The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023)

George MacKay and Léa Seydoux in The Beast

Cast: Léa Seydoux, George MacKay, Guslagie Malanda, Dasha Nekrasova, Martin Scali, Elina Löwensohn, Marta Hoskins, Jula Faure, Kester Lovelace, Felicien Pinot, Laurent Lacotte. Screenplay: Bertrand Bonello, Guillaume Bréaud, Benjamin Charbit, based on a story by Henry James. Cinematography: Josée Deshaies. Production design: Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Anita Roth. Music: Anna Bonello, Bertrand Bonello.

Bertrand Bonello's The Beast is a jigsaw puzzle of a movie, asking the viewer to assemble the scattered pieces of three distinct stories -- a doomed romance set in early 20th-century Paris, a contemporary suspense thriller about stalker and prey, and a futuristic sci-fi tale about artificial intelligence -- into a single frame. The risk of such non-linear narratives is that the viewer may think that the finished product doesn't reward the effort of putting it all together. Each individual story in The Beast is enough to base an entire movie on. They share a common theme: the intersection of fear and desire. Is anything gained by jumbling them into one another? I think that Bonello knows the central fact about jigsaw puzzles: that the end result, the finished picture, is less important than the pleasure of putting the pieces together. He demonstrates this knowledge by opening his film with a distancing device: Léa Seydoux playing an actress in front of a green screen, being rehearsed through the movements -- a woman taking up a knife to defend herself from an unseen beast -- that will recur in some fashion throughout The Beast. It's a little like the picture on the cover of the puzzle box that helps you know what pieces are likely to go together. It's well-acted, with Seydoux and George MacKay deftly handling the switches between French and English, including the American accent called for in the thriller section, and Bonello achieves some creepy and suspenseful moments throughout. But in the end, I think its success depends mostly on the viewer's willingness to play his game.  

Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve, 2023)

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Léa Seydoux, Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling. Screenplay: Denis Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts, based on a novel by Frank Herbert. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: Patrice Vermette. Film editing: Joe Walker. Music: Hans Zimmer. 

The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015)

Colin Farrell has had an odd career, never quite making it to major stardom, but continuing to work in sometimes offbeat films like the wonderful In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008). And when it comes to offbeat, there are few films that march to a more eccentric drummer than The Lobster, in which Farrell has tamped down his typically assertive persona and bloated his trim figure with an unhealthy-looking paunch. It's not quite the transformative performance that often wins Oscars for actors, though it has earned Farrell quite a few nominations from critics groups as well as one for a Golden Globe. Farrell plays David, whose recent breakup with his wife has caused him to be sent to a hotel whose residents are given 45 days to find another partner. If they fail to do so, they are turned into animals -- David tells the hotel manager (Olivia Colman) that he wants to be turned into a lobster. He is accompanied to the hotel by his brother, who has already been turned into a dog. But ... oh, there's no point in going on with a summary. It's a film of multiple turns and revelations, each of which has to be discovered by viewers with their own fresh insights into the quite unusual vision of its director, Yorgos Lanthimos, and his co-screenwriter, Efthymis Filippou. It's part dystopian fantasy, part tragicomedy, part satire, part fable. Farrell is quite good, as are Colman, Rachel Weisz, John C. Reilly, Léa Seydoux, and Ben Whishaw as the present and former residents of the hotel, some of whom have escaped into the woods to avoid being transformed and are now in a kind of guerrilla war with the residents. Comparisons to Kafka's stories have inevitably been made, and while it's not quite of that exalted original order, The Lobster is one of the few recent films that feel fresh and daring.

Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015)

How can there be, by current count, 24 James Bond films? (Not counting the 1967 spoof version of Casino Royale, which had no fewer than five directors, including John Huston.) Why has the series not run its course by now? It has survived regular cast changes, including its central character, who has been played by six different actors: The current Bond, Daniel Craig, had not even been born when the first film in the series, Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962), premiered. Even recurring characters have been recast: M, Miss Moneypenny, and Q have each been played by five actors, and M underwent a change from male to female when Judi Dench took over the role in GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995), though the part reverted to male (Ralph Fiennes) at the end of Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012). Yet the series has retained a reassuring familiarity, even to the point of typically beginning with a spectacular action sequence that almost certainly can't be topped in the remaining parts of the film. In Spectre, Bond is in Mexico City, where he shoots a bad guy, setting off an explosion that has him scrambling to escape from the building's collapsing façade, then chases another bad guy escaping from the rubble onto a helicopter, on which they struggle for control as it careens wildly over the crowds celebrating the Day of the Dead in the Zócalo. Then come the credits and another Bond-film staple, the thematic pop song: This one, "Writing's on the Wall," sung by Sam Smith, who co-wrote it with Jimmy Napes, won an Oscar. And then it's down to the usual business: chastisement by M (Fiennes), gadgets by Q (Ben Whishaw), and pursuit of the villains seeking control of the world. In Spectre there are two: One, Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott), is trying to take over control of intelligence services all over the world, while the other is a familiar figure from earlier Bond films, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), who is in cahoots with Denbigh. (Blofeld, who had been a regular supervillain in the Sean Connery era, was absent from the Bond films after 1983 because of copyright litigation that was settled before Spectre, which takes its title from Blofeld's global criminal organization, was filmed.) There are also vodka martinis, shaken not stirred, to be quaffed, and "Bond girls" to be bedded -- although in recent years, Bond's sex life has become less wildly promiscuous and the women have become more complex characters. In Spectre, one of them, Madeleine Swann, is played by Léa Seydoux, a more than capable actress who sometimes seems to be fighting against the limitations of the role, trying to make Madeleine a more interesting figure than the screenplay allows. So to return to the original question: Why do we still gravitate to the Bond films when there are more novel action-adventures to be had? The series has been so frequently imitated -- Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible movies are virtually indistinguishable in formula from Bond films -- that maybe imitation suggests the answer: We crave the familiar, but we also relish the small surprises when the formula is tweaked. In Spectre, for example, M, Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), and Q all get out of the office and into the field for a change. Spectre is not quite as satisfying an outing as Skyfall, and there are signs of fatigue in Craig's performance, suggesting that his term as Bond has run its course -- though he has reportedly signed on for the next one. But longevity can be its own reward: We have become so comfortable with the formula that it still excites people to speculate about the next James Bond -- Tom Hiddleston? Idris Elba?

Blue Is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)

It's at least half an hour too long, and the sex scenes inevitably have something exploitative about them, but Blue Is the Warmest Color remains exceptional in large part because it's one of the most intimate portraits of a human relationship on film. The jury at Cannes was right in citing not only the director but also the two actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, when it gave the film the Palme D'Or. Exarchopoulos in particular demonstrates a rare courage, not for exposing her body but for allowing the rawness of her emotions to show forth. There are moments when her character, Adèle (Kechiche changed the character's name from "Clémentine" when he cast her), becomes almost pitiable in her helpless infatuation with Seydoux's Emma, Exarchapoulos's fresh beauty becoming disfigured in her portrayal of Adèle's suffering at the inability to make the kind of fusion she desires with Emma. It's a fable about the limitations of love that transcends sexual orientation. The film's NC-17 rating once again demonstrates the wrong-headedness of the American ratings board's approach to sexuality, as opposed to its blithe acceptance of any extreme of violence in film.