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

Bradley Cooper directs himself, Lady Gaga and Sam Elliott in this third remake of the new talent overtakes famous lover rock romance.

So this… THIS… is the front runner for the best picture Oscar? I went in open minded, open hearted, ready to be conquered. I was ready for Lady Gaga not to be the best actor in the world (I’d spent 10 weeks watching her awkward turn in American Horror Story: Hotel). Hell, it is not like Cooper is a particularly dynamic screen presence either. But at times this was laughably bad. The poor Parisian cinema goers who heard us chuckle uncontrollably through another sweary, laboured round of dialogue. Was Dave Chapelle going to say “Bro” at the end of every sentence? Do regular folk think endless scenes of smearing cream on each other’s faces is intimate? No one really thinks songs just come together like that and can be performed unrehearsed with a band and a small town’s worth of people eagerly watching , do they? Don’t have LG perform at a drag revue as her intro… it is just too on the nose! This is going to be a heavily spoofed and parodied film. Not just as it can be camp and awful at times, but because it is iconic. It will capture the general public’s imagination. And it ain’t all bad. Sure the talkier interludes are stinkers but the concert moments have a rush of energy. The editing is pleasingly off key. It jerks around a bit. But this twitchy cutting captures the thrill of facing your fears, realising your dream… hell, falling in love. Sam Elliott does a ton with a little. The songs are memorable belters. Cooper the director has a relaxed framing style and a strong sense of colour that captivates. But as a product… and this is a product… base Hollywood… It is just The Bodyguard ain’t it, really? Killer album sales, fluffy yet random movie attached. But that shouldn’t be critically lauded. It shouldn’t win no gongs after Christmas. And just who is Dave Chapelle’s character… a man whose garden Bradley Cooper likes to regularly visit for a drunken shit and a sleep. Is that his character?

5

Tom Shadyac directs Jim Carrey, Courteney Cox and Sean Young in this comedy about a goofy animal related crime solver who has to find the Miami Dolphins kidnapped mascot. 

Full discolure: I watched Ace Ventura many, many times as a teenager. I know it back to front. And in the last couple of years I’ve caught large incomplete swathes of it when channel surfing in hotels. It is a very juvenile film I can’t help settling on. Carrey shines in it with a OTT star making turn. Like Groucho Marx or Inspector Clouseau he’ll arrive in any normal social set-up and derail it with his wacky behaviour. And on a base level this works. Amusing you in every colorful scene. There’s no sophistication to Ace Ventura and it noticably lacks a killer set piece but as mindless entertainments go this fits nicely into an early evening even as it enters middle age with me. “Liiiike a glooove!”

7

 

 

 

Paweł Pawlikowski directs Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot and Borys Szyc in this doomed romance film following a world weary music teacher and a grifting young singer as they fall in and out love over decades of Soviet rule in Poland. 

Hauntingly beautiful black and white photography capture the sexiest onscreen pairing in years. Broken and imperfect, internally and externally, you feel the attraction and the betrayals of this mismatched pair. The novella like format reduces what should be Doctor Zhivago epic love story down to a series of elliptical vignettes. Compelling, seductive, misanthropic stuff.

8

 

Denis Villeneuve directs Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Paul Dano in this grim thriller where a set of parents make dehumanising choices after their children go missing and the police release their only suspect. 

Villeneuve is clearly a fine filmmaker. He approaches his cinematic storytelling with patient mastery, both unshowy yet confidently deliberate. He imbues his genre works with a craft that elevates them up out of being mere entertainments. And Prisoners, like all his other projects, skirts around some unwieldy issues without ever letting them consume the narrative propulsion. Faith, grief, child abuse, vigilantism, torture, truth, alcoholism, class and parenting are all explored in their darkest aspects. He wrings out committed, subtle performances from an enviable mix of big name stars and A-game supporting actors (Dano is excellently creepy). The film has small scale set pieces that grip and motor the generous running time. The thickly tangled mysteries and twists surprise though make sense as they unravel. And yet… and yet… the film leaves me cold. Both watches I appreciated the top to bottom quality of the production, the sensitive exploitation of the risky subject matter and the intelligence with which the ideas were batted about. Yet I just can’t get attached to Prisoners beyond deserved respect. An unjustifiable forcefield exists that stops the film from touching me, provoking me. Happened at the cinema, happened here on an open minded revisit. It is a movie that does everything right, except win me over. I’m left watching a daring formal exercise that doesn’t put a foot wrong, that should be my kind of cinema, wondering why I care so little about it… during and after.

6

Perry Henzell directs Jimmy Cliff, Carl Bradshaw and Janet Bartley in this Jamaican drama that switches into a crime thriller, starring the reggae superstar.

