The Pied Piper (Jacques Demy, 1972)

 

Jacques Demy’s underrated The Pied Piper could be viewed as lacking focus, the title narrative almost crowded out by an emphasis on the conniving of church and state; for a children’s film (of sorts anyway -  I recall it being shown on daytime British TV back in the day) there’s a persistent emphasis on death, bigotry and venality. As such, it provides yet more evidence of Demy’s mischievously perverse streak: the casting of an amiably diffident Donovan as the piper might suggest a somewhat fluffy approach, but any such impression would be highly offset by the estimable (and very British, for a film set in Germany) presence of John Hurt, Donald Pleasence, even Diana Dors! (there’s also Oliver Twist’s Jack Wild, his prematurely worn appearance in itself rather poignantly resonant). The film is bookended by the arrival and departure of a family of traveling performers, but Demy hardly bothers to develop them as characters, his attention shifting between the financial strains caused both by the construction of a cathedral and by pending wars, a Jewish alchemist persecuted by the religious establishment, a lovelessly strategic marriage (all the creepier for the casting of a 13-year-old actress), and the core plague/piper narrative, at times seeming here almost like an afterthought, but perhaps all the more persuasive for that, rendering the piper’s discomfiting revenge almost an inevitable consequence of wrong-headed governing decisions (he leaves behind the children of the kind and tolerant itinerant family). And then the closing scroll highlights the numbers who died of the plague and the persistent religious persecution, causing us to wonder whether we’ve all along been watching a more conventional historical epic than we realized (especially, perhaps, as the closing credits reveal the film to be an early production of David Puttnam, a decade or so before providing British cinema with its big night at the Oscars).

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

 

If Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is any kind of tour de force, the viewer may assess it primarily as one of research and organization rather than of artistic imagination, and yet it holds up remarkably well when viewed with the hindsight knowledge of how our subsequent real-world pandemic played out. In particular, the social media agitator played by Jude Law, who seemed rather shoehorned into the film at the time, snappily foresees a future deluge of false information, of supposed miracle cures pushed by financial self-interest; the character’s remark about not knowing that the vaccine won’t cause autism in ten years eerily anticipating a whole administration’s worth of regression. Inevitably, Soderbergh’s choice to survey such a wide landscape within an almost overly concise running time involves much elision: for example, we see Matt Damon’s everyman character lining up in a food line which turns violent when supplies run out, and apparently witnessing a shooting in a nearby house, but we never gain a broader sense of the scale of economic and social chaos (which we understand to be considerable, the cited infection and mortality rates being much worse than those of Covid), and at the end normality seems to have reasserted itself with improbable ease. And the use of so many stars (including no less than three best actress Oscar winners) in small roles can be an impediment to sinking into the narrative, giving the project the feel instead of a displaced, quasi-celebratory caper movie. Soderbergh chooses to end the otherwise linear chronicle by circling back to the start, to track the virus’s (in this case entirely natural) origins; by then the information’s importance seems supplanted by what we know of the subsequent global upheaval, and yet it’s a pointed reminder of the inherent fallibility of global supply chains and infrastructure (and that’s without even getting into the lab leak theories).

Sur un air de Charleston (Jean Renoir, 1927)

 

It’s tempting to write off Jean Renoir’s silent short Sur un air de Charleston as unworthy of attention: Renoir apparently made it in just a few days, and some of its key elements are frankly painful to observe now. Still, a little background reading, and one’s deep regard for Renoir’s later work, suggests not so much that there’s more there than meets the eye, as the phrase goes, as that a modern-day eye may find it hard across a hundred-year distance to distinguish the mildly subversive from the cringeworthy. The use of an African-American protagonist (Johnny Hudgins) is fairly remarkable for the time, undermined by the use of minstrel get-up and blackface; learning that this was at Hudgins’ initiation rather than Renoir’s makes that aspect of the film more complex and perhaps knowingly provocative, but not enough so to neutralize one’s basic antipathy. Still, accusations of condescension are somewhat tempered by the fact of the film being set in a post-apocalyptic future where Africa is the new hub of civilization, the protagonist traveling in his futuristic craft to a decimated Europe seemingly occupied only by a scantily clad woman and her companion ape; the woman shows off her dancing skills, in scenes that were reportedly once considered erotic (the actress, Catherine Hessling, was Renoir’s wife at the time) but now seem largely grotesque. Much about the film is puzzling and contradictory: the premise sounds visionary, but the use to which it’s put feels static and imaginatively limited; it uses slow motion to deepen our engagement with Hessling’s dancing, but in other respects (like the ape suit) feels wantonly shoddy; Renoir includes a couple of inventions which suggest magical powers on the part of the woman, but it’s hard to see how that relates to the broader scheme. Still, one may find it oddly lingering in the mind, albeit in a way that’s not necessarily all welcome…

