Review of 2019: Part 3 – Movies

Part 1 was about books, Part 2 was live stuff. This one's about films. I only saw 95 this year, which by my previous standards is pathetic, but is also probably Healthy and A Good Thing.

Fourteen premieres of the year...

... being old films I saw for the first time in 2019, and really liked.



1-3. Three Colours Red (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1994), The Double Life of Véronique (Kieślowski, 1991) and No End (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1985) – The climax to Kieslowski’s tricolore trilogy is a sort of twisted Amèlie: a wilfully dark slow-burner that dares you to love it. Part-time model Irène Jacob has a sexist boyfriend, a junkie brother, and has just run over a dog. That dog belongs to reclusive retired judge Jean-Louis Trintignant, who hates everyone and is spying crustily on his neighbours. After that charming meet cute they begin a tentative friendship, but this is no simple Hollywood heartwarmer and Trintignant no thawing grandpa: he remains a complex character, and their relationship is as much about honesty as redemption. If it speaks to you, though – and it does to me – you’ll never forget it. This is Kieslowski’s most stylish film: playful at times, almost hallucinatory at others, with Felliniesque tendencies and an inspired use of music. Those flourishes augment a story that feels minor and even disjointed for quite a while – but stick with it. The final 20 is astonishing.

When I was watching movies, this was the year of Kieslowski. Véronique is an understated, hypnotic Kieslowski film that runs the gamut from eerie to joyous, but thrums with quiet pain, while radiating artistry in the imagery, music (by Zbigniew Preisner) and performance. Jacob is chokingly effective as Véronique and Weronika, sensitive, identical women who never meet, but feel an intangible connection. It’s often plotless – and its bits of plot can feel like contrived whimsy – but it’s mesmerising too, and when it hits, it hits hard. You may know it’s coming, when Véronique takes a closer look at those transparencies... oof. I’d like to watch this again soon, as I’m not quite sure how to judge it: the moments of profound visual and emotional beauty (Jacob walking in the light between shadows) vs some apparent shortcomings that are more prosaic. It could end up being a favourite.

And then there was No End, which began the whole thing. That's a mesmerising Kieslowski film about a ghost, a grieving widow and a political trial. It's a sad, wise, wintry work, profound about loss and revealing about communist Poland. Every scene is brilliant.

I'm going to watch Dekalog for the first time in 2020. I can't wait.



4. Heat Lightning (Mervyn LeRoy, 1934) – Like The Petrified Forest but fun: a tough, crackling, slangy piece of Pre-Code magic about mannish mechanic Aline MacMahon, her frustrated kid sister (Ann Dvorak) and the fugitives, floozies and other lost souls who stumble into their desert gas station. It’s a little masterpiece: a film that juggles irreverence, suspense and drama, working hard for its emotional moments, which are understated and all the more effective for it. And it has pretty much my dream cast, dominated by MacMahon – who’s in terrific form – but with a decent part for Dvorak (largely sidelined by Warner’s after taking an eight-month honeymoon and briefing against the studio from the boat), as well as perfect supporting bits for Willard Robertson as McMahon’s quietly-spoken admirer, Glenda Farrell as a flirtatious divorcee, and Frank McHugh as her put-upon chauffeur. Plus Lyle Talbot as a nervy bank robber on the lam. It is 1933 after all.

5. The Twilight Samurai (Yōji Yamada, 2002) – A wonderful film about widowed, low-ranking samurai Hiroyuki Sanada trying to care for two daughters – and a mum with dementia – as honour and clan loyalties threaten to draw him into conflict. It’s a mixture of the conventional and the markedly not: there’s a little spoonfeeding and a mawkish coda, but also a hero who’s told off for being smelly, and a bit where the long-promised face-off is delayed by the villain wanting a chat and eating his own cremated daughter. In either mode, the film has a lovely feel to it: touching, melancholic but good-humoured, ultimately elegiac, and while the accent is rarely on action, it can do that too. Sanada is perfect as the taciturn hero: reluctant retainer and doting father, spurning the love of his life through a sense of duty.



6. Tales of Manhattan (Julien Duvivier, 1942) – The best pormanteau film I’ve seen from Hollywood’s Golden Age, beginning with Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth and Thomas Mitchell trapped in a warped, noirish love triangle, and ending with Paul Robeson arms outstretched, in full voice – the stories all linked by the same increasingly bedraggled tailcoat. There’s a phenomenal collection of talent assembled here by Fox, both behind and in front of the camera, including director Julien Duvivier (Pépé Le Moko), writers Ben Hecht and Lamar Trotti, and one of the best casts brought together in this or any other era. And though the film juggles genres, it brings the same heightened sensibility to each, as well as ruminating gamely on the nature of luck. With the exception of a tiresome chapter starring W. C. Fields – excised from the original release, restored on home video – every single one of these stories is good (the African-American one is compassionate and treats its younger characters quite well, though it’s also patronising and stereotypical to the point of racism), and two of them are exceptional.

The pick of the bunch is a screwball masterpiece in miniature, utilising Ginger Rogers’ gift for instant emotional connection and Henry Fonda’s ever underrated comic timing in a funny, lushly romantic story about a bride falling in love with her best man. And in the other stand-out, which features a lovely part for veteran character actor Harry Davenport, homeless alcoholic Edward G. Robinson gets cleaned up, in more ways than one, to attend a university reunion, which – naturally thanks to George Sanders – turns into a referendum on his character. Right from the ingenious play-within-a-film near its commencement, you know this movie’s going to be something special, and it is. There’s wit and wisdom to spare. There’s also Charles Laughton as a frustrated composer, J. Carrol Naish as an armed robber and Robeson in dungarees, married to Ethel Waters, spouting socialist agitprop – so something for everyone, really. Also, did I mention how good Thomas Mitchell is here? He is. And he’s fantastically directed.



7. The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979) – Eight gang members in lovely leather waistcoats try to fight their way home to Coney Island from The Bronx, pursued by the cops and every ridiculously-attired badass in town. A richly visual cult action film from Walter Hall, with echoes of early John Carpenter, tons of suspense and a gloriously grimy NY milieu. On one level it’s completely preposterous (one rival gang appear to be Kiss wearing baseball gear, another are in dungarees and on rollerskates), but luckily it’s also amazing: one of the great all-in-one-night movies (see also: After Hours, Die Hard, American Graffiti, Attack the Block). And, apparently oblivious to it, and in other ways rather unreconstructed, it’s also really quite gay. It can add something curious and intangible to a B-movie when you get wooden actors speaking stylised dialogue, but when those bad actors go big, it falls down. That’s the case here: keeping it simple, the Warriors work – even if a few could be written more fully – while hamming baddie David Patrick Kelly is notably A Bit Much. Cracking film, though.



8. They Came to a City (Basil Dearden, 1945) – A genuinely inspiring socialist allegory, based on a J. B. Priestley play, with a heady atmosphere of victory-scented utopianism that places it unmistakably in 1944. A bit heavy-handed in places, but thoroughly striking, with rich rhetoric, a notably fine Googie Withers performance, and modernist, abstract sets that are almost as fascinating as her face.

9. Nine Queens (Fabián Bielinsky, 2000) – A terrific, endlessly surprising Argentine film about two con men walking the streets of Buenos Aires, trying to close the deal of a lifetime. Affecting and amusing, with a cast of memorable characters – particularly Ricardo Darin’s goateed, merciless Marcos.



10. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti and Rodney Rothman, 2018) – When a film has a cartoon Peter Porker pig known as Spider-Ham and that cartoon Peter Porker pig says something so unexpectedly moving that it nearly makes you cry – that’s when you know you’re watching a good film. It’s that heart that sets it apart, though it is also very funny and well-animated, and Lord and Miller’s post-modernism freshens the formula without overwhelming the story. Even the action climax doesn’t overstay its welcome (much). Film noir isn’t from the 1930s, though. Sort it out.

