It is clear from his film, Dragged Across Concrete (2019), that writer-director S. Craig Zahler wants to bring urban realism back to cinema. A fictional city, Bulwark, is meant to be a typical significant American city with all its crime and tension. Bulwark might as well be today’s Minneapolis, and, in point of fact, a policeman played by Mel Gibson gets suspended from his job for doing something a bit similar to what Derek Chauvin did. He does it not to a black man but to a Mexican (there is no rioting), albeit black criminals are certainly here. White ones too.

All the while, the facts of life are conservative, not liberal. No one in the film is actually woke. The wife of Gibson’s Officer Ridgeman (Lauren Holden) fears she has become a racist. There is enough racist—and “racist”—language to make any liberal elite shed a pansy tear. And Jennifer Carpenter, as John Nolte describes, enacts “a professional woman desperate to be home with her baby, to be a full-time mother.”

Concrete is a fascinating movie, a disturbing caper tale. It is carefully shot with few closeups and contains cool, curious dialogue, even if Zahler’s writing seems slightly inauthentic in the film’s last fifteen minutes. Looking intimidating, Gibson is okay but in an easy part. Tory Kittles is in a harder one and succeeds memorably.

A Henry King film, The Snows of Kilimanjiro (1952) serves up biographical content about Ernest Hemingway, here in the guise of a writer named Harry Street, and it’s pretty strong on the subject of loss. To be specific, there is the loss of an unborn baby and later of the woman (Ava Gardner) who carries the baby. Gardner’s Cynthia Green is Harry’s true love (their scenes together are usually pleasurable).

By and by, however, the film becomes perturbingly bad—tedious, in fact. To me, as played by Gregory Peck, Harry is not very interesting (just like Ava Gardner’s acting) or appealing. Kilimanjiro is serious, to be sure, but so is the Henry King-Gregory Peck production The Gunfighter, and it’s a gem.

It is silly to show a young, surly, anti-Semitic Adolf Hitler, who is an aspiring painter, getting practically chummy with a Jewish art dealer called Max Rothman. This is what the 2002 film Max does, which is partly why it is pronouncedly un-brilliant—an intellectual lightweight. Partly, I say. The high school smarts of the film’s details and dialogue account for the rest of its unfortunate failure. For example, when Hitler tells Max he suffers “terrible doubts” about himself as an artist, Max replies, “Paint them. Paint your doubts.” Whatever.

The movie was written and directed by Menno Meyjes. John Cusack has poise and perfect timing as Max, and is winning. Noah Taylor (Hitler) knows how to portray a repulsive fool, but he belongs in a film we can regard as an intellectual asset (and an artistic success).

For once in a movie, a free-spirited girl is presented credibly and even as largely likable (and not just as a concept). This is 20-something Venus (Veroushka Knoge), a French-speaking Russian who pals around with French lass Fleur (Isabelle Pires), a rather shy and reserved person. Emmanuel Mouret‘s Venus et Fleur (2004) is a breezy, sexy romance in which the two friends search for a boyfriend and are none too fastidious. What also makes the film commendable is its subtle unpredictability.

For the most part, life is good in Venus et Fleur—the ending is slightly rueful, though—in the sphere of French Prosperity. Mouret has learned from Rohmer and Truffaut, his movie having a look both unadorned and beautiful. It lasts only an hour and 15 minutes. And I will say again that it’s sexy, casually so. Knoge is as cute as a button.

(In French with English subtitles)