Rick's 100 favourite movies: Part 1

I love movies. The film bug got me when I was 13. I was nursing a knee injury and looking for something to do that didn't involve playing football. I saw Star Wars, then not long afterwards On the Waterfront and Les 400 Coups, and that was that. Since then, my obsessions have moved from method-ish tough guys like Brando, John Garfield and Jean Gabin (and the juvenile delinquent poster boys such as Jean-Pierre Leaud), through the Empire, Leonard Maltin and Cahiers canons, to the current state of affairs, a heady, happy place where I can watch anything, enjoy the connections between everything, and mine whatever I like, lauding unheralded celluloid heroes like Lillian Gish and Jack Conway, trumpeting B-movie mystery-comedies from the 1940s (a constant and total favourite) and arguing the case for maligned or barely seen movies, whether it's MGM's "chocolate box" Little Women, Bernard Shaw's miraculous Major Barbara, or astounding arthouse movies such as The DreamLife of Angels and Seraphine.

As a massive nerd, I've always been an obsessive list-maker, as well as a journalist and writer, so I can tell you how many feature films I've seen (4,137), which ones I've seen on the big screen, and what the best movie I saw in 2011 was (Ghost World, again). Now and then I'll put together a list of my favourite movies. I have far more than a hundred favourites, but it's a fun game to play and hopefully representative of what I love about cinema: its ability to transport and transform, and its use as a crutch, a time machine and a tool for social change, in the best and worst senses of all those ideas. I created a new list this week (looking at the last top 100 I compiled, at the end of 2014, I've swapped out a quarter of the hundred), so I thought I'd share it with you here. Numbers 100-76 are below, with the others coming up soon. Did I mention that I love movies?

100. The Killer (John Woo, 1989)

Woo's A Better Tomorrow had as good a plot, and his Hard Boiled matched this one for action, but The Killer was by far the director's most effective marriage of the two, as noble hitman Chow Yun-Fat attempts to pay back the innocent woman caught in the crossfire, bringing him into conflict - and then partnership - with cop Danny Lee. It's full of breathtaking shoot-outs (yes of course with doves) and effective reflection, transcending its pulpy origins to become the definitive modern action film.

99. Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949)
A bewitching, exceptionally rewarding adaptation lit by Allyson's warm characterisation, O'Brien's lump-to-the-throat emoting and cinematography and music that - at least to me - seems perfectly pitched. Full review.

98. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel Coen, 2013)
Unusually and arrestingly affecting. Perhaps my relationship with the Coens could yet blossom. Full review.

97. Forbidden Games (Rene Clement, 1952)
Its high points are so high, its view of childhood so arresting and deftly realised, that poorly-framed interiors and a handful of duff scenes seem a little beside the point. Full review.

96. Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954)
Is it better than Singin' in the Rain? Well, no, but this is 'favourites', not 'best'. Enrapturing and deeply moving, with an ending that destroys and exalts me every time. Watch 'The Heather on the Hill' here.

95. Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944)

Perhaps the best of Sturges' immortal satires, though they're all pretty special. He coached star Eddie Bracken intensely on both this and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and the results are astonishing.

94. The Railway Children (Lionel Jeffries, 1970)
"Daddy! My daddy!"

93. Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950)
A dazzling film, containing one of the three or four best female performances in American cinema in the shape of Judy Holliday's endearing, eye-wateringly hilarious Billie Dawn. Born Yesterday is a flawless metaphor about the working classes and the emancipating power of knowledge posing as an utterly delightful romantic comedy. Full review.

92. The Iceman Cometh (John Frankenheimer, 1973)
One of the great casts brings to life one of the great plays. I love the 1960 TV version with Jason Robards (who did more than anyone to reinvigorate interest in the work), and he's a better Hickey than Lee Marvin, but screen titans Robert Ryan and Fredric March are in sensational form.

91. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984)
Appallingly and sickeningly misogynistic, but that opening 40 is like nothing else I've ever seen, an astounding meditation on the impermanence of memory and the fatal allure of the past. I was obsessed with watching the film as a teenager, and completely overwhelmed by it when I did.

90. My Life as a Dog (see below)

"This movie, directed and largely written by Lasse Hallström and released in 1985, when he was thirty-nine and I was sixty-three, made me like life and human beings much more than I had ever done before. Quite a favour!” - Kurt Vonnegut

89. A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951)
Chaplin said this was the best movie ever made about America, and who am I to disagree? The pre-crash Monty Clift was surely the handsomest man ever to have lived.

88. Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)
Probably Woody's best movie, though I have another of his films higher up since I watch it the most. Review.

87.Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
It's a shame I can't watch this any more because I hate Polanski so much (though I can watch Woody Allen films, apparently). Still, I know the script off by heart, so perhaps I can just say it to myself. In some ways it's the ultimate '70s movie, a paranoid howl of despair that explodes genre convention, but it's also a gorgeous homage to the '40s, full of the most extraordinary Robert Towne dialogue.

86. The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt (Peter Godfrey, 1939)
Probably my favourite studio-era B-movie, though Confessions of Boston Blackie and The Saint in New York are up there too. A mixture of thriller tropes and screwball comedy, with Ida Lupino in incredible form as PI Warren William's dizzy new girlfriend, and Rita Hayworth as the femme fatale, just months from Only Angels Have Wings.

85. Séraphine (Martin Provost, 2008)

It’s such a different sort of movie: spiritually profound, quietly sincere, unusually yet perfectly-paced: not rushing to introduce its obscure, anti-social heroine, taking her faith seriously, and finding both humour and poignancy in her singularity and complete lack of interest in societal niceties or norms. Full review.

84. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013)
A plotless ramble through the life of a 27-year-old dancer - who encounters assorted epiphanies and disappointments - shot like Woody's Manhattan or À bout de souffle, scripted with a nod to Whit Stillman and emanating its writer-director's usual good-natured angst, uncertainty about contemporary life and warm-hearted, off-kilter sentimentality. Full review.

83. Partie de campagne (Jean Renoir, 1936)
Renoir couldn't be bothered to finish this film because it kept raining. Review.

82. The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941)
Writer Lillian Hellman’s vision of America – imagined by Gregg Toland, enlivened by a killer ensemble, given order by the gifted Wyler – is far darker than anyone could have expected, the blanched Davis poisoned by greed, leaving goodness, humanity and virtue all gasping for breath. Full review.

81. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
This film is just so, so good. More than 20 years on, the freshness and effortlessness of it all is still astounding. Its vernacular. Its spiky, absurdist humour. Its moments of heart. Those long, wordless takes. The diner. The toaster. The watch up Walken’s ass. The legion of stylised lines that never feel mannered or forced. Actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Travolta and Uma Thurman producing performances from nowhere that continue to reward and astound. QT hasn’t done anything comparable since. Nowadays I will him to succeed – and with Django he did – but there was a brief time when all you could do was watch in slack-jawed amazement as he created dizzying, dazzling films that re-wrote the rules of genre cinema.

80. Another Country (Marek Kanievska, 1984)

"A sad, scintillating film." Full review.

79. A Thousand Clowns (Fred Coe, 1965)
85% of this film resulted in outright, prolonged laughter. 60% visibly moved me. 100% of Robards' performance is beyond brilliant.

78. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973)
"This is real life. But with better dialogue." Full review.

77. Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)
I had this in my previous two lists too.

76. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927)
Perhaps the most famous silent film of all, and one of the best, equipped with an emotional tractor beam too often absent from Murnau’s eye-wideningly inventive works. Full review.

***

Thanks for reading. The other 75 are coming up soon, here's the list so far:

Dumbo, Django and Despicable Me 2 - Reviews #167

Just six movies in the past 10 days, as I keep being interrupted by life and the world and stuff.


