Review of 2017: Part 3 – Movies

I’ve cut back a bit on film-watching in recent years, aiming for a slightly more balanced and healthy existence, but movies are still a huge part of my life. Here’s my top 10 of 2017, plus a few personal recollections of the year, and 13 older films I ‘discovered’ in 2017, and which you might like too.

Parts 1 (books) and 2 (gigs, shows and exhibitions) of the year in review are up on those links.

My 10 favourite films of 2017



It's been a great year at the cinema: I rarely see a new film as good as this year's #3, let alone two even better, and there are so many up-and-coming directors doing interesting work. This list is based on films which received a general release in the UK this year, so it includes some films from last year's London Film Festival. To read about some of the best movies coming up next year, including Guillermo del Toro's masterwork, The Shape of Water, you can go here.

Bubbling under (but still marvellous): Christine, The Beguiled, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), Tower, Call Me By Your Name.

***

10. Paddington 2



Director: Paul King
Cast: Ben Whishaw (voice), Hugh Grant, Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Brendan Glesson
They did right by Paddington again. The prison sequences are all kinds of lovely. Full(ish) review.

***

9. Battle of the Sexes



Director: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Cast: Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman, Bill Pullman
A hugely uplifting, entertaining movie, with a typically dynamic central performance from Emma Stone, who inhabits the character of Billie Jean King almost entirely, as the tennis legend breaks away from the sexist tennis establishment, confronts the fact she's a lesbian, and gears up for the eponymous match, opposite self-styled 'male chauvinist pig', the shy and retiring Bobby Riggs. Full review.

***

8. The Salesman



Director:Asghar Farhadi
Cast:Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti, Babak Karimi, Farid Sajadhosseini, Mina Sadati
An utterly compelling moral thriller from the writer-director of A Separation, Asghar Farhadi, about a couple (Shahab Hosseini and Taranah Alidoosti) whose marriage is thrown into turmoil by the hand of fate, as they prepare to appear together in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It contains a late shock so well-executed that it made the person next to me in the cinema do a little fart. Now that's movie-making. Full review.

***

7. Tickling Giants



Director: Sara Taksler
A wonderful documentary about 'the Egyptian Jon Stewart', Bassem Youssef, a heart surgeon who becomes a TV satirist and national hero following the Arab Spring. As the political climate festers and the military intervene, his potshots at authority start to divide the revolutionaries, leading to protests, boycotts and threats, but he and his staff remain unyielding – at least at first. After one of the writers says she doesn’t care about the outcry, a colleague asks if she’d care to provide a more diplomatic answer. “Yes,” she replies. “I don’t give a shit.” I expected Tickling Giants to be insightful and powerful, but not such fantastic fun as it is, and if you’re worried that Egyptian humour won’t translate across language and cultural barriers, you couldn’t be more wrong. Full review.

***

6. Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi



Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Daisy Ridley, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Kelly Marie Tran The first sequel that feels like a film on its own terms. It's also a tremendous antidote to gung-ho macho heroics, plays deliriously and drolly with our expectation of good-bad guys, and features the coolest new series vehicles since Return of the Jedi's speeders. I wrote this piece just after emerging, dazed and happy, from the cinema.

***

5. I Am Not Your Negro



Director:Raoul Peck
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson (narrator)
A profoundly powerful polemic that forces you to view the African-American experience through the piercing gaze of writer, thinker and activist James Baldwin, who speaks with authority, insightfulness and a broiling anger about the way his people have been exploited, abandoned and killed by their own country. It's a superb film in itself, and it also turned me onto Baldwin's writing, which has been one of this year's greatest joys, and changed the way I look at myself and the world. Full review.

***

4. Fences



Director: Denzel Washington
Cast: Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Jovan Adepo, Russell Hornsby, Mykelti Williamson
An astonishing drama, based on August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which tells an archetypally American story in the manner of Eugene O'Neill or Arthur Miller, but does so to elucidate the African-American experience, which as 13th so eloquently expressed, is the result of decisions that have never been in their hands. It's both extraordinarily original and utterly timeless, with a polemical power that comes along rarely, and two of the finest performances in years. Full review.

***

3. La La Land



Director: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend, Rosemarie DeWitt, Finn Wittrock, Jessica Rothe
The problem with contemporary musicals is the undercurrent that says: “Isn’t this wacky, we’re doing a musical!” It was musicals’ everyday nature, their centrality to the national psyche that made them so magical. Somehow Chazelle has made that live again. Full review.

***

2. Certain Women



Director:Kelly Reichardt
Cast: Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, James LeGros, Jared Harris
A film of unwavering, unflinching honesty and quiet poetry – from Williams’ piercing, scarcely likeable performance to that shot of a rogue truck tumbling off the road – a gift from a filmmaker at the very peak of her powers. Full review.

***

1. Moonlight



Director: Barry Jenkins
Cast: Trevante Rhodes, Ashton Sanders, Alex Hibbert, André Holland, Jharrel Jerome, Jaden Piner, Naomie Harris, Janelle Monáe, Mahershala Ali
An enveloping, once-in-a-lifetime film about the constancy, malleability and complexity of human nature, the pain and ecstasy of love, and the world's vicious but not quite unrelenting assault on the weak. Full review.

***

Five obsessions that defined my year in movies



Orson Welles
My intense infatuation with Awesome Orson flares up every three or four years. This time it was a first big screen viewing of The Magnificent Ambersons that set it off, sending me on a fast-paced journey through established classics (Kane, Touch of Evil, The Trial) and oddities both remarkable (The Immortal Story) and not (Journey Into Fear, Too Much Johnson). Though Ambersons will never be seen again in its proper state – having been cut by a third against Welles’ wishes before release, with the culled footage dumped in the sea – it also cast its spell on me more thoroughly and enduringly than ever before. I’m still thinking about it now, three weeks later, and I haven’t been able to look at any other film in the same way since. It’s the greatest thing he ever did and, even in its butchered form, one of the key works of screen art, with a look, a feel and an atmosphere – playfulness giving way to an exhausted, defeated malaise – that is like nothing else in cinema.



The big screen
More than half the films I saw this year were at the cinema, thanks to both the BFI’s magnificent programming and a newly rekindled love of the big screen experience. There’s still nothing quite like it, and it’s got me off my arse and out of the house and then back on my arse to catch films I love, that I have on DVD, but that I’ve never quite seen before. After experiencing countless movies ruined by dodgy prints or the Odeon’s laissez-faire attitude to keeping a projector in focus, I’d begun to see digital as a simple solution, especially after the great 4K job done on films like The Third Man. One of my favourite film writers, Ian Mantgani, took me to task a while ago for such naïvete, and he was right. Seeing Minnelli’s The Cobweb on film – the widescreen image tactile, its brash colour scheme turned a touch gaudy – or Ambersons with grain and flicker and the odd scratch, the soundtrack a little screechy now and then, but as it was shot and should be seen, is the ideal filmgoing experience, and one which perfectly polished pixels are never going to be quite able to match. Having said that, if the print is a hissy, fuzzy mess, don't take the piss by putting it on.



