Delicatessen (Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991)

Marie-Laure Dougnac and Dominique Pinon in Delicatessen

Cast: Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Karin Viard, Ticky Holgado, Edith Ker, Rufus, Jacques Mathou, Howard Vernon, Marc Caro. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro, Gilles Adrien. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Marc Caro. Film editing: Hervé Schneid. Music: Carlos D'Alessio.

Lovers of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie (2001) should be warned that while Delicatessen has some of the affecting whimsy of that earlier film, it also revels in the grotesque to a sometimes queasy extent. It's a post-apocalyptic tale about a decaying apartment house in a bombed-out city, in which the ground floor is occupied by the titular establishment, run by a butcher who carves up the occasional employee (lured there by a Help Wanted ad) and serves him to his tenants. The grotesquerie of Delicatessen has caused it to be likened to the works of Terry Gilliam (who endorsed its American release) and David Lynch, but it's somewhat more anarchic than their films, borrowing its tropes equally as much from horror movies. It has its moments, but I found my interest flagging as its eccentricities piled up.

Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002)

Cast: Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Chen Daoming, Donnie Yen, Zhongyuan Liu, Tianyong Zheng, Yan Qin, Chang Xiao Yang. Screenplay: Feng Li, Zhang Yimou, Bin Wang. Cinematography: Christopher Doyle. Production design: Tingxiao Huo, Zhenzhou Yi. Film editing: Angie Lam, Vincent Lee. Costume design: Emi Wada. Music: Tan Dun.

Visually, one of the most beautiful films ever made, Hero is a ravishing blend of color, texture, pattern, and movement, with spectacular locations that range from desert to mountain, from forest to lake. If it had as much to please the mind as it does the eye -- and ear, counting Tan Dun's score -- it might have been one of the great films. It's a fable about the emergence of China as a nation under its first emperor, using a Rashomon-like narrative structure in which we get various versions of the story of how a swordsman known as Nameless (Jet Li) vanquished three assassins -- Sky (Donnie Yen), Broken Sword (Tony Leung), and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) -- to earn the right to come within ten paces of the king of Qin (Chen Daoming), in other words, to come within killing distance of the ruler. Nameless first tells his story, and then the king responds with his own theory about what really happened. A true version, in which Nameless is revealed as the real assassin, finally emerges. The result is to give us flashbacks to a variety of fight sequences, involving some astonishing wire work in several breathtaking settings, the most memorable of which may be the duel in the yellow leaves of an autumnal forest between Flying Snow and Moon (Zhang Ziyi), Broken Sword's apprentice and rival with Snow for his love. In the end, however, the film seems to have no real point to make other than the need for strong and powerful leadership, which is not exactly a positive statement in these days.

Rango (Gore Verbinski, 2011)

Cast: voices of Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Ned Beatty, Alfred Molina, Bill Nighy, Stephen Root, Harry Dean Stanton, Timothy Olyphant, Ray Winstone. Screenplay: John Logan, Gore Verbinski, James Ward Byrkit. Cinematography: Roger Deakins. Production design: Mark "Crash" McCreery. Film editing: Craig Wood. Music: Hans Zimmer.

Rango's Oscar win for best animated feature is anomalous: The award typically goes to a product of the Disney/Pixar factory. And unlike the usual winners, the characters aren't the usual cuddly figures destined for the toy shelves, but a gnarly selection of lizards and rodents and other desert creatures, centered on Rango himself, a bulbous-eyed chameleon voiced brilliantly by Johnny Depp. Visually, then, Rango is aimed more at adult audiences than at the kiddies. On the other hand, its story is the usual excuse for harmless mayhem that is the stuff of most animated features. There is a good deal of wit in the film, much of it aimed at Western-movie clichés, but I found that on the whole it left me a little cold. There's something to be said for cuddliness after all.

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.