Maren Ade directs Peter Simonischek, Sandra Hüller and Ingrid Bisu in this comedy about an ageing father, with a taste for pranks, who invades his estranged business executive daughter’s life with his infantile whimsy.

As a dual character study of two lonely people Toni Erdmann is rich and commendable for taking the road less travelled. As a comedy it often is chucklesome in its cringeworthyness. And as a satire of modern corporate life and the fag end of globalisation, it has some apt points. It is not a laugh riot however, is leisurely paced and the change in the protagonists is marked but somehow still ambiguous. Fans of arthouse will no doubt sift more out of it but I found it to be a satisfying one-watcher.

6

Albert Brooks directs himself, Kathryn Harrold and Bruno Kirby in this romantic comedy about a movie editor who dumps a woman and then deals with the fallout.

The finest, funniest Brooks film I’ve seen – this is full of wit and self-loathing. A long weekend of bad behaviour from a needy man. It is quite, quite recognisable. Cinematically playful and unpredictably sly, this is a forgotten classic. Fans of Woody Allen and Nora Ephron will find a more self-aware, hipper, misanthropic alternative to their best works. Or if you are looking for a more emotionally intelligent Curb Your Enthusiasm, then it hits that sweet spot too.

9

Dominic Sena directs Hugh Jackman, John Travolta and Halle Berry in this crime actioner where a hacker is coerced into taking part in a billion dollar heist.

Starts well, ends messily… but on such a gargantuan scale that you can’t help but admire it. It is a big nothing movie. Speeches are made, tables turn, things explode, cyphers run for their lives, a bus flies… and not one plot point connects neatly to another. All flash, no bucket. Infamous for Halle Berry being paid an extra half a million dollars to show her boobs. They are nice tits but the moment feels cold, lifeless and forced much like the brainless razzle dazzle that occupies everything around them. Two hours of sledgehammer cinema.

5

Pablo Berger directs Maribel Verdú, Macarena García and Daniel Giménez Gacho in this monochrome warping of the Snow White fairy tale stealing its look from 1920s silent cinema and centring around a bullfighting dynasty.

A magical, often very sexy, pastiche. It could move a little faster in the opening stretch… this Snow White doesn’t become the fairest of them all until well after the midway point. The matador backdrop will prove distasteful to some. Yet any film that adds a mischievous chicken as an agent of narrative change is alright by me.

7

Renny Harlin directs Zi Yang, Richie Jen and Nick Cheung in this Hong Kong action thriller where morgue workers are held hostage by villains at Christmas.

Die Hard 2: Die Harder. Cliffhanger. The Long Kiss Goodnight. Harlin had a decent 90s Hollywood career of producing top end mayhem. This Asian career revival is smaller scale but actually works well. The narrative is a hard pump of chases, stand-offs, twists and opportune interruptions. There’s enough carnage and kinetics to sate the nostalgic action fan. It promises Die Hard in a morgue, it delivers Cliffhanger across a two storey building. The baddies want a bullet from a corpse. The hostages do everything they can to undermine and frustrate their armed transgressors. Nick Cheung makes for a nerdy reluctant hero, more Poirot than Jack Traven. Zi Yang is spunkily capable as his plucky assistant. Both end up with the ending you want for them. It just zips along pleasingly… loyal to what you’d expect from its director’s back catalogue, hitting the note you want from a HK gun flick. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel and it carries the crushed baggage of a production of its type. It is all a little too polished (especially the unlived-in setting), the humour is very dated, the smaller characters are one note and histrionic (a delivery driver turns up who you’d swear is a Sacha Baron Cohen creation if he were only a foot taller) and there are two too many subplots that are tied up way too neatly with little cumulative significance. But all in, all out… this is a Friday Night throwback that even when it wobbles, wobbles in a way familiar to the sub-genre it apes. Watched at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

7

Alan J. Pakula directs Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt and Rubén Blades in this thriller where a decent NYC beat cop discovers his pretty lodger is an IRA gunrunner.

Underwhelming but not the utter disaster it was tagged as on release. It is a film that painstakingly sets up its two protagonists for either a cat-and-mouse action finale or a more character based drama… then pigheadedly achieves neither. Pitt gets lost in the mix, Ford does a lot with weak material. It is hard for Ford to make a bad film, he just is utterly compelling on screen, even in watery broth like this. Pitt was quoted as saying this was “the most irresponsible piece of filmmaking” he’d ever seen. You can understand why… his part is diminished, the politics iffy, the reshoots adding very little to an uncertain mix. Yet it idles along glossily and there’s rarely a scene that couldn’t work well in a more lively film. Average, unspectacular, old fashioned.

