The Square (Ruben Östlund, 2017)

Cast: Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, Terry Notary, Christopher Læssø, Lise Stephenson Engström, Lilianne Mardon, Marina Shiptjenko, Annica Liljeblad, Elijandro Edouard, Daniel Hallberg, Martin Sööder. Screenplay: Ruben Östlund. Cinematography: Fredrik Wenzel. Production design: Josefin Åsberg. Film editing: Jacob Secher Schulsinger. 

Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or winner The Square is a satire, but its objects are so many -- the art world, public relations, economic inequality, social inequity, smug political correctness, and so on -- that it tend to lose focus at moments when it should be sharpest. Added to that, Östlund indulges his absurdist side so often -- a chimpanzee wanders unexplained through an apartment, an interview is persistently interrupted by the shouts of a man with Tourette's -- that it's often hard to decide what's important in the film. The writer-director has been compared to Luis Buñuel, Michael Haneke, and Lars von Trier, but he lacks Buñuel's control, Haneke's cynicism, and von Trier's cruelty, so that any edge the satire might have is blunted. It's also two and a half hours long -- perhaps half an hour longer than it should have been. Still, it's a film of very funny moments, and a few disturbing ones, and the performances, especially Claes Bang as the museum director hoisted with many of his own petards and Elisabeth Moss as the American journalist who interviews and sleeps with him, are skillfully entertaining.  

Pride (Matthew Warchus, 2014)

The success of The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997), a movie about unemployed steelworkers who become male strippers, seems to have inspired a new genre of feel-good movies about the struggles of the British working class. And Margaret Thatcher's union-breaking efforts during the 1984 coal-miners' strike has become the nexus for a series of films in the same spirit. The year before The Full Monty, there was Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996), about how the brass band staffed by unemployed coal miners helped raise spirits after their pit was closed. There was Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000), about a striking miner's son who wants to become a ballet dancer. Like The Full Monty, it became a hit stage musical. Unfortunately, once you have a string of movies like these, you also have a formula to follow, which Stephen Beresford's screenplay for Pride, in which a group of gays and lesbians in London decide to raise funds to support striking Welsh miners, does almost to the letter. It's based on a true story, and the results are amusing and heart-warming, but a feeling of déjà vu works to prevent your feeling that you've seen anything fresh and surprising. What it has going for it is a beautifully committed cast, with some familiar old pros -- Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Andrew Scott, and Dominic West -- and a few fine newcomers, particularly Ben Schnetzer, an American actor who launched his career in Britain. (An interesting reversal, considering the number of Brits, including West in The Wire and The Affair, along with Andrew Lincoln in The Walking Dead, Matthew Rhys in The Americans, and Hugh Dancy in Hannibal, who have found their careers flourishing in American television.) The film capitalizes on anti-Thatcher sentiments while downplaying the contemporaneous arrival of the AIDS crisis. There is a scene in which the group's leader, Mark Ashton (Schnetzer), encounters a former lover (a cameo by Russell Tovey) who is obviously ill, and a revelation that Jonathan Blake (West) was diagnosed with the disease several years earlier, but these are incidental to the main plot. The movie manages to avoid spoiling the feel-good mood by revealing only in the credits sequence that Ashton died at the age of 26 in 1987; Blake, however, is still alive.