After her husband is gone, Alice (Ellen Burstyn) sells her stuff and the house, picks up her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter III) and embarks on fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming a singer just like Alice Faye.

Tommy: Life is short.

Alice: Yeah, well, so are you.

Drak [“dragon” or “devil”] returns to his village. No one understands why he came back, or where he has been. The villagers postulate smugglers and there's other drunk nefarious thoughts, but for sure they know that with the potter, the draught returned. In an unspoken ritual sung in old tongues, the grey women summon the rain. The forest, dry as tinder, has taken the cattle, all there is. Drak knows where the animals went and a deal is struck.

“Don't you recognise me?”

– Drak

Drak sa vracia speaks in mere whispers and smoky greys. The main characters – the #fire, smoke, pottery, and composer Ilja Zeljenka's often silent motif – weave their wordless presence throughout the ancient landscape; that same landscape that carved itself into the locals' being.

Quintessential Americana. Filmed in Canada.

“The sun looks ghostly when there's a mist on a river and everything's quiet. I never knowed it before.”

– Linda

After a horrible birthday alone followed by a lovely night out, Norah wakes up with a terrible hangover and a hunch of being a murderess.

“How about you slip into something more comfortable, like a few drinks and some Chinese food?”

– Harry

The Blue Gardenia is Lang's hard-bitten take on the gruesome Black Dahlia murder case and part of his newspaper noir trilogy together with While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, both from 1956.

“We were soldiers together. A long time ago. We were young, you know? Free from everything. We've been through a lot together, we were… friends.”

Considered one of the earliest positive cinematic depictions of (male) homosexuality, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael tells the story of lonely artist Zoret (director Benjamin Christensen), his bright young muse and model Michael (Walter Slezak), and the more mature art critic Switt (Robert Garrison). Though it's mostly suggested – there's a female temptress (Nora Gregor) assuming a heterosexual perspective – its motif of the spoken and unspoken relationship between the men is definitely one of love, much in the same way Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946) is.

“Now I may die content, for I have seen great love.”

– opening title card

Michael is the second book adaption of Herman Bang's Mikaël (1902) after Vingarne [The Wings] (Mauritz Stiller, 1916).

They've been planning this for months, Canon City's Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility's toughest inmates. It's going to happen on December 30, and all men are ready to go.

“Nice guys.”

Fascinating about Canon City is the usage of some of the actual locations, ánd people, involved in the 1947 #prison break.

 

Also striking, unfortunately, is the unevenness of the affair. John Alton's cinematography, while wonderful, wanders between noir and stuck camera shutter. And that voice-over… well, lets not mention that at all.