WINTER KILLS

"Winter Kills" was a satire, and often a very funny one, on the Kenndy assassination, based on a novel by Richard Condon who also wrote "The Manchurian Candidate" and despite an all-star cast, mostly in cameo parts including an uncredited and silent Elizabeth Taylor, it was a gigantic flop both with the public and the critics, (though Vincent Canby thought it was the best American film since "Citizen Kane"). It's certainly not that but of all the conspiracy thrillers and paranoia pictures of the seventies it's the most fun.

Jeff Bridges is excellent as the dim-witted brother of the assassinated President running around trying to find out who organized the hit and John Huston is superb as his father, the real power behind the throne. Nice work, too, from Anthony Perkins and, in the Jack Ruby role, Eli Wallach. I'm not quite sure what audience writer/director William Richert had in mind when he made this but in the intervening years it has built up quite a considerable cult reputation and it certainly shouldn't be missed.

HOME FROM THE HILL

If, like me, you consider Vincente Minnelli one of the all-time great directors then you have to accept that his melodramas are just as good as his musicals. In the fifties and sixties he made a series of heightened melodramas, grandly operatic in tone and shot largely in Cinemascope and colour, (the 1952 "The Bad and the Beautiful, which he made in black and white, is perhaps the most famous of his non-musicals but it's a piece of Hollywood hysteria I've never actually liked). If the subject matter of most of his films gravitated towards soap-opera, the style he applied and the look of these pictures was extraordinary.

Minnelli was fundamentally a designer and Cinemascope gave him the opportunity to use the screen as a vast canvas in which he could place his characters. A lot of these films are among the most visually stylish of their period. Of course, he was also blessed with very strong scripts and outstanding casts. He made "Home from the Hill" in 1960 and it's not as well-known as some of his other films. It doesn't deal with as 'controversial' a subject as homosexuality like "Tea and Sympathy", the same level of hysteria as "The Cobweb", the deep intensity of "Some Came Running" or the insider knowledge of the movie business of "Two Weeks in Another Town" but it remains a hugely exciting piece of cinema nevertheless.

It's a family drama and a surprisingly intimate one considering its two and a half hour running time. Robert Mitchum is the small-town patriarch who can't keep it in his pants and is living in a loveless and sexless marriage with Eleanor Parker. Their son is George Hamilton, initially a momma's boy but taken under his father's wing when he turns 17 and George Peppard is the young rough-neck who, it turns out, is Mitchum's illegitimate

son.

The very fine screenplay was by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr from a novel by William Humphrey that veers from small-town soap opera to faux Greek tragedy complete with a Greek Chorus of gossipy old men and like almost everything Minnelli did he handles the interplay between his characters with the same brio as he handles the widescreen and his use of colour. It's also beautifully played by the entire cast with Peppard proving to be the revelation. It may be the least revived of his films but it's still unmissable if you do get the chance to see it.

IN A BETTER WORLD

One of the few Best Foreign Language film Oscar winners worthy of the prize Susanne Bier's IN A BETTER WORLD is a beautifully made, narratively complex and deeply moving work dealing with issues of family and relationships on a very broad canvas, (it moves between two continents). It's also one of the great films about childhood, (both boys are superb; William Johnk Nielsen as the violent and disturbed young Christian and Markus Rygaard as his more pacifist friend Elias giving two of the finest child performances I've ever seen). I suppose you could say that fundamentally it begins as a study about the relationship between fathers and sons and the friendship between boys before developing into a much darker study on the nature of violence both on a simple domestic level and on an international scale. It's a film that grips you from the start and never lets go. As Elias' parents, a Swedish doctor unable to deal with the ethical issues facing him both as a parent and a professional and his wife, also a doctor, Mikael Persbrandt and Trine Dyrholm are terrific. Certainly not an easy watch, I admit, but essential viewing nevertheless.

THEEB

For a time I actually thought this extraordinary film from the United Arab Emirates might win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, (the Academy have always been partial to foreign films featuring children in leading roles), until I realised that the film's very simplicity, not to mention its 'exoticism', would almost certainly rule it out. Nevertheless it would have been a worthy winner, (it did win a BAFTA for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer).

