Been a while but I've had no idea how to group the films I've been watching together. I'll just get these out of the way before I see Caramel and then I'll have another batch to do, but the champions league final may take precedence - we'll see.

Found a very early Hitchcock (his first sound feature) called, simply, Murder! It starts off looking like it's going to be a precurser to 12 Angry Men, but before the midpoint the plot switches to general sleuthing as a juror who has passed the death penalty on a woman becomes incresingly convinced of her innocence. Said juror is Herbert Marshall, an actor I enjoy and he was fine here. Decent film but nothing really to get too enthusiastic about.

I finally saw a short film I've wanted to see for over a decade as it inspired (both broadly and very specifically, respectively) The Terminator and 12 Monkeys. La Jetée is a "photo roman" (or photographical novel) by Chris Marker and it lives up to the billing of inspiring such popular films. The story is that after world war three everyone in Paris, like the rest of the world, goes underground. Our hero is imprisoned in a camp and forced to have experiments done on him by doctors who want to send him back as well as further ahead in time to give them a chance at rebuilding their future.

Being continual shots from still photographs, the imagery is the strength of the film, it's very powerful and haunting. The sound design is out of this world though and the editing first rate. It deals with very interesting themes (he is chosen for his memory of an image of a woman at the end of a pier, exploiting that to send him back) in extremely moving ways. It's inventive, artistic, a technical marvel and unmissable if you're a fan especially of 12 Monkeys.

Got another Ingmar Bergman film (because I changed rental companies and their search engine was so appalling it was just simple to add Bergman and French movies rather than see what they really had), this one was Waiting Women. Basic story is vignettes of marital problems told by the wives of three brothers as they wait for their men to come home. Each of the sections has good performances at their heart, Eva Dahlbeck's segment was the funniest, but Maj-Britt Nilsson's the most successful probably solely because it had more time than the other two put together. Very well acted, episodic film which doesn't really say much as a whole but the yarns are interesting enough individually.

Last one I'll talk about here is Red Beard - I started watching Kurosawa Akira films around the same time as Ingmar Bergman ones but while I enjoyed them and think some are among the finest I've ever seen, he never gripped me the way Bergman did with the *need* to see everything I could of his (I've seen about three times as many Bergman films as I have Kurosawa films). This was probably the biggest title of Kurosawa's I hadn't seen and I found a lot to like. It is very long and also, not unlike Waiting Women, very episodic. What this means is that some of it is more successful than others and doesn't mesh into quite the whole as a smooth narrative can. That said, it's very well made with some decent acting and some fine cinematic moments created. Unlike Bergman films where he gets "a performance" out of his lead actors, Kurosawa is the star of the film. The technique is the reason to watch and it does come together, but after a little wandering along the way.