Clint Eastwood directs himself, Sondra Locke and Geoffrey Lewis in this gentle comedy about an ailing Wild West show that unwittingly picks up a rich heiress to be their sharp shooting leader’s stage assistant. 

Undemanding fun. Clint shares a few platitudes about identity being what you want it to be and the shifting sands of the ticket buying public’s tastes but in the main this is quite happy being an purely episodic and laconic screwball romantic comedy. It is more in love with the rootin’ and tootin’ than the female lead and the wry comedy never really does more than raise a smile but that’s all by the by. A consistent  joie de vivre between the bunch of Clint stalwarts who pad out the cast make it all very, very watchable.

6

John Rawlings directs Maria Montez, Sabu and Jon Hall in this golden age Hollywood adventure where Scheherazade, Sinbad, Aladdin and an acrobat help Baghdad’s real caliph dethrone his bad brother.

If you can’t handle half the cast in brown face, the other half not even bothering then this really, really isn’t the flick for you. If on the other hand you can stomach a bunch of old Jewish entertainers doing music hall knockabout schtick while praising Allah every other sentence then there’s tons to enjoy. Sabu handles the action and the smarts, the honkies the romance. It all moves along with magisterial epic sweep and looks appropriately fantastic and to scale. As Sunday afternoon, boldly technicolor adventures go, this has charm and romp in spades. Dated bad taste aside, I loved it.

9

Peter Hyams directs Gregory Hines, Billy Crystal and Jimmy Smits in this buddy cop comedy about two wise cracking cops working out their last 30 days before early retirement and losing their edge now they can see the finish line, despite some very dangerous enemies made over their careers. 

Clearly written for two far older movie stars, it is lottery win lucky whomever the first choices who turned this script down were turned it down. Crystal and Hines’ chemistry is magical… so much so that the highlight of the movie is when we literally go on a five montage sequence of their holiday to Florida in the middle. That’s right, five minutes of them on roller skates and scooters chasing girls in bikinis is the highlight of a cop movie. Aside from this, Running Scared is a very average movie – the plot scattershot, the romances begrudgingly bolted on with Pritt Stick and the set pieces way, way too sitcommy to thrill. Every time I watch it, I realise how waferthin it all is. A week later the good vibes created by its leads are all that linger and I want to do it all again. It doesn’t really deserve a 7 score, but I’ve worked along the lines that I score Beverly Hills Cop a 10 so have counted down from that accordingly. If you think Axel Foley’s first adventure with its kickass soundtrack and amazing bantz is merely average than by any equation Running Scared is not the movie for you.

7

Wilson Yip directs Donnie Yen, Simon Yam and Lynn Hung in this Kung fu biopic of WWII years of the man who later  trained Bruce Lee in the art of Wing Chun. 

As a lesson in historical accuracy you wouldn’t want to wander into an exam after watching this but as a martial arts movie it is classy and engaging. Strongly choreographed fights and the wickedly likeable Donnie Yen front and centre. What more could you want really?

7

Olivier Assayas directs Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger and Sigrid Bouaziz in this art house thriller about a young woman in Paris waiting for a message from the beyond from her deceased twin brother, funding her time in limbo by choosing fashion wear for a spoilt star. 

A movie seemingly made in freefall. It grabs onto anything it can catch a hold of without properly grasping onto anything tangible. The supernatural subplot is more fruitful than the mysterious stalker noir narrative crowbarred into the middle. If you ever wondered what a Hitchcock movie might look like if his cattle had access to text, Skype, YouTube and Wikipedia then you get a glimpse here. It all adds up to nothing in the end, but a very decorative, hauntingly beautiful nothing. And Stewart really carries the whole thing, no matter how daft or convoluted it unravels. She’s always been the prettiest of the current batch of movie stars; grungy yet willowy, coy yet openly sexual, but she admirably appears to be committed to only working with challenging directors these days. Woody Allen got the best out of her so far in Cafe Society last year, but on the strength of her making this pretentious piece of fannying about quite watchable I’d wager she may turn out to be her generations Johnny Depp. More than an angelic face, as long as she dodges descending into self parody when she hits middle age / accidental franchise, I’d happily buy a ticket to just about whatever she makes from now on.

6

Jordan Peele directs Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams and Bradley Whitford in this horror about a black man who suspects something sinister when he visits his white girlfriend’s family home, which also doubles up as a razor sharp satire.

