The Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry, 1936)

Marguerite Moreno and Sacha Guitry in The Story of a Cheat

Cast: Sacha Guitry, Marguerite Moreno, Jacqueline Delubac, Rosine Deréan, Roger Duchesne, Elmire Vautier, Serge Grave, Fréhel, Pierre Assy, Henri Peiffert. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Marcel Lucien. Art direction: Henri Ménessier. Film editing: Myriam Borsoutsky. Music: Adolphe Borchard.

The word that occurs to me for Sacha Guitry's The Story of a Cheat is "droll." It reminds me of a Gallic version of those postwar Alec Guinness comedies, like Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949) and The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951), in which people do criminal and even cruel things but the film remains lighthearted. It begins, after all, with the death of 11 people, all members of the protagonist's family, when he is 12 years old. Eventually, he is seduced into a life of thievery by three women. In the film, he is in his 50s, writing his memoirs at a table in a café, narrating the film in voiceover -- there is little actual dialogue. For those of us who aren't fluent in French and rely on subtitles, it's almost like a silent movie with a constant flow of title cards. Guitry -- writer, director, and star -- is a charmer whose work was profoundly influential on French film, and I hope to see more of his work in the coming weeks.

Her Smell (Alex Ross Perry, 2018)

Elisabeth Moss in Her Smell

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Dan Stevens, Cara Delevingne, Agyness Deyn, Gayle Rankin, Eric Stoltz, Ashley Benson, Dylan Gelula, Eka Darville, Amber Heard, Virginia Madsen. Screenplay: Alex Ross Perry. Cinematography: Sean Price Williams. Production design: Fletcher Chancey. Film editing: Robert Greene. Music: Keegan DeWitt.

Sometimes the opportunity to watch good actors act is almost the only thing a movie gives us. (That's true, I'm afraid, of a lot of the Meryl Streep oeuvre.) Certainly it's the chief thing the punk-titled Her Smell offers: Elisabeth Moss tearing up the screen as a self-destructive rock star. But we've seen the story before and Alex Ross Perry has nothing novel to give us in his version of it. Moss's Becky Something collapses at the peak of her career, leaving a broken marriage, an infant, and a mountain of lawsuits, including those by her producer, Howard Goodman (Eric Stoltz). She sobers up -- the film doesn't show how -- and retreats into seclusion. But the ever-forgiving Howard persuades her back for a final gig at a concert featuring the many acts he has produced over a 20-year career. Is she strong enough to make it? Her long-suffering bandmates and her ex-husband (Dan Stevens) have forgiven her trespasses, but they still have some doubts about her continued stability. She is something of a head case where it comes to New Agey guidance -- she still, for example, believes in the guru called Ya-Ema (whose real name, someone says, is Alvin), even though he has gone to prison for defrauding her and others. Yet the film has to end with a triumph, and it does. I have no ear for the music in Her Smell, so I can't comment on that other than to say it seemed mediocre, but Moss gives it her all, doing her own singing. But it's her acting we came to see, and that's exceptional.

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)

Carey Mulligan and Ryan Gosling in Drive

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, Kaden Leos, Jeff Wolfe, James Biberi, Russ Tamblyn. Screenplay: Hossein Amini, based on a novel by James Sallis. Cinematography: Newton Thomas Sigel. Production design: Beth Mickle. Film editing: Matthew Newman. Music: Cliff Martinez.

I wasn't surprised, in reading about Drive after I watched it, to find the film being compared to Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy of the 1960s. Both, of course, feature a protagonist with no name who has a slight oral fixation -- a cheroot in the case of Clint Eastwood in the Leone films, a toothpick in the case of Ryan Gosling in Nicolas Winding Refn's. And both are taciturn and impassive, Eastwood with his squint a little more consistently menacing than Gosling with his bland, unemotional mien. The difference is that Gosling makes us sense that there's something going on deep inside, behind that façade, but we won't really know what it is until he stomps a man to death in an elevator late in the film. With Eastwood it's more a matter of what you see is what you can expect to get. I admire the style with which Refn pulls off his story, with the occasional casting against type, as with Albert Brooks as a thug, and the effective use of actors who can play almost anything, namely, Bryan Cranston and Oscar Isaac. The risk of concentrating on style is that everything remains on the surface, and that's the real problem I have with Drive, that it feels superficial if occasionally witty, as in its use of pop songs to comment on the characters and action. The repetitions of "A Real Hero" are, I think, meant to be ironic: There's nothing especially heroic about Gosling's driver, except that he does what he does to help Carey Mulligan's Irene and her young son. But when he finally boils over into an act that amounts to overkill, she's forced to question his character. Still, the movie is a cut above most recent attempts at neo-noir.