11. Lenny (Bob Fosse, 1974) – An exceptional, intelligent Lenny Bruce biopic, with Dustin Hoffman’s acerbic, neurotic, obsessive, impulsive Bruce – an insecure adulterer and hopeless morphine addict, as well as trailblazer and mirror to America’s rampant hypocrisy – a little more recognisable than the Manic Pixie Dream Lenny of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. It’s directed in incomparable New Hollywood style by Fosse, a clear influence on films from Raging Bull to Jackie, with credible performances led by Hoffman’s pyrotechnics, though Bruce’s professional life is rather more interesting to watch than his personal one, meaning that the decision to angle the story on his relationship with his wife (Valerie Perrine) isn’t necessarily right.



12. Harper (Jack Smight, 1966) – A genuinely special PI film that bridges the gap between The Big Sleep (with Bacall in the General Sternwood role) and Altman’s Long Goodbye, as Paul Newman’s tough-talking, hungover Lew Harper scoops old coffee grains out of the bin for re-use – and gets outsmarted a half-dozen times, while rarely losing his smirk. At times the plot plods and the story feels secondhand, the film touched too by those naff ‘60s elements that never feel authentic, but it’s packed full of scintillating William Goldman dialogue, with a first-rate cast – including Shelley Winters as an alcoholic former starlet, Julie Harris a smack addict chanteuse, and Arthur Hill as Newman’s best bud – and imaginative imagery from Conrad Hall. The final scene in particular is an absolute classic: Goldman at his zenith, and Newman close to his; a shame then that the writer’s conspicuous contempt for women, fat people and “faggots” serves elsewhere to detract from the sardonic lyricism of his lines.

13. Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1995) – A revealing, difficult documentary about counter-culture cartoonist Robert Crumb, mental illness and America. The sequence in which you see his brother's comic books degenerate from charming pastiches of popular art into endlessly and impossibly dense word-heavy blue scrawls is as harrowing a depiction of insanity as I've seen. I've found it hard to get it out of my head.



14. The Adventures of Mark Twain (Irving Rapper, 1944) – Wonderful episodic Americana about steamboat captain, gold prospector and comedy roaster Sam Clemens (Fredric March) – better known by his nom de plume. March is excellent, sidestepping his penchant to play too big, and there are lovely moments throughout – particularly the love scene in the rain, and the characters tumbling from the Huck Finn manuscript – though the second half is sometimes too conventional, and Alexis Smith (as Mrs Clemens) is increasingly asked to eulogise Twain’s greatness for the benefit of the viewer, rather than enjoy a character of her own. Still, the writers’ knowledge of Twain is clearly first-rate (I’m talking the works, not the events), and they do a good job of knitting his observations and witticisms into the script without it ever feeling mannered or laborious. Plenty of his gags still hold up, though the ones in his climactic speaking tour are admittedly absolutely terrible bantz. Max Steiner’s score has his usual virtues and vices: lovely themes alongside clichéd jingles and hysterical cues.

***

Old favourites

The ten best films I rewatched:



1. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) – Fragments of genius. Amidst the wreckage are five or six of the most stunning passages in American cinema. I wrote at length about the film here.

2. Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001) – You can take your Juno, your Scott Pilgrim, even your Heathers, and chuck them in a skip, because Ghost World just does it all so much better. Well, all of it that's worth doing. I'm beginning to think this melancholy, bitingly hilarious crystallisation of teen ennui might be the only film I'll ever really need.



3. Holiday (George Cukor, 1938) – Unfortunately I am in love with Katharine Hepburn in this film. And in love with the Potters. Lew Ayres starts as a cartoon, then adds layer upon layer. Inspired, inspiring, intoxicating. It’s pretty much perfection. Here's a full-length piece about it. The film is out on Criterion Blu-ray, including the original 1930 version as an extra, next month.



4. On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) – Along with Star Wars and Les 400 Coups, this was the movie that got me into movies. I had that amazing Italian poster on my wall as a teenager. I’ve been to a concert because they were performing a bit of the score. I still know the (incomparable) taxicab scene off by heart. The film, enduringly problematically, is an apologia for informing, in which director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg shamefully equate the parlour communists they ratted out to the HUAC with murderous mobsters. Context and subtext aside, though, it remains an absolutely exhilarating piece of cinema: powerful, rousing, moving – even sexy.

Brando, in the greatest of all his performances, is Terry Malloy, the uneducated ‘bum’ who threw his one shot at a title fight and is now the mascot of a corrupt waterfront labour union run by Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). After setting up a talkative neighbour to get shoved off a building, Terry falls for the victim’s sister, convent girl Edie (Eva Marie Saint), and feels the first painful stirrings of conscience. There’s such an intensity and a depth to Brando’s performance here, which conjures beauty and nobility and even innocence from a character who is thick and crude and inarticulate and sometimes ugly. Something is always happening beneath the surface of his skin, and the details too are dynamic: the way he picks up Saint’s glove, cleans it off, then puts it on, as he sits on a swing and continues his guileless, pained, teasing courtship.

Schulberg’s dialogue is lyrical but real, the location photography groundbreakingly good, and Leonard Bernstein’s sole movie score a revelation, while Kazan dips into horror iconography and avant garde camera swishes – the latter simulating Terry’s punchdrunk climactic stagger – to augment the action. It comes too with career-best turns from Saint (her debut), Cobb and Karl Malden, as well as the finest thing Steiger did outside of The Pawnbroker. I still find it a troubling, difficult and mendacious film, but it also gave me the gift of cinema and I will always love it.



5. Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935) – Not the most groundbreaking, challenging, interesting, avant garde or seamless musical, but hands-down my favourite. The five numbers are transformative, transcendent, even transfiguring, and around them is a slick, funny Wodehousian comedy of mistaken identity, only occasionally made mystifying by time, and played to the hilt by a perfect supporting cast: bask in Helen Broderick’s one-liners, Edward Everett Horton’s double-takes and that weird, slightly saucy pouty thing that Eric Blore keeps doing.

I really love Ginger’s facial acting in this, especially the two greatest of the dance sequences: ‘Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)’ and ‘Cheek to Cheek’ – the latter a heightened, aching, impossibly beautiful five minutes of cinema, and irresistible shorthand for the intoxicating nature of Depression-era escapism, utilised in films like The Purple Rose of Cairo and The English Patient.

There are some wonderful flashes of instant mythmaking too, particularly Sandrich’s exuberant shot of Fred and Ginger’s feet travelling to the dancefloor at the start of ‘The Piccolino’, and the delirious, ecstatic way they twirl out of frame at the close, love conquering all, including the elaborately drawn-out plot whose very superficiality enhances those peaks of exotic American romanticism.



6. A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954) – An utterly devastating musical melodrama, with Judy’s best performance, some brilliantly perverse numbers, those delicate, beautifully balanced CinemaScope visuals from Cukor, Leavitt and Hoyningen-Heuse, and Moss Hart’s rich, economical dialogue. It can feel jumpy at times – and not just because of the two lost passages (now partially reconstructed) – with long scenes, sudden epiphanies and then leaps forward, but the classic sequences are legion. Three favourites are the early passage in Norman’s bedroom – which brilliantly foreshadows and elucidates in a handful of images and lines – Esther’s emotionally complex monologue in her dressing room (followed by a ‘show must goes on’ musical reprise), and Maine putting on one last great performance prior to his fateful dip.

The last hits very close to home for me and as such is virtually unwatchable. That Esther-Norman relationship is one of the most effective and believable I’ve seen on screen: so tactile and true, with a rhapsodic tenderness, an easy, playful chemistry and a shared pain that you engage with almost physically. Mason’s acting in the night court, and later in his bed, is mesmerising. And then there’s ‘The Man That Got Away’ – arguably the outstanding musical sequence in all of cinema, though the journey there was tortuous. Cukor and co were on at least their fourth vastly different conception of the scene by the time they cracked it. It’s absolute magic: the only thing more extraordinary than what Judy is doing with her body – contorting in communion with her muse in that dim, smoke-filled dive – is what she’s doing with her voice.

