Waiting for Godot
Michael Lindsay-Hogg 2000 Ireland (1st time; DVD)
Two tramps question their existence while waiting by a road for Godot, who never shows.
Beckett's play has been interpreted as a religious allegory, though his preoccupations with form merit discussion of Godot as the narrative convention the two characters wait for. In the meantime, its hollow ponderings, quite ingenious in the play, are horribly transferred to film: badly shot, and the sound is terrible.

Not I
Neil Jordan 2000 Ireland (1st time; DVD)
A mouth spits out a monologue about nothing in particular.
One of the few adaptations in the "Beckett on Film" series that feels specifically suited to film, and not simply a filmed play, this is shot entirely in close-ups of Julianne Moore's mouth, delivering Beckett's original monologue with mounting despair. It's brilliant stuff; fourteen minutes of speech, to the point where the words don't look like they're coming from the mouth anymore, but have become abstract, almost detached from one another. Only the opening shot, which contextualises what we're about to see, detracts.

Ohio Impromptu
Charles Sturridge 2000 UK (1st time; DVD)
A man reads from a book to a listener, who happens to be the same person.
Cinematic in-joke: Jeremy Irons plays the dead ringers here, one of whom talks the whole time, the other simply knocking on the table. If it tries for a tragic tone, it doesn't quite succeed, though there are pleasures to be found in the camera trickery--though most of the time, admittedly, there's no need for it, with match-cutting detaching us from what could have been a far more intimate adaptation.

Rough for Theatre I
Kieron J. Walsh 2000 Ireland (1st time; DVD)
A and B, two tramps who may or may not be the last people on earth, struggle to get on.
The problem with this anthology is most evident here; the directors simply aren't good enough, and although this short has one of the more authentic settings of the Beckett adaptations, the actors are far too animated, far too humane, far too recognisable, to evoke the playwright's abstraction.

36 Quai des Orfèvres / 36
Olivier Marchal 2004 France (1st time; big screen)
Two rival cops try to nab a gang of thieves before the other, in order to get the top job in the service. Both are bent, but one is dirtier than the other.
So entrenched in seediness is this thriller, so determined to establish a world of rotten cops, that the ridiculous narrative arc, the mounting body count, and the convenient twists of injustice can't help but entertain. Depardieu and Auteuil, France's two best-known actors, go head-to-head in a battle reminiscent of Mann's Heat (1995), and the gusto with which both performances are captured drives this film along satisfactorily to its predictable climax. A dark, loud film void of the emotion it strives for, which ultimately turns out to be as black-and-white as it doesn't want to be.