I can't handle this. At all.

*SOME SPOILERS*
Dumbo (Ben Sharpsteen, 1941) - I didn't watch many films as a kid, but Dumbo was my favourite. It was also the third DVD I ever bought (if memory serves), after Once Upon a Time in China II and Three Colours Blue. But I hadn't seen it for perhaps seven or eight years before this evening. And I'd forgotten how desperately sad it is, drawing a lump to the throat around the 20-minute mark and holding it there until its climax. Only Capra has ever made you work as hard, or go through so much, for your happy ending, as Dumbo - a pure innocent, like Bresson's Bathazar - is tormented, patronised and brutalised, on his way to a climactic act of almighty catharsis.

It takes a little while to get going, with some extraneous, somewhat ill-conceived material about the circus and its sentient, breathing train, but every scene featuring the impossibly cute, stunningly expressive title character - a big-eyed little elephant with gargantuan ears - is pure magic, whether pairing him with his protective mother (wonderfully voiced by Disney regular Verna Felton), or the smart-talking Timothy Q. Mouse (veteran character comic Edward Brophy), a self-appointed guardian who takes her place after fate intervenes - and sets the life-changing finale in motion with an extraordinarily powerful plea for compassion.

After the failure of the matchlessly ambitious Pinocchio and Fantasia, Dumbo was intended by Disney as a back-to-basics affair along the lines of Snow White, on that smaller scale and with that slighter running time. The tremendous amount of love, care and attention to detail poured into it, though, remains staggering, from the incomparable opening with its formation of storks delivering newborn babies to be excitedly unwrapped by their parents, past the adorable sequence with Dumbo in the bath, through that terrifying set-piece that sits him atop a burning edifice, via the gobsmacking "pink elephants" set-piece and showstopping When I See an Elephant Fly number to a punch-the-air finale of uncommon brilliance (with a little tacked-on wish-fulfilment).

The film is simply conceived and unashamedly episodic, but hand-drawn with a rich and vivid flair, and capable of moving me more deeply than just about any movie I've ever seen. For all the surrealistic brilliance of those pink elephants - the most trippy, out-there and perhaps original thing Disney has ever done - my favourite passage (perhaps in all of cinema) is the breathtakingly beautiful, utterly sincere scene of Dumbo and his mum set to Baby Mine, which begins with them touching trunks through a cage window and ends with a wrenching farewell. It's the first thing that comes to mind whenever I think of the film: if the pink elephants wow me, then Baby Mine destroys me, and I think it's what makes this Disney's greatest - just pipping Bambi to the crown.

George Lucas once batted away criticisms of his movies' cold aloofness by saying that it's easy to make an audience feel something: you just choke a kitten in front of them. Dumbo's formula isn't complex, and you could argue that it follows that Lucas template - take an obviously adorable hero, make fully sure your audience is in love with him, then make him suffer - but its method of manipulation is so sublime and its story of redemption so timeless that it's very difficult to fault. Well, except for the train being alive - that's stupid. (4)

***



Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

"Sold!"

I thought I was destined to dislike Django Unchained - or at least leave disappointed. I still remember the visceral thrill of seeing Kill Bill: Vol 1 on the opening night, being knocked sideways by this full-frontal assault on the senses, gazing up at the mammoth screen in rapt enthralment, perched on the edge of the only spare seat in the house, right on the end of the front row. I saw the film again a couple of weeks later, and thought: "Well, that didn't hold up particularly well", but the energy and invention of it all made one thing clear: a Tarantino movie is an event movie, more than any summer blockbuster is ever going to be. And whatever he does, for however long he does it, I'm going to watch it.

