Six Unusual Films

1. “The Zookeeper’s Wife” (2017, American) - A film that attempts to extract some humanity from events in Warsaw following the Nazi invasion of 1939. Beautifully photographed and suggestive, with a deft photographic style.
2. “Burn After Reading” (2008, American) - The Coen Brothers’ gift for brilliant satiric comedy in a film about two men who find a top secret CIA file and then attempt to sell it. Great actors throughout.
3. “One Day” (2011, American, British) - A wonderfully imaginative film about a young man and woman who spend a night together as friends after graduating from the University of Edinburgh. The film explores the way that day, July 15, marks the most important events in their subsequent lives. A charming, irresistible film.
4. “The Book of Henry” (2017, American) - A smoothly enticing film about two neighboring homes in the suburbs. One is inhabited by a mother raising a boy with talents amounting to genius. The other home is not so well endowed. The ensuring tension between two opposing parents rises to sensational levels. Naomi Watts is never less than great.
5. “Kill the Messenger” (2014, American) - A film dealing with the controversial aspect of depicting conspiracy theories as film fiction. The reporter as hero seems now an embedded part of American film culture.
6. “Far From Heaven” (2002, American) - A film about what was not discussed in the America of the 1950s.

Six Unusual Films (First Four Weeks Only)

1. “The Zookeeper’s Wife” (2017, American) - A film that attempts to extract some humanity from events in Warsaw following the Nazi invasion of 1939. Beautifully photographed and suggestive, with a deft photographic style.
2. “Burn After Reading” (2008, American) - The Coen Brothers’ gift for brilliant satiric comedy in a film about two men who find a top secret CIA file and then attempt to sell it. Great actors throughout.
3. “One Day” (2011, American, British) - A wonderfully imaginative film about a young man and woman who spend a night together as friends after graduating from the University of Edinburgh. The film explores the way that day, July 15, marks the most important events in their subsequent lives. A charming, irresistible film.
4. “The Book of Henry” (2017, American) - A smoothly enticing film about two neighboring homes in the suburbs. One is inhabited by a mother raising a boy with talents amounting to genius. The other home is not so well endowed. The ensuring tension between two opposing parents rises to sensational levels. Naomi Watts is never less than great.

Tuscany and Provence

The Reinvention of Cinema

1. “Shadows in the Sun” (2005, American) - A young man is sent on a publisher’s mission to a literary genius rusticated in Tuscany. The older man has daughters. The ensuing magic of place and soft air arouse the instructive emotions of friendship and love.
2. “Priceless” (2006, French, English subtitles) - The swank hotels from Biarritz to Nice provide a plucky French girl with opportunities to snare rich men. In one hotel, she meets an attractive young man. They spend the night together in a luxury suite. She then learns he is simply a bartender. The French are masters at turning this situation into a display of wit, charm and effusive delight.
3. “My House in Umbria” (2003, American) - A successful woman romance novelist runs a pensione for tourists. On a shopping trip to Florence, the train is bombed by terrorists and several wounded passengers convalesce at her villa. The intense complexity of people’s lives and secrets come out.
4. “Young and Beautiful” (2013, French, English subtitles) - This stylish, perfectly paced, smoothly beautiful film is utterly mesmerizing. A girl of 17 has a brief sexual fling with a German boy in the South of France. She experiences it as an observer. With supreme detachment, the director explores an adolescent girl’s navigation of adult sexuality as an enterprise.
5. “Jean de Florette” (1986, French, English subtitles) - The first of two films set in a village in Provence. A crafty and prosperous landowner plots with his nephew to acquire the land of a newcomer. Their greed is steeped in a secret neither suspects. A magnificent portrayal of self-serving cunning.
6. “Manon of the Spring” (1986, French, English subtitles) - The second part of “Jean de Florette” that pursues its latent ironies as they evolve into a tragedy of region, greed and human weakness. The scale rivals Shakespeare and Melville in its lush beauty and magnificence.