Ever since The Promise in 1996, the prospect of a new film from Belgian siblings Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne has been cause for rejoicing. The Silence of Lorna, their latest portrait, which premiered in Cannes, has failed to elicit the rapturous response received by some of the earlier work, such as the 2005 Palme d'Or winner The Child. Yet despite an exposition that some found lengthy, the Dardennes bring great resonance to this fable of a young Albanian immigrant caught in a terrible dilemma who struggles to redeem herself. As in The Promise, the film focuses on the illegal maneuvers of “aliens” hoping to share in the material affluence of the European Union – in this instance by obtaining citizenship through false means. This time the brothers have placed their camera in the more gentrified city of Liège, rather than their grimy industrial hometown of Seraing. Lorna has become a Belgian citizen through her sham marriage to junkie Claudy (Dardenne regular Jérémie Renier). A local mobster who engineered the union is planning to kill Claudy with a staged overdose so Lorna can remarry a Russian Mafioso, who himself will then gain Belgian citizenship. But when the now clean Claudy threatens to start using drugs again, the two have passionate sex and form a sudden bond.

Throughout history, two factors have formed people's taste in any art, their valuing of it, that is: knowledge of that art and knowledge of life. Obviously this is still true, but the function of taste seems to be altering. As formalist aesthetic canons have come to seem less and less tenable, standards in art and life have become more and more congruent, and as a result the function of taste is increasingly the selection and appraisal of the works that are most valuable to the individual's very existence. So our means for evaluating films naturally become more and more involved with our means for evaluating experience; aesthetic standards don't become identical with standards in life but they are certainly related – and, one hopes, somewhat braver.

Of course the whole process means that human beings feed on themselves, on their own lives variously rearranged by art, as a source of values. But despite other prevalent beliefs about the past connected with theology and religion, we are coming to see that people have always been the source of their own values. In the century in which this responsibility, this liberation, became increasingly apparent – the twentieth – the intellect of man simultaneously provided a new art form, the film, to make the most of it.

That art form is obviously still with us, and now, in the twenty-first century, more than ever, it seems.

We live in a secular, narcissistic, even hedonistic age. Is there anyone out there who still doubts this? If you do, have a look at a film made by Ingmar Bergman over forty years ago – Winter Light (1962) – and you'll see what I mean. This is not to say that something like Winter Light couldn't be made now. We're dealing here with the rule and not the exception, the middle, not the extremities. Obviously, none of this is intended to denigrate Bergman's film as a mediocrity, or a priori to privilege contemporary films over it. Still, “men are as the time is,” as Edmund declares in King Lear, and no artist in any medium – particularly one so popular, or immediate, as the cinema – can claim exemption.

Winter Light takes place on what used to be a day of rest and devotion – the Sabbath, in this case one wintry Sunday in a rural clergyman's life, between matins and vespers. The middle entry in Bergman's “faith” trilogy, Winter Light suffers far less from the defect of the other two parts, Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and The Silence (1963): such an excess of symbolism that each picture breaks down into a series of discernible metaphors for spiritual alienation rather than an aggregation of those metaphors into an organic, affecting work. Though, apart from its literary-like piling up of symbols, Through a Glass Darkly relied on almost none of the arty legerdemain that marred The Magician (1958) and The Seventh Seal (1957), Winter Light is even starker and more circumscribed.

Remember the name Bahman Ghobadi, whose “children's film” Turtles Can Fly (2004) I have finally had the opportunity to see. As I watched this picture, I thought of two of its cinematic relatives, each of which shall frame my discussion of Turtles Can Fly. The first is Roberto Rossellini's neorealist film Germany, Year Zero (1947), in which a twelve-year-old boy, trying to feed his family amidst the destitution of occupied Berlin, poisons his sickly father (played by the only professional in the cast, Franz Kruger) to lessen the burden. Unable to live with the deed, however, he throws himself from the ruins of a tall building – but not before poignantly finding a moment to play (yes, play, not pray) before killing himself.

The second work I recalled, as I screened Turtles Can Fly, is the “new” neorealist West Beirut (1998), a film by Ziad Doueiri about two Muslim boys and a Christian girl (all played by young people who had never before acted) growing up in the war-torn Lebanon of 1975. Here they manage to tease, quarrel, idle, snack, and bicycle like their youthful counterparts everywhere, at the same time as they take risks – amidst bombed-out buildings, rubble-strewn streets, military checkpoints, and frequent sniper fire – that even the most intrepid of schoolchildren would have trouble imagining.

The worldly life of Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963) was, like that of many another artist, very worldly. This is especially true of film artists, for no one can live in a movie environment as in a Buddhist monastery. And no film director is likely to get the chance to achieve such “purity” as Ozu's (more on this term later) unless he can deal with the rather less pure circumstances that surround the making of all films.

Ozu entered films as an assistant in 1923, when he was twenty years old, assigned to a director of light comedy. He had been born in Tokyo but moved away with his mother while quite young. His father had remained in Tokyo to manage the family business, so Ozu grew up virtually fatherless – an interesting fact in light of the centrality of father figures in his later films. Sent to a boarding school, he did badly and was expelled. When he was in a prefectural (or public) middle school, he was dispatched to the city of Kobo to apply to a good high school. Instead Ozu went to a movie. He soon saw other films, by Thomas Ince and Rex Ingram, and later he said that, if he had not seen them, he might never have chosen the film profession.

But he did choose it, and, with the help of a friend of his father's, he got his first job. Ozu remained an assistant for four years.

Now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, Some Like It Hot (1959) is still significant in four ways in American film history. It is the best film by the last European director to flourish in the United States. (Hollywood has seen two principal “waves” of European directors. The first group, including such men as Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau, were imported in the 1920s by an American industry that was jealous of European artistic advances and worried about commercial competition. The second group consisted of the political refugees of the 1930s.) It is the best film of the last great sex star created by Hollywood. It is the last of the carefree American comedies that sprang up when sound came in, bloomed through the thirties, and had a revival after World War II. And it is the last really good film farce produced in the United States to date. There have been new imitations of old farces, there have been new farces, but all are inferior to Some Like It Hot, in part because, unlike Billy Wilder's picture and all other great farces, cinematic or theatrical, they lack conviction in the moving body – running, sliding, hurtling, wheeling, bicycling, jumping, climbing, and falling – as a source of wonders.

The plot concerns Joe (played by Tony Curtis), a saxophone player, and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), a bass fiddler, both young and broke, who accidentally witness the Saint Valentine's Day massacre of one gang by another in Chicago in 1929.

The subject of this chronicle is not the current war in Iraq, or direct filmic treatments of that war, even though these have already begun to be made: witness James Longley's documentary Iraq in Fragments (2005), Philip Haas's fiction feature The Situation (2006), Nick Broomfield's docudrama Battle for Haditha (2007), and Kathryn Bigelow's thriller The Hurt Locker (2009). Nor is my subject metaphorical movie treatments of a “present” conflict, like the Iraq or Afghan one, through the lens of a past war (be it World War II, Vietnam, or Korea). No, my subject here is two films, produced in the twenty-first century, that are directly about World War II: Clint Eastwood's unique “double feature,” Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), both of them about the same World War II battle, the first picture made from the American point of view, the second from the Japanese perspective. (The only remotely comparable work I know is The Human Condition [1961], Masaki Kobayashi's trilogy of films about one Japanese man's continuing, and harrowing, experiences during the Second World War.)

Eastwood's pictures deserve comment precisely because, though they are World War II films made during a subsequent, unpopular war, together they are not meant (as were How I Won the War [1967] and Catch-22 [1970] vis-à-vis Vietnam) to be the metaphorical lens through which we are meant to view the Iraqi conflict (except in the most generalized sense, that war is hell).

The kernel of what would eventually become the film of Forbidden Games (1952) was a somber and disquieting screenplay that its author, François Boyer, found impossible to sell. He expediently repackaged the contents as a novel, published in 1947 under the title The Secret Game and virtually ignored in France, but which enjoyed a major, if freakish, commercial success in America. Unexpectedly, it now looked like a hot property, so René Clément and the screenwriting partners Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost took Boyer's film script-cum-novel and turned it back into a screenplay. But that wasn't the end of the movie's tortuous prehistory. Forbidden Games was originally planned as a humble short subject – the middle section of a three-part omnibus or anthology film to be called Cross My Heart and Hope to Die. This larger project got shelved after financing fell through, and the existing footage composed no more than a vignette. Impressed by its lyricism and grace, however, the producer Robert Dorfmann urged Clément to expand the material to feature length.

Like many great films, then, Forbidden Games sprang serendipitously from a chain of accidents, failures, and stopgaps, none of which are remotely evident onscreen. Clément's direction is so scrupulously measured, and the theme so archetypal, that every shot achieves a kind of fatedness.

The archetypal creature of the city is the movie gangster, whom Robert Warshow described over sixty years ago as a tragic hero. “Thrown into the crowd without background or advantages, with only … ambiguous skills,” Warshow wrote, “the gangster is required to make his own way, to make his life and impose it on others.” Frustrated by the facelessness of the individual in the big city, he sees crime as the rational way to establish his identity. Yet there is a tragic flaw in this ambition to rise above the crowd, for the successful racketeer increasingly becomes the target of both the police and his fellow criminals. The greater his success, the more precipitous his fall; in the end, “there is only one possibility – failure.” The final meaning of the city for the gangster, according to Warshow, thus can only be “anonymity and death.”

But Warshow understood that, like Greek tragedies, gangster films were not realistic works of art – they were mythological ones. And this means that, from an artistic point of view, the city, like the ancient Greek stage, is a metaphorical space and not a real one, even when gangster films are shot on location in actual cities like New York. So, for Warshow, the gangster inhabits the

The Coppolas, Francis Ford and his daughter, Sophia, both have the same artistic problem: neither is a thinker. The father has always been short on thought; indeed, he stumbles when he thinks, when he thinks he's thinking. The Godfather (1972, 1974, 1990) was strongest in its execution – also its executions – not in its adolescent implications of analogy between the Mafia and corporate capitalism (an analogy that ignores, among other things, the origins of the Mafia and its blood bonds of loyalty, which have nothing to do with capitalism). The Conversation (1974) faltered in its Orwellian ideological structure. And in Apocalypse Now (1979), the attempts to dramatize private moral agony and general moral abyss during the Vietnam War were disjointed, assumptive, weak, for all of Vittorio Storaro's aptly hallucinogenic color cinematography.

Even Coppola's scripts for others have suffered from woolly thinking: his screenplay for Jack Clayton's The Great Gatsby (1974), for example, turned Fitzgerald's supple suggestiveness into mindless blatancy; and his scenario for Franklin Schaffner's Patton (1970) presented the glaringly contradictory nature of this famous general as praiseworthy, even fathomless, complexity. That's the top of the heap. From there, we head down to Coppola's blotchy script for René Clément's Is Paris Burning? (1966), a rambling, pseudo-documentary recreation of the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation.