Prefab Story (Vera Chytilová, 1980)

Cast: Lukás Bech, Antonín Vanha, Eva Kacírková, Oldrich Navrátil, Jirí Kodet, Bronislav Poloczek, Daniela Srajerová, Milan Klásek, Ladislav Potmesil, Hana Hejduková, Petr Kratochvíl. Screenplay: Vera Chytilová, Eva Kacírová. Cinematography: Jaromir Sofr. Production design: Ales Voleman. Film editing: Jirí Brozek. Music: Jirí Sust. 

Vera Chytilová's Prefab Story (aka Panelstory or Birth of a Community) is so brilliantly made that I'm saddened that it isn't better known. The setting is a huge modern housing complex in Prague, where the apartments are being filled with eager new tenants even while construction is going on. Construction equipment plows and scrapes through the muddy site as the residents try to go about their daily business, with great crane-hoisted slabs of walls sailing high above them. Life goes on in often intersecting narratives, which Chytilová links into continuity with two characters who perambulate through the complex: a small boy (Lukás Bech) and an old man (Antonin Vanha). The boy thinks it's all a grand adventure, while the old man is the only one who seems to care about his fellow inhabitants. It's a superb mix of documentary-style footage and multiple, a humanistic satire edited with wit and given bite by a spiky, often atonal score.  

A Tale of Summer (Éric Rohmer, 1996)

Amanda Langlet and Melvil Poupaud in A Tale of Summer

Cast: Melvil Poupaud, Amanda Langlet, Gwenaëlle Simon, Aurelia Nolin, Aimé Lefèvre, Alain Guelaff, Evelyne Lahana, Yves Guérin, Franck Cabot-David. Screenplay: Éric Rohmer. Cinematography: Diane Baratier. Film editing: Mary Stephen. Music: Philippe Eidel, Éric Rohmer, Mary Stephen. 

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime. 

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love's day. 

Andrew Marvell's great carpe diem lyric "To His Coy Mistress" was probably written when Marvell was in his 30s. Éric Rohmer's carpe diem movie, A Tale of Summer (Conte d'Été, aka A Summer's Tale) was made when Rohmer was 75. Marvell heard "Time's wingéd chariot hurrying near." Rohmer was all but riding in it. This film, the third in his series of "Tale of the Four Seasons," though set in the present, is a kind of memory piece, based on Rohmer's youthful experience. It centers on Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud), a twentysomething taking a summer break before starting his career teaching mathematics, idling in a beach resort in northwestern France. He attracts the attention of Margot (Amanda Langlet), on a summer job as a waitress before continuing her work as a researcher in ethnology. They start a flirtatious friendship, taking long walks and talking about each other's love life. Gaspard is in a tenuous relationship with Léna (Aurelia Nolin), whose arrival he expects any day -- she has been traveling in Spain with her sister and some cousins. At a disco with Margot one evening, Gaspard also attracts the attention of Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), an acquaintance of Margot's. When Léna finally arrives, he finds himself juggling the attentions of all three women. In summary it sounds like an adolescent male fantasy, but Rohmer slyly exposes the awkwardness and discomfort in Gaspard's commitment phobia and his missteps with each woman. A lovely setting and a particularly skillful performance by Langlet as the most sensible figure in this romantic quadrangle give this slight film its great charm.  

Calamity (Vera Chytilová, 1982)

Bolek Polívka in Calamity

Cast: Bolek Polívka. Dagmar Bláhovká, Jana Synková, Marie Pavliková, Jaroslava Kretschmarová, Zdenek Sverák. Screenplay: Vera Chytilová, Josef Silhavy. Cinematography: Ivan Slapeta. Production design: Bohumil Pokorny. Film editing: Jirí Brozek. Music: Laco Deczi. 

Vera Chytilová's Calamity is a loosey-goosey comedy about the misadventures of Honza Dostál (Bolek Polívka), a college dropout who has decided he wants to drive a train. And so he does eventually, while dealing with the advances of several young women. The lanky but agreeable Honza is nobody's idea of a hunk, but perhaps there was a shortage of available young men in 1980s Czechoslovakia. Eventually, the film stops being a collection of occasionally funny incidents and focuses on the titular calamity: The train Honza is driving gets buried in snow, and the movie centers on the reactions of the passengers, including several of his girlfriends, to their predicament. Chytilová, whose career had suffered after the Soviets cracked down on sassy Czech filmmakers, manages to insert some sly digs at the government bureaucracy but they lack the bite of her earlier films. It's a benign, amusing movie with one or two laugh-out-loud moments. 

Intervista (Federico Fellini, 1987)

Cast: Federico Fellini, Sergio Rubini, Antonella Ponziani, Maurizio Mein, Paola Liguori, Lara Wendel, Antonio Cantafora, Nadia Ottaviani, Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Mario Miyakawa. Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Gianfranco Angelucci. Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli. Production design: Danilo Donati. Film editing: Nino Baragli. Music: Nicola Pionvani. 

