Review of the Year: Part 2 – Movies

Here's part two of my Review of the Year, focusing on films. Twenty 'discoveries', six movies re-appraised, five areas of obsession, and some bits and pieces of writing you might enjoy.

DISCOVERIES

... being films that I saw for the first time this year, and loved.

1. Playground (Laura Wandel, 2021) – The highlight of this year's London Film Festival, and a film that I got to rave about in Sight & Sound's annual poll. It's a staggering debut that begins like Être et avoir and ends like a prison movie. Seven-year-old Maya Vanderbeque is extraordinary as Nora, a sensitive young girl trying to negotiate the perilous world of big school, a place of obscure rules and incomprehensible moral codes. “When you help someone, it makes things worse,” she tells a teacher, in the film’s most profound and affecting scene. Shot in shallow focus, at child’s-eye level, it’s fantastically immersive, gripping and moving, the innocence and charm of its opening reels evaporating as Nora is sucked into a vortex of pain. But while it is a film without convenient illusions, and cursed with a memory of childhood’s cruelties and formative, guilt-ridden compromises, it is not merely human but humane, recalling the best of the Dardenne brothers, before a final shot that reminded me of Bicycle Thieves in its sincerity and pained, tear-stained hopefulness. A masterpiece, simply.

2. Princess Cyd (Stephen Cone, 2017) – What if Swimming Pool, but unutterably lovely? A warm and fuzzy film that deals deftly and deeply with faith, love and dead parents – all the good stuff, in fact. It’s unusually attuned to how people talk, and every scene is about something, both on the surface and beneath. Its rough edges, of which there are many, only add to the charm; the slight amateurishness in places serving to make it seem more real, as if it’s a docu-drama starring the people this all happened too. It reminded me, in turn of Housekeeping, Sciamma, Junebug and The Way, Way Back, and yet it’s not derivative in any way. And if its view of the world remains rosily and reassuringly liberal, it is also not uncomplicated. The scene in which Cyd and her aunt talk about sex is some kind of classic.

3. Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945), in which we learn that Stahl created the Sirkian melodrama, Douglas Sirk just perfected it. While Sirk would go on to remake three of Stahl’s monochrome hits – including Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession – the look and feel of his classic cycle of ‘women’s pictures’ seems to have been drawn largely from this Technicolor noir. It’s one of the best-looking colour films I’ve ever seen: sumptuously shot by everyone’s favourite egomaniacal cinematographer, Leon Shamroy, who conjures a chic world of turquoise and cyan that spells d-e-a-t-h. After all, that’s the colour of Gene Tierney’s eyes – as well as the walls of the train carriage, the water on the lake, her gown, her slip-ons and the carpet on those fateful stairs – and her murderously clingy fatale just isn’t going to share new husband Cornel Wilde with anyone. It is a chilly, masterly film that kills the cute, sees perversity and psychopathy within love, and is head over heels with its villain’s face. Full review here.

4. Light Sleeper (Paul Schrader, 1992) – Just the right words, and just the right number of them, as Schrader reworks Taxi Driver again, but finds all kinds of different shadings. For long stretches, it’s his best film, with only the trimmings (particularly the synthetic work by Susan Sarandon and Victor Garber) and the ending dulling its edge. Dafoe was never half as good – as a drug dealer and ex-addict vaguely thinking he might reform – and both Dana Delany and Mary Beth Hurt are absolutely terrific in support. Schrader wraps the existentialism and surprising characterisation in the perfect ambience, helped by a typically apposite score. It’s a film about tormented masculinity, but more than that: its impact on others.

5. Matewan (John Sayles, 1987) – An incredible movie about labour, faith, violence, honour, pragmatism and loneliness, as union organiser Chris Cooper arrives in the town of Matewan to support striking miners, unwittingly but unavoidably setting in motion a chain of violence. It’s a film filled with extraordinary moments, both big and small: Cooper’s little smile at the dinner table and his Mennonites monologue; McDonnell gasping with grief on a porch swing; the procession that follows a killing: Fordian staging and howls of sorrow; and a simply jawdropping finale, Sayles staging a tragedy in the style of a Western gone mad. The film sags just now and then but it has six or seven remarkable scenes, and the feeling of truth. Full review.

6. Ceiling Zero (Howard Hawks, 1936) – In broad plot terms, this second collaboration between director Howard Hawks and star Jimmy Cagney is like every other aviation pic of the ‘30s, and yet what’s going on within that is completely new. You can see it as another film in the vein of MGM’s Night Flight, a rehearsal for writer Spig Wead’s Test Pilot, or a dry-run for Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings but Cagney’s character – and characterisation – are quite unlike anything else in the genre, or in cinema at large. His Dizzy Davis is introduced as a hellraising ledge, a continuation of Cagney’s fast-talking Pre-Code heroes, who returns to the small commercial airport run by his mate Pat O’Brien and picks up where he left off – spewing wisecracks, pulling stunts and chasing women. But that’s all a trick on the audience: his pioneering pilot is a relic, a danger and almost a joke, a 34-year-old barnstormer with a dicky heart, adrift in a new world filling with college graduates. And how he plays it... cast as an inveterate shagger, he goes for the most unexpected option imaginable, giving the most gentle, sensitive and tactile performance of his career. I wrote a mini-essay on the film here.

7. Run for Cover (Nicholas Ray, 1955) – The second of three films from my extended investigations into the work of Jimmy Cagney. Released five months before the same director’s Rebel without a Cause, Run for Cover finds Nick Ray tiring of the young rebel character he had created in They Live by Night and Knock on Any Door, as everyman Jimmy Cagney invests heart and soul in self-pitying, no-good John Derek. If that seems unexpected, then so is everything else about this Western, from an opening anti-heist to a climactic non-shootout among Aztec ruins. Shot like an Eastwood film and plotted like a Boetticher, it’s resistant to the mythos of genre, with no interest in the idea of the legendary hero or the fastest gun. More thoughts here.

8. Shattered Glass (Billy Ray, 2003) takes 10 minutes to settle into anything even remotely resembling real life – or indeed the world of journalism. After that it is completely riveting, always holding back just enough, in terms of both its information and its emotion. Christensen, Azaria and Lynskey are all excellent, but Sarsgaard is just sensational, those four forming the most 2003 ensemble imaginable with help from Chloë Sevigny, Rosario Dawson and Steve Zahn. The film has surface flaws – including a few duff lines and some odd structural choices – but the central thrust of the story is perfect, and it has more to say about how the media (and therefore the modern world) works than just about any other movie of its type. Its intelligence and incisiveness are way above the ordinary.

9. To Live and Die in L.A. (William Friedkin, 1985) – A kinetic ‘80s actioner, with cop William Petersen looking to avenge his partner by bringing down psycho Willem Dafoe – using whatever means necessary. What I love most about the film is that it defines its genre and then defies it, offering the most heightened versions of each stock scene, before setting fire to the rulebook in its final reel. That mixture of the traditional and offbeat runs right through the movie. While the dialogue and score are agreeably mainstream, Friedkin’s instinctive handling is incredibly varied. The action sequences are pulsating (I’m not really a car chase guy, but man, that car chase). And yet other parts of it are shot almost like an art film. The extended counterfeiting montage seems amazingly fetishistic, like a Jacques Becker scene filmed by De Palma. The movie can seem meatheaded at times, glorifying the idea of tortured machismo as much as questioning it, but those shades of grey are partly what makes it so interesting. It is also unbelievably entertaining. Bonus thought: by 1995, synths and neon seemed the most impossibly dated elements of the '80s; now they feel more modern than everything else.

10. Remember My Name (Alan Rudolph, 1978) – This pretends to be a slasher and ends up as a noir, but it’s New Hollywood to its bones – provocative and deep, full of subtly striking shots, and lit by one of the best performances of its decade. Geraldine Chaplin is just sensational as the endlessly slippery central figure: brittle, malevolent, vulnerable, sad, with a Chaplinesque physicality and a gameplan we can only guess at. More here.

