The Breaking Ice (Anthony Chen, 2023)

Chiuxio Qu, Haoran Liu, and Dongyu Zhou in The Breaking Ice

Cast: Dongyu Zhou, Haoran Liu, Chiuxio Qu, Ruguang Wei, Baisha Liu. Screenplay: Anthony Chen. Cinematography: Jing-Pin Yu. Production design: Luxi Du. Film editing: Hoping Chen, Mun Thye Soo. Music: Kin Leonn. 

Anthony Chen's The Breaking Ice is a post-pandemic fable centered on three members of Generation Z, the cohort that perhaps suffered the greatest cultural dislocation when Covid emerged: At a time when they should have been exploring life's options, setting out on careers, discovering themselves, they were severely restricted. The film also features a relationship that has been oddly prevalent in movies recently, the two-guys-and-a-girl triangle popularized by French New Wave directors in films like François Truffaunt's Jules and Jim (1962) and Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part (1964). (It was also central to this year's film by Luca Guadagnino, Challengers.) The "girl" in this case is Nana (Dongyu Zhou), who works as a tour guide, a job she certainly doesn't want to turn into a career. Leading a group of tourists, she meets Haofeng (Haoran Liu), who works in finance in Shanghai and has come north for a friend's wedding. He takes the tour to fill time before his flight leaves, but being much younger than the rest of the tour group, he strikes up a conversation with Nana. When they return to the hotel, they continue to see each other, and eventually she introduces him to Xiao (Chiuxio Qu), who has come north to work for his aunt in a restaurant, a job he also doesn't intend to keep. The rest of the film is about the discoveries the somewhat misfit trio make about each other and themselves. Chen is a little too heavy-handed in creating epiphanic moments for his protagonists and with the trope announced in his title, from an opening sequence showing ice being cut into blocks to a scene near the end of the film in which the three protagonists pass an ice cube from mouth to mouth. Still, it's a film with engaging performances and the beautiful scenery of an unfamiliar setting: northeastern China right at the border with North Korea.

About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2023)

Deniz Celiloglu in About Dry Grasses

Cast: Deniz Celiloglu, Merve Dizdar, Muzab Ekici, Ece Bagci, Erdem Senocak, Yüksei Aksu, Münir Can Cindoruk, Onur Berk Arslanoglu, Yildrim Gücük, Cengiz Bozkurt, Emrah Özdemir, Elif Ürse, Elt Andaç Çam. Screenplay: Akin Aksu, Ebru Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Cinematography: Cevahir Sahin, Kürsat Üresin. Production design: Meral Aktan. Film editing: Oguz Atabas, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Music: Philip Timofeyev. 

Midway in the third hour of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's About Dry Grasses, he breaks the third wall. Actually, he breaks all of them: The camera follows the protagonist down a hall and through a door that opens onto the studio where the set has been constructed. We see the crew moving about in the studio and the actor going to what may be his dressing room, where he takes a pill and then returns to the set. We then follow him back onto the set and the film proceeds with no further such interruptions. It's an audacious moment that breaks the tension but not the mood. We have just witnessed a long scene that's the intellectual and moral heart of the film, and we're anticipating something physical and emotional to happen. The effect is to add another layer to an already complex narrative that centers on the film's anti-hero, Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), a schoolteacher in a remote Turkish village. Samet hates it. He hates the climate, which he says has only two seasons, winter and summer. In the former it's covered with snow and in the latter with dry grass. He hates the school administration and some of his fellow teachers. He hates the social and political unrest that plagues the region. He hates its poverty and ignorance. And as you can guess, he hates himself for not being able to escape. He also hates his students, except for one pretty young girl, Sevim (Ece Bagci), in whom he takes an interest that will get him into a lot of trouble. His only release is in griping to his roommate, Kenan (Muzab Ekici) and to a woman they meet, Nuray (Merve Dizdar), who teaches at another school in the area. Nuray lost a leg in a terrorist attack, but she copes with the loss and with the less than ideal circumstances in her life. Eventually, the plot will center on the relationship of Samet, Nuray, and Kenan, which Ceylan uses to explore topics like survival, commitment, endurance, and more. Celiloglu is superb at playing a character we come to loathe even as we maintain a certain sympathy for him, but the triumphant performance in the film is by Dizdar, who won the best actress award at Cannes for the film. About Dry Grasses is overlong but it's filled with moments of beauty in which we come to see the landscape that so plagues Samet with other eyes than his.   

A Prince (Pierre Creton, 2023)

Vincent Barré and Pierre Creton in A Prince

Cast: Antoine Pirotte, Pierre Creton, Grégory Gadebois (voice), Vincent Barré, Mathieu Amalric (voice), Manon Schaap, Françoise Lebrun, Chiman Dangi, Pierre Barray, Yves Edouard, Maxime Savouray, Olivier Chaval, Evelyne Didi, Bruno Martin, Marie-Odile Daubeuf. Screenplay: Vincent Barré, Pierre Creton, Mathilde Girard, Cyril Neyrat. Cinematography: PIerre Creton, Léo Gil Mela, Antoine Pirotte. Film editing: Félix Rehm. Music: Jozef van Wissem. 

At a key moment in Pierre Creton's A Prince, Antoine Pirotte, the actor playing Pierre-Joseph, gets out of the bed he's sharing with two other men and is replaced by the much-older director himself, who then assumes the role. The voiceover narrator simply notes that Pierre-Joseph had gotten older. It's clear at that point, if it hasn't been earlier, that the film is deeply rooted in Creton's own experiences, dreams, desires, and vision. So much so, in fact, that it almost becomes a barrier between the viewer and the film, disarming even critical responses to something so personal and idiosyncratic. Some critics, for example, took Creton to task for the "orientalism" of the character Kutta (Chiman Dangi), an Indian, the titular prince, who is viewed as an exotic creature, culminating in a startling nude scene near the end of the film. But it's clear that the Kutta of the film is a reflection of Pierre-Joseph's -- and by extension Creton's -- own imaginings. Similarly, critics objected to the heavy use of voiceover narration, whereas I think Creton resorts to it as a way of suggesting that we all turn the past into stories in our head. This is all to say that I found A Prince fascinating but often opaque, a tantalizing but inaccessible attempt at autobiographical fiction.

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.