20 DISCOVERIES
or 'premieres', or 'first watches', or whatever you call films that you saw for the first time this year. Here are the 20 that had the biggest effect on me.
2. All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023) – If you lost a parent young, this is about as emotional an experience as film can give you. If you didn’t, I wonder how you even make sense of it. Regret and pain and absence and longing and Scott’s inky eyes endlessly shining with tears. It's exactly as brutal and as gentle as it needs to be, excavating how our relationships with those we've lost can be easier than with those still living, but what you’re forever missing in return. It's funny in places; profoundly gay; wryly modern; but principally it's a ghost story about grief. It's certainly the most overwhelmed and unanchored I've ever felt in a cinema. It didn't feel much like watching a film at all, really.
4. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) – Finding a shorthand for this film is difficult. Saying it’s “about a father-daughter relationship” offers no clue as to its poetic instincts; calling it “a film about memory, mental illness and loss” carries the latent (and erroneous) threat that it is wanky, or unstintingly hard work. Instead, it is an intensely moving movie that in its rawness, naturalism and emotional honesty – smuggled in via fond joshing and moments of musical and visual inspiration – hits every audience it finds, about as hard as possible. It has some of Morvern Callar’s strobing and sun-bleached stylistics, some of Half Nelson’s grinning sadness. But its greatness is all Wells’s own, the dialogue, performance and camera all doing different things that together form a perfect truth. She fixes our eyes on a Polaroid as it reveals itself, on a TV recycling the recent past, on a man’s back as he comes apart at the seams. She wields the song score like a weapon, distorting it to meet her demands, the familiarity disfigured like our memories after trauma. As Mescal and Corio love and joke and hurt. I can’t get over that single fleeting shot of young Sophie’s face before she starts to dance: the filmmaker’s innate and crucial understanding that joy doesn’t undermine tragedy, it augments it.
6. The Intern (Nancy Meyers, 2015) – While clad in the garb of Meyers’ unquestioning capitalist conformity: a humanist masterwork. De Niro’s modest, earnest performance is pitch-perfect.
8. Black Sheep (Allan Dwan, 1935) – A wonderful B movie from Sol Wurtzel’s unit at Fox, which deals – as ever – with jewel thieves on an ocean liner. But what lifts it way out of the ordinary is the central relationship between embittered, alcoholic gambler Edmund Lowe, and the bored, failing actress who joins him in intrigue (Claire Trevor). Their characters are real, their badinage (except for one slightly weak recurring affectation) zingy, and their chemistry off the charts. There’s a small moment where Trevor stops just short of embracing Lowe (“… that’s all I wanted to know,” she says instead) that must be among the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on screen. Around them, there’s Lowe’s father-son relationship with a wayward rich boy, some rather tiresome drunk comedy, and Eugene Pallette releasing a clockwork mouse onto a dance floor, but we’re here for the heart-mending central couple. Just lovely.
10. Freeway (Matthew Bright, 1996) sets itself up as nihilistic and sneeringly classist but stick with it: that’s all part of the game. It’s an adolescent, smugly dark and secretly soft minor masterpiece: Little Red Riding Hood as exploitation flick, with Witherspoon’s incredible performance as a white-trash teenager trolling a serial killer (Kiefer Sutherland). Like DiCaprio, she was most interesting before she became acclaimed, and as the perma-swearing, borderline-illiterate, hotheaded anti-heroine, she’s this movie’s heart and soul. Sutherland, too, was never half as good as he is here, and now and then a riotous Danny Elfman score gets involved, as disorientating as the rest of it. Bright's aim is to shock and surprise and confound, with whiplash turns of both story and tone, and his aim is true.
12. Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann, 1949) – My new favourite genre: French Revolution noir, a world of Wellesian angles and huge looming heads. The paranoiac plot, about Robespierre’s missing hitlist, can barely withstand a moment’s scrutiny, and I was having far too much fun to care. It’s riotous pulp mayhem, with incredible photography from the inimitable John Alton, a fabulously seedy performance from Arnold Moss as the duplicitous Fouché, and every noir trope vividly reimagined for the setting. A horse-and-cart chase? Why not indeed. The scene in which Moss and Robert Cummings claw disfiguringly at one another’s faces gives Cloak and Dagger a run for its money in the Genuinely Disquieting Fight Scene stakes. This 35mm screening was a real highlight of the BFI's fabulous 'Film on Film' festival.
14. Absolution (Anthony Page, 1978) – Richard Burton, Billy Connolly and the lad from Kes, together at last. Thanks to Indicator for excavating another sleeper from the bin of history, in this case a film that has been underrated, vilified, overlooked and then, worst of all, forgotten. Written by Anthony Shaffer, who subsequently disowned the movie after having his work rewritten, it’s essentially Sleuth filtered through Hitchcock’s I Confess, with an ageing Burton as a priest and schoolteacher who becomes engaged in a twisted battle with pretty protégé, Dominic Guard. It’s beautifully acted by the leads, atmospherically directed, and perpetually surprising. The only shortcomings are Connolly’s glib, surface-level performance as a drifter, and one twist too many.
16. High Tension (Allan Dwan, 1936) – A fast-paced B movie, with Brian Donlevy as a wisecracking deep-sea diver continually letting down his short-tempered, hilarious, pulp-fiction-writer girlfriend, Glenda Farrell – and as much fun as that sounds. Former silent film pioneer Dwan is slumming here, making a movie for Sol Wurtzel’s B-unit at Fox, but his comic timing is spot on, and that one meticulously-plotted establishing shot in Honolulu is a beaut. This one’s just highly entertaining throughout, with spectacular leads and a good balance between comedy, story and off-kilter romance; as Farrell’s love rival, Helen Wood has almost as good chemistry with Donlevy as Glenda does. Only complaint: the wrap-up is too abrupt. Norman Foster, who plays the second lead, soon became a B-movie director at Fox, and later collaborated with Orson Welles on the ‘My Friend Bonito’ chapter of the unfinished It’s All True, Journey Into Fear and, as an actor, The Other Side of the Wind.
18. The Gay Deception (William Wyler, 1935) – Frances Dee is a sweepstakes winner masquerading as an heiress in a New York hotel, where European prince (Francis Lederer) has gone incognito as a bellboy. It’s a charming romantic confection, stylishly handled by Wyler, and filled with familiar faces. Paul Hurst is particularly funny as Lederer’s irascible line manager, who introduces another patronising maxim every day. Lederer’s accent makes him unintelligible at times, but visually he’s just right as both intrusive admirer and dignified royal, and Dee’s eccentric performance refuses to make even a passing acquaintance of sentimentality. (Also: she's allowed to have big sticky-out ears, a novelty in this period.) The film isn’t consistently hilarious or unfalteringly affecting, but it's still a little gem.
20. The Road to Glory (Howard Hawks, 1936) – “Anything to get out of this grave.” A near-classic Hawks picture, devised by Fox to recycle footage they owned from the French war movie, Wooden Crosses. Somehow that lead to something halfway extraordinary, written by Nunnally Johnson, Joel Sayre and William Faulkner (!), shot by Gregg Toland, and featuring one of the best performances you’ll ever see, Fredric March underplaying unforgettably as a womanising lieutenant with magic in his fingers. He joins a memorable love triangle, fighting battle-hardened captain Warner Baxter for the affections of nurse June Lang. The film is ironic, cynical and witty, with Lang the most surprisingly effective of Hawksian women – she soon became a bright, blonde second lead, before her reputation suffered from marrying a literal gangster – but is sadly somewhat derailed halfway through by a lousy subplot featuring Lionel Barrymore as Baxter’s father, a character supposedly torn from life, but not remotely believable.
