The Rocket From Calabuch (Luis García Berlanga, 1956)

Valentina Cortese and Edmund Gwenn in The Rocket From Calabuch

Cast: Edmund Gwenn, Franco Fabrizi, Valentina Cortese, Juan Calvo, José Isbert, Félix Fernández. Screenplay: Leonardo Martín, Florentino Soria, Ennio Flaiano, Luis García Berlanga. Cinematography: Francisco Sempere. Film editing: Pepita Orduna. Music: Guido Guerrini, Angelo Francesco Lavagnino.

In his last film role, Edmund Gwenn plays an atomic scientist who hides out in a small Spanish town, fleeing the demands made on him by the American military. But his cover gets blown when he helps the villagers in their annual fireworks competition with another town. It's the usual droll, loving comedy from one of its masters, Luis García Berlanga.

More (Barbet Schroeder, 1969)

Klaus Grünberg and Mimsy Farmer in More

Cast: Klaus Grünberg, Mimsy Farmer, Heinz Engelmann, Michel Chanderli, Henry Wolf, Louise Wink. Screenplay: Paul Gégauff, Barbet Schroeder, Mimsy Farmer, Eugene Archer, Paul Gardner. Cinematography: Néstor Almendros. Art direction: Néstor Almendros, Fran Lewis. Film editing: Denise de Casablanca, Rita Roland. Music: Pink Floyd.

A vivid downer film, in which a German student (Klaus Grünberg) and an American hippie (Mimsy Farmer) get more deeply involved in drugs, moving from pot to LSD to heroin. More avoids some of the clichés of films about the counterculture of the late '60s -- it doesn't try to re-create the drug experience with camera tricks but instead views its characters externally as it traces their disintegration. It places its more sordid sequences against the beauty of Ibiza to good effect, and the cinematography of Néstor Almendros makes the most of the location, but the film still feels heavy and dated.

Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, 1959)

Noël Coward and Alec Guinness in Our Man in Havana

Cast: Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O'Hara, Ernie Kovacs, Noël Coward, Ralph Richardson, Jo Morrow. Screenplay: Graham Greene, based on his novel. Cinematography: Oswald Morris. Art direction: John Box. Film editing: Bert Bates. Music: Frank Deniz, Laurence Deniz.

Given its cast, its director, and its screenwriter, Our Man in Havana has always seemed to me that it should be a little bit better than it is. I think director Carol Reed may be mostly at fault: His best films, like Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Third Man (1949), have just the right mixture of gravitas and wit. Here there's a little too much gravitas weighing down what could have a more pronounced satiric edge: a tale of bumbling British espionage. It's possible, too, that a little uncertainty of tone lingers over the movie because it was filmed on location in Cuba just after the fall of Batista -- Fidel Castro himself visited the shoot -- and the subsequent course of the revolution lends a queasiness to the subject matter. Nevertheless, we are in the hands of masters like Alec Guinness, Noël Coward, and Ralph Richardson here, so there's enough to enjoy. 

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

Benjamin Millepied and Natalie Portman in Black Swan

Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder. Screenplay: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: Thérèse DePrez. Film editing: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Clint Mansell.

Overheated melodrama with horror movie elements that seems determined to make ballet into more of a psychological and physical trial by torture than is entirely plausible. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her role as the tormented dancer, and she gets good support from Mila Kunis as her potential rival and Barbara Hershey as her mother. But I found myself laughing at its excesses when I think director Darren Aronofsky, over the top as usual, meant for me to shudder at them.

Welcome, Mr. Marshall! (Luis García Berlanga, 1953)

Cast: Manolo Morán, José Isbert, Lolita Sevilla, Alberto Romea, Elvira Quintillá, Luis Pérez de León, Félix Fernández, Fernando Aguirre. Screenplay: Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis García Berlanga, Miguel Mihura. Cinematography: Manuel Berenguer. Film editing: Pepita Orduna. Music: Jesús García Leoz.