If you love the film as I do, and enjoy reading, I’d really recommend Ronald Haver’s book about A Star Is Born and its 1983 reconstruction, a mixture of making-of (and unmaking-of, and remaking-of), Hollywood history, detective story and love story.



7. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992) – A shortsighted gunfighter, a hero who can’t get on his horse, and a bloke being shot on the shitter. Yes, it’s the last great Western: Eastwood’s ambivalent masterpiece about the cost of killing, and a lot else besides. It’s classic in style but offbeat in nature, chock-full of stylised, lyrical language (which extends even to the opening crawl) and powered by an astonishing ensemble. English Bob’s unmasking, Clint’s heart-to-heart with the damaged damsel, and the Schofield Kid’s tear-flecked confession are all extraordinary highlights. Saul Rubinek? Saul Rubbernecking, more like. *high five* There's a long(-ish) read here.

8. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013) – The Coen brothers film that I really love: yearning, folk music, wintry sadness, counter-intuitive plotting and cats. Call me conventional but I could live without the John Goodman passage. The musical scenes are utterly perfect.



9. I Love You Again (W. S. Van Dyke II, 1940) – An immaculate, unheralded comic masterpiece, with Bill Powell’s effortless tour-de-force as teetotal pillar of the community Larry “Grape Juice” Wilson, who gets a whack on the head and reverts to his old self – charming conman, George Carey. He heads home to raid the savings, only to fall in love with his own wife (Myrna Loy, naturally), who’s busy divorcing him. Frank McHugh is hilarious as the phony medic along for the ride. Ingenious script by Charles Lederer, Harry Kurnitz and George Oppenheimer, whose hand seems most apparent. There’s the odd rough edge from Woody Van Dyke’s obsessive, breakneck one-take approach, but he certainly knew how to film comedy, especially with a script and cast as good as this one.

10. Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) – “Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?” A near-perfect noir, with poetic insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) suckered into a murder plot by housewife, anklet wearer and angel of death, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). It’s cleverly plotted, intensely suspenseful and full of the most extraordinary dialogue and voiceover, written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler.

Stanwyck is good and MacMurray terrific – cast brilliantly against type for the first time – though no-one can touch Edward G. Robinson as the gruff, adoring, fast-talking investigator from up the corridor, who smells a rat but can’t ever quite believe that it’s his friend. Their doomed bromance gives the film its heart and its deeply moving final exchange – another of Wilder’s impeccable pay-offs, though only because the gas chamber finale that he shot was rejected by censors. I’m even coming around to Stanwyck’s wig.

***

And here's a top 25 of the decade...

... boiled down from a long list of 70 to a shortlist of 68, then a final 25. It's favourites, really, not best, though that distinction is always a little muddy. The top two are right, anyway; the rest of it is up for grabs.



25. Bad Lucky Goat (Samir Oliveros, 2017)
24. Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012)
23. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)
22. Paperman (John Kahrs, 2011)
21. Skeletons (Nick Whitfield, 2010)
20. I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2016)
19. The Other Guys (Adam McKay, 2010)
18. The Interrupters (Steve James, 2011)
17. The Intouchables (Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, 2011)
16. Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (Susanna White, 2010)
15. A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Lelio, 2017)
14. The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011)
13. Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011)
12. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012)
11. Best of Enemies (Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, 2015)



10. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016) – Kelly Reichardt has such a unique way of looking at the world, at humanity, and this triptych of short stories is an instant classic: a rich, tactile, beautifully-edited film that's brilliantly low key in its performances, its humour and its sumptuous, washed-out, finely-grained cinematography. First-watch review here.

9. Amy (Asif Kapadia, 2015) is a tough watch, but it feels essential, not just for its vivid picture of a fascinating, deeply troubled young woman, but also for its wider significance: as a plea for people to stop being so horribly selfish, to stop seeing excess and illness as ‘rock and roll’ and drug abuse as a joke, and for the media to realise that if it wants to paint itself as a crusading Fifth Estate, then some basic humanity wouldn’t go amiss. First-watch review.



8. The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 2011) has elements of fatalism without being pessimistic, tells a simple story that never looks for an easy way out, and eschews sentimentality while radiating a bold and uncompromising sense of humanity. It moved me very deeply. Full review.

7. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011) – A breathtaking, one-of-a-kind character study about a high-school student (Anna Paquin) wrestling harrowingly with life's vicissitudes after causing a fatal accident. It's profound, rounded, literate, poetic and intimate, full of completely surprising and real characters and developments, and climaxing with a scene of remarkable catharsis in lieu of any easy answers. More here.



6. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) – An intensely beautiful, compassionate film in three parts about a quiet, 'soft' African-American boy being battered by the inner-city experience as he tries to deal with his tortured sexual awakening. First-watch review here.

5. Pride (Matthew Warchus, 2014) takes a premise that seems merely like a liberal wet dream and fashions an astonishingly erudite, funny and intensely moving movie, which works as an examination of our shared humanity, a startling recreation of the last stand of our country's working class, and a much-needed rallying cry at a time when the left has never seemed weaker or more irrelevant. Full review here.



4. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) – An exhilarating feminist actioner that unleashes torrents of water on the risible '80s Mad Max films from an improbably great height. More here.

3. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013) – This sad, whimsical and purposefully baggy story of missed opportunities and shambling urban alienation is an extraordinarily special piece of work, and one which avoids cliché not because it thinks it’s clever to do so, but because this is how things would be, how the characters would behave. Full first-watch review here.



2. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012) is remarkable in every way: stunning to look at, full of jaw-droppingly lyrical dialogue and blessed with a triumphant, eminently hummable Cajun soundtrack. Lit by a multitude of brilliant sequences that seem to come out of nowhere, but don't, and dominated by Wallis's heroics (including some excellent screaming), it packs an emotional punch like nothing else I've seen in years. More here.



1. Winter's Bone (Debra Granik, 2011) – Debra Granik's feminist masterwork is the key film of the decade so far: an unorthodox, spine-tingling thriller, a humanist fable, and a staggering study of a good person under almost intolerable pressure. In her breakout role, Jennifer Lawrence is Ree Dolly, a strong, selfless, smart-mouthed 17-year-old living with her vacant mother and two young siblings in Missouri's Ozark Mountains. Once it ran with bootleg moonshine, now this here's Meth Country, and if her crystal-cooking father doesn't turn up for his court hearing, they're going to lose the house, the woods and the whole family unit. So Ree sets out in search of him, facing threats, silence and regular beatings from pinch-faced people who share a lot of the same blood that runs in her veins, and down her face. There's brutality and violence to spare, but it's the humanity you remember. Full review.

***

Thanks for reading, and thanks in particular to those who've shared these pieces.

Rick's 100 favourite movies: Part 3

This is the third of four posts about my favourite movies, taking in everything from Elia Kazan's apologia for informing to Pixar's finest film, via martial arts, pastries and Lillian Gish with a big gun.

Part 1 (100-76) is here, and part 2 (75-51) can be found here.

50. Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937)

A crackling feminist masterpiece that passes the Bechdel Test 90 times a minute, as a flawless ensemble cast trades blistering, bitchy, pitch-black wisecracks while hanging out in a theatrical boarding house for women. It's also the tearjerker to end them all, though it only seems to be me who feels that way. Full review.

49. The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
Sex and death in Texas, as dissolution sweeps an ailing town and its picture house gets ready to close. Ben Johnson gives one of my favourite performances, as that old, sad voice of reason, Sam the Lion, delivering a waterside monologue that's perhaps the best three minutes of the New Hollywood.

48. The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928)
One of the great late silents, with Vidor interrogating the American Dream like the big leftie he was. Completely heartbreaking.

47. The Dreamlife of Angels (Erich Zonka, 1998)

Profound, poignant film about the friendship that develops – and then unravels – between two young women who meet at a factory in Lille. Ila (Élodie Bouchez) is friendly, compassionate and happy to ask for help; self-centred Maria (Natacha Régnier) throws her pride and practicality to the wind as she embarks on a self-destructive affair with an utter shit. A wise, insightful and immersive study of human relationships, and the nature of friendship, with exceptional performances from the two leads – especially the big-eyed, expressive Bouchez.

46. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)
Unforgiven is Clint Eastwood's masterpiece: a towering dismantling of Western mythos, extraordinary in every way. I wrote one of my best pieces on it.

45. Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
"I want... to die." *sob*

44. On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

With Les 400 Coups (see the final part of the list!) and Star Wars, this was the movie that got me into movies, and inspired a Marlon Brando obsession that's never really gone away. I must have seen it 30 times. It's also fascinating – though troubling – from a historical perspective, as writer Budd Schulberg and director Elia Kazan's apologia for naming names to HUAC. I still know the entire taxicab scene off by heart. Try me.

43. Le Doulos (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962)
Melville par excellence, with Belmondo at his best and a killer twist.

42. Blessed Event (Roy Del Ruth, 1932)
Arguably the greatest comedy film of all time, with “that kid from advertising” Alvin Roberts (Lee Tracy) commandeering his newspaper’s society section, and turning it into the filthiest gossip column in America. Tracy is my favourite male actor and was once one of the biggest stars in the world, until the Production Code outlawed his brand of comedy and he compounded matters by allegedly urinating on the Mexican Army, with the result that he was unceremoniously fired by the biggest film studio in the world. I've reviewed the film here, and written about Tracy here.

41. Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955)

Bergman does sex comedy - and the result is a deep, delicate, just about perfect movie, like the best of Lubitsch and Ophüls mixed with Partie de campagne. And while it's influenced everyone from New York-based Jewish songwriter Stephen Sondheim to New York-based Jewish filmmaker Woody Allen, the original remains by far the best. A lawyer, his young wife, his mistress, her lover, her lover's wife, the mistress's mother, the lawyer's son and a couple of horny servants flirt, argue and try to cop off with each other (except the mum), the whole group ultimately coming together for a sunlit weekend in the country. Beautifully written, acted and photographed, it's equal parts sentiment, melancholia, absurdism, witty badinage, and timeless, mind-expanding philosophy on the nature of love, lust and language, full of surprises, clever bon mots and rich characterisation. There's even a bit where someone falls in a puddle.

40. Broadway Danny Rose (Woody Allen, 1984)

Danny Rose: What'd you do, you divorced him, or got a separation, or what?
Tina Vitale: Nah, some guy shot him in the eyes.
Danny Rose: Really? He's blind?
Tina Vitale: Dead.
Danny Rose: Dead. Of course, 'cause the bullets go right through.

I don't think this is Woody's greatest film, but it's the one I return to most often: a sweet, funny, utterly charming tall tale - with hidden emotional heft - about a loveable Broadway talent agent (Woody Allen) trying to escort his best client's mistress (Mia Farrow) to a crucial show, and unwittingly incurring the wrath of the mafia. What seems at first glance a slight, minor movie holds untold pleasures, from Allen's script - stuffed with gems - to Gordon Willis's mesmerising monochrome cinematography, and an unforgettable, uncharacteristic performance from an unrecognisable Farrow, as the forceful, temperamental Tina Vitale, her late husband a juice man for the mob. "He made juice for the mob?" asks a baffled Allen.

39. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)

Crouching Tiger is one of the great films of last decade, often claustrophobic in scale, but epic in its treatment of human emotion, and chock-full of magic, magnificence and good old-fashioned fucking mayhem. It looks beautiful, it sounds beautiful - hell, it is beautiful - and where it's going, we don't needs roads, or even floors. Much more on it here.

38. The Bakery Girl of Monceau (Éric Rohmer, 1963)
A mesmerising, intoxicating Rohmer short that's as close to a personal manifesto as you'll ever see on screen. His enduring preoccupation was where eroticism touches romance, and his view of both was heady, wise, ironic. After the false start that was the director's abysmal debut feature, the tedious, neorealist Signe du Lion, this story of a law student (Barbet Schroeder) flirting with a counter girl at a Parisian bakery (Claudine Soubrier) as he waits for his true love (Michèle Girardon) to walk past is extraordinarily affecting, honest and insightful: grubbily conspiratorial as we're asked to see everything from his jaundiced viewpoint (it's a 'moral tale' in so much as it's about personal morality), a little eerie as it ponders fate and chance, and gloriously sensual when they duck into an alleyway to talk and he starts stroking her neck. The first of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, and – at 23 minutes – the best film I've seen this year.

37. Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus, 1959)

An astonishing movie that I only heard of for the first time in May; it sounded amazing, so I got a ticket to a BFI screening. It's the Orpheus myth transplanted to the Rio Carnival, with womanising guitarist Breno Mello falling in love with pure, troubled Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn). They dance, have sex, and save one another, but his feisty ex-girlfriend and Eurydice's psychotic, death-faced stalker hint at the unlikeliness of a happy ending. It's a feast for the eyes and ears, with impossibly vibrant Eastman Color cinematography showcasing Rio and its carnival (those yellows!), invigorating dance and intoxicating bossa nova music, while the story moves effortlessly from utterly joyous to blackly terrifying and then abstractly spiritual. Perhaps it runs out of steam towards the very end, but for the most part it captures Rio with a startling immediacy: its characters pulsating with passion, natural charm and an unapologetic, everyday eroticism. The story - adapted from a Brazilian play - struck me as one of those high-concept ideas that might extract a certain truth from its material by dropping it into Rio. In actuality, it's difficult to believe when watching Black Orpheus that it would or could make sense anywhere else, such is the film's complete conviction, and the virtuosic skill that Camus displays in meshing these diverse elements together, while capturing the penury, charm and beauty of the setting, and inspiring a host of pitch perfect performances. It's extraordinary.

36. The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928)
One of the high watermarks of silent cinema: a stunningly atmospheric drama ignited by a tour-de-force performance from the incomparable Lillian Gish, who plays a tormented, tortured waif driven to madness as she’s buffeted by a desert wind and by unfettered male sexual aggression. More here.

35. Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996)
My favourite performance of all time, courtesy of the incomparable Emily Watson. I also find von Trier the most interesting director working today.

34. Winter's Bone (Debra Granik, 2010)

Debra Granik's feminist masterwork is the key film of the decade so far: an unorthodox, spine-tingling thriller, a humanist fable, and a staggering study of a good person under almost intolerable pressure. In her breakout role, Jennifer Lawrence is Ree Dolly, a strong, selfless, smart-mouthed 17-year-old living with her vacant mother and two young siblings in Missouri's Ozark Mountains. Once it ran with bootleg moonshine, now this here's Meth Country, and if her crystal-cooking father doesn't turn up for his court hearing, they're going to lose the house, the woods and the whole family unit. So Ree sets out in search of him, facing threats, silence and regular beatings from pinch-faced people who share a lot of the same blood that runs in her veins, and down her face. Full review here.

33. All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)
From the astute, literate voiceover and classic freeze-frame that launches the story, via stinging one-liners, sublime reaction faces and a litany of unimprovable set-pieces, to one of the most memorable, satisfying (and scary) endings in the history of movies, All About Eve is a landmark of Hollywood’s Golden Age: an unassailable classic with the kind of dialogue that a moviegoer dreams about. More here.

32. The Snowman (Dianne Jackson and Jimmy T. Murakami, 1982)
What Christmas Eves were invented for (as well as venerating the baby Jesus), and the first film I ever loved.

31. The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992)
The twist. That twist. This mercurial masterpiece of ‘90s cinema has now been reduced to just one thing. Not that its twist isn’t magnificent, but it’s certainly not the film’s raison d’etre, or its reason to be celebrated. It doesn’t explain why the film continues to enrapture, enthral and grow in emotional resonance as the years pass and the viewings rack up. And, unlike most twists, it doesn’t come at the end, but at the halfway point, meaning that if you’ve avoided seeing the film because you think you know how it ends – you really don’t. Full review.

30. Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935)

My favourite musical, starring my favourite musical star, Fred Astaire. The immortal 'Cheek to Cheek' is unquestionably the highlight, but this slice of ineffable, irrepressible escapism is stuffed with great jokes, timeless Irving Berlin songs and irreproachable dancing.

29. Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)
Garbo Laughs! And Ernst Lubitsch reminds everyone once again that he's the best director of romantic comedies in the history of movies.

28. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
One of the great films, a beguiling, bewitching, sometimes bewildering collision of Gothic horror and fairytale, a haunting, hypnotic vision of pure evil, of goodness, of redemption, of innocence lost and perhaps regained, of greed and guilt, loss, delusion, sexual obsession and puritanical perversion. It has some weak acting, wild lurches in tone and even a little Schufftan silliness, and yet also many of the most striking, magical sequences of its era, climaxing with a half-hour confrontation between good and evil that is amongst the most indelibly artistic and impossibly moving passages of pure cinema ever put onto celluloid. And just when you think it can’t get any better, silent screen icon Lillian Gish turns up, armed with the only truly worthy role of her sound career. Full write-up here.

27. Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings, 1942)

Incredible short from propagandist (and anarchist, and surrealist) Humphrey Jennings, one of my favourite filmmakers. Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started and Diary for Timothy are his most well-known films, and this one contains my favourite shot in his ouevre (it's the bloke exhaling smoke through his nose while watching Flanagan and Allen), though most of his work from 1939 onwards is great, especially Spare Time and The Silent Village.

26. Up (Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, 2009)
This is the review I wrote for the paper when it came out: "PIXAR'S latest - and greatest - is a very special piece of work, a deliriously enjoyable yarn that packs a considerable emotional wallop. It begins, gloriously, with a scrupulously detailed faux '30s newsreel, as a Lindbergh-esque aviator − Charles Muntz − returns triumphant from exploring the Venezuelan wilds only to fall from grace amidst accusations of fakery. Watching, transfixed, is Carl Fredricksen, a bespectacled, toothy wannabe adventurer. Returning home from the theatre, he stumbles across a fellow Muntz afficionado, the talkative Ellie, and a friendship blossoms. Through an exquisite, intensely moving wordless montage ('Married Life'), we see Carl and Ellie's life together, as they fall in love, marry and grow old, their dream of exploring South America dashed time and again - the savings jar smashed and raided to cover house repairs and hospital bills. Ending with Ellie's passing, this four minute sequence is a bold, breathtakingly brilliant bit of moviemaking that evokes It's a Wonderful Life and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with that exalted predecessor. Having lost his wife, and set to relinquish his home and independence, retired balloon salesman Carl (voiced by Edward Asner) does the only thing he can, affixing 20,000 balloons to his house in a bid to fly it to Paradise Falls - the lost world of Muntz's famous mission. Accidentally along for the ride is Russell, a young Wilderness Explorer who's desperate to secure his "assisting the elderly" badge and has been hunting for a snipe under the porch. From then on in, all bets are off, as the film's boundless imagination and anarchic sensibility conjure up a world of neurotic talking dogs, androgynous, chocolate-gobbling birds and paranoid adventurers, whilst never forgetting that we care what happens to its damaged, appealing central duo. Hysterically funny and emotionally resonant, Up hums with invention from first frame to last and, in having the guts to tackle big subjects with honesty, subtlety and intelligence, emerges as one of the finest films of recent years."

***



Thanks for reading.

Shane Black, Black Orpheus and awfully big problems – Reviews #241

Some reviews. In chronological order.


This tagline has absolutely nothing to do with the story, for which I admire it.

Crime of Passion (Gerd Oswald, 1957) – Tough-talking journo Barbara Stanwyck marries cop Sterling Hayden, then decides he needs a leg up the ladder, in this spirited if rather unbelievable late noir.

It stands out from the competition thanks to its decidedly adult approach, a typically imposing performance from Raymond Burr as Hayden's omniscient, brooding boss, and one fantastic shot after a key character receives a decidedly final comeuppance, though it doesn't change my conviction that Stanwyck did very little of value after 1944.

Hayden plays about the only characters in history who look as dishevelled and sweaty as me after working overtime at the office, which is reassuring and kind of disgusting. (2.5)

***



CINEMA: Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus, 1959) – An astonishing movie that I only heard of for the first time last month; it sounded amazing, so I got a ticket. It's the Orpheus myth transplanted to the Rio Carnival, with womanising guitarist Breno Mello falling in love with pure, troubled Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn). They dance, have sex, and save one another, but his feisty ex-girlfriend and Eurydice's psychotic, death-faced stalker hint at the unlikeliness of a happy ending.

It's a feast for the eyes and ears, with impossibly vibrant Eastman Color cinematography showcasing Rio and its carnival (those yellows!), invigorating dance and intoxicating bossa nova music, while the story moves effortlessly from utterly joyous to blackly terrifying and then abstractly spiritual. Perhaps it runs out of steam towards the very end, but for the most part it captures Rio with a startling immediacy: its characters pulsating with passion, natural charm and an unapologetic, everyday eroticism.

The story - adapted from a Brazilian play - struck me as one of those high-concept ideas that might extract a certain truth from its material by dropping it into Rio. In actuality, it's difficult to believe when watching Black Orpheus that it would or could make sense anywhere else, such is the film's complete conviction, and the virtuosic skill that Camus displays in meshing these diverse elements together, while capturing the penury, charm and beauty of the setting, and inspiring a host of pitch perfect performances.

It's extraordinary. (4)

See also: The overall effect may have been what Orson Welles may have had in mind when he pitched up in Rio to shoot the carnival in 1942, backed by the Roosevelt administration's Good Neighbour policy. In the event, he and studio RKO proceeded to bugger up the entire venture – a process documented in the second volume of Simon Callow's biography of Welles – though tantalising clips surfaced in the 1993 documentary, It's All True.

***



The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman, 1961) – This is the second of B-movie legend Roger Corman's eight movies based on the works of Gothic genius Edgar Allan Poe, and it's a step up from The Fall of the House of Usher: smarter, sharper and far more experimental. You can see it in the tinted flashbacks, a flirtatious attitude towards the truth and its stunning use of sound, which is used to disorientate, haunt and alarm us from the off.

As so often during this series, Vincent Price is a recluse who's either been driven half insane by the death of his wife, or is pretending that he has in order to avoid a few tricky questions, posed in this case by her brother, John Kerr. In comic roles, Price's scenery-chewing could look embarrassing, but amidst the horror milieu it's deliriously enjoyable, while attaining a histrionic truth with this more heightened material.

The movie dips a little in spots − trimming 10 minutes could have meant less time simply getting from one place to the next − but its coherent mix of visual stylistics, intelligent placing between madness and reality, and outstanding horror highlights make it an enjoyable watch, while the climax benefits from the groundwork done in ingratiating us with Price's character, before going off the deep end to delirious effect. (3)

***



TVM: The Best of Friends (Alvin Rakoff, 1991) – A remarkably thoughtful and mature TV movie based on the correspondence between legendary playwright George Bernard Shaw (Patrick McGoohan), esteemed museum curator Sydney Cockerell (John Gielgud) and Dame Laurentia McLachlan, a Benedectine nun who was one of the world's leading authorities on church music. Quite how a play in which the characters simply wander in and out of one another's rooms and gardens, reciting their letters, can be this entertaining, immersive and affecting is rather beyond me, but Hugh Whitmore's script is remarkably incisive, insightful and inspiring − even curiously, enduringly comforting − in its ruminations on friendship, religion and death.

That's especially true in the hands of these performers, with McGoohan a barnstorming but immensely likeable Shaw, and two of the finest actors of all time delivering late masterclasses: Gielgud's Cockerell understated, self-deprecating and self-aware, Hiller's Dame Laurentia radiating compassion, humanity and understanding: a fitting companion piece, in Hiller's penultimate appearance, to the greatest performance she ever gave, in Shaw's own Major Barbara. (4)

***



Last Action Hero (John McTiernan, 1993) – A smug mess of a movie, theoretically in the Sherlock Jr/Purple Rose of Cairo tradition, about an annoying child (Austin O’Brien) who uses a magic ticket to enter the new Arnie movie, Jack Slater IV, causing the abrupt and unnecessary deaths of two people.