Megadoc (Mike Figgis, 2025)

 

About halfway through his record of the making of Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis, Mike Figgis comments that the best such documentaries all record disasters, and that as such there’s part of him that celebrates when something goes wrong on Coppola’s project. It’s a sign though of Figgis’s ultimate reticence, if not of his outright passivity, that one wouldn’t know from his own film that Megalopolis was indeed a failure by most measures, losing at least $75 million of Coppola’s own money, the critical response at best mixed: Megadoc leaps from the end of shooting to the Cannes premiere with the obligatory standing ovation and then abruptly ends without further comment. Among other omissions, it also gives little sense of what Megalopolis is actually about (albeit that even many of those who worked on the film seem unsure on that score), and due to varying cooperation from the actors, gives a rather skewed impression of the experience of watching the film (one might think it’s mainly a chamber drama starring Shia LaBoeuf and Jon Voight, with Adam Driver hovering on the sidelines). But for all of that, Figgis’s film barely has a dull moment, fascinating in the portrayal of the immaculately turned-out Coppola (a different suit and tie ensemble every day) often at odds with the monster he’s unleashed, mystified that everything involves so many people and takes so long, as if he were a mere hired hand himself; budgetary numbers occasionally flash up on the screen, all of them staggering. Perhaps it’s fitting that one of the most charming passages is an improvised conversation between Dustin Hoffman and Aubrey Plaza as they arm-wrestle, Hoffman doing his (edge-of-creepy) best to push things in a flirtatious direction; it’s a moment that shows up the paucity of such spontaneous engagement amid so much care and diligence, even if it relates to nothing in the finished movie.

Dracula (Radu Jude, 2025)

 

Toward the end of his Dracula, Radu Jude cites Wittgenstein (who was himself quoting from another source): the thing about progress is that it always seems greater than it really is. In the context of a film that draws so heavily and explicitly on artificial intelligence, it might be taken as a warning about unintended consequences, that’s if the film in question wasn’t so unbowed by the new technology, if it didn’t in fact treat it mainly as a big joke, allowing the creation of fearsome monsters worthy of a blockbuster, but dropping them almost at random into a movie which at other times could hardly look cheaper or superficially sloppier, for example staging historical dramas with no regard as to whether the present-day world intrudes (in fact, inviting it in; there are numerous glimpses of bemused passers-by, clearly not tutored extras, responding to the action). The film isn’t far short of three hours long, inevitably often dragging a bit, and yet spawning new narratives and technological deployments right to the very end, establishing Jude’s immense capacity partly through the variety and relentlessness of how it suppresses it, the number of times we’re forced to ask whether what we’re watching shouldn’t by various measures be “better.” The Dracula myth provides a canny basis for such a project: there’s hardly a piece of material that’s been so regularly reworked and revisited, while seldom getting anywhere excitingly new (Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, for all its strengths, hardly broke major cinematic ground; Luc Besson’s Dracula by all accounts does so even less). Jude’s primary angle on Dracula, to make him old and ridiculous, might not be the most sophisticated of available approaches, but again, that fits the film’s scrappily unbound mood. The biggest surprise may come at the very end, in extreme contrast to much of what precedes it, suggesting the endurance of simpler cultural pleasures (and, for better or worse, attached human pettiness).

