maurice_yacowar

This unflinching film about sex trafficking is as far from the sentimental nostalgia of the director's Cinema Paradiso as you could imagine.

"Hitchcockian thriller," quoth NYT on the dvd jacket. Sure enough, it has The Master's obsessive spiralling staircase, the jangling shrill violins and post-Frenzy sexual violence. The graphic sex has to be in that flashes of flashback format or it would be paralyzing.

Irena is a Ukrainian cleaner and maid in Rome. She's, trying to keep tab on the affluent young couple that has adopted one of the nine babies she has been forced to bear (in 12 years of sexual exploitation).

The film traces the horror and range of exploitation of women even in cell-phone contemporary Europe. At the mild end, to get the job she has to pay a percentage to the apartment manager who lands her work. That percentage rises to half to ward off his molestation (aka "I love you").

Irena's perils surpass any Paulines. To secure that job she has to paralyze the woman she has befriended to replace. The pimp she thought she despatched (and robbed) resurfaces more sadistic than ever, with murderous consequences. Even as she tries to toughen up her young charge Irena herself is propelled into unmotherly brutality. She's brutally mugged by two Santa Clauses!

Yet Tornatore manages a happy ending. Irena comes out of prison to meet the girl she tended, thinking her her daughter. The girl is beautiful - but in a taut, non-binary way. Instead of the curves the pimps would peddle she's taut, a warrior, her nursemaid's protege prepared for the harsh world that almost destroyed Irena.

Coup de chance is clearly an 89-year-old's movie. If you're going to have a stroke, let it be "of luck." Filmed entirely in France - and in French - it's the slandered genius's possibly final assertion of his art and soul against the calumny he unjustly endures in America.

As well, the spectacularly autumnal forest in the dramatic conclusion evoke the golden age of the survivor. This is prefigured in the lovers' first meeting, accidental (fated?) in the street. There they quote some high school Prévert: "Dead leaves picked up be the shovelful. (You see, I have not forgotten.) So are memories and regrets." So too the film's summary wisdom. Heroine Fanny reads from her murdered lover Alain's novel the philosophy by which he lured his high school goddess into an affair: "everyone's life was a miracle, everybody alive had hit the jackpot. It was important not to squander this miracle and she was prepared to take full responsibility for her choices. Still, it terrified her how big a part luck played in it all.." In emphasizing the importance of hair-breadth chance Allen's Paris film specifically evokes his London film Match Point (2005). The latter opened with a tennis ball suspended in mid-bounce over a net. It could fall either way. This time it falls over, to score a point. At the end the killer throws a stolen wedding ring from a bridge to the Thames. It his a rail, bounces up and then - down to the ground. Unknowingly, the killer's intention has been thwarted.

But no. Another murderous burglar finds that ring, which ultimately frees the real killer from suspicion. In the later French forest an innocent hunter commits the fatal accident that the villain had planned for his own excuse. Fate, justice - it's all chance, all luck. That makes life neither comedy nor tragedy but "a farce; a black farce." The new film also echoes the earlier one's romantic triangle, with variations. Fanny works for an art auction house and is married to a very successful but only "practically legal" investment counsellor, Jean. That harmony is disrupted when she meets and falls for the writer who adored her in high school.

Emily Morton's heroine Chloe marries Tom, a tennis pro promoted into her father's elite business. That marriage is threatened by Scarlett Johannson's struggling American actress, Nola ('alone' in reverse). Nola loses her engagement to Chloe's brother Matthew but falls into an affair with and pregnancy by Tom. In the Paris film the opening shot follows a blond ponytail which evokes Johannson but turns out to be Fanny. Plus ca change.... This time the killer doesn't get away with it. But neither husband is an innocent victim.

That's not the only cultural allusion in a film that ripples with pertinent French culture. The heroine's maiden name is Moreau - and she has a Jeanne Moreau mouth to match. Several names evoke French culture: Fanny, Camille, Jean, Sorel, Blanc, etc. Especially the auteur shadow of Claude Chabrol drops across the wealthy upper class family shivered by betrayal and murder.

The hot lovers fear turning into Mallarme's "swan frozen in ice." Alain buys Fanny The Secret Garden, a fantasy novel about a child's redemption. The title puts a cultural frame against all the floral wallpaper - pale leaves behind Jean's office desk, lively branches behind Alain's bed - and the autumnal forest where justice finally descends. In his refuge from America Allen luxuriates in his adopted French culture.

The auction house in passing provides an even more dramatic allusion: Caravaggio's painting of the boy David flaunting Goliath's harvested head. Goliath is famously painted as the adult Caravaggio, and David after his own youthful mien. Like that painting, here Allen is the old man hanging on the arm of his past.

One last touch. The charming but evil Jean exults in his colossal model train set. This opulent doodad grows out of some boyhood trauma. It reveals him still rooted in its insecurities and desperate for a power beyond even morality. Like the Caravaggio connection from the past to the present artist, this train evokes Mia Farrow's slandering of Allen, which crumbled on the implausibility of his alleged assault on their daughter in their attic, around a model train set. It's a quiet, personal reaffirmation of the aging artist's innocence.

So in what zone do we focus our interest? Are we entirely self-absorbed or do we engage our views and responsibility beyond us? And how far will we range our commitment?

Hard to image a more dramatic example than this film, purporting to record the daily experience of the historic Rudolph Hoss family. They enjoy their plush garden and manor smack next-door to the Auschwitz concentration camp where Herr Hoss is the excellent Director.

Opulence, power, self-satisfaction, right smack dab against arguably mankind's most horrible exhibition of inhumanity. The Holocaust. You know, the unprecedented 20th Century German atrocity that the Gaza government tried modestly to emulate on October 7 in Israel.

Herr Hoss may be slightly troubled by this disjunction in his humanity. Perhaps that's why he rides a horse to work, so that "next door" might seem "distanced." His weird haircut can be read as his trimming of his hair (=self) to match his officer's cap (=role). Ironically, it could pass for the Jew's skullcap. It's another reduction of his self in wrong-headed discipline.

No such qualms for his Frau. She's a deft mistress of the house, sufficiently broad-minded to employ Jewish maids. "You have Jews in the house," her mother marvels. Frau Hoss even lets her maids choose some underwear from the loot delivered from the prison. For herself she saves the fancy fur coat, showing off secretly in her mirror.

Less happy, her mother still resents having been outbid on the curtains, when the rich Jewish woman for whom she cleaned had her possessions auctioned off. Somewhat consolingly, that woman is now in the camp.

But the matron is mercurial. Infuriated by news of her hubby's transfer away from that idyllic appointment, Frau Hoss turns sharply on one maid servant: "I could have your ashes spread on the garden if I wanted." The good woman knows what's going on next door, on what others' suffering her lavish comfort is based. It only enhances her delusion of power, her pleasure.

The film's brave premise assumes we too know what's going on next door and will be appalled by these characters' indifference, indeed explotation. The agents or instruments of that inhumanity carry on nonplussed. We hear some of the telltale sounds they hear but we pause to read them - and are appalled they don't.

The film's basic conceit is that we find cheap comfort in remoteness. Dramatizing this, the film characteristically shows us something that it allows to fade away, leaving us haunted by the lingering score.

That begins with the opening title. We read it, it fades away and we hear the music over a black screen for a spell - a spell well cast - before the plot opens on the Hoss family enjoying a sunny lakeside picnic. The framing music moves from sombre chords into a culminating scream.

So, too, an action is implied but not shown. A helpless young girl enters Hoss's office and routinely prepares for his use. Like the Auschwitz enormities, we don't see the sex. Cut to Hoss going into some deep downstairs for his shameful post-coital cleanse.

For her part, Frau Hoss invitingly gives a manly worker a fag and they stand eying each other. Her dog enters, knows what's happening so turns tail and leaves. So does the camera. But we're left knowing even in their marital intimacy these characters live on the edge of a reality they are determined to ignore. The Hosses sleep in small twin beds with no exchange of physical affection. Their marital ardour is as false as their affected honour.

Does it work?

It does insofar as the Hoss couple's comfort and career ambitions go. But we catch strains of failure. One of their sons has picked up the Cruel Guard role and tortures his kid brother in the greenhouse.

The oldest daughter lives another compulsive retreat from comfort in her sleepwalking. She hides in closets, as her family hides from the reality they serve in the day. Hoss's nightmare evokes the Hansel and Gretel story, the witch's oven an echo of the death factory and the Hoss family life just another Grimm tale.