Shane Black, one of my favourite writers, was called in to rescue this one, and his dizzyingly post-modern screenplay has some great one-liners and clever, satirical ideas, especially at the beginning – from Arnie as Olivier as Hamlet (actually retained from the original script) to O’Brien’s mum saying “Tell me the story of your life starting this morning, first period” to a cartoon cat who turns up at various moments to smoke the bad guys – but it’s also long, flabby, frequently irritating, and infuriatingly aloof, establishing absolutely no emotional connection with the story and its characters, so that we don’t really care about anything that happens, we’re just waiting for the next spoof, barb, gag or absurdly OTT action sequence.

Nor does it actually seem to make sense within its own parameters (why would the world of a Jack Slater movie include cop characters from across other genres and eras?!), while the kid is really poorly written and played, spending most of the movie trying to convince Slater that he’s a character in a movie, which admittedly leads to a couple of vaguely interesting thoughts on artifice and reality, but is mostly just pointless and boring.

The film’s neither as bad as the initial reviews and box-office takings suggested, nor anywhere near as good as the recent re-evaluation would have it (or as it thinks it is): a shambles with some smart ideas, great gags and mind-boggling stuntwork, but a shambles nonetheless. (2)

***



Dans Paris (Christophe Honoré, 2006) – This is a pretty good homage to the French New Wave with one huge and inescapable problem: Romain Duris’ character. I’ve suffered from depression my whole life, and what you don’t – repeat don’t – do is abuse your partner because of it. We’re asked to side with a protagonist here who spends the first half hour of the film berating and assaulting his girlfriend, and even if the rest of it were as good as Les quatre cents coups, that wouldn’t be OK.

In fact, the remainder of the movie is mostly spent with Duris in bed and his weird, warm-hearted womaniser of a brother (Louis Garrel) attempting to give him some vicarious pleasure by sprinting and shagging his way across the city, the whole thing presented as an updated pastiche of early ‘60s cinema. Around half of its derivative but energetic trickery hits the target: the apeing of Magnolia’s sole excursion into non-diegetic song is brilliant, the opening direct-to-camera address excruciatingly irritating. The non-linear narrative works, the Bande a part-ish dancing doesn’t. Contemporary Paris seen through the Nouvelle Vague lens good, sped-up action shamelessly half-inched from Zazie dans le Metro bad.

It’s also only partly successful in its evocation of mental illness: there’s truth and honesty in Duris’s characterisation (his wordless listlessness, his idea that we are born with a great sadness embedded inside us), but also pretension and falsity (the sections about his sister don’t ring true, much of the chat on the sofa is meaningless twaddle).

I loved Garrel’s appealingly offbeat character, though – just a note off normal, but that note is everything – and the climactic reading of a children’s story: the invasion of innocence into adulthood, seen there whole and like home, amidst the fracture of grown-up life, like the bit in the Ghost World comic where Enid puts on her favourite record from when she was a kid, and it both comforts her and exacerbates her unhappiness. The relationship between the brothers works too: sincere, standoffishness and loving, an unbreakable bond between their mutual exasperation.

Dans Paris isn’t a great film – it’s too annoying for that – but there’s something about it that’s oddly special. Such a shame then that it’s morally repellent.

***



The Heat (Paul Feig, 2013) – An enormously fun movie that revives the spirit of '80s buddy-cop comedies like Stakeout and Running Scared, adds a pinch of Lord and Miller's 21 Jump Street, and injects a heavy dose of Feig's feminism. Sandra Bullock is an arrogant FBI agent from New York, sent to bust a drugs ring in Boston. There she clashes heads with lone wolf cop Melissa McCarthy, whose idea of pounding a beat involves mostly pounding kerb-crawlers and beating drug dealers.

I've loved Bullock for years, so it was her co-star's performance that I found a revelation. I came into this movie as a McCarthy sceptic and left it as a fan: her performance is big but not too big, as interested in creating chemistry as stealing scenes, and to the benefit not the detriment of the material (not the case in Bridesmaids), which is exceptionally good throughout. There are simply dozens of big laughs here, as well as moments of emotion loaded with just the right balance of sentiment and cynicism, right through to a hilarious end-credits scene.

There are a couple of mental illness gags that made me want to section the writer, but hey-ho. (3.5)

***



The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (Francis Lawrence, 2015) – The same deal as before, only more so. Take Lawrence out of the equation, and this series may be barely watchable; with her in it, you can scarcely look away, her matchlessly expressive face rendering every twist, every tragedy believable and real, even when she's sharing the screen with a retired stylist who has inexplicably turned herself into some sort of tiger.

I'm in two minds about the material: it's nice that the movie looks to consider the morality of revolution, but you do worry that it would fall its philosophy SATS, and while I'm glad that this fourth and final film isn't an endless, no-holds-barred battle, the narrative it chooses isn't wholly satisfying. There's also an issue with suspending one's disbelief: if the fascist dictatorship that Lawrence's 'Mockingjay' opposes is really so devious and brilliant, wouldn't the booby traps they set be a bit more, y'know, certain? Throw 10 more gallons of oil into that flood. Set the oil on fire. Nuke all the buildings. Don't put the underground station's exploding floor on a timer. Send a thousand troops into the sewer.

Yet for all that, I found it more entertaining than a couple of films to which I've given five stars − a dichotomy that still confuses me. With Lawrence front and centre, the film sweeps you along, in its love triangle, its story of rebellion, its moments that I recognise as Hollywood hokiness but adore all the same: like when Katniss turns up incognito on the front line, and her co-conspirators begin to recognise and salute her. Something about this series gets to me, even when I know it's trading on cliché, even when I know it it's dealing with big subjects in a juvenile, even trite way.

You can pick holes in the movie − in its narrative, the murkiness of some of the cinematography, the utter redundancy of its patronising sunlit coda − but Lawrence carries it on her shoulders, and makes it work. I'm not sure these movies deserve the performance that she gives in them (the only other people who create anything comparable are Jena Malone and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who have little more than five minutes' screen time between them), but despite James Newton Howard's music, some snippets of strong action, and death scenes that surprise and therefore impress, it's her utter unbendable conviction that drags this out of the ordinary and sears it on your memory.

After the original, this final instalment is the second best of a series that I can watch all day, and then get infuriated about all night. (3)

See also: I've written reviews of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay – Part 1 at those linked pages there.

***

CINEMA: The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016)

"You know someone else who was just following orders? Hitler." *winks*

PI Gosling and thug-for-hire Crowe pool their erratic talents in this rollicking neo-noir buddy comedy from the inimitable Shane Black. It's such fun to gorge yourself on his cracking one-liners, exuberant set-pieces and subversive smarts, though I got full before the end.

(3)

***

Thanks for reading.

The Crying Game, Jennifer Lawrence, and perhaps the worst film of the 1940s - Reviews #204

In this, your my latest reviews update: great films, bad films, and a book about whether some people are now or have ever been members of the Communist Party.



The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992)

The twist.

That twist.

This mercurial masterpiece of ‘90s cinema has now been reduced to just one thing. Not that its twist isn’t magnificent, but it’s certainly not the film’s raison d’etre, or its reason to be celebrated. It doesn’t explain why the film continues to enrapture, enthral and grow in emotional resonance as the years pass and the viewings rack up. And, unlike most twists, it doesn’t come at the end, but at the halfway point, meaning that if you’ve avoided seeing the film because you think you know how it ends – you really don’t.

The Crying Game is essentially a redrafting of director Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa, but transferred to the world of the Troubles, as an IRA volunteer (Stephen Rea) helps take a British soldier (Forest Whitaker) hostage, then promises to look up his quarry’s girlfriend (Jaye Davidson), should they have to put a bullet through his brain. Nothing pans out as you’d expect, but Rea does end up seeking out the troubled, brutalised and lovelorn Davidson in a vividly-realised East London, and appointing himself her protector.

