani. Screenplay: Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel, Guy Ritchie, based on a book by Damien Lewis. Cinematography: Ed Wild. Production design: Martyn John. Film editing: James Herbert. Music: Christopher Benstead. 

If Henry Cavill isn't cast as the next James Bond it may be because he's already played the role: His character in Guy Ritchie's The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is based on the World War II special ops agent who was one of the models for Ian Fleming's character. Fleming himself appears in Ritchie's movie, played by Freddie Fox. Unfortunately, that bit of borrowed glamour is the most interesting thing about the film, which is routine war action stuff, a caricature of the actual Operation Postmaster in 1942. Cavill's Gus March-Phillips heads a team of misfits with nothing to lose in an attempt to destroy a ship supplying the German U-boats that have been prowling the Atlantic. The danger of the mission is reinforced by domestic politics that threatens to undermine the plan, which has the support of Winston Churchill (a miscast Rory Kinnear) but not that of his political rivals. It's a movie loaded with war movie clichés: the sultry spy (Eiza Gonzàlez), the nasty Nazi (Til Schweiger), the marksman who never misses (Alan Ritchson), the last minute need for a Plan B. You've seen it all done better.