1964: The Train

The movie about a team of French resistance members trying to keep the Nazis from deporting a collection of world-renowned paintings to Germany is another one of those incredibly well-crafted 1960s Hollywood pics that provide really good entertainment, but don't even intend to grab you by the lapels. (7)

1961: Léon Morin, prêtre

In a Nazi-occupied French village, a priest, played by Belmondo, converts a woman (Emanuelle Riva) from one false belief system (communism) to the next (christianity). Will he get into more than just her mind? - Melville's commercially most successful film, and of those I've seen the one I found least interesting so far. It's not bad, but it doesn't have a lot to recommend it either, except for a little of that old French film charme that's hard to pin down. (6)

2000: Fail-Safe

The black-and-white remake of the 1960s classic (which I've never seen) about an impeding nuclear war between the US and the USSR is sort of outdated, but manages to entertain throughout with a tight screenplay and good visuals. (7)

1965: The War Game

Fiction-documentary about what it might look like if Britain suffers a nuclear attack. Given that the outcome is rather dreadful anyway, I felt that the film might have been more effective if it had tried less hard. (6)

1963: Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour (Muriel, or The Time of Return)

Four people meet in a room in Boulogne-sur-mer and their interconnected lives proceed from there. There's love and hate and the war in Africa and a lot of stuff I'm sure I didn't get on the first viewing. But, if that's a basis for that kind of opinion, it's not about the plot anyway, it's mostly about style. Muriel has a modernist soundtrack (think Stockhausen), shows lots of modernist architecture, both interior and exterior, and employs at least two ways of quick editing: First, a kind of proto-hip hop cutting, in which quick successions of cuts skip only a few minutes each; second, quick cuts away from the main plot to show small scenes that are not allowed to take any longer than they absolutely must (e.g., four seconds). That's a main technique for presenting a film not only about specific people, but also one about the city on the whole, as a kind of side order. Or is it the main order?

For the time being, I'm giving it eight points, but I think it's a grower.

1963: Le petit soldat

Godard's second feature, starring Anna Karina and some bloke who's not Jean-Paul Belmondo, was banned by the French government for three years, for telling the story of a man who gets caught between the fronts of the opposing fractions fighting the Algerian war in Europe. More importantly, like the earliest talkies, it was apparently shot silently, with only the most important sounds overdubbed later. To me, that's a technical weakness rather than a bold artistic move, but I got used to it at the time. With its grainy black and white and its nervous energy, it feels like a lesser version of À bout de souffle, which is not to say it is a bad film at all. (7.5)

2008: Flammen & Citronen (Flame and Citron: The Nazi Assassins)

The film about resistance fighters in Nazi occupied Denmark is generally good, but little not-so-good elements here and there make it merely o.k. (6)

1961: The Guns of Navarone

Ah, splendid! The WW2 film about a rugged band of colourful characters on an all-important mission to destroy two of the Nazis' most powerful weapons on the greek island of Navarone is just what Hollywood blockbuster cinema is supposed to be: An epic featuring interesting locations, suspense, lots of silent-loud contrasts between the scenes and a cast of actors that are stars for a reason. (8)

1969: Model Shop

The loose sequel to Lola has the kind of screenplay that won't get you any love in screenwriting class: A day in the life of George, who has to deal with his girlfriend nagging about his lack of ambition, the worry of being drafted into Vietnam and the company who want to repossess his car, so George drives around town trying to raise a hundred dollars and meets Lola, who now works in a "model shop", where people can take their own pin-up photos. This one is going to make some people fall asleep, but I liked the excellent cinematography, the film's time-capsule quality and its general feel. One of the rare sequels (if it is a sequel) that I liked better than the original. (7)

1975: Love and Death

Woody Allen's very silly film about a Russian torn between war and females' loins, which plays endlessly on his betaness and is really very silly indeed, is by far the funniest of his films I've seen. That is all. (7.5)

1969: L'armée des ombres (Army of Shadows)