Titanic films
As I mentioned in passing in my books review, my friend Jess and I are watching all the films we can find about the Titanic. Our grand experiment is in its infancy, but we have managed Titanic (good), Titanic (great), A Night to Remember (excellent) and Raise the Titanic (absolute shit), and we’ve secured further titles for 2018 already. Next up: S.O.S. Titanic.



Lillian Gish
There haven't been quite the opportunities to further my Gish fandom that previous years have offered, but I've done my best. I tracked down three more of her films: The Greatest Question (a derivative but persuasive star vehicle), The Cobweb (a big, bold Minnelli soap with Gish in an unusually large supporting role), and The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (more a historical curio than A Good Film), and saw a watchable version of her 1928 classic, The Wind, for the first time. Anyway, we're very much in love, even though she died in 1993.



François Truffaut
I finished my voyage through the lesser-known works of François Truffaut, drawing the inescapable conclusion that this is one of those rare times the popular canon has it right: some of them were crap. Here's the full list of his 22 features, with plenty of reviews to go with it.

It's also important to mention at this point that IN OCTOBER I MET DANNY DEVITO.

***

13 'discoveries' of 2017

Perhaps because many of them were on at the BFI, this year's discoveries are perhaps a little less obscure than in previous years (a notable dearth of 1930s B-movies, sorry), especially if you're interested in seeing the established 'classics' of world cinema, but hopefully there'll be a couple that are new to you.



Chloe in the Afternoon (Éric Rohmer, 1972) – The last – and greatest – of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, with businessman Frédéric (Bernard Verley) torn between his marriage to quiet, repressed academic Hélène (Françoise Verley) and the sensual, erratic Chloe (Zouzou), who returns to Paris six years after driving his best friend to the point of despair. Shot in 1.37:1, reinterpreting Murnau’s Sunrise for the sixth time, and equipped with an unreliable, self-justifying narrator who’s obsessed with women, it feels like the summation of the series, and also its cleanest, clearest and most narratively inventive example: full of profound insights and observations wrapped in a light, sexy, playful exterior that simply doesn’t prepare you for what’s coming. Full review.

Cria cuervos (Carlos Saura, 1975) – A miraculous film, quite unlike anything else I’ve seen, that plays out on the face of its young heroine (Ana Torrent from Spirit of the Beehive) and exists in that strange place between memory, reality and fantasy, as scenes bleed one into the next, and Torrent recalls her authoritarian, adulterous father, conjures the gentle spirit of her neurotic mother (Geraldine Chaplin) and cautiously negotiates a new, lonelier life in the bosom of her strict aunt’s family. Full review.



Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960) – Jacques Becker's final film is a tough, meticulously detailed and incredibly suspenseful prison break movie, as four men awaiting trial acquire an apparently callow, privileged new cellmate (Mark Michel), while preparing their painstaking, painfully slow escape from the Big House. Cast mostly with non-professional actors (as opposed to unprofessional actors, like Marilyn Monroe) and based on an autobiographical novel by José Giovanni, it works as both a gripping thriller and a socialist allegory about class, co-operation and bourgeois hypocrisy. Full review. I saw Bertrand Tavernier talk about Becker, his great hero, at the BFI in September.

The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) – A pulsating, gripping, brilliantly-directed docu-drama about the Algerian revolution, which works as a history lesson, a thriller and a study of a handful of memorable characters on both sides of the battle, all augmented by Ennio Morricone's exceptional score. Full review.



Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989) – For all its rough edges (or perhaps because of them), Soderbergh’s debut still looks astounding. Full review.

Claire's Knee (Éric Rohmer, 1970) – The Rohmerest Rohmer film ever (hot French people talking unreliably about love and sex amid beauteous locales), with great acting, stunning Nestor Almendros photography and some of the finest examples of Rohmer defining his characters, their dynamics and his audience's perceptions through understated and apparently effortless composition. Laura > Claire, tho.



Babette's Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987) – A film full of painterly imagery, complex truths and quiet wisdom that echoes long after the curtain has fallen, and the virtuosic storytelling − hopping between time-frames, mood and media − takes the breath away. Full review.

Prick Up Your Ears (Stephen Frears, 1987) – Near-perfect biopic of gay '60s playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman), focusing on his volatile relationship with live-in lover, Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina), powered by a superb Alan Bennett script, and Oldman's best performance. 'Synthesisers by Hans Zimmer'! Full review.



Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) – We meet Chihiro just minutes after an emotional farewell to her old friends: she’s sitting in the backseat of her parents’ car, as they trail a moving van to their new home. The family stop to investigate what seems to be an abandoned theme park, and soon the parents have been turned into pigs, Chihiro’s life has been saved by a boy who it turns out is a dragon and also a god, and she’s been forced to find employment in a fully-functioning bathhouse populated by ghosts, assisted by a multi-armed man who lives by a furnace with his friends – sentient bits of soot – and under the cosh of giant-headed Thatcher-a-like Yubaba, whose beloved germaphobe baby is bigger than she is. That’s the first 20 minutes. Full review.

Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969) – So much for the tolerant left.



Le deuxième souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969) – A violent, grimply poetic underworld epic from Jean-Pierre Melville, with Lino Ventura as a brutal train-robber – obsessed with his own personal conception of honour – who escapes from prison only to be drawn inexorably towards a heist plot. Relatively unknown within the Melville canon, it takes a little while to find its rhythm, but once it does it's stunning, with mesmerising set pieces and several superb supporting characters, including ironic, omniscient police inspector Paul Meurisse, and Denis Manuel as a short-tempered gypsy gunman.

All This, and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940) – An exceptionally classy melodrama, with Bette Davis giving one of her most extraordinary performances as a silhouette of a woman who enters the Duc de Praslin's tempestuous household in Paris of 1848 to act as the governess, falling in love with her master and becoming beloved of his children, before incurring the formidable wrath of his jealous, unstable wife. It's a beautifully balanced and restrained performance, with the star often saying one thing and playing three more, her heroine having to keep her emotions in check, know her place in society and her household, and juggle the conflicting responsibilities to her employers, her charges and herself. She's a character rarely permitted to speak honestly, but yet at every instant we know what she's thinking. Full review.