But that brings me to the first problem: Kill Bill: Vol 1 is the only good film that Tarantino has made since Pulp Fiction, and it isn't even that good. Jackie Brown was a messy, "mature" movie that looked and sounded suspiciously like its writer was just flailing around, with nothing left to say after whacking out two instant classics in three years. Kill Bill: Vol 2 had its moments, but felt more like a collection of interesting deleted scenes than a film. InjUriOUWs Ba$turdz was just completely pedestrian, aside from Waltz's exceptional performance and that one nerve-shredding sequence in a bar. And then there is Death Proof. The reason I haven't seen Django until now is because I go to the cinema with Mrs Rick, and she has refused to watch any Tarantino films since we saw Death Proof. This seems entirely reasonable, since Death Proof is probably the worst movie of the last 10 years.

As if to further ensure my hostility, Tarantino then started laying into John Ford, my favourite movie director, and the inventor of the modern Western, in his idiotic publicity interviews for Django. "I hate John Ford", he said, before going on to imply that Ford and his films were racist. Sorry, Quentin, but I'm shutting your butt down. You made a film condemning racism. In 2012. For hipsters. Ford did it in 1960. At the peak of the Civil Rights struggle. For an audience half-comprised or rednecks and racists. His film took their prejudices, threw them up on screen and shot them to pieces. That movie was Sergeant Rutledge, and it's one of the bravest and most progressive movies ever made by a mainstream American filmmaker. Admittedly Ford cast the black star, Woody Strode, as a Chinaman five years later, but really we're nitpicking.

So I suppose I approached Django with my enthusiasm severely compromised: that long-held fantasy of a Tarantino film that would pick me up and sling me at the wall tempered by the reality of his last few, and a lingering resentment that his tiresome posturing now involves telling his legions of fans to ignore The Great American Director. The thing is, though, that Django’s good. Like, really good. Midnight in Paris good. It’s a film that sees an artist awakening, rising from a long creative slump. It’s a movie that stands on its own two feet, without the need for post-modern pastiche that colours his worst films. The insertion of that “mandingo” fight sequence (sadly not a man fighting a dingo, though there is something similar to that elsewhere) seems cribbed from Jules Dassin’s Night and the City, but otherwise this is (mostly) all his own work. And it all feels so effortless, just as Tarantino’s recent films seemed so mannered and forced.

As you’ll probably be aware, as you saw it ages ago, the story deals with Django Freeman (Jamie Foxx), a slave-turned-bounty-hunter who travels with his German mentor (Christoph Waltz) to a Southern plantation run by a flamboyant, eye-linered slave owner (Leonardo DiCaprio) - the only man who takes handshakes more seriously than Mark Hughes - in the hope of freeing his wife (Kerry Washington). Just as Inquisitive Batmen was a Jewish revenge movie, so this is an African-American one – made by a man who appears to be under the mistaken impression that he is actually black. It reminds me a little of that line about Life Is Beautiful: "Clowning does not merely seem an inappropriate response to the realities of a concentration camp, but the wrong response". Levity and gunplay may be the wrong response to the realities of slavery, but Django's a hell of a lot of fun.

Though the film isn’t explicitly split into chapters like the first Kill Bill, it still comprises three distinct sections. The first, dealing with Django’s transformation, is light-hearted, surprising and dizzyingly fun. The second, taking place in and around the rather wonderfully-named “Candyland”, is hysterically intense, a fusion of Tarantino and Tennessee Williams: incredibly and brilliantly talky, full of ingenious ideas and colourful dialogue, densely plotted, polemical and hideous, enveloping you in its sickening, seductive world. Its masterstroke is dipping into phrenology, the intriguing and appallingly offensive "medical" basis for racism. And the final passage – power-hosing the remnants of that moral swamp from your body, and lasting barely 35 minutes – is pure, cartoonish Blaxploitation, aside from containing a couple of those beautiful quiet moments that QT can do so well, when he’s so inclined. The clichéd shot of the slave smiling at the departing figure of Django is nevertheless rousing, while the last scene between Foxx and Waltz is the most affecting in a Tarantino movie since Mr Orange said he was sorry. The dynamic of the characters is also refreshing - yes Django needs an in with "civilised" society in the context of the times, but Tarantino avoids the old Cry Freedom trap by a mile; there's no way the hero of his film is going to be the white guy, or that the only way we'll be asked to empathise with the plight of black people is through the eyes of a Caucasian protagonist.

