Chicken for Linda! (Sébastien Laudenbach, Chiara Malta, 2023)

Cast: Voices of Mélinée Leclerc, Clotilde Hesme, Laetitia Dosch, Estéban, Patrick Pineau, Claudine Acs, Jean-Marie Fonbonne, Antoine Momey, Pietro Sermonti, Scarlett Choleton, Alenza Dus, Anaïs Weller, Milan Cerisier, Anna Parent. Screenplay: Chiara Malta, Sébastien Laudenbach. Film editing: Catherine Aladenise. Music: Clément Ducol. 

Chicken for Linda! is a candy-colored animated feature about a mother's attempt to prepare a chicken dinner for her little girl. It's a film about children and maybe for children, but I wouldn't show it to an averagely inquisitive child unless I was prepared to answer questions about the death of a parent, the stress of a single parent, corporal punishment, family quarrels, organized labor strikes, chicken theft, police enforcement of the law, and the killing of animals for food. (I've probably missed a few. It's been a while since I was a child or had one.) Much of the often frenetic, if colorful, action centers on the attempts to kill the stolen chicken, which is not going to sit well in some households. The whole plot is initiated when the mother, Paulette, slaps Linda for something she didn't do. (The fat purple cat did it.) To make it up to her, the guilt-ridden Paulette promises to make Linda a dinner of chicken with peppers, which Linda recalls as the favorite dish of her father, who died when she was very little. Paulette's efforts to find a chicken are thwarted by a strike that has closed all the markets, so she drives out to the country to find one there. Finding only a sulky teenager at the farm, in desperation Paulette steals one, only to have the cops called on her. And matters get worse when the chicken escapes. Each character has their own bright color, so it's easy to keep track of them once the action gets complex. There are also some interpolated song sequences with the flavor of French pop music. It's an enjoyably lively film unless you really want to examine its subtext, so maybe try not to.
 

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.  

Here (Bas Devos, 2023)

Liyo Gong and Stefan Gota in Here

Cast: Stefan Gota, Liyo Gong, Cédric Luvuezo, Teodor Corban, Saadia Bentaïeb, Alida Constantin, ShuHuan Wang, Victor Claudio Zichil, Jovial Mbenga, Sanae Kamlichi. Screenplay: Bas Devos. Cinematography: Grimm Vandekerckhove. Production design: Spela Tusar. Film editing: Dieter Diependaele. Music: Brecht Ameel.

Bas Devos's Here is about soup and moss and names. It's also about fireflies and construction work and family and lab work and evolution and climate change and cities and nature and shorts and rain and long walks and diversity and kindness and whatever sticks in your mind after you watch it and start thinking about it. It must have been an incredibly difficult film to edit: Just how long can and should you hold a shot of men sitting on a bus or branches waving in the breeze before a viewer begins thinking they should watch something else or go get something to eat? I kind of hated it while I was watching and kind of loved it afterward.  

Adieu Bonaparte (Youssef Chahine, 1985)

Patrice Chéreau in Adieu Bonaparte

Cast: Michel Piccoli, Mohsen Mohieddin, Salah Zulfikar, Patrice Chéreau, Mohamad Atef, Ahmed Abdelaziz, Abla Kamel, Hassan Husseiny, Huda Sultan, Dahlia Younès, Christian Patey, Gamil Ratib. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Yousry Nasrallah. Cinematography: Mohsen Nasr. Production design: Onsi Abou Seif. Film editing: Luc Barnier. Music: Gabriel Yared. 

Youssef Chahine's Adieu Bonaparte is about a clash of empires: the nascent one that will be led by Napoleon Bonaparte and the crumbling one that saw Islamic culture spread across much of what was Eurocentrically called "the known world." But its point of view is primarily that of the people caught between these two powerful forces, the people of Egypt, when French forces under the command of Bonaparte, not yet emperor, clash with the Ottoman Turks who then ruled Egypt. Mostly it's about the relationship between a fictional character, the young poet and interpreter, Aly (Mohsen Mohieddin), and the French general Maximilian Caffarelli (Michel Piccoli), an intellectual who had lost a leg in an earlier conflict when the French annexed a territory belonging to Belgium. (The movie repeats a witticism that Caffarelli doesn't care what happens because he'll always have one foot in France.) Caffarelli befriends Aly and his brother Yehia (Mohamad Atef) partly because he's sexually attracted to the young men, but also because he has a curiosity about Egyptians and their culture. Meanwhile, Bonaparte (Patrice Chéreau) suffers a defeat when Admiral Nelson destroys his fleet and forces him to stay in Egypt. Chéreau gives a wonderful performance as the preening but determined man who would be emperor, and Piccoli is equally fine as Caffarelli. Mohieddin holds his own with the French stars, as Aly struggles with his admiration for Caffarelli and his loyalty to his brother Bakr (Ahmed Abdelaziz), a leader in the struggle for Egyptian self-determination. It's a handsomely filmed production, with fine work by cinematographer Mohsen Nasr and an epic score by Gabriel Yared. But it's also often hard to follow, with its swarm of characters, many of them members of Aly's family, and its historical backstory. Chahine has a tendency to overload his narratives with incidents that distract from or seem only tangential to the main story.    

Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981)

Michael Ironside in Scanners

Cast: Stephen Lack, Michael Ironside, Jennifer O'Neill, Patrick McGoohan, Lawrence Dane, Robert A. Silverman, Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Art direction: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

David Cronenberg's Scanners is remembered today for its exploding head and the literal face-off of its conclusion, and probably for making splatter into a genre. But so many heads have been exploded and so much gore has been spilled since then that today it looks a little tired and slow. It's not helped by the woodenness of much of its acting. A lot of the criticism has been leveled at its leading man, Stephen Lack, but nobody is up to par. In contrast to Lack, Michael Ironside goes full ham as the film's villain. It also has a dialogue track that lacks ambience -- I don't know if it was post-synched, but it has the deadness characteristic of films that were. Cronenberg's script was reportedly being written while the shooting proceeded, which may explain some of the flatness of the performances, the confusion about where the movie's headed between its action sequences, and why the ending seems so perfunctory. Still, it's worth a watch for its pioneer bloodletting and for being the film that launched an important director's career.   

Finishing School (Wanda Tuchock, George Nicholls Jr., 1934)

Frances Dee and Bruce Cabot in Finishing School

Cast: Frances Dee, Bruce Cabot, Ginger Rogers, Billie Burker, Beulah Bondi, John Halliday, Sara Haden, Helen Freeman, Marjorie Lytell, Adalyn Doyle, Anne Shirley, Irene Franklin, Jane Darwell. Screenplay: Wanda Tuchock, Laird Doyle. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: Arthur P. Schmidt. 

Finishing School is a reverse Cinderella story in which poor little rich girl Virginia Radcliff (Frances Dee) finds her prince in Ralph "Mac" McFarland (Bruce Cabot), an unpaid intern at a children's hospital who supports himself by working as a waiter in a Manhattan hotel. Virginia has two wicked stepmothers: her real mother, the snobbish socialite Helen Radcliff (Billie Burke), and the headmistress of the finishing school Helen sends her off to, Miss Van Alstyne (Beulah Bondi). If there's a fairy godmother in the film, it's Virginia's wisecracking roommate, known as Pony (Ginger Rogers), who helps turn the shy and proper Virginia into something of a rebel. The movie is one of those Depression-era fables in which the tables are turned on the wealthy, and also one of the last movies to be released before the Production Code clamped down on the depiction of premarital sex. It earned a condemnation from the Catholic Legend of Decency for just that. Virginia and Mac do it in one of those pan-to-the-window scenes in which we see the snow outside filling up their footprints. And from what follows, including Virginia's refusal to see the school physician, we know the consequences even though nobody ever says "pregnant" out loud. The denouement is precipitated by a literature teacher who tells Virginia and her class that Anna Karenina's suicide was the only possible response to her breach of proper behavior, which is all that the school really teaches. It's a not-unwatchable little film that gets a nice boost occasionally from Rogers's snappy delivery of her lines, but otherwise is mainly a document of the era in which it was made.   

The GoodTimesKid (Azazel Jacobs, 2005)

Sara Diaz in The GoodTimesKid

Cast: Azazel Jacobs, Gerardo Naranjo, Sara Diaz, Lucy Dodd, Pat Reynolds, Gill Dennis, Melissa Paul. Screenplay: Azazel Jacobs, Gerardo Naranjo. Cinematography: Eric Curtis, Azazel Jacobs, Gerardo Naranjo. Film editing: Azazel Jacobs, Diaz Jacobs. Music: Mandy Hoffman. 