The Mouthpiece (Elliot Nugent and James Flood, 1932) – Few pre-Code films were ever as sweet and affecting as this one, in which William’s noble prosecutor reacts to tragedy by reinventing himself as an amoral shyster for the underworld (with a moustache, naturally), only to be changed back by the guileless southern office waif (Sidney Fox) he’s been trying to shag. It’s a little clumsy in places, and mistakes audacity for humour, but it’s saved by the performances. Full review.

***

Thanks for reading.

Next year's best films: London Film Festival 2017 round-up − Part 2

Here are my 10 favourites from the BFI London Film Festival 2017. To read about the less good films, please toddle on over here. And thanks for reading, it makes me happy.

***

10. Wrath of Silence



Director: Yukun Xin
Cast: Wu Jiang, Yang Song, Wenkang Yuan
Country: China
UK release date: No release confirmed
Rating: 3/4

A genuinely unusual take on that old chestnut, the 'psycho looking for his missing kid' flick, but used to interrogate the iniquities of contemporary Chinese society (without anyone involved in the production gettinh killed), as a mute miner – left behind by the rapid pace of progress – engages in a bleak, apparently hopeless quest that's punctuated by moments of dark comedy and bone-crunching action (there's a lot of him just kicking people really hard).

The final shot could have used a bit of work, but the ending is otherwise superb, a fitting capper to a film with a few rough edges (cartoonish villainy, an opening that's more confusing than intriguing, a little mid-section bagginess) but interesting ideas, superb imagery – that in-camera shot of the desert giving way to the city! – and the best exhausted fight scene in aeons. Clever title too.

It's basically Kurosawa's High and Low, but for China in 2017. Having said that, and as the director acknowledged, there are no state officials involved in wrongdoing: the corruption shown is all in the private sector, even if it's high-ranking lawyers who operate within the public realm and increasingly dominate Chinese society.

... and curiously, like my previous film in the festival, Wonderstruck, it hinges on a mute person and a taxidermical diorama. This one's good, though.


Director Yukun Xin (centre), his producers and friends, outside NFT1 at BFI Southbank.

***

9. Our Time Will Come



Director: Ann Hui
Cast: Zhou Xun, Eddie Peng, Wallace Huo, Paw Hee-ching, Jessie Li
Country: China
UK release date: No release confirmed

Rating: 3/4

Stories from the Chinese underground: a film of great moments, appreciable humanity and unapologetic feminism, those virtues triumphing over some more prosaic flaws, like irregular pacing, a curious framing structure, and a few flirtations with propaganda and artifice.

It's a film of wit, stoicism and sincerity, with two key scenes ruminating on honour and duty that recall those towering triumphs of French cinema, Grand Illusion and Army in the Shadows, for which one can forgive some improbable (but dynamic) action heroics, a monochrome round-table that just made me think of Woody Allen, and a few too many scenes of people wrapping things up in blankets.

***

8. Angels Wear White



Director: Vivian Qu
Cast: Vicky Chen (as Qi Wen), Zhou Meijun, Mengnan Li, Weiwei Liu, Jing Peng
Country: China
UK release date: No release confirmed
Rating: 3.5/4

An excoriating moral thriller about the destruction of innocence – though not, director Vivian Qu says, the debasement of "purity" – which follows two girls left behind by the pace of progress in China: an 11-year-old abandoned to the appetites of a police commissioner, and the 15-year-odd runaway (Vicky Chen), doing odd jobs in a hotel, who's the only witness.

The film's closest analogue is probably Half Nelson – and not just because Qu and Dardennes cinematographer Benoît Dervaux get the most out of some playground tunnels amongst other quasi-surrealist diversions. Like that film, it's an intelligent, consistently surprising heartbreaker that never goes for the soft option when a tough lesson will do.

The writer-director of another Chinese film in the season, Wrath of Silence (see #10), said he steered clear of criticising state officials, as his scripts had to be cleared by the censorship office. Qu (who offers a heroic lawyer where Wrath's was corrupt) clearly doesn't give a shit, and this painful, richly symbolic work – which keeps its violence off camera, and any sentiment or sensationalism off the screen – is a vivid indictment of a society that simply isn't looking after its kids.

Angels Wear White isn't some worthy lecture, though, and while it's slightly uneven, it's a bleakly vibrant, well-acted, quietly poetic, furious film about desperation, the potential for change, and systematic, state-sanctioned abuse masquerading as justice and progress.

It's also the best Marilyn Monroe film since 1961.


Dervaus and Wu trying to ignore the weirdo with the mobile phone all up in their grills.

***

7. On Chesil Beach


<3 Saoirse Ronan. After Brooklyn and this, I'm starting to think she can do no wrong.

Director: Dominic Cooke
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Billy Howle, Emily Watson, Anne-Marie Duff, Samuel West, Adrian Scarborough
Country: UK
UK release date: 19 January 2018
Rating: 3.5/4

For almost its entire length, this adaptation of Ian McEwan's 2007 novella is close to perfect: the beautifully-modulated, restrained story of a strait-laced couple in the still strait-laced early '60s who look back on their often idyllic courtship from the claustrophobic environs of their honeymoon suite.

McEwan and director Dominic Cooke don't change much of the book: they and their cast just subtly externalise feelings that were elucidated as thoughts on the page, and cast off a few memorable moments that might alienate or unwittingly unnerve a cinematic audience (a spasming muscle, jizz on the face).

The leads are brilliant, particularly Saoirse Ronan as the sexually repressed violin prodigy Florence, and if a couple of elements don't quite work − McEwan's slightly embarrassing fixation with Edward (Billy Howle) liking a good ruck, and Anne Marie-Duff's simplistic scenes as his mother, which are tonally off − those are offset by passages of understated lyricism and rich, convincing romance which clash gloriously with the hysterically uncomfortable wedding night, from the inedible none-more-1962 meal (rendered gloriously on the screen: slice of melon with glace cherry, anyone?) to Edward rolling off the bed because he can't have sex with his shoes on.

When the explosion comes, and it does, it's heartbreakingly portrayed, and one of those sequences that works so well because it's so faithfully rendered. Then McEwan starts to write new scenes that were merely summarised in the book, and all bets are off. The first three − dealing with Edward and his family − are minor but quite satisfying, especially the one with his father, and the fourth is an absolute belter, a slightly obvious but incredibly affecting scene set in a record shop in 1975.