All of Tarantino’s films have the same three basic ingredients: talking, violence and suspense. Here, the "N-word"-heavy dialogue is largely sensational (a little mention for the rather lovely: "On the off chance there are any astronomy aficionados amongst you, the North Star is that one"), the bloodletting is superbly choreographed and much of the drama is so taut that is seems to be fraying before your eyes. Tarantino is helped by a superb ensemble: Foxx is a persuasive hero and DiCaprio is better and more intriguing than he has been in years – he never quite became the actor he seemed destined to in the mid-‘90s – though the standout is Waltz, one of the director’s greatest discoveries. As the charming, erudite and brilliant Dr Schultz, a former dentist now in the corpses-for-cash business, he’s laid-back and playful, but also enigmatic, until that sense of rage at the injustices of the world begins to broil beneath his avuncular façade. There’s something exalting, enthralling, even hypnotic about his performance – and indeed about the giant, quivering “tooth” he keeps on the top of his van.

As usual, Tarantino has assembled a bizarre supporting cast, which this time includes Samuel L. Jackson as a virulent “Uncle Tom” figure, Jonah Hill as a Klansman, Don Johnson as a racist, and the likes of James Russo, Russ Tamblyn and Bruce Dern! The director’s weak spot in terms of casting (and in terms of general filmmaking) is that he always feel compelled – perhaps through pity – to include roles for this hopeless Quentin Tarantino guy, who’s the worst actor I’ve ever seen. Here he pitches up looking like Randy Quaid and attempting an Australian accent. It isn’t pretty. Or good.

As ever, the film comes with the soundtrack to your next two months – the one thing Tarantino never gets wrong – and includes Jim Croce’s I Got a Name, a rather wonderful song which I first came across in the 2005 film Invincible, and which accompanies the unveiling of Django and Schultz’s two-man dream team. Their adventures out West actually get little screen-time, a fascinating decision that recalls the absent robbery in Reservoir Dogs, and reminded me of an interview with Tarantino from the early 1990s in which he explained that what you didn’t see was often crucial – a lesson he’d learned from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Tarantino’s direction has seemed to falter in recent years, being geared towards people with the world’s shortest attention span (Kill Bill: Vol 2), those with limitless patience who really like fire and blood (UpROARious P0th3ads), or sado-masochists (Death Proof). Here he’s absolutely on top form, delivering the requisite thrills through a fusion of pyrotechnics and restraint that he hasn’t had in check since Pulp Fiction. And this is, unquestionably, his best film since Pulp Fiction: a masterful, genre-bending movie that’s full of superb exchanges and exceptional individual scenes, but also works as a compelling and consummately confident whole. It loses half a star for some rare wrong moves (castration? Yawn, even if it leads to a fun Jackson monologue), Quentin's performance and the dancing horse. (3.5)

***



CINEMA: Despicable Me 2 3D (Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, 2013) - Retired supervillain Gru (voiced by Steve Carell) has settled down with his three adopted daughters and his legion of Minions, and is branching out into the exciting world of jams and jellies. Then, out of the blue, a secret organisation fighting the planet's greatest (and most ridiculous) criminals gets in touch - asking him to go deep undercover at a shopping mall, where he's joined by a feisty ginger agent (Kristen Wiig) who seems preferable to the women he's been trying not to date. This sequel to one of the best animated movies of the past few years - not in the same league as Up and Cloudy, but comfortably in that second tier - is one of those follow-ups that in dramatic terms has no real reason to exist, but in terms of entertainment is very welcome all the same. Perhaps as a result, the story is weaker and slighter - without the strong emotional hook we got last time around - the new characters are rather dull (well, except for that one absolute beauty of a scene in which the world's most macho villain rides a shark into a volcano) and there are a couple of fart gags that seem a little laboured. Thank goodness, then, that it's so uproariously, outrageously funny, thanks a little to Gru, but mostly to his Minions, whose exuberant silliness, blissful juvenility and endlessly inventive escapades - from magic shows to impressions of their mutant friends - lead to some of the funniest sight gags and sequences I've seen on screen in a long time. Despicable Me 2 doesn't compare to the first film, because its humour and action is serving a story that seems altogether more contrived within the boundaries of its preposterous universe, and the film does sag a little in the middle, but it made me laugh a lot - and that spirited comic imagination is something that shouldn't be underrated. (3)

