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.

Film critics are offended by the “fascism” and the politics of Uwe Boll‘s Citizen Vigilante (2026), but it doesn’t matter. Nobody is reading these reviews, few though there are, and scores of people are renting the film from Amazon Prime and Apple TV; and it’s resonating with them. Yes, the film is irresponsible—and agitprop—but it makes the point that the authorities in Western society are also irresponsible. They cruelly represent progressive indifference to rampant immigration, incompetence about immigrant crime (and crime in general), and wimpy permissiveness.

Banned in Germany, where Boll was born, the English-language CV is pulpy, gory, grim, and even sexy. Armie Hammer‘s performance probably cannot be improved on. Margarita Mladinic is never false as a prostitute and has a clearly comely body.

Presenting small town life in mid-20th century Italy, Federico Fellini‘s Amarcord (1974) is tasteless, scatological and, to me, unfunny. Practically the only good thing about it is that the woman who plays the tobacco seller has an absolutely gorgeous nude bosom. Never mind the use to which it is put.

(Italian with English subtitles)

Touchy, forgetful, and psychopathic, Howard has already murdered one woman and is perhaps destined to murder another—nice Helen Gardner, the protagonist of the thriller Beware, My Lovely (1952). Helen hires Howard as a day laborer, but Howard seeks to be comforted and then oppressive, forbidding Helen to leave her house. Helen makes every imaginable move that a woman in her circumstances would make—this alone is absorbing—and Ida Lupino enacts her splendidly. She can sustain fright and is never hammy. Robert Ryan is as charming as Lupino, but a perfect Howard and so never false as a mentally disturbed culprit. Harry Howard, often a movie production designer, directed satisfactorily.