It's set in the Ottoman province of Hijaz during the First World War and deals with a child's rite of passage as he embarks on a perilous journey, together with his older brother, to guide an English officer across the desert and through enemy territory. The boy, Theeb, is beautifully played by Jacir Eid Al Hwietat. Indeed this is one of the great performances by a child in the movies and this is one of the great films about childhood since everything is seen through Theeb's eyes. However, unlike a film made in the West, there is not a trace of sentimentality to be found, Visually superb it may be but this is a harsh picture of a harsh way of life and with this film alone, director Naji Abu Nowar has already earned his place in the annals of world cinema. See this at all costs.

CAUGHT

The least typical of Max Ophuls' masterpieces, "Caught" is a Women's Picture, written with a steely edge by Arthur Laurents. Barbara Bel Geddes is outstanding as the girl who marries money in the shape of Robert Ryan's sociopathic multi-millionaire, modelled so we are told on Howard Hughes, but he treats her with such contempt she runs away and gets a job as a receptionist to James Mason's struggling doctor. It's a triangle quite unlike other triangles in the movies of the time; there is a psychological depth at play here rare in a genre picture of its kind and both Mason and Ryan are superb while Ophuls' framing of the characters greatly enhances the relationships between them, (the distance between Ryan and Bel Geddes in his mansion, the close proximity between Mason and Bel Geddes in the office scenes).

In lesser hands this might have simply been novelettish but it isn't the superficiality of the material that interests Ophuls but how he can manipulate the material so the film is all of a piece. The least typical of Ophuls, I said; perhaps not. Shot after wonderful shot reveals this to be the work of one of cinema's great stylists and it really shouldn't be missed.

THE BEST MAN

Dirty political in-fighting never really got more entertaining than in Franklin Schaffner's brilliant 1964 film of Gore Vidal's political comedy-drama THE BEST MAN. This is the one about the National Convention to choose a candidate to run for President. The front runners are nice, liberal Henry Fonda, (he's the Adlai Stevenson type), and rotten right-wing Cliff Robertson, who may look like a Kennedy but acts like Joe McCarthy, (and, of course, don't forget that Bobby Kennedy was once in the McCarthy camp). Each has dirt on the other; Robertson wants to release information that shows Fonda once had a nervous breakdown and would, therefore, be mentally incompetent to be president while Fonda's team has information that during the war, 'when there were no women around', Robertson was, euphemistically, a de-gen-er-ate, or to put it another way, he took his pleasures where he could find them, (why is it that it's always assumed straight men turn gay 'when there are no women around'?), but while Robertson has no scruples in blackmailing Fonda, Fonda is much too nice a guy to reciprocate.

We have to presume that Vidal, who also wrote the script, knows of what he speaks and Schaffner's film must indeed be accurate but no matter, it is still hugely enjoyable and is terrifically well acted. Of course, the role of the do-gooder intellectual politician fitted Fonda like a glove, (his performance here is almost a reprise of his role in ADVISE AND CONSENT). As his rival, Cliff Robertson was possibly never better; I honestly think his performance here eclipses his Oscar-winning role in CHARLY. Their respective wives are nicely played by Margaret Leighton and Edie Adams respectively while Shelley Berman is brilliant as the somewhat unreliable witness against Robertson and Lee Tracy is on terrific form, (and gaining an Oscar nomination), as a former president who just happens to be dying. Unfortunately it is not a film that is often revived but it is certainly one well worth seeking out. 

42ND STREET

What people tend to forget about "42nd Street" is that for a musical, certainly one as lauded as this one is, is that it's mostly devoid of musical numbers right up to the end when it lets loose with it's three big production numbers. Until then it could almost be seen as a documentary about putting on a show were it not for all the off-stage shenanigans between the players and, in their limited way, the cast are pretty near perfect.

Ruby Keeler still dances like a baby elephant but she has chutzpah to spare and acts like she really believes her own publicity. Dick Powell was always a charming juvenile, if a slightly mature one and Ginger Rogers displayed star quality even then and in too small a part. Warner Baxter may have cut the ham a tad thickly but he had a kind of wild, wide-eyed charisma nevertheless. Bebe Daniels and George Brent, in particular, are less convincing although the sight of Daniels hobbling in on crutches, ('Go out there and make me hate you'), is a camp delight. The production numbers of Busby Berkeley are a marvel in themselves. Lloyd Bacon is responsible for all the talky stuff that precedes them.

FOR A LOST SOLDIER

It's unlikely that a movie like "For a Lost Soldier" would be made today. Some might say we live in more 'protective' times; others might say we live in more puritanical times. I have no intention of getting into arguments over the Me2 Movement or indeed about how cinema and the world at large has become more censorial on what we can see or say or do. "For a Lost Soldier" is by no means an explicit film but its theme is clear. It's about a 12 year old boy in war-time Holland who not only develops a friendship with an older Canadian soldier but also falls in love with him as well and, we are lead to believe, probably experiences something sexual with him, too. The boy grows up gay, (he is played in adult life by Jeroen Krabbe), though I would suggest he was always gay and was simply acting on his nature.

Since the film was made in 1992 the age of consent has gone down and the world in general is thankfully much more accepting of gay relationships in all forms though children are still protected in law from exploitation and rightly so, though someone seeing "For a Lost Soldier" might argue no exploitation takes place while others will argue that Walt, the soldier's relationship with the child is predatory since it is he who initiates the sexual element and may argue that the abuse is at least emotional. Some, on the other hand, will see him as innocent as the boy.

Of course, what the film basically is is a love story; a tale of first love, the difference being that both protagonists are male and one of them is a child. It was controversial when it was made and it's just as controversial now. It discusses issues that most people still find repugnant and it will always be a film that will have difficulty finding its audience. It isn't that well-made; director Roeland Kerbosch isn't the most proficient of film-makers and the acting is adequate at best but it remains a brave and challenging film and ultimately a very touching one. Unfortunately, times being what they are, it's now almost impossible to see.

A DATE FOR MAD MARY

"A Date for Mad Mary" is a small budget Irish comedy that arrived like a bolt from the blue into Irish cinemas last year. It never really did the business it deserved to and in a just world it would have been a world-wide indie hit, so if you missed it, seek it out as it's absolutely terrific. 'Mad' Mary McArdle, (star-in-the-making Seana Kerslake), has just been released from prison where she's been doing time for GBH, only to find she's to be Maid of Honor at her best friend Charlene's wedding. The problem is, she doesn't have a date to bring to the wedding.

This is the kind of feel-good movie we don't get enough of in our cinemas these days even if it has a dark core and a hard edge. It marked the feature debut of Darren Thornton, who co-wrote the picture with his brother Colin and for a fledgling director he handles his cast, young and old, male and female, with real aplomb; all the performances are outstanding. As Mary, Kerslake is never off the screen and she's superb but then everyone is. This is a funny, touching and up-lifting film and Thornton looks set to become the new Lenny Abrahamson.

DEEPWATER HORIZON

A disaster movie about a disaster that really happened. In his film "Deepwater Horizon", director Peter Berg adopts a documentary approach and takes his time getting to the big bang and the movie is all the better for it. This is a movie that never exploits either its subject or its characters while still ticking all the necessary boxes and benefits considerably from a first-rate cast, (Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, a terrific John Malkovitch, Kate Hudson etc), all at the top of their game; no mean feat when the real star of the picture is an exploding oil rig, (special effects, cinematography, editing, sound recording are all top notch). As disaster movies go, this is highly effective and in the end, very moving.

SONG TO SONG

You know that a Terrence Malick film about the music industry won't be like any other film about the music industry but then a Terrence Malick film won't be like anything other than the Terrence Malick film that preceded it and the one before that and quite possibly the one before that. You could say that Terrence Malick's films are unique..except they aren't; nowadays they all look and sound the same which is why so many people have written him off. I think I may be one of the very few people who not only liked "Knight of Cups" but actually chose it as my best film of the year.
That was about the movie industry, or at least about an actor in Hollywood, and "Song to Song" is about the music industry or at least about a handful of people involved with the music industry and like the last couple of Malick pictures it basically dispenses with dialogue and 'conversations' in favour of a stream of consciousness narration, or several narrations, as various characters take up 'the story'.