If only they'd ended the film there, as the next has Edward explaining not just the moral but also the text of the story, before a closing sequence set in 2007 that has some of the worst Old Person Make-Up that I've seen: he looks like he's been badly burned, and the rest of the cast are only slightly less ridiculous. Yes, the moment that it's all leading up to got to me, even while I knew I was being manipulated, but from Edward's risible stance at the crease onwards, it's an embarrassing and completely unnecessary coda.

Look, lads, you've got a while till the general release, how about heading back and having another go? Because most of this movie is bloody brilliant.

***

6. Battle of the Sexes



Director: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Cast: Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman, Bill Pullman
Country: USA
UK release date:
Rating: 3.5/4

A hugely uplifting, entertaining movie, with a typically dynamic central performance from Emma Stone, who inhabits the character of Billie Jean King almost entirely, as the tennis legend breaks away from the sexist tennis establishment, confronts the fact she's a lesbian, and gears up for the eponymous match, opposite self-styled 'male chauvinist pig', the shy and retiring Bobby Riggs.

When I heard about the movie, I thought it might be dressing the occasion up as something it isn't, but it gets Riggs right − played by Steve Carell with great subtlety and chutzpah as a slightly pathetic hustler who plays the press like a violin − seeing the villain (represented by Bill Pullman's Jack Kramer) as the society that allows his phony chauvinistic bluster to land.

Almost everything about the film is first-rate: the montages (I love a sports montage!), the pacing, much of the dialogue, it's just the one-dimensional nature of the human villainy (Kramer, Margaret Court) and the overt on-the-nose social commentary that feels too shallow and Hollywoodised: Alan Cumming's character, a gay costume designer, seems to have wandered in from The Hunger Games and just doesn't seem real. The audience loved him, but he's so magic gay: an acerbic queen who's really a wise and profound guardian angel.

On the whole it's a really lovely film, though: incredibly fun and with such a deep, appealing performance from Stone: that penultimate scene in the changing room is so perfectly played, so complex and apposite, when most movies would have given her an unconvincing and sentimental fictional heart-to-heart with Riggs that explained her character and justified his.



***

At the midway point, let's pause for some trivia.

Cinematic celebrities spotted: Mike Leigh (at the next film in the list), Terry Gilliam at the #1 movie.
Most comfortable screen: Vue Leicester Square: Screen 5
Most exciting screen: Odeon Leicester Square (shame about the leg-room)
Best loos: Vue Leicester Square.
Worst loos: Empire Leicester Square, somehow worst than the portaloos at Embankment Garden Cinema.
Best Q&A: The Florida Project for the lolz and adorableness, Angels Wear White for the insights into Vivian Qu's creative process.
Worst Q&A: The pretentiousness of Zama, both film and Q&A, wound me up. Red carpet feeds (I saw The Battle of the Sexes and 3 Billboards) aren't for me, I just find the fawning absolutely unbearable, and though Emma Stone fielded her questions with a bit of humour and panache, and Martin McDonagh offered some insights into the genesis of his film, there's not much that one can really say to questions like "How are you so brilliant and gorgeous?"
Most exciting person to see in the flesh: AUBREY PLAZA FROM PARKS AND REC, especially as I was just about certain that she wouldn't come over for the film.
Request for next year: Please, more variety in the Q&As for the really big screenings: these always just centre around the same two questions (To the writer/director: 'How did you come up with the idea?'; to the stars: 'How did you get on board?' or 'What did you think when you read the script?'), and subsequently the same two answers, while the format is so rigid that there are never any follow-up questions. As a result, they're nowhere near as insightful as the Q&As for smaller events. It's such a wasted opportunity and makes it seem like we've just got the stars over from Hollywood for a fashion parade. Considering the incredible amount of preparation that clearly goes into this amazing festival, it seems really half-arsed.

All in all, though, it was just such a magical and exciting 11 days, and I feel so privileged to have been able to go to it at all, let alone to so many exciting events.

***

5. The Meyerowitz Stories: New and Selected



Director: Noah Baumbach
Cast: Adam Sandler, Grace Van Patten, Dustin Hoffman, Elizabeth Marvel, Emma Thompson
Country: USA
UK release date: 13 October 2017 (on Amazon)
Rating: 3.5/4

A moving, frequently hilarious comedy-drama – sort of 'Woody Allen's The Royal Tenenbaums – about a family living in the shadow of impossible oft-married patriarch and undiscovered sculptor, Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman).

It has perhaps a couple of endings too many, and Emma Thompson misses the mark as a ditsy New York alcoholic, but the rest of the cast is great, some of the comic, character-rooted flourishes are instant classics – Sandler and Stiller's conversation about business, the way Hoffman runs (I tell you, if he'd done this in Marathon Man, it would've been twice as good) – and there are several darkly comic passages addressing neuroses that frequently debilitate me: Stiller asking a nonplussed nurse if he's abandoning his father by going to a meeting, Sandler's summation of his dad's legacy.

In fact, Sandler has several scenes here that are superb, and if his familiar excesses occasionally intrude (or at least call to mind his dual life as the shittest thing on screen), he's now started giving so many good performances that he's in danger of becoming liked and respected. The call with his daughter (Grace Van Patten) early on in the picture is a beauty.

The Meyerowitz Stories is a really terrific film, Baumbach's best since the unassailable Frances Ha, and yet after 10 minutes I thought I was going to hate it, the director setting it up as a film about privileged, self-serious New York intellectuals with their meaningless problems, before tipping us a huge wink with a line about houmous.

***

4. You Were Never Really Here



Director: Lynne Ramsay
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alessandro Nivola, Alex Manette, John Doman
Country: UK/France/USA
UK release date: No release date confirmed, but probably February
Rating: 3.5/4

Well what did you think a Lynne Ramsay noir with Joaquin Phoenix as a hitman would be like?

Ramsay can write great dialogue, but with a Hitchcockian desire to tell stories using just pictures, that visual imagination – CCTV action sequence ftw! – and her matchless ear for apposite pop music, she rarely needs it. Admittedly she loves a long arthouse silence, so your tolerance for her work may depend on whether you do too, but once this one gets going it's unmissable.

There's Phoenix out intense-ing himself to a Jonny Greenwood score, a deeply moving Jonathan Ames story that invokes and updates the likes of Taxi Driver, The Searchers and A History of Violence without ever feeling like a retread, and a lot of people being twatted in the head with a hammer. Really, what more could you ask for?

Except, of course, the star and director turning up pissed to the screening and spoiling the festival director's Q&A with a mixture of in-jokes and gratuitous flirting.

I just can't get over that line in the politician's dining room, this film's inspired inversion of "Let's go home, Debbie." It damn near broke me.



