The Firemen's Ball (Milos Forman, 1967)

Cast: Jan Vostrcil, Josef Sebánek, Josef Valnoha, Frantisek Debelka, Josef Kolb, Jan Stöckl. Screenplay: Milos Forman, Jaroslav Papousek, Ivan Passer, Václav Sasek. Cinematography: Miroslav Ondrícek. Production design: Karel Cerný. Film editing: Miroslav Hájek. Music: Karel Mares.

Milos Forman's raucous comedy about the screwups of a small town fire department as it attempts to celebrate its retired fire chief and raise money with a raffle got the director into deep trouble in Czechoslovakia when the regime realized that the film was actually a satire on communist bureaucracy. And the truth is, The Firemen's Ball teeters between slapstick comedy and mordant satire so much that it winds up a little too dark for laughter, a little too silly for pointed criticism. Which is not to say that it isn't sometimes very funny or that its criticism didn't have an effect: Forman went into exile and wound up a major Hollywood director. The mostly non-professional actors in its cast throw themselves into their roles and the pacing of the film is appropriately hectic. Somehow, despite the frowns of officialdom, The Firemen's Ball wound up as the Czech entry for the best foreign language film at the Oscars, which led to another irony: The winner in that category was the Soviet Union's entry, Sergey Bondarchuk's War and Peace. 

Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952)

John Payne and Lee Van Cleef in Kansas City Confidential

Cast: John Payne, Coleen Gray, Preston Foster, Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam, Dona Drake, Mario Siletti, Howard Negley, Carleton Young, Don Orlando, Ted Ryan. Screenplay: George Bruce, Harry Essex, Harold Greene, Rowland Brown. Cinematography: George E. Diskant. Art direction: Edward L. Ilou. Film editing: Buddy Small. Music: Paul Sawtell.

This intricately plotted film noir benefits more from its supporting cast of heavies -- Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, and Jack Elam -- than it does from its nominal leads, John Payne and Coleen Gray. Payne's Joe Rolfe gets framed for a big heist, but there's not enough evidence to convict him, so he sets out to track down the hoodlums who set him up. The first twist is that none of the actual thieves know who any of the others are -- they were all sent on their mission in masks, supplied by the mastermind, known to them as "Mr. Big." And he turns out to be a retired police captain (Preston Foster) who was forced out of his job by politics. And he isn't interested in the loot itself but in staging a capture of the thieves and a recovery of the money so he can get the reward and maybe even be reinstated in his old job. As if this twist isn't enough, he's also the father of the young woman (Gray) whom Rolfe falls in love with after he sleuths his way to the Mexican resort town where the plot leads everybody else. Fortunately, Phil Karlson's no-nonsense direction keeps the movie from getting snared in its own twists and turns.

At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2018)

Willem Dafoe in At Eternity's Gate

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Mads Mikkelsen, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Niels Arestrup. Screenplay: Jean-Claude Carrière, Julian Schnabel, Louise Kugelberg. Cineatography: Benoît Delhomme. Production design: Stéphane Cressend. Film editing: Louise Kugelberg, Julian Schnabel. Music: Tatiana Lisovskaya. 

Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate is less a dramatic biopic than a series of conversations about art and madness centered on the figure of Vincent van Gogh. Willem Dafoe got yet another well-deserved Oscar nomination for playing van Gogh as a man who walks the line between genius and psychosis. Schnabel's contribution to this familiar story is to introduce a recent theory that van Gogh's death was not a suicide but instead a mishap, the result of a random gunshot when the artist was being harassed by a couple of young hoodlums. Van Gogh, in this theory, claimed he shot himself perhaps to protect the perpetrators but also as a kind of acknowledgement that he had reached a terminal point in his life. But what matters most in the film is art, explored in conversations between Vincent and his brother, Theo (Rupert Friend), his fellow artist Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac), and near the end of the film with a priest, played by Mads Mikkelsen. It's an often fascinating film in its re-creation of 19th-century Paris, Arles, and Auvers-sur-Oise, and its deft matching of scenery and people with the corresponding places and faces familiar to us from van Gogh's paintings. To my mind, cinematographer Benoît Delhomme overuses the hand-held camera to the point of inducing a kind of nausea, but perhaps the intent was to suggest the instability that van Gogh tried to turn into fixity by painting it.

The Two Popes (Fernando Meirelles, 2019)

Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce in The Two Popes

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Pryce, Juan Minujin, Luis Gnecco, Cristina Banegas, María Ucedo, Renato Scarpa, Sidney Cole, Achille Brugnini. Screenplay: Anthony McCarten. Cinematography: César Charlone. Production design: Mark Tildesley. Film editing: Fernando Stutz. Music: Bryce Dessner.