The film has an Achilles’ heel that’s larger and weaker than almost any other film deserving of classic status, and that is Forest Whitaker. His performance is so hysterically awful that all you can do is gaze in slack-jawed disbelief as you try to come up with credible theories as to how he a) didn’t get sacked, and b) didn’t get banned from Equity. Asked to portray a Jamaican-born Londoner, he opts for an accent that sounds like Dick Van Dyke’s character in Mary Poppins pretending to be Nelson Mandela.

Everything else about the film, though, is perfect. Rea is in the form of his life, delivering one of the performances of the decade as the kind, gentle foot-soldier moved by love and loyalty, particularly in the terrific scene where, asked to provide solace to a condemned man, he leans on Corinthians 13:11 (“When I was a child, I thought as a child…”), only to find it’s no solace at all. “Not a lot of use, are you Fergus?” mangles Whitaker. “Me?”, whispers Rea, his eyes holding an almost unbearable sadness. “No. I’m not good for much.” Davidson proves his equal as an erotically-charged, good-humoured and endlessly appealing creature who works as a hairdresser and moonlights as a torch singer, hinting at a basic duality and the pain searing through her soul. It’s a film about game-playing, identity, mutual reliance and the healing of scars; in her debut, Davidson is asked to carry an astonishing amount of that, and doesn’t put a foot wrong. Adrian Dunbar, Jim Broadbent, Ralph Brown and a bobbed, flawlessly-accented and terrifyingly psychotic Miranda Richardson round out a phenomenally impressive cast.

It’s also a brilliantly plotted film, one of the few movies of recent years that’s both consistently unpredictable and overwhelmingly satisfying, as it shifts location, genre and mood, beginning as a moral thriller, lighting a sensual slow-burn that casts the early London scenes in a woozy, gorgeous glow, then fashioning a love story of uncommon brilliance and breathtaking originality.

It's a cast-iron masterpiece.

And yet all anyone talks about is that bloody twist. (4)

***



"Now, you know I've got the legal right to go in there hunting the man any place I want?"
"I know you'd be wasting your time and pissing me off."
CINEMA: Winter's Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) - I went to see this at the cinema on Saturday, and I'm going to keep doing it until someone makes a better movie.

Debra Granik's feminist masterwork is the key film of the decade so far: an unorthodox, spine-tingling thriller, a humanist fable, and a staggering study of a good person under almost intolerable pressure. In her breakout role, Jennifer Lawrence is Ree Dolly, a strong, selfless, smart-mouthed 17-year-old living with her vacant mother and two young siblings in Missouri's Ozark Mountains. Once it ran with bootleg moonshine, now this here's Meth Country, and if her crystal-cooking father doesn't turn up for his court hearing, they're going to lose the house, the woods and the whole family unit. So Ree sets out in search of him, facing threats, silence and regular beatings from pinch-faced people who share a lot of the same blood that runs in her veins, and down her face.

There's brutality and violence to spare, but it's the humanity you remember: Lawrence's pleading chat with her mother in the woods, her silent screaming, that beautiful final scene: Ree's essential goodness flawlessly intact despite the intrusions of a cold and often heartless world. There's lyrical imagery - a little girl hopping her hobby horse around on a trampoline, oblivious to the mounting horrors swarming around her sister - Christian bluegrass music that roots you as firmly in this world as a red pin on a Google Map, and a script whose singular, sparse vernacular feels almost intrusively authentic.

Granik finds no nobility in poverty, but she finds plenty in the poor; her vision of a rural community still clinging to some semblance of life as it's ravaged by substance abuse shocking but compassionate. Even the stylistic trappings of Ree's family - grubby clothes, toys outside and tyres in the yard - are synonymous in American film with problem neighbours deserving our fear and contempt; here they're the everyday belongings of ordinary people living their lives the best they can. The director's boundless sense of empathy even extends to Ree's coke-snorting, wife-beating uncle, Teardrop (John Hawkes), a sort of satanic update of the good-bad sidekicks Dan Duryea used to play in '50s Westerns.

Simply everything about Winter's Bone operates on some profound and lofty level, from Lawrence's mesmerising central turn - still by far the finest thing she's done - to its evocation of an insular and restrictive world, deadly to outsiders and even those who belong, and its high-handed attitude to thriller conventions: "Yeah, we can use that; no, we'll sling that; for this bit we're just going to set fire to the rulebook". Movies don't get any better. (4)

***



A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929) - A late, great British silent: a dizzying tale of romantic and sexual obsession, its slight story dazzlingly directed by Anthony Asquith.

Uno Henning drops from the sky onto Dartmoor and his silhouetted figure sprints full-pelt across the plains towards his destiny. His destiny? That cottage. The door opens, he advances on a terrified brunette (Norah Baring), she shouts: "Joe!" and suddenly we're flung into their back story. He was a shy, taciturn hairdresser, she a flirtatious manicurist, but were they friends or lovers or is something altogether darker going on?

You could sketch the scenario on a postage stamp and still have room to praise the direction, but what direction it is: surely an influence on Asquith's contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, and analogous to Murnau's Sunrise in its swaggering confidence and desire to exploit the dying form in every conceivable manner, from a PoV camera vibrating as it receives a head-massage, to a frankly terrifying cacophony of cross-cut paranoia, as Baring goes to the cinema with her new fella, and Henning has a few dark thoughts, all - rather gloriously - whilst watching a Harold Lloyd film.

It's a little masterpiece, and it'll keep you guessing right up to the finish, while exalting you through its refusal to recognise the limits of late silent cinema. (4)

***



I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) - This bruising, brutal slab of social realism was made during that brief period when Hollywood had the opportunity, and the inclination, to take aim at the nation’s ills. In 1932-3, films like Heroes for Sale, Wild Boys of the Road, The Mayor of Hell and Gold Diggers of 1933 (ostensibly a throwaway musical) held a mirror up to Depression-era America, in all its cruelty, drudgery and despair. Packed with righteous rage, these explosive movies went off like dynamite, helping to set the national agenda and changing laws and lives. Then the Hays Code came in, and the mainstream simply wouldn’t touch progressive pictures (with the very rare exception, like Ford and Zanuck’s The Grapes of Wrath in 1940).

Paul Muni is James Allen, a returning soldier who wants something more than a dead-end factory job, but in his quest to become somebody finds only poverty, hunger and wrongful arrest. Sentenced to 10 years on a chain gang, he is brutalised and beaten down, but never beaten. Then, one day, he makes a run for it. The opening 10 is somewhat corny and clunky, and tonally at odds with what follows, but in this context it kind of works: in the eyes of the writers, Muni’s perma-winking mummy’s boy has to be that way for us to root for him; that’s no longer true – if it ever was – but it does make his dehumanisation even more bracing.

The chain gang footage is simply like nothing before or since: figures in striped suits toiling in the boiling sun, treated as less than human by sadistic authority figures. The anti-establishment message, showing the system as corrupt, vindictive and peopled by sociopaths, dispenses with the usual benevolent prison wardens or governors familiar from The Big House and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. Here, the only people with an ounce of decency are the crooks: jug-eared Allen Jenkins – who leaves the bunk house for the last time striking a match on a coffin – Everett Brown as a hulking black sledgehammer-swinger who whacks Muni’s shackles and his ankles, and Edward Ellis (who played The Thin Man), exceptional as an ageing con who shows Muni the ropes.

Though the film seems to ask us to swallow a lot, its more incredible plot points are actually torn from real life, the whole thing based upon Robert E. Burns’ best-selling memoir, I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang. And though it has a handful of obvious flaws, including a smidgen of the obligatory comic relief (thankfully kept to a minimum) and Helen Vinson’s weak, wooden turn as the love of Allen’s life, it remains one of the key movies of its era, with a stunning performance from the stocky, punchy Muni – a proto-John Garfield fresh from Yiddish theatre, via Scarface – virtuosic photography from LeRoy and Sol Polito that perfectly evokes the milieu, and among the all-time great, unresolved endings.

