Farewell My Love (Youssef Chahine, 1956)

Shadia and Farid Al-Atrash in Farewell My Love

Cast: Farid Al-Atrash, Shadia, Abdel Salam El-Nabulsi, Ahmed Ramzy, Tawfik El Deken, El Sayed Bedeir, Reyad El Kasabgy, Zeinat Elwy, Thoraya Helmy, Adly Kasseb. Screenplay: El Sayed Bedeir, Abul Suood El-Ibyari, Mahmoud Fahmy Ibrahim, Abdel Aziz Salam. Cinematography: Ahmed Khorshed. Film editing: Hussein Afifi. Music: Farid Al-Atrash. 

Youssef Chahine's Farewell My Love takes place in a convalescent ward of a naval hospital in Egypt, where a boisterous group of sailors is recovering from a variety of illnesses under the watchful eye of a pretty nurse, Horreya (Shadia). One day, a new patient, Ahmad Yosry (Farid Al-Atrash), is brought to the ward to recover from kidney surgery. Ahmad doesn't know that he's dying, but Horreya does, and she tells the other patients, cautioning them not to reveal the truth. Ahmad at first is surly and just wants to be left alone, but eventually the others in the ward win him over, especially when they find out that he's a good singer -- just right for the musical show they're planning. Ahmad and Horreya fall in love, too, after a scene in which another patient tries to teach Ahmad how to flirt with her, with comic results. They sing a few love songs, and he makes a big hit in a musical number that's a patriotic salute to Egypt under the rule of Nasser. But then Ahmad finds out that he's dying, and he's furious that Shadia and his friends in the ward have known it all along. You've seen the movies in which the lead character thinks he's dying, but it turns out there was a mixup in the lab and he's healthy, or a medical breakthrough occurs at the last moment. But this time what started out to be a romantic comedy with some songs and antics thrown in takes another direction. One of the formative films in Chahine's career, Farewell My Love turns into a cinematic anomaly: a feel-bad musical. It's one of the oddest movies I've seen, and not just because of the usual cultural dissonance that sets in when you watch a film made in another language and country. It's because so much of it is familiar to me from Hollywood movies, and when it departs from their conventions and tropes it does so radically, even disastrously.

The Judge and the Assassin (Bertrand Tavernier, 1976)

Michel Galabru and Philippe Noiret in The Judge and the Assassin

Cast: Philippe Noiret, Michel Galabru, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Claude Brialy, Renée Faure, Cécile Vassort, Jean-Roger Caussimon, Jean Bretonnière, François Dyrek, Monique Chaumette, Yves Robert. Screenplay: Jean Aurenche, Bertrand Tavernier, Pierre Bost. Cinematography: Pierre-William Glenn. Production design: Antoine Roman. Film editing: Armand Psenny. Music: Philippe Sarde. 

A serial killer has been prowling the French countryside, but when he is finally captured, the judge in charge of the case is less interested in justice than in milking the sensational crimes as a means to his own glory and advancement. That's the essence of Bertrand Tavernier's The Judge and the Assassin, a colorful historical drama based on events that actually took place in the last decade of the 19th century. The standout performer is Michel Galabru as Joseph Bouvier, an army veteran obsessed with a young woman named Louise (Cécile Vassort), whom he attempts to kill before turning the gun on himself. Both survive, but Bouvier is sent to a mental asylum -- and then deinstitutionalized, whereupon he begins his tour of the countryside, raping and killing young victims. Eventually he's brought before Émile Rousseau (Philippe Noiret), a judge who sees an opportunity to make a name for himself in a country already in a frenzy over the Dreyfus Affair. Rousseau lives with his mother, slyly played by Renée Faure, who has a wonderful scene in which the sweet old lady reads out the gruesome particulars of Bouier's violent sex crimes. He also has a mistress, Rose, played by the young Isabelle Huppert. Tavernier spends more time with these secondary characters than is absolutely necessary, but they give some depth to the characterization of the judge. The film doesn't quite make its mark as a commentary on the way justice is undermined by human greed and deviousness, and it ends a touch too didactically. But Tavernier succeeds at handsomely blending a brutal story, splendid performances, and ironically lovely views of the rural French landscape.

Lady of the Train (Youssef Chahine, 1952)

Laila Mourad and Yehia Chahine in Lady of the Train

Cast: Laila Mourad, Yehia Chahine, Emad Hamdy, Serag Mounir, Zeinab Sedky, Saïd Abu Bakr, Aziza Helmy, Sanaa Gamil, Ferdoos Mohamed, Thuraya Faknry, Abdel Aziz Hamad. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Nairuz Abdel Malek. Cinematography: Mahmoud Nasr. Film editing: Kamad Abul Ela. Music: Ibrahim Haggag. 