Turn in the Wound (Abel Ferrara, 2024)

 

At its core, there’s something rather touchingly idealistic about Abel Ferrara’s Turn in the Wound (and how often does one think to describe Ferrara’s work in such terms?): a belief that Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine might have been avoided if Putin’s worldview weren’t so small, and in the expansive capacity of seasoned, evocative artistry. That’s embodied here by Patti Smith, seen rehearsing and backstage and in performance; one might initially assume she’s performing in Ukraine, but it’s actually at the French Pompidou Centre, an assertion of the cultural heritage that persists far from the battlefront (even as Smith’s darkly evocative lyrics and storm-damaged presence and the swirling accompanying visuals seem in productive conversation with Ferrara’s documenting of wartime atrocities and dislocations). The film includes a brief meeting with President Zelensky, commenting on Putin’s inability to perceive or value the rights and desires of Ukrainians, and some piercing battlefield footage, a devastating tumble of mud and blood and fire and chaos; that aside though, it often feels somewhat random in its content and assembly, seeming that Ferrara may have talked to whomever happened to step before his camera (he includes a passage of himself being interviewed on Ukrainian TV, disclaiming any particular agenda). It all contributes to an overwhelming sense of almost unprocessable wrongness, with multiple anecdotes of torture and deprivation at Russian hands, of their soldiers' savagery and recklessness: the film makes no claim to balance, whatever that would mean in this context. One of its last interviewees, a man who lost an arm in combat, comments on how his experiences have helped him mold a better attitude, an awareness that things could always be worse than they are: it’s hardly a complex life lesson, but Ferrara’s film is a penetrating counterpoint to a world that often seems intent on smothering any such reflectiveness.

Mon oncle d'Amerique (Alain Resnais, 1980)

 

A viewer might feel obliged to take Alain Resnais’ Mon oncle d’Amerique highly seriously, to assume that the juxtaposition of the film’s narrative (which follows three very different but eventually intertwined lives from childhood to middle age) and the wall-to-wall commentary by behavioural scientist Henri Laborit generates a work of unusual analytical acuity. Resnais disclaimed any such intention though, and from today’s perspective, in part informed by the director’s often singularly whimsical subsequent work, the film plays primarily as a sly, deliberately unsolvable puzzle, encouraging us to find correspondences and echoes and explanations while fully knowing that the exercise will lead only to frustration (like gifting a jigsaw puzzle in which some of the key pieces are missing, or imported from another puzzle altogether). Even if it could be demonstrated that the story the film tells was in some kind of perfect conjunction with Laborit’s theories and explanations, that story would still be (however superficially enjoyable) a pumped-up melodrama (including such elements as a lie about being mortally ill and a desperate suicide attempt) of limited inherent interest, the exercise providing little or no insight into how to conduct or what to expect from our own lives (the lab-grown aspects partly evidenced in how removed and unmoving it all feels). But any allegations of pumped-up self-importance should be adequately punctured by Resnais’ occasional use of rat-headed people in illustrating our conditioned nature (years before David Lynch and his rabbits!). And the film’s very title provides a warning against overly literal viewing; all three principals refer at different points to an American uncle, but as someone whose biography is unclear, or who may not exist at all, America itself absent from the film until its final sequence, and then used mainly to illustrate the desolation that may result from mankind going off track (and in this respect, at least, the film has a point…)

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Alexander Hall, 1941)

 