What story, you may ask? Perhaps unusually for Malick there are more characters than usual on display with at least three stories running through the picture. The central characters are Faye, (Rooney Mara), a would-be performer, Cook, (Michael Fassbender), the Svengali-like producer Faye is sleeping with in the hope that it will advance her career and BV, (Ryan Gosling), another musician with whom she embarks on an affair. Then there's Rhonda, (Natalie Portman), the waitress that Cook marries and Amanda, (Cate Blanchett), the older woman BV falls for, not to mention an extraordinarily good Patti Smith playing herself. Each of these characters has 'a story' to tell and all are beautifully played. In many respects this is Malick's most accessible film since "The Tree of Life


".
Of course, how you respond to it will depend on how you respond to Malick in general. Personally I think this is a vast improvement on "To the Wonder" and it's certainly the equal of the vastly underrated "Knight of Cups". This is an intelligent and surprisingly engaging film and once again the dazzlingly brilliant cinematography is courtesy of Emmanuel Lubezki. It really shouldn't be missed.

THE SUN ALSO RISES

Ernest Hemingway's novel of 'the lost generation' swaning around Europe in the Twenties became this big, prestige production from Darryl F Zanuck and directed by Henry King who was something of a dab hand at turning out big, prestige productions like this. If it's a tad on the turgid side and if the cast were a trifle too old for their roles it's still immensely entertaining and King's direction is often outstanding. It also has old-fashioned star quality of the kind we associate with a much earlier age. Tyrone Power may be miscast as Jake Barnes, Hemingway's 'existential' hero and Mel Ferrer was his usual wooden self but Ava Gardner is surprisingly good as Brett and both Eddie Albert and especially Errol Flynn, (it's probably his best performance), are excellent while Juliette Greco steals her every scene.

Despite all the money that was poured into the picture it wasn't really a success; maybe had it been made 20 years earlier things might have been different but by 1957 a new realism had taken over and epic dramas like this one were seen as dinosaurs. Today it feels like a throwback to a time when Hollywood was king and big, bold movies like this were ten a penny. It's certainly no masterpiece but it's no dog either.

A BURNING HOT SUMMER

Philippe Garrel at his lushest and mercifully at his most accessible. "A Burning Hot Summer" is a delectably sensuous tale of amour fou in which two couples spend a summer together in Rome; a case of Godard meets Minnelli. So as not to stray too far from the fold, Garrel makes one of the women, (Monica Belluci), an actress married to a so-so painter, (Garrel's son, Louis), and the other couple, movie extras. It's the same kind of self-enclosed world Woody Allen might inhabit sans the humour or indeed any attempt at Gallic charm; at times it reminded me of how Joan Crawford used to suffer in mink. All four central performances are excellent, even the usually reticent Louis Garrel makes his mark here. Unfortunately none of these people are particularly likeable and outside of the movie I'm sure I wouldn't want to know them. For once, however, that doesn't prove a barrier when the film is as smart as this one.

JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG

Even if you find Stanley Kramer's film ponderous, overlong and frankly a little distasteful in its simplistic view of the events it portrays there is no denying that it's an acting tour-de-force and really rather gripping as a courtroom melodrama and in the end you can't help but be moved by it. (Never mind that it deals with the Nazi war trials and the Holocaust; films that sincerely attempt to show that good people can do terrible and evil things do tend to move one on a fairly basic level and this is no exception). On the other hand, Kramer and writer Abby Mann do tend to aim for what be considered cheap sentiment rather than for any real, visceral emotional connection with the material as if the events themselves are too over-whelming to be treated in anything but the most conventional terms. In other words, it is a film that suffers a tad from 'Hollywood-itess'.

Still, at least it is a film of ideas and arguments. When Mann won the Oscar for his screenplay he accepted the award, not just for himself, but for 'intellectuals everywhere'. Today that may sound condescending but you can see where he was coming from. Here was a film that dealt with grave matters soberly, even sombrely and ultimately sincerely and like any good court-room drama it does try to present both sides of what many will contest is a one-sided argument. How do you defend the indefensible, (and the insertion of newsreel footage of the concentration camps actually doesn't feel exploitative and the cutaways to the actors works).

