The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)

This was an Academy Best Picture nominee starring Gary Cooper, but neither of those details drew me in as much as the peculiar title. What makes it more peculiar is that the film focuses almost equally on three Bengal lancers. It turns out that the title was lifted from a book with a different plot and characters, much like Blade Runner was.

Cooper plays Lieutenant McGregor, a Canadian serving in the British Army in colonial India. He becomes well acquainted with two lieutenants new to his unit: Forsythe (Franchot Tone) and Stone (Richard Cromwell), the latter being the estranged son of their colonel (Guy Standing) and newly commissioned. Alas, Stone has yet to cultivate sufficiently responsible behavior and ends up a hostage for incipient rebel leader Mohammed Khan (Douglas Dumbrille), who overestimates the colonel's sentimentality. Fortunately, McGregor is only so ruly himself and can persuade Forsythe....

Amour (2012)

I've heard that the latest crop of Academy Best Picture contenders is especially depressing. With that in mind, perhaps I should have given lower priority to this older nominee, which looked too dismal for my dad. Nevertheless, I rather wanted to complete another year's worth, and this was the only one from 2012 I hadn't seen yet.

In modern Paris, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are an elderly couple. Their life seems pleasant enough, until Anne has a stroke that leaves her unresponsive for several minutes. She gets surgery to unblock her carotid artery, but it's a rare failure case, so she needs a wheelchair thereafter. She makes Georges promise never to send her back to the hospital or on to a nursing home. Alas, it's hard to find good help elsewhere, so he struggles to support her on his own. Each one, at times, expresses a sentiment that they'd both be better off with her finishing dying.

The Prisoner (1955)

This has nothing to do with the hit '67 TV series of the same title. That said, it is another British program in which nobody has a given name and the setting is ambiguous. All we know for sure is that the nation used to be under Nazi rule and is now under communist rule.

A cardinal (Alec Guinness) gets arrested on the dubious charge of treason against the regime, which, of course, will put him on trial only when he's almost certain to confess. He is not subjected to physical torture, whether because his captors want to be more civil than that, couldn't hope to break someone the Nazis couldn't that way, or really don't want to risk martyring him in the public eye. Instead, his interrogator (Jack Hawkins) takes a faux-friendly approach, made all the more possible by their past acquaintance. It takes longer than the superiors like, but the interrogator is determined to find a chink in the emotional armor.

Ferdinand (2017)

Blue Sky Studios, once said to be #3 among CG movie studios, shut down for good today. I was not aware of this scheduled event or the company's 2019 purchase by Disney when I chose to watch its penultimate production yesterday. I just thought it was one of the more promising Academy nominees for Best Animated Feature that I hadn't seen yet. Its basis in a classic children's book I hadn't read tempted me too.

As a calf, Ferdinand lives on a Spanish ranch that raises bulls specifically for the lethal kind of bullfight. Not only does he not like the prospect of getting stabbed to death; he doesn't like fighting at all. He escapes to a farm, where a loving girl and her father take such good care of him that he grows especially big in adulthood (and is then voiced by John Cena). Alas, he's not smart enough to keep out of town, where his oafishness is widely mistaken for berserkness, so he gets taken back to his old haunts, now with a good chance of being picked to face El Primero (Miguel Ángel Silvestre), a matador who's no Manolo.

Finding Forrester (2000)

I had known director Gus Van Sant only for Good Will Hunting, Milk, and a segment of Paris, je t'aime. When I learned that FF resembles GWH in that its protagonist is a young man who tends to hide his brilliance so as not to stand out from his lower-class buddies, I got interested. One key difference intrigued me further: It's about writing.

Between basketball skills and test scores, sixteen-year-old Jamal Wallace (breakout Rob Brown, who had expected to be an extra!) gets a scholarship to attend a ritzy private school, which he accepts with some uncertainty, since it's a very different culture from his usual environs. Around the same time, on a dare, he attempts to burglarize the apartment of a locally feared, mysterious recluse (Sean Connery) but panics and leaves behind a backpack full of his secret writings. The recluse, one William Forrester, returns them with a load of constructive criticism, which inspires Jamal to come back for more. It takes Jamal a while to figure out that William is a literary one-hit wonder who's pretty much disappeared for half a century (based loosely on J.D. Salinger). Naturally, each one can learn from the other, with William gradually opening up to Jamal and then people in general.