Audrey Tautou is enticingly sweet, and quite magnetic, in France’s He Loves Me . . . He Loves Me Not (2002).  She enacts a psychologically damaged woman who loves, and wants to run away with, a happily married cardiologist.  He’s played by Samuel Le Bihan, who is excellent, getting right the doctor’s manly professionalism and intermittent anger.

Directed by Laetita Colombani, the film plays like a Claude Chabrol opus until it strangely comes to a halt and rewinds in order to tell its story a second time.  It intends to let us know whether the cardiologist bears any culpability with respect to Tautou.  And it’s all fascinating.  The film verifies that an individual assertion about “my truth” is, in this case, no truth at all.

In her direction, Colombani is very sensitive to what her characters are going through, and, along with Tautou and Le Bihan, Sophie Guillemin (as Tautou’s friend, Heloise) gives an especially persuasive performance.

(In French with English subtitles)

The only thing I know about the Parker Brothers board game “Clue” is that a 1985 Hollywood movie is based on it.

Not without wit, not without slapstick, Jonathan Lynn‘s Clue is a comedic—nay, a farcical—mystery flick.  The final, true reveal at the end is not as captivating as what comes before it, and isn’t meant to be.  A zippy ride to the conclusion, just to give pleasure, is all Lynn and co-screenwriter John Landis are after.

Most of the actors shine.  Tim Curry is all poise and charm.  Smartly Michael McKean plays a sometimes hysterical State Department man, while Lesley Ann Warren thrills as a cynical lawbreaker.  Madeline Khan is damnably under-used, but Eileen Brennan is electric.  Attractive too.  The younger Colleen Camp is extra-attractive:  what a body in this body of thespians!

Four teenage boys try to rape an off-duty prostitute and subsequently kick to death the inoffensive man who attempts to rescue her.  The sheriff of Kiowa, Colorado, Matt Wyatt, arrests the four brutes, only to encounter the violent fury of one of the boys’ fathers and the fearful bearing of false witness about the crime.  A partial High Noon situation emerges, along with Matt’s getting twice wounded.  But he receives needed help from the murdered man’s brothers.

Sometimes, when reading Westerns, you get the sense that the stakes are not all that high.  Not so with A Killing in Kiowa (1972) by Lewis B. Patten.  The stakes seem sky high from beginning to end.  It’s a vivid and vigorous tale Patten imparts, with time not always presented in a linear fashion.  Also, I’m glad it avoids the frequently used cattlemen-vs.-farmer conflict.

Kiowa County, 1898 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

French author Michel Houellebecq exhibits a certain distrust of liberalism in such novels as the recent Serotonin (2019) because he wants to be, and is, ruthlessly honest in his vision of life.  Comprehensive too:  Serotonin is darkly political in various ways, as when its protagonist, an agronomist, considers the E.U. “a fat slut” that hurts French farmers, and when he broaches the subject of factory farms with their cruelty to animals.

Is there any optimism in this political outlook?  No.  The novel as a whole, furthermore, is preoccupied with death, especially death by suicide.  Florent, the protagonist, almost causes a death by murder.  Interestingly, though, Houellebecq distrusts not only liberalism but also his own natural agnosticism.  At one point Florent opines that God is “mediocre,” but there are positive remarks about God as well, even on the book’s last page.

Loung Ung‘s nonfiction book, First They Killed My Father, became in 2017 Angelina Jolie‘s film of the same name.  Both are about the Khmer Rouge rebels in Cambodia in the 1970s, as witnessed by Loung as a young girl.

Loung and Jolie collaborated on the grave screenplay, which accurately presents the Khmers as hostile leftists who condemn “individualism” and “private property”—and who are murderous brutes.  Needless to say, they have gained control of Cambodia, and, subsequently, the invading Vietnamese add to the bloody, hair-raising content.

Alas, cinematic cliches crop up, as when a sudden gunshot drives a flock of shrieking birds out of the trees; but Jolie is capable of some fresh and commanding shots as well.  Examples are when Loung pushes a lone corpse away from a river bank and a scene of desperate children scampering through shallow water to escape the bullets of Khmer and Vietnamese soldiers.

A Netflix presentation, First They Killed My Father was filmed entirely in Cambodia.  There is familiar material here, but it is still a staggering picture important for its existential concerns.