It is also superbly filmed. Kramer wasn't just a polemicist but a superb craftsman, something for which he was never given his due. He was also a great actor's director and here a number of well-known players do what may well be their best work. Tracy is, as ever, beautifully understated; no actor could do gravitas like him, as is Dietrich, indeed as is Lancaster as the principal defendent, silent for most of the film and splendid in his great speech at the end. As two of the witnesses Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland are simply magnificent. Both were nominated for the supporting Oscar and it is hard to believe they lost to George Chakiris and Rita Moreno in "West Side Story". On the other hand, it was very much to the Academy's credit that they gave the Oscar for best actor to Maxamillian Schell as the brilliant and arrogant young defence attorney Rolf. This just wasn't Schell's finest hour but one of the great performances by any actor in an English language movie.

You could, of course, argue that it might have been even more effective with a cast of unknowns, that unknowns might have made it feel more 'truthful' but I doubt it. Great actors bring their own truth to proceedings and Kramer populated his film with some of the best for that very purpose. Revered at the time both the film and Kramer have both fallen out of favour but it shouldn't be overlooked. We still need films like "Judgment at Nuremberg.


" 

HURRY SUNDOWN

Critically reviled at the time of its release this Otto Preminger film indeed suffers from some serious miscasting, (Michael Caine as a gentleman from the Deep South; Jane Fonda as his Southern Belle of a wife), and it does lay on the hysteria a tad thickly not to mention having a few plot strands that could do with some serious tidying up, but like so many of Preminger's pictures it's also seriously underrated. Preminger was always in his element when dealing with serious subjects in a melodramatic fashion, (here the issue of racial prejudice as well as the sexual shenanigans of the well-heeled and not so well-heeled white folks). If the accents vary widely the large cast otherwise acquit themselves with aplomb, (Fonda is excellent, then there's always a young Faye Dunaway, Burgess Meredith, always good as a villain, Robert Hooks, Beah Richards and George Kennedy), while the director once again makes very good use of the wide-screen. If the material is handled more conventionally than in several of Preminger's preceding pictures it nevertheless shows a master's hand at work making this a movie ripe for rediscovery.

ALICE SWEET ALICE

"Alice, Sweet Alice" (aka "Communion", aka "Holy Terror"), isn't just one of the great American horror films but one of the key American movies of the seventies. It was made by Alfred Sole in 1976 and quickly built up a cult reputation. It's long been unavailable except in some pretty dreadful copies, (an earlier dvd release was virtually unwatchable). It's now been restored on bluray and it really shouldn't be missed.

It begins with the murder of a young girl in a church on the morning of her first communion. The prime suspect is her disturbed older sister Alice and before the film is over a number of other killings or attempted killings have taken place. It's not particularly well-acted but Sole's imaginative direction and his handling of the set-piece killings is sublime. It also mixes sex, religion and murder to superb effect and although she was nineteen at the time the film was made the casting of Paula E. Sheppard as the pre-pubescent Alice was a brilliant stroke, though she was to make only one other film, "Liquid Sky", making her perhaps the quintessential cult performer.

Sole, too, didn't have a career after this, (he only made two subsequent films), which I suppose makes him one of the ultimate cult directors. Of course, if the film owes a debt to anyone or anything it must be to Hitchcock and to "Psycho" though stylistically the films are very different. It's also vastly superior to any of the so-called slasher films that followed it while "Hereditary" doesn't even deserve to be mentioned in the same breath.

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE

Despite the recorded instances of his own bisexuality and a tendency to act 'fey' on occasion, Marlon Brando might have seemed an unlikely candidate to play the bisexual major going nuts over Robert Forester's young soldier in John Huston's film of Carson McCullers' novel "Reflections in a Golden Eye", any more than Huston, usually associated with more 'macho' enterprises, might have seemed the obvious director for this sort of material but then if we consider Huston's penchant for adapting literary 'classics' it may not seem so odd after all. As it is,"Reflections in a Golden Eye" is one of Huston's finest films; highly literate, extremely bizarre and visually remarkable, though Huston's original version, filmed in scenes of desaturated colour, is all but lost to us and we must make do with this more conventional looking Panavision version.

It's set in a fort in the deep South. Brando is the major married to Elizabeth Taylor's Southern Belle but lusting after Robert Forester. Forester likes to ride naked in the woods and lusts after Taylor, (he sneaks into her room at night to watch her sleep), while Taylor is screwing Brian Keith who is married to Julie Harris who cut off her nipples with a pair of garden shears. "You call that normal," asks Taylor, "...with garden shears!" Of course, no-one is 'normal' in any conventional sense with the possible exception of Keith, (and he thinks homosexuality can be cured by turning an effeminate houseboy into a soldier!), but then we are in McCullers' territory and McCullers deep South was an even steamier hothouse than that of either Tennessee Williams or William Inge.


