Monsieur Verdoux
A comedy so bleak and droll that laughing is frequently besides the point. You could be forgiven for finding Monsieur Verdoux unbearably didactic and grating, but for <PERSON>'s own enormous skill at wringing pathos from farce, and the devastating precision with which he frequently hits his targets - which encompass no less than the world and everybody in it. <PERSON> is at once a reflection of <PERSON> himself (a notorious womanizer turned here literal-ladykiller), the <PERSON> (the physical tics and mannerisms perverted into a pantomime of murder), and modern society in its stately appetite for killings, frequently committed in the name of progress. The enormity of <PERSON>'s ambition, the skill and complexity of his metafictional explorations, and the delightfully mannered artifice of his mise en scène overshadow and ultimately dwarf the fact that perhaps the joke isn't, after all, very funny. 285