Federico Fellini is a colorful hodgepodge of Fellinian themes, a kind of nesting doll movie in which several stories reside within one another. There's the interview itself, by a Japanese television crew, which frames a story about Fellini and his career, which frames stories about Fellini's early days at Cinecittà, the process of casting for his movies, his aborted plans to film Franz Kafka's Amerika, and the highlights of his career. The last culminates in the reunion of Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg along with clips from the Trevi Fountain scene in La Dolce Vita (1960). Like many of Fellini's films, it's a memory piece, part humorous, part regretful. It succeeds as a movie about movies, but never emerges from its self-reflectiveness into anything more substantial, the way his great movie about movies, 8 1/2 (1963) does. 

Boat People (Ann Hui, 1982)

Season Ma and Guo Jun-yi in Boat People

Cast: George Lam, Season Ma, Andy Lau, Cora Miao, Mengshi Qi, Meiying Jia, Shujing Lin, Guo Jun-yi, Wu Shu-Jun. Screenplay: Chiu Kang-Chien. Cinematography: Wong Chung-Gei, David Chung, Huang Zong Ji. Art direction: Tony Au. Film editing: Kin Kin. Music: Law Wing-Fai, Hako Yamasaki. 

Controversy still lingers around Ann Hui's Boat People, as it does around any work that attempts to tell the story of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The initial controversy arose because Hui made it in the opening phases of the transfer of the territory of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China, with the financial backing of that country and in a location, the island of Hainan, that belonged to China. It was the first Hong Kong film made in the People's Republic, and those holding out for Hong Kong's independence were upset by the collaboration. Today, the controversy centers on how accurate the portrayal of Vietnam and its government in the years immediately after the war really is. Boat People depicts a land of fear and repression, and its heroes are those who resist and try to escape from it. Critics of the film call it distorted and melodramatic. It centers on a Japanese photographer, Shiomi Akutagawa (George Lam), who witnessed the fall of South Vietnam and has returned three years later to document how the country has changed. He has the occasionally grudging and suspicious support of the new government, which of course wants a favorable portrait of the country. But as he travels about, he begins to suspect that he's not being allowed to see the whole truth. Befriending a small family, and particularly a 14-year-old girl, Cam Nuong (Season Ma), and her younger brothers Nhac (Wu Shu-Jun) and Lam (Guo Jun-yi), he starts to find the darker side of the new Vietnam. He also meets Nguyen (Mengshi Qi), who is unhappy with the course the country has taken, and his mistress (Cora Miao), who trades in the black market and helps people escape Vietnam. Boat People is an often compelling and brutal film that succeeds as drama despite (or perhaps because of) its political biases.  
 

A Tale of Autumn (Éric Rohmer, 1998)

Marie Rivière and Béatrice Romand in A Tale of Autumn

Cast: Marie Rivière, Béatrice Romand, Alain Libolt, Didier Sandre, Alexia Portal, Stéphane Darmon, Aurélia Alcaïs, Matthieu Davette, Yves Alcaïs. Screenplay: Éric Rohmer. Cinematography: Diane Baratier. Film editing: Mary Stephen. Music: Claude Marti, Gérard Pansanel, Pierre Peyras, Antonello Salis. 

A matchmaking mixup forms the plot of Éric Rohmer's A Tale of Autumn (Conte d'automne, aka Autumn Tale), the final film in Rohmer's quartet, Tales of the Four Seasons. It's a setup that will be familiar to watchers of rom-coms, or even TV sitcoms: Two people independently try to make a romantic match for a friend, leading to confusion when the unwitting friend meets the two different would-be mates chosen for them. Magali (Béatrice Romand), a widow in her 40s with two grown children, runs a small vineyard in the Rhône Valley. She's friends with Rosine (Alexia Portal), a young woman who is dating Magali's son, Léo (Stéphane Darmon). Rosine admires Magali, and when the older woman confesses that she gets lonely, decides that she has the perfect match for her: Étienne (Didier Sandre), who was her professor at the university and with whom she has been carrying on a mutual flirtation. Meanwhile, another of Magali's friends, Isabelle (Marie Rivière), also gets it in her head that Magali needs a man and places an ad in the personals section of the newspaper. When Gérald (Alain Libolt), a widower, responds to the ad, Isabelle at first pretends to be Magali, whom she has described in the ad, and then confesses the truth. Rosine and Isabelle separately arrange for Magali to meet their choices at a reception celebrating the wedding of Isabelle's daughter. Predictably, nothing goes quite as either of the matchmakers wishes. Rohmer relies on intelligent dialogue, the beauty of the French wine country, and the skill of his performers to cover up the artificiality of his plot, and he mostly succeeds. 

My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007)

Ann Savage in My Winnipeg

Cast: Ann Savage, Louis Negin, Amy Stewart, Darcy Fehr, Brendan Cade, Wesley Cade, Lou Profeta, Fred Dunsmore, Kate Yacula, Jacelyn Lobay, Eric Nipp, Jennifer Palichuk, Guy Maddin (voice). Screenplay: Guy Maddin, George Toles. Cinematography: Jody Shapiro. Production design: Réjean Labrie. Film editing: John Gurdebeke.