The cast, of course, are superb, particularly Brando who at one stage has to endure a whipping from Taylor and who applies face-cream as he awaits the arrival of a gentleman caller. Unfortunately the gentleman caller is actually calling on Taylor which pisses Brando off no end. Indeed so completely over-the-top are proceedings that the film plays like a horror movie. There is an unsettling, clammy quality to it that you don't find in other Huston films. But in 1967 this wasn't what audiences wanted and critics were equally dismissive of the film; it flopped, though a new generation have discovered its myriad delights and while not often revived it remains an absolutely essential part of the Huston canon.

NORTHWEST FRONTIER

When lists of the great directors are being drawn up the name of J Lee Thompson is always noticeably absent, (even lists of great British directors tend to ignore him). Perhaps that's because Thompson's films were never meant to be taken too seriously and were certainly never meant to please the critics but he was a great director of crowd-pleasing entertainments of which NORTH WEST FRONTIER is one of the best. It was the middle film in a trio of great action/adventure yarns that began with ICE COLD IN ALEX and concluded with THE GUNS OF NAVARONE.


The North West Frontier is, of course, in India; the warring factions in this case are the Muslims and the Hindus and the Muslims are determined to kill a young Hindu prince so it's up to Kenneth More and Lauren Bacall to get him to safety which means a train journey across some very dangerous terrain, and this is one of the greatest of all 'train' movies. The train itself is something of an old jalopy; the driver is the wonderful IS Johar and the other passengers are Wilfred Hyde White, Ursula Jeans, Eugene Decker and a brilliantly cast Herbert Lom and there are several great set-pieces as good as any in action cinema. So if J Lee Thompson isn't Welles or Tarkovsky or Kubrick, he was, nevertheless, very much his own man and I would be much happier watching NORTH WEST FRONTIER over and over again, if stranded on a desert island with a projector and a suitably large screen, than anything by those giants of cinema.

SCARFACE

Not so much a remake as a reinvention of Howard Hawks' 1932 classic, Brian De Palma's SCARFACE gave Al Pacino one of his greatest roles as Tony Montana, the Cuban immigrant who comes to Miami and embraces capitalism in the only way he knows how. Violent, excessive and almost 3 hours long, De Palma's movie is something of classic itself and Pacino's admittedly wildly over-the-top performance is nevertheless hugely enjoyable. He is also the only one to get his name above the credits but a supporting cast that includes Michelle Pfeiffer, (the gangster's moll he takes for himself), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, (the sister for whom he harbours almost incestuous feelings), Steven Bauer, (his partner in crime) and Robert Loggia, F Murray Abraham and Harris Yullin as sundry bad guys, are all excellent. The first rate script is by Oliver Stone and visually the film often resembles something Stone might have directed rather than De Palma.

LIBERAL ARTS

As writer, director and star of LIBERAL ARTS Josh Radnor really makes an impact. In this little gem Radnor is a 30-something academic who, on a visit back to his alma mater, starts to rediscover his youth in the form of a fling with the daughter of one of his old professor's best friends who just happens to be 16 years his junior. Richard Jenkins is the professor being put out to pasture and Elizabeth Olsen is the girl Josh falls for and they are both excellent. It's a very romantic rom-com but it's also smart, intelligent, funny and surprisingly literate and it's beautifully played down to the smallest part with Zac Efron turning in a lovely cameo as a spaced-out matchmaker. It's not really the kind of film that packs the multiplexes which is a pity because this is a considerable cut above most of the other rom-coms that have come out in the past few years. It's also a very good New York picture and you should seek it out.

FAIL SAFE

The same year Kubrick brought us to the edge of the apocalypse with DR STRANGELOVE, Sidney Lumet did it again, only this time without the laughs. Indeed I can think of few more sobering films than FAIL-SAFE which has an almost identical scenario to Kubrick's film but plays it for melodramatic suspense. This time it's a mechanical fault that sends six bombers past their fail-safe point en route to Moscow and possibly World War Three.

