Bedroom Window (1987)

The plot relies too much on bad police work and characters making stupid decisions, and the end is rushed and a mess, but Bedroom Window, a thriller I loved as a kid and managed to dig up and rewatch last night, gleefully, is a fun, effective thriller and homage to Hitchcock, featuring not just a falsely accused The Wrong Man, but a Rear (bedroom) Window that affords a view of a crime, a Witness For The Prosecution courtroom fiasco, and hijinx at a The Man Who Knew Too Much gala event, and the movie also features terrific performances from Steve Guttenberg, perfectly cast as the boyish, truly short-sighted Terry Lambert who lies and tells police he witnessed a crime, Isabelle Huppert as the glamorous, self-interested other woman who actually witnessed the crime but didn't want to come forward, and Elizabeth McGovern as an assault victim and shrewd amateur undercover investigator.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Greta (2019)

At one point, Isabelle Huppert as the title character, an older piano-playing French woman much too keen on developing a mother-daughter relationship with Chloë Grace Moretz's student waitress Frances, does some balletic boxing footwork to Chopin that will make you laugh because it is like the actress knows you know the actress knows how silly everything is in this Neil Jordan thriller, and it is silly but nonetheless the thriller manages to overcome this excessive silliness (and several glaring plotholes and a far too low-affect heroine) by once - no, perhaps two or three times - veering away from what viewers are expecting of this sort of throwaway Single White Female psycho-thriller and delivering instead some shocks and surprises and - yes, I'll say it - moments, fleeting moments, of good old-fashioned Hitchcockian thriller fun (namely some Psycho-inspired flourishes).

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Happy End (2017)

With his trademark extreme wide shots and long muted scenes, Michael Haneke again turns his audience into sociopathic voyeurs as he coldly picks apart a French bourgeois family in the same way a bird of prey might annihilate the carcass of a sparrow, but the dread and anxiety you experience while watching this film probably stems more from your expectations from watching Haneke's other films than from anything going on in this less involving of the director's works.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Things To Come (L'Avenir) (2016)

Anyone who saw Isabelle Huppert in Elle is likely to want to rush to see her in this and she is magnificent again as a fiftysomething philosophy teacher who, following the death of her mother, separation from her husband and a cancelled publishing deal, discovers herself completely unencumbered for the first time in years: the film opens with fervent student demonstrations and Huppert's grace in defeat, acceptance of loss and hopefulness is contrasted with the unrest of the students and others, like former pupil Fabien, a revolutionary-in-the-making after Che Guevara, and his friends who are young and passionate fighters for change.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS