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“... Ilearned​ only recently, from Charlotte Chandler’s biography, that Bette Davis had taken her first name from a Balzac novel, not knowing, apparently, that the character in question was ‘rather a bitch’. All too appropriate, we might think, since Davis referred to the people she played in movies as ‘all those bitches I had to take everywhere with me ...”

“... In​ 1979 the makers of Alien, Stalker and, it might also be said, Apocalypse Now invented worlds we thought we wanted to know about but couldn’t inhabit. Domestic quarrels and the musical had their day too (in Kramer vs. Kramer and All That Jazz), and we may feel that Roman Polanski’s Tess belongs to both old and new worlds, but still: it was a good year for otherness ...”

“... We may​ think all biopics are biofantasies, in which case the opening title card of Adam McKay’s new film Vice will have us laughing already. After all, he is the former Saturday Night Live writer who made The Big Short, a very funny movie about the 2008 financial crisis. The card says: ‘The following is a true story.’ If we aren’t laughing, we may be wondering, ‘True to what?’ And we certainly need to rework the narrator’s question, which we hear soon after: ‘How does a man go on to become who he is?’ We later learn that our narrator is dead at the time of speaking, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on his logic ...”

“... And the humans,​ ’ a dark deep voice asks at the beginning of the film, ‘what can they do but burn?’ The answer is quite a lot, especially when they are defended by superheroes. Still, many of them do burn, and the film itself, The Avengers (2012), directed by Joss Whedon, quietly raises the issue of collateral damage. Did the superheroes have to fight their war to save the world on the streets of New York, amid crashing buildings, smashed cars and uncountable corpses? Later films in the series have had other battlefields, like an airport, or a lunar landscape where every combatant is a soldier of some kind ...”

“... Towards​ the end of Blade Runner the actor Rutger Hauer, playing a replicant whose programmed life is fading, says he has ‘seen things you people wouldn’t believe’. ‘All those moments,’ he adds, ‘will be lost in time, like tears in rain’: memory and knowledge, the replicant has understood, are part of what constitutes identity. The same actor makes what we might call a cameo disappearance in Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers ...”

“... A recurring​ effect in the films of Agnès Varda, especially her documentaries, is a kind of hesitation between photography and moving pictures. A shot looks like a still – the opening image of Daguerréotypes (1975), say, showing a couple behind the glass door of the perfume shop they work in. The wife shifts her head slightly but that’s all she does, and the man who strides past the shop down the street seems to belong to another world, miles away from the dreaming pauses of photography ...”

“... What does​ a wedding look like in an Ozu film? Two large hired cars outside an anonymous block of flats. Inside the building, father and elder brother in sleek Western morning suits, younger brother in smart but more casual clothes. Sister-in-law very tidy in black traditional Japanese dress. Bride cloaked in a mountainous confection of pink and white silk, topped by a hat that looks like a small but heavy monument ...”

“... Warning: Even more spoilers than usual. ‘One can feel​ that there is always a camera left out of the picture,’ Stanley Cavell wrote in The World Viewed, ‘the one working now.’ The proliferation of selfies has familiarised us with first-person photography but nothing so far has solved the problem of first-person narration in film. Whatever subjective-looking angles the image adopts, the filmed person is not the one holding the camera ...”

“... There is a mystery about Terrence Malick’s new movie, but it has nothing to do with life, death and the wonders wrought by the maker of the universe, which are the film’s modest ostensible subjects. The mystery about The Tree of Life is how a work that is truly terrible in so many respects can remain so weirdly interesting. Interesting only to some, certainly; and maybe not interesting enough even then ...”

“... Don’t be diabolical,’ a title card says at the end of the film. ‘Don’t destroy the interest your friends might take in this film. Don’t tell them what you have seen. Thank you on their behalf.’ This kindly instruction must refer to the tricky ending rather than the whole movie. It can’t spoil things if we say we have just seen Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques, soon to be shown in a new print at the British Film Institute and around the country; or that this is one of the great murder movies; or that France has never looked seedier on film ...”

“... Nothing in the new film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is quite as compelling as the posters for it. Well, there are compelling moments in the movie but they keep losing their allure by reuse; they just go on telling us there is a mystery while the posters picture it. The posters show Gary Oldman as George Smiley – or rather they show him as Alec Guinness made a little taller, thinner, cooler ...”

“... The employees gather outside the shop in the morning, waiting for the boss to arrive and let them in, and already a curious sort of time travel begins, memories of what will be this film’s future, its remakes and derivatives, among them Are You Being Served? and You’ve Got Mail. You try to shake these associations off and concentrate on the film itself ...”

“... The chief pleasure of the new version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is the sight of John Travolta as the model bad guy. He is genial and livid by turns, entirely persuasive in both moods, the very image of crazed behaviour, and far more engaging and unhinged than he was in Pulp Fiction. That film brought certain of his earlier roles to mind, but this one makes us want to rethink Grease entirely, and maybe the whole genre of the musical ...”

“... Joseph Losey’s The Servant hasn’t lost any of its mystery over the years since 1963; it might even have gained a bit. This is odd because the film seems in many ways so obvious, giving off unmissable hints and signals at almost every moment. But then this obviousness itself is not what it seems to be. What’s obvious about the hints and signals is that this is what they are ...”

“... My Nazis are different,’ Ernst Lubitsch said in reply to critics who hadn’t liked his film To Be or Not to Be. The critics thought he was failing to be funny about what shouldn’t be laughed at anyway, the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Lubitsch – we can read his response in the material accompanying the recently issued Criterion DVD version of the film – thought the critics had failed to see how even Nazism could become a routine, a home for stock figures and therefore mechanical, ridiculous ...”