An intriguing corker this. As an exercise in paranoid thrills it tightens its noose with a Polanski level of perfection. And given its confident genre trappings it still marries its entertainment concerns with some very truthfully awkward interaction between its black and white characters, making sophisticated assessments on the current racial climate in America. Kaluuya shines (British audiences will remember him as tubby Tealeaf in BBC’s Psychoville though he has matured almost unrecognisably since), striking the right balance of intelligence and social discomfort. It stumbles just a little at the end, the ensuing violence once the trap is sprung is a little tame for horror aficionados. But it has the added palpable frisson as our hero fights for his very survival, that as a young black man covered in white folks blood, if the police do turn up, it certainly won’t be to rescue him. Smartly played, possibly the most important and engaging piece of African American cinema since Spike Lee’s heyday.

8

Terence Fisher directs Christopher Lee, Charles Gray and Nike Arrighi in this tale of a group of friends trying to rescue a mate from the grip of a cult of devil worshippers.

Probably the best Hammer horror ever made with both a relishable Lee front and centre, a brilliant final half as the heroes try to survive a series of diabolical attacks inside a chalk circle AND a time slip. The appearances of the devil and daemons are well designed, cleverly fleetingly deployed (the less we read into the first one being a staring middle aged black man in his swimming trunks is likely for the better though). Sure, sure… it suffers from the shonky charms of all Hammer productions – entire scenes exist merely because a country house and sitcom actors were available and it will all appear very dated to unloving eyes. Get caught up in its overwhelming positives though and it’s an imaginative, sexy and propulsive sixties horror.

8

Bill Condon directs Emma Watson, Dan Stevens and Luke Evans in this live action remake of the animated Disney classic where cursed brute and intelligent maiden fall for each other just in time to break a spell. 

Fabulously (almost grotesquely) ornate, ridiculously expanded from its source movie by a whole hour, bravely wearing a fittingly modern and inclusive diversity on its sleeve… I still can’t see a situation where I’d pop this on again at two plus hours over the brilliant 85 minute animated original. Only Luke Evan’s rippling Gaston matches his hand drawn counterpart. The normally fantastic Stevens and Kevin Kline seem neutered amid the CGI, while Watson’s Belle is annoyingly toothsome. As she winsomely barked at a wardrobe “I’m not a princess” I thought “Jog on, love, and stick your pretty dress on.” The wardrobe seemingly agreed. Like a good tranny drag act, this passes as a big screen blockbuster, but we all know it is miming along to a more talented original’s work.

6

 

 

Paul Verehoven directs Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte and Anne Consigny in this very dry and dark comedy of manners about a middle aged woman who is raped and then enters into a power struggle with everyone around her as she tracks down her assailant.

… AND he’s back. The provocateur is back. And even if this wears the ageing trappings of an upper middle class drama, the true intent is made explicit from our opening shot.  We start with a pet cat dispassionately observing a rape and things only get more shocking from there. Every scene messes with your sensibilities, even if it does it a bit more subtly than a robot cop heroically throwing a suspect through windows while reading him his rights or a murder suspect flashing her gash at the cops interviewing her. Unlike his extremely full on, Hollywood blockbuster entertainments, here Verehoven luxuriates in his European art house milieu. Meaning he can explore the diverse interactions of awful people trapped by family ties, workplace commitments and evolving sexual needs rather than the immediate violent reactions his genre works required. If you are a Guardian reader, you’ll find pretty much each and every cold twist and turn troubling. Good… you are meant to. You can leave your politics at the door and enjoy the often laugh out loud fun at safe distance (like that cat). Or you can work through the intellectual, ethical and emotional challenges as they calmly bombard you. Verehoven has created a gilded gauntlet for you to survive, it’s just a gauntlet of office parties, Christmas dinners and five star restaurant meet ups rather than gaudy satirical dystopias or cokey sleazy nightclubs. And Huppert brings her usual cold fish act and expands it into every crevice of the film. Constantly onscreen, constantly pushing to maintain her hard fought for upper hand, convincingly portraying a woman who refuses to be the victim. It is a playful powerhouse of a performance; brittle yet open, witty and attractive. Since Basic Instinct, pretty much every Verehoven film has had a strong, sexually confident, multi faceted female lead front and centre (Starship Troopers aside but that had its own discordant agenda). Let’s hope we get at least another one from him now he enters disgraceful old age.

9

Corin Hardy directs Joseph Mawle, Bojana Novakovic and Michael Smiley in this Irish rural horror about a family plagued by fairytale forest “folk”.

I’m all for the slow burn in a horror but the first hour of The Hallow moves at such a grinding dawdle I almost gave up. Luckily the last 25 minutes provides a fair bit more of the old school (and excellent) creature design, a burning scythe and shifting loyalties within the family. A show stopping last act just about redeems the endeavour, gifting us with a director worth keeping a bloodshot eye on.

6