Cleo from 5 to 7

A self-involved pop singer (Corrine Marchand) walks the streets of Paris in an all-consuming anticipation of her biopsy results during the afternoon hours of the title. Agnes Varda's New Wave near real-time work is smooth, free flowing, and crisply and beautifully shot, while a little light in plot though not substance. Marchand is a unique and glamorous presence.

*** 1/2 out of ****

The Life of Oharu

A woman in waiting (Kinuyo Tanaka) of modest respectability falls to woeful and pitiable levels after partaking in a relationship with a commoner (Toshiro Mifune). Cast out from her village, she soon finds herself bearing a son to powerful lord she is forbidden to see, widowed on another occasion, and sold into a life of prostitution by her father. Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu is bleak and sorrowful, somewhat labored, shot in beautiful black and white, and made with precise craft. Tanaka is heartbreaking as the doomed and innocent Oharu.

*** out of ****

The Ballad of Narayama

In a famine ravaged village, the elderly upon their 70th birthday are sent to trek up a mountain where they are to wither and die, a woman (Kinuyo Tanaka) nearing the age graciously prepares for her godforsaken journey while the rest of her family, save a grieving son, behave selfishly. Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama is a disconsolate take on self-centeredness, selflessness, and the throwaway culture regarding the elderly with the sung narration and beautiful alternately radiant, verdant, and grim artificial looking sets creating a distinctive atmosphere. Tanaka is magnificent.

*** 1/2 out of ****

The Pledge

On the night of his retirement party, a Nevada detective (Jack Nicholson) tags along to the crime scene of a child murder. When a mentally handicapped suspect is swiftly arrested, coerced into confessing, and commits suicide the would be retiree is less than satisfied. Skipping his fishing trip to Florida, he conducts his own investigation while using the daughter of a new lover (Robin Wright) as bait and putting his own sanity into jeopardy. From a novel by Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Pledge is haunting, poetic, and truly tragic, offbeat and uniquely directed by Sean Penn, with a commanding and sensitive performance by Jack.

**** out of ****

Mulholland Drive

A chipper young woman (Naomi Watts) just arrived in L.A. finds an amnesiac (Laura Elena Harring) just involved in terrible car wreck living at her aunt's home. As unrelated plot developments start to cobble up (including the story of an arrogant director (Justin Theroux) being muscled by the mob), the two women's personas seem to merge or take on entirely different realities. David Lynch's Mulholland Drive is a film that has both baffled and frustrated me the first couple of times through it due to its resistance to reason and obstinance in the face of logic. Revisiting it again, and expecting those same exasperating feelings to return while not trying to find a coherent plotline, I surprisingly found it to be a fascinating, hypnotic, frightening, suspenseful, and still maddeningly frustrating exercise, with Lynch at the apex of both his form and strangeness. Watts is incredible in essentially a dual role.
*** 1/2 out of ****

Monsieur Hire

While being accused of the murder of a young woman outside of his apartment complex, a well-mannered, immaculately composed peeping Tom (Michel Blanc) observes the daily rituals of his neighbor (Sandrine Bonnaire) who discovers his voyeuristic behavior and seems to return his affections. Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire, from a novel by Georges Simenon, is elegantly made and exactingly directed, with a wonderful score from Michael Nyman, and a plot that takes a surprising trajectory for such a simple premise.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Veronika Voss

A once prominent movie star (Rosel Zech) who earned her start under Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry becomes romantically involved with a reporter (Hilmar Thate) who suspects her neurologist (Annemarie Durringer) of keeping the faded actress under her influence through the use of morphine. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's reimagining of the tragic demise of German actress Sybille Schmitz (his death mirroring her own not long after the release of the film) is shot in brilliant black and white in a melodramatic almost campy mood yet of course with the darker undertones evoking Wilder's Sunset Blvd or even What Ever Happpened to Baby Jane. Zech and Thate are both superb.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Diary of a Lost Girl

The daughter (Louise Brooks) of a pharmacist is raped by her father's assistant and is sent away to a medieval reformatory and then a whorehouse before receiving her inheritance and achieving her belated redemption. Daring and still ribald, G.W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl is consummately directed (the reformatory scenes are virtuosic) with impeccable black and white cinematography and a surprising lack of intertitles.A beautiful Brooks commands out sympathy.

*** 1/2 out of ****

La Cérémonie

A maid (Sandrine Bonnaire) concealing an illiteracy problem and a violent incident in her past goes to work for a benign, bourgeois family (headed by Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Cassel) and befriends an unstable local postal clerk (Isabelle Huppert) also with skeletons in her closet, a relationship rooted in pseudo lesbianism and class jealousy that devolves into mayhem. Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie is a cold-blooded class conflict movie, slow-paced, involving, and ultimately harrowing. The cast, especially Bisset, is exceptional.

*** 1/2 out of ****

French Cancan

An impressario (Jean Gabin) engages in romantic entanglements with his main drawing act (Maria Felix), a new discovery (Francois Arnoul) and two of her lovers while reintroducing the can-can, an outdated dance number, and opening what would come to be known as the Moulin Rouge. One of Jean Renoir's post American exile works, French Cancan is dominated by cheesy French humor and underdrawn characters, though Gabin's performance is winning and the dance numbers, the finale in particular, are spectacular.

