The Game (1997)

David Fincher’s red-herring thriller “The Game” failed with most mainstream critics. I loved it. I just saw a different movie. “Game” is a deceitful movie about the deceit of movie-making, the Hollywood button-pushing that we know is fiction, but that we get sucked up into: Drama, action, comedy. The edits, camera angles, lights, sound effects: We know it’s fake, but we buy in bulk. We get involved. The plot: Michael Douglas is soul-dead San Fran multimillionaire Nicholas Van Orton who accepts a “gift” from his baby brother (Sean Penn), a vacation that comes to him at home and office, a personalized attack that crushes and removes every instinct Nic has built, bought, and forged, starting with a TV with its own mind and running past a crashed cab in deep water. The plot is preposterous, of course, but it’s on purposefully so, this beautiful nasty meta-film of a film stars a man who has bought into his own Hollywood thriller by choice, we the audience running with him. By choice. Douglas -– the symbol of amoral America during the 1980s –– is perfectly cast as a vastly unlikable man who we root for quickly. We are him. A

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

I fell off the Wes Anderson Wagon years back. I loathed “Moonrise Kingdom,” having OD’d on his hipster bullshit. Now comes “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and I’m back on board. Maybe because this WWII-ish (that is, everything here is fictional and with faux names) flick is pure caper, a 1940s-type adventure that plays like Tin-Tin for adults, but with a sharp political edge on violence and the act of needing a passport to travel our great world. But it never preaches. It’s a raunchy, clever comedy. Ralph Fiennes (seriously funny and edgy) is Gustave, the manager of the hotel of the title who obsesses every whim of his rich guests and happily screws old ladies. When one (Tilda Swinton in makeup) croaks, Gustave gets the blame. I won’t dish another word. Watch the story jump three hoops via flashbacks and rocket forward, with the required Bill Murray cameo, Willem Dafoe as a scar-faced killer, and a prison break better than the “Shawshank Redemption.” Anderson thankfully is no longer out to impress us with just how far out he can make a French movie reference, but is having pure, high fun. And it works. A-

Gosford Park (2001)

Robert Altman’s art-house hit “Gosford Park” has been high in interest for the past three years thanks to Brit series “Downton Abbey,” both written by Julian Fellowes and concerning early 20^th century England where wealthy, connected families made caste system upstairs/downstairs a way of home, and of thought. 

Here, an aging benefactor (Michael Gambon) hosts a shooting/dinner party, bringing in family, friends, and hangers-on from local lands and across the pond in America. After the feast, a hunt, and other stuff you or I don’t ever do, the old man ends up murdered, and suspicion abounds. 

Among the cast: Kristin Scott Thomas as the wife, Maggie Smith as an (imagine!) uppity bird, Ryan Philippe and Clive Owen as footmen, Bob Balaban as a filmmaker, and Helen Mirren as a head house-woman. 

“Park” is purposefully slow as we follow these people in their routines before the murder pops every one’s bubble. Watching the film now, it’s a cool gift to see characters and dialogue lifted for “Downton,” and Stephen Fry brings the comedy as a bumbling detective. But it’s often a check-your-watch sit. 

The cast is marvelous, working for a film master sorely missed. B+