***

3. A Fantastic Woman



Director: Sebastián Lelio
Cast: Daniela Vega, Francisco Reyes, Luis Gnecco, Aline Küppenheim, Nicolás Saavedra
Country: Chile
UK release date: 2 March 2018
Rating: 3.5/4

This is really, really good.

I'm always struck by the sky-high ratings on IMDb for bad LGBT movies, and wonder if it's attributable to a) the comparative paucity of these films, meaning that we should celebrate those we get, regardless of their technical or artistic deficiencies (the extension, I suppose, is the tribalistic mindset this engenders, in which you can't judge them as bad films, as they're not just films); b) my lack of insight into what these films should be doing in relation to their audience and LGBT issues in 2017.

Anyway, no such ruminations necessary on this one, it's fucking brilliant: a dazzling, poetic, sometimes dream-like Chilean film about a trans woman (Daniela Vega) trying to hold it together – and reach some point of resolution – after the death of her boyfriend. I should mention that his family aren't helping.

Vega has the most fascinating face and the camera makes the most of it, not least in a dazzling nightclub sequence that moves from pain to sensuality to a fantasy dance number, but there's such depth to her characterisation too, and the film's refusal to give her easy, sassy victories is uniquely satisfying, grappling profoundly and humanely with issues that are both specific and universal.

The effect is of a Dardennes story adapted by Almodovar, but I haven't seen anyone like Vega before. I'm not sure she can really sing classical (the best use of 'Ombra mai fu' is now and forever in Humphrey Jennings' seismic short film, Spare Time, Handel fans), but the rest of the music's a treat, with British composer Matthew Herbert delivering an audial dreamscape that like the script, photography and performances serves to conjure a very particular mood.



***

2. Bad Lucky Goat



Director: Samir Oliveros
Cast: Jean Bush, Kiara Howard, Ambrosio Huffington, Honlenny Huffington, Elkin Robinson
Country: Colombian
UK release date: No release confirmed
Rating: 4/4

I was expecting Brewster's-Millions-with-a-goat, I got something like the very essence of charm: a wonderfully atmospheric story of burgeoning sibling friendship, set on a Caribbean island, about a brother and sister who accidentally wreck their parents' car by running over a goat, and hatch one scheme after another to try to get level.

Colombian director Samir Oliveros shot the film on Providence Island (an old colonial outpost owned by Colombia) using non-professional local actors, a score written by local musicians (several of whom play on screen) and the locales as another character in a way that recalls a film of escape, change and geographical flavour that I've always loved, Seducing Doctor Lewis. Bad Lucky Goat is very funny when it wants to be, though it's not packed with jokes: much of the joy lies in its genuinely offbeat sensibility and its deceptively lofty ambitions.

Oliveros, who'd made just one previous short and is now doing a master's in LA, told me (as I was bothering him in the lobby) that he shot this one "guerrilla-style" and is now learning how to be a professional filmmaker, ideally in Hollywood. I hope that training doesn't erode the instinctive brilliance of this debut, which is fast-moving but laid-back, packing an astounding amount into its 76 minutes, dealing with themes of superstition, familial loyalty and accidental goat slaughter, and featuring beautiful performances from the two young leads − both of whom are now eyeing careers on screen. Like the rest of the cast, they adapted Oliveros' English-language script into their phonetic local language, Creole, and I could listen to their slang-heavy exchanges all day.

I got lost in its world, and while the film's trip to the cockfights may be a bit of a rude shock to myself and my other libtard cucks, it ultimately did little to dispel the film's very special atmosphere.

***

1. The Shape of Water



Director: Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg
Country: USA
UK release date: 16 February 2018
Rating: 4/4

Guillermo del Toro's wonderful fable – "my favourite thing I've ever done" – is kind of like Arrival starring Amélie, as a shy, mute cleaner (Sally Hawkins) at a government base begins to communicate with the aquaman in the tank, and feels the first flickerings of love.

Set – like my previous film at the LFF, On Chesil Beach (see #7) – in 1962, it's really about today: a plea for tolerance in the light of Trump and co's war on Muslims, blacks and gays, and a monster movie in which the monster isn't the Other, it's right-wing, gung-ho America, represented here by Michael Shannon, as a psychotic vet in a teal Cadillac who'll beat the living shit out of anything that doesn't conform to his very specific notion of a person. The toxic machismo and vicious hatred of otherness isn't restricted to him, though, it's endemic: and hiding behind the most benign of fronts.

Shot in a rich, stylised palette of greens and browns (admittedly more City of Lost Children), set partly above an old, working cinema and filled with little visual effects – though with a creature who's delightfully and resolutely real – it reminded me of nothing as much as Amélie. That 2001 movie might be the last time I felt quite so charmed by a lead character as by Hawkins' Eliza Esposito, whose increasingly appealing, steely, sexy performance recalls that holy trinity of great mute turns: Dorothy McGuire in >The Spiral Staircase, Samantha Morton in Sweet and Lowdown and Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda, and is just as full of nobility and pathos; just as lacking in gimmickry.

There's nice work too from Richard Jenkins, who is frequently held hostage in underwhelming comedies, but showed in Tom McCarthy's 2007 masterpiece, The Visitor that he's just about the best actor in America when he can be bothered. As Eliza's gay flatmate, a struggling, alcoholic advertising artist, he's never self-pitying or trite, and those traits no more define who he is than the fact he's bald.

The plot is fine: diverting, involving and well-balanced between moments of intrigue, suspense and humour, but it's the passages of poetry that completely bewitched me, including one sequence in a waterlogged bathroom that took the breath away.

There's another beguiling flight of fancy that memorably references Fred and Ginger's 'Let's Face the Music and Dance', and music is critical to this film: Hawkins and Jenkins engage in an impromptu tap, Alexandre Desplat equips her with the most enchanting theme, and del Toro exhibits his great love for – and understanding of – classic Hollywood by including several clips from old Fox musicals, including Bojangles and Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel and colour clips of Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda rendered in the monochrome of '60s tube TV. Realising that I was in a cinema in which a modern audience was being forced to watch old footage of Alice Faye, and listen to a short monologue discoursing on her ill-fad career was just the most delightful thing.

So… a sci-fi, a horror, a monster movie, a romance, a Cold War thriller, and a history lesson about Alice Faye: this genre-bender is many things, but above all it's an emotional experience, a clear-sighted, glowing-hearted picture with some of the most beautiful imagery and a performance I'm going to be rhapsodising about for weeks, months, years.



Del Toro, his producers, and Richard Jenkins. Sally Hawkins got ill. ***

Thanks for reading.

London Film Festival: Part 1 − Rebecca Hall, La La Land and Finnish film

"Do you have any dreams...?"



