The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009). The premise is great. Four guys go to Las Vegas for a bachelor party. The next morning they wake up from a blackout drunk with the groom-to-be missing, and they have to reconstruct their crazy night from increasingly absurd clues. It’s like Memento reimagined as a ribald comedy. The execution is another matter. The screenwriting team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (who saw this turn into a box office sensation just a few weeks after their handiwork resulted in a dreadful-looking bomb) just pile on incident after incident, getting laughs from jolting the audience instead of creating anything actually, you know, funny. The main male characters are either hastily sketched cliches, or, in the case of the groom, so immaterial that a dense mist has more presence. That’s still a better fate than that afforded the female characters, who are either mean, whorish, doltish, or, delightfully, some combination of the three.

The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962). Though Jonathan Demme presided over an admirable remake a few years ago, The Manchurian Candidate is one of those films that belongs completely, marvelously to its era. All the looming menace of the Cold War hangs over the film like the long shadows cast by prison bars. Though it’s based on a novel first published in 1959, the film has all sorts of subtle echoes of the recently elected President Kennedy, particularly the crazy right-wing notion that he was some sort of Vatican plant, poised to topple the republic when given the proper single. What plays like a comically paranoid thriller to most can seem like a horrifying cautionary tale to the sad, addled few. Frankenheimer provides the film with taut direction and artful staging, particularly the scenes that merge fabricated memories with the brainwashing exercises that drive the plot.

The Children’s Hour (William Wyler, 1961). Taken from Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play, the film revolves around two women running a boarding school for young girls. When one of their more defiant, problematic charges fabricates a rumor about the pair engaged in a lesbian love affair, the prudish, bigoted mores of the time (which are, sadly, not that different from the prudish, bigoted mores of this time) cause everything they’ve worked for to crumble away. Given the copyright dates of the film and its source material, a certain dearth of enlightenment is to be expected in the subtext, but the basic point of the work is noble and it’s delivered with commendable restraint. Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine deliver fine work in the leading roles. As the paramour of Hepburn’s character, James Garner is less distinguished, playing most scenes with the same tone of agitated exasperation.

The Soloist (Joe Wright, 2009). A Los Angeles newspaper columnist meets and befriends a homeless man whose mental illness derailed a once-promising pursuit of a career as a classical musician. Based on a true story, the film has its heart in the right place, and everyone involved clearly endeavors to treat the story with special care, lest it devolve into cynical heart-tugging. All that restraint leaves it shockingly flat and colorless. The characters never come to life, feeling instead like randomly scattered ideas scooped up and shoved haphazardly into shells. As the journalist, Robert Downey, Jr. is particularly ill-served with little more than a recurring motif of comic encounters with urine to give his role personality. Susannah Grant’s screenplay tries to get into the greater issues of homelessness in Los Angeles, including the hypocritical actions of the power structure that embraces humanitarian efforts for public relations gain and authorizes aggressive crackdowns when the TV cameras have left the scene. These issues are given only glancing treatment, however, and the overwhelming sense is that Joe Wright has simply been stumped by all the material before him, unable to figure out how to pull it together into a cohesive vision.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Bunuel, 1972). Watching Bunuel’s wicked, surreal assault on the upper class made me feel like I needed to do some outside reading to keep up. A group of elite swells keep trying to sit down for dinner, only to have their repast canceled by some interruption or another, from innocent confusion over timing to the sudden flare-up a military skirmish. Interspersed throughout are dream sequences that reveal the fears of certain characters. Bunuel takes dead aim at the hypocrisy and judgmental nature of these people, showing how their zealotry over stature controls all. It’s an odd, devilish beast, and there were a few moments where I was admittedly left wondering if the revered director and his consensus classic might not actually be swathed in quite the ornate garb that everyone else along the parade route seems to see. Still, it’s a complex, questing work. It may not fully warm my heart, but I can readily see it as a piece of cinematic art capable of launching a thousand film classes.