Poor Things (2023)

I've wanted to see this since I caught a few clips at the Academy Awards. My desire decreased when I learned that Yorgos Lanthimos directed. Nonetheless, almost as soon as it came to Netflix, I obliged.

In 19th-century London, heavily pregnant Victoria Blessington (Emma Stone) commits suicide. Victor Frankenstein-like Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) could simply revive her, but seeing little sense in bringing back a suicidal mind, he transplants her baby's brain into her head first. When he asks med student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to help document the behavior of this "Bella Baxter," she can barely talk or balance, but she's learning fast. Eventually, Godwin talks Max into proposing to Bella. She accepts, but since Godwin would still require her to stay on his property all the time, she first runs off on an adventure with Europe-traveling lothario Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Neither she nor Duncan knows what they're getting into.

Nouvelle Vague (2025)

When I saw this advertised on Netflix, I briefly thought it was quite old, perhaps belatedly released like The Other Side of the Wind. That's a deliberate nod to the subject. Once I understood, I was sold.

By 1959, film critic Jean-Luc Godard has directed a short but feels much less accomplished than his cinematic comrades. He finally agrees to direct a romantic crime story co-written by François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, which would become Breathless. Godard's many unconventional techniques, including long periods without shooting, annoy pretty much everyone he works with, especially female lead Jean Seberg and producer Georges de Beauregard. Other famous figures who turn up include Jean Cocteau, Éric Rohmer, and Roberto Rosselini.

Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (2025)

No, nothing to do with the 2001 Amélie. I hadn't heard of this hand-drawn adaptation from a book until its nomination for Best Animated Feature. For once, I went to a theater at a time I'd normally be having lunch, figuring I wouldn't be too hungry after 78 minutes.

In 1969, Amélie is born the third child to Belgian parents staying in Japan. For her first two years, she is outwardly unresponsive. Then she spends six months raging at her limitations, until her grandmother and a new nanny, Nishio, daughter of landlady Kashima, show her understanding and teach her to enjoy life. Alas, Grandma isn't long for this world, and Kashima's wartime grudge against Belgium leads her to discourage Nishio from spending much time around Amélie. What's more, Dad's job means they may have to move back to Belgium any week, despite Amélie self-identifying as Japanese. (I won't list voice actors, because none of the names for English or French mean anything to me.)

Father Goose (1964)

I hadn't heard of this movie before YouTube suggested it. It turns out to have been Cary Grant's second-to-last work and one of his favorites, not least because he acts more like himself than ever before. (No, the protagonist doesn't do any drugs besides whiskey.)

American civilian sailor Walter Eckland (Grant) swipes Australian naval supplies and openly cares only about himself, so we don't feel too scandalized when Commander Frank Houghton (Trevor Howard) strong-arms him into staying at a Papua New Guinea hut and watching for Japanese planes during World War II. He hears about an eligible replacement he can fetch, but by the time he arrives, the replacement has been killed. All he finds are teacher Catherine Freneau (Leslie Caron) and seven female students of various ages, two of whom speak only French. Reluctantly, Walter takes them to the relative safety of his hut, where Catherine disapproves of his slovenly lifestyle. The navy can't rescue them any time soon, so they'll have to get used to each other.

Touchez pas au grisbi (1954)

I wondered why I found this DVD in the H section of my library. The answer came at the title screen when the British subtitles read, "Honor Among Thieves." (No relation to a recent movie.) To make matters more confusing, it was released in the U.S. as Grisbi but appears on IMDb by its literal translation, Don't Touch the Loot.

Big-time crook Max (Jean Gabin, long after his heyday) has recently stolen gold bars, planning to retire on them. Unfortunately for him, partner in crime Riton (René Dary) has an unfaithful girlfriend (Jeanne Moreau) who lets their secret slip to her other boyfriend, Angelo (Lino Ventura). Angelo's men abduct Riton for ransom, so Max enlists two more partners (Paul Frankeur and Michel Jourdan) to help confront them....

Divines (2016)

I selected this partly for being very different from anything I'd seen lately and partly for having a runtime of less than two hours, which has grown scarce on my Netflix list. The cover image of a girl with a bloodied face did not exactly draw me in, but it did warn me that this wouldn't be much fun.

In a Romani suburb of modern Paris, high school friends Dounia (Oulaya Amamra) and Maimouna (Déborah Lukumuena), unsatisfied with their likely career options, resort to crime. At first they merely shoplift and sell on a black market. Then they persuade irascible drug dealer Rebecca (Jisca Kalvanda) to hire them for various tasks. They enjoy the pay, but it's a dangerous business, and teens aren't known for their cautious decisionmaking....

Lucy (2014)

So much for my prediction that I wouldn't watch another action crime flick right away. A friend suggested we see this together. Since it runs only 89 minutes, I figured at least it wouldn't be a great loss.

Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), a college student in Taiwan, puts a little too much trust in a guy she's been seeing for a week (Pilou Asbæk). He pressures her to make a mysterious delivery where he's no longer welcome. This gets her the unwelcome attention of ruthless drug lord Jang (Choi Min-sik), who has her knocked out and surgically implanted with a pouch of a fictitious new synthetic drug to smuggle. When the pouch leaks, she acquires superpowers, escapes, and seeks to collect the drug from other known mules. Not all the effects are good, so she'll have to act fast before her body gives out.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

In the wake of the Academy Awards, I feel a little more motivated to watch the nominees. This was the only one playing at a nearby theater this week, apart from Oppenheimer. The showing included closed captioning, which suited me fine given the accents.

Novelist Sandra (Sandra Hüller) and her preteen son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), find her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), dead of a head injury outside their French alpine lodge, evidently having fallen from a higher floor. No eyewitnesses to the event come forward. Investigators discover enough fishy details to cast doubt on the idea of an accident. Sandra's lawyer friend, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), advises a focus on the possibility of a suicide, while the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) at her trial leans heavily on the likelihood that she killed Samuel. Daniel testifies in her favor, but his word carries only so much weight. (Funny how almost all the characters have first names spelled the same in English.)

Mission: Impossible -- Dead Reckoning Part 1 (2023)

What a trickily punctuated title. Someone must regret that the original had a colon. Anyway, since the past three sequels had been going strong and Christopher McQuarrie was still directing, I figured it was a worthy way to fill an evening. Kinda surprised there weren't more people in my theater on its U.S. debut.

What can possibly challenge Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) anymore, when even age doesn't seem to slow him down? An online AI gone self-aware and rogue, now known only as "the Entity," has been infiltrating all kinds of sensitive information systems. Ethan's mission is to collect the two halves of a key that promises access to the Entity somewhere, but once he understands that the government wants to control rather than destroy the Entity, he himself goes rogue. Not only does he once again have Impossible Missions Force support only from Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), with the rest of the IMF after them, but they can't rely much on their state-of-the-art equipment with the Entity compromising things. To make matters worse, sadistic terrorist Gabriel (Esai Morales), a personal foe from before Ethan joined the IMF, is serving the Entity's interest.

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

On a whim, I decided to watch something playing at the AFI Silver Theater today. This French oldie was playing at a convenient time for me. That's right: 5 p.m. Since it showed only once today, I can only assume someone chose the slot on purpose.

Cléo (Corinne Marchand) is a fairly successful singer, albeit not widely recognized on the street. Expecting to take an exam for a potential cancer diagnosis soon, she visits a tarot reader (Loye Payen), whose verdict is unpromising. Convinced of her own doom, Cléo spends most of the film trying to come to grips with it or take her mind off it while doing various things with other people in the city before seeing the doctor (Robert Postec).

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

The 1930 adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque novel was my favorite Academy Best Picture of the decade. How could a remake live up to it? Well, for one thing, the visual quality hasn't aged well. Also, its "Germans" make no attempt not to sound like Americans, whereas this version was German-made.

In 1917, four teenage friends, the most focal being Paul (Felix Kammerer), are moved to join the German army. They soon find themselves in a northern French trench with the more seasoned "Kat" (Albrecht Schuch), who helps steal food for them. About a year passes in total. As for the rest, all I really need to tell you is that the source material is antiwar....

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort/The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

For foreign-language musicals on screen, mostly Indian movies come to mind. The only exceptions I could think of were Nosotros los pobres and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, both of them serious and the latter possibly qualifying as an opera with its nonstop singing. By contrast, TYGoR is more of a Gene Kelly-type vehicle; indeed, Kelly gets a supporting role as visiting composer Andy. And yes, most of his lines are in French.

The official English title is misleading in that the leads, sisters Delphine (Catherine Deneuve, also in TUoC) and Solange (Françoise Dorléac), are old enough to work as teachers. Delphine is on the verge of dumping her obnoxious gallery-owning boyfriend (Jacques Riberolles), and both sisters hope to find romance and move from Rochefort to Paris to pursue musical success. As it happens, showmen Étienne (George Chakiris) and Bill (Grover Dale) could use help with a town fair stage act. But they're not the true love interests. Solange will literally bump into hers (Kelly), and Delphine will keep missing Maxence (Jacques Perrin), the sailor and artist who already has a crush on her. Meanwhile, their café-owning mother (Danielle Darrieux) is thinking she broke up with the unfortunately named music shop owner Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli) too rashly.

For intro paragraph brevity, I have skimped on the credits. Most of the above characters have alternate actors for singing voices: Anne Germain as Delphine, Claude Parent as Solange, Romuald Figuier as Étienne, José Bartel as Bill, Donald Burke as Andy, Jacques Revaux as Maxence, and Georges Blaness as Simon. Some of the less prominent characters do too, leaving me to wonder whether Darrieux was the only on-screen actress to sing.

About half the musical sequences focus on dance over singing. No, we don't get to see a lot of that from Kelly, who was in his mid-50s by then. But it's no La La Land either; the choreography is pretty good.

As for the songs, the melodies are fine, and I've grown fonder of the sound of French. Sometimes the subtitles try for rhymes, tho not consistently. One odd scene has characters talking in rhyme, in both languages, without music. Maybe more than one did and I was too caught up in other elements to notice.

What could distract me so? Well, the plot, which I also skimped on above. It may look conceptually basic, and the loves are certainly shallow, but events get pretty intricate, and the dialog isn't slow. Some of its humor may get lost in translation, though I perked up at an explicit reference to Jules and Jim. The rest of the humor is largely in situational improbabilities, along with the cute brattiness of the sisters' much younger brother (Patrick Jeantet on screen, Olivier Bonnet for singing).

Apart from Kelly's age, you could almost believe that this musical came out a great deal earlier. There are just a couple lines too risque for the Hays Code era, not that that ever applied in France.

Overall, I just kinda like it. I feel I would've gotten more out of it if I were better versed in French. And maybe more alert at the time.

The Earrings of Madame de... (1953)

So much for my earlier decision not to see this. Eh, I have changed some in seven years. Anyway, yes, that is the entire title, tho it's just Madam de... in the original French. Whenever her surname would be given, it is completely drowned out, interrupted, or visually blocked. I still don't know the purpose -- maybe trying to convey that all sorts of women are like her? At least we know her first name, and the significance of her jewelry becomes apparent almost immediately.

In what I take to be the 19th century, Louise (Danielle Darieux) has been so profligate in her Parisian decadence that she sees fit to sell the earrings her husband, André (Charles Boyer), gave her for their wedding. To save face, she claims to have lost them, but the jeweler (Jean Debucourt) sells them back to André, who gives them to his mistress (Lia Di Leo), who sells them to pay off her own debts. Their next buyer, Fabrizio (Vittorio De Sica), just happens to run into Louise and fall for her....

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

An old French classic is already iffy for me; one that gets reviled in some circles is iffier still. I had planned to skip this one, until I got invited to a Meetup group to discuss it. Hey, if it was bad, at least we could harp on it together.

None of the characters have given names, and the setting is ambiguous apart from a fancy resort. What's important to know is that a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) insists that a woman (Delphine Seyrig) had had a romantic liaison with him at a Czech spa and agreed to meet him again around this time, but she denies ever meeting him before. The other man of note (Sacha Pitoëff) evidently disapproves of the first man's actions and challenges him to games of Nim.

The Summit of the Gods (2021)

The only reason I knew this title is that it was included on someone's list of best animated features from 2021. The exclusion of Luca was, well, fishy, but I didn't dismiss the whole list on that basis. I chose to watch TSotG when I did partly because it's only 90 minutes and partly because it looked different from anything I'd seen lately. Which it was.

In the '90s, a shady stranger in Tibet offers to sell photojournalist Makoto Fukomachi a camera allegedly belonging to George Mallory, who might have been the first to scale Mt. Everest in 1924 but didn't make it back. Fukomachi refuses, but then he sees the vendor get shaken down for the camera -- by none other than Habu Joji, another famous climber who has been missing for years. Could Joji have come across Mallory's remains? He makes himself scarce before Fukomachi can catch up to him. Anxious for a good story, Fukomachi does detective work on Joji's background. By the time they meet again, it's not just about solving the mystery of Mallory; it's about accompanying Joji to record his next attempt to climb Everest -- in the winter, with no third member of the team.

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

If your first thought was the Billy Idol song, yup, this is where the title came from. It's also thought to have influenced the appearance of Michael Myers in Halloween. But contemporary critics hated it, and one of the few positive reviews nearly got the writer fired (not even in France). That might be why it was marketed deceptively as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus in the U.S. I was pretty reluctant to watch it myself, not for lack of reputed quality but for disturbing premises. Still, I mustered the courage.

Christiane (Edith Scob) has been facially unpresentable since a car accident. Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), being her father, a reconstructive surgeon, and the cause of the accident, takes it upon himself to give her skin grafts. Of course, it's hard to find a willing donor for a face transplant, so with the help of assistant Louise (Alida Valli)...well, you can guess. And no, once isn't enough.

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.

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

Oh boy, direction by Robert Bresson again. This time I felt an obligation to watch because it's his most popular work. In fact, it was the highest among the British Film Institute's faves that I hadn't already seen. But that's not very promising to me. Well, at worst, it would be only 95 minutes I wasn't getting back.

Three child siblings adopt a donkey and name him Balthazar. When their family runs into trouble years later, they have to sell him. He has several owners after that, none of them kind. Meanwhile, one of the kids he knew, Marie (played in young adulthood by Anne Wiazemsky), against the advice of others, enters an abusive relationship with delinquent Gérard (François Lafarge), one of his owners. The film focuses about half the time on Balthazar and half on Marie, tho they do share a number of scenes.

The Two of Us (1967)

I finally got another disc delivery for the first time since last year. It's rather hard to coordinate the timing with streaming, so this meant yet another foreign-language flick about a Jewish guy. Oh well, still not all that similar.

In occupied Paris, the Langmann family is laying low, tho not quite to an Anne Frank extent. Eight-year-old Claude (Alain Cohen) keeps calling unwelcome attention to himself, so his parents send him to live in the countryside with the parents of a friend of theirs, who will gladly take care of a pseudo-grandchild for however many months. (The French title translates to "The Old Man and the Boy.) That arrangement is safer overall, but Claude has to maintain a charade of being Catholic like them. They -- perhaps especially the outspoken old man (Michel Simon), who asks Claude to call him Pépé -- believe the propaganda about Jews.

Dreams (1990)

Wisely marketed by Netflix as "Akira Kurosawa's Dreams," this is my first anthology viewing since...well, another Kurosawa piece. It's also from later in his career than anything else I've seen. I figured I'd like it better than Dodes'ka-den, partly because dreams are bound to be at least close to fantasy.

There are eight stories, generally set in 20th-century Japan. In "Sunshine Through the Rain," a young boy ignores his mother's warning not to go into the woods on a day with the titular weather, because kitsune have weddings then and don't brook human witnesses. In "The Peach Orchard," another boy, missing the peach trees that his family clearcut, sees their strangely human-shaped spirits. In "The Blizzard," four mountain climbers are on the verge of succumbing, possibly to the yuki-onna, before reaching their camp. In "The Tunnel," a former WWII commander walks through a tunnel and meets the ghosts of men who died following his orders and don't know it yet. In "Crows," a budding artist imagines(?) himself meeting an anglophone Vincent van Gogh (Martin Scorsese!) in France and traversing the scenes of several paintings. In "Mount Fuji in Red," a nuclear meltdown rapidly depopulates the volcanic area, with most people deciding they'd rather drown than face cancer. In "The Weeping Demon," on another mountain, radioactivity has effectively turned humans into demons in a Buddhist hell. And in "Village of the Waterfalls," a traveler discovers a contented Luddite village.