11. Rocks (Sarah Gavron, 2020) – They should make all films this good. That opening scene is so joyous and yet so alien, its characters the sort of people who sit opposite you on a train and then do your fucking head in for the next two hours. This gloriously empathetic movie allows you into their lives. It’s a film of resilience, desperation and joy, its imagery dotted with spare poetry, its hero all bunged up with unspoken anguish. I was really struck by the parallels with Les 400 Coups. Both begin with their characters symbolically distanced from the touristic image of the city, both end with them seeing the sea for the first time. And, in between, they steal; they run away; we see their parents as lost, childlike figures. If Girlhood is the most obvious parallel in terms of theme, and perhaps Half Nelson in terms of style, the Truffaut film felt like Rocks’ spiritual twin. That it can withstand such a comparison is about as high praise as I can dish out.

12. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) is about sex and death, the very mundanity of its early dialogue scenes accentuating both the film’s eroticism and the fleeting nature of existence, before it begins to drown its men in black, abstract spaces. The movie’s main card is Scarlett, making an early swerve into low-budget weirdness, and it plays that perfectly. I have rarely seen a film as besotted with its star; I’m surprised that Glazer didn’t get both an Oscar and a restraining order. The camera is obsessed with every line of her face, obsessed with her eyes. And it’s through those eyes that we see the film, that we see Earth as an alien landscape, full of curious natural phenomena and simplistic beings. Under the skin, we are all animals, it says – some of us with vast compassion, some of us without even consent. Further thoughts here.

13. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931) – A very Pre-Code Jekyll, with the doc using the pursuit of science as an excuse to relieve his unruly horn. It's really a film about toxic masculinity, with Fredric March a superficially sensitive 'good man' barely masking a monster, and Miriam Hopkins allowed to be bawdy and sensual and yet still an affecting victim. The scene in which she flees to Jekyll and pleads for his help, proposing a master-slave relationship that both tickles his fetish and provokes his self-loathing, is really something. Aside from one oddly stagey sequence near the end – March permitted to do some slow emoting on the floor in front of a piano – it's just a beautifully-directed film: so instinctive and inventive and alive. How the hell was Mamoulian three years ahead of everyone else in Hollywood?!

14. Minding the Gap (Bing Liu, 2018) – Skateboarding is an escape from the domestic violence that colours the lives of these young people. Two are victims, haunted by their childhoods. The other may well be a perpetrator, introduced as an outsider hero, but evincing the unstinting self-pity and hollow charm of the abuser. It cheats a little in its presentation of these three characters’ relationships with one another but attains a deep emotional truth in dealing with its central subject.

15. Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano, 1999) – A warm, sweet, episodic and often very funny film about a gangster (Takeshi) escorting a little boy to his estranged mother – and back again. Takeshi's character is so fantastically and disarmingly rude – just a little boy himself, really, with little filter and no impulse control – which keeps the movie well away from genre clichés, and the ending works so well precisely because it doesn’t try to do too much. A mention too for that beautiful musical theme (even if it is slightly over-used), and the scene in which Kitano tries to get psychic tips on a series of bicycle races: a comic masterpiece.

16. The Lady in Red (Lewis Teague, 1979) – The last great Pre-Code film, 45 years after the fact, as farm girl Pamela Sue Martin is brutalised by a range of obsolete genres, en route to a dalliance with Dillinger. More here.

17. The Shooting (Monte Hellman, 1966) – Warren Oates plays a bounty hunter in this Ranown-style Western that morphs into a Reichardt movie that morphs into a New Hollywood movie that morphs into a hippie headfuck. It mixes existentialism, Old Testament dialogue and a blankly beautiful psycho in the Gene Tierney mould (Millie Perkins), who can’t really act but whose limitations drag the movie into interesting places: namely exploitation territory. Oates is characteristically sensational in a part that imbues him with the gruff humanism of a Van Heflin, while Nicholson plays the Henry Silva/James Coburn/James Best part from the Ranown cycle with his teeth, and a conspicuously modern sense of nihilism. This period of Nicholson’s career always reminds me of Bruce Dern’s incredulous utterance just three years later: “Jack Nicholson’s a movie star now?!” I’ve never seen a Western in which everyone gets so exhausted, man and beast. And only Meek’s Cutoff ever left you feeling satisfied with so few of the answers.

18. Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975) – An archetypal New Hollywood neo-noir, with useless PI Gene Hackman searching for a 16-year-old nymphomaniac (Melanie Griffith) – only it's him who's lost. Hackman is great, plastering a smile over every emotion until finally it's pulled away, topped only by Jennifer Warren, scintillating as the double-talking, hard-nippled fatale whose gnomic utterances are part of her weaponry. More here.

19. He Was Her Man (Lloyd Bacon, 1934) – A tender, erotic Pre-Code drama with soft-voiced safecracker Jimmy Cagney fleeing the hoods he just crossed, while escorting sad-eyed retired sex worker Joan Blondell to her wedding in an immigrant fishing community. It’s similar in plot terms to The Bride Came C.O.D., but very different in tone, with two astonishing central performances. Neither star was ever gentler nor more sensual. More here.

20. Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) – A short, sweet, gently magical film about mother-daughter relationships, childhood and depression. It’s surprisingly cheery for a Sciamma movie, its suffering oblique and largely unseen, and perhaps for that reason can’t match the emotional impact of her other features. That small moment, though, where Marion says, “You didn’t invent my sadness”, is one of the most truthful and resonant evocations of mental illness (as I have experienced it) yet put on screen.

***

RE-APPRAISED: MOVIES I REVISITED, AND CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT

THREE UP:

1. The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994) – The greatest of the neo-noirs, an intensely funny black comedy in which city trash (and absolute psycho) Linda Fiorentino steals the cash from her husband’s drug deal and holes up in cow town, where she has oodles of malevolent fun manipulating the men around her. It exists not in a credible ‘90s but in a world where Double Indemnity was reality and we’ve just moved on a half-century. The venetian blinds still throw slatted shadows on the walls, and Fiorentino’s ‘backwards writing’ trick is surely a reference to the opening shot of The Maltese Falcon but people can now fuck, and say ‘fuck’, and there’s no censorship code demanding that being a fatale be fatal. Everything about it works: Steve Barancik's misanthropic script, the neat foreshadowing in Dahl's direction, and Fiorentino's for-the-ages performance, which might have won her an Oscar had they not shown the film on HBO first. Peter Berg has just the right amount of callow uncertainty as the patsy, and Bill Pullman and J. T. Walsh are impeccable weasels. I remembered it as a good movie; it's a whole lot more than that. A masterpiece, in fact, but – perhaps more importantly right now – incredible escapism.

2. Babe: Pig in the City (George Miller, 1998) – I remembered this as merely a collection of amusingly insane creative decisions but it is, in fact, a really great film. Babe goes to America in an attempt to save his farm, but instead ends up as a robbery victim, circus punchline and, ultimately, benevolent dictator of a flophouse for abandoned animals. The film takes a simply outrageous risk with its premise, proceeds to capture its city in a similar way to Amélie, and then breaks out seamlessly and stylishly into ingenious or balletic action, including one of the most terrifying and ultimately affecting set-pieces in American film. You'll know it when you see it. The story may be slight and even distractingly eccentric at times (Farmer Hoggett's wife is arrested for being a drug mule in the first 15 minutes, which is perhaps the most normal thing that happens in the film), but the execution is everything, with memorable characters, an undertow of heartbreaking melancholy, and a neat narrative style that surely inspired Pushing Daises. The gracefulness of Miller's camera, and his attendant use of space, is absolutely beguiling. As is the film's sense of originality. Remember originality in mainstream cinema? What was all that about?

3. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1955) – What a knockout: Nick Ray’s meticulous, super-stylised melodrama, got up in Western clothes and shot in garish Trucolor. I saw this as a teenager, when I wanted cool gunslingers and concessions to naturalism, and hated it, regarding the film’s champions as posers and pseuds. Now I’m a pseud myself and can revel in the theatrical choreography, sex-starved sadism and wild gender reversals: those overpowering women and emasculated men. Crawford is quite effective in martyr mode (though her character’s relationship with guns – and the men who draw them – complicates matters), but it’s Mercedes McCambridge who dominates, in her massive performance as the quiveringly cruel Emma, so terrified of her own desire that she starts hanging everyone in sight. Now and then the film falters, abruptly shifting tone with the help of deafening orchestral cues, but mostly it’s fascinating, with incredible use of sound – the characters dictating their own atmosphere like something out of Brecht – and a succession of spectacular pay-offs. In Borgnine’s dance of death and that bullet through the forehead it has two of the greatest flashes of action in Western history. And even its flaws tend to enhance the whole: that cheap and shonky Republic back-projection only adding to the feeling of unreality and claustrophobia. The next year, Ray made Run for Cover (see above), abandoning the strangulated, uptight atmosphere of this one, and toying with genre convention by providing a hero who was a rough reversal of Johnny Guitar: not a legendary gunman posing as a nobody, but a nobody mistaken for an outlaw.

THREE DOWN:

1. The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973) – A smug, purposefully shambling pseudo-noir, with Altman not so much deconstructing the PI genre as dismantling it. Since the genre was fine as it is, that exercise ends up being rather more fun for him than it is for us. More whinging here.

2. The Baxter (Michael Showalter, 2005) – Showalter’s performance as the title character is so pointlessly weird and artificial that it actively disengages you. Neither it nor his film quite dares to be a parody, and yet they're also fatally lacking in sincerity. I would love to see the movie that Michelle Williams thinks she’s in, as she is sensational.

3. The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman, 1943) – I’d forgotten how talky and didactic this is. I like Lamar Trotti as a screenwriter – his work on Judge Priest, Young Mr Lincoln and Yellow Sky is frequently exquisite – but if you’ve ever wanted to know what it would feel like to be bludgeoned to death by liberalism, then now’s your chance. More here.

***

OBSESSIONS

1. Well, Cagney, of course. An actor I loved when I first got into old movies as a teenager, then came to vaguely overlook and underrate. Seeing him electrify a couple of otherwise mundane pictures (Great Guy and 13 Rue Madeleine) back in 2019 reminded me how great he could be, and I properly remedied the situation this year, watching or rewatching a dozen of his films. The toughness I knew about, as well as his Lorre-ish blending of comedy and danger, but the beguiling softness I'd somehow missed. You can find all the reviews here, but these are the best of them: a salute to the neglected majesty of The Roaring Twenties, and more qualified appraisals of White Heat, The Public Enemy and Love Me or Leave Me.

2. André De Toth – I'm not sure he's a great director – and I suspect those who argue he is of a certain pseudiness – but I've certainly had a good time trying to decide. A kind of poor man's Preminger in comportment, De Toth had one eye, seven wives and 21 children (two of them biological), and made one unassailable masterpiece, a 1959 snow Western called The Day of the Outlaw. That one I was already familiar with (though that didn't prevent me from watching it again), but this tweet encouraged me to dig deeper, leading me to Riding Shotgun, as well as more disposable fare like The Bounty Hunter and Man in the Saddle. All three are led by Randolph Scott, perhaps the worst actor of his era, and the star of several of my favourite films.

3. Paul Schrader/William Friedkin – You know, sometimes the Film Bros are just correct.

4. Mae West – Another blind spot for me: I'd seen just one of Mae's movies before Indicator put out a lavish Blu-ray box-set. The pick of the bunch is I'm No Angel, and although the subsequent imposition of the Hays Code certainly curbed her fun (especially at first), West's control of her body, her talents and her destiny is still so refreshing. She didn't just carry these films, she wrote most of them, and frequently brooked the sexist cliches of '30s cinema, both behind the screen and up on it.