John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum (Chad Stahelski, 2019)

Mark Dacascos and Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, Mark Dacascos, Asia Kate Dillon, Lance Reddick, Anjelica Huston, Saïd Taghmaoui, Jerome Flynn, Tobias Segal, Randall Duk Kim. Screenplay: Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Collins, Marc Abrams. Cinematography: Dan Laustsen. Production design: Kevin Kavanaugh. Film editing: Evan Schiff. Music: Tyler Bates, Joel J. Richard.

I'll admit that I haven't seen the first two John Wick movies, for much the same reason that I've never watched any of the Taken or Fast and Furious movies: Who needs another action movie franchise? But the films have gotten enough positive response, and I like Keanu Reeves enough, that I gave in and watched the latest in the series. I wasn't disappointed: It's full of well-choreographed fight scenes that are almost balletic (not to mention ballistic) in character. The sets and cinematography are handsome. Reeves doesn't disappoint, Halle Berry is terrific, and I liked seeing old favorites like Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, and Anjelica Huston. It was nice to see Mark Dacascos, whom I knew only as the Chairman on Iron Chef America, in his martial arts element. On the whole, I'd say it's on a par with the best of the James Bond and Mission: Impossible movies. Will I watch another John Wick movie if one comes my way? Probably. But let me say it again: Who needs another action movie franchise?

Anthony Adverse (Mervyn LeRoy, 1936)

Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland in Anthony Adverse

Cast: Fredric March, Olivia de Havilland, Donald Woods, Anita Louise, Edmund Gwenn, Claude Rains, Gale Sondergaard, Louis Hayward, Steffi Duna, Akim Tamiroff, Ralph Morgan, Fritz Leiber, Luis Alberni, Billy Mauch, Henry O'Neill, Pedro de Cordoba, Scotty Beckett. Screenplay: Sheridan Gibney, based on a novel by Hervey Allen. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold. 

This lead-footed, tin-eared attempt at an epic runs for almost two and a half hours, but it seems longer. Warner Bros. threw a lot of resources into it, including some top-flight actors, and earned Oscars for Gale Sondergaard (the first ever supporting actress award), cinematography, film editing, and score (an award that at the time went to the head of the studio music department, Leo Forbstein, and not to the one who deserved it, Erich Wolfgang Korngold). In fact, Korngold's score is the liveliest thing about the film, which is hamstrung by Fredric March's lack of charisma in the title role. March was a fine actor, but he seems miscast and a little too old (he was in his late 30s) in a role that calls on him to be dashing and occasionally reckless. The script, drawn from the first volume of Hervey Allen's doorstop bestseller, is full of contrivances and coincidences, made worse by some cliché-clotted dialogue and characters. The villains, Claude Rains and Gale Sondergaard, are as deep-dyed as you could want. Scheming and sneering at virtue, Rains produces one of the most memorable of villainous cackles when he laughs triumphantly, and Sondergaard narrows her eyes and flashes her teeth with snakelike relish. There's also an unfortunate episode in which Anthony goes to the Warners backlot version of Africa and becomes a slave trader, taking as a mistress a vixen named Neleta, played by the Viennese actress Steffi Duna, who does a hoochy-koochy dance that's surely not African. The problem with any summary of the movie is that it makes it sound like more fun than it is. 

Take Aim at the Police Van (Seijun Suzuki, 1960)

Misako Watanabe and Michitaro Mizushima in Take Aim at the Police Van

Cast: Michitaro Mizushima, Misako Watanabe, Shoichi Ozawa, Shinsuke Ashida, Mari Shiraki, Toru Abe. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa, Kazuo Shimada. Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine. Production design: Takehara Sakeguchi. Film editing: Akira Suzuki. Music: Koichi Kawabe.