Made at the height of the Cold War the film is an earnest and sometimes hysterical plea for nuclear disarmament that at the time would certainly given you pause for thought and a few sleepless nights. If Walter Bernstein's script lays on the arguments a tad too thickly you can't fault Lumet's handling of the material, (dispensing with a music score, for example), nor the terrific performances of most of his cast. If Walter Matthau comes across as nothing more than a sounding board and Fritz Weaver's degeneration into madness, a bit too obvious then Dan O'Herlihy, Frank Overton, (it's his best role), a young Larry Hagman and, best of all, Henry Fonda as the President forced into making the hardest decision of his life, more than compensate. Indeed this is one of Fonda's best performances; he's as believable an American President as I've seen on screen, making you wonder, had the actor chosen to go into politics, just how far he might have gone. Gerald Hirschfeld did the brilliantly bleached cinematography.

SABRINA

Billy Wilder in a benign mood but then what other kind of mood could he be in when his title character, SABRINA is none other than Audrey Hepburn. She's the chauffeur's daughter in this charming Cinderella tale, who leaves Long Island for Paris where she's to learn cooking, (yes, like me, you may think her chauffeur father a tad extravagant when it comes to his daughter's education), only to return, no longer an ugly duckling, (as if she ever was one in the first place), but a fairy-tale princess. Her Prince Charming is William Holden but he's slightly tarnished, (he's actually something of a heel), and Audrey has been too busy gazing longingly at him to notice it's his older brother, sweet, old-fashioned Humphrey Bogart, that she really loves.

It's based on a play by Samuel Taylor and Taylor, Wilder and Ernest Lehman did the adaptation and it's very fine. Wilder directs with the lightest of touches and his cast responds accordingly. Hepburn, acting and looking more beautiful than ever, is charm personified, Holden displays a rare comic streak and seems much more comfortable than in many of his dramatic roles while Bogart is the revelation here. Of course, he played comedy before, (and won the Oscar for it in THE AFRICAN QUEEN), but he's so good, (and so relaxed), here it makes you wish he had done comedy more often. A huge hit, the film has remained a perennial favourite. It was remade with Julia Ormond as Sabrina and Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear in the Bogart/Holden roles. It wasn't a patch on the original.

LEK AND THE DOGS

"Lek and the Dogs" is the most overtly experimental of Andrew Kotting's films, the one closest to the art-gallery rather than the art-house. It is based loosely on the play "Ivan and the Dogs" about a boy who leaves his home in Russia and goes to live with a pack of wild dogs though there is nothing theatrical or even concrete about Kotting's handling of the material which is composed of a series of images linked to some degree by a series of chapter headings and Lek's narration, each complimenting the other.

You could say it's aimed, not at a cinema audience, but to those who prefer watching video installations though it might also sit well on a double bill with Wes Anderson's "Isle of Dogs" while the Russian connection should remind you of Tarkovsky. It's also more approachable than it sounds thanks in large part to the casting of Xavier Tchili as Lek who seems to live and breathe the role until it ceases to be a performance. Top marks, too, to the remarkable sound design and to Nick Gordon Smith's extraordinary cinematography. Definitely a key work in experimental cinema.

HOTEL SALVATION

 The journey of old people towards death is a theme not unknown in the cinema, sometimes treated comically but more often treated tragically yet always with a great deal of affection and by some of the cinema's greatest directors. "Hotel Salvation" is the first feature by the 26 year old Indian writer/director Shubhashish Bhutiani but it could have come from Satyajit Ray. Daya, (lalit Behl), is the 77 year old who, convinced he is going to die, asks his son Rajiv, (Adil Hussain), to take him to the holy city of Varanasi where he will find salvation. 

Bhutiani treats his subject not as gloomy tragedy about the end of life but as a comedy that celebrates life in all of its forms, shot in glorious colour by his cinematographers David Huwiler and Michael McSweeney and displaying a deep affection for its characters and the traditions they hold dear and he has drawn wonderful performances from his entire cast, (Anil Rastogi is outstanding as the proprietor of the hotel).