Plus Glenda Farrell as a blackmailing nymphomaniac. Yowzer. (4)

***



Magic in the Moonlight (Woody Allen, 2014) - For the first hour, Woody Allen's latest is a frothy nothing: a light, tone-deaf excursion, with pleasant period trappings but precious few laughs, that sees an exceedingly rational conjuror and professional debunker of mystics (Colin Firth) pitting his wits against a supposed psychic (Emma Stone), who may be preying on a wealthy ex-pat family.

It suffers from all the flaws we came to associate with Allen in the noughties: a tin ear for dialogue, supporting actors playing in the wrong key (Simon McBurney, who's dreadful), and an inability to mine a premise for what it's worth, instead getting caught up in repetition, inanity or gags that would have been chucked out at the redraft stage a couple of decades before.

Then, miraculously, the film arrives at its true purpose, and everything changes. The final third is, simply, magic: genuinely funny, intensely romantic, and with a real point and purpose every bit as poignant and clever as the morals Woody was dishing out in his '80s heyday. It takes a while to get there, but boy is it worth it.

Firth, to his credit, is very good throughout, though especially in that dazzling last half-hour. (2.5)

***



The Dog (Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren, 2013) - This potentially fascinating documentary about the gay bank robber portrayed by Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon doesn't really work, partly because the filmmakers don't seem able to discriminate between the insightful and the irrelevant, and partly because their garrulous hero is an annoying, dislikeable, overbearing idiot - a fact they fail to utilise in their favour.

John Wojtowicz is a self-declared "pervert", a fact we derive less from his confession that he's pre-occupied with sex, than the way he keeps trying to kiss strangers on the face, apparently oblivious to their raging discomfort. The film charts his idiosyncratic existence: how he had his first gay experience whilst in the army, how Vietnam turned him from a Goldwater Republican into a peacenik, and how, in 1972, he took seven hostages at a Chase Manhattan bank in Brooklyn, in an attempt to fund a sex-change operation for his 'wife', Ernie.

What the film doesn't do is ask him how he'd tried to get the money beforehand, how he alighted on the idea of robbing a bank, how he planned the heist, how he recruited his accomplices (beyond meeting them in a bar) or, really, most of the things you'd genuinely be quite interested in finding out about. What it does do is hang around with his mother - once a liberal-minded matriarch, now a wizened, terrifyingly embittered old crow - chat to a couple of his ex-wives (one male, one female), and offer scattershot reminiscences from various gay rights activists and eyewitnesses.

The film took around seven years to finish (Wojtowicz died in 2006, the movie didn't emerge until 2013) which perhaps hints at the unsatisfying and incomplete nature of the footage they'd acquired. Sometimes it will alight on an interesting idea - like the suggestion that its subject's life was dominated for the final 30 years by Dog Day Afternoon - but more often than not, it stumbles around in the dark. In the closing minutes, it seems to be suggesting that Wojtowicz was really a fabulist, but the most incredible thing he ever talks about clearly happened. It was on the news. They made a film about it, with Al Pacino. It's the point of this documentary.

I was looking forward to this one a great deal, and it just didn't really deliver. In some ways that's personal taste - nobody in it seems very honourable or nice or clever or fun to spend time with, and its world is one of pointless debauchery and sickening, senseless violence. But on a more universal level, it's just poor journalism, with key questions left unanswered, meaningless diversions, and a fatal lack of focus. (2)

***



The Marrying Kind (George Cukor, 1952) - Aside from some early walk-ons, Judy Holliday made just eight films, but her name still endures today due to the second of them, a rom-com par excellence by the name of Born Yesterday, for which she won the 1950 Best Actress Oscar.

Half of the eight were scripted by Garson Kanin, an erratic but talented screenwriter and director who often worked in partnership with his wife, part-time character actor Ruth Gordon. Holliday had torn up the screen as a nervy, murderous wife in Adam's Rib, starred in Kanin's Born Yesterday on stage and screen, and would go on to appear in It Should Happen to You, a superlative satire that triples up as an affecting romance and knockout comedy.

The Marrying Kind is sadly the weak link in their collaboration: a dreary, stressful film - co-written with Gordon - about a marriage on the rocks, which has a clever gimmick juxtaposing past reality and self-justifying voiceover, one immensely powerful melodramatic scene, and a memorable monologue from a butcher with his own take on the American Dream, but is largely just footage of Holliday and screen husband Aldo Ray arguing. About everything.

Ray is introduced here as an exciting new screen personality, and - bizarrely - receives a solo credit at the end, telling us to watch out for his next picture. It's wishful thinking: he has a couple of passable moments, but simply can't hold his own against an actress of Holliday's quality, and strangles line readings with a voice like a drunk, chain-smoking Moose Malloy.

Not that this one would have worked anyway: it poses as a realistic examination of a marriage, then throws ludicrous, unrealistic and cartoonish obstacles into the mix, with no apparent comedic or dramatic gain. Then we seem to get to the crux of the matter, only for the film to almost forget the dark ground it's traversed. It's not as bad as Full of Life, the 1957 domestic drama that marks the definite low-point of Holliday's screen career, but it's pretty weak, and there's little of her fire, sparkle or sentimental side on show here, nor director George Cukor's famed sophistication. (2)

See also: I wrote a little bit about Kanin's memoirs in my review of 2014. They came out in 1974, it sometimes takes me a while to catch up. ***



Power of the Press (Lew Landers, 1943) - A hopeless, excruciating collision of small-town patriotic wisdom and WWII propaganda flick, as folksy newspaper editor Guy Kibbee takes over a New York paper infested with fascist fifth columnists, including Hearst-like businessman Otto Kruger, who's in preposterous form.

It's legitimately one of the worst films of the '40s, with a patronising script of relentlessly insulting stupidity, actors repeatedly falling over their dialogue, and an approach to visual composition from minor B-movie legend Lew Landers (name-checked in Gremlins!) that mostly consists of just standing people in a line; some of it isn't even in focus!

Having said that, the film is sort of fascinating from a historical perspective for its snapshot of contemporary politics (including pro-Soviet sentiment), an early Sam Fuller story, and the fact that the blacklisted radical framed for murder is played by an unbilled Larry Parks - the Communist actor who eight years later was fitted up by the HUAC and became one of its most craven informers.

I only watched it because I want to see every movie starring my favourite actor, Lee Tracy (who plays a snappy but spineless, circulation-chasing editor). Unless you're doing the same, which would surprise me, I'd steer clear.

If you want a good old movie about newspapers and ethics, watch Deadline - U.S.A., or Fuller's own Park Row; for the small-town-paper stuff, see It Happens Every Thursday; or to catch Tracy as a newspaper-world whirlwind, try the comic masterpiece Blessed Event or his trivial but entirely entertaining B-movie, The Payoff.

Basically just don't watch this.

***

BOOK



Naming Names by Victor S. Navasky (1980/2003) – “It was a question of choosing to be a ‘hero’, or a shit,” said Ring Lardner, Jr. In 1947, he and 10 other Hollywood screenwriters and directors were jailed and blacklisted for refusing to name and denounce the fellow left-wing radicals with whom they’d consorted during the previous decades. Four years later, when their legal hearings finally ended, the second tranche of subpoenaed witnesses – including actor Larry Parks – were found to be made of somewhat bendier stuff, and so the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) got its names, and Tinseltown proceeded to tear itself to pieces in a seven-year orgy of betrayal and despair. Navasky’s book could perhaps do more to place you in those chilling public testimonies – as cinematic as they were – but is in all other ways the best telling of this story that one could imagine: a forensic, scrupulously even-handed examination of the climate, people and organisations that enabled this to pass: part history, part journalism, part theory (both psychological and sociological), and part devastating moral audit: an angry, righteous polemic about a mass dereliction of duty that destroyed countless lives. Periodic light relief is provided by the pen of Dalton Trumbo, the hilarious blacklisted writer whose witheringly sarcastic letters to his agent and to co-conspirator Albert Mantz occasionally interrupt Navasky’s more methodical prose. (4)

***

Thanks for reading.