IF I HAD LEGS, I'D KICK YOU

 'Therapist on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' or perhaps right in the middle of one might have been a better title for "If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You" as therapist Linda tries to cope with an ailing daughter, an absent husband and a great big hole in her ceiling. Described, at least by the folks who give out the Golden Globes, as a comedy this is indeed a darkly funny but deeply disturbing picture of a mental breakdown seen from the perspective of the woman having the breakdown.

In this role, Rose Byrne, (never off the screen), is terrific, terrifyingly so in fact. Writer/Director Mary Bronstein has given her the part of a lifetime and Byrne grabs it with both hands and then shakes it to death but while Byrne may never be off the screen it's far from being a one-woman show. 

On her road to unraveling we also get to know her own therapist, (a beautifully cast Conan O'Brien), her very unstable patient, (a superb Danielle Macdonald), the drug dealer next door, (rapper A$AP Rocky) and her daughter's doctor, (Bronstein herself). All are beautifully played and provide much needed relief from Byrne's very obvious pain, not than I would have wanted to miss a minute of it.

The movie itself is far from an easy watch. Bronstein films Byrne's fractured life in a fractured style, for example we never see the child's face until the end, we just hear her demanding voice and is that hole in the ceiling a portal to the Twilight Zone? It might as well be for all that Bronstein shows us. Yes, this is a strange movie but also a brilliant one and I found it a pleasure welcoming Bronstein back into the cinematic fold. Others haven't been so forgiving; go expecting a comedy and you are bound to be bitterly disappointed.

THE ICE TOWER

 The movie "The Ice Tower" is as cold as its setting or indeed any of its characters. Lucile Hadzihalilovic's painfully slow tale of obsession is the kind of European art-movie that gives art-movies a bad name.  Jeanne, (Clara Pacini), is the young girl who runs away from home and stumbles on the set of a film version of "The Snow Queen", (a book that, coincidentally, she happens to be hooked on). Adopting someone else's identity she gets a job as an extra on the film and then develops something of a crush on the actress playing The Snow Queen, (Marion Cotillard at her most glacial), a crush the actress reciprocates in her strange and demanding way.

This, however, is no "All About Eve" and Jeanne dosen't have the wherewith all to be much of a schemer. Rather she's a young girl in love with an ideal and a diva incapable of returning her love and, as the song says, 'unrequited love's a bore'. About the midway point it would seem that Jeanne's fantasies and the film she's appearing in become intertwined just as we kind of guessed they might, (films like "The Ice Tower" are very easy to read), but by then I had given up the ghost. Others, however, have found it to be the veritable bee's knees and "The Ice Tower" has been figuring in many end-of-year best film lists. All I can say is, for those who like this sort of thing this is the sort of thing they like.

BLUE MOON

 "Blue Moon" is a great play but it isn't on the stage; it's on the screen, an original screenplay by Robert Kaplow, (inspired by the letters of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland), but basically staged on one set, Sardi's, on the opening night of 'Oklahoma', the first musical Richard Rodgers wrote with Oscar Hammerstein after ditching his song-writing partner of more than 20 years, Lorenz Hart and it's Hart, not Rodgers and certainly not Hammerstein, who's the main attraction.

This is the story of a brilliant but bitter alcoholic, a homosexual who probably wanted to be heterosexual and who perhaps convinced himself, if no-one else, that he was heterosexual and he's played magnificently by Ethan Hawke, (digitally reduced in height), in a performance that, had it been in the theatre, would have become the stuff of legend and which might still do here on film.

Everyone else are just supporting characters in Hart's world but at least they are memorably played by Bobby Cannavale, (Sardi's lone barman), Andrew Scott, (Rodgers), Patrick Kennedy, (the writer E.B. White), and best of all Margaret Qualley as Elizabeth, the girl Hart worships as the very epitome of beauty,

It's a sad but ultimately uplifting movie, (how could any movie featuring the music of Rodgers and Hart be anything but uplifting), and it shows once again the command director Richard Linklater has over almost any material be brings to the screen. Yes, this might make a great play but Linklater keeps it highly cinematic, using every inch of the Sardi's setting beautifully. Moving and not in the least sentimental.

WEAPONS

 This twisted variation on 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' is undeniably entertaining but I'm not sure it would have been as much fun if  director Zach Cregger had decided to film it in strictly chronological order. Rather "Weapons" keeps doubling back on itself telling its totally bizarre tale of disappearing children from several perspectives as chapter headings inform us whose story we're getting at any one time.

Fundamentally this is a warped fairy-tale and, as in all good fairy-tales, children are really at the heart of it; children and a real-life wicked old witch, superbly played by Amy Madigan in a performance that will certainly bring her an Oscar nomination at least. In fact, Madigan is the films dark heart and soul although there is also good work from Julia Garner, Josh Brolin and Alden Ehrenreich but ultimately it's thanks entirely to Madigan that by the time we get to the totally daft and very grisly finale I was completely won over.

HARVEST

 Set in an indeterminate period in the past and presumably in Scotland judging by the accents "Harvest" could best be described as folk-horror but not as we might know it. This may be a difficult film to pin down but it's utterly absorbing. Director Athina Rachel Tsangari seems to have found a way to transport us back to the Middle Ages while keeping a very 21st century eye on things.

It hasn't much of a plot as such, just a community so close to nature that it dictates their every waking moment but it's a nature which, together with the outside world, seems intent on destroying the community with every day that passes. It's also stunningly photographed by the great Sean Price Williams while heading an extraordinary cast of actors and musicians are Caleb Landry Jones and Harry Melling. They are the faces we recognize in what is essentially an ensemble piece, (Neil Leiper, Rosy McEwen, Arinze Kene and Frank Dillane are all excellent).