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SEVEN OLD FAVOURITES
2. Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) – One of Old Hollywood’s true miracles. So sweet and cynical and clever and true and modern and timeless and of-its-time. Andrews as a slick shitheel, Cooper at peak bashful, Stanwyck at peak everything. Then there's Wilder’s dialogue, Hawks peppering his background with old professors, and Toland, fresh from The Little Foxes, throwing in those two wild and moody deep-focus close-ups. The ‘Richard ill’ scene robs me of my breath.
4. Libeled Lady (Jack Conway, 1936) – The great unheralded screwball comedy, and the ultimate comfort movie, with scintillating dialogue, that incomparable Loy-Powell chemistry, and Jean Harlow showing that in just seven years she had transformed herself from a plank of wood with large breasts into the best comedian in Hollywood.
6. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) – The plan-view photography during the sword vs whatever's-on-the-wall fight. The way every character has untold and epic depths. Michelle Yeoh's cheekbones. CINEMA!
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SIX STINKERS
2. No Orchids for Miss Blandish (St. John Legh Clowes, 1948) – A notoriously and mesmerisingly terrible New York-set noir, shot in England, and populated predominantly by homegrown actors doing dreadful American accents in front of woefully unconvincing backdrops. Sid James is the wise, archetypically American barman, which goes about as well as you’d expect. It is marginally more nasty, violent and sexually provocative than was generally permitted by the Hollywood censor (though the outcry in the UK was largely fuelled by latent fears of cultural colonisation), but such licence can only take you so far when the story is this tedious, the characters are so colourless and similar, and no-one can act. The source novel was a blatant rip off of William Faulkner's (dire) 'Sanctuary', and Jack La Rue effectively reprises his analogous role from the Pre-Code adaptation of that book, The Story of Temple Drake (1933). Times had changed, though, and the part here was transformed, with the sanction of the BBFC, from that of a sadistic sex criminal to a doomed romantic.
4. Hot Pursuit (Anne Fletcher, 2015) – A pissweak action-comedy featuring perhaps the single most irritating performance in cinema history, as Sofia Vergara yells virtually every line with the exact same grating intonation. The film’s principal jokes are that (a) she is vain and (b) Reese Witherspoon is small, though there’s also much spirited punching down, none of it funny (the opening scene has two jokes, one about transvestites and the other taking the side of a controlling father). This is basically The Heat if it was no good – comedically or morally – with even Witherspoon unable to make it work, though it is marginally more watchable than, say, This Means War. The movie's brief diversion into romance is a bit less shit than the rest of it. I like it when Reese sings ‘(I Never Promised You) A Rose Garden’. It lasts about 15 seconds and is easily the best bit of the film.
6. Traveller’s Joy (Ralph Thomas, 1950) – An often painfully unfunny farce inspired by postwar currency restrictions (yes really), with Googie and McCallum as a divorced couple who get stranded, broke, in Stockholm, a city that’s vividly brought to life, if indeed Stockholm is a drab, poorly-filmed hotel room. The film was based on a hit West End play but the material was dated by the time the movie was released. That’s the problem with signing a deal to hold your film until the source play has folded; it tends to fold because no-one cares anymore. The movie proved an incongruous closing chapter to the story of the near-legendary, borderline-notorious studio, Gainsborough Pictures, best-known for its flushed, sadistic mid-‘40s melodramas. In 1949, it merged with Rank. The man behind the camera is Rank (in both senses of the word) director Ralph Thomas, exhibiting his usual absence of style... and subtlety... and timing… though he does, in one fascinating moment, wring a proto-Sid-James bit of leering from Maurice Denham, who in reference to a potential sexual encounter genuinely utters the phrase, “Oi oi”. Thomas later directed the vaguely underrated Doctor series, while his brother Gerald was responsible for the Carry On films. Responsible in the sense that he should have been tried in the Hague. The film’s most interesting elements are Yolande Donlan’s part as a deceptively smart blonde – she’s very appealing, but also entirely ripping off Judy Holliday’s Billie Dawn, a part she had played in the West End – and the ration-induced gluttony of the script, a charge that Evelyn Waugh later levelled at his own Brideshead. There are, at most, three jokes that halfway land. I only watched Traveller’s Joy because I like Googie Withers but she’s largely bland here, and so is the film. Dora Bryan plays a Swedish maid (?).