Seijun Suzuki's early-career Take Aim at the Police Van is a sold, somewhat overplotted excursion into the realms of film noir, but with none of the flash and dazzle of such later films as Story of a Prostitute (1965), Tokyo Drifter (1966), or Branded to Kill (1967). It's the story of Daijiro Tamon (Michitaro Mizushima), a prison guard who's on a bus transporting prisoners when it's attacked and two of the prisoners are shot dead. The attackers get away and Tamon gets suspended -- really scapegoated -- for his inability to stop them, so because he has nothing else to do he decides to figure out what was behind the assault. One of the prisoners who survived the attack, Goro (Shoichi Ozawa), was released on bail the day of the incident, and following up on some things Goro did and said on the bus, Tamon seeks him out. In the process, he winds up uncovering a human trafficking gang, gets slugged and chased a couple of times, and becomes involved with Yuko (Misako Watanabe), the noir "mystery woman" who has some connections to the traffickers. There's big thriller sequence in which Tamon and Yuko are tied up by the bad guys in a gasoline tanker truck that's sent rolling downhill with gas spilling out behind. The bad guys set the trail of gasoline alight and Tamon and Yuko have to free themselves before the burning gas reaches the truck and it explodes. I have to admit that this gimmick was spoiled for me by the TV series Mythbusters, on which Adam and Jamie demonstrated that a truck in that situation probably wouldn't explode, but I also wondered why, if the bad guys wanted to get rid of them, they didn't just kill them outright. But if you go questioning that sort of thing you'll never have any fun at the movies.

Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000)

Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast

Cast: Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane, Amanda Redman, James Fox, Cavan Kendall, Julianne White, Álvaro Monje. Screenplay: Louis Mellis, David Scinto. Cinematography: Ivan Bird. Production design: Jan Houllevigue. Film editing: John Scott, Sam Sneade. Music: Roque Baños.

As paunchy, suntanned Gal Dove, a retired safecracker played by Ray Winstone, stands beside the swimming pool of his Spanish villa, a huge boulder comes crashing down the hillside behind him. But just as it seems about to flatten him, it takes a bounce and sails over his head to land in the pool. The incident is metaphorical for what's about to occur to Gal with the arrival of deranged motormouth Don Logan, played by Ben Kingsley in an Oscar-nominated performance. Don has been dispatched by crime boss Teddy Bass (Ian McShane) to persuade Gal to participate in an elaborate heist back in London. Don is as deadly as the boulder, and like it, he too winds up in the pool, but not before doing a good deal of damage. Kingsley's hilariously sinister performance as the unhinged mobster is the most celebrated thing about Sexy Beast, but this decidedly eccentric spin on a film noir plot is also an invigorating reworking of the conventional heist movie. The heist itself, which involves breaking into an impregnable vault underwater, would have been the center of an ordinary movie, but here it's intercut with a flashback to what happened in the confrontation of Don with Gal and his wife, Deedee (Amanda Redman). Jonathan Glazer's work directing TV commercials and music videos is reflected in the film's occasional hyperactivity and elements of the surreal and bizarre, but he's also able to sustain moments of tension before and between eruptions of violent action.

Return to Oz (Walter Murch, 1985)

Cast: Fairuza Balk, Nicol Williamson, Jean Marsh, Piper Laurie, Matt Clark, Emma Ridley, Sophie Ward, Fiona Victory, Pons Maar, voices of Sean Barrett, Denise Bryer, Brian Henson, and Lyle Conway. Screenplay: Walter Murch, Gill Dennis, based on books by L. Frank Baum. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Norman Reynolds. Film editing: Leslie Hodgson. Music: David Shire.

As a kid I was completely enthralled by the Oz books, a passion made more difficult by the odd fact that school libraries of the day refused to stock them, so I had to order my copies from the small printing and stationery shop in my town that also stocked a few books. Which is why I have always loved Walter Murch's Return to Oz, even though it was a commercial and mostly critical flop. I suspect that the 1939 Judy Garland movie had so cast its own particular spell that people who didn't know the subsequent books by L. Frank Baum (which were continued not so well by Ruth Plumly Thompson but excellently by Baum's illustrator John R. Neill) were expecting Murch's film to be as brightly colored and as tuneful as the Garland movie. But the Oz books were a much darker business entirely, and Murch's film reflects not only that but also Baum's ambivalence toward technology. In Return to Oz, there's a late 19th and early 20th century mistrust of electricity but a fondness for mechanism, hence the rotund wind-up Tik-Tok, an engaging steampunk character before anyone knew to call it steampunk. Murch and production designer Norman Reynolds have gone back to the source in visualizing Baum's characters, so that the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly lion look more like illustrator Neill's visions of them than like Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr in costumes and makeup. The filmmakers rely on puppetry and the stop-motion artistry of clay animation as developed by Will Vinton. The effect is sometimes creepy, and much of the movie is probably too dark for very young viewers, which explains some of the difficulty the movie had finding an audience. There are scenes that evoke horror movies in their dark menace, which is all to the point: The era in which Baum lived was more inured to threats to children than our nervously overprotective one. Unfortunately, the box office failure discouraged Murch, the winner of three Oscars for sound design and film editing, and one of the best-known collaborators with directors like George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, from directing more movies, and put the kibosh on further equally imaginative explorations of the Oz books.