5

My Top 10 Harrison Ford Movies

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe directs Terry Gilliam, Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort in this documentary following Gilliam’s thwarted attempt to adapt Don Quixote that suffered budget cuts, flash floods, inappropriate locations and sick leads.

When this ‘unmaking of’ was first released, we all viewed it as a humorous shambles. The series of bad luck occurrences that compounded to derail a Gilliam movie. He’d been there before with Brazil and Baron Munchausen… classics were finally born from those troubled production. This time we got an aborted project… we learnt what a gamble movie making is outside of the studio system. A few compromises and you no longer have any flexibility in your shooting schedule, a few acts of god and you no longer have a film. 15 years down the line and a version of his The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has finally been made, different cast, smaller scale… inaccessible currently to the average UK film fan. But on rewatching the first stumbling try, you realise the true tragedy unfolding is not that one story Gilliam attempted to tell was shuttered but that it was his reputation was destroyed. The Python animator had been one of the key visualist of my childhood. From Holy Grail to Fear & Loathing he produced grand, ornate, grotesque mega budget celluloid cornucopias. Since Jean Rochefort’s hernia, he has muddled about in lower budget messes and defanged studio projects. The appetite to fund his visions disappeared over those ten chaotic, uncontrollable days of non-shooting. The trust in him to deliver another 12 Monkeys or a Fisher King or Time Bandits by the money men vanished. His movies no longer make bank, his movies no longer had the resources to align his unique visual sense with a mainstream audiences’ quality control. We didn’t know it then but Lost in La Mancha isn’t about one movie not completed, but the genius permanently crippled.

6

Richard Marquand directs Donald Sutherland, Kate Nelligan and Christopher Cazenove in this wartime thriller where a knife happy Nazi spy finds himself shipwrecked on remote Scottish island with an unhappy couple for company.

A movie that has a shifting nature. Starting out as a manhunt chase where an icy Donald Sutherland stabs anyone who crosses into his path through 1940’s London. This is slick stuff, there to emphasise the sociopath’s isolation among his enemy and humanity in general. It reminds me of the great 1939 thriller novel Rogue Male, where a sniper is left psychologically abandoned while outfoxing facist pursuers. Sutherland is the dark mirror of Geoffrey Household’s literary protagonist, capable yet hounded… on the wrong side of history. This alone would mark Eye of the Needle out as a decent potboiler but at the midway point, the focus changes. On the run, Sutherland’s cad washes up on Storm Island. There’s a young family reside; frustrated cripple husband, untouched wife, precious toddler son. A drive away there is only a drunken lighthouse keeper and a few sheep. They drag Sutherland from the waves. The wheelchair bound husband suspects he’s a wrong un… the wife discovers a kindred spirit. Another yearning soul who has made a bad life decision and by living with the consequences has cut themselves off from society. A tweedy, rainy, steamy gothic romance ensues – part Daphne Du Maurier, a whole hunk of a Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Ken Follet, the author whose airport novel the film is based on, sure knows how to steal from the best. Kate Nelligan is given a rich complex role, Sutherland as her inappropriate lover becomes a more rounded creation. Then night falls and we are back in action and suspense for a rousing finale. This is a film that constantly improves from a rather stock starting point… and then carries on lingering in your mind a good week after watching. Well worth hunting down… Whatever happened to Kate Nelligan?

7

Billy Wilder directs Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Susan Sarandon in this adaptation of the play His Girl Friday was based on.

Solid yet slower than the Howard Hawks’ cinematic classic. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a straight adaptation, and you certainly cannot deny the pedigree of those involved, but you do end up ticking off the minor variations rather than enjoying it as its own thing.

6

My Top 10 Billy Wilder Movies

Andrew Fleming directs Steve Coogan, Paul Rudd and Jack Gore in this romantic comedy where a flamboyant gay couple find themselves unexpectedly raising a grandson.

Colourful and bawdy but blunt rather than witty. Coogan and Rudd work well off each other and it is inoffensive enough even when straying into hard R rated jokes. A sweet way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

6