As he so often did, Luis García Berlanga thumbed his nose at the Franco-era censors with a satiric look at a small Spanish village out to court foreign aid from the Americans under the Marshall Plan. The residents set up a kind of Andalusian Potemkin village, donning costumes they don't usually wear and generally dressing up the place in the fashion they think American tourists will expect. In dream sequences, we see what the villagers not only hope but also what they fear they will get from the Americans.

Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935)

Peter Lorre in Mad Love

Cast: Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive, Ted Healy, Sara Haden, Edward Brophy, Henry Kolker, Keye Luke, May Beatty. Screenplay: Guy Endore, P.J. Wolfson, John L. Balderston, based on a novel by Maurice Renard. Cinematography: Chester A. Lyons, Gregg Toland. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.

Peter Lorre's American debut made him a specialist in creepy roles. He's Dr. Gogol, a mad physician, obsessed with a lovely actress (Frances Drake) married to a concert pianist (Colin Clive) who, when his hands are injured in an accident, allows the doctor to operate on them. But the doctor replaces the pianist's hands with those of a murderer, a specialist in knife-throwing, who has just been guillotined for his crimes. Naturally, this means that the pianist can't play anymore but develops a new talent for throwing sharp objects. And so on. It's a pretty well made piece of hokum that gained some late notoriety when Pauline Kael accused Orson Welles of stealing from it when he made Citizen Kane (1941), largely because both films had the same cinematographer, Gregg Toland.

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1947)

Cedric Hardwicke and Sally Ann Howes in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

Cast: Derek Bond, Cedric Hardwicke, Bernard Miles, Sally Ann Howes, Alfred Drayton, Aubrey Woods, Stanley Holloway, Jill Balcon, Mary Merrall, Athene Seyler, Sybil Thorndike, Fay Compton, Cathleen Nesbitt, James Hayter. Screenplay: John Dighton, based on a novel by Charles Dickens. Cinematography: Gordon Dines. Art direction: Michael Relph. Film editing: Leslie Norman. Music: Lord Berners.

Forgettable and rather plodding version of the Dickens novel, kept alive only by some good actors doing their thing well.

Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

Jonathan Pryce in Brazil

Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, Jim Broadbent. Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown. Cinematography: Roger Pratt. Production design: Norman Garwood. Film editing: Julian Doyle. Music: Michael Kamen.

I have to admit reluctantly that I'm not a fan of the kind of dystopian social satire epitomized by Terry Gilliam's Brazil and echoed in such films as Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen (1991) and the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). They seem to me too scattered to be effective as satire, too dependent on production design and special effects to connect with the realities they're supposedly lampooning. I find myself forgetting them almost once they end. That said, Brazil is always worth watching just for the performances of a cast filled with specialists in a kind of British-style muddling through even the weirdest of situations.

Plácido (Luis García Berlanga, 1961)

Cast: Cassen, José Luis López Vázquez, Elvira Quintillá, Manuel Alexandre, Mario Bustos, María Francés. Screenplay: Luis García Berlanga, Rafael Azcona, José Luis Colina, José Luis Font. Cinematography: Francisco Sempere. Art direction: Antonio Cortés. Film editing: José Antonio Rojo. Music: Miguel Asins Arbó.

Luis García Berlanga in fine form with yet another satire that conceals the knife edge within a depiction of village eccentrics. This time, it's the ostentatious and superficial charity of the bourgeoisie that gets the knife, as the title character (Cassen) tries to keep the truck on which he and his family's livelihood depends from being repossessed.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J.A. Bayona, 2018)

Chris Pratt in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, James Cromwell, Toby Jones, Ted Levine, Jeff Goldblum, BD Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, Isabella Sermon. Screenplay: Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow. Cinematography: Oscar Faura. Production design: Andy Nicholson. Film editing: Bernat Vilaplana. Music: Michael Giacchino.

Not quite as inane as its 2015 predecessor, this installment of the Jurassic World series -- if such there is to be, since Covid-19 seems to have put the filming of the next installment on hold -- benefits from making Bryce Dallas Howard's character less of a ditz in heels, and from eschewing the tired kids-in-jeopardy theme from the first. Still, this is one of those movies from which you know what you're going to get, and if you want that sort of thing, have at it.