The adults' self-deception may also be wavering. The visiting Frau Hoss's mother waxes exuberant over the luxurious house and garden. But when she can't sleep at might she peers into the darkness and perhaps sees and hears the deeper darkness. Impulsively she leaves. Her explanatory note is read by her daughter, then flung into the fire. As if that solves it.

That internal gnawing may also explain Herr Hoss's vomiting when he learns his transfer has been rescinded and he will stay in his happy home to supervise the Hungary operation. A medical operation found him hale. But now alone he vomits in the hallway, as if finally unable to contain the vile basis of his life and fortune.

In that scene the marble floor is a sequence of boxes within boxes, like prisons within prisons, or contexts within contexts. This elaborates upon the film's central theme - ignoring the tragedy outside your box.

As it happens this film is made poignantly pertinent by the current Jewish situation, with Israel's existential threat ramifying into a global resurgence of antisemitism. As the Hosses' moral condition is defined by their detachment from their context, so we can be read by our response to the Gaza attack on Israel and her response. For many responders to the current war, history begins on October 9.

As usual Keats springs to mind. Heard melodies are sweet; those unheard are sweeter. Holocaust imagery is harrowing, yet what we know is happening but refuse to witness or acknowledge is even worse.

As befits such a courageous woman director as Jane Campion, In The Cut moves star Meg Ryan out of the Rom Com fuzzies splat into the arena of toxic masculinity. That's as drastic a persona remake as one can imagine. Unfortunately it sidelined rather than justly advanced Ryan's committee.

Franny Avery (Ryan) is a college Creative Writing prof who moves through a world of poetry. Even beyond her classroom, her trips in the NYC subway provide snatches of poetry to beguile her. Her name suggests an ancestry in Salinger, with no Zooey here in sight to share her precocity and innocence.

Her snatches of poety veer into the sensual and sensational. Thus one: "The still waters of the water under a frond of stars. The still waters of your mouth under a thicket of kisses." That last phrase anticipates her cunnilinguistic seduction by the aggressively sensitive cop Molloy (Mark Rufalo), a dab hand at articulating sexual techniques himself. Molloy persists in interviewing her about the first woman's murder, the questioning segueing into courtship.

Instead of Zooey this Franny has a sadly hypersexual half-sister Pauline, whose aggressive luring of her doctor leads to her banishment and criminal charges. Pauline's sadistic murder is the second one Franny confronts. The first victims partial body was found in Franny's garden. Eden this NYC tenement ain't. This is underlined by the names of the working girls' job sites: The Red Turtle, Baby Doll.

Franny and Pauline pretend to a sexual agency that proves an illusion. Both remain trapped in the oppression of male authority. The fat pimp outside Franny's apartment may appear to be a caring guardian but he too sells women.

In particular Franny's poeticizing transparently fails to gloss over Pauline's sexual helplessness: "You're a poet of love. The lovelorn man who Sick in soul and of this Busy human heart aweary Worships the spirit Of unconscious life In tree or wildflower Gentle lunatic." That's BS. Lorca but in this sad case a fatal BS.

Franny equally deceives herself in her intimate warming towards one of her students, the large seemingly sensitive black man Cornelius. He won't carry her bag because that would be "an insult" to her Amazon bearing. She leaves it for him anyway. He obliges. Cornelius skips class, writes in defence of mass murderers and sadists like John Wayne Gacey and submits his assignments in blood-like red ink - or blood. When Franny admits a moment of intimate submission Cornelius shucks his professed gentleness altogether and proves as sexually violent as the literary subjects he professes to rewrite.

Franny at first denies any connection to the first woman's murder. But she accidentally witnessed the victim's earlier blowing a man with a telltale tattoo. Molloy's reflections on that sexual act - plus having that telltale tattoo - eventually convince her that her lover is the killer. The ultimate revelation may clear him but it only confirms the official empowering of the rampant male at the expense and exploitation of women. That dooms women from the brilliant prof down to the most helpless and least tenurable.

The title refers to the low-scale scavengers who sell arms to the US military. It also evokes Marc Antony's line in Shakespeare's Julius Caeser: "Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war." That is, declare a state of chaos then go brutal. (That's the possibly unwitting mantra of Hamas.) Your declared chaos will excuse your savagery.

The film opens on hero David Packouz being beaten up by Armenia thugs - then goes back to trace how an ordinary, appealing young American massage therapist got into that predicament.

Skilled director Todd Phillips explains this true story on two levels. Psychologically, the young innocent was seduced into collaboration with a high school buddy, Efraim.

Jonah Hill plays him with Falstaffian vaunt and void. He has a raging lust for wealth, admiration, food - concentrated in his needing a cocaine high. His sense of love is someone to exploit. His sex shrinks to hand- and blow-jobs. This in contrast to David's disciplined and respectable profession of massage. Efraim can care for no-one else. He will eventually rub everyone the wrong way.

David is like Prince Hall charmed by that unyielding larger-than-life spirit. Their partnership provides David's new marriage with a flashy Porsche and apartment - but both only parallel Efraim's. David is no longer his own self. His new career compels him to lie to his wife - and to keep lying, until all trust is gone.

The story's psychological lesson is the destructiveness of Efraim's unbridled greed. Our lads are set up for a $30million profit. Efraim blows it by irrationally wanting more. He's angered by the revelation their bid low-balled the rivals by $53 million. Suddenly their windfall isn't enough. He ruins the deal by trying to cut out his two key collaborators and by failing to pay the Albanian box-merchant who had saved their deal and even increased their profit. Piddling savings both, that doom the operation. And inexcusable - a reminder of the self-destruction and madness in unharnessed greed.

Larger than the psychological reading, though, the social translates that character flaw to the wider culture: the destructiveness of unbridled capitalism. Our "heroes" personify the self-destruction and irrationality of a social system that allows such dramatic excess in the society's disproportionate distribution of wealth. The film's truth applies to the economic structure as much as to our heroes' character - and its loss. Aye, there's the rub. A happy medium would be the better massage.

Aptly, this film about the stifling repression by the patriarchy focuses on two women working in a boys' detention centre. The boys live in a state of fragile repression, which can erupt even in a Christmas show. The female staff snap at their juniors, complicit in the principle of hegemony.

The drama centers on the power shift between two women who work there, The beautiful new Harvard Psych PhD Rebecca meets, liberates and is eventually overtaken by the mousey submissive functionary Eileen.

When Rebecca breezes into her new job she's introduced by Old School sexist jokes and dismissal. But her interest in Eileen draws the girl out of her repression. By film's end, Eileen has grabbed the power and initiative, leaving Rebecca in full retreat.

Rebecca initially warms Eileen by identifying as a fellow orphan. She has learned aggression as a way to survive in the male world. This she demonstrates when she cold-cocks a brute in the bar. Eileen is still smothered by her violent drunken father,. Denying herself any identity, she restricts her wardrobe to her mother's old clothes. For sexual release she indulges in masturbatory fantasies at work.

Eileen's father is the nightmare patriarch. The former police chief, retired in humiliation, survives as a violent, obsessive, helpless drunk. He disdains of Eileen for lacking the gumption to escape him as his other (unseen) daughter did. That's the no-win ethos of the patriarchy. You lose if you serve.

The other central male is another cop's son, jailed for having murdered his father in bed. Enigmatically, he has since refused to speak. Rebecca draws out his secret: His mother condoned his father's sexual abuse of him. Rebecca dumps her discipline of psychology and invades the mother's house, intent upon forcing her confession. In taking the woman prisoner Rebecca in effect ruins her own career.

During that woman's captivity Eileen shifts from unwitting accomplice to impulsive commandant. On impulse she raises the stakes from kidnapping the mother to killing her. At this unintended extremity the psychologist disappears. We watch Eileen's escape, as she hitches a ride with a trucker and joins a series of trucks - possibly tricks - hitting the highway. That's an ironic reassertion of the male power, on the road as in stasis.

The central women's relationship begins in kindred spirit, warmth and sensual attraction. It's shivered by Rebecca's inappropriately forceful initiative, then broken by Eileen's extremity. The patriarch is a prison that defeats anyone who submits to its strategy and hegemony.

In Poor Things the titles are wraiths of letters, floating, emaciated, fading away, like the beings that preceded and are then drawn out of the corpses under the doctor Godwin Baxter's knife and training. The letters suggest an ever-fading life and substance, the tension between man's skeleton through aspiration back to its reversion into bone. This theme recurs in the film's intermittent black-and-white evocations of Victoriana which casts the film both in our current times of colour and our stripped past.

