MONOS

 Boy soldiers are nothing new in international cinema with killers as young as ten gracing our screens in movies like "Beasts of No Nation". In the Colombian film "Monos" the soldiers are a mix of young men and women guarding an American hostage, (Julianne Nicholson), firstly on a remote mountainside and then in some unforgiving tropical jungle. Who these teenage warriors are fighting or why is never explained in a scenario that is part Kafka, part William Golding and part Werner Herzog.

There's only a slim semblance of a plot; instead director Alejandro Landes simply films his young cast, (who go by names like 'Bigfoot', 'Wolf' and 'Dog'), as they mostly fight among themselves, have sex or simply try to survive and what begins as just the kind of art-house movie designed to give art-house movies a bad name becomes, in its second half, the kind of savage 'adventure' movie Coppola might have made back in the seventies, indeed did make back in the seventies; there are sequences here as breathtaking as any in recent cinema. I simply couldn't take my eyes off it but whether it finds its audience is another matter entirely.

TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN.

 Another Minnelli movie about the movies and better, in its trashy, glossy way, than his overrated "The Bad and the Beautiful", (cleverly incorporated into this scenario to let us see what Kirk Douglas' character was like as a younger actor). This time he's a washed-up actor offered two weeks work in a film being shot in Rome's Cinecitta studios and directed by Edward G. Robinson with whom he's had a love/hate relationship stretching back awhile.

He's also got an oversexed ex-wife, Cyd Charisse, and women problems generally, (the cast also includes Daliah Lavi, Rosanna Schiaffino and Claire Trevor as Robinson's venomous wife). There's also a talentless young hack involved and he's played very well by George Hamilton. We are, of course, very much in "La Dolce Vita" territory or at least in the world of Eurotrash or Cannes where topless starlets meant more than the films being screened. The film itself is highly artificial which is just as it should be, pitched at just the right level of hysteria. Not a Minnelli masterpiece perhaps but essential nevertheless.

THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION

 Clearly a prestige production, (you only have to look at the credits, both in front of and behind the camera), yet this Sherlock Holmes movie wasn't really a success. Perhaps Holmes was out of favor by the mid-seventies or perhaps the frivolous tone put people off, (it's certainly not in the same class as Billy Wilder's "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes"), and yet it's a difficult film to dislike even if the ridiculous plot is something Robert Downey's Holmes might have found himself caught up in.

Firstly there's the cast. Nicol Williamson is Holmes, Robert Duvall with a plummy English accent is Watson, Laurence Olivier is Moriarty and Alan Arkin is Sigmund Freud, attempting to cure Holmes of his cocaine addiction, (hence the title). Then there's Vanessa Redgrave, Samantha Eggar, Joel Grey, Jeremy Kemp and Charles Gray while Nicholas Meyer's screenplay from his own novel certainly errs on the smart side and therein lies the problem; this is a spoof that is just too clever for its own good.

Herbert Ross both produced and directed the picture and he gives it that bland touch of class he often brought to his movies while Ken Adam's Production Design and Oswald Morris' Cnematography ensures it's always easy on the eye - there's even a Stephen Sondheim song on the soundtrack. Of course, what audience it was aimed at is something of a mystery; perhaps one even beyond the powers of the great detective himself.

PERFECT DAYS

 Wim Wenders' idea of an 'action' movie is having someone stumble after silently walking down a street for ten minutes of screen time. He is, in other words, a minimalist who draws you slowly but inexorably into his sagas of lonely men living largely isolated existences and his new film, "Perfect Days", is no exception.

His hero, Hirayama, is a middle-aged Tokyo toilet cleaner, superbly played by Koji Yakusho, (he won Best Actor at Cannes), without doing almost anything at all and Wenders simply follows him through his mostly silent days and nights as he cleans toilets, tends to his plants, takes the occasional photo, reads William Faulkner and listens to a lot of sixties and seventies American music on what we now might think of as ancient cassettes. Considering how fully Yakusho embodies his role this could just as easily be a documentary about a real toilet cleaner.

Of course, it won't be a film for everyone; its simplicity and lack of what we might call a plot could prove off-putting to a lot of people, (perhaps the nearest thing to a plot in the film deals with the love life, or lack of it, of Hirayama's co-worker). Naturally, among the music Hirayama listens to is Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day' and while his life might seem conventional and even boring to most people to Hirayama every day is perfect. So, too, is Wenders' film which, on reflection, you could even call his Japanese "Paris, Texas".