Youssef Chahine's fourth feature film, Lady of the Train, is a musical melodrama that starts out like a film noir. Laila Mourad plays a famous singer married to a compulsive gambler played by Yehia Chahine, the director's cousin. When he gambles away the family fortune, she boards a train for a concert date, and is thought to be dead when the train crashes. Learning that she survived the crash, he persuades her to go in hiding so he can collect her life insurance. When his scheme threatens to be revealed, he disappears, leaving her to fend for herself and taking their young daughter with him. Twenty years pass, as an awkwardly inserted voiceover tells us. The daughter grows up to look exactly like her mother (and is played by Mourad, of course). The usual reconciliation soap operatics ensue. Chahine uses some sophisticated filmmaking techniques to make this nonsense work, though they sometimes contrast almost comically with the film's naïve narrative and cost-cutting effects. The crucial train crash, for example, features an obvious model train, and the sets for the musical numbers, which include a tribute to the Egyptian textile industry, are sometimes cheesy. In one scene, set in an office, a picture on the wall has been crudely blotted out, leaving a jittery, fluttering patch in the background behind the characters. It was apparently a portrait of King Farouk, who fell from power in 1952 while the movie was being made. Lady of the Train is an entertaining mess, but it's full of the promise that Chahine would fulfill a few years later.   

Death Watch (Bertrand Tavernier, 1980)

Harvey Keitel and Romy Schneider in Death Watch

Cast: Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton, Thérèse Liotard, Max von Sydow, Caroline Langrishe, William Russell, Vadim Glowna, Eva Maria Meineke, Bernhard Wicki. Screenplay: David Rayfiel, Bertrand Tavernier, based on a novel by David Compton. Cinematography: Pierre-William Glenn. Production design: Anthony Pratt. Film editing: Michael Ellis, Armand Psenny. Music: Antoine Duhamel. 

Bertrand Tavernier's Death Watch takes place in a future in which death from disease has become so rare that it's not just newsworthy, it's a commercial opportunity. That is, it attracts those who would cash in on the voyeurism of reality television. Watching people die has become as popular as watching wealthy housewives squabble is today. This leads TV producer Vincent Ferriman (Harry Dean Stanton) to try to persuade Katherine Mortenhoe (Romy Schneider), who has been told that she's dying from an incurable disease, to let him document her last days. Ferriman has a secret gimmick: He has persuaded Roddy (Harvey Keitel), a cameraman, to undergo an experimental procedure that turns his own eyes into cameras that broadcast whatever he sees to Ferriman's studio. Roddy is supposed to follow Katherine wherever she goes as she's dying. Katherine wants no part of Ferriman's plan at first, but eventually she pretends to go along with it, planning to escape. You guessed it: She doesn't know about Roddy's augmentation, and when she thinks she has given Ferriman the slip, hiding out in a slummy part of the city and disguising herself, Roddy seeks her out and befriends her, secretly transmitting her experiences back to the studio. It's an ingenious setup for a story that takes some predictable courses -- yes, Katherine and Roddy fall into something like love -- but also has a few surprising and even poignant twists. Tavernier's film gets its texture from the tension between its futuristic story and its setting, a mundane urban environment that could be almost any era in the past hundred or so years. Even its international cast provides a sense of universality to the film. Like most good science fiction, it's really about the present more than the future,

My One and Only Love (Youssef Chahine, 1957)

Farid El-Atrash and Hind Rostom in My One and Only Love

Cast: Shadia, Farid El-Atrash, Hind Rostom, Abdel Salam El-Nabulsi, Mimi Shakib, Seraj Munir, Abdel Aziz Ahmad, Zinat Sidqi. Screenplay: Abul-Suood El-Ibyari. Cinematography: Ahmed Khrshed. Music: Farid El-Atrash. 

Youssef Chahine's musical romantic farce My One and Only Love (aka Inta Habibi) is an Egyptian equivalent of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies like The Gay Divorcee (Mark Sandrich, 1934), screwball comedies that burst into song. Two initially mismatched people, in this case Yasmine (Shadia) and Farid (Farid El-Atrash), go through a series of misadventures before they finally realize they love each other. Farid has a belly dancing girlfriend, Nana (the comically voluptuous Hind Rostom), and Yasmine has her heart set on a would-be oil millionaire, Semsem (Abdel Salam El-Nabulsi). But they're forced by their families to wed each other because they've been left a substantial legacy on the condition that they do so. After much ado, they decide to marry, collect the fortune, and go their separate ways after a divorce. Much more ado and quite a few songs follow before the inevitable happens. The movie was probably inspired and shaped by Chahine's stay in Hollywood. The character of Semsem has the earmarks of the role Ralph Bellamy used to play: the fiancé who gets dumped. And Farid has a comic sidekick, Shalabi (Abdel Aziz Ahmad), in the manner of Edward Everett Horton. In short, good noisy fun.  