***



*VERY MINOR SPOILERS*
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999) - All human life is here, in Jarmusch's existential hitman flick. At a prosaic level, this story of a lone, violent outsider (Forest Whitaker) turning the tables on his cartoonish mob bosses grew from Le Samourai and led to Drive. On a more timeless one, it's a movie about life itself, with a beautiful, humanistic hero who places common moral ground and an adherence to his rigid, rigorous samurai code over superficial ties like age, language and the constraints of late 20th century, inner-city America. Jarmusch's pet theme has always been the similarities that triumph over our differences - but has he ever done it more effectively or movingly than in the friendship between Whitaker and an ice-cream selling immigrant (Isaach De Bankole) who speaks only French? In a way, the movie seems almost unfinished - in need of one last script revision and a final cut - troubled as it is with a rough-and-ready visual and editing style, moments of disjointed storytelling, and some ironic villainy that at times just pushes too far (the Flavor Flav raps are weirdly broad and shallow by Jarmusch's standards). But it's also a startling and brilliant film: its belly laughs and bright, brief action sequences never serving to obscure an unforgettable undercurrent of wistful melancholia (those poor pigeons - I only just got over On the Waterfront), quiet humanism and tranquil nobility. And as the epitome of all three, the braided, sad-eyed Whitaker gives one of the finest performances of that or any other decade. (3.5)

***



Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1998) - I don't watch many horror films, but Owen is a bit of a buff, so I asked him to recommend me four of the best - the only rule: no slasher movies. Cube was the first, and it's really good: a taut, tense fusion of horror, thriller and sci-fi that sees a cop, a doctor, a maths whizz, a cynic and a serial prison escapee trying to climb - and think - their way out of a series of cube-shaped rooms, many of them booby-trapped. The acting's pure B-movie standard, but that's part of its charm, while the originality of the concept, an atmosphere akin to Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and a succession of stomach-churning, claustrophobic sequences - replete with nasty surprises - make it something of a minor classic. There's the odd lull, daft line or obvious revelation - and the maths whizz is pretty bad at maths - but also a heady combination of shifting sympathies, effective character drama and suspenseful action that makes it something of a spiritual successor to those chamber Westerns of the 1950s - just relocated from the sprawling outdoors to a series of dingy, dangerous cages, each 14ft by 14 by 14. (3)

***



Liar Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997) - Well, it's not subtle... (2.5)

The Prestige, Élodie Bouchez, and RKO's breeding ground - Reviews #105

In the latest reviews round-up, I swear twice (sorry), get swept away by a modern French masterpiece and wander the streets of London clutching a naked cut-out of Jane Asher. Oh no, that wasn't me, that was John Moulder Brown.