Shall I admit that there are two establishments I find utterly useless: the British royal family and the papacy? But that both somehow never fail to grab my interest whenever their internal workings are exposed to view, as in the TV series The Crown and Paolo Sorrentino's The Young Pope and its sequel, The New Pope. Fernando Meirelles's The Two Popes has some of the juicy insiderness of those series, but it feels hamstrung a bit by the fact that the relationship between Benedict XVI and Francis is an ongoing story. At the end of the film, Benedict and Francis have achieved a kind of rapprochement, but news stories since the movie's release have suggested there's a lot of continuing tension between the two. Where The Two Popes works best is in its portrait of the younger Francis's life in Argentina, in which Juan Minujin takes over the role from the Oscar-nominated Jonathan Pryce. I would have liked a corresponding treatment of the more controversial past of Joseph Ratzinger, the young Benedict, but that might have steered the film, already more than two hours long, in the direction of a miniseries. Anthony Hopkins also received an Oscar nomination (as supporting actor, though he receives top billing) for his performance as Benedict, and he manages to capture some of the narrow-eyed conservatism of that pope, which just left me wanting more.

Jungle Book (Zoltan Korda, 1942)

Sabu in Jungle Book

Cast: Sabu, Joseph Calleia, John Qualen, Frank Puglia, Rosemary DeCamp, Patricia O'Rourke, Ralph Byrd, John Mather, Faith Brook, Noble Johnson. Screenplay: Laurence Stallings, based on a novel by Rudyard Kipling. Cinematography: Lee Garmes, W. Howard Greene. Production design: Vincent Korda. Film editing: William Hornbeck. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

If you can ignore the childish anthropomorphism that labels elephants "gentle" and tigers "evil," and tolerate the Anglo actors in brownface playing Indians, there's some fun to be had in Jungle Book. Sabu is a lively Mowgli, swinging on vines through the jungle and interacting well with the animal characters, both live and puppet. The sets and Technicolor cinematography are appropriately lush and vivid, and there's a spectacular forest fire at the film's end. But something in me prefers both the cel-animated Disney version of 1967 directed by Wolfgang Reitherman and its 2016 live/CGI remake by Jon Favreau. Is it just that in the fight between Shere Khan and Mowgli I found myself rooting for the beautiful tiger?

Separate Tables (Delbert Mann, 1958)

Cast: Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth, David Niven, Wendy Hiller, Burt Lancaster, Gladys Cooper, Cathleen Nesbitt, Felix Aylmer, Rod Taylor, Audrey Dalton, May Hallatt, Priscilla Morgan. Screenplay: Terence Rattigan, John Gay, based on plays by Terence Rattigan. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Production design: Harry Horner. Film editing: Charles Ennis, Marjorie Fowler. Music: David Raksin.

This somewhat stodgy drama set in a residential hotel in England received seven Academy Award nominations, including best picture, and David Niven and Wendy Hiller actually won for best actor and supporting actress. Unfortunately, today it seems tired and rather clichéd, with Gladys Cooper reprising her smothering mother role from Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), this time keeping her thumb on Deborah Kerr (who racked up the fifth of her six unsuccessful Oscar nominations for the film). Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth were called in for star power, but only seem miscast as the squabbling divorced couple. Niven's performance as the faux major whose imposture is exposed when he's arrested for sexual harassment in a theater is indeed the standout in the film, but the Oscar is also a reward for a quarter-century of playing second leads and sidekicks.

The Sea Hawk (Michael Curtiz, 1940)

Gilbert Roland and Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk

Cast: Errol Flynn, Brenda Marshall, Claude Rains, Flora Robson, Donald Crisp, Alan Hale, Henry Daniell, Una O'Connor, James Stephenson, Gilbert Roland. Screenplay: Howard Koch, Seton I. Miller. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: George Amy. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold. 

