Tarkovsky’s film was produced by the Swedish Film Institute, it was photographed by Sven Nykvist, Bergman’s cinematographer, and it starred Erland Josephson, who has acted in many Bergman films.

There are moments when the resulting film, The Sacrifice, looks uncannily like a work by Bergman, and I think that is intentional: Tarkovsky, the visitor, an exile from Russia, was working with Bergman’s materials and subjects in much the same way that an itinerant Renaissance painter might briefly stop and submerge himself in the school of a master.

Yet Tarkovsky is a master, too. With Bergman, he is one of the five living filmmakers who have concerned themselves primarily with ultimate issues of human morality (the others are Akira Kurosawa, Satyaijit Ray, and Robert Bresson). He is the greatest Russian filmmaker since Sergei Eisenstein, and yet he stands outside the Soviet tradition of materialism and dares to say that he is spiritual, that he can “still be summoned by an inner voice.” These days, it takes more courage for an artist to admit his spiritual beliefs than to deny them.

When Tarkovsky made The Sacrifice, he knew that he was gravely ill. Now he lies dying in a Paris hospital with a brain tumor. He did not choose a small subject for his final statement. His film is about a man who learns, or dreams, that the bombers have gone on their way to unleash World War III. He offers his own life as a sacrifice, if only his family can be spared.

The movie is not easy to watch, and it is long to sit through. Yet a certain joy shines through the difficulty. Tarkovsky has obviously cut loose from any thought of entertaining the audience and has determined, in his last testament, to say exactly what he wants, in exactly the style he wants.

He uses a great many long shots—both long in duration, and with great distances between the camera and the subjects. Long shots inspire thoughtfulness from the audience. We are not so close that we are required to identify with a character. We stand back, and see everything, and have time to think about it. The movie doesn’t hurtle headlong toward its conclusion, taking our agreement for granted. There are spaces between events that are large enough for us to ask ourselves if we would do what the man in the movie is doing.

It is his birthday. He plants a tree, carefully, methodically.

There is a belief that it is impossible to plant a tree without thinking of your own lifespan, because in all certainty the tree will be there long after you have gone. As he plants the tree, his small son watches him and then toddles thoughtlessly about on the surface of the planet he does not yet know is a planet.

Some people came to the birthday party: the man’s wife, his daughters, some friends, and a mailman who apparently is the island’s mystic. In a sense he delivers the cosmic mail, bringing news of inner realities. During the party, the news comes that the war has broken out.

All of this is told slowly, in elegantly composed shots, with silences in between. When the characters speak, it is rarely to engage in small talk; the hero has a long monologue about the quality of our lives and the ways we are heedlessly throwing away the futures of our children. When the man begs to make his sacrifice, he does so not by ranting and raving to heaven, but by choosing one of his own maids—a humble working woman—as a sort of saintly person who might be able to intervene.

The Sacrifice is not the sort of movie most people will choose to see, but those with the imagination to risk it may find it rewarding. Everything depends on the ability to empathize with the man in the movie, and Tarkovsky refuses to reach out with narrative tricks to involve us. Some movies work their magic in the minds of the audience; this one stays resolutely on the screen, going about its urgent business and leaving us free to participate only if we want to.

That is the meaning of a sacrifice, isn’t it—that it is offered willingly?

The leading German-controlled production company, Continental, often censored scenes it objected to, but its mission was to foster the illusion of life as usual during the occupation; it would help French morale, according to this theory, if French audiences could see new French films, and such stars as Michel Simon and Danielle Darrieux continued to work.

Tavernier considers the period through the lives of two participants, the assistant director Jean Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin) and the writer Jean Aurenche (Denis Podalydès). The film opens with a flurry of activity at the hotel where Aurenche is expecting a visit from an actress; the proprietor sends champagne to the room, although it is cold and the actress would rather have tea. Aurenche is a compulsive womanizer who does what he can in a passive-aggressive way to avoid working for the Germans while not actually landing in jail. Devaivre works enthusiastically for Continental as a cover for his activities in the French Resistance.

Other figures, some well known to lovers of French cinema, wander through: We see Simon so angry at the visit of a Nazi “snoop” that he cannot remember his lines, and Charles Spaak (who wrote The Grand Illusion in 1937) thrown into a jail cell, but then, when his screenwriting skills are needed, negotiating for better food, wine, and cigarettes in order to keep working while behind bars.

Like Francois Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980), the movie questions the purpose of artistic activity during wartime. But Truffaut’s film was more melodramatic, confined to a single theater company and its strategies and deceptions, while Tavernier is more concerned with the entire period of history.

The facts of the time seem constantly available just beneath the veneer of fiction, and sometimes burst through, as in a remarkable aside about Jacques Dubuis, Devaivre’s brother-in-law; after he was arrested as a Resistance member, the film tells us, Devaivre’s wife never saw her brother again—except once, decades later, as an extra in a French film of the period. We see the moment in a film clip, as the long-dead man collects tickets at a theater. There was debate within the film community about collaborating with the Nazis, and some, like Devaivre, risked contempt for their cooperative attitude because they could not reveal their secret work for the Resistance. Tavernier shows him involved in a remarkable adventure, one of those wartime stories so unlikely they can only be true. Sent home from the set with a bad cold, he stops by the office and happens upon the key to the office of a German intelligence official who works in the same building. He steals some papers, and soon, to his amazement, finds himself flying to England on a clandestine flight to give the papers and his explanation to British officials. They fly him back; a train schedule will not get him to Paris in time, and so he rides his bicycle all the way, still coughing and sneezing, to get back to work. Everyone thinks he has spent the weekend in bed.