Pillion (Harry Lighton, 2025)

Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling in Pillion

Cast: Harry Melling, Alexander Skarsgård, Douglas Hodge, Lesley Sharpe, Jake Shears, Mat Hill, Nick Figgis, Zoe Engerer, Jake Sharp, Jacob Carter. Screenplay: Harry Lighton, based on a novel by Adam Mars-Jones. Cinematography: Nick Morris. Production design: Francesca Massariol. Film editing: Gareth C. Scales. Music: Oliver Coates. 

A god beckons. A lowly mortal obeys and is rewarded. But what happens if the mortal wants more from the god than he is willing to give? What happens when he rebels against the god? That's usually called hubris. When Marsyas, for example, challenged Apollo, he wound up being flayed alive. The fate of Colin (Harry Melling), the lowly mortal who challenges the godlike Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) in Harry Lighton's Pillion is painful but not so dire. Ray and Colin meet in a bar, have sex in an alley, and begin a sadomasochistic relationship. Colin remains a very human figure, a homely man who lives with his parents, sings in a barbershop quartet, and works as a parking garage attendant. Ray retains his godlike character: We never learn where he comes from or what he does for a living when he isn't cruising with his pack of gay biker buddies, each of whom has his own sub who rides pillion and does their bidding. The one person who dares to question who Ray really is, Colin's mother, dies. Lighton finds a wonderfully satisfying middle ground between mythic tale and gay porn in telling this story.  It's a provocative film that transcends sensationalism, reminding me of some of D.H. Lawrence's explorations of the mysteries of sex.

A Week's Vacation (Bertrand Tavernier, 1980)

Michel Galabru and Nathalie Baye in A Week's Vacation

Cast: Nathalie Baye, Gérard Lanvin, Flore Fitzgerald, Michel Galabru, Jean Dasté, Marie-Louise Ebeli, Philippe Delague, Geneviève Vauzeilles, Philippe Léotard, Philippe Noiret, Jean-Claude Durand. Screenplay: Bertrand Tavernier, Colo Tavernier, Marie-François Hans. Cinematography: Pierre-William Glenn. Production design: Jean-Baptiste Poirot. Film editing: Armand Psenny. Music: Pierre Papadiamandis. 

Laurence (Nathalie Baye) is 31, just the right age for burnout and a mid-life crisis to set in. It happens as her boyfriend, Pierre (Gérard Lanvin), is driving her to her job as a schoolteacher. Something about the routine, and perhaps Pierre's rough, quippy manner, suddenly hits her the wrong way, and she bolts from the car. She winds up at the doctor, who tells her to take a break. So for the next week, Laurence takes some time off, in a kind of staycation, to reflect on her job, her relationship with Pierre, and her aging parents. But it's not that easy to take a vacation from any of them. She still lives with Pierre, she has homework to grade before her scheduled return, and encounters with her students and their parents intrude. She becomes more involved with one parent in particular, Mancheron (Michel Galabru), the proprietor of a small cafe who is concerned about his son. Bertrand Tavernier's lovely, low-key film follows Laurence through the week, sometimes with flashbacks, and while it ends with her acceptance of life as it is, we feel that she has become stronger. Baye is marvelous in the role, and Tavernier maintains a delicate balance of sadness and comedy throughout. 

Return of the Prodigal Son (Youssef Chahine, 1978)

Cast: Shoukry Sarhan, Ahmad Mehrez, Hasham Selim, Majida El Roumi, Souheir El Moshdy, Huda Sultan, Mahmoud el-Meliguy. Screenplay: Salah Jahine, Farouk Beloufa, Youssef Chahine. Cinematography: Abdel Aziz Fahmy. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Hassan Abouzeid, songs: Salah Jahine. 

A family serves as a microcosm of Egypt's political and social crises in Youssef Chahine's Return of the Prodigal Son. The prodigal son of the title is Ali (Ahmad Mehrez), who returns to his family after a 12-year absence, his experience in the larger world much sought after by the dysfunctional community he left behind under the leadership of his ruthless older brother, Tolba (Shoukry Sarhan). It's a melodrama with striking shifts in tone, some of them created by interpolated musical numbers. These give the film a hopeful lift when the social and personal problems overwhelm its characters, particularly the two young people, Ibrahim (Hesham Selim) and Tafida (Majida El Roumi), caught in the maelstrom of family antagonisms. The film is a mixture of the actual and the symbolic that sometimes doesn't work but leaves a strong impression anyway.

