Spike Lee directs John David Washington, Adam Driver and Laura Harrier in this true story recreation of the black Colorado cop who infiltrated the Klu Klux Klan in 1973. 

Spike Lee on a comeback. I’m there. I’m in. I held onto the legend longer than most. Critically he went off the boil around Clockers in 1995. But I stayed with him and would say He Got Game, Get On the Bus, 25th Hour and Inside Man are among his best. After that his projects struggled to get much of a release over here in the UK, and my appetite dwindled also. I own Chi-Raq on DVD but have felt no pressing hurry to unwrap the cellophane from the packaging. But now we have a heavily marketed, universally acclaimed, multiplex bothering, Cannes Grand Prix winning “return to form” and it’s… O.K.? BlacKkKlansman is an intriguing story on paper, the concept pops. But the reality is the investigation was stunted before it really got going and the benefits of it were minimal. Once you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve kinda seen the film. There’s not much more to the history than a stranger than fiction hook. Spike is as cinematically playful and as incendiary as ever. Therefore the film is unsurprisingly a mixed bag. The thriller elements are weak and watery, the attempts to satirically future echo the slogans and attitudes of the Trump administration become overbearingly obvious. Less is more once we’ve got that joke. The romance works, as do the scenes were Washington and Driver become woke of their own endurance of everyday racism. The ragtag rhythm of fiery didacticism and laidback period caricature produces only a few moments of true power. Lee seems emboldened when he recreates speeches of historical figures. The sequences replicating the oratory of Kwame Ture, Jerome Turner and Kennebrew Beauregard are captivating. They are also the most obviously bolted on additions, extraneous to the narrative. There’s social horror too… the Klan guffawing at The Birth of a Nation’s dated racism is uncomfortable viewing, the use of video footage depicting a white supremacist ploughing his car into Charlottesville protesters in 2017 proves devastating. It makes for quite the punctuation point. But if you were sold by the trailer advertising a hip, zany thriller then you are gonna walk out unsated.

6

 

Michael Lehmann directs Winona Ryder, Christian Slater and Lisanne Falk in this black teen comedy about a trio of bitchy school bullies, a serial killer cool kid and the girl caught in the middle of them. 

With its vibrant primary colour palette, razor sharp dialogue and sexy, threatening performances Heathers is an easy movie to love. Ryder makes for a winning lead (convincingly smart yet naive as the plot needs her to be) and her chemistry with Slater’s manipulative bad lad is smoking. The ecosystem of the school is captured perfectly too. An intentional recipe of three parts satire, one part condemnation. No tribe of children or adults gets away unscathed from Lehmann’s and screenwriter Daniel Waters’ skewed vision. You get the feeling even the background characters have been conceived to be presented as more complex than their chosen stereotypes. The nastiness of the film, both psychological and the violence, motors the entertainment. Horrid behaviour. Excessive retribution. The film easily slips into the visual mode of horror when it wants to grip you. Heathers straddles the no man’s land between John Hughes dramedies and Scream shocks. Tone and timeline sync up perfectly for it to act as the crossover point. A nexus point between teen classics. It meanders a little getting to the third act but the finale is taut and explosive. 30 years still young.

9

 

 

Albert Hughes directs Kodi Smit-McPhee, Johannes Haukur Johannesson and Natassia Malthe in this adventure film about a Stone Age boy seperated from his tribe who partners up with an injured wolf to survive the journey home. 

A tribal White Fang, this is the epitome solid filmmaking. Hughes creates some beautiful imagery, making the prehistoric environment realistic yet spectacular. It is not going to be anyone’s favourite movie but it passed a couple of Dog Day hours effectively.

5

John Landis directs Tim Matheson, Tom Hulce and John Belushi star in this frat comedy about the worst house on campus – the original of its sub-genre. 

I’ve never been a fan of this “hit” but this revisit (almost definitely my last) was a slog. Just repugnant characters behaving badly. Yet the mayhem has no timing, wit or satirical intent. Belushi’s occasional appearances have a charming anarchy, the SHOUT! musical number is brilliantly edited, the lovely Karen Allen is in it and doesn’t have too offensive a role… I’m clutching at straws. The very, very dated gender politics will consign this one to the bin. Bin it!

3

John Landis directs John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Carrie Fisher in this musical comedy about two jailbird brothers trying to get their blues band back together to save an orphanage. 

Indulgent, meandering, excessive. Yet the music is great… numbers from Aretha, Ray Charles, James Brown, John Lee Hooker and Cab Calloway, all absolutely rock. The Blues Brothers performances themselves have a magic. So the comedy that coddles all this gold is hit and miss… when Belushi and Aykroyd actually have a funny set piece to work with you can see what might have been. “How much for the little girl?”

7

 

Bill Douglas directs Robin Soans, Keith Allen and Alex Norton in this epic recreation of the Tolpuddle martyrs story. 