Of course, it won't appeal to everyone, most particularly to horror fans. This is an art movie almost experimental in its execution but if you give yourself over to it then there are treasures to be found in almost every frame.

MISERICORDIA

 If there was ever a movie you had to piece together yourself it's "Misericordia". It's the kind of movie Hitchcock might have made if he were gay and French, (think a more twisted "Rope" laced with a dose of "The Trouble with Harry"), but I doubt if even Hitchcock at his most contrary would have made anything as off-the-wall as this. 

At the beginning if you join the dots you assume they will add up to...what? Only to find it going into places you didn't see coming as it gets progressively weirder by the minute and, I might add, surprisingly funny in a way that Hitchcock would definitely have appreciated. Of course, what the characters in "Misericordia" get up to may defy belief but as Mr. Hitchcock himself would have said, 'It's only a movie' but one you're unlikely to forget in a hurry.

PHARAOH

 This Polish epic about the intrigues that went on in the court of Ramses XII and his young successor Ramses XIII is the very antithesis of anything Hollywood might have turned out. It's certainly stately and visually superb and its battle scenes smack of 'realism' rather than artifice but it's also ponderous and with a plot that's convoluted at best, (being a mid-sixties Polish film its problems had to reflect the Poland of the time), and is finally something of a bore.

Yes, Jerzy Kawalerowicz's (he of "Mother Joan and the Angels" fame), "Pharaoh" is an intelligent epic, modern not just in its outlook but in its style and with none of the anachronisms of DeMille or those widescreen American spectacles of the fifties but there were times when I would have given my right arm for something cruder, something garish, for a dollop of bad taste but no such luck; this is a Polish art-movie after all and it's as po-faced as they come.

On the plus side Jerzy Zelnik, (still only twenty-one when the film was made), brings real gravitas to the part of the young pharaoh, (he also plays his double, the scheming Lycon), though again I wished he would lighten up a bit  on occasions and it was clear even at this early stage his career was assured. It's certainly not a bad film by any means and it does have its admirers, ( critic and scholar Michal Oleszczyk being one as he clearly demonstrates on his very in-depth 'Afterword'), but if I must go back to ancient Egypt give me Hawks' "Land of the Pharaohs" any day.

THIS ISLAND EARTH

 The best and certainly the most imaginative of all the 'flying saucer' movies. The effects may be crude and hardly special and the acting more wooden than a row of book shelves but an outstanding use of color, a reasonably intelligent script and some amazing art direction, (considering the budget), put "This Island Earth" in an altogether different league from its contemporaries. A sci-fi movie that both adults and kids can enjoy in equal measure.

CAUGHT STEALING

 A very black crime comedy from, of all people, Darren Aronofsky which means it's also quite nasty, (for a 'comedy' it's very violent and not really that funny), but it's more than redeemed by Aronofsky's usual visual style and the brilliant cinematography of Matthew Libatique, an unusually original take on a well-worn plot with a few nice curve balls thrown along the way and by a superb performance from Austin Butler as a hapless, heavy-drinking ex-football player who accidentally falls foul of some very unpleasant Russian and Jewish gangsters.

It's also got a first-rate supporting cast that includes Regina King, Matt Smith (nicely cast against type), Zoe Kravitz, Griffin Dunne, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D'Onofrio and Carol Kane. Of course, there's not a frame of it that's really believable, made up as it is from tried and tested ideas but it still may be the most enjoyable film Aronofsky has made to date. (And make sure you stay for the off-the-all closing credits).

DANGEROUS ANIMALS

 I've said it before but it seems to me that Australian serial killer movies are ten a penny so if they are to make any kind of mark they really need to up the ante which is what "Dangerous Animals" does ten times over. The premis is very simple; Jennifer Lawrence lookalike Hassie Harrison finds herself prisoner on a fishing boat  in shark-infested waters skippered by mad, bad and very dangerous to know Jai Courtney who has a habit of feeding his catches to the sharks. 

Needless to say none of what happens to Hassie or her boyfriend Josh Heuston, who comes to her rescue, is particularly pleasant, (this is a very violent film), but director Sean Byrne knows how to keep the suspense at boiling point and provide a few very neat twists in what is basically a tired genre and this one had me yelling at the screen, something I haven't done in quite awhile. In fact, I have a feeling that "Dangerous Animals" could be a cult classic of the future. It's certainly the best shark film I've seen since "Jaws".

EDDINGTON

 With only four feature films to his credit Ari Aster has already become one of those directors whose name screams 'auteur' or maybe just 'cult' as he hasn't quite cut it yet at the box-office, (his detractors will say he's been working his way down since his first feature "Hereditary" and since nothing he's done since has been as successful either critically or commercially, they may he right), but if his subsequent films haven't quite nailed it there are few American filmmakers this ambitious.

A genre director Aster has always worked outside the box, subverting our expectations at every turn. Fundamentally he makes horror movies but they are not like anything else in the field. These are nightmares that sneak up on you and his latest, "Eddington" has its own nightmare already built into its scenario. Set in 2020 Covid has hit America if not the small town of Eddington, at least according to its covid-denying sheriff, (another superb Joaquin Phoenix performance), whose stance pits him against the town's mayor, (Pedro Pascal), so Joaquin decides to run for mayor, too. Meanwhile far from Eddington the Black Lives Matter movement is gaining ground and suddenly it seems the outside world is coming to town and not in a good way.

A black and bloody comedy "Eddington", like "Midsommar" and "Beau is Afraid" before it, can't quite sustain its length nor can Aster fully tie the many threads of his plot satisfactorily together but if you want to call this a failure it's definitely a brilliant one; smart, crazy, prescient and displaying real imagination. It also confirms its writer/director as someone whose films are fast becoming 'event' movies and who surely must have a masterpiece waiting in the wings.