La vie rêvée des anges (Erick Zonca, 1998) aka The Dreamlife of Angels – 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. This one’s going right to the top of the 2012 list. (4)

***



Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970) is a fascinating, virtuosic study of romantic and sexual obsession set around a London bath house gone entirely to seed. John Moulder Brown plays a 15-year-old school leaver who finds work there and becomes besotted with the free-and-easy redhead (Jane Asher) who shares his duties. Their innocent flirtations escalate until he's chasing her around the London Underground with a monochrome cut-out of her naked body, shouting: "Is this you?!" It begins as a playful, absurdist and almost bawdy comedy - the only film I've seen that shares the feel of My Own Private Idaho, as Diana Dors shouts about George Best whilst rubbing a teenager's head against her boobs - then becomes darker and odder by the minute, as Skolimowski brings an outsider's eye, and an Eastern European sensibility, to bear on the complex, mutating material, on its way to the only ending these films ever have. Moulder Brown's accent is a pity - as with A Kid for Two Farthings, cockernee would have been preferable to estuary - but Asher's pitch-perfect performance, the inventive, well-paced narrative and Skolimowski's vivid visual sense, tying the intro to the ending with intelligent glee, make it a cast-iron classic. (4)

***



*SPOILERS*
The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006) - Wow. That was great: one long magic trick, in which turn-of-the-18th-century magicians Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman indulge in an obsessive rivalry, their secrets revealed through a series of delicious, rug-pulling twists. Two of Nolan's most highly-praised films - The Dark Knight and Memento - leave me a little cold (he probably doesn't care), but this one's a wow: somehow sheer escapism, despite a narrative that takes in existential despair, suicide and death-by-drowning. Like Nolan's later Inception, his non-linear structure juggles three stories (or in this case, three time-frames), as Bale-reads-about-Jackman-reading-about-Bale's-life. Phew. There's the odd bad line ("You deserve each other"? Really?) or slip into domestic melodrama, and the film suffers from a serious case of Scarlett Johansson, but it's just a ripping good ride, with a spectacular denouement that made my brain ache. Someone is probably going to tell me that the pay-off doesn't make sense, but I don't care. So nerr. (4)

***



The Moon Is Blue (Otto Preminger, 1953) - Stagy, unusually frank sex comedy - written by playwright and '30s character actor Hugh Herbert of the "woo hoo!" catchphrase - about a professional virgin (Maggie McNamara), the newly-free bachelor (William Holden) who picks her up up the Empire State Building, and the caddish elder gent (David Niven) who later muscles in. It starts off very slowly - with a deeply boring wordless opening - but picks up greatly for a fresh, funny second half that recalls Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (Ernst Lubitsch's most underrated comedy), and is dominated by Niven's hilariously immoral characterisation. He really was a sensational light comedian - right up there with Cary Grant and William Powell. Wordy farce wasn't Holden's forte, but he's OK, while McNamara equips herself well - once you get used to the fact that she looks and sounds like the five-year-old Margaret O'Brien. Dated, sure, but for all its flaws, a fun way to spend an evening. (3)

***



The Assassination of Richard Nixon (Niels Mueller, 2004) - This functional portrait of a beaten-down loser who finally snaps - and proceeds to mount the most hilariously shit assassination attempt of all time - owes no small debt to Taxi Driver and the classic Edward Dmytryk B-movie The Sniper. But it's just not in the same league. Sean Penn, surely the most overrated person in the entire world, isn't "acting" as much as usual - a welcome relief - but despite that atypically nuanced performance, a reasonable, unsensationalised script and Mueller's sporadically intelligent handling, it's all been done a whole lot better before. (2.5)

***



Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) - Bizarrely lacklustre Tarantino film about various pockets of resistance fighters and secret agents planning to off the Nazi brass during a film premiere. It's watchable throughout and there's a taut, tense, tight-as-a-drum suspense sequence set in a bar - as a Gestapo officer begins to suspect undercover British soldier Michael Fassbender isn't all he seems - but the film is largely lacking the excitement and raw energy one usually associates with the director, or at least used to. Christoph Waltz is exceptional as a cultured Jew-hunter, but he's also the only character Tarantino bothers to flesh out, a mystifying decision in a film that bills itself as a Jewish revenge fantasy. When one considers the car-wreck that was Death Proof - comfortably one of the worst 10 films I have ever seen - you can view this as something of a return-to-form but, compared to Reservoir Dogs, it lacks distinctiveness, quality and heart. (2.5)

