Although it is often potently, admirably shot, The Neon Demon (2016), by Nicolas Winding Refn, is dissatisfying. Elle Fanning stars as a young model who is almost beauty itself. She becomes the object of jealousy, erotic hunger, and ridiculous violence. The film is art—poor art, because it’s sensationalistic and tawdry; and it pretends to offer insight into a few things. Pretends. What it offers instead, you’ll see,* is the physical uglification of actress Jena Malone. Refn has a new film out—Her Private Hell—which I hope is a step up.

*If you’re a spectator of this thing

A silent film by Ernst Lubitsch, The Doll (1919) is cinematic artifice at its most curious. Lubitsch pretends it is crafted from what he pulls out of a toy chest, and a story gets underway presenting a babyish, hypersensitive young man (Hermann Thimig, fascinating) who refuses to get married. What he does instead, to gain an uncle’s dowry (for some gluttonous monks!), is to “marry” what he believes to be a mechanical doll. But not so. The dollmaker’s daughter is pretending to be the doll. Ossi by name, she is played by Ossi Oswalda, a German actress who attained a lot of fame in the Silent era and, in ill health, died at only 48. Here, she seamlessly displays the daughter’s mischievousness and is a luminous delight. In fact, so is The Doll. Anyone who is getting into Lubitsch must see it.

Claude Goretta‘s 1977 French picture, The Lacemaker (La Dentelliere), deals with a shy, gentle working-class girl (Isabelle Huppert) and a smart, unassuming college student (Yves Beneyton) who simply do not belong in a serious amatory affair with each other. It is also about lives that become empty and disillusioning and even nonsexual, and are thoroughly secular. After seeing it on videotape years ago, I was never able to see it again except recently on YouTube in an auto-translated version—not the best subtitles; in fact they’re worthless. Still, I’m grateful for it.

The film is an excellent one, splendidly, poetically directed by Goretta. There are beach scenes as lovely as the camera placement is inspired. There is dandy camera movement too (the crane shot) and meaningful fades to black. The Lacemaker derives from a novel by Pascal Laine. On its own, Goretta’s screenplay impresses. As in his film The Invitation, he loves his characters. Huppert and Beneyton are persuasive actors; Florence Giorgetti even more so.

Christmas in July (1940), by Preston Sturges, is a nice short story of a film. It isn’t novelistic, yet it is a feature film. Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell) is tricked by co-workers into believing he won a commercial slogan contest. He can’t possibly afford the purchases he then makes; enter the police, etc. As in other Sturges movies, a pendulum swings from being poor to being rich or vice versa, and it happens one way or another. An American fond of Europe, Sturges looked at New World wealth with European guilessless and consternation but also hope.

Christmas is slight but pleasurably rowdy. Not as good as, say, the more novelistic Sullivan’s Travels, it is nevertheless engaging. Powell’s acting is ready for tragicomedy and successful. The daughter of an Irish-born barber, Ellen Drew is likable as Jimmy’s wife but seems to have a bit of an accent which harms her voice appeal in lengthy speech.