The end-credits are too small to read. In context, they are the sign of the maker, the creator, at once stretching the limit of his art but falling short of fully realizing it. We aspire to spirit but lapse back into being things. The skeleton persists. The bone outlasts the spirit, however reborn.

Hence too the mutants that derive from Dr Baxter's craft and genius. Weird animals, like a four-footed goose and a pig-headed chicken, scuttle through the scenes, as if to normal to warrant a close-up. His steam-engine carriage pretends to be drawn by a fake horse-head, as if the industrial revolution were but an inflection of the idea that man stays beast.

Similarly hybrid is the genre-basis of the plot. A female Candide strides through the story of Frankenstein's bride against the urban landscape of a retrospective futurist Verne (the air balloons, that vehicle, etc).

The innocent afoot is Bella. Baxter created her when he took the body of a maritally oppressed suicide and implanted the brain of the baby in her womb. She bears his surname because he made her, in a non-sexual paternity. We watch the creature blossom syllable by syllable from impulsive inarticulate into the new, independent feminist. Given physical being by the mad scientist, she on her own discovers and asserts her humanity and rights.

Her "I must go punch that baby" anticipates her turning from impulsiveness to effective social order.

The doctor's seamed and resewed face evokes Dr Frankenstein's monster, whom Mary Shelley imagined and Hollywood multiplied. The Victorian context is reaffirmed by the latent William in Dr. Godwin's name. Like this Baxter, William Godwin apparently exempted himself from conventional sexuality, as Kara Hagedoorn has demonstrated.

The legitimate freedom of nonbinary sex is also exemplified by Bella's lesbian affair,. That begins in the brothel that also introduced her to the conflict and exchange of power in human sexuality. Those mutant animals and machines universalize this liberty in the nonbinary.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos's new feature is so rich, complex, probing and untrammelled that one reluctantly hazards any reading upon a single viewing. So I'll wait, this current venture my wraith, a presence but not fully bodied.

In Aki Kaurismaki's new film, men coming out of a rep cinema say Night of the Living Dead reminds them of Diary of a Country Priest and Bande a Part, respectively. Fair enough. Our film has its own apparently lifeless heroes in staggering tsearch of rebirth. Their heartening tale is conveyed through Bresson's skeletal aesthetic and Godard's (albeit way lower key) outsiders.

Anyway, Fallen Leaves reminds me of Ozu - a subdued minimalist almost static anatomy of a season as an emblem of the current human condition. As the title- and the closing song, with Autumn in for Fallen - suggests, we're in a chilly, bleak, tired world, sapped of colour and energy. But the heart beats on, especially those of our dulled central couple whose solitudes ache for their intuited connection.

The course of their true love is hobbled by Holappa's weakness - drink - and his accidents, whether losing her number or walking into a train. Meanwhile Anya patiently survives on her own. When she loses her shelf-stacking job for pinching a past-date pastry, she takes a drudge job in a pub. That ends when her boss is busted for drug dealing. Thence to a sheetmetal factory - the industry in which Holappa has his union card. He struggles on his own, with neither union support - until she recovers him at the hospital, retrieving him from a coma.

Anya's second job is dramatically masculine, sweaty factory work. It involves her in some heavy digging and some heavier carting. This balances - and saves from cliche - her larger woman's project, saving her man from his destructive weaknesses.

When she adopts a dog she demonstrates her generous impulse to care for the desperate, to add a relationship to her solitude. Having inherited her small flat from her godmother, Anya is a step up the social ladder from her working friends - and a ladder above her lover.

Amid the cold barren settings the backgrounds bristle with film posters. Cinema provides a rich escape denied these characters' real lives. Holappa waits outside the cinema in futile hope of meeting Anya again. A ring of cigarette butts tells her he had been there.

The last shot echoes Chaplin (the auteur not Anya's dog). The lovers walk into the sunset of a cold, heartless world. The factory scenes recall the dehumanizing sterility of Modern Times. And in the spirit of The Great Dictator the outside news world boils down to Russia's horrible barbaric attack upon innocent Ukraine. Not a saving barber in sight.

Six months later the soundtrack would have added the October 7 attack on Israel and Israel's response. No resurgent spring there either. But Kaurismaki's small, touching lives go on, in a carefully controlled simplicity. Elegance can also be stark.

Not often that a title so denies the thrust of a film. In this film's therapy-speak, accusing someone of hurting your feelings evades the reality: You choose to feel hurt. Partners in a successful relationship will assume responsibility for their own responses instead of blaming the other.

That's the point of all the family tensions here. The compulsion to be candid is embodied in Beth's title of her memoir: I Had to Tell It. She felt the compulsion to reveal her parents' cruel lack of respect of her. Excrement "for brains" was one of her daddy's sobriquets for her. Her candid memoir enabled her escape from the diminution it made her feel.

In her creative writing class Beth is properly over-enthusiastic about her students' attempts. But she's surprised and hurt that none have read or even heard of her book. They dutifully promise to correct that, but any insult is hers to take not what they gave.

Her response to her own son is diametrically opposed to her father's but equally problematic. In over-praising his potential and accomplishments she undermines his self-acceptance as much as her father did hers.

Beth's key "betrayal" now is her husband Don's praise of her new book, a novel. When she overhears his admission that he doesn't like the book she feels he has been lying to her.

But the husband's defence is solid. He wanted to support her even if the work was not to his taste. The second agent's sale of the book justifies Don's support. But Beth is immediately tested again when the blurb on her cover is trumped by a better blurb on the book beside hers. Who says what doesn't matter as much as how the subject chooses to respond.

When the couple jocularly recall their false appreciation of each other's gifts they are reminded that a close relationship may often depend upon such small tactful fibs. So, too, instead of declaring how ugly his facial surgery has left him Beth assures him he will look good when it heals.

The film closes on a perfect shot. The couple is together in bed again, starting to read their respective copies of their son's first play. We don't know how good/bad it will be or how supportive/candid they will be in response. But now they know the balance that's required and the understanding on both sides.

In a minor replay of the theme, when Beth's sister's boyfriend is fired from his play he resolves to retire from acting. Instead he apparently auditioned for another and enjoys success. Again, the firing isn't as significant as how he chooses to respond to it. As the bard put it, Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.

Don's counselling sessions work the same theme. Though he feels he is losing his skill and memory, the point again is that the responsibility to work lies with the client not the therapist. The longterm client who can't afford him anymore attests to Don's efficacy.

When the mutually hateful couple demand their $33,000 refund they indignantly reject his advice they separate. Their shared rejection of him saves their marriage when his patiently hearing them didn't. What he says or doesn't say is not as important as what they work out.

Perhaps the domestic theme's clearest exercise is in sister Sarah's interior design work. When she goes by her own taste her proposed lighting fixtures leave her apparently sophisticated client cold. But her desperate offer of a phallic grotesquerie works immediately. Here as in the psychological issues we can nurse our own abused feelings or try to understand the offending other's.

I don't know writer/director Nicole Holofcener's work. After this extraordinarily fresh, sensitive, witty intro I must watch for her more.

This may appear to be the standard political drama. All the women are secretaries. All the leaders, bosses, even the panel of judges whose investigation frames the narrative are men.

But there is one exception - the eponymous hero, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.

Between radiation treatments for her eventually fatal lukemia, the chain-smoking, conscience-driven woman negotiates Israel's skin-of-the-teeth survival of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

While the Jewish state's survival drama predominates there is also a compelling faith in the power a woman can wield in high office. She may recoil from the threat of turning its attacker Egypt into an army of widows and orphans. But that effective possibility wins Israel's fragile peace with Sadat.

Golda's effectiveness counters her disclaimer: "I'm not a soldier. I'm a politician." Success in the latter requires at least the possibility of the former. For all her grit and sinew, she remains a character of sentiment, emotion, empathy - keynote requirements so often forgotten in leadership.

In contrast to Golda's wisdom, with even her suppressed gut instincts validated over time, the nation's vulnerability is as due to the masculine entity as its military successes are. In particular, the nation's foremost military heroes are here demystified: Moshe Dayan and Arik Sharon. Their vanity clouds their judgment.

Unfortunately the film also rings true to Israel's current predicament. Golda may coerce Egyptian President Sadat into recognizing the state of Israel. But to today's arab world, especially to the genocidal Palestinian campaign with its global support, the target is "the Zionist entity." Not even lip-service respect is paid any "Israel," however legitimate and important an contributor to the world it has proved to be.

Finally, there is the issue of Jewface. Why wasn't a Jewish actor cast as Golda? Is this an affront to the Jews?