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. 

Nomad (Patrick Tam, 1982)

Patricia Ha in Nomad

Cast: Patricia Ha, Kent Tong, Cecilia Yip, Leslie Cheung, Stuart Ong. Screenplay: Chiu Kang-chien, Joyce Chan, Eddie Fong, Kam Ping-hin, John Chan Koong-chun, Patrick Tam. Cinematography: Peter Ngor Chi-Kwan, David Chung, Bill Wong. Production design: William Chang, John Hau. Film editing: Cheung Kwok-kuen. Music: Violet Lam. 

The English title Nomad refers to the yacht owned by the family of Louis (Leslie Cheung), an idle young man who finds himself entangled with a working-class young woman called Tomato (Cecilia Yip), while his cousin, Kathy (Patricia Ha), is toying with the affections of Pong (Kent Tong), who scrapes out a living as a lifeguard and a cab driver. But the Chinese title of Patrick Tam's film, which translates as "Youth on Fire," is more to the point. It starts out as a scattered, sexy movie about the escapades of four Hong Kong twentysomethings with not much more on their minds than what their hormones put there. But then it veers off in another direction with the arrival of Kathy's former boyfriend, Shinsuke (Stuart Ong), a deserter from the Japanese militant organization known as the Red Army. Things do not go well for the hedonistic quartet. The credits list six screenwriters, which is a sign that too many ideas have been tossed into the mix for the viewer to assimilate into a coherent story. But Nomad is undoubtedly provocative on many social, political, and historical levels.  

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016)

Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Gal Gadot, Scoot McNairy, Callan Mulvey, Tao Okamoto. Screenplay: Chris Terrio, David S. Goyer. Cinematography: Larry Fong. Production design: Patrick Tatopoulos. Film editing: David Brenner. Music: Tom Holkenborg, Hans Zimmer. 

Dark, brutal, noisy, and glum, Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is unleavened by wit. The meeting of the self-made superhero and the benevolent alien was bound to happen eventually, but why did anyone have to take it so seriously? Why couldn't it have been fun, like an encounter of the campy Batman of the old TV series and the naïf Superman of James Gunn's 2025 reboot? Or if not that, at least not something so goddamn apocalyptic. You can see some of its actors, particularly Amy Adams and Holly Hunter, trying to rise above the chaos, but they keep getting sucked down into a plot that seems to go out of its way to make less sense than most comic book movies do. 

Under the Sun of Satan (Maurice Pialat, 1987)

Gérard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire in Under the Sun of Satan

Cast: Gérard Depardieu, Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Alain Artur, Yann Dedet, Brigitte Legendre, Jean-Claude Bouriat, Jean-Christophe Bouvet. Screenplay: Sylvie Pialat, Maurice Pialat, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos. Cinematography: Willy Kurant. Production design: Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Yann Dedet. Music: Henri Dutilleux. 

Are the torments that afflict the priest played by Gérard Depardieu in Maurice Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan mental or spiritual? And is there a difference? That's the conundrum the film leaves us to ponder and the reason the film caused so much uproar when it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It's a tense, talky film that begins with the young priest, Donnisan, confessing his self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy to his superior, Menou-Segret (Pialat), who is shocked to find that Donnisan wears a hair shirt under his cassock -- he also secretly flagellates himself. Then the film shifts to Mouchette (Sandrine Bonnaire), a 16-year-old girl with two lovers. She visits the first, Cadignan (Alain Artur) to tell him that she's pregnant and then, playing with his rifle, shoots him. Then she has sex with the other, a physician named Gallet (Yann Dedet), who has examined Cadignan's body and ruled the death a suicide. He tells her that he won't perform an abortion for her. The stories of Donnisan and Mouchette will intersect eventually, but not before the priest experiences a dark night of the soul in an encounter with the devil. Donnisan is transformed but destroyed by this meeting. The denouement, in which Donnisan seems to perform a miracle, has caused the film to be likened to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955), but Pialat's work is messier than Dreyer's.   

Straight to Hell (Alex Cox, 1987)

Courtney Love in Straight to Hell

Cast: Dick Rude, Sy Richardson, Courtney Love, Joe Strummer, Miguel Sandoval, Jennifer Balgobin, Sara Sugarman, Biff Yeager, Shane MacGowan, Spider Stacy, Terry Woods, Xander Berkeley, Kathy Burke, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Jim Jarmusch, Grace Jones, Zander Schloss. Screenplay: Dick Rude, Alex Cox. Cinematography: Tom Richmond. Production design: Andrew McAlpine. Film editing: David Martin. Music: The Pogues, Dan Wool. 