CHALLENGERS

 How sexy you find tennis probably depends very much on how sexy you find the players; the men's sweaty, muscular bodies when the shirts come off; the women racing around the court in their short skirts. The whole idea is more like something out of the comic 'Viz' than the real thing and it's this element that Luca Guadagnino wants us to keep in the forefront of our minds when watching "Challengers".

Guadagnino's latest is as much about the sex as it is about the tennis and very enjoyable it is, too. Never one to shy away from laying things on a tad thickly he goes all out here in a steamy tale of sexual as well as professional rivalry. Tashi, (Zendaya), is the up-and-coming potential champion while Patrick, (Josh O'Connor), and Art, (Mike Faist), are the young turks and boyhood friends who both spy her at the same time, both wanting her as much perhaps as they may even want each other.

At the centre of the film is a long tennis match between the two men, one of whom is now Tashi's ex-lover and the other, her husband but the action is broken up by flashbacks telling us how all three have reached this point in their lives. It's a technique that works surprisingly well both in building up a picture of the protagonists, (the three leads are superb), as well as naturally building up suspense, at least until the climax which isn't so much treated as a tennis match as a battle between two young gods on the slopes of Mount Olympus with an ending bordering on parody. Still, this is top-notch multiplex fare, brilliantly shot, edited and acted and further proof that Guadagnino is up there with the best of them.

MONKEY MAN

 There's no doubt that Dev Patel is a fine actor and now, with his first film as a director, someone who clearly knows the ropes. Unfortunately that film, "Monkey Man" is just another "John Wick" rip-off set in Mumbai, an ultra-violent revenge fantasy distinguished, if at all, by a subplot involving a community of Hijiras living on the margins who help our hero when he needs it most.

Otherwise it's business as usual and something of a vanity project for Patel, very well made but hardly pleasant viewing. With its main plot involving political corruption and the rise of right-wing politics in India as well as murder and revenge, it's a tad more intelligent than the Wick movies and the action scenes should ensure its success at the box-office but personally I found the excessive violence a turn-off.

PLEASE DON'T EAT THE DAISIES

 In the late fifties and early sixties a lot of highly colored, widescreen Hollywood drivel passed themselves off as comedies though laughs were largely absent but perhaps the most dishonest of the lot was Charles Walters' "Please Don't Eat the Daisies", a 'comedy' in name only based on Jean Kerr's novel which, in turn, was largely about life with her husband, the drama critic Walter Kerr.

Here David Niven is the drama critic and Doris Day the wife who doesn't like what her husband is turning into. They also have four young boys who are so different from each other it's as if they had four different fathers; certainly none of them could be the progeny of Mr. Niven. This whimsy is meant to be heart-warming. (they even have a big cuddly dog and live, not too happily. in a New York apartment which is why they move to the country), but not a frame of it rings true. It's a one joke movie in which the joke isn't funny.

Day is good in that ingratiating, strident Doris Day way of hers but Niven is horribly miscast while talented supporting players like Spring Byington, Richard Haydn, Jack Weston, Patsy Kelly and, worst of all, Janis Paige, (they don't even give her a musical number), are totally wasted with most of the 'gags' revolving around the appalling children, (and keeping the baby locked in a cage is the most tasteless joke of all). Perhaps what's most unforgivable is that given Kerr's role as part of the Broadway elite this should be so flat, unfunny and false. I cringed throughout.

WELCOME TO HARD TIMES

 Could "Welcome to Hard Times" be the most bizarre western ever made? It's certainly the most bizarre western Burt Kennedy has ever been associated with, (he wrote and directed it). Unusually violent and clearly influenced by the Spaghetti Westerns and not dissimilar at times to Clint Eastwood's "Pale Rider" it's about crazed psychopath Aldo Ray's terrorizing and destruction of the small town of Hard Times. (well, more a couple of buildings calling itself a town), in which Henry Fonda is the mayor who refuses to stand up to him, (there doesn't appear to be a sheriff).