As if casting Helen Mirren could possibly be considered an insult to her subject. Simply, Mirren is magnificent. Her physical transformation - not just the face but the body, the legs, the motion - is matched by the subtlest nuances in feeling, perception, posture, expression. There has not been a better performance this year.

I gather Mirren spent three hours each day at makeup. Sarah Silverman would have taken twelve. The persecution rests.

Arguably the most touching scene is the newsreel clip of the real Golda and Sadat chatting with easy warmth over their peace deal. As she jokes, they're a grandmother and grandfather enjoying each other. They incarnate Golda's most famous line: "We won't have peace till the arabs decide they love their children more than they hate us." The line is famous enough not to be articulated here. But it drives that newsreel warmth.

As well, the Golda-Sadat harmony offers that illusory hope that the other arab nations might someday accept peaceful existence with the Jewish state. That, after all, has since 1948 been the crucial reason why the Palestinians have not accepted the statehood they were offered. They want to replace the Jews not join them. And the world won't rein them in. Today as in 1973, as in 1948, Israel cannot count on anyone but herself for defence.

In this undervalued 1999 comedy Robert Altman once again uses a social microcosm to anatomize contemporary America. The Easter weekend setting in Holly Springs casts a Christian framework around the seedy Mississippi small town setting.

That birth/death issue also drives the three central characters. Camille Dixon (Glenn Close)- blending Garbo and the Mason Line- is the classical Southern Belle pretending to purity. The director of community theatre tries to hide the fact that her Aunt Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal) has committed suicide. Camille is so assured of her privilege that she runs roughshod over the police crime-scene tapes and assumes she will inherit her aunt's estate. She even claims co-credit with Oscar Wilde for her production of Salome. Camille falls from inherited privilege to madness.

As a result of Camille's vain machinations, the suspicion of murder befalls Cookie's closest friend and help, Willis Richland (Charles Dutton). Willis personifies the complexity and delusions of American racism. We're led to be suspicious of his every action, only to be disabused by his virtue. His night invasion of the mansion is to keep his promise to clean Cookie's guns. If he steals a mickey of bourbon at night he replaces it the next day. He has the knowledge to help Cookie on her crossword.

Indeed Willis refutes the myth of America's racial divide. His white grandfather sired a huge keyboard of children and grandchildren, a spectrum of whites and blacks. Willis's surname anticipates Camille's bequest of her estate to the most legitimate heir, this black man. He was to that manor born.

As Willis refutes the cliche of the shiftless inferior black, Ned Beatty provides an affable humane alternative to the Rod Steiger redneck stereotype sheriff. Beatty's Lester Boyle immediately knows Willis is innocent by his homespun wisdom. In fishing veritas.

The third central character is the most ambiguous. Emma Duvall (Liv Taylor) is a vagabond with an instinctive bond with Willis and an equally compelling antagonism both to her supposed aunt Camille and to her putative mother Cora (Julianne Moore). That bloodline proves as fallacious as the assumptions of Willis's difference.

Throughout, human instincts run athwart social expectations. Though Emma is an outlaw, of suspect character, her compulsive affair with rookie cop Jason (Chris O'Donnell) provides a romantic stability and bracing spirit otherwise lacking after Cookie's suicide.

Indeed if Camille was counting on getting the fortune cookie she assumed her due, that fortune is as ersatz as Cookie's fake necklace. The true fortune is the border-crossing relationships that dissolve the vicious faultlines we usually see in dramas around smalltown Mississippi. On this Easter the humane America is reborn - not least because a child saw and reported the gun hidden among the Easter eggs.

Damn, the Dardenne brothers make fine films. Lorna's Silence is a placid recording of a woman's power - but mainly its restriction - with roiling turmoil beneath its surface. It's challenging to watch because no character invites - or even allows - our emotional identification. Even at the end.

Our obvious impulse is to side with Lorna. The Albanian woman paid the Belgian Claudy to marry her so she could gain Belgian citizenship. That established, she can now get a bank loan so she and her lover Sokol can open their own snack bar.

Still, they need the $10,000 a Russian will pay to marry Lorna to win Belgian citizenship himself. To rid herself of Claudy Lorna offers him $5,000 for a divorce and fakes his assaulting her as grounds. Despite the obvious tensions in their homelife she tries to help him break his serious drug habit. In one desperate intervention she gets him through withdrawal by having sex.

These citizenship finaglings are orchestrated by the wannabe gang bass Fabio. With his taxi driver front, we are not surprised to find him taking Lorna for a ride. While she only wants Claudy divorced, Favio rigs Claudy's murder as an overdose. The run of coarse love never does smooth true.

For all her power in marital citizenship Lorna is radically helpless. Not entirely unlike reality, here men wield the authority and compel the woman's silence. Fabio runs the show. Even her financial gains are illusory. Fabio retracts his payments when Lorna breaks the Russian deal. Worse, Sokol proves a false lover when he takes back his investment in their project and unconvincingly pledges to meet her in Albania.

For all her sympathetic efforts to dump Claudy by legal means, she feels guilty at his death. She declines to dispel the cops' assumption of suicide. Her silence has been an immoral compliance. Powerless in reality, she finds a moral peace in imagining she is carrying Claudy's child. That possibility shivers the Russian deal and breaks Fabio's support.

At the end his henchman is clearly driving her to death. When she flees him she ends up powerless, helpless, doomed - with not even her purse. She hides in an abandoned shack in the forest. Her fantasy of carrying Claudy's child is her only sustenance - and an expression of her will and moral responsibility that had been silenced too long. This final delusion allows her a cleansing her reality denied.

Indeed cleansing may be the film's underpinning metaphor. Lorna works in a dry cleaning business. The staff's uniforms are nurse-like white. Lorna uses the hospital setting to back up her domestic violence suit against Claudy. She buries her dirty money, then tries to cleanse it by giving it to Claudy's alienated family. Even the film's palette serves the metaphor, with its bright patches - whether the blue in the opening shot or Lorna's wardrobe reds - an arresting relief against the dark background. The colour feels bracing, like a mouthwash.

Indeed, isn't all that business about getting citizenship through marriage a political form of cleansing, a superficial legitimizing? Only in her final and fatal isolation, with that delusion of continuing Claudy through their imaginary child, can she feel finally "clean." That's her tacit scream against her lifelong silence..

Two decisions determine this film's perspective on the duplicities and compromises that characterize modern American marriage.

Director Ira Sachs sets the film in the suburban and executive posh of 1949. That's the golden age of naive illusions about marriage. Peyton Place had yet to puncture the pretence to suburban innocence. The buoyant voice of Doris Day sets off the cheer, promising she can't give us anything but love, baby. Here the lovers dish out as much duplicity as love.

Hence the gloss and brightness in every domestic scene and the affluence of the business and club settings. Indeed the film evokes the bright style of the master of '50s melodrama, Douglas Sirk, attended by his detachment and satiric bite. Of course the historic setting still implicates contemporary marriage as well. Marriage is marriage.

Sachs' second decision is to cast as narrator the slickest and most dishonourable character, Richard (the ever-suave Pierce Brosnan). That's like Iago getting the direct addresses to his audience, which immediately poisons the viewer's perspective upon the saintly Othello.

Initially Richard confirms his opposition to marriage. He ends up marrying the chirpy Kay (Rachel MacAdams) himself. To get there he has to betray his prosaic best friend Harry (Chris Cooper), who's planning to kill his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson) so he can marry Kay. Richard also helps Pat conceal her illicit affair. Of course Richard serves mainly his own end, to win Kay for himself. Richard initiates the repeated bromide: "I'm not at all certain that one can build happiness upon the unhappiness of someone else" - especially not someone with our moral sense!

Despite being a war widow, Kay seems childlike in her wide eyes, glowing hair and smile, and her principal principle: "A woman needs to be loved, and that's true. But it's not the whole truth. She also needs somebody to love." That's the '50s sense of "the woman's place." She's as ripe for Richard's seduction as she was to salvage the lachrymose Harry.

The film ends on the neighbourhood's happy couples playing charades - an apt metaphor for the reduction of love and marriage to shallow performances. After all, as Richard confidently assumes: "Whoever in this room who knows what goes on in the mind of the person who sleeps next to you... please, raise your hand... I know you can't, not honestly." Finally, Pat and Harry move silently together cleaning up after the guests. Their harmony is as deep as ever, now built upon their respective abandoned passions. That shot - from outside, through the living room window - echoes the first: Harry's insubstantial reflection on his high office window, while his duplicitous best friend Richard introduces him and his tale.