About 40 years ago, a group of Very Cool People found themselves with time on their hands, so they gathered some of their Very Cool Friends and went to the place in Spain where a lot of spaghetti Westerns were made and made one of their own. The story of Alex Cox's Straight to Hell is negligible because nobody took it seriously: Four bank robbers stash the loot in the desert and hole up in a ghost town that suddenly comes alive with a variety of residents, and then everybody pretty much kills everybody else. It's scarcely even a parody of the spaghetti Western. Nobody much liked it at the time. Roger Ebert called it "an indulgent mess" and it bombed at the box office. But it survived as a cult film, and in 2010 it got a "director's cut" version. It's still an indulgent mess, but a few comic moments survive the mayhem, and there is occasionally some funny dialogue: "A gun is like a tool. Ain't no better or no worse than the man that uses it." "Just like shoes." 

Rude (Clement Virgo, 1995)

Richard Chevolleau in Rude

Cast: Maurice Dean Witt, Rachael Crawford, Clark Johnson, Richard Chevolleau, Sharon Lewis, Melanie Nicholls-King, Stephen Shellen, Gordon Michael Woolvett, Dayo Ade, Dean Marshall, Ashley Brown. Screenplay: Clement Virgo. Cinematography: Barry Stone. Production design: William Fleming. Film editing: Susan Maggi. Music: Aaron David, John Lang. 

In his first feature film, Rude, Clement Virgo makes the rookie mistake of trying to do too much, telling stories of three residents of the Toronto neighborhood Regent Park when just one story would be enough. They are familiar stories, too: an ex-con trying to avoid being drawn back into drug-running, a closeted gay man fearful of being outed, and a young woman dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Virgo ties them all together with the running commentary of a disc jockey called Rude (Sharon Lewis), on her pirate radio show. Fortunately, Virgo has chosen capable actors and he displays a great deal of cinematic style that almost overcomes the familiarity of the material.  

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia DaCosta, 2026)

Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry, Emma Laird, Sam Locke, Robert Rhodes, Ghazi Al Ruffai, Maura Bird, Connor Newall, Lewis Ashbourne Serkis, Mirren Mack, David Sterne, Cillian Murphy. Screenplay: Alex Garland. Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt. Production design: Carson McCall, Gareth Pugh. Film editing: Jake Roberts. Music: Hildur Guðnadóttir. 

A pandemic has swept the world, leaving the survivors at the mercy of the worst among them. Good thing it's just a movie, right? I won't say that Alex Garland, who gave us Civil War (2024), about an American citizenry at odds with its government, didn't have something more in mind than a post-apocalyptic Britain, so let's just keep in mind Oscar Wilde's pronouncement: "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." On the surface, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a worthy successor to, maybe even an improvement on, Danny Boyle's 2025 film 28 Years Later, which introduced Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a solo survivor fending off those infected by the Rage Virus we first encountered in Boyle and Garland's 28 Days Later (2003). Film series usually peter out after one or two sequels, but this one has somehow gotten stronger. (I'm not going to say it's because life has copied art, to invoke another Wilde aphorism.) Nia DaCosta's direction is sure-handed, and the cast is more than up to the often gruesome demands of the script. The ending, reintroducing Cillian Murphy as Jim, the survivor from 28 Days Later who hasn't aged much in 28 years, lets us know a sequel is on the way, and for once I don't mind. 

Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

Isabelle Weingarten and Guillaume des Forêts in Four Nights of a Dreamer

Cast: Guillaume des Forêts, Isabelle Weingarten, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, Giorgio Maulini, Lidia Biondi, Patrick Jouané, Jérôme Massart. Screenplay: Robert Bresson, based on a story by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme. Production design: Pierre Charbonnier. Film editing: Raymond Lamy. Music: F.R. David, Louis Guitar, Chris Hayward, Michel Magne. 

Robert Bresson's spare, terse Four Nights of a Dreamer is not for those who want their love stories lush and passion-filled. It's about the accidental and fragile nature of mutual attraction. Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts) is an artist whom we first see thumbing a ride out of Paris into the country, where he does somersaults and annoys a promenading family by briefly bursting into song. Then he returns to the city where, out walking at night, he sees a young woman on the verge of flinging herself into the Seine. She is Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten), who is distraught because she thinks she has been abandoned by the man she loves. For four nights, Jacques tries to help her reconnect with him, and just when they seem to be forming their own connection, they encounter her lover on the street and she goes off with him. Jacques  returns to his apartment and resumes work on his painting and his dreams. The Parisian night's soft colors and shadows and the music of street performers provide the emotional content of this understated romance, which shows the steady hand of its director without his frequently harsh view of human attempts to connect with one another. 

Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1991)

Jacques Dutronc in Van Gogh

Cast: Jacques Dutronc, Alexandra London, Bernard Le Coq, Gérard Sèty, Corinne Bourdon, Elsa Zylberstein, Leslie Azzoulai, Jacques Vidal, Chantal Barbarit, Claudine Ducret, Frédéric Bonpart. Screenplay: Maurice PIalat. Cinematography: Gilles Henry, Jacques Loiseleux, Emmanuel Machuel. Production design: Philippe Pallut, Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Yann Dedet, Nathalie Hubert, Hélène Viard. 

Maurice Pialat's avoidance of melodrama, sentimentality, and biopic clichés makes his Van Gogh an exceptional contribution to the flood of films about the life and death of the artist. Pialat even avoids the one fact that everyone seems to know about Vincent Van Gogh: the mutilation of an ear. There's a passing reference to it, but no prosthetic has been attached to Jacques Dutronc's head to represent it. Pialat is as much concerned with the milieu, the village of Auvers-sur-Oise and the vie bohème of Paris, as he is with the facts of Van Gogh's last days. And by casting Dutronc, better known as a singer, in the role, he avoids the "movie star syndrome" that tainted the characterization when the part was played by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956), Willem Dafoe in At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2016), and Tim Roth in Vincent & Theo (Robert Altman, 1990): We don't have to filter Van Gogh through our familiarity with the actor. Pialat also avoids focusing on the pictures themselves: He wants us to see the man more than the paintings. The result is occasionally frustrating. Pialat is fond of jump cuts that leave us momentarily trying to figure out where and when we are, and though the scene set in a Montmartre brothel that serves as a kind of climax to the film is exhilarating, it feels like an overextended set piece rather than an integral part of Van Gogh's story. But I know of no film that gives a richer sense of the world in which Van Gogh and his contemporaries -- the movie verbally and visually invokes Cézanne, Renoir, Lautrec, and others -- lived and worked. 

The Batman (Matt Reeves, 2022)

Zoë Kravitz and Robert Pattinson in The Batman

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Colin Farrell, Paul Dano, John Turturro, Andy Serkis, Peter Sarsgaard, Barry Keoghan, Jayme Lawson. Screenplay: Matt Reeves, Peter Craig. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: James Chinlund. Film editing: William Hoy, Tyler Nelson. Music: Michael Giacchino. 

No, we didn't need a Batman reboot, and certainly not one at an epic length. But I appreciated Matt Reeves's visually and tonally dark The Batman for its coherent and sometimes original reworking of too-familiar material. If we must have billionaire vigilantes, let them be like Robert Pattinson's Bruce Wayne, at least a little tormented by self-doubt. Batman has always seemed to me the weirdest of superheroes, Wayne's role-playing being just this side of psychosis, and Pattinson gives the part some of that quality. I also like the transformation of the Penguin into a crippled mob henchman who hates his nickname, and I'm grateful that it gave Colin Farrell a chance to show what a protean actor he is, here and in the TV series that was spun off from the film. The considerable talents of Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Paul Dano, and Andy Serkis are well-used too, and I liked Michael Giacchino's melancholy score, with its variations on Schubert's "Ave Maria." But really, the best I can say for the movie is that as insults to my intelligence go, it was a well-made one. 

Who Killed Teddy Bear (Joseph Cates, 1965)

Sal Mineo in Who Killed Teddy Bear

Cast: Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, Jan Murray, Elaine Stritch, Margot Bennett, Daniel J. Travanti, Diane Moore, Frank Campanella. Screenplay: Leon Tokatyan, Arnold Drake. Cinematography: Joseph C. Brun. Art direction: Hank Aldrich. Film editing: Angelo Ross. Music: Charles Calello. 

Who Killed Teddy Bear is about kinks, and it has one of its own: the fetishization of Sal Mineo's body. The film takes every opportunity to explore it, showing the actor in his underwear or swim suit whenever possible. But this is only one of the peculiarities of a very odd film that falls somewhere between exploitation flick and serious exploration of a culture, that of New York City, poised between the repressions of the 1950s and the frenzy of the 1970s. Mineo plays Larry Sherman, who lives with his sister (Margot Bennett), mentally handicapped since a trauma that occurred when she was a child. He works as a busboy in a discotheque -- not one of the mirror-balled hothouses of the next decade, but a well-lighted place that looks like a suburban rec room. Juliet Prowse plays Norah, a DJ at the club, which is managed by the tough-talking Marian (Elaine Stritch). When Norah starts getting creepy phone calls, she contacts the police, and Lt. Dave Madden (Jan Murray) takes charge of the case. Madden is obsessed with sex crimes, and in his off time he studies his extensive collection of literature on the subject and listens to tapes of the victims he has interviewed, undisturbed that his 10-year-old daughter can also hear them. Norah is at first grateful for Madden's help, but eventually repulsed by his obsessions. Unfortunately, neither director Joseph Cates nor screenwriters Leon Tokatyan and Arnold Drake seem to know what to do with this assortment of characters and what might have been a solid thriller veers off into incoherence. 

Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925)

Belle Bennett in Stella Dallas

Cast: Belle Bennett, Ronald Colman, Lois Moran, Alice Joyce, Jean Hersholt, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Screenplay: Frances Marion, based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Film editing: Stuart Heisler. 

Although eclipsed by the 1937 version directed by King Vidor and starring Barbara Stanwyck, the first filming of Olive Higgins Prouty's lachrymose novel Stella Dallas is well worth seeing, chiefly because of Belle Bennett's blowsy, undaunted Stella. It's hard to see why suave Ronald Colman's Stephen Dallas  would fall so completely for Stella's unkempt charms that he's willing to marry her, except as a kind of penance for his father's criminality and loss of the family fortune, but this is not a story for skeptics or realists. This is domestic melodrama of the purest sort, in which conventional psychology plays only the faintest role. It's a tale that requires you to believe that there's a maternal instinct that overcomes all, even the disapproval of polite society, and that it will be rewarded by seeing your daughter married to a product of that society, even if you have to do it standing in the rain outside the wedding. Bennett is grand in the role, even if her character doesn't have the complexities that Stanwyck brings to it. 

A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982)

Nelly Frijda, Edda Barends, and Henriëtte Toll in A Question of Silence 

Cast: Edda Barends, Nelly Frijda, Henriëtte Toll, Cox Habbema, Eddie Brugman, Hans Croiset, Erik Plooyer. Screenplay: Marleen Gorris. Cinematography: Frans Bromet. Art direction: Harry Ammerlaan. Film editing: Hans van Dongen. Music: Lodewijk de Boer, Martijn Hasebos.

Janine (Cox Habbema), a court-appointed psychiatrist, examines three women on trial for a mysteriously random murder of the owner of a boutique. The women were strangers to each other before they assaulted the man, who accused one of them of shoplifting. Janine's task is to determine whether the women were insane when they committed the crime, and she comes to feel empathy for them when she examines the ways in which they were discriminated against by the men in their lives. Marleen Gorris crafts an intriguing courtroom drama that has been dismissed by some as feminist agitprop, but deserves praise for the way Gorris manipulates our attitudes toward the issues it raises.   

Love Letter (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1953)

Masayuki Mori in Love Letter

Cast: Masayuki Mori, Juzo Dosan, Yoshiko Kuga, Jukichi Uno, Kyoko Kagawa, Shizue Natsukawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Chieko Seki, Ranko Hanai, Chieko Nakakita, Keisuke Kinoshita. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, based on a novel by Fumio Niwa. Cinematography: Hiroshi Suzuki. Art direction: Seigo Shindo. Film editing: Toshio Goto. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

Struggling to get by in postwar Japan, Reikichi Mayumi (Masayuki Mori) spends his idle time searching for his childhood sweetheart Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga). Then one day he finds her and berates her for what she did to survive: become the mistress of an American soldier. That is the crux of the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka's first film as a director, Love Letter. The letter itself is the giveaway to Michiko's secret. Reikichi overhears her dictating it to his friend Naoto Yamaji (Jukichi Uno), who ekes out a living by writing letters for women whose GI boyfriends have left them behind when they returned to the States. Michiko bore the soldier's child, but it died, and now she urgently seeks his financial aid, fearing that she will have to prostitute herself to live. Tanaka creates a vivid portrait of a wounded country where regret about the past is secondary to the need to survive. In this context, Reikichi's rigid morality seems out of place. Alive with secondary characters, the film gives us more than just a tortured romance, and although it contains a soap opera crisis, Tanaka wisely avoids a pat reconciliatory ending.    

War Machine (Patrick Hughes, 2026)

Alan Ritchson in War Machine

Cast: Alan Ritchson, Stefan James, Blake Richardson, Dennis Quaid, Esai Morales, Jai Courtney, Alex King, Keiynan Lonsdale, Jack Patton, James Beaufort, Joshua Diaz, Jacob Hohua, Daniel Webber. Screenplay: Patrick Hughes, James Beaufort. Cinematography: Aaron Morton. Production design: Enzo Iacono. Film editing: Andy Canny. Music: Dmitri Golovko. 