What a massive treat this is: one of the world's greatest film festivals on our doorstep, glowing amidst the gloom of this lousy year, and bringing the likes of Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling and Isabelle Huppert to the capital. It's the first time I've got properly involved since moving to London in 2014, and it's been a magical experience. I'm seeing 18 films across the two weeks, from a Finnish boxing drama to a documentary about Syria's answer to Jon Stewart. Here are the first four.

THURSDAY 6th



Film 1: The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (Juho Kuosmanen, 2016) at Vue West End – A completely charming, disarming Finnish film, based on a true story, about a boxer who falls in love whilst preparing for a world championship fight. Shot in grainy monochrome, it reminds me a little of Truffaut in its grace notes (lovely, self-contained sequences of children) and also of Half Nelson – with its eye for an arresting, unexpected image or sentiment – though its sensibility, and its sense of humour, are all its own.

Whatever their quality, boxing movies tend to be bruising noirs about proud patsies (Body and Soul, The Set-Up, Champion), shameless stories about underdogs (Rocky) or cynical, bruising portraits of disconnected losers (Raging Bull). Olli Maki, with its humble hero, quiet humanity and knockout ending, could scarcely be more different.

Occasionally it seems unfocused or long-winded, but the performances from stage star Jarkko Lahti (as Olli), newcomer Oona Airola (as his ordinarily beautiful new girlfriend) and Eero Milonoff (playing his ex-champ of a manager) are really fresh, credible and well-judged, the bits of off-kilter humour mesh nicely with the affecting central storyline, and the film’s blending of realism, sweetness and surprise makes it a richly enjoyable experience.

A cracking start to the festival from debuting feature director Juho Kuosmanen – who won ‘Un certain regard’ at Cannes for this one. (3)



Guest: Juho Kuosmanen (post-film Q&A)

***

FRIDAY 7th



Film 2: Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016) at Vue West End – A stunning character study of a woman whose name is notorious if indeed it’s known at all: Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall), a news reporter in early ‘70s Florida who’s indelibly associated with her final act: shooting herself on live TV.

This richly empathetic film goes beyond the sensationalist headlines to explore her psyche, her environment and her motivations (if something as irrational as suicide can have motivations at all), and though the script’s shorthand and inventions can seem too pat and glib, Hall is just staggeringly good, and the film feels just right.

First, though the script: its mixture of the tough and the tender is right, but at times it’s simply crude and rudimentary: allusions to Chubbuck’s breakdown in Boston are sledgehammer-subtle, the invention of a crush on network anchor Michael C. Hall is simply misleading, and the way the film sometimes presents depression as a series of bad responses to triggers seems simplistic. That kind of paraphrasing or superficiality feels OK in a movie like, for example, Dmytryk’s The Sniper, which also strips away its character’s safety net by episodes, but a real story deserves better than that.

The story does, however, get the performance it deserves: in actuality, one of the best performances in years. As Christine, Rebecca Hall is simply astonishing. Tightly-wound, highly-strung and unable to connect, she has moments of eye-popping neurosis, but there’s nothing here that’s false or overdone. She lashes out in moments of black comedy, embraces the awkward by overstepping the mark quite egregiously with her boss, and then acquires a fittingly unearthly calm once her mind is made: I’ve been with someone about to kill themselves, and I didn’t see it coming either.

The film’s artistry and humanity grows organically from her performance, which places its roots far below the script and nourishes everything else. Michael C. Hall is fine and Tracy Letts is good as her boss, but it’s Rebecca Hall who makes everything work: in moments of disintegration that risk seeming synthetic and smack of screenwriting-by-numbers, her conviction is complete and utterly overpowering.

She’s by no means the only thing about the film I admired. When I say that it ‘feels right’, I don’t just mean that its portrayal of mental illness is extremely realistic and nuanced (sadly I have more experience in this area than I would wish on anyone) in a way that no movie aside from von Trier’s Melancholia has approached, but also that the film replicates the textures of ‘70s Florida in both its look and its sound: its succession of apposite West Coast soft rock classics is some of the best use of music I can remember. And nor is the script a write-off: the final scene seems tacked-on and false, but its opening gambit is amusing, its ability to sometimes give us a good time while putting us through the wringer isn’t to be underestimated, and the shards of black comedy embedded in the tragedy twinkle darkly amidst the heartbreak.

She is, though, the thing about the film that lifts it way out of the ordinary, turning it into an experience to be cherished, as it turns a headline into a portrait that acts too as a plea for empathy. A lot of people are hurting. Try to connect. (3.5)



Guest: Michael C. Hall (post-film Q&A)



Film 3: Tower (Keith Maitland, 2016) at Vue West End A moving, utterly gripping documentary about the University of Texas shooting in 1966, which doesn’t – as the festival literature suggests – use the tragedy to understand subsequent massacres, but instead tells the stories of the victims in mesmerising fashion.

It’s a film about the ways we react in extreme circumstances, and afterwards: the way that life-defining events have an aftermath and, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Deadeye Dick (another work that’s superficially about a shooting), the way the story may be over, but the life has to continue.

Director Keith Maitland took five years to make the film: conducting dozens of hours of interviews, then interspersing the footage of talking heads with archive film and new sequences of rotoscopic animation, which enabled him to restage much of that fateful, fatal day at the real locations, without having to get permission to film there.

It’s a striking approach that lends the film an artistic distinctiveness without undercutting its realism, and imbues it with a nauseating tension while keeping its real human stories centre-stage. And the stories are incredible, the characters unforgettable: the reflective, forgiving Claire, the tower itself – since the shooter is unseen, it seems to be picking off innocents at random, like the truck in Duel – and resourceful off-duty cop Martinez.

Best of all is Rita, whose selflessness dominates this story and makes it a portrait of humanity at its best, rather than at its worst. (3.5)

Guest: Keith Maitland (post-film Q&A)

***

SATURDAY 8th



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Film 4: La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016) at Odeon Leicester Square – I’ll be astonished if I see a better film than this at the London Film Festival: Whiplash director Damien Chazelle’s homage to MGM musicals is like Blue Valentine starring Fred and Ginger, with a first half of unparalleled joy and a second that’s almost unbearably poignant.

It’s a movie about people out of time: actress Emma Stone should be in the ‘40s, jazz musician Ryan Gosling should be in the ‘30s and they shouldn’t both be on the cusp of realising their dreams if this relationship is going to work.

Timing is central to people getting together (a fact rarely acknowledged in movies) and La La Land acknowledges the fact that these characters may want to have their time over again (or have it in an idealised realm) in the most spectacular way imaginable: a climax that’s both exhilarating and replaces your entire throat with a lump.