With Passages Ira Sachs moves to the forefront of current American directors. (Memo to self: Go find his earlier films. Now.) The narrative frame anatomizes Tomas Freiburg (Franz Rogowski), a German bisexual directing films in Paris. In the first scene he rudely directs a scene, especially nit-picking on a young actor who's not descending the stars as the director wants. The film chronicles the director's troubled descent off-(his)camera.

It ends on a full-screen profile of Freiburg bicycling furiously through the Paris streets. He has found he cannot control people in his love-life the way he directs them on film. As he cycles he's incongruously wearing the tux and bowtie he donned to prepare to take his film to Venice. All dressed up but now nowhere to go. He's furious because he has just been finally rejected both by the beautiful Agathe (Adele Exarchopoulos) and by his husband Tim (Ben Wilshaw)., The closing music is a cacophonous amplification of La Marseillaise. That cultural nationalism places the pug-faced hero in the grand tradition of French romantic film stars: Gabin, Belmondo, Depardieu. These unhandsome men had a romantic force that transcends our ordinary schmucks' moral responsibility.

The passages of the title refer to the growth of the lovers who come to reject Freiburg. As Tim notes, Tomas tends to fall into an affair upon completing a film. Now he's hurt by Tomas insisting on describing his Agathe passion to him. Tomas leaves Tim, impregnates Agathje, then turns jealous at Tim's new affair with a black stud novelist Tomas persuades Tim and Agathe to attempt to manage a trois. Feeling marginalized, Agathe asserts her independence with an abortion. When Tim orders Tomas never to see him again the Venice honour pales before the director's isolation.

The cyclist's resolve and rage show he hasn't learned a thing. He still tries to bend his lovers to his will, as if he ruled the set offstage as on. He storms into Agathe's primary school classroom futilely to beg her to return, then extravagantly promises escapes of his desire not hers. He betrays both lovers by not telling Tim of Agathe's abortion, to exploit Tim's desire to raise a child.

His two love-objects are considerable characters in their own right. Tim is a very successful designer, running a large company. If the woman is, as usual, cast in a lower register, Agathe is still an obviously effective primary school teacher. Either could carry their own film so Tomas's dismissive treatment defines him not them.

Despite his role in the French screen tradition, Tomas is very much a modern lover. He is fully non-binary. There is contagious fervour in his bouts with Agathe. In his post-phallocentricity he gives her a manual orgasm. (Or in today's parlance is it Digital?). His intercourse with Tim is the most graphic I've ever seen on screen.

And that is the film's point: Even in this most modern sexually enlightened male there remain a selfishness and drive for power that precludes his genuinely loving. Indeed it's all in his name. The director has the voyeurism of the Peeping Tom but in his need for selfless submission in love he's the Doubting Tomas. That costs him the frei (freedom) in Freiburg. That last cycle through France is his solitary confinement.

A Mike Hodges noir tends to be blacker and more cerebral than even the artsier end of the norm. Here he anatomizes the male ego in two respects: a man's compulsion to make one's mark and his sexual identity.

The former is expressed in hero Will's meditation that frames the narrative: "Most thoughts are memories. And memories deceive. The walk. The way he smoked a cigarette. Laughed. The dead are dead. He's gone. What's left to ever say he was here at all? Not much." Clearly Will is a man of will. Fed up with his criminal life he suffers a breakdown, then disappears into the forest for a basic, solitary existence. Three years later his social life is reawakened when he finds a gang-beaten man in the forest. He takes him to the victim's address then returns to his monkish isolation. His brother Davey's surprising suicide returns him to his abandoned world. For Davey's apparently wasted life compounds Will's grief at having wasted his own.

Davey was a handsome, likeable, happy-go-lucky chap who dabbled in drug sales. Being "webbed up with all the beautiful people" brought him easy success. His wastefulness we read from the party scene where he locks himself in a bedroom with a rich beautiful girl - only to sell her drugs. He's too manly to indulge himself. Even money he dismisses as "a cunt's drug" - but he keeps a healthy stash. Will has no doubt about his brother's heterosexual bent.

But Davey's confidence, self-respect and will are destroyed when he's raped by Boad, a crime boss who covers his wealth by his front as a luxury car dealer. The macho Boad has a beautiful wife and estate and a macho swagger.

In explaining the rape to Will, Boad reveals a shivered masculinity. He describes following Davey through his nocturnal adventures. Boad's language is so full of disgust that he seems to be casting a moral righteousness upon his attack on the boy. But Boad is rather expressing his lustful attraction to him. His suppressed homosexuality compels him to destroy the spur and victim of his love. At the same time, Davey may have felt his own sexual identity undercut by his violation.

When Will banished himself to the wilds he turned away from his devoted lover, Helen. He tries to recover that relationship when he asks her to pack her back and run off with them. After despatching Boad Will speeds to get her. As his car rounds the bend in the last shot we know what's awaiting him. Helen is a gunpoint captive of an imported gunself Boad had hired to kill Will.

In this tangle as in the web of masculine sexuality there is no escape. Just the deceptive and fugitive memories.

Robert Altman's Kansas City (1996) is effectively a twin of his Nashville (1975). Both use their titular cities to anatomize their respective music and political cultures. Both respond pointedly to their time.

In Nashville the Country and Music scene catches the tension between America's traditional political values - ostensibly democratic - and the confrontational spirit that grew out of the new individualism, personal and sexual liberty and protests against the Vietnam War. Michael Murphy plays a political go-between (aka hack) who dangles support for a governorship to win an influential musician's (Henry Gibson) presidential support. The only Black character represents Charlie Pride, the first African American success in American country. Our guide through the narrative is the callow Shelley Duvall flower child, rootless, passive and gormless.

In Kansas City there is a greater weight on the city's blues/jazz tradition, with correspondingly more attention to the tension between the white and black societies. Against the contemporary setting of Nashville, Kansas City revives the 1930s, recalling the roots of America's urban racial division.

As our guide through the plot Blondie O'Hara (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is Duvall's antithesis: a fevered, complex, impulsive, violent woman who stoops to kidnapping in hope of recovering her husband Johnny (Dermot Mulroney) from the clutches of the Black criminal gang headed by Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte).

Michael Murphy is again Altman's slick politician (as in his Tanner series, as well). His Henry Stilton is a big cheese in his state because he's an official advisor to President Roosevelt. Blondie kidnaps his wife Carolyn (Miranda Richardson) to compel Stilton to rescue her Johnny. The ostensibly legitimate White authority enlists the governor's deployment of thugs to intervene - too late.

Nothing of Blondie's passion for her Johnny appears in the Stiltons. Despite the white couple's erotic pet names - Heinie and Pussy - there is no ardor between them. Stilton does what he has to in order to save his wife - and prevent a scandal - but he declines to speak to her.

Indeed the White world is defined by this government's - shall we say? - pragmatism. Steve Buscemi, as Blondie's sister's husband (also, because these characters live in ruts, a Johnny), embodies the criminal abuse of democracy with his deployment of imported and multiple voters and his violence toward the uncooperative. However more stylish, there is also a telling bigotry in the ostensibly well-meaning but offensively condescending, naive, supercilious, colonialism that Carolyn bestows upon the black women in her continuous drugged stupor.

Blondie's loser husband is a parody of the White understanding the Black. He dons blackface to steal the money-belt of a black high-roller. In a twist on sexual stereotyping, victim Sheepshan is a huge, expansive Black enriched by his contract to plant telephone poles! Caught and facing death, Johnny preserves his dignity by facing up to Seldom Seen. To save his life he offers to become Seldom's slave, a historic reversal that appeals to Seldom's humour. "You have guts," Seldom smiles, respectfully. "Now they're your guts," vows Johnny. So Seldom carves them out.

The Black leader's very name asserts the film's rare presentation of a Black voice, perspective and moral structure. Such authority is indeed seldom seen. And even more rarely heard. As the gang leader, Belafonte is brilliant, a total opposite to his usual mellow voice and gentleness. Here he rasps his orders and his own firm and self-respecting principles. As he explains his commitment to Johnny's theft victim: "You have to understand Sheepshan. He's a loser. And losers've got to be respected. They're the backbone of my business. They're my customers, and I take good care of my customers." Such respect and responsibility are seldom seen in the film's white community. Despite having Blondie carried kicking and screaming from his club, Seldom respects at least one woman's authority: "If my mother was alive, she'd cut your balls off. Woman went right to the point. She never, ever missed a beat." (Further to his - and Altman's -credit, Belafonte wrote his own dialogue.) The film's moral center may arguably lie in the frequent and extensive musical scenes at The Hey Hey Club. Without the explicitness of the Nashville lyrics, the jazz scenes provide the film's most powerful emotional address and affirmation of the Black spirit - and especially the harmony that lies in freeing the individual voice. To this end there are two extended scenes of dual jazz lead performers.