*** out of ****

Harakiri

A fallen ronin (Tatsuya Nakadai) who has lost everything, namely master, livelihood, and family, arrives at a lord's residence in order to commit seppuku, a ritual form of suicide. In an attempt to deter his actions, he is told of another recent samurai who made a similar request and was forced to carry out his demand, as he was suspected of attempting to fleece the manor by being turned away with riches. Instead, the noble ronin at the castle's doorstep has a more damning revelation about his relationship to the pitiable young man. Kobayashi's Harakiri is vivid, violent, and harsh, with an aim for calling out hypocrisy yet exists largely for generating empathy and is always utterly compelling, unfolding in a serpentine and novelistic fashion. Nakadai is excellent as the principled and vengeful warrior.

**** out of ****

Come and See

In Belarus in the heart of World War II and the German occupation, a teenager fights with the Russian Resistance, sees his family slaughtered, and bears witness to the unspeakable Nazi atrocities all around him. Harrowing,  nightmarish and occasionally consuming, Elem Klimov's Come and See is dense and murky, made with an impressively fluid camerawork though muddled photography, and contains the feel of an even more unrelentingly bleak Tarkovsky film with an ending that, depending how you interpret it, I'm not sure how useful it is.

*** out of ****

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

A U.S. Senator (James Stewart) travels to the town of Shinbone for the funeral of a rancher (John Wayne) and relays to reporters the legend of how, decades earlier, he made the same journey in hopes of using the law and democracy to civilize the territory, was menaced by a rabid outlaw (Lee Marvin), and given assistance from the recently deceased cattleman. John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a compulsively watchable (even during its filler sequences), beautifully shot black and white Western with one of the most memorable finales in history while bringing together the differing sensibilities of Stewart and Wayne. Marvin ranks up there as one of the nastiest baddies to ever grace the screen.

**** out of ****

Mon oncle Antoine

In a rural, asbestos mining Quebec town in the late 1940s, a young teenager becomes a man while working in his uncle and aunt's general store/mortuary during the Christmas Season as he serves a funeral, spies on a female customer, flirts with the same-age adoptive daughter of his employers, and discovers the truth about his personal relationships. Claude Jutra's mischievous though subtle and sensitive Mon oncle Antoine, is a profound and insightful coming of age story crafted with an exacting point of view, camerawork, and music.

**** out of ****

Smiles of a Summer Night

An attorney (Gunnar Bjornstrand), his young, virginal wife (Ulla Jacobsson), a vulnerable son returned home from college, their slatternly maid (Harriet Andersson), a visiting actress (Eva Dahlbeck), her officer lover (Jarl Kulle), and his troublemaker wife all converge on a country estate where various affairs come to light, jealousies and anguish abound, and tempers flair. Ingmar Bergman's first, liberating mass success is sharp, provocative, light, and amusing, made with delicate cinematography, and a game cast with Bergman regulars Bjornstrand and Andersson standing out and Kulle highly memorable as a caddish officer always seeking satisfaction. For a worthy reworking see Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

*** out of ****

The Killing

Several character types are enlisted for an intricate robbery of the money room at a California horse track but the plan starts to unravel when the greedy, disloyal wife of one the culprits begins to poke her nose in. Presented in disjointed time at breakneck speed, extremely hard-nosed, and with a modern feel, Stanley Kubrick’s crisply shot and edited early work stands among the cream of other noirs produced during the period. In a cast of great faces and tough supporters, Sterling Hayden is a standout as the no nonsense leader, Elisha Cook, Jr. is memorable as the pushover counter worker, and Marie Windsor is excellent as his nefarious wife. The finale is jaw-dropping with a perfect ending and closing line.

**** out of ****

Contact

In lieu of a more lucrative career, a brilliant scientist (Jodie Foster) makes her living studying the stars and satellites for signs of extraterrestrial life, partly in an attempt to reach her parents whom she lost in childhood. When she discovers what appears to be an actual message from a star light years away with what appear to be contact instructions, it creates national hysteria over who should pay for the device, who should be the one to make the initial reception, and should we even partake in this particular endeavor. (spoilers) Based on Carl Sagan's book, Robert Zemeckis' Contact lacks the profundity it thinks it possesses in its religion vs science themes (in what is actually cornball philosophy) but the Foster performance is in earnest and her culminating intergalactic journey is remarkable.

*** out of ****

A Man Escaped

A Resistance member (Francois Letterier) is arrested by the Gestapo, charged with sabotage and sentenced to die, and placed in a concentration camp in Lyon, where over 7,000 perished during the war. There he painstakingly sweeps his cell to develop means of escape, meanwhile acting as an impetus of hope to his fellow prisoners. Robert Bresson’s A Man Escape is an exacting, inward looking meditation, both beautifully and meticulously shot while generating quiet and palpable suspense. Nonactor Letterier is tremendous and reflective as the saintly inmate.

**** out of ****

Departures

With his Tokyo symphony closing a young man (Masahiro Motoki) is forced to sell his cello, return home with his doting wife (Ryoko Hirosue), and find work. After answering a misleading want ad, he finds undesirable work that gives him great meaning in encoffinment, that is delicately and tenderly preparing corpses in a showing before cremation. Oscar winning Japanese foreign film is calculated with forced, unearned emotion but not without depth and a conclusion that is admittedly moving. The main actor is cartoonish but is surrounded by talented supporters.

*** out of ****

Shadow of a Doubt

With the police closing in on him, the Merry Widow Murderer (Joseph Cotten) travels cross country to his family home in Santa Rosa, California and the company of his adoring niece (Teresa Wright) who slowly begins to unravel the unsavory truth about her cagey and mysterious uncle. Alfred Hitchcock’s self-proclaimed favorite film is an ingeniously crafted, creatively detailed, and slyly subversive work with Wright assuredly carrying the film, Cotton making a sinister villain, and Hume Cronyn hysterically funny in his film debut as the next door neighbor with a predilection for the macabre.

**** out of ****