A movie that will always be more famous for its perfect reggae soundtrack (one of the best LPs ever released) than its content. The music from Cliff and contemporaries gives the haphazard plot an energy and life that not even far less naive jukebox movies have ever matched. The first half follows a country boy with a dream struggling to survive in the big bad city. It is a simple piece of neo-realistic filmmaking, one that fits Cliff’s limited but charming central turn. And while he has a hard time making his mark in Kingston, a city of corruption and hypocrisy, you couldn’t predict where the film will swerve halfway in… unless you’ve seen him brandishing guns on the poster. Midway through his tough new life, Cliff’s Ivanhoe Martin goes to the cinema and watches a cowboy movie. He cheers at the black hat taking down the law. Then for rest of our story his hustle shifts; he records a hit song, gets the girl, becomes a drug dealer, an outlaw and a folk hero. Is this a hard working boy’s fantasy or the tough path of crime readily open to a kid with stunted dreams in an unfair society? I’m not sure the film ever knowingly asks that question. Henzell just wants to get some exploitation bolted on to his production. Some shoot outs, some sex and violence to make itself marketable. And why not? So two films in one, both of which might be technically unnoteworthy but have a unique liveliness and milieu that win you over. The Harder They Come is the dictionary definition of a cult item but the unabashed positives of it make it very enjoyable.

8

David Fincher directs Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt and Kevin Spacey in this horror thriller about a serial killer forcing deaths onto people guilty of the seven deadly sins. 

I was under 18 when I went to see Se7en at the cinema. And Se7en is the epitome of an 18 certificate film. Subliminally installing images of knife strap-ons and exploded guts and severed heads into your mind while brazenly plunging you into a rain sodden cityscape that might as well be hell. I went with my parents. David Fincher said in an interview at the time he wanted to make films that scar. Films like Jaws, that stay in your fear receptors years later. That even if the movie flopped, he hoped that some 21st century kid might catch it late night and tell their friends about the old movie they saw that ended with a surprise head in a box. The severed head.

Fincher was justified in his fears of a flop. This was his first project after the nightmare production of Alien3. A gruelling Hollywood baptism of fire that saw him be sacked three separate times on set, have his footage reassembled by producers and spend a year of his career a pariah, a period about which he still will not comment on in public to this day. Se7en was his second movie but his chance to reboot his reputation from scratch. Smaller scale and with a cast who could use their clout to keep his vision true from executive compromise and back pedalling. Visually, it is a similar film to his Alien entry. Industrial gothic. Beams of holy light piercing into caves with sweaty walls and crumbling utilitarianism. Antiques and faulty tech littered around unloved workspaces. Oblivion with a Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.

This time his vision captured the general public’s imagination, Se7en was a modest smash and Fincher would go on to refine and control his precise, pessimistic cinematic style in classics like Fight Club, Zodiac and The Social Network. Those films slowly became more prestigious, his reputation as one of the few living greats grew with each masterful release. Se7en isn’t one of those grand, important, sophisticated awards bothering movies but it is his finest. An obscene mystery movie that pounds you with it constant bleakness and dazzles you with its revolutionary twists.

There’s only one action sequence. A foot chase that appears from nowhere but bruises and shudders you. Unlike the stunt led spectacular set pieces of an Arnie or Harrison Ford flick from that era this isn’t about a hero surfing the impossible but a human trying to avoid the probable. Every corner Detective Mills turns, every door and window he darts through, puts him in the crosshairs of a man who has proven how little he cares for human life. He stumbles, and slips, and careens towards the embodiment of death itself. Doggedly in pursuit of a villian he does not understand. It is a breathtaking break from all the world weary reviewing of the fanatic’s gruesome work. Much of the narrative is passive. Freeman’s marvellously resigned Somerset sums up Se7en’s core mode.

SOMERSET

All we do is pick up the pieces. We take all the evidence, and all the pictures and samples. We write everything down and note what time things happened…

MILLS

Oh, that’s all.

SOMERSET

We put it in a nice neat pile and file it away, on the slim chance it’s ever needed in a courtroom. (pause) It’s like collecting diamonds on a desert island. You keep them just in case you ever get rescued, but it’s a pretty big ocean out there.

 

The performances are, in general, excellent. After having his cast prescribed to him for Alien3, Fincher clearly revels in filling his shot at redemption with distinctive turns. Most only have a scene or two to impress. R. Lee Ermey, John C McGinley, Richard Roundtree all add a gruff masculinity to their disempowered men of action roles… like Mills they want resolution and justice but have no practical answers to John Doe’s crimes. Morgan Freeman’s apathetic lead detective is electric. Trying to drown out the chaos and the degradation of the city he lives in. Apathy as a survival mode. The one chink in this perfect movie’s armour is Pitt’s Mills. He’s a little too twitchy and mannered here. Pitt goes big and aggressive, a good opposite to Freeman’s composed protagonist and fitting with his character’s ultimate fate. But it is nowhere near as nuanced and relaxed as his effortless partner. Gwyneth Paltrow mainly sleeps and looks angelic until her time to shine happens off screen.

And then we get Kevin Spacey… discounting his obscured appearances earlier on, his third act arrival into the movie is one of the best played hands in genre screen writing. “Detective. Detective. DETECTIVE! You’re looking for me.” The whole movie resets around his otherworldly enigma of a performance. We even get daylight. Just who the fuck is John Doe? Do we judge the man by his methods or his honesty or his success? In just 15 minutes of shackled, restrained screentime we stare true dogmatic evil in the face and he sneers right back at us, self amused and smugly triumphant. I’m surprised Anthony Hopkins didn’t FedEx Spacey his Silence of the Lambs Oscar the day Se7en wrapped. I guess the delivery man was busy.

10