The first is postered as a "Battle" between two star soloists, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins. Their duel in alternating solos, of increasing inventiveness and strength, concludes with a handshake of mutual regard. There is a harmony even in this energetic rivalry. The film closes on another rich but gentler number that foregrounds two bassists - instrumentalists who are more commonly supports in the background.

All the musical numbers expressing the Black world emphasize harmony and the freeing of the individual voice. That integrity contrasts to the false hegemony and effects of America's racist power structure in 1996 as in 1935 - and, alas, even more so in 2023.

In 1970 a Minnesota Physics professor, Larry Gopnick, suffers a Job-like accumulation of afflictions that challenge his self-respect and his faith.

But the film opens with a short yiddish drama set in a 19th Century shtetl home. The farmer exultantly tells his wife of his remarkable experience. When his wagon broke down in the blizzard a stranger appeared and helped him out. He invited the stranger home for a warm soup. When he gives the stranger's name the wife is appalled. That man died three years ago. The visitor must be an evil spirit in disguise, a dybbuk. Sure enough, the stranger - as befits the dybbuk - declines the offer of soup. He rejects the wife's claim that he'd died. When the wife impulsively stabs him in the stomach he doesn't bleed.

But then he does, a little. He asks for soup. Rather than wait, he stumbles outside. The couple fear they have killed a human being. Or have they expelled the dybbuk?

Now, the Coen brothers have stated that this amuse bouche was just an invention to set the mood. It has no more connection to the main story than the old Looney Tunes cartoons had to the features they attended.

Not so. Remember D. H. Lawrence: "Trust the art, not the artist." That anecdotal opening carries the heart of the film.

For one thing, its yiddish dialogue connects with the continuing theme song. "The Miller's Tears." There the turning of the wheels signifies the singer's fear of helplessly moving towards a solitary death.

In addition, the introductory short story exemplifies the rich tradition of Jewish folklore and narrative which Gopnick's woman friend recommends he turn to for counsel. As his marriage dissolves. The fact that she has braces on both legs prepares for the inadequacy he finds in the three rabbis he consults. The senior authority, Rabbi Marshak, with his remote authority and both natural and supernatural scholarship, even resembles the dybbuk by his forked beard and mysterious detachment.

Most importantly, the radical ambivalence of the farmer's initially beneficial encounter sets up the film's presentation of life as a matter of mixed blessings. Any hint of a silver lining opens into a massive cloud. Literally, at the end. Rabbi Marshak has returned the confiscated transistor radio - with the secreted $20 - Gopnick's son Danny can finally pay off his debt to the bully Faigle. There a dark tornado continues its advance. The young brute's name is a denial of the delicacy of Faigelleh, a common term for "little bird" or "gay." The film ends on an open note of various potential doom.

Like that farmer, Gopnick's apparent advantages all open into vulnerability. His two children are growing distant from him and from his faith. His daughter is stealing money to save for a nose job, which Gopnick forbids. Son Danny is focused on the poor antenna reception of his F Troop and getting stoned for/at his bar mitzvah.

Gopnick's marriage explodes when his wife Judy reveals she is leaving him for Cy Ableman and expels him to a motel, sarcastically and suggestively named The Jolly Roger. A Korean student whom he has failed leaves him a fat envelop of cash to buy a passing grade. Gopnick is up for tenure but he has no publishing record and the committee has been receiving anonymous letters about him, which obviously will not influence their decision, but.... Even when Gopnick's anger at the student causes a chain of traffic accidents that kills rival Ableman, Gopnick is not saved. His wife, amid her dramatic grieving, demands he pay for the funeral.

Eventually life improves for Gopnick. The TV antenna challenge provides a view of the beautiful neighbour sunbathing nude. That eventually leads to their sharing a joint - and Gopnick's fantasy of sex with her. Still, the other neighbour, a redneck hunter encroaching on Gopnick's property line, provides a balancing fantasy of antisemitic murder.

Then there is Gopnick's brother Arthur, at loose ends, living on the Gopnicks' couch then joining him in motel exile. Arthur's continual draining of a cerbaceous cyst on his neck is a grisly emblem of the film's major motif: life draining away. Arthur is a likeable but nightmare personification of the Miller's song. In his despair he blames God for not having given him anything.

Indeed, even beside Gopnick's tribulations brother Arthur is the most compelling challenge to the Rashi epigraph that opens the film: "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." Gopnick struggles to find meaning in his trials. As he advises his failed student, the physics major depends on mathematics to prove the theories that physics can observe but not explain. As the dream Cy puts it, "Mathematics is the art of the possible." The first two rabbis demonstrate the shallowness of religious explanations of human frailty. The first, very junior, rabbi offers as solace the vision of God in the parking lot. The second remains stymied by a congregant dentist's discovery of "Help me" etched in Hebrew inside a gentile patient's teeth.

Against these silly simplicities two complexities appear as if to test the Rashi. One is Arthur's notebook, his Mentaculus, crammed pages of scribbles and scrawls that he claims enables his power to predict. That helps him win at poker games - for which he attracts police attention. But it proves of no avail when he's busted for soliciting sodomy in North Dakota (!). To lawyer him up for the latter charge Gopnick abandons his principles, uses the student's bribe and raises his grade to a C-.

The second dramatic complexity is the huge blackboard Gopnick dreams of filling for his class that ultimately proves - "The Uncertainty Principle. It proves we can't ever really know... what's going on. So it shouldn't bother you. Not being able to figure anything out. Although you will be responsible for this on the mid-term." Indeed life is the mid-term in which we struggle to survive the inexplicable - and are best advised to steer clear from complicating things.

That's the essential simplicity by which we stumble through faith and knowledge alike, however fervid our need for delusion. Arguably the key rabbinic illumination is Rabbi Marshak's. Too aloof to counsel his adult congregants, he receives the bar mitzvah lads to bless them. At Danny's visit the rabbi steps away from his usual formula with a personalized simplicity, citing Jefferson Airplane.: Stepping down into the boy's secular sphere the aged rabbi achieves the simplicity that is immediate, a connection, a true value. In that modest reality he one-ups even the dybbuk his chin-growth evokes.

Add George Marshall's The Gazebo (1959) to the list of Best Non-Hitchcock Hitchcock films. It may not dislodge Charade but it ranks.

Glenn Ford plays Elliott Nash, a TV writer/director who's driven to kill a blackmailer threatening to publish old nude shots of his wife Nell (Debbie Reynolds), who's breaking into Broadway stardom. Her devoted ex-suitor Harlow Edison (Carl Reiner) is the cop hot on his tail.

Nash is trying to write a screenplay commissioned by Hitchcock, but his blackmail worries distract him. When Hitch phones him, Nash solicits his advice and how to get rid of a body without a shovel. The "fireplace" response suggests the body might be burned away but no. Hitch rather suggested deploying the fireplace shovel. Thus the film-world produces a miniature solution to the real/reel-life dilemma.

Hitchcock casts a more general shadow than just that scene. The whimsical imagery and music of the opening and closing title sequences evoke the tone of The Trouble With Harry (1955). So too the characters' assuming responsibility and guilt over a corpse they didn't kill and the burial and unearthing of the body. Both films offer a black comic version of Hitchcock's patented "transfer of guilt" theme. Cop Edison is a hedonistic and self-serving antithesis to sheriff Calvin Wiggs. But the antithesis is as clear a parallel as an equation would be.

When the opening scene moves from a classic noir murder scene into the mechanics of its TV presentation we recall the theatre/life fluidity in Stage Fright (1950). (See my discussion of that film on this site.) A host of Hitchcocks - especially I Confess (1950), Dial M for Murder (1954), The Wrong Man (1956), etc. - lie behind the cop's line "It's amazing. How an innocent man can look so guilty." Here the wrong man is the corpse as well as the erroneously accused killer.

Unlike Suspicion (1941) here the husband who appears to be so guilty actually is that guilty - until a convenient heart attack renders him innocent.

Finally, the climactic intervention by the pigeon provides a prophetic link to the birds in Psycho (1960) - from the Phoenix setting to Norm's stuffing - and of course on to The Birds (1963).

