A wonderful vacation prevented me from doing a roundup of the Michael Powell retrospective at Lincoln Center, so please forgive the following self-indulgent remarks:

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is, quite simply, one of the best movies ever made; I left Lincoln Center that afternoon feeling unspeakably sad, because I'd seen it alone and missed the chance to introduce it to someone I cared about. (Fortunately, I have the DVD now, and I'd be glad to watch it with anyone who asks.) Black Narcissus strikes me as the weakest of the Archers' great movies: it has some problems in the narrative department, and it's missing the density of ideas and English values that I love in their other films, but it's clearly a major work of art. One of Our Aircraft is Missing and The Small Back Room are the films that bookend the Archers' string of six masterpieces, and they're merely wonderful, especially The Small Back Room, which finds two great directors riffing on expressionism, romance, suspense, and wartime atmosphere in a way that makes Hitchcock seem lame. The Phantom Light, The Spy in Black and The Edge of the World are fine, atmospheric early curiosities. The Battle of the River Plate is simply a bad movie, horribly inert and tedious at times, but occasionally redeemed by bits of Uruguayan color. Ill Met By Moonlight, the Archers' last movie together, is a skillful novelette, and its simple suspense story and beautiful black-and-white cinematography sometimes make it feel like a looser, lighter Wages of Fear. And The Thief of Bagdad is still The Thief of Bagdad.

However, the real discovery, and the second-best movie I've seen all year (after A Canterbury Tale) is Contraband. I feel vaguely silly about raving about a quickie thriller made in 1940 that barely registers a hundred votes on imdb.com, but I can't help myself: this is one of the most entertaining movies I've ever seen, a weird, terrifically ingenious comedy-thriller about a Danish sea captain hunting for two missing passengers during a London blackout. Best of all, the sea captain is played by Conrad Veidt, who played the Nazi major in Casablanca—and it's a measure of Contraband's goofiness that it isn't until halfway through the movie that you realize he isn't the villain, but the romantic lead. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Contraband is funnier and more exciting than any of Hitchcock's British pictures, and one of the best movies of the '40s, in its own lightweight, slapdash way. It's apparently on DVD somewhere, and I'm drooling over the prospect of finding a copy of my own.