However many improbabilities arise in Jack Reacher (2012), it’s a vigorous, reasonably intelligent, engaging crime thriller starring Tom Cruise.  It works because I assume its source material, a Lee Child novel titled One Shot, is well-crafted.  (Am I wrong?)  Jack Reacher (Cruise) is a drifting ex-military cop who wishes to mete out justice to a sniper he knows, only to find out he needs to pursue a different offender, the true sniper.  Cruise and Rosamund Pike, playing a defense attorney, make a good team; both have energy and project smarts.  Christopher McQuarrie has directed and scripted the film with savvy, and nowhere is either the violence or the profanity excessive.

Jack Reacher is almost as good a crime drama as The LineUp and Bullitt.  Check it out.

Cover of Red Eye

Both truthful and nonsensical, the Wes Craven thriller Red Eye (2005) is solid entertainment.  Rachel McAdams is more than suitable as Lisa, a hotel manager needed by Jackson Rippner, acted by a nuanced Cillian Murphy, for a cruel assignment:  assistance in murdering the deputy secretary of Homeland Security.  If Lisa refuses the enlistment, Rippner will see to it that her father (Brian Cox) is killed.  Not much personal vision comes through, but this is a fundamentally conservative movie, one which any liberal can enjoy.  This despite the opinion in The Village Voice that, owing to the depiction of rude airline customers, “Red Eye could even be called anti-American.”  Well, that’s one view.

Lisa becomes heroic but is not a superwoman, not a feminist heroine.  She needs help from her dad.  The deputy secretary is hardly a dunce or a bully.  An assassination attempt by terrorists is quite silly, but at any rate it shows how murderous the fanatics are.  I repeat: truthful.  Fundamentally conservative, but actually more entertaining than conservative.

Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful (2002) is loosely based on a good 1969 Claude Chabrol film, La Femme Infidele.  There are many things wrong with it, but for the most part Lyne’s directing is not one of them.  He and film editor Anne V. Coates understand pacing and suspense, while actress Diane Lane understands worry and guilt.

The movie’s two screenwriters convince me, without moralizing, that adultery and existential bleakness go together.  According to Mark Steyn in The Spectator, the film communicates that “sex is not just a passing fancy, but profoundly disruptive, not life enhancing but life shattering, and what’s broken cannot be remade.  The fling cannot be unflung.” 

Unfaithful (2002 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Robert Bresson picture, Mouchette (1967), is an adaptation of a short novel by Georges Bernanos.  

The novel, a successful one, is about a preteen French girl living in harsh, awful surroundings.  Dirt poor Mouchette is disliked by her peers and has an insensitive, criminal father and a dying mother.  Worse, she is eventually raped by an epileptic poacher.  It is easy to suspect she is en route to becoming a wicked young adult, but after hearing from an old woman, a layer-out of the dead, that the dead used to be worshipped as gods and that the woman herself  “understands” the dead, Mouchette decides to drown herself.  She escapes a hopeless world by dispatching herself to a realm where the dead are not merely dead, to God’s realm.

It is no surprise that the Catholic-born Bresson would be drawn to filming another Bernanos novel after directing Diary of a Country Priest many years earlier.  However, what he does with his customarily nonprofessional actors seriously harms Mouchette.  He insists on their being dry and undemonstrative, which of course means they’re histrionically sleepwalking.  It doesn’t work.  The film doesn’t work—it’s unconvincing—although certain shots and details are meaningful, even spiritually so.  That is, they have a “religious” power, such as the shot of the pond, and the simultaneous Magnificat music (by Monteverdi), where Mouchette’s suicide occurs.  We feel sure the Deity’s grace has reached this unsaved, terribly oppressed child.  Bresson’s movie could have been a winner, but a few things for which we can be grateful do characterize it.

(In French with English subtitles.)

Mouchette stands at the gate of the rides of the fair, looking at the people in the rides. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 1965 short film, Black Girl, is the only feature I’ve seen by the late Ousmane Sembene, a Senegalese writer and director.

Mbissine Therese Diop, who plays Diouana, the black girl of the title, is not much of an actress and the voiceover narration is awfully repetitive, but BG‘s subject matter is formidable and the direction sophisticated without artiness.  Something else the film is without is the once fashionable Marxist beliefs Sembene held, for all it attacks is racial pride and condescension among postcolonial Europeans.

In Dakar, Senegal jobs are hard to get.  Eagerly, then, Diouana goes to work for a white couple that hires her to care for their three children.  Some time later the couple leave the Senegal the French had once colonized for the glorious Riveria, taking Diouana with them but also—a thousand pities—turning her into a virtual slave.  She cooks and cleans, nothing more, and is for a long time unpaid. 

Never is the white couple caricatured, which makes their free-floating racial pride, their racist state of mind, that much worse.  A basically harmless rebel in a state of despair is what Diouana becomes; she accomplishes nothing.  Her rebellious streak does her no more good than do the pretty dress and glamorous wig she wears for her time in France.

Despite some defects in Black Girl, and despite its being low-budget, it is nice to see an African work of art.  Sembene takes a situation with ordinary hopes and desires, with mundane necessities and activities, and turns it into something tragically grotesque.

Black Girl (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)