Jeremy Saulnier directs Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgård and James Badge Dale in this dour thriller where a wolf expert gets drawn into an Alaskan township’s vicious cycle of violence.

Lacking the vice like grip of Green Room or the emotional punch of Blue Ruin this feels like a bit of stumble for Saulnier. The atmosphere is oozing out of every shot and there is a stand out set piece involving a large calibre gun and some overwhelmed cops. The protagonists are too aimless, the storytelling too languid. It often feels like a chore. A shaggy wolf story, all meandering set up with no final act resolution to justify the long path taken.

5

Drew Goddard directs Cynthia Erivo, Jeff Bridges and Dakota Johnson in this jigsaw puzzle crime thriller set around a stateline straddling hotel with some dark secrets and very dangerous occupants. 

It feels like something that would have been greenlit in the ferocious wake of Pulp Fiction, it plays like a nimble homage to The Hateful Eight, and no doubt it will make an excellent Sixties set double bill with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood once Tarantino finishes that. Yet the film shares the most DNA with Goddard’s own The Cabin in the Woods. That was to horror cinema what this is for crime. A drawn out bottle episode that expands out to transcendental levels. While that was a crazier, more satisfying ride… this still, in its most kinetic and playful sequences, is some unpredictable fun. The stellar cast chime nicely off each other. Bridges cashes in his likeability to sell a shaky part, Erivo catches the attention with her amazing singing voice as the one good egg in a rotten basket, while Hemsworth dances in topless and takes over a third act. Dakota Johnson feels more than a little lost in the shuffle and Jon Hamm seems only to come alive in period pieces set in this era. Gambits, gorgeous sets, plot altering flashbacks, conversations that play like duels and excellent use of music. So Bad Times is uncannily like a forgotten Tarantino movie, Tarantino doesn’t work prolifically enough for that to be any kinda issue.

7

 

Panos Cosmatos directs Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough and Linus Roache in this horror revenge stomper about a lumberjack hunting down the demonic cult who made moves on his wife. 

Every frame is a heavy metal album cover come to life. We get some of the most nightmarishly diabolical monster design since Clive Barker’s Hellraiser heyday. We get a no hold barred Cage performance, forging axes or swigging gallons of vodka in his tighty whities. He is to genre cinema what Olivier was to Shakespeare. We get Cheddar Goblin. Because Cosmatos loves himself some ominous, creepy slow build but he thrills in deflating his tension a burst at just the right moment with a gooey gross out punchline. “It didn’t make any sense. There were bikers, and gnarly psychos, and… CRAZY EVIL!”

9

Rainer Werner-Fassbinder directs  Brigitte Mira, El Hedi Ben Salem and Barbara Valentin in this drama about an ageing German who begins a universally frowned upon romance with a young African immigrant.

Still not fully got my head around Fassbinder as an auteur. His theatrical staging and stilted rhythm stop me from getting lost in his melodramas. Yet he has a non judgmental view of humanity that is rare in cinema. All his population are prone to sin, erratic in their behaviours, fools for love, and brutish in their ability to hurt. This sweet and flawed romance is very endearing, the casual racism it is met with familiar, yet never over the top even when being satirically petulant. With his childish talk and his base urges, Ali isn’t exactly a progressive view of the other. He just wants affection and cous-cous. Is there anything wrong with wanting to feel at home? Even when it means straying from your home? Brilliant seventies colours and frank attitudes win you over. This is easily the best film I’ve seen by the German cokefiend who loved warping “Women’s Pictures”.

9

 

J. C. Chandor directs Robert Redford in this survival drama where a lone sailor battles silently against oblivion when his yacht starts taking on water out in the middle of the ocean.

Patient and dedicatedly crafted, this man against the elements parable is technically a marvel. The increasing impossibility of our protagonist’s survival is captured with a deft simplicity. Cinematic storytelling at its purest. Redford is  almost dialogue free. Barely emoting. So that a focussed look or a suppressed sigh has to carry the meaning of a 1,000 scripted words. And does. In all honesty this is one of my favourite performances of his. Just for its craggy fragility. By the time shipping tankers pass his derelict craft, uncaring behemoths closer to Lovecraftian beasts than signs of humanity finally reached, you are overawed. As good as it all is though it does become one note very early, you know from start to end you are watching an exercise, a high wire act, that exists solely so it can. A clinical triumph. There’s not much here that’d would bring you back for a second watch. Chandor succeeds in putting his icon through an existential wringer without supporting cast or much dialogue. That in itself is impressive, but in a single journey, no return kinda way.

6

 

 

Stanley Kubrick directs Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou and Ralph Meeker in this WWI drama about the arbitrary execution of three soldiers for cowardice after the failure of an improbable assault. 

