KNEECAP

 After what seems like decades in the cultural wilderness home-grown Irish cinema has produced three great Irish films in as many years, firstly with "The Quiet Girl" and now, this year, with "That They May Face the Rising Sun" and now "Kneecap", named after the Irish-speaking Hip-Hop band who just happen to brilliantly play themselves.

Fundamentally Rich Peppiatt's instant classic is about how two lads from West Belfast became the highly successful and highly controversial band Kneecap with more than a little help from their Irish teacher who became band member number three with a balaclava and the name DJ Provai but unlike most films about bands or the music industry "Kneecap" is a kaleidoscopic gem of almost surreal sounds and images that blows the cobwebs off the genre with all the force of an exploding bomb.

This is at once a history of a band and of the Northern Ireland Troubles unlike any other and it's very funny in a way no other film that's dealt with the Troubles has been before. Of course there are people in Northern Ireland who would ban the film or just maybe flush it down the toilet, (a recent concert by the band had to be rescheduled after protests that the venue, on the East Bank of Derry's River Foyle, would prove problematic), but then that's their loss since both the film "Kneecap" and the band Kneecap are just about as good as movies and music can get.

BEYOND THERAPY

 Proof that even Robert Altman can cook a rancid turkey. "Beyond Therapy", which he co-wrote with Christopher Durang from Durang's play and which, to Durang's dismay, he proceeded to change radically, is about the kind of New Yorker's who read 'The New Yorker' or are just found between the pages of 'The New Yorker' and who spend half their lives on the psychiatrist's couch.

It's clearly meant to be a comedy but it's one in which every joke has been drained of humor making it hard to believe that this was made by the man who gave us "Nashville" or that actors as talented as Glenda Jackson, Jeff Goldblum, Julie Hagerty, Tom Conti, Christopher Guest and Genevieve Page would lower themselves to appear in it. Surely everyone involved must have realized what a crock they were involved in. Shockingly bad.

STAGE DOOR

 Some of the best dialogue ever heard in an American movie delivered by a mostly female cast all of them at the top of their form. The setting is a theatrical rooming house populated by wannabe actresses. There's Katharine Hepburn, (the high-brow Vasser type), Ginger Rogers, (the low-brow chorus-girl type), and the others, (Lucille Ball, Constance Collier, Eve Arden, Ann Miller and Andrea Leeds who was Oscar-nominated as the tragic Kay).

Amongst the men are Adolphe Menjou, (a big producer, what else!), Jack Carson, Grady Sutton and Franklin Pangborn, none of them a match for the girls. Of course, the source material was a play by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman which might account for the sharp wit though this cast certainly helped. The director was the great and undervalued Gregory La Cava who won the New York Film Critics' Best Director prize for his work. Something of a classic, in fact, that deserves to be better known.

THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC

 Bresson at his most austere with a subject in keeping with that austerity, "The Trial of Joan of Arc" may lack the formal beauty of Dryer's film and Florence Delay may not be Falconetti but what Bresson's film has are Joan's words spoken directly from the manuscripts of the trial so this is probably as close we are likely to get to what actually happened.

Of course, with no wider backstory, other than what history has told us, it is difficult to place these events in a broader context which isn't to say the film doesn't work on its own terms. What we are seeing is a fragment of the tapestry rather than the tapestry itself while both Delay and Jean-Claude Fourneau as Bishop Cauchon are perfectly cast. Not one of Bresson's masterpieces, then, but quite extraordinary nevertheless.

7 WOMEN

 Now considered in some quarters to be a masterpiece and one of his finest films, John Ford's final film "7 Women" was neither a critical nor a commercial success at the time, (though the magazine Cahiers Du Cinema did name it as one of the ten best films of the year). The 7 women of the title are missionaries in 1935 China; at least six of them are, the seventh, played by Anne Bancroft, is the new doctor who joins them. The only man, outside of a few Chinese servants, is teacher Eddie Albert, that is until warlord Mike Mazurki comes calling with rape and pillage on his mind.

In many respects this is just another Ford western albeit with a Far Eastern setting and a very fine one it is if not quite the masterpiece some people think it is. For Ford it's also quite explicit in its attitude to sex particularly in its barely hidden lesbian subplot with head missionary Margaret Leighton lusting after young teacher Sue Lyon, seemingly unable to live down "Lolita". Bancroft, when she arrives, isn't just a breath of fresh air but a smoking, swearing, sexually liberated outsider who proves to be more than a match for the invaders.

Like "The Man who Shot Liberty Valance" it's clearly shot on sound stages and like that earlier classic is redeemed by an old man's experience of the world at large as well as an ambivalent attitude towards organized religion with each of the characters beautifully sketched and played. Add plague to the proceedings and you have one of Ford's most unlikely films but one as deserving of our attention as any that preceded it.

HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL

 Unintentionally hilarious exploitation picture on the dangers of drugs in American high schools in the late fifties populated by high school kids played by actors who were at least ten years too old for their roles. Russ Tamblyn is the new student who's really an undercover cop planted in the school to find out who the dealers are. Jan Sterling is the glamorous and liberal teacher, Mamie Van Doren is Tamblyn's sex-pot of an 'aunt' while John Drew Barrymore is one of the bad guys.

Albert Zugsmith produced and Jack Arnold directed "High School Confidential" in 1958 and it was dated almost before it hit the screen. On the plus side it was very handsomely photographed in Black and White Cinemascope and the drag race sequence is certainly effective as is the climatic fight scene between the villains and some more civic-minded students lead by a very handsome and youthful Michael Landon before he built his little house on the prairie.

IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE.

 One of the better sci-fi movies of the fifties with intelligent direction, (by the great Jack Arnold), and an above average script making up for the lack of sophisticated special effects. OK, so the monsters look like wobbly jellies with one big eye and the acting is as wooden as we might expect from the likes of Richard Carlson and Charles Drake but at least at the time of the 'Red Menace' in an age of paranoia here was a sci-fi movie that said the invaders might not wish us harm after all. Originally filmed in 3D, though it hardly merited the use of the new technology, it has since gone on to be something of a cult classic.

HAMLET GOES BUSINESS

 The plot of "Hamlet" transferred to contemporary Finland then filmed in the style of a forties film noir with its tongue lodged firmly in its cheek. Aki Kaurismaki's "Hamlet Goes Business" is yet another of his many multifaceted treats exploring in large part the bizarre relationships between men and women only this time fleshing it out with yet another cod-thriller plot. So what if it steals from Shakespeare, (I can think of no better man), and at least this one clocks in at under ninety minutes rather than four hours. Good fun even if it lacks the emotional density we associate with the very best of its director.

KWAIDAN

 Masaki Kobayashi's ""Kwaidan" comprises of four ghost stories, each told in the kind of Kabuki-style that many Japanese films are famous for and all are visually highly attractive if a little on the predictable side, (only the third one really stands out from the others). Indeed, this is a movie in which style dominates with many of the frames looking like old prints but in terms of content the film is sadly lacking in substance. The cast, however, go at it as if they were performing some sacred text even if Kobayashi doesn't want to do anything as crude as breathe life into the proceedings, Still, as portmanteau pictures about ghosts go, it's definitely a cut above average. It's also, I feel, highly overrated.

DONOVAN'S REEF

 Unfairly dismissed at the time of its release "Donovan's Reef" now feels like, if not quite a late masterpiece, still something of a classic piece of Fordian hokum and an opportunity for a bunch of actors to enjoy themselves on, as Jack Warden's character describes it, "one of the most beautiful islands on earth". It's virtually plotless and on a formal level it hasn't moved on from the kind of films Ford was turning out in the forties and fifties and it might have been negligible had it been directed by anyone else but frame to frame Ford imbues it with all the affection and Fordian 'touches', including some spectacular Fordian brawls, that made him perhaps the primary director in American cinema.

Naturally, it's highly sentimental, quite misogynist and also highly ambivalent on the issue of race, (the Chinese get short shrift but Ford handles the issue of miscegenation with a lot more sensitivity than might have been expected), and it has in Elizabeth Allen a properly feisty Fordian heroine. Indeed the cast is first-rate. John Wayne, (who else), is Donovan who runs the local saloon, (hence the title), Lee Marvin is his sidekick, Jack Warden the local doctor and Allen's father, (her presence on the island and their relationship is as near to a plot as the film gets), while the supporting cast includes Marcel Dalio, Cesar Romero and Dorothy Lamour. You might call it a holiday film, particularly for the cast and crew, but if it is then you just might wish all holiday films were directed by Ford.

YEAR OF THE DRAGON

 When Michael Cimino made "Year of the Dragon" he was no longer flavor of the month. Crowned King of the Hill with only his second feature, "The Deer Hunter", his star plummeted when his third film, "Heaven's Gate", became the biggest flop in Hollywood history, at least as far as the studios and the public were concerned, despite its being a masterpiece and one of the greatest of all American films. After its commercial failure it seemed like Cimino might never work again but you can't keep a good man down even if it did take five years before he got behind the camera again.

Co-written by Cimino and Oliver Stone from Robert Daley's novel, "Year of the Dragon" was a gangster epic, part Jimmy Cagney and part De Palma's "Scarface" set in Chinatown with Mickey Rourke as the potentially racist cop caught in the middle of a Triad gang war and John Lone as the Chinese drug lord he has to go up against. It's not a great film with thick-ear dialogue and mostly so-so performances, (though both Rourke and Lone are excellent), and it did little to redeem Cimino's sullied reputation but it's certainly very stylish and fast-moving with a number of first-rate set-pieces and was definitely undeserving of the five Razzie nominations it received.