I think I would have enjoyed War Machine more if it didn't feel like the kind of movie Pete Hegseth would love. At the beginning it's a straightforward celebration of military machismo, but then it turns into an invasion from outer space sci-fi movie while still retaining its conviction that the warrior ethos of muscle and grit is what will save us. Granted, it does give a nod to intelligence, as the hero manages to conquer the alien war machine with his knowledge of applied physics. The movie doesn't give Alan Ritchson much of an opportunity to play anything but Reacher gone Ranger, but he demonstrates the kind of presence that should ensure his continuance in action flicks, including the franchise that War Machine seems likely to produce.    

Every Man for Himself (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980)

Jacques Dutronc in Every Man for Himself

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Nathalie Baye, Cécile Tanner, Paule Muret, Anna Baldaccini, Roland Amstutz. Screenplay: Anne-Marie Miéville, Jean-Claude Carrière. Cinematography: Renato Berta, William Lubtchansky, Jean-Bernard Menou. Art direction: Romain Goupil. Film editing: Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville. Music: Gabriel Yared. 

Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man for Himself is about transactional lives: Everyone in the film is trying to get something from someone else. Naturally, the key figure is a prostitute, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who eventually gets involved in the lives of a couple dissolving their relationship: the filmmaker Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) and his girlfriend, Denise (Nathalie Baye). It's a droll, talky, and sometimes bitterly funny film with a melancholy undertone reinforced by several reprises of the aria "Suicidio" from Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda. For the real-life Godard it represented a return to more or less conventional filmmaking after the late '60s and '70s immersion in politics and experimentation, and it shows his mastery of creating vivid characters with problems of their own self-centered making. 

The Million Dollar Hotel (Wim Wenders, 2000)

Jeremy Davies in The Million Dollar Hotel

Cast: Jeremy Davies, Milla Jovovich, Mel Gibson, Jimmy Smits, Peter Stormare, Amanda Plummer, Gloria Stuart, Tom Bower, Donal Logue, Bud Cort, Julian Sands, Harris Yulin, Charlayne Woodard, Tim Roth. Screenplay: Nicholas Klein, Bono. Cinematography: Phaedon Papamichael. Production design: Robbie Freed, Arabella Serrell. Film editing: Tatiana S. Riegel. Music: Brian Eno, Jon Hassell, Daniel Lanois.

The idea for Wim Wenders's The Million Dollar Hotel was conceived by Bono while he was filming the video for "Where the Streets Have No Name" in downtown Los Angeles near the Cecil Hotel, a run-down residence hotel. At its Australian premiere, the film's star, Mel Gibson, in one of those unfiltered remarks that wrecked his career, told an interviewer that the movie was "as boring as a dog's ass." He later backtracked, saying that he didn't really mean what he said, but it stuck. Wenders's film isn't boring, but it's not a highlight of the career of the director who gave us Wings of Desire (1987) and Paris, Texas (1984). It's a muddled blend of satire, whodunit, and tragic romance with tinges of magic realism, based on the weary premise that outcasts and the mentally challenged possess a higher wisdom. Gibson plays Skinner, an FBI agent investigating the death of a resident of the titular Los Angeles hotel: Did the artist Izzy Goldkiss (Tim Roth in a cameo) fall from the hotel roof, or was he pushed? Skinner is there at the behest of Izzy's wealthy father (Harris Yulin). He finds that the residents of the hotel are mostly deinstitutionalized mental patients, and they're no help in solving the case. Skinner is not a model of normality himself: He wears a neck brace and it's later revealed that he once had a third arm growing from his back: "I could play the violin and wipe my ass all at the same time." In his investigation, he centers on Geronimo (Jimmy Smits), an artist like Izzy, and employs Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies), one of the residents who is infatuated with another, the pretty Eloise (Milla Jovovich). The performances are mostly good, although Davies plays Tom Tom as a little more manic than he needs to. But in the end it's a movie mostly for U2 fans and Wenders completists. 

I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Marcus Carl Franklin, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere in I’m Not There 

 Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Kris Kristofferson (voice), Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bruce Greenwood, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams. Screenplay: Todd Haynes, Oren Moverman. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Judy Becker. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Bob Dylan. 

I'm Not There is a kind of giveaway title: Bob Dylan isn't there on the screen either. Confronted with the most enigmatic music figure of the 20th century, Todd Haynes resorts to a deconstructed biopic. Bob Dylan's personae are so varied that he evokes the young man addressed in Shakespeare's Sonnet 53: "What is your substance, whereof are you made./That millions of strange shadows on you tend?" Haynes doesn't find a million Dylans, but he sticks to half a dozen, played by as many different performers, including a young Black actor (Marcus Carl Franklin) and a woman (Cate Blanchett, who earned an Oscar nomination for the role). Each of them represents a different stage in Dylan's life and career, but you really have to be steeped in knowledge of his biography already to fully appreciate the skill with which Haynes makes it all work. Or you can simply sit back and enjoy the audacity and originality of the film.