As it happens, the film's source play, staged in London in 1958, was written by Alec Coppel, best known for his script for Vertigo (1958). He comes by his Hitchcock spirit legitimately. Indeed, Nash's fond description of the eponymous edifice may equally apply to the British Hitchcock: "a little bit of Olde England comes to Connecticut." My thanks to Joel Gunz of the HitchCon gang for alerting me to this connection.

As the end-credit song reminds us, "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep." Wes Anderson's extravagant confection enacts the variety of dream-lives that buffer - yet illuminate - our "real" life.

The film is a nesting doll of performed fictions. The film we've gone to a theatre to see - so far - opens on a small-screen black and white TV image where the host (Brian Cranston) introduces playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) at work. He appears in a small box far away in the small screen. That's two levels already. His surname evokes yet another, the mythopoeic frontier lawman of the everything's OK corral.

A fourth is the stage presentation of that ostensible play, which itself moves from the stage to the backstage, inner-level of presentation. Then the three-act play is itself presented as a reel-life performance in the eponymous small desert town near the atom bomb testing site.

On that level, the preternatural bright colours and stylized action add yet another context: the animated cartoon. The "real" dramatization is heightened into blatant artifice. As if to confirm this context, an actual roadrunner appears briefly in the action and at length in the foreground of the last shot. The "meep meep" is implicit.

That layering of dramatic production embodies our dependence upon fantasies to guide us, especially in a world more than ever shadowed by the elaboration of that atomic threat. The periodic boom and mushroom clouds leave the citizens shaken but not stirred. As thematic luck would have it, among the trailers preceding this screening was that of the more historic reminder of the birth of the atomic threat, Oppenheim.

Against the cataclysmic paranoia of The Bomb, the film craves community spirit. So Montana defends the alien who briefly reclaims the asteroid that gave the set city its name: "I reckon that alien didn't mean no harm. No, he ain't American. No, he ain't a creature of God's Earth, but he's a creature of somewhere." And aren't we all? Indeed all the film's characters are creatures of a somewhere not quite real but an entrance towards it. Actress Midge and widower Zack move from separate boxed frames into a passionate refuge from their respective tragedies. Zack's antagonistic father-in-law learns a lesson in humanity and respect from Zack's young triplet daughters, their mom transported in Tupperware.

With all this fictional layering we often miss the identities in the most star-studded cast since Altman's The Player. The likes of Cranston and Norton, Scarlet Johansen, Liev Schreiber, Tom Hanks, slip by virtually unrecognizable. Conversely, Jason Schwartzman appears usually in his bearded role as recently widowed father, then as the clean-chinned actor. This becomes another kind of layering, of the stretch between the real and the fantasy.

All these layers of performance draw us through the director's fantasy to remind us of the debt we, the debt that our science, the debt that our governments, owe - to humanity, not to their own advantage. A timely and tragic reminder, that really should wake us up but....

A cheeky pun lies at the core of this challenging Israeli sex drama. The heroine is a documentary filmmaker retreating to her parents' suburban flat after the end of an affair. She is supposedly writing a script but instead tries out female roles in an unsympathetic reality.

In the opening scene collision 33-year-old Michal is rear-ended by an older man, Zeev. That dynamic repeats in their first sex act, a rear penetration. In a third form of back-sliding, psychological regression, the woman reverts to teenage angst in her parents' cramped home, both in her impulsive behaviour and in her revolt against their authority.

Their tension over the father's extra car is pure Teen. The woman sees it as representing her long overdue independence. The father sells his car to an acquaintance rather than help free his daughter.

Ostensibly to research the school scene, Michal sidetracks her screenwriting to enter Zeev's world. She gets stoned with a high school student for a one-night stand. She attends their grad prom, where she has another violent sexual encounter with Zeev.

This lover personifies the violent patriarchy. As well as being the school principal, he is a Lieutenant Colonel in the army reserve. Both his sexual encounters with Michal end in violence, the first in Zeev's penetration and the second in his rejection of her advances in the school's girls' washroom.

Zeev may seem sensitive in singing his prom ballad, but he is driven by a masculine authoritarianism. Michal's father parallels this troubling patriarchy, both when he sees her naked in the bathroom and when he slaps her in a later argument. Similarly, Michal's mother's opposition to Michal's affair seems impelled by her own attraction to Zeev, which she lacks the courage to advance.

Clearly writer/director Maya Dreifuss is an auteur to be reckoned with. In Bikur Holim (2005) heroing Michal (again) suspends her trip to India to broker the troubled relationship between her mother and grandmother, three generations of women in an oppressive world. In Highway 65 Daphna is a spirited 40-year-old policewoman working petty crimes in Tel Aviv. Her growing uncertainty in distinguishing reality from fantasy anticipates our Michal's role-playing, both as a troubled teen and in the hooker act she performs for Zeev.

Dreifuss was one of the five women directors in Heroine (2016), which presented five stories of women struggling in their defining professions: officer, babysitter, nurse, stripper, director. Her present film seems to grow out of the last.

Dreifuss's film also shares philosophic territory with Hagar Ban Asher's The Slut (see my analysis on this site). Both explore the societal and biologic limits that oppress women even in modern Israel, the most egalitarian state in the region and among the world's most open to women's rights and advancement. By their biological role in reproduction and their societal function in sex their very freedoms only lead back into their restriction.

Writer-director Chandler Levack has delivered a perfect gem of Growing Up teen film. At 17 Lawrence (Isaiah Lehtinen) is traumatized by the recent suicide of his father and his own implausible ambition to get into the $90,000 Tisch film program in New York. If his ambition and film nerdery might qualify him, his secretary mother's sparse salary and his own narcissism imperil his path.

In foolish hopes of earning his way he takes a part-time job at the Sequels video rental store. The store name accurately connotes the industry faith in remakes and reissues but also suggests the sequentiality of film and life experiences. But we immediately see through the union rep's promise of a long career in that business. We know what has happened to video rental outlets.

Lawrence finds an illuminating parallel in the store manager, Alana (Romina D'ugo), who confesses that a traumatic casting couch experience in Hollywood drove her from her acting to the vicarious world of videos. Thus alerted to his own limitations, and realizing his selfishness in his one school friendship, Lawrence settles into the consolation prize, a $60,000 scholarship to the film program at Carleton. Similarly enlightened, Alana resumes her acting ambition. Video rentals don't resolve life's problems.

That happy ending incidentally affirms the integrity and value of working in one's native Canada instead of blindly aspiring to the supposedly superior industry below the 49th. This film is so scrupulously paced, so perfectly cast, so quietly and movingly acted, that it could never have been made in Hollywood. Its final brilliance is in asserting its national values and spirit.

Levack reminds us how joyous a small perfection can be.

This sexually explicit drama is of special interest because its lead actress, Hagar Ben Asher, also wrote and directed the film. All superbly.

Only the cell phones establish the contemporary setting of this rural Israeli community. Otherwise its examination of the transactional nature of female sexuality in society could be any time in history.

Her name, Tamar, evokes the Genesis heroine who avenged herself on her father-in-law Judah for breaking his promise of providing the twice-widow with her third husband (after seed-spiller Onan!). Tamar posed as a roadside prostitute to become pregnant by Judah - then exposes him. That falsely accused prostitute undercuts the heroine's reduction by the film's title.

We know nothing of the film Tamar's past. She works as an egg-seller (aptly enough) and is a loving, responsible mother to her two young daughters. (The Biblical Tamar had twin sons out of Judah.) When her maternal responsibilities allow, she freely gives sexual services to the local men who help her. The bike repairman even provides bikes for her two daughters - her service in exchange for goods.

In these transactions Tamar takes various degrees of seeming pleasure and detached interest. She shows no desire for a fuller relationship. These encounters give her fleeting connection and practical benefits. By providing only manual or oral sex she keeps control over the men.

Tamar changes when she goes to bed in an emotional, non-transactional way with Shay, the vet who has returned to his dead mother's home. When she drops to fellate him he pulls her up for a fuller embrace. After the darkness and detachment of her servicing scenes, her full sex with Shay erupts in a golden glow. Now the sex is love. She invites his insemination and thrills him with news she is pregnant. At Shay's invitation Tamar and her daughters move into his home. His ease with the girls suggest his potential fatherliness.

So what goes wrong? That she loves Shay is clear from her phone calls and her pleasure at his comfort with her daughters. But her pattern of sexual barter inhibits her break from her past. She delays her users rather than denying them. To put off one client she deliberately spills a tray of eggs (shades of that Onan). Accustomed to using sex impersonally she seems unable to convert fully to the love with Shay. Perhaps frightened of the new emotion, or by her loss of control in the new intensity, she unilaterally aborts Shay's child and uses his increasing engagement with her daughters to stay away from their home.