In The GoodTimesKid Azazel Jacobs gives a millennial spin on the two-guys-and-a-girl trope popularized by French New Wave directors in films like Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959), Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962), and Bande à part (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964). The girl in this case is Diaz (Sara Diaz), who lives with one of the guys, Rodolfo Cano (Jacobs). But when the antsy Rodolfo gets fed up with their relationship, he decides to join the army. Somehow the letter telling him to report for duty gets sent to another Rodolfo Cano (Gerardo Naranjo), who goes to set the record straight, and winds up following the other Ricardo home. Diaz is there, preparing a birthday party for her Ricardo, who doesn't want one and storms off. So the other Ricardo decides to hang around with her. If none of this makes much sense so far, you have a choice: either stick around to watch this low-key wackiness develop, or find another film to watch. In its defense, the film has some lovely moments, as when Diaz does a loosey-goosey dance to "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." But if you have no affection for grungy slackers or existential ennui, not to mention low-budget independent filmmaking, this isn't for you. I liked Diaz, who reminded me of Shelley Duvall, and Naranjo gives his Rodolfo a sweetly lost melancholy that contrasts nicely with Jacobs's self-destructive ferocity, but as a movie it's really kind of trifling. 

Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024)

Kirsten Dunst in Civil War

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sonoya Mizuno, Nick Offerman, Nelson Lee, Evan Lai, Jesse Plemons. Screenplay: Alex Garland. Cinematography: Rob Hardy. Production design: Caty Maxey. Film editing: Jake Roberts. Music: Geoff Barrow, Ben Salisbury. 

Alex Garland's Civil War grows out of our current political tensions, which means that it's either too timely or not timely enough to be entirely successful. At least Garland has the wisdom not to give his his fable too much direct correspondence to political actuality: There's no way, of course, that Texas and California would be allied secessionist states. What it does have is a kind of physical actuality, meaning a lot of bloody conflict. It also has some terrific performances, starting with Kirsten Dunst's tough photojournalist, Lee, a long way from Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002) or the title role in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006). She's matched well by Wagner Moura as her reporter partner, Joel. I knew I had seen Moura before but I couldn't quite place him until I was reminded that, 40 pounds heavier, he was Pablo Escobar in the series Narcos. Aside from unlikely alliances, the story stretches credulity that the intensely focused Joel would choose to bring along on a perilous journey an aging, overweight reporter like Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a callow young photographer like Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). But as I said, it's a fable, a story meant to make a point -- or rather several points. One of them is that journalism depends on a sometimes cold-hearted pursuit of the truth. Another is that political stability is a fragile thing. And that both are in perpetual danger. If Civil War fails in making those points effectively, and I think it does, it's because the medium, an action movie, is inadequate to deliver the message. 

French Wedding, Caribbean Style (Julius-Amédée Laou, 2002)

Nicole Dogué in French Wedding, Caribbean Style

Cast: Dieudonné, Loulou Boislaville, Nicole Dogué, Daniel Njo Lobé, Lucien Thérésin, Emile Abossolo M'bo, Ériq Ebouaney, Emilie Benoît. Screenplay: Julius-Amédée Laou. 

You can't count on much help from the internet if you want to know more after watching Julius-Amédée Laou's French Wedding, Caribbean Style. There's precious little about the film on the usual sources like IMDb and Letterboxd. But it's a refreshing, noisy, chaotic treat that takes on all sorts of subjects: racism, colonialism, sexism, and any number of cultural conflicts in an amusing but bittersweet, insightful, provocative way. The setup is simple: a young white Frenchman and a young woman whose grandparents immigrated to France from Martinique in the 1930s arrive at the reception after their wedding, which is being held at the home of her parents. The event is being recorded by her younger brother on a video camera, and we see everything through that lens. There are the usual family tensions on display -- get any large family, no matter the ethnicity, together and you'll witness them. The groom's parents, an uptight couple, are not terribly happy with the marriage, but even among the bride's relatives there's some conflict. Still, everything proceeds noisily as the young videographer pokes his camera's nose into what's going on. But midway through the film, an uninvited guest arrives: the bride's old boyfriend, who throws a bombshell into the occasion. His "wedding gift" is another videotape, and a shocking one. At this point, as the reception turns into an uproar, the camera falls into the hands of the bride's younger sister, who has an entirely different attitude toward what's going on. That shift in point of view opens up a new perspective on the proceedings. I have to say that I found the ending of the movie a little more didactic and conventional than I'm entirely happy with, but I still admire the huge ensemble cast and the energy and artistry with which Laou has put together this boisterous film. If you subscribe to the Criterion Channel (and you should), you owe it to yourself to check it out.  

We All Loved Each Other So Much (Ettore Scola, 1974)

Stefano Satta Flores, Vittorio Gassman, and Nino Manfredi in We All Loved Each Other So Much

Cast: Nino Manfredi, Vittorio Gassman, Stefania Sandrinelli, Stefano Satta Flores, Giovanna Ralli, Aldo Fabrizi. Screenplay: Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Ettore Scola. Cinematography: Claudio Cirillo. Production design: Luciano Ricceri. Film editing: Raimondo Crociani. Music: Armando Trovajoli.