5. Holly Hunter – I don't care what it is, if Holly Hunter's in it, I'll watch it. The greatest actor of her generation, if only occasionally given the material to match. Watching Copycat, shortly after revisiting Broadcast News, made me realise that Holly Hunter talking in a choked whisper is the main thing cinema was invented for. She is absolutely staggering in that film – cast as a cop hunting a serial killer with help from boffin Sigourney Weaver, who got strangled by a psycho and hasn’t left the house for 13 months (which in the current climate doesn't seem that long). The movie is like the halfway point between Tightrope and In the Cut: a hybrid of misogynistic serial killer porn and inverted feminist thriller, and isn't great overall, but it's worth it a hundred times over for Hunter’s rich, multi-layered characterisation, a performance that knocks you sideways.

***

MY BEST WRITING ON FILM

1. My favourite piece to write this year was this one. Getting to tell the story of Ghost World on its 20th anniversary was a dream come true. As a teenager, the film struck me like lightning, and it's been hugely important to me ever since. Since I compressed a month of research into 1,800 words, here are a few deleted scenes:

- Enid’s trendsetting look, worked on by Birch and costume designer Mary Zophres, wasn’t purely for show. “It was a great way to express Enid’s mood from day to day,” says Birch, “because she was so stoic and almost monotone in a lot of her expressions and delivery – with the sarcasm and everything – so it really gave you a glimpse of her inner world.”

- Birch on the age-gap relationship: “The only one in control of that relationship was Enid. She’s the driving force in finding him, in building a connection with him, in trying him out in a romantic capacity and then making the decision to go. So there is no power imbalance, other than that she’s got all the power, but doesn’t know what to do with it.”

- Zwigoff on working with the Weinsteins. “United Artists, MGM and Granada pretty much left me alone, for which I’m ever grateful. It was the opposite of my next film, Bad Santa, which was a constant series of battles with the Weinsteins. I refused to let them ruin that film after I’d put so much work into it. I managed to stubbornly navigate around most of their bad ideas, but I’d say that experience took about 10 years off my life. They deserve prison for that alone.”

- Joe Talbot on Ghost World’s ambivalence: “It doesn’t feel like it’s ever judgemental towards its characters. Sometimes directors end up wagging our finger at our characters, to show our own moral superiority, because we’re afraid that we’ll be judged by the flaws of the characters we’ve created. And I really loved Ghost World’s ability to hover above that fear and that judgement.”

- Illeana Douglas made frequent pleas to Zwigoff for Seymour to end up with her character, Roberta. Those fell on deaf ears.

- What does Birch think Enid would be railing against today? “She’d probably be pissed off about everything,” she says. “As much as I am.” Zwigoff says the character would still have “mindless consumerism” in her sights, “and maybe greed, and religion”. Does he think consumerism has worsened since 2001? “Well, you can now buy a $75 ‘vagina’ candle at Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website,” he says. “That’s the ‘high-end’ racket. The low-end grifts are more like the Dollar Menu at McDonald’s. But they’re all trying to scramble for more money for which they would eagerly trade off say, the Amazon rainforest for a few more pennies of profit.”

2. A spirited defence of Return to Oz, for the Guardian. (Link)

3. Interviewing Benh Zeitlin for Total Film (August issue). (Link to preview)

4. Stray thoughts on Tiger Bay, a revolution in British film. (Link)

5. An American in Paris on the big screen. (Link)

6. Trash as social history: Pit Stop. (Link)

***

AND A COUPLE OF PIECES ABOUT OTHER THINGS

1. On returning to gigs, for the Guardian. (Link)

2. On the Manics' Holy Bible for Record Collector's special edition mag:

***

Thanks for reading. I'll leave you with one of the greatest pieces of dialogue ever written, by Jules Furthman for Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings, a film that I watch at least once a year:

Bonnie Lee: You love him, don't you, Kid?
Kid Dabb: Yes, I guess I do.
Bonnie Lee: Why can't I love him the way you do? Why couldn't I sneer when he tries to kill himself, feel proud when he doesn't? Why couldn't I be there to meet him when he gets back? Why couldn't I... What do you do when he doesn't come back when you expect him to?
Kid Dabb: I go nuts.