The exuberant opening sequence sets the tone (I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it) and from there on it’s great music, irresistible chemistry and a descent into heartbreaking Technicolor melodrama of which Jacques Demy would be proud.

From Stone’s hair lit like a neon sign (echoes of One From the Heart), to a Band Wagon-ish jaunt in a park, via nods to Gold Diggers (stylised montages! Chorus gals living together!), Broadway Melody of 1940 (challenge dancing!) and the climactic dream ballets of the ‘50s, it fits into the grand tradition without ever feeling like a novelty or a rip-off. And if I say that Mandy Moore’s choreography more than makes for A Walk to Remember, that is no small concession.

The problem with contemporary musicals is the undercurrent that says: “Isn’t this wacky, we’re doing a musical!” It was musicals’ everyday nature, their centrality to the national psyche that made them so magical. Somehow Chazelle has made that live again, and if his leads can’t dance quite like Fred and Ginger, they can sing comparably and act better. Gosling's comic timing is a thing of eternal beauty.

I expected to be charmed by this film, but I didn’t expect to be blown away like I was, or completely broken by the end. This is a wonderful, wonderful movie, and so far the undisputed highlight of a dizzyingly good festival. (4)



Guests: Pre-show Q&A with Ryan Gosling, Damien Chazelle, cinematographer Linus Sandgren and two producers.

***

Thanks for reading. Part 2 includes Bing Crosby, Casey Affleck and a bizarre Isle of Man-set comedy from Julian Barratt and Simon Farnaby of The Mighty Boosh.

Lillian Gish, Henry V, and Woody Allen in 2015 - Reviews #223

A few reviews. Next time: a journey through the back catalogue of Francois Truffaut.

FILMS



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Irrational Man (Woody Allen, 2015) - In 1989, Woody Allen created one of his greatest movies, Crimes and Misdemeanours: a bleak, gently blistering drama in which Martin Landau kills his mistress then tries to deal with the guilt of it all. Since then, Allen has made three serious crime movies and, to a greater or lesser degree, they are all terrible. This latest one is perhaps the least terrible of the three (the others are the tone-deaf Match Point and the brain dead Cassandra’s Dream), but it still falls down an elevator shaft after 50 minutes.

Joaquin Phoenix is a brooding cliché of a philosophy professor – dark, sexy, dangerous – who attracts the attention of both an unhappily married lecturer (Parker Posey) and a guileless student (Emma Stone) while toying with the idea of murder. At first you can forgive the film its flaws: lazy exposition, laughable lines and erratic performances (often helpless in the face of the dialogue), because the story is surprisingly involving and watchable, but after a while even that starts to go wrong, and there’s nothing left to cling to.

The movie’s conformity is a problem for me: it purports to wrestle with serious philosophical quandaries (albeit like a low-rent Rope), then goes for the easiest possible way out. And it conforms in its characterisation too. Phoenix’s professor disastrously calls to mind Half Nelson, a film against which almost everything looks unoriginal and somewhat pathetic. In that movie, Gosling’s crack-addicted teacher tries to impress his sister-in-law with his magnetic brand of nihilism and she literally laughs in his face. Here, no-one laughs in Phoenix’s face, they just want to boff him.

In the one interesting choice Allen makes, he has Joaquin’s penis misfiring early on, but when he gets the chance to build on this later, he falls short of pushing the character as far as it will go – they both do – and the results are just unbelievably frustrating. Watch the end of Peter Medak’s The Ruling Class for an example of how you kick your film into another gear, with a seductive, beguiling paragon of evil.

As I have said at least once before, I prefer the ever-underrated In My Father’s Den to the widely-praised You Can Count on Me because the muscular, avenging angel of an anti-hero gets kicked down some stairs and called a prick when he tries to do the right thing, rather than winning out in some pyrrhic but vital way. I prefer Half Nelson to Irrational Man for about 800 reasons, but it starts with Phoenix’s drab if extremely charismatic caricature, and the hypnotic effect his character has on everyone, with his hilariously stupid malt-swigging.

He is also the only actor I’ve ever scene who has scenes stolen from him by his own tummy, Phoenix’s funny little pot belly arriving in the room shortly before him, with a kind of scene-stealing grace that Peter Lorre might have admired. Stone, meanwhile, does her best, and has a handful of truly, unexpectedly impressive moments (considering she’s in a film that simply doesn’t work), but more often than not she is – well – powerless to act, her line readings sounding like something from a 1930s B-movie actress. Or a porn star.

Another problem with the film (and there are many) is Allen’s superficial understanding of philosophy, which both undermines the serious message he is attempting to impart and, more prosaically, means that his brilliant professor is often just spouting rubbish, or paraphrased platitudes. Allen has read the chapter headings in his textbook, it seems, but gone no further epitomised by the frankly embarrassing scene in which Phoenix says the class will consider “Sartre’s classic line, ‘Hell is other people’”, which is as much Sartre as we get. Woody also has no idea how to build a crime narrative, as evidenced by the sequence in which Stone explains that everyone a murder victim knew “couldn’t have done it” – an equivocal shorthand that is frankly insultingly stupid.

I suppose he is 80 now.

At this stage in his career, Allen is desperately in need of a script editor who can tell him: a) You don’t know how teenage girls speak; b) You can’t write working class characters in a contemporary setting; c) You’ve forgotten how to subtly interweave exposition; d) Your plotting is built on contrivance and coincidence, not anything that resembles real life.

In the excellent 2012 documentary detailing his life and work, Allen fascinatingly reveals how he decides which film to do next, emptying a drawer onto his bed and then searching through scraps of paper on which are written one-line summaries of possible projects. He used to dress and augment these frameworks, until the incidental joys were as great as the story they adorned. Now – with the exception of Midnight in Paris and perhaps Blue Jasmine – that isn’t really true: from photography to performance to dialogue to sound, it all feels perfunctory: we simply travel from A to B, his hand revealed well in advance, the minor pleasures few and far between, if they are there at all.

As far as bad dialogue goes; well, it simply doesn’t get any worse than this:
Phoenix: “I’m just… too far gone.”
Stone: “I’m going to be late for my piano lesson.”

And then there are the Allenisms that pepper his work: stock phrases that emerge from the mouth of so many of his characters, no matter how different they are supposed to be. Will he ever again make a film in which someone doesn't say, "This is cra-zy."