After Ray rides out, leaving very little behind but ashes, Fonda persuades the survivors to rebuild the town, welcoming any newcomers who come riding by and then...you don't have to be too smart to figure what's coming. It's certainly got a sterling cast; as well as Fonda and Ray there's Janice Rule, Janis Paige, Keenan Wynn, Lon Chaney Jr., Warren Oates and Fay Spain and Kennedy's screenplay, from E. L. Doctorow's first novel, is so off-the-wall it's impossible to dismiss it. In fact, if any western from the sixties, or indeed from any period, deserves a cult following it's this one. Is it any good? Of course not but you certainly won't see another one quite like it.

THE FLAVOUR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE

 In post-war Japan a middle-aged couple's arranged marriage is in trouble. Made just before "Tokyo Story", Yasujiro Ozu's "The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice" is one of the director's least highly regarded works and yet this is as incisive a study of marriage as anything by Bergman or Albee, the only difference being that Ozu's characters are so much more gentle, more humane. Even as the wife, (Michiyo Kogure, superb), wishes her husband would just disappear there is none of the harshness we find in films and plays from the West. Ozu clearly has a deep affection for all the characters in his films.

The husband Mokichi, (an equally superb Shin Saburi), may be a bore to his wife for no reason other than he is a good, quiet man whose life is simple and unexciting yet neither is she a typical harridan , just a woman who could have had more and who has, not too unhappily, settled for what she sees as her lot.

There is a subplot involving the wife's niece, (Keiko Tsushhima, excellent), who is now rebelling against her own planned arranged marriage and once again Ozu seems very much on her side. Like so much of Ozu's work this is another study of the role of women in Japanese society, mature, often very funny and absolutely essential.

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER

 Having made two films on the essence of cinema or at least on the filmmaker's craft, (her own), Joanna Hogg has now turned her attention to ... a ghost story albeit one without a conventional ghost. "The Eternal Daughter" is set in the kind of hotel that says very loudly either 'Downton Abbey' or 'The Haunting' and it's on the latter than Miss Hogg has decided to concentrate but being an art-house kind of director this is no "Scream"; rather it's closer in tone to the kind of ghost story or horror movie Chantal Akerman might have made in her best "Jeanne Dielman..." mode.

Tilda Swinton is the daughter and she's also her mother and they are staying in this stately pile together and they both seem to be cut from the same cloth but Swinton, who is at her very best here, isn't someone you would want to spend too much time with. For a start all the creaks and bangs and the things we usually associate with haunted houses all seem to start with her, at least with the daughter, (her mother is more amenable).

It appears that the hotel was once the mother's family home and Hogg's film is really a journey into the past, an attempt to reconnect that doesn't appear to be working. In both roles Swinton is superb, the daughter presumably yet another incarnation of Hogg herself and apart from a few minor characters, she's really the only person on screen. In dramatic terms nothing really happens and yet the film is haunting in its own pervasive way, proof that Swinton could hold our attention just reading the telephone book and that Hogg is a singular talent no matter what material she turns her hand to. Hopefully next time, however, she will make something a little more lively.

RIPLEY

 I didn't think it possible to improve on what I considered to be perfection but Steven Zallian's 8 part television series "Ripley" puts all previous screen 'Ripley's' in the shade. Adapted from Patricia Highsmith's novel "The Talented Mr. Riley" it has in Andrew Scott a Ripley not so much talented as lucky. Tom Ripley kills twice in the course of the series without really thinking too much about the consequences of his actions and once he decides to take over the identity of his first victim, Dickie Greenleaf, he seems to be living entirely on his wits as well as on Dickie's money, barely keeping one step ahead of the police.

Scott, one of our finest actors, is simply magnificent as Ripley, full of nervous charm and tightly controlled terror and there's terrific work, too, from Dakota Fanning as Dickie's girlfriend Marge, suspicious of Tom's motives from the start and from Maurizio Lombardi as the dogged Italian detective on Ripley's trail without actually knowing whose trail he's on.

The murders themselves, (the two take up almost all of two of the eight episodes), are messy and gripping in ways that murders seldom are on film and benefit considerably from being shot, 'Psycho-style', in perhaps the best black and white cinematography I've seen on any screen, large or small, certainly in recent times; the cinematographer is the great Robert Elswit. In fact I'm pretty sure I won't see anything better than this again in the coming twelve months. Oh, and it's also very funny in its grisly way and has the best 'performance' by a cat that I can remember seeing...ever.