When Inglourious Basterds came out, some people complained that it was not what they had expected from a film advertised as depicting the work of freedom fighters behind enemy lines: No training scenes, no raids on barracks, wtf? It is possible that Tarantino's deviations from the genre standards were inspired by L'armée des ombres, Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 flop about the French resistance. Thinking back to the plot, it seems a strange movie indeed: Never do we see the freedom fighters take any effective action against the Germans, and one comes away from the film with the feeling that had the resistance never existed, this would not have made much of a difference. Instead, what is chronicled are the internal workings of the group; much time is given to the killing of resistance members who gave away the names of comrades. 145 minutes long, it is deliberately paced (many people will find this movie boring), and its subdued mood is underlined by Pierre L'Homme's excellent, excellent cinematography, which might best be described as a technicolor version of the work Robert Elswit did for Michael Clayton, and which nicely contrasts with Eric de Marsan's very good, somewhat saccharine music. A minor masterpiece which teaches the lesson that even if you're fighting on the side of the good guys, you may end up doing ugly things. (8)

1948: Germania anno zero (Germany, Year Zero)

Rosselini's neorealist classic about a boy in bombed-to-pieces postwar Berlin features lay performances from lay actors and more technical ineptness than you should expect from a 1948 picture. Historically important it may be, particularly good it's not. (5.5) Better films in the same mould are Ladri di biciclette and Rosselini's own Roma, città aperta.

1957: Kumonosu-jô (Throne of Blood)

Kurosawa's idea behind his version of Macbeth, the overriding aesthetic principle of which is scarceness, seems to be to make Ozu look like Busby Berkeley. (7) Just the right thing to watch after Sex and the City 2, and I've also got four Rosselinis lined up.

2007: In the Valley of Elah

Despite asking us to sympathize with an ex-soldier who managed to raise his two sons into joining the army, the first three quarters of this film, about a father trying to find out who killed his son, work decently as a mystery, until the film starts to clumsily hurl its anti-war meassage at the audience. Possibly the most hideous last scene in movie history. (5)

1966: La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers)

Not only is it fully warranted that this film's look is renowned for its proximity to the documentary style, but the first half or so merely recounts a series of terrorist attacks, complete with dates given and a narrator leading us through the events. After Colonel Mathieu arrives to lead the counterinsurgency, things get a little more conventional. Crisp and elegant, it's a very good film to look at throughout. (7.5)

1914: Cabiria (123 min.s Kino Restored Print)

It's set during the Second Punic War between Rome and Cathargo, and apart from that the intricacies of the plot are hard to follow; this probbably isn't helped by a third of the footage missing from the version I saw - anyway, at its centre are Cabiria, who gets seperated from her parents as a little girl and the impressively muscular slave Maciste. Writer-director Giovanni Pastrone, who seems a little biased in favour of the Romans, fires on all cylinders: Volcanos! Elephants! Earthquakes! Armies! Camels! Mirrors that set ships on fire! Stuff falling down! Lots of it! The film's real megalomania, however, is in the title cards, which not only sometimes introduce multiple characters and plotpoints, but also have a tendency to summarize the entire scene we're about to see: Sandra pleads with the noblemen to be released, but to no avail, followed by a three-minute scene in which Sandra pleads with the noblemen to be released, but to no avail - that kind of thing. Sorta fizzes out at the end. (6)

1970: Patton

Never having read anything about the film's content, but having seen versions of the film's poster multiple times, I naturally had assumed that this was some anti-patriotic war comedy, sort of like M*A*S*H, but apparently, a man looking somewhat silly saluting in front of a giant national flag does not signify parody or satire in the USA.

No comedy then; rather, this is a biopic about an actual US general during WWII, co-written and well-made except for the fact that most of the indoors scenes look like having been shot in the studio. On the plus side: In the original (undubbed and mainly English) version of the film, all of the dialogue in German is delivered by native speakers, which is fairly unusual. (6.5)

1942: Saboteur

In this Hitcock wartime film, you'll be surprised to learn, a man is wrongly accused of being a saboteur. It's a little patchy and the showdown on the Statue of Liberty has more in terms of symbolism than in terms of spectacle. Not a bad film, but North by Northwest it is not. (6)

1981: Eye of the Needle

The Second World War: Ruthless Nazi spy vs. upstanding, albeit inept, English Rose. Who clearly does too much crying for this to be called a feminist film, and the overly dramatic score is bordering on parody, but why not? (6)

1933: Duck Soup

Not nearly as good as A Night at the Opeara. (6.5)