***



The Ploughman’s Lunch (Richard Eyre, 1983) – Incredibly cynical satire, written by Ian McEwan, about a BBC radio producer (Jonathan Pryce) and his relationships with fellow right-wing media types (including camp, mulleted Tim Curry), his working class parents and a Socialist historian. It’s more a series of polemics on British history and Thatcherite Britain than it is a coherent drama, which means that while individual scenes are often striking and interesting, the overall effect is rather muted. I also found it quite hard work spending 100 minutes in the company of such a hateful human being, so bereft of redeeming qualities, as Pryce’s selfish, duplicitous journo, even in the name of satire. I do get quite turned on by newsreels of the Suez Crisis, though, so we have that in common. (2.5)

***



*INCLUDES A FACT-HEAVY GUIDE TO THE CHARMS OF THE FALCON SERIES*
The Falcon in San Francisco (Joseph H. Lewis, 1945) – This was the eighth of Tom Conway’s 10 outings as the eponymous crime-solver and adventurer, a role he took over from his real-life brother, George Sanders, in 1942. The series is notable for that trivia point, and as a breeding and dumping ground for studio RKO. The Falcon in Mexico is said to contain footage shot by Orson Welles for his never-completed film It’s All True. Music that features prominently in Falcon films turns up in other RKO pictures: San Francisco uses 'My Shining Hour' from the Fred Astaire musical The Sky's the Limit as background music, while the sumptuous theme for the classic noir Out of the Past was featured as an on-screen nightclub number in The Falcon Takes Over. That same film was the first adapted from Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, a huge hit for the studio two years later when it was filmed more faithfully as Murder, My Sweet. The series also includes bit parts for stars on the rise and on the skids. Alibi features up-and-coming Lawrence Tierney (later Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs) and future Out of the Past femme fatale Jane Greer - who later fell out of favour with Howard Hughes by not boffing him - while that idiot who brought King Kong to New York, Robert Armstrong, turns up in San Francisco 12 years on. People like Allen Jenkins, Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards (the voice of Jiminy Cricket), Edward Brophy (the voice of Timothy the Mouse), Esther Howard, near-legendary character actor Elisha Cook, Jr. (the gunsel from The Maltese Falcon), Barbara Hale and Fox's favourite "other woman", Lynn Bari, appear in other outings.

Two key directors of the ‘40s and ‘50s also got their big break in Falcons: Edward Dmytryk – the noir specialist and notorious Hollywood Ten-ner who gave series highpoint Strikes Back such a punchy style – and Joseph H. Lewis, the B-movie legend who went on to make Gun Crazy and The Big Combo. Lewis isn’t given much of a free rein with the low-budget San Francisco, but he does contribute one fantastic little set-piece, in which Conway wakes up from being slugged, sees various blurry figures hoving into view, gets smacked around a bit and then falls to the floor, photographed artfully through a wooden chair – recalling Lewis’s predilection for shooting-action-through-inanimate-objects that got him the nickname “Wagon Wheel Joe” in his Western days. Otherwise, it’s a pretty pedestrian affair by the series’ standards, pleasant enough, but with a thin, somewhat unconvincing story and a predictable reveal, though if you want to see Edward Brophy being insulted by a lot of women, this is definitely the film for you. It was Conway’s last Falcon based on an original story; the final pair were remakes of the first two Sanders films. (2.5), just about.

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The Long Gray Line (John Ford, 1959) - One of Ford's worst films, a long, shapeless biopic of West Point trainer Marty Mahan (Tyrone Power) that's something like his version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips. It's seriously light on plot, beginning with tons of broad, witless comedy, before segueing into an hour of overwraught sentimentality, with no coherent viewpoint or - indeed - any point at all. There are some moving moments along the way, especially the scenes set around Mahan's son's birth, and Maureen O'Hara is very good in support, but it's one of the director's rare misfires. (2)

See also: Ford's 1956 Western, The Searchers, isn't half bad, though...