A man on a train dozes and dreams, and we see his dreams because they are in a way ours. He is dreaming about the city he is trying to leave, which is at once the real city of Winnipeg, a remembered hometown, and a fantastic extrapolation from the actual place. Guy Maddin's "docu-fantasia" My Winnipeg gets its power to seize the imagination from our own experiences growing up in a place with a family. Maddin sets out to recreate the merging of memory and feeling that makes up our dreams about people and places we have known, and he succeeds remarkably. It's a feat that can only be accomplished in the movies, the medium that is most often likened to dreams. I leave the exegesis and interpretation to others because it's a personal work that inspires personal reflection.    

Evil Cat (Dennis Yu, 1987)

Hsu Shu-Yan in Evil Cat

Cast: Lau Kar-Leung, Lai-Ying Tang, Mark Cheng Ho-Nam, Wong Jing, Hsu Shu-Yan, Stuart Ong, Teresa Ha Ping. Screenplay: Wong Jing. Cinematography: Arthur Wong. Art direction: Sita Yeung. Film editing: Ming Lam Wong. Music: Law Wing-Fai. 

A phantom kitty litters Hong Kong with mutilated corpses in Dennis Yu's anarchic horror movie Evil Cat. When a construction crew unearths the site where the feline spirit is entombed, Master Cheung (Lau Kar-Leung) escapes from the nursing home where he is spending his last days dying of cancer in order to fulfill the ancient duty imposed on him: to put an end to the cat's ninth life. Along the way, he enlists the aid of Long (Mark Cheng Ho-Nam), chauffeur to the rich Mr. Fan (Stuart Ong), who becomes one of the first victims of the cat. His daughter, Siu-Chuen (Lai-Ying Tang), and the bumbling police inspector Mr. Woo (Wong Jing), also get involved in the hunt. It's a movie careless of genre, tone, and sometimes taste that doesn't end well for anyone, except maybe the cat. But it's catnip to aficionados of Hong Kong action movies, who will go on and on about its sources and influences, while the rest of us are wondering what the hell we just watched. 

Project Hail Mary (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, 2026)

Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz (voice), Lionel Boyce, Milana Vayntrub, Ken Leung, Priya Kansara (voice). Screenplay: Drew Goddard, based on a novel by Andy Weir. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: Charles Wood. Film editing: Joel Negron. Music: Daniel Pemberton. 

Like most sci-fi movies, Project Hail Mary is more fiction than science, but it does put the science at its center. It has that in common with the other movie scripted by Drew Goddard from a novel by Andy Weir, The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015).  Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's film is somewhat more fantastical than Scott's, involving as it does the extinction of the human race by a plague of extraterrestrial entities known as astrophages -- star-eaters. This time the hero is not a plucky astronaut trying to survive on Mars by sciencing the shit out of it, but a misfit scientist who gets shanghaied into a one-way trip to Tau Ceti. There he has a close encounter with a benign ET. Yes, Project Hail Mary is derivative, but at this stage what sci-fi movie isn't? It's all done with a great deal of wit and charm, largely on Ryan Gosling's part but also the puppetry and voice work of James Ortiz as the amiable Rocky. At an hour and half, it's a shade too long, but it deserved to be the hit it was. 

Pressure (Horace Ové, 1976)

Herbert Norville in Pressure

Cast: Herbert Norville, Oscar James, Frank Singuineau, Lucita Lijertawood, Sheila Scott Wilkinson, Ed Devereaux, T-Bone Wilson, Ram John Holder, Norman Beaton, John F. Landry, Archie Pool. Screenplay: Horace Ové, Samuel Selvon. Cinematography: Michael J. Davis. Film editing: Alan Cummer-Price. 

"Message movies" get a bad rap. The message too often undermines characterization, turning people into ideas. Horace Ové's Pressure is guilty in that regard. His young protagonist, Tony (Herbert Norville), is a vehicle for the film's ideas about racism, immigration, capitalism, and imperialism. Tony is the England-born son of Trinidadian immigrants, who would like nothing more than for him to assimilate into British culture. His older brother, Colin (Oscar James), who came to Britain with his parents, however, has turned his experience of racism into activism in the Black Power movement. Tony has finished school but struggles to find work, and his idleness begins to get him in trouble. Eventually he joins Colin in the movement, but the film ends on a bleak moment in that struggle, too. It's easy to dismiss Pressure as preaching to the choir and to observe that the struggle for economic justice and ethnic identity continues unabated 50 years after the film was made. But Pressure is skillfully made, effectively dramatizing its issues with scenes that verge on comedy, like Tony's job interview with a politely indifferent potential employer, and even touches of the fantastic, like the dream Tony has under the influence of a reefer. Ové has successfully channeled anger into art.