“... stay at home, eat their potatoes – that’s all they eat – stare at the landscape, chop wood, do the ironing. They scarcely talk except to bark a command or a piece of information to each other. The wind continues to blow furiously, and its music is supported on and off by the same grinding tune we heard at the beginning of the film. One day father ...”

“... What would you get if you combined The Great Dictator with Pulp Fiction and shifted the scene to France? One answer might be Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds, but it’s not a great answer because the film itself is so many things. Of the identifiable movies within its fanciful confines, one is rather good, another is so bad you have to like it and the third is just meandering ...”

“... Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant provokes two questions even before we’ve thought much about the film. Both are about timing. Why did it take the best part of a year after its US premiere to find a screen in the UK? And why does the film itself take so long to find out what sort of work it wants to be? It becomes a pretty amazing movie when it does find out, but – this would be a supplementary question – why couldn’t Herzog have found out before or during shooting, or even in the editing room? Was he waiting for Nicolas Cage to turn into Klaus Kinski on the screen? It is possible that the second set of questions is itself an answer to the first ...”

“... The first thing​ Estrella remembers being told about her father, in Victor Erice’s shadowy masterpiece The South, is that before she was born he predicted her sex and gave her a name. ‘It is a very intense image,’ she says in voiceover at the beginning of the film, ‘that in fact I made up.’ She made it up, but we have just witnessed the scene, the pregnant mother on the bed that is now the daughter’s, the father sitting there waving the pendant he uses to make his prophecies ...”

“... We know​ what black comedy is but I wonder whether some stories don’t call for another colour. Pale grey, for example, might be about right for Anne Fontaine’s Gemma Bovery (2014), a stately, not obviously funny film in which an English woman stumbles into Flaubert’s plot and dies not deliberately by arsenic poisoning but accidentally by swallowing, or rather failing to swallow, a chunk of baguette ...”

“... Ousmane​ Sembène’s Mandabi (1968), now available in a restored print, was the first full-length feature film whose characters speak an African language. Small bits of French appear, but Wolof is heard all the time. And the title offers a good example of a kind of colonisation in reverse, being a Senegalese adaptation of the French term for money-order: mandat de débit ...”

“... Songs​ by Sparks (or the Mael brothers) include ‘When You’re a French Director’, ‘Edith Piaf Said It Better Than Me’, ‘Angst in My Pants’, ‘Life with the Macbeths’, ‘Falling in Love with Myself Again’ and ‘I Can’t Believe That You Would Fall for All the Crap in This Song’. Any of these phrases could serve as the title for Leos Carax’s new movie, Annette, his first excursion into English-language cinema ...”

“... It’s​ not the main function of great fictional characters to provide platforms for the careers of others, but they do the job very well. In a new film, Sherlock Holmes walks into Inspector Lestrade’s office and announces that he has solved a particular case. Lestrade is pleased, and says he has two questions. The first is how did Holmes do it? Holmes offers a detailed answer ...”

“... It’s​ an old narrative device and a very effective one: to provide the day or month without mentioning the year. Garrett Bradley’s new feature-length documentary, Time (on Amazon Prime), begins with a woman telling the camera that it is 23 July and that she has been out of prison for a week and one day. On 24 May she says she is pregnant with twins and has been for 22 weeks ...”

“... Much​ of what Pauline Kael had to say in ‘Raising Kane’ (1971), her long article in the New Yorker, got lost in the controversy it created. One of her aims was to draw attention to Herman Mankiewicz’s role in writing the screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941), and therefore in the success of the film. But, more interestingly, she was also evoking a whole school of New York writers, for whom Mankiewicz could be made to stand representative: a set of wisecracking, worldly figures supposedly attracted to Hollywood by the prospect of copious easy money, who created not a genre of film, but rather a style that prepared the way for Citizen Kane ...”

“... Xavier Giannoli’s​ Illusions perdues won a raft of César awards this year, including for best film, best cinematography and best adaptation. This success seems like something of a fable, since the film itself is all about winning and losing. And the prize for the adaptation, which was undertaken by Giannoli with Jacques Fieschi and Yves Stavrides, is perhaps the most interesting, since the film feels less like a version of Balzac’s novel (written between 1837 and 1843) than an exemplification of Balzac’s theory of history, a sort of fancy dress version of a time much closer to us than the early 19th century ...”

“... Ryusuke​ Hamaguchi admits that he worried about his film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy: ‘I was actually scared that maybe I was writing the same story three times.’ We don’t have to take him literally – the stories are not that similar and he knows what he’s doing – but it’s an interesting thought. In each story, as in Hamaguchi’s recent Drive My Car (2021), which was nominated for four Oscars, there are characters who don’t know what to do with knowledge they can’t share, or that they have chosen not to share ...”

“... Joachim​ Trier’s Oslo films – Reprise (2006), Oslo August 31st (2011) and The Worst Person in the World (2021) – didn’t start out as a trilogy, but when one of his actors suggested that they formed one, Trier liked the idea. It’s not so obvious what links them, except for being set in Oslo and adding up to three, but the idea grows on you ...”

“... The Peruvian poet​ César Vallejo wrote in a famous sonnet that he would die in Paris on a rainy Thursday. He lived in Paris, it rains quite a bit there, especially for poets, and he had a one in seven chance of being right about the day. In fact, he died in Paris on a Friday. It was raining. The poem isn’t so much a near-miss prophecy as a piece of lugubrious theatre, playing with what used to be called mentalism ...”

“... The​ meaning of the word ‘foundling’ seems pretty clear, but there is an interesting slippage in its implications. Such children are not lost and found, they are picked up after being left somewhere. Or thrown away, as the subtitles of Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Broker keep reminding us. A middle-aged man – Ha Sang-hyun, played by Song Kang-ho – looks tenderly at a baby and asks: ‘How could anyone throw him away?’ This has been interpreted as a sentimental moment in a sentimental movie, and Kang-ho won the Best Actor award at Cannes for that tender look and others like it ...”