Burt Kennedy directs John Wayne, Ann-Margret and Ben Johnson in this western where a group of hired guns try to reach a derailed train full of stolen gold before a posse catches them.

A fun little western. 70% of it is just horses riding through landscapes but the shoot-outs are enthralling, the attitude elegiac without being dour and Ann-Margret and The Duke have a nice platonic bond. Sturdy.

7

Jean-Luc Godard directs Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli and Jack Palance in this tale of lust and movie-making in Italy.

Tyrannical Hollywood producer wants to fuck Bardot. Comes across as spitefully misogynistic and brightly dull. I’m watching some of these “greatest films ever made” after them not being in my cultural life for 40 years and realising I haven’t watched Face / Off in the past 5 years. I could be spending my time more effectively.

4

Ramin Bahrani directs Michael Shannon, Andrew Garfield and Laura Dern in this thumping drama about a struggling construction worker who joins the payroll of a callous evictions profiteer after he is dispossessed by the same man.

When they compile lists of the forgotten or overlooked classics of the last decade this will be prominent in all of them. A Sweet Smell of Success for home owners. A Wall Street for vapers. A muscular, unleashed, moving Glengarry Glen Ross. A Big Short not interested in smugly lionising or crassly humanising the corrupt suited scumbags who profit from the misery the system produces. Like all of the above films have their seductive devil figure, this one has Shannon. A beast of a character actor – imposing, righteous, untrustworthy. Here he justifies his role’s parasitic business practices with unwavering belief and ire. Watching him patiently de-house a family with scripted rigorousness and calm scheduled aggression is just one of a series of powerhouse scenes. For the first hour, 99 Homes plays like wave after wave of distressing panic attacks. The pace and the emotional impact, the constant intelligent distress Bahrani causes to his more sympathetic protagonist, and to us, is masterful. Then the corruption comes. Always gripping, never cloying this a financial thriller, a battle for a soul, relevant. Yet it does fumble the final moments. Reaching for an overly dramatic conclusion where Garfield’s ostensible hero can get away clean. It doesn’t achieve it. But for a film this ambitious and effective not to completely join its loop isn’t the end of the world. It is not exactly a happy ending, certainly not a falsely triumphant one.

9

Reed Morano directs Blake Lively, Jude Law and Sterling K Brown in this trainee assassin thriller where an orphan from a terrorist attack goes from junkie to killer.

An unpleasant variation on a genre difficult to get wrong. The visuals and storytelling are murky and jagged. I assume they are supposed to be impressing on us the lead’s paranoid and emotionally hollow state but instead it removes us from caring about the plot as it unfolds. I felt very disassociated from what was happening onscreen. There are a few immersive action sequences that are impressively executed but not enough to sate your adrenaline fix. And if we are boiling it down to bone and skull then the half-assed conspiracy mystery that strings this together is merely an excuse for Lively to try out a series of looks. Her Golden Age Hollywood glamour is muted by the miserablist wardrobe. She gets to be bruised smackhead, shivering trainee, buttoned up incompetent. Only a scene where she poses as a high class call girl delivers the goods. No one has bought a ticket to see Blake Lively underfed, suffering and looking dowdy. And looking at the opening weekend numbers, no one did.

5

Nicolas Pesce directs Andrea Riseborough, John Cho and Frankie Faison in this reboot of the haunted house curse franchise.

I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed an entry in the choppy and often incomprehensible Ju-On series. This one steals the colour chart from Mindhunter and has a cast of seasoned character actors… but I dozed for the final half hour.

3