Warner Bros. doing one of the things it did best (besides backstage musicals and gangster films), the Errol Flynn swashbuckler. The Sea Hawk has rousing action sequences (sweetened by George Amy's editing and Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score), a cast drawn from the ranks of the studio's seemingly inexhaustible store of character players, and a loving disregard for historical actuality. If only it had Olivia de Havilland as the love interest instead of the frozen-faced Brenda Marshall, it might have been more of a classic than it is. Still, there's Flora Robson doing her second turn as Queen Elizabeth I -- she had played her three years earlier in William K. Howard's Fire Over England -- and Claude Rains in a black wig as the Spanish ambassador. Henry Daniell has the role that might better have gone to Basil Rathbone as Flynn's chief antagonist, the villainous (and fictional) Lord Wolfingham. For audiences in 1940 the whole thing was an obvious analogue to the conflict raging in Europe, with plucky England standing up against the German Spanish dreams of world conquest. The United States was still officially neutral, but everyone knew what Queen Elizabeth's final patriotic exhortation was all about.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot, 2019)

Cast: Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, Rob Morgan, Tichina Arnold, Mike Epps, Finn Wittrock, Danny Glover, Willie Hen, Jamal Truelove. Screenplay: Joe Talbot, Jimmie Fails, Rob Richert. Cinematography: Adam Newport-Berra. Production design: Jona Tochet. Film editing: David Marks. Music: Emile Mosseri.

With Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada, 2018) and Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018), The Last Black Man in San Francisco forms a kind of trilogy of films about gentrification in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first two films are based in Oakland, but the center of gravity in the area is what people continue to call The City. Jimmie Fails (the character and the actor-writer have the same name) is obsessed with a Victorian house in which his family used to live, back when old houses were cheap and many of them were located in predominantly black neighborhoods. He has convinced himself somehow that the house was built in 1946 by his grandfather, who settled in San Francisco after the war, and that the decline of the family fortunes, brought about by his father's fecklessness, robbed him of his heritage. Jimmie now lives in the rundown Bayview-Hunters Point area of San Francisco, bunking with his friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) and Mont's blind grandfather (Danny Glover), but whenever he can he takes the bus or rides his skateboard to the old house and surreptitiously does what he can to keep it up whenever the elderly couple who live there are away. The more realistic Mont does what he can to dispel his friend's illusions, but when the residents move out and the house is held up because of conflicts over its ownership, Jimmie moves in and tries to claim ownership himself. Eventually, Jimmie is forced to confront reality. Meanwhile, Fails and writer-director Joe Talbot craft a loving but pained portrait of what San Francisco has become in an era of severe income disparity. The film is neither as pointed as Blindspotting nor as raucously satiric as Sorry to Bother You, but it accumulates its own special poignancy in its exploration of the racial and economic disjunctions of the 21st century.

Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)

Sam Rockwell in Moon

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Dominique McElligott, Rosie Shaw, Adrienne Shaw, Kaya Scodelario, Benedict Wong, Matt Berry, voice of Kevin Spacey. Screenplay: Duncan Jones, Nathan Parker. Cinematography: Gary Shaw. Production design: Tony Noble. Film editing: Nicolas Gaster. Music: Clint Mansell. 

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a mining engineer at the end of a three-year stint as the solitary maintenance man at an outpost on the dark side of the moon. His only companion is a robot called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), who tends to his every need. The energy corporation for which he works has promised to return him to his wife and small child on Earth when his shift is over, but he has been unable to communicate directly with his family, only receiving recorded messages. Then an accident happens, and the truth about who Sam Bell is comes out. There's an ironic happy ending to the film: "Sam" gets returned to Earth, where he exposes corporate wrongdoing, but the last word is uttered by a Rush Limbaughesque talk show host: "You know what? He's one of two things. He's a wacko or he's an illegal immigrant. Either way, they need to lock him up!" Moon might have been a little better if this satiric note had played throughout the film, but it's solid sci-fi that doesn't depend on flashy CGI and it features a compelling performance by Rockwell.  

Police Story 2 (Jackie Chan, 1988)

Jackie Chan and Keung-Kuen Lai in Police Story 2

Cast: Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Kwok-Hung Lam, Bill Tung, Keung-Kuen Lai, John Cheung, Charlie Cho, Yuen Chor, Ben Lam, Chi Fai Chan, Shan Kwan, Isabella Wong, Ann Mui. Screenplay: Jackie Chan, Paul B. Clay, Edward Tang. Cinematography: Yiu-Tsou Cheung, Yu-Tang Li. Production design: Oliver Wong. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Yao-Tsu Chang, J. Peter Robinson, Siu-Lam Tang.

Jackie Chan's hyperactive policeman Cha Ka-Kui has been demoted to traffic as a result of the mayhem in the first Police Story film, but he bounds back under threat from his old enemies. There's a lot more pyrotechnics in this installment, thanks to the explosives wizardry of the film's chief villain, a deaf mute played by Keung-Kuen Lai.