The film isn’t funny, either. Not in the way that the first hour of Magic in the Moonlight isn’t funny: this one isn’t even supposed to be. In Crimes and Misdemeanours, among his greatest masterstrokes was to run a hysterically funny narrative in parallel to the main affair, with Allen’s self-righteous documentary maker outfoxed by his insufferable rival (Alan Alda), his character receiving a devastating final sting that threw him and Landau together, and cast the central story into a different light. Here, everything is in the same tone – visual, verbal and philosophical – with no wit or nuance to leaven the po-faced, self-serious quasi-moralising.

These problems are epitomised by a potentially interesting scene near the close, which somehow manages to be taut and tense but also completely embarrassing, with apparently improvised dialogue that has to be heard to be believed, and an action pay-off that’s like a Byker Grove outtake. It’s a fitting climax to an unredeeming, tacky and obvious third act that just about explains itself but is as uninteresting as Allen has ever been. Except for Cassandra’s Dream<, which is the caveat that keeps on giving, and the worst film that Allen will ever make.

In Allen’s hands, it seems that fatalism – predicated on chance – has none of the danger, cynical humour or dark poetry of noir, it’s merely predictable coincidence, playing out in bright colours and dull words. (2)

***



The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjöström, 1926) - A year before their towering masterwork, The Wind, director Victor Sjöström, writer Frances Marion, and stars Lillian Gish and Lars Hanson made another film – The Scarlet Letter – a flavourful, somewhat fanciful adaptation of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel. Miss Gish is ideally cast (though perhaps wearing a bit too much make-up, historical accuracy fans) as Hester Prynne, whose illegitimate child outrages Puritan, 18th century New England, visiting tragedy upon her restrictive community. Hanson is her troubled lover, the outwardly respectable Rev Arthur Dimmesdale.

MGM’s films from this period never quite seem to match – say – Fox’s in terms of their scale or authentic set design, and the plotting sometimes comes off as forced or convenient, but Sjostrom's imaginative staging leads to a succession of visually striking passages (he was a great director of shadows and of feet) and the acting grabs your attention and holds it, with Gish’s inventive, intuitive gesturing creating a Hester who’s flirtatious, resolute and also feels intensely, every thought transmitted by the actress’s peerless evocation of the inner life.

Her innocent seduction of Hanson is the sort of scene she so rarely got to play - not that you'd know it from her effortless, uncompromised sensuality - while the sequence in which she reveals the scarlet letter, if plumb in the centre of her comfort zone, is a masterpiece of subtle expression and heart-wracking poignancy. (3.5)

A thousand thanks to Owen for getting hold of this one for me. I’ve been after it for years.

***



Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944) - Olivier’s near-mythic adaptation of Henry V is a film of dazzling, bravura moments, but not altogether a great film. Beginning with a brilliant gimmick – a framing device that presents the action before an audience at The Globe in 1600 – it then abandons the conceit at exactly the right time, with a staggering fade that takes us from London to the sky above the ocean, where a swelling British fleet is moving stealthily, hazily towards France. Once they get there, though, we face a world that lurches weirdly from fantastical castles to earthily realistic battlefields, as the narrative mixes Henry’s rousing speeches and introspective ruminations with some of the broadest, most unbearable comedy imaginable (at one point a Welshman wears a leek on his head while ending every sentence with the words, “Look you”), culminating in a wooing scene that seems to go on for ever.

Despite those shortcomings, there are scenes as rich in beauty and emotion as just about anything British cinema produced in the ‘40s, thanks in no small part to the sumptuous Technicolor photography and Olivier’s astounding performance, which – despite the occasional recourse to simply yelling – is full of tenderness, steel and imperious regality, while exhibiting his unique gift for Shakespearean delivery: his understanding so rich, his interpretation so clear, that the dialogue could just as well be in modern slang, were it not for its power, its consequence and its ability to stir anyone with a pulse, an English birth certificate and, ideally, a sword. He also has one hell of a way with a battle sequence: the long take of advancing French cavalry moving from a trot to a murderous gallop is just an astonishingly exciting piece of action cinema.

Olivier adapted two further Shakespeare plays as director and star – Hamlet and Richard III – and while both are better than this celebrated first effort, Henry V still has moments that simply take the breath away. (3)

***



All Through the Night (Vincent Sherman, 1941) - This is the other film in which insular isolationist Humphrey Bogart has a change of heart to battle despicable Nazi Conrad Veidt. But unlike in Casablanca, he’s a gangster who gets in over his head while searching for the killers of his favourite cheesecake supplier.
This weirdly pitched yarn is a curious mixture of heavy-handed propaganda, mannered dialogue and variable suspense: a melange of Hitchcock, Damon Runyon and what we now recognise as ‘WWII Warners’, as the studio warms to the cinematic possibilities of the conflict. It starts oddly and ends badly, but what’s in between is often good fun, with a frankly astonishing cast doing what it can with a peculiar script that promises much but delivers relatively little.

Though he’s given rather too many visual gags for a performer whose talents lay elsewhere, Frank McHugh’s line deliveries are – of course – an utter joy, while Peter Lorre is perfect as the mirthfully malevolent gunman, Pepi, the diminutive, sleepy-eyed legend having turned this type of playful, cigarette-led scene-stealing into nothing short of an artform. (2.5)

***

BOOKS



The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1965) – This story of a Scottish schoolteacher engaging her charges in twisted adult games is slim, spare and economical, warped, waspish and filled with malevolent, brilliant throwaway jokes, its nastiness masking a poignancy and perception that linger, along with the bitter taste of betrayal. When Spark’s Sandy talks about the virtue of economy, as a way to live and to create art, she may as well be commenting on the book in which she finds herself. (4)



Orson Welles: One Man Band by Simon Callow (2015) – The third volume of Callow’s biography is another stunning achievement: fast-paced, fascinating and immensely readable, the author expertly juggling disparate sources to not only document and explains Welles’s triumphs and disasters, but also to discern the truth behind his endless self-mythologising, coming as close as anyone has to explaining who Welles was, and why he was like that.

Dealing with Welles's life between his estrangement from Hollywood in 1947 and the release of his intensely personal Chimes at Midnight in 1964, it’s often sad, occasionally punch-the-air inspiring and - for the most part - wonderfully written, with Callow a fond but wise and moral adjudicator with a rare insight into the art of acting. And for that, we can forgive him some excessive use of Latin, an occasional recycling of his pet theories and the suggestion that classic ensemble dramas include “Casablanca and Four Weddings and a Funeral".

Sometimes I did wish we could linger longer on the majesties of those things that work - Othello, Touch of Evil, et al - before moving onto the next backstage debacle, but by any standards it's an exceptional work, and for fans it's pretty much essential.

I'm not sure I will ever get over not seeing Welles's stage play of Moby Dick. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.