Officially, Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan is only seven minutes shorter than Warren Beatty and Buck Henry’s 1978 remake Heaven Can Wait, but feels much tighter than the later film, sometimes to the point of seeming to rush: for example it sets-up the dimension-crossing romance at its centre in a mere few minutes of screen time, whereas the later version productively lingered at least a little longer. Notwithstanding that broad impression though, and leaving aside Beatty/Henry’s main tweak of making the protagonist Joe Pendleton a football player rather than a boxer, the two follow very similar trajectories, with an almost identical arrival point, both in tone and content. In both versions, Pendleton is killed in an accident (a plane in the original, a bike in the remake), denying him a chance at an upcoming sporting triumph. The administration of the afterlife concedes an error and sends him back, but into the body of a rich industrialist murdered by his wife and secretary; Pendleton rapidly overhauls the man’s cold-hearted public image, along the way turning a bitter young adversary into a star-crossed love. As the change of title may herald, the otherworldly Mr. Jordan is a more prominent presence in the original than the remake, its impact more fully conditioned on the interplay of Robert Montgonery’s pugnacious Pendleton and Claude Rains’ unflappably genial Jordan. Although further point-to-point relative evaluations of the two are largely subjective, the remake certainly does more with the murderous duo by casting Charles Grodin and Dyan Cannon, albeit both under-utilized – the characters in the original barely register as more than plot devices. Pendleton’s friend and trainer Max Korkle is a highlight of both, James Gleason snappy and short-fused in the original, Jack Warden in the remake more slow-burn befuddled (and benefiting from additional time spent on establishing the Pendleton/Korkle relationship).

Youth (Hard Times) (Wang Bing, 2024)

 

As the title indicates, Wang Bing’s documentary Youth (Hard Times) paints a gloomier picture than the preceding Youth (Spring), notwithstanding that both films run over three and a half hours and are set almost entirely in the dingy textile workshops and living quarters of Zhili (the closing captions tell us the city contains some 18,000 such businesses, employing 300,000 mostly young migrant workers); in each case, the great length serves to release us from normal expectations of pace and narrative, allowing at least a somewhat heightened sense of the claustrophobic repetition of such lives. The first film is hardly light viewing by any measure, but contains much camaraderie and joshing and flirting among the workers, the constant preoccupation with hourly rates and productivity offset with conspicuous consumption of the kind whereby one individual notes that another is still using last year’s iPhone. Hard Times feels both literally and figuratively darker, more deeply characterized by anxiety, by recurring resentment that the rates are insufficient, that they’re lower than those paid last year or in other shops; a greater number of its subjects are somewhat older, with families, working to pay off debts. But despite their efforts to act collectively, the workers have inherently little power, particularly embodied by a group whose crooked boss takes off, his obligations unpaid, leaving them to scurry around salvaging what they can. Like its predecessor, Hard Times ends by showing some of its people back in their home villages, the explosion of light and space almost dizzying in contrast to the compressed dinginess of what’s gone before, partly celebratory but also underlining the strangeness of such far-flung economic structures; the basic decency of the final note, one of respect for a neighbor’s crops, underlines (if it were necessary) the scant evidence of generosity in what precedes it.

The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024)

 

The critical response to David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds was heavily informed by the styling of star Vincent Cassel to evoke Cronenberg himself, and by the knowledge of Cronenberg having been widowed after a long marriage; although those data points aren’t irrelevant, they may lead one to expect a more morosely introspective film than the director actually delivers here. On the contrary, it’s in some respects among his most playful works (even as the customarily frosty tone discourages such a reading), a construct in which almost nothing can be taken at face value, even (or perhaps especially) the facts attaching to the dead. The shrouds of the title are designed by Cassel’s Karsh to be wrapped around bodies (including that of his own wife, dead from cancer) before burial, allowing the family to view their decomposition, or whatever else may transpire underground; the technology is hacked and the graves vandalized, kicking off a chain of events including both Chinese and Russian interests, and transgressions including suggestions of extreme medical malpractice. But it’s all mostly talked about rather than dramatized, and further, talked about in terms that are either speculative or unreliable; for example, the narrative culminates in an unexplained burial, for which it offers at least four different explanations, with Karsh declining to take the obvious action that would narrow those down. The overall effect is certainly somewhat rarified and cerebral, but also uncommonly destabilizing and invasive, its ending providing only the most superficial closure (at best). Cronenberg allows his protagonist two sexual partners in the course of the narrative, one his wife’s twin sister, and the other the blind wife of an important prospective client, providing even ecstatic release an enmeshed and over-loaded quality (although again not without a streak of wry amusement – the sister, for example, gets turned on by conspiracy theories, seemingly the more outlandish the better…)

Une femme douce (Robert Bresson, 1969)

 