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SIX RE-APPRAISALS
... being, naturally, movies I revisited, and changed my mind about.
THREE UP
I actually saw this first one on New Year's Eve 2022, but this is my blog and I can do what I want.
2. The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016), which I liked on release, but thought outstayed its welcome. Not this time. It's Shane Black’s phenomenally entertaining buddy movie, with hired thug Russell Crowe and PI Ryan Gosling teaming up to search for a missing porn star in smog-filled late-‘70s LA. Occasionally too meta, with an overlong action climax and a plot that I still don’t understand, but honestly, who gives a shit? About as much fun as the movies have given us in the past decade. Now please make The Nicer Guys (2025) and The Nicest Guys (2028).
3. The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) seemed thin and dated when I saw it as a teenager, but it was on pan-and-scan ex-rental VHS, and perhaps I was in the wrong mood too. It is, of course, your lean-and-mean sci-fi actioner, with its perfect premise, inspired use of Arnie, and Biehn’s frenzied B-movie intensity: so integral to the film, and so often overlooked. Cameron, then a veteran of just one film – Piranha II: The Spawning, from which he was fired – knits together the action in his instinctive and inimitable style. The rough edges, like Arnie’s rubber head, only add to the fun, though once the star finally exits to be replaced by a relatively scrawny metal skeleton, the film is conspicuously less scary, despite the shimmering imagination of that climactic crawl: its relentless grasping and panting evasion. The panicked synths, ominous drums and atonal honks of Brad Fiedel’s score are the coup de grâce.
THREE DOWN
2. Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939) – A folksy Fordian fantasy, with the Master printing the legend about the Great Emancipator’s formative years. Ford, and writer Lamar Trotti, are essentially revisiting – and reworking – their 1934 film, Judge Priest: both are movies about a lawyer, haunted by grief, who masks his wisdom and skill with eccentricity and stand-up comedy. Priest even faced down a lynch mob, as Abe does here, though the scene was cut from the earlier film for being too contentious, before being reinstated in Ford’s 1953 remake, The Sun Shines Bright. If I’m honest, Young Mr Lincoln didn’t strike me the same way at 38 as it did when I last saw it aged 21. In the interim, I’ve always thought of it rosily as one of Ford’s unassailable classics, but it isn’t quite that. The soundtrack is too busy, too noisy and ultimately too much (while Ford usually used music brilliantly, his producer Darryl F. Zanuck tended to over-score, leading to a notable battle over My Darling Clementine) and Trotti simply isn’t as good a writer as Frank Nugent. If in doubt he tends to lean towards corn, and the climax to his courtroom drama here simply isn’t convincing – or even plausible. But the film is inferior to the following year’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois, based on Robert Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, not because the latter is more faithful to the facts – thought it’s certainly that – but because Ford’s film is flawed in conception and construction, centring on one semi-interesting court case, and too often taking its focus off Abe. The times when it does work, in fact, are when it focuses tightly on its mythologised central figure, generally analogous in this director’s work to an American Jesus, and on the image and nascent iconography of this jacklegged, tufty-haired, big-hatted future president. Henry Fonda, wearing three hours’ worth of make-up including a false nose that makes him look like Gary Neville, hadn’t quite become Henry Fonda, but he makes a fair stab of inhabiting an Abe who was already in some integral way Lincoln. The film's three great moments all belong to him and Ford: a brilliant segue to winter (unfortunately accompanied by a cacophonous, doom-laden score) that finds Fonda, like so many of the director’s heroes, chatting quietly at a graveside; Abe’s silence as he stares at the river in the company of flutey socialite Mary Todd; and the final passage, in which he walks off alone, into a thunderstorm that represents the future.
3. Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007) – You win some, you lose some: just a couple of minutes ago, Raimi was buzzing; now he's crying. More's the point, I spent more than a decade claiming this was a better film than the original. I'm lucky someone didn't punch me in the face. The first thing to say is: "Three villains, Avi? Three? That’s insane." Fuck me, this is such a mess. A shallow, unnecessary, bloated, almost unremittingly sour sequel that trashes the first two films, systematically sullying their every perfect moment. If that makes it sound potentially intriguing – a darker, more mature work, perhaps: something akin to Return to Oz, which inverted the iconography of the beloved 1939 musical – then rest assured: it’s not. Because it’s also stupid. The film finds Peter ruined by fame: now an insufferably smug Spidey whose worst traits are about to be amplified by an alien symbiote. Meanwhile, an escaped murderer (Thomas Haden Church), a vengeful paparazzo ((chris)Topher Grace) and a resentful old friend (James Franco) brood and plot, encouraged by their new superpowers. Church’s Sandman is a handy example of exactly what has gone wrong here. While Dafoe and Molina’s villains could have been taken from old horror films – perhaps Karloff vehicles at Columbia – this storyline about a doting father trying to get the money for his daughter’s operation might have been lifted from a cloying Wallace Beery film made in the early days of the talkies. The Sandman is an impressive visual creation but we neither care about Church’s plight nor enjoy his villainy: his dialogue is the most functional and tedious imaginable, and there’s no fun in his malevolence. There’s the odd sequence in Spider-Man 3 that is really special: most notably a restaurant scene between a desperate Mary-Jane and an oblivious, supercilious Peter that plays like a Before Midnight outtake, if bafflingly spliced with 'Allo 'Allo-ish comedy from Bruce Campbell. And there are a few that are really fun: Raimi having a laugh as Peter struts down the street ogling appalled women; the JK Simmons bits; every action sequence until the final one. But they’re in the service of a film that is cloyingly sentimental, crashingly pointless and apparently endless, the action climax anticipating the MCU both in its self-satisfied, bromantic asides and the fact that it goes on for fucking ever. Directors are not necessarily the last word on their own work, but when Sam Raimi said in 2014 that this film was "awful", he was not wrong. Most damagingly, it threatens to cloud our memories of those earlier films. I’m going to just start pretending it doesn’t exist. “Spider-Man 3? Yeah, it was a shame that never got made.”
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OBSESSIONS
2. Ty Power – As an offshoot from the above project, I have spent several pleasant evenings gazing at Tyrone Power's pretty face, sometimes in colour.
3. Kung fu films on the Eureka label – You keep releasing them, I'll keep buying them. Often this proves to be wise (Royal Warriors) and at other times I feel like I've been robbed (Burning Paradise). But on those evenings when the switch marked 'brain' needs to be flicked to 'off', they're frequently a godsend.
4. Noir – That world of shadows, shady dames, and wry PIs who are the wittiest guys in the room, but with no concept of the frame closing around them. Throw in bluff cops, returning soldiers, corporate slimeballs, drunken floozies and homoerotic heavies, and you have the makings of a good evening in. Criterion Channel's 'Holiday Noir' season has been a treat (including an offering from the cheapo Monogram studio in which a man ends up being sentenced to death after throwing his shoes at a cat), while Indicator are doing the Lord's work with their Columbia Noir and Universal Noir sets.
5. Movies about politics – Completing this year's genre triumvirate: give me a set-piece gently stylising the to-and-fro of a congressional hearing, or an ob-doc about political corruption in a senatorial race, and you can burn down my house in the next 100 minutes and I won't notice.
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Thanks for reading.
