I have no great love for the mobster films of Martin Scorsese, yet not having watched Goodfellas feels like an increasingly blatant hole in my cinematic education. It’s weird to see this now as so many of the shots from it are now memes in popular culture and the character archetypes Scorsese establishes here recurs so often in later films. There is no absolutely doubt that Scorsese is at the height of his powers here as he brings so much rich detail and life to the stories of the gangsters. Yet it’s also pure glorification of a lifestyle that revolves entirely around being unrepentant murderers and robbers. Sure they get their comeuppance at the end as is traditional but you can tell that Scorsese has no enthusiasm for that part of the film at all.
Here’s yet another European film about the Holocaust, especially poignant given current events in Israel. It stars Alain Delon in the title role and more interestingly was directed by an American Joseph Losey after being effectively exiled to Europe after being denounced by the House Un-American Activities Committee. We’ve watched many films that show the concentration camps. This one however is about the bureaucracy that identifies and detains Jews to be sent to the camps and how this warps the entirety of society in Vichy France. Between doubts as to whether or not this Mr. Klein that we see really is a Jew after all and the steadily ratcheting tension as the walls close around the main character, it’s a fantastic film both in its conception and its execution.
I can’t summon much enthusiasm for Marvel films these days but I was always going to watch this final part of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy just because it was written and directed by James Gunn. This has very little to do with the wider MCU and that is for the best as the Guardians’ own mythos has grown large enough to be its own thing. I wouldn’t say this is strong film exactly, its plot about uncovering Rocket Raccoon’s origins is straightforward and to the point with all of the expected emotional beats. Still it’s a serviceable action-adventure film and it closes out the trilogy in a satisfying manner and that’s good enough.
This film by Satyajit Ray feels utterly different from his other works yet we loved it just the same. I understand that this is the only one of the director’s body of work made in the Hindi language and indeed this one deals with the fate of an entire kingdom, the state of Awadh. I kept expecting the two parallel storylines to converge at some point but I suppose this is part of the joke as the film is all about recounting a historical tragedy with a powerfully incisive sense of humor.
This was adapted from a novel and that usually means a denser, richer film. It’s certainly long but I didn’t find it especially rich or insightful. It’s a beautifully shot film, somewhat anime-style in its aesthetics even, and director Naomi Kawase gets al of the basic building blocks of her craft right so it manages to convey plenty of emotion. Yet it’s also a film that plays things completely safe and breaks no new ground whatsoever. This means that I had no difficulty enjoying myself while watching it but at the end I found myself asking: just why?
We’re probably going to be slowly working through the filmography of Jean-Pierre Melville next. This director is considered a spiritual father of the French New Wave and this was his first feature film, itself based on a book written when France was under occupied by Nazi Germany. It’s such an impressive film that does so much with so little. Most of it consists of just the same three people in a salon, and this is very much a monologue driven film. Yet it conveys so much of the pain and humiliation of being occupied and how one must passively resist even when active resistance is impossible.