The gorgeous long tracking shots (the ones in the trenches you’d swear were achieved with a steadicam). The exploration of dehumanisation. The fatalism of rigged game unhappy ending.  The characters defined and dwarfed by their environment. The detached wry subtlety of the humour. This has a whole bunch of what you’d expect from a later Kubrick masterpiece but it is still tellingly a director finding his style. Touching on themes that interest him rather than having the freedom to fully give the movie over to them. Any other director and this would be their finest work though. A tight wartime drama, convincing and superbly acted. Some of the shots are so intricately composed they would be high points in any other auteur’s oeuvre. Not our Stanley. The only moment that feels truly his, rather than prescribed by producers Harris and Douglas, is that coda. The jeering soldiers taking a respite from oblivion in a bar, shaken back into feeling by a scared German girl’s song.

9

My Top 10 War Movies

1. Dunkirk (2017)
2. The Great Escape (1963)
3. The Last Of The Mohicans (1992)
4. A Matter Of Life And Death (1946)
5. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

6. Apocalypse Now (1979)
7. The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)
8. Braveheart (1995)
9. Fail Safe (1964)
10. Gallipoli (1981)

 

 

Carlos Saura directs Ana Torrent, Geraldine Chaplin and Mónica Randall in this arthouse drama about an orphaned child who doesn’t understand death but might be a murderer.

A summer of mourning as three orphaned sisters play and forget their dead parents; one a fragile mother, the other a cheating high ranking figure in the facist regime. This was made during the last days of Franco. Time shifts between memory, fantasy, haunting and predictions fluidly, often without cuts. The camera moves from the present to another moment in a panning motion. This enjoyable character study is powered by an enigmatic and dark turn by young Torrent and the repeated use of a defiant belter of a pop song; Porque Te Vas by Jeanette.

7

 

 

Ruben Fleischer directs Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed in this super(anti)hero movie about a washed up investigative reporter who becomes attached to a very nasty alien symbiote. 

A daft yet diverting effects movie. There’s a brilliant 45 minutes in the middle, where Hardy talks to his new, deadly split personality and tries to avoid dying from being its host, that are demented and gratifying. The set-up that idles along before it is overlong and cliched. The big action finale lacks tension and personality. Yet a pleasingly black humoured one man double act has been birthed by the end credits that you are hungry to see more of. Hopefully Venom is an amuse-bouche for bigger and better things. The trap is set to capture more Cronenbergian / Jekyll and Hyde carnage if a sequel is ever greenlit.

6

John Schlesinger directs Melanie Griffith, Matthew Modine and Michael Keaton in this thriller where a couple rent out the flat below their new home to a very disturbed grifter.

There ain’t no better way to enjoy a Saturday night than a bit of yuppies in peril gloss. Pacific Heights has problems but its strength win through. Keaton is superb as the dangerous enigma Carter Hayes. Shifty, charming, intense… this is him shifting his weight after a year stuck in a rubber cowl. And Schlesinger is too good a director for this job. The lighting, framing and camera movement is inventive. He lurks and ducks and shifts focus like its the late sixties. When a dream sequence finally occurs it visually is no massive tonal change from the everyday storytelling of this world. What stops Pacific Heights from being truly great though is the ostensible leads. Melanie Griffiths lacks agency until the final twenty minutes. When she finally gets stuck in and turns the tables you realise the film should have gotten to this pleasure point far, far earlier. While Modine weirdly tries to out crazy Keaton once his buttons are pushed, convincing neither as an  everyman nor as a gullible mark. Part of the joy of this sub genre is watching the entitled go getter be put through the wringer… the wringer in the form of Keaton is satisfyingly punishing and yet you still feel Modine’s dickhead isn’t punished quite enough by end credits. Still nasty mysteries squat within the slick little shocker.

7

 

Ben Sharpsteen directs Edward Brophy, Herman Bing and Margaret Wright in this Walt Disney animation classic about an elephant babe with massive ears struggling to find his place in the circus.

Despite being assembled as a cheapie, this is one of the Disney unit’s best. A string of shorter sequences (essentially a circus themed run of Silly Symphonies) through which pearls of the Dumbo story are threaded. Three of these pearls are brilliant. The superfluous introduction of Casey Jnr the steam train, the delirium of Pink Elephants on Parade and the jazzy triumph of When I See an Elephant Fly. The bittyness of Dumbo is really its secret strength. It is fine there are asides and distractions from the central plot. It is not just slight and mawkish, it pulls at the heartstrings unashamedly like an emotional tug ’o war. Walt is better when he is gleefully manipulating the fairytale form rather than the audience directly.

8