So after my disastrous end to my Russian campaign I decided to go for the most opposite film to Tarkovsky I could find so I found the US remake of My Sassy Girl (starring Jesse Bradford and Elisha Cuthbert), which got unceremoniously dumped to dvd without a theatrical release. Was it good? Not at all, but it was better than the Tarkovsky, which a/ was the plan and b/ couldn't have been hard 
. It's pretty much the same story as the South Korean original but without much of the charm. In its own right it's got a weird tone to begin with (thanks to director Yann Samuell, who was exactly the same in his other "anti-romance" film Jeux d'enfants) and is occasionally funny - it's not bad, but equally it's far from good and I wouldn't really recommend it unless you've seen the original and have a morbid curiosity as to how much they've butchered it.
In comparison to that, the next film I watched, Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville couldn't be more different. It's a ... how shall I describe it, it's a sci-fi noir. I'd read a review of this from the time (in the New York Times) prior to deciding whether to watch it (as I am no fan of the French New Wave at all) and it described the film as basically an interesting opening wasted, great visually but a hack-job script. That assessment is not too far off. The acting is okay, the visuals are interesting, but there are several incredibly annoying facets to the basic storytelling from the overbearing score to the grating voice of the computer. After about 45 minutes the hero gets taken in to the Orwellian centre and from then on in it does gets rather tedius, but it does have enough to retain interest overall. I saw it because it was originally shown with La Jetée before it, but it's only worth seeing if you really want to see more French New Wave, or you're really bored.
Coincidentally the next two films I saw were obviously based on real life people and incidents but one claims at the beginning to be fictional and the other claims to be factual. Both cause problems in their respective approaches but are equally very fine films, I'll take them in order. The Hungarian film, Colonel Redl, is one of those that was highly acclaimed on release (it won a BAFTA, was oscar nominated and was a prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival) but has disappeared into obscurity since.
The film on its own works very well as far as it goes, chronicling the rise of this soldier in the turn-of-the century Austria-Hungary alliance. It's an incredibly elegant, beautifully made, smooth film with a fantastic performance from Klaus Maria Brandauer that just gets better and better. In taking the real life story of this man and what he did and changing it all around though you cheapen it and make both the decision to do what he did as well as the impact of that decision diminished, confused and not as meaningful as the truth would have done. So a very well made film with a brilliant performance at its centre, but missed the boat in a rather distasteful way given what this man in reality did.
Another film that misses the boat slightly is Missing, which I knew nothing about prior to watching (aside from it being oscar nominated for the acting) so I was very pleased to see it being about US involvement in a South American military-ran country, as I was such a fan of Salvador. This is about the disappearance of an American writer (in what is obviously supposed to be Chile immediately after Allende was ousted) and follows his wife and father's attempts to discover what happened to him. It misses the boat by proclaiming everything to be "documented", but skirts around certain issues (we don't see exactly what happened to him nor precisely why). Now in the past I've criticised films like United 93 for pointlessly exploiting sensitive subject matter by not asking the question "why?", but in that case we already knew the "how/what/when"s whereas this is a film that asking those questions is enough because it is designed to inform or at least explore what we don't already know and attempt to tackle some of the "why?" in the process.
That said though it is a phenomenal piece of filmmaking, the film absolutely shifts along at a pace and is extremely involving. It works precisely because of the nature of the story, something like A Mighty Heart fails dramatically because all we see is a group of people sitting around waiting for the phone to ring and tell us the plot, whereas here we have active protagonists and their journeys and confrontations and setbacks are compelling. Jack Lemmon is outstanding and Sissy Spacek fine as the searching relatives, but it is the storytelling, the way we are drip fed information as they find it that ties us in with their characters' experience. It may duck the odd question or facet, but it needs to otherwise the film would have been vulnerable (the filmmakers were sued anyway), yet it still manages to get its point across and unequivocally let you know their version of "the truth", whilst still being an absolutely first rate film in its own right. Best of the bunch.