You would imagine a film like this would be greeted with rapture in France, but no. The leading French film magazine, Cahiers du Cinema, has long scorned the filmmakers of this older generation as makers of mere “quality,” and interprets Tavernier’s work as an attack on the New Wave generation that replaced them. This is astonishingly wrongheaded, since Tavernier (who worked as a publicist for such New Wavers as Godard and Chabrol) is interested in his characters not in terms of the cinema they produced but because of the conditions they survived, and the decisions they made.

Writing in the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann observes: “Those who now think that these film people should have stopped work in order to impede the German state must also consider whether doctors and plumbers and teachers should also have stopped work for the same reason.” Well, some would say yes. But that could lead to death, a choice it is easier to urge upon others than to make ourselves.

What Tavernier does here is celebrate filmmakers who did the best they could under the circumstances. Tavernier knew many of these characters; Aurenche and Pierre Bost, a famous screenwriting team, wrote his first film, The Clockmaker of St. Paul, and Aurenche worked on several others. In the film’s closing moments, we hear Tavernier’s own voice in narration, saying that at the end of his life, Aurenche told him he would not have done anything differently.

The character, Jack Flowers, is out of a book by Paul Theroux, who took a nonfiction look at this same territory in The Great Railway Bazaar, one of the best modern books of travel. The film is by Peter Bogdanovich, and what a revelation it is, coming after three expensive flops.

Bogdanovich, who began so surely in The Last Picture Show, seemed to lose feeling and tone as his projects became more bloated. But here everything is right again, even his decision to organize the narrative into an hour of atmosphere and then an hour of payoff.

Everything. Not many films are this good at taking an exotic location like Singapore and a life with the peculiarities of Jack Flowers’s, and treating them with such casual familiarity that we really feel Jack lives there—knows it inside out. The movie’s complex without being complicated. Its story line is a narrative as straight as Casablanca’s (with which it has some kinship), but its details teem with life.

We meet the scheming Chinese traders Jack sometimes works for; the forlorn and drunken British exiles who inhabit “clubs” of small hopes and old jokes; the whores who do not have hearts of gold or minds at all; the odd Ceylonese girl who is Jack’s match in cynicism, but not his better.

And we meet William Leigh, another remarkable fictional creation. Leigh is a British citizen out from Hong Kong on business, who looks up Jack Flowers because Jack can arrange things. To Jack’s well-concealed surprise, William Leigh doesn’t want a prostitute. He wants some talk, a drink, some advice about a hotel room. Jack never really gets to know Leigh, but a bond forms between them because Leigh is decent, is that rare thing, a good man.

Denholm Elliott, usually seen here in third-rate British horror films, has the role, and triumphs in it. It is a subtle triumph; the movie doesn’t give Leigh noble speeches or indeed much of anything revealing to say, but Elliott exudes a kind of cheery British self-pride, mixed with fears of death, that communicates as clearly as a bell.

Jack Flowers, meanwhile, runs into trouble. Singapore hoodlums are jealous of the success of his brothel, so they kidnap him and tattoo insulting names on his arms (altogether a more diabolical and satisfactory form of gangland revenge than the concrete overcoat). Jack has the tattoos redecorated into flowers, as William Leigh gets drunk with him. Then, his Singapore business opportunities at an end, he signs up with an American CIA type (Bogdanovich) to run an army brothel near a rest and recreation center.

One of the joys of this movie is seeing how cleanly and surely Bogdanovich employs the two levels of his plot. One level is Jack’s story, and it leads up to an attempted blackmailing scene that’s beautifully sustained. The other level is the level of William Leigh, whose life is so different from Jack’s, and yet whose soul makes sense to him. The levels come together in a conclusion that is inevitable, quietly noble, wonderfully satisfactory.

All of this works so well because Bogdanovich, assisted by superb script and art direction, shows us Jack Flowers’s world so confidently—and because Ben Gazzara makes Jack so special. It’s not just a surprise that Gazzara could find the notes and tones to make Saint Jack live. He has been a good actor for a long time. What’s surprising, given the difficulties of this character, is that anyone could.

Out of those workshops a cast gradually emerged, and it was clear almost from the start that the star was an eleven-year-old street child named Shafiq Syed, whose history was unknown, but who proved to be such a natural filmmaker that he sometimes reminded the directors of errors in continuity. Using Syed and shooting on actual locations in Bombay, director Mira Nair has been able to make a film that has the everyday, unforced reality of documentary, and yet the emotional power of great drama. Salaam Bombay! is one of the best films of 1988.

Shafiq Syed plays its hero, a boy named Chaipau who works for a traveling circus. One day he is sent on an errand—to get some cigarettes from a neighboring village—and when ...