Much of Robert Bresson’s Une femme douce is devoted to spectatorship, emphasizing the “gentle woman’s” passivity and lack of agency: the film includes an extended scene from Michel Deville’s Benjamin (when she and her husband go to the movies), another from Hamlet (a trip to the theatre), exhibits at a natural history museum and art gallery, shows watched on TV, even animals at the zoo. Further, the film begins by establishing her death, her body laid out on a bed as her husband narrates the story of their relationship, a story in which he all but harassed her into marrying him, and in which one senses that even his acts of generosity and openness are oppressive to her (for example, he praises an incident he observed in which another man tried to pick her up and she seemingly turned the man down, but it’s already been established that her actions were ambiguous, and the husband’s words serve to make him rather than her the owner of the narrative). The (pointedly unnamed) woman is far from a blank slate - she’s sufficiently educated to recall a passage that’s been omitted from the production of Hamlet, and on their wedding night she appears to be the sexual instigator – but when married to a less intuitive man, this may impede rather than facilitate happiness; as played by Dominique Sanda, the film has a recurring sense of sadly thwarted inquiry and possibility, and when she says near the end that she’ll be a faithful wife, it rings with defeat more than commitment. The film anticipates Bresson’s later L’argent in the recurring focus on money changing hands: after getting married she goes to work in her husband’s pawnshop business, one of her main attempts at rebellion embodied in paying needy people more than the items are worth (another action later appropriated by the husband when trying to prove himself to her).

New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998)

 

Abel Ferrara’s singular (well, of course) New Rose Hotel is a fascinatingly displaced piece of work, a globe-spanning tale of conspiracy and manipulation and perhaps eventual catastrophe, built around a hundred million dollar transaction, that takes place almost entirely in hotel rooms, bars and the like, major events recounted to us third hand or else briefly glimpsed on blurry surveillance screens. Christopher Walken (dizzily idiosyncratic even by his standards) plays Fox, mastermind of a scheme to lure a brilliant sought-after Japanese scientist away from his corporate base, the plan consisting almost entirely of dangling a woman that the scientist won’t be able to resist (Asia Argento’s Sandy), complicated when Fox’s faithful lieutenant X (Willem Dafoe) also falls for Sandy, to the extent of the two talking about getting married. The plan works improbably well, and Fox collects his fee, but then things fall apart; Sandy vanishes, and the two men have to make a run for it. Ferrara’s astounding structural coup has the story essentially ending some twenty minutes before the end (and that’s with various momentous developments merely mentioned in passing), thereafter focusing on X as he goes to ground and mournfully runs through the events we’ve already seen, the film revisiting prior scenes with added details and shifted emphases that suggest the two men perhaps never fully grasped what they were involved in, Sandy increasingly taking on the contours of a classically unknowable noir-type woman. One is left with the sense of a movie that even if barely of this world in many of its particulars, taps a universal capacity for loss and regret (and, especially in the various songs we see performed, for fragile beauty); the ending constitutes no form of closure, provoking on the contrary a sense that Ferrara's film would as happily have circled back to continue picking obsessively at its own bones, and so on and so on indefinitely.

Spectateurs! (Arnaud Desplechin, 2024)

 

Arnaud Desplechin’s Spectateurs! would provide a most engaging introduction to the director’s oeuvre, despite (detractors might say because of) being a somewhat atypical project for him; it’s a largely academic observation though given that like all Desplechin’s recent work, it’s hardly been seen outside France. The film is a personal journey through cinema, including a few montages that wouldn’t be out of place in an Oscar broadcast (Die Hard!), but also spending extended time on memories of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, and most unexpectedly, the late Misty Upham (with whom Desplechin worked on Jimmy P). Desplechin intersperses sweet-natured recreations of key moments in his cinematic growth, including being taken by his grandmother to see a sixties remake of Fantomas but then having to leave when his sister got scared, and screening Vera Chytilova’s Daisies for a school film club and in the process having a girl develop a heightened interest in him. Despite some moments of gravity, the film’s prevailing sense is of lightness and openness to possibility; one feels that on another day Desplechin might have gone in this or that different direction (the film includes a montage of diverse people talking about memorable cinematic experiences, including such quirky choices as a woman recalling that she went to see Train to Busan, and didn’t like it). The film’s final moments are suitably and delectably diverse, contrasting a chance glimpsing of Desplechin stalwart Mathieu Amalric at a screening of 400 Blows, an aspiring director talking in awestruck terms about his transcendent experience of that film, and Desplechin himself, alone in a room, sitting and typing, muttering a final maxim in a manner that lovingly (and is it more self-deprecatingly or self-regardingly?) evokes Godard, an impression immediately cemented by playing Tom Waits’ Ruby’s Eyes under the final credits (just as in Godard did in Prenom Carmen).

Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, 2014)

 

David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars ranks in the lower half of his work, Hollywood’s empty materialism and drained humanity seeming basically like too narrow and obvious a topic to fully engage him. Julianne Moore plays Havana Segrand, a career-challenged actress who engages a new arrival in town, Agatha Weiss, as a personal assistant; Agatha’s teenage brother is the (wantonly unpleasant) star of a “Bad Babysitter” comedy franchise, their father a lifestyle guru who counsels Havana. The film has a broad vein of vicious satire, exemplified by how Havana giddily celebrates the death of another actress’s little boy (an event causing the actress to withdraw from a role that Havana covets), but that’s familiar territory, albeit more sharply executed than average. Of greater interest are its multiple instances of doubling: two (at least) quasi-incestuous relationships between siblings, two characters visited by visions of dead people, two name actors beset by career anxiety, two case histories involving fires, two instances of drowning, all of which contributes to a sense of proliferating stasis, a perception that Hollywood stories are essentially just all the same (of the two movies foregrounded in the narrative, one is a franchise sequel and the other a remake). At the same time, the gradual revelation of so many interconnections between characters creates an ultimately savagely implosive quality: Cronenberg goes relatively light here on the “body horror” (mostly displaced into conventional concerns about appearance, and to skin permanently marked by earlier calamities), but the film ultimately feels no less invasive and destabilizing (conspicuous by its absence of course is anything close to lush cinematic pleasure). Still, Hollywood mythmaking isn’t entirely absent: an early scene has Agatha bragging in seemingly transparently bogus manner to a driver she’s just met about her connections with Carrie Fisher, all of it turning out in short order to be true!

The Grapes of Death (Jean Rollin, 1978)

 

In a way, nothing in Jean Rollin’s The Grapes of Death penetrates as much as the opening images of weary agricultural labourers trudging through the vineyards, their heavy breathing prominent on the soundtrack (the film’s feel for rural landscapes and textures makes the title’s evocation of Steinbeck more apposite than one might expect – it’s also sometimes been released under the far more prosaic title of Pesticide). One of the labourers complains of feeling sick, his concerns brushed aside by the boss, and from there it’s a short hop to Living Dead territory, with a young woman, Elisabeth, jumping off a train to escape a murderously demented passenger and thereafter wandering through a rugged landscape which appears challenging enough even in its usual state, let alone when populated by zombies (although, intriguingly, the contagion takes radically different forms, for example affecting one conniving woman’s mind while leaving her body unmarked – in the film’s most ultra-Rollinesque moment, she obligingly takes everything off to demonstrate). Even when at its more conventional, the film has an intriguing sense of remove, starting from the oddly under-populated train; an exchange about the distinction between those who fought during the war for an unexamined notion of patriotism and those who specifically opposed Fascism in all its forms hinting at festering cracks that only needed slight prodding to split open (it’s amusing that two of the primary characters avoid contagion because, being solidly of the working class, they drink beer rather than wine). It all winds its way to a suitably bleak, un-celebratory conclusion, seeming to portend a bleak future for Elisabeth, perhaps for all. A minor mystery concerns whether the “Francois Pascal” cited in the credits refers to Francoise Pascal of Rollin’s The Iron Rose, even though she’s not in the film: at least one online site says that it does, and that her scenes were cut, but I think I would have more faith in Rollin’s spelling ability, if nothing else.