The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949). This was the last film made by the great German director Max Ophüls during a brief dalliance with Hollywood, and it exhibits both his mastery of the form and the knack for scratching away at tremulous morality that probably sealed the failure of Stateside tenure. Based on the Elisabeth Sanxay Holding novel The Blank Wall (which later became source material for the Tilda Swinton vehicle The Deep End), the film relates the story of an everyday woman who attempts to cover up a murder that she suspects was perpetrated by her daughter against a lover who’d fallen out of favor. Her machinations eventually bring her into the sphere of a gangster who initially tries to blackmail her but then begins to have more complicated feelings about the situation. James Mason plays the gangster with a tone of menaces that’s leavened by a genteel curiosity that perfectly sets up the transformations the character will go through. Ophüls brings an incredible sense of mood and foreboding to the whole film, and he moves his camera with stunning loveliness. There’s also a nice small performance by Geraldine Brooks as the daughter, using her overtures towards sexual independence as an especially concerted expression of burgeoning maturity.

One Day (Lone Scherfig, 2011). As leaden and unappealing as Lone Scherfig’s prior film, An Education, was nimble and warmly wise, One Day is about a couple in Britain whose relationship to one another is traced by checking in on the same date over the course of several years. Adapting his own novel for the screen, David Nicholls never surpasses the glib gimmickry of his conceit, especially as the two central characters barely acknowledge the recurring momentousness of this particular square of the calendar. More problematically, the core relationship is never convincing, largely because the character played by Jim Sturgess spend much of the film as the sort of insufferable narcissist that almost everyone would give up on, especially if she’s a shrewd, cynical, literary-minded beauty such as the character played by Anne Hathaway. To his credit, Sturgess does believably carry his character across the years, showing the gradual impact of growing older in a way that Hathaway can’t quite manage. Scherfig tries for a light, breezy touch, which just serves to underscore the many problems in the story.

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). It’s not too difficult to figure out how this one got into the household rotation, is it? As it turns out, we were doing Ridley Scott’s dreadful return to the rough concepts of Alien by watching the original film. The sci-fi/horror classic is rife with admirable qualities that Scott has been systematically eliminating from his repertoire ever since: intense patience, a commitment to preserving the integrity of the plot, the careful layering of character and an unassuming confidence that the audience will connect with it all with little added prompting. Even with the shock almost completely eroded away by the years (although H.R. Giger’s freaky design work is still head-spinning), the movie remains riveting for most of its running time, largely because Scott and credited screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (by most accounts, David Giler and Walter Hill took passes at the script as well) smartly focuses on building character-based verisimilitude into the fantastical happenings. No matter what else is happening, the largely doomed passengers on the spacecraft Nostromo definitely come across as a group that has been working together for a long time and are, frankly, a little sick of one another. That alone makes the tension of their situation terrifyingly real.

Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967). If Le Samouraï sometimes threatens to reduce down into little more than an exercise in cool, it’s hard to ignore how effectively it fulfills that limited mandate. Alain Delon plays a skilled hitman whose unassailable record of covering his tracks gets its first blemish when he kills a nightclub owner. He’s spotted by several individuals and spends much of the film trying to extricate himself from trouble with both the police and his employers who are planning to eliminate the risk of being identified through him. Jean-Pierre Melville directs with stark fascination, rooting into all the seedy nooks of his plots, and Delon glides through the film with a tight, fierce majesty.

Salesman (Albert and David Maysles, 1968). An absolutely brilliant piece of direct cinema from the Maysles brothers (working with Charlotte Zwerin), which follows a group of door-to-door Bible salesman as they work in their main territory around Boston and then take a trip to Florida to peddle their wares there. It’s absolutely exhausting to watch them work the various customers, coaxing people without a whole lot of income to invest in religious books so ornate that they require a payment plan. As usual the Maysles are astute, quiet observers, letting the situations unfold without trying to impose overarching themes or narratives. They wind up finding a through line of a story anyway, as the building frustration of one particular salesman gives the film a satisfying beginning, middle and end. Even without that, their capability to make something engrossing out of commonplace working toil is astounding.