Widows (Steve McQueen, 2018)

Elizabeth Debicki, Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo in Widows

Cast: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Garret Dillahunt, Liam Neeson, Robert Duvall, Carrie Coon, Jacki Weaver, Lukas Haas, Jon Bernthal, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Kevin J. O'Connor. Screenplay: Gillian Flynn, Steve McQueen, based on a TV series by Lynda LaPlante. Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt. Production design: Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Joe Walker. Music: Hans Zimmer.

A solid dark thriller with a powerhouse cast, Widows tells the story of four women married to professional thieves who are bereaved when a major heist goes wrong and the van the men are in goes up in a fiery explosion. The problem is that the loot was also incinerated and it belonged to a powerful Chicago politician and crime boss, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who shows up at the home of one of the women, Veronica (Viola Davis), demanding repayment. Veronica, who had no part in her husband's crimes, is desperate to raise the money, but her husband's chauffeur had the key to his safety deposit box, in which she discovers a notebook full of detailed plans for all of his heists, including one he had yet to pull off. Eventually, she concludes that the only way to raise the necessary millions is to do that heist herself, for which she enlists two of her fellow widows. The film casts fine actors like Liam Neeson, Daniel Kaluuya, Robert Duvall, Carrie Coon, Lukas Haas, and Jon Bernthal in secondary roles as the complications and surprise twists ensue. Steve McQueen's no-nonsense direction and the skill of his cast make the whole thing mostly plausible, mainly by not giving you time to question some of the plot's weaknesses. There's a subplot about the election battle between Jamal Manning and Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), the scion of an old Irish political family, which is tied to the main plot by some fairly tenuous threads, a few of which are blatant contrivances. But the focus is on Veronica and her crew, played superbly by Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo.

Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960)

Jean Keraudy, Marc Michel, Philippe Leroy, Raymond Meunier, and Michel Constantin in Le Trou

Cast: Michel Constantin, Jean Keraudy, Philippe Leroy, Raymond Meunier, Marc Michel, Jean-Paul Coquelin, André Bervil, Eddy Rasimi. Screenplay: Jacques Becker, José Giovanni, Jean Aurel, based on a novel by Giovanni. Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet. Production design: Rino Mondellini. Film editing: Marguerite Renoir, Geneviève Vaury. 

All prison break movies have to be judged by the standard set by Robert Bresson's 1956 masterpiece A Man Escaped. Most of them are found wanting, but Jacques Becker's last film, Le Trou, though it lacks Bresson's moral intensity and political significance, makes a good try at it. What Becker's film has going for it is a fine ensemble of actors, including one of the men who participated in the attempted prison escape in 1947 on which José Giovanni based the novel that Becker turned into a film. Under a screen name, Jean Keraudy, Roland Barbat not only plays the prisoner Roland Darbant but also introduces the film as a "true story." This touch of documentary realism gives Le Trou a solid grounding, and Becker uses it to great effect, especially in a long take in which the prisoners break through the subflooring of their cell into the basement beneath. For a long time we see them hammering away almost ineffectively at the concrete, but just as we fear that this is going to be like watching paint dry, the seemingly impervious substance begins to chip away, revealing the larger rocks and looser material underneath. It's a tour de force of sorts, because the concrete must have been poured especially for the filming and designed to resist the hammering just enough to build suspense. What plot there is other than the elaborately detailed escape focuses on Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel), a young prisoner who is moved into the cell after the other four have already made their plans for the escape. Initially they mistrust the newcomer, but he earns their acceptance -- up to a point. The film eschews a music soundtrack, relying instead on the sounds of the prison for atmosphere. There are some darkly comic moments, as when two of the prisoners, having made it into the basement, have to hide from guards making their rounds. We don't see how they do it at first, but then it's revealed that one of the prisoners is standing on the shoulders of the other, dodging the patrol behind a convenient pillar, around which they just barely manage to make their way as the guards circle it. In hindsight, there are lots of things to cavil about, such as how the escape plan was devised and the necessary tools acquired -- matters that A Man Escaped details more interestingly -- but Le Trou holds up well while you're watching it, relying on solid characterization and vivid details to disarm skepticism.