A very beautiful, very patient and very pure movie. Douglas chooses a slow rhythm, a relaxed wave of almost painterly tableauxs, to allow the historical tragedy to unfold. He presents the social and economic situation where a family’s work is undervalued to unliveable prices. Where the hierarchy conspire together so that any discussion of wage increase is stunted, muted or retaliated to punitively. He presents the positive unifying of the men in the village to take non violent, non disruptive action to improve their plight. He lingers on their punishment (transportation to Australia) and eventual redemption. These recreations have the same visually seductive and period accurate detailing of any impressive literary adaptation you care to mention. But his visual style makes this world of less than two centuries ago seem strange and alien. A world without rights or welfare infrastructure feels prehistoric to modern viewers (and it is a world the Tories and Trump want to erode us back into one privatisation at a time). By the time we reach Australia we may as well be exploring a fantasy dream world. Yet the risk and consequences feel tangible, brutal even. It is not all darkness and didactic polemic though. The martyrs have a warmth and humour to them that holds our hand over their mistreatment. And Douglas follows Alex Norton through a series of roles from travelling magic lantern gypsy to early hermit photographer. Via this sidebar of cameos, the pair essay a mini history of the birth of cinema. Comrades is a complex and triumphant work, ripe for rediscovery as a modern classic. I probably would have missed out on it if it wasn’t for a trip with my family to The Tolpuddle Martyrs museum in Dorset occurring in close proximity with the Edinburgh Filmhouse showing it as part of their 40th anniversary retrospective. The shot of the doomed men arriving in good faith to negotiate a modest pay rise,  only to be offered to sit on a set of chairs they failed to secure a fair price on earlier still lingers with me over a month later.

9

Jon Turteltaub directs Jason Statham, Li Bingbing and Ruby Rose in this monster comedy about a dormant prehistoric shark released on the modern day ocean. 

Not quite as OTT wackado as it needs to be nor a gleefully terrible as it could have been. This delivers on what you expect from a Stath versus Shark movie made predominantly for the unsophisticated Chinese cinema going market. But equally doesn’t feature enough moments where our Jase calls the mega predator a toilet or dropkicks its teeth out. Mayhem ensues, just not enough to make this a cult experience.

5

Peyton Reed directs Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly and Michael Douglas in this sequel to the Marvel size shifting action comedy. 

So this is how uninspired an Ant-Man movie looks when they don’t have Edgar Wright’s pre-production storyboards to crib from. Could easily be three episodes of a 90s teatime sci-fi serial shown in sequence. Biggest sin of all, Paul Rudd feels lost in the mix. That man is built for stealing scenes and here he is supposed to be the star.

4

Brian Helgeland directs Mel Gibson, Gregg Henry and Maria Bello in this adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter, a book where a low level crim is left for dead and takes on a syndicate to get what’s owed to him; $70,000.

The Hunter is one of the greatest crime thrillers ever published. Parker (or Porter as he’s called here) is the genre’s finest anti-hero. Lee Marvin, Robert Duvall, Chow Yun-Fat and Jason Statham have all played successful variations of him. Hell, his DNA is in Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul’s Mike Ehrmantraut and Fargo the TV series’ Lorne Malvo. Career criminal, forward thinker and yet in the moment improviser, warped moral code, broken and beaten look hiding a steely focus and resolve to win. You can see what attracted Mel to the part at the height of his box office reign. He is great in the lead role. The nonchalance with which he delivers the line “Forgot my cigarettes” when returning to rescue Bello from a sticky situation is a thing of hard boiled beauty. And Payback is a very watchable Gibson vehicle. His crumpled smart suit, his bone crunching solutions to anyone who hinders him, his fatalist romantic streak – he is as gritty as unfixed asphalt. With its jazzy score keeping you up with the pace and bleach bypass colour scheme (it is a world of blues and greys like it stars eyes and hair are the defining palette), Payback should be a crime classic. But the tone is wobbly as fuck.There are too many broad comedy villians (Lucy Liu’s dominatrix triad being the key offender) and the reshoots to soften the end product are obvious. That silvery almost monochrome look is abandoned in later scenes, the archness of the dialogue vanishes. I’ve not yet seen the now available version of Payback that remains true to Helgeland’s original vision. In that version allegedly the dog dies, the head of the syndicate remains unseen, Gibson is brute to his treacherous wife. What we got served up at cinemas in 1999 is fun enough. Payback is the kinda movie whose errors become background flaws a few days after watching. The good stuff sticks in the long term memory, the concept is far stronger than the delivery. And Gibson all but in name revisited Parker / Porter in How I Spent My Summer Vacation. Will we get a third rough and tough adventure… fingers crossed.

7

Joe Alves directs Dennis Quaid, Bess Armstrong and Lea Thompson in this shark sequel where Cheif Brody’s grown up boys face down a great white at SeaWorld.

Bleakly rote and forgettable. Only the ropey 3D fx catch the eye, due to the visual joins being so glaringly obvious. Allegedly Quaid was coked up out of eyeballs making this. At least someone had fun. Avoids a 1 rating as it has Lea Thompson in a bikini for a few scenes. I’m only human.

2