Shay senses her increasing alienation. After he and the girls frolic in a pool he goes to get Tamar. When he spots her with a hastily fleeing partner Shay leaves her there and speeds home. He puts the girls to bed, the older one in his and Tamar's bed.

What ensues we don't know but we see him stripping naked at the foot of the bed. Tamar returns and is shocked by what she sees through the window. We hear heavy breathing. At the least he may be masturbating. This is entirely out of character. Perhaps he feels himself isolated, perhaps even unmanned by his new domestication, the abortion, Tamar's infidelity. Perhaps here his sexual aberration parallels Tamar's debilitating sexual pragmatism.

After she has roused a neighbour, three men beat up Shay. In the last shot he lies in a foetal curl and she embraces him. The man who has led her back from cold sexuality to love is reduced to a helpless child.

That finale suggests Tamar's struggle to sustain love with Shay against the sexual determinism that is woman's fate. Tamar's pragmatic use of her sex has compromised her emotional life and freedom. The power she seems to deploy is still her radical restriction. Even in an apparently mutual "use" the male retains the advantage. That the daughters will grow into this dilemma is suggested in the scene where they - however still playfully - explore sexual embrace.

The opening scene sets this theme. The camera pans across a quiet, pallid country field, arriving at a closeup of the legs of a handsome horse. Suddenly the mare breaks free, leaps a fence and runs wild - only to be knocked down by a motorist. Through the course of the narrative Shay heals the horse, enabling her to run off again. Like Tamar, the horse is a free natural spirit doomed to paying the world's price on her freedom. As a healer, Shay is drawn to Tamar, but at the end both need each other to heal.

Like any Paul Schrader film, this is a story of a sinner's redemption. Narvel Roth still wears the skin-signs of his murderous neo-Nazi past, That wrath he has converted into a brilliant career in horticulture. He tends the lavish gardens of the socialite Mrs Haverhill - and her more personal needs, as summoned. The latter includes his accepting her orphaned grand-niece Maya as his apprentice. That eventually threatens the grace he has found in Haverhill's Gracewood Gardens.

The opening credits play beside spectacular images of opening blossoms. These are individual examples of the ordered constructions of the gardens. The motif establishes the individualism that flowers most healthily when it serves a larger order.

Roth is eloquent about gardening. He declares it a faith in the future. He describes the garden as an imposition of order on chaos, with various forms at various points in history. After a violent destruction, he lauds the garden's capacity to rejuvenate itself. These reflections make the film an allegory of political pertinence. For here gardening becomes a metaphor for social as well as landscape governance.

Behind the title of this master gardener is the "master" race he has deludedly espoused, an assertion that led to mass destruction. In protecting, then loving, the mixed race Maya, Roth completes his abandonment of that blighted ethos. His gardening ethic aligns him with orderly conduct, faith in nature and community and the control and social function of individualism.

That's where this film addresses the rising fascist movements especially in North America but also in Europe and beyond. Against their violent individualism Schrader reasserts the values of social harmony, respect and the healthiness and beauty of order. In Maya's ex-boyfriend's attack on Gracewood, the swastikas painted on Roth's cabin walls suggest that Roth was betrayed to the druggies by the cop who had been his handler. The extremist Right, of course, commonly has roots in the police force and army, where their violent impulses can find sanction - and arms.

As "Gracewood" points to the grace of natural growth, "Haverhill" echoes Miss Haversham of Great Expectations, a wealthy woman frozen in her frustrated past and determined to inflict her power upon those she supports. Roth makes an updated Pip.

The last shot in this quiet, brilliant film is an implicit antithesis to the entire drama that precedes it. It's a bird's eye view of the two central grad student artists walking off together, about to disappear into the industrialized cityscape. The bird - which we hear but don't see - is the pigeon that was cripped by Lizzy's cat and saved first by Jo, then by Lizzy.

Caring for the bird became a bone of contention between them, though not as serious as Jo's failure to provide her tenant with hot water. The women's recovery of civility, community, friendliness, represents the healing power of Nature over its traditional antithesis, Art.

As the capital A suggests, the Art here is the enclosed artificial world of an art school's grad program. Writer/director Kelly Reichardt brilliantly catches the character and style of contemporary art schools. In this community there is a pervasive ritual of mutual support, cliches of appreciation. When a ceramic work is spoiled by a burn, the tech claims he prefers imperfections. More interesting, you see. The school bubble is sustained.

The film also catches the Moment of art style and form. Macrame is back. The looms loom large again. The students' openings anticipate the empty chat, posturing and cheese of The Real Art World. Their work is good enough but as typical as their low prospects for successful art careers. Their grad show opening may prove as good as they ever get.

The best art is heroine Lizzy's ceramic figures, which out of the kiln freeze the angst and frustration we see in her life. There she primarily suffers by being the only responsible character around. For Jo, seeking out the perfect tire for a tree swing is more important then getting her tenant hot water. Aren't artists supposed to be more sensitive, more responsible, than the cliche landlord?

And as several characters remark, why would anyone take a pigeon to a vet? In life they are foul pests. In art they are Nature, the superior force which humanity requires we serve even through Art.

Lizzy's parents have in effect abandoned their children, especially Lizzy's mentally afflicted brother. Her father is a retired potter who still spins fictional life successes and is exploited by a couple who pause their travels to live off him. They are the parasitic fossils of '60s Bohemianism. They come to the show for the wine and cheese.

When Lizzy's brother digs a pit in his back yard - Earth Art to express the mouths of Nature we don't listen to - his work is no more futile than the ostensibly advanced work of the students. Indeed his Outsider instinctive fervour emerges valourized when he takes the initiative of picking up the recovered pigeon and releasing it.

As Lizzy's exhibition opening proceeds we wonder which disaster will ruin her work. The gambolling children? The wild brother enraged he must control his cheese-eating? The father bumbling along? The insensitive Jo? No, all is saved when we remember the reality that our creativity can only emulate and serve. Nature wins out.

The title is of course as rich as the climactic closing shot. Showing up is what we do when we put up a show. But it's also our quintessential responsibility as artists and as human beings. Showing up, being responsible, saving what life we can.

Perhaps some might suggest this requires a "spoiler alert." The last scene ends on an unresolved question. Eleven-year-old Caite is in the arms of her cousin Eibhlin's husband, Sean, as they weepingly cling to each other. But down the road stomps her brutish, selfish, irresponsible, drunken and adulterous father, Da.

The question: Will her father insist on taking her back, another mouth to feed but another servant to use? Or will he risk the loss of face and free his daughter to the more nourishing she discovered in her summer with her cousin?

It's the old "Lady or the tiger?" trick I remember from Grade IX (with no idea what short story that's from.) Perhaps we're not given the answer so we're free to choose which we prefer. I can imagine some viewers rigid enough in their sense of filial obligation to require the pathetic girl to return to that stifling condition. It takes a leap of the imagination but I can imagine someone who would prefer that ending. Think Republican.

At my (Canadian) matinee I'm certain 110% (staff included) wanted her to be taken back to her cousins. There she was well fed, properly dressed, excused for mistakes and mainly embraced with love by the couple who had lost their only child. The stifled child from her large, penurious family, becomes the other couple's loved replacement of their dead son.

That optimistic ending finds some support in Da's earlier instruction to his wife: "Tell them they can keep her for as long as they like." But that was when she was raggedy, suppressed at home and bullied at school. When the cousins return her well-dressed, more grown (i.e., useful) to the family burdened by a newborn son, he may decide not to free her. The 1981 rural Ireland setting may confirm such a tribal conclusion.

We certainly enjoy watching her blossom at the cousins'. She speaks freely, laughs, improves her reading ability (after a humiliation at school) and even "runs like the wind" in a burst of openness. Her every pore silently cries out against having to return to her cruel home. Desperate, she runs to catch up with those loving supporters. But Da comes lumbering up.

Withholding the resolution of that question may allow for an additional meaning. Caite's ending uncertain, we witness Sean's growth in emotional openness. Sean does not have wife Eibhlin's immediate embrace of the recessive child. He can ignore her, be curt, even scold her. He may be more frozen in grieving his son. But as the couple warm Caite into blossoming, she erodes Sean's crust. He can share his wife's desire to keep the girl and feel her despair at her returning. Suspending her fate, the last shot reveals Sean's growth in emotions. Like Caite, he is enrichened and freed from their respective suppressions.