An American or British film dealing with the same subject would be mawkish beyond belief and the jokes would probably fall flat. Of course, it's also unlikely that someone like Satyajit Ray would have taken such a broad outlook or have his characters 'find themselves' quite as enthusiastically as they do here. That said, this is a remarkable debut and a film to make you feel good about yourself and about life (and death) in general.

THE PARALLAX VIEW

One of the best of all conspiracy theory movies and a brilliant political thriller, "The Parallax View" came from a time in the mid-seventies when American cinema appeared to have reached a peak in providing intelligent, grown-up entertainments that were both fun to watch and which required bringing your brain into the cinema with you rather than leaving it in the foyer with the popcorn. It begins with a political assassination on top of Seattle's Space Needle. At this stage the audience doesn't have apply any guesswork; we can see the set up. We can see the killing of the apparent assassin and we can see the real assassin get away.


Step forward three years to a grubby Warren Beatty, who was there that day working as a reporter and who is now being contacted by another reporter, (Paula Prentiss in a tight cameo), who was also there and now fears for her life. It seems almost anyone who was there at the time is already dead; cue Warren off to uncover the truth. If the plot feels reasonably predictable, the treatment is superb. Alan J Pakula was the director, working from a screenplay by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr and the great Gordon Willis was the cinematographer, working a lot more in the light for a change and there's an excellent supporting turn from Hume Cronyn as Beatty's editor and a brilliant one from the underrated William McGinn as the guy tasked with recruiting assassins. There's a twist in the tale you will probably see coming but it doesn't lessen the effect. As I said, this is a smart piece of multiplex entertainment from a time when movies like this were commonplace. Those, as they say, were the days.

MEN IN WAR

Another movie long considered 'lost', and now mercifully restored, Anthony Mann's "Men in War" is a war film worthy to take its place beside Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line", (you can see its influence on Malick's masterpiece); in other words, this is a near-masterpiece and certainly one of Mann's greatest films. The war in question is the Korean and another American patrol find themselves caught out in the open, like so many before them in so many other war films, as they try to survive and like Robert Aldrich's brilliant "Attack" is as much about the conflict between an officer and a sergeant as it is about the external conflict with the enemy. The principle protagonists are Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray whose contempt for each other is only matched by their contempt for the enemy. Both actors are outstanding and others in the exceptional cast include Robert Keith, Vic Morrow, Nehemiah Persoff, James Edwards and L Q Jones.

You might call it an anti-war film since few films about men in conflict have painted such a dark picture of the costs of war and what it can do to men in the field. Indeed, this has even been called an 'art-house' war film which is probably just another way of saying that it's different and very intelligent. It's also stunningly well photographed in black and white by Ernest Haller and boasts another very score by Elmer Bernstein. How it ever came to be 'lost' in the first place is something of a mystery, (did audiences simply find it too bleak?). Let's just be thankful, then, that it's been 'found' again

COOL HAND LUKE

Nothing else in the Stuart Rosenberg canon quite prepares you for COOL HAND LUKE. It was an instant classic and it hardly mattered who the director was, (though I guess a bad director could have messed things up). This was the great anti-establishment movie of its day, (a late sixties REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE), with that blue-eyed beauty and most iconic of anti-establishment actors, Paul Newman, cast in the title role. As Fast Eddie Felson and Hud Bannon, Newman had already held two fingers up to the establishment and in many ways this was the role that came to define him.

The plot, by now, is familiar to generations of moviegoers. Newman is sentenced to two years on a chain gang for screwing the heads of parking metres, in itself something of a motiveless crime; he claims he was just settling old scores and you know from the second you see him he isn't going to stay put so it's a movie about a man who becomes a hero to his fellow prisoners for continually running away and for being continually brought back and it's full of classic scenes; the car-washing scene, the egg eating competition, the tar-rolling scene, the boxing match between Newman and George Kennedy.

The casting, of course, was crucial. It was a movie full of identifiable character parts where the actors cast as prisoners, the warden and the screws all had their marks to make, (though no African-American or gay prisoners)? Kennedy got the Supporting Actor Oscar and Strother Martin was magnificent as the warden but it has one of he great supporting casts, all brilliant and too many to mention with the wonderful Jo Van Fleet taking the only significant female role as Newman's mother. It was adapted by Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson from Pearce's novel, Lalo Schifrin did the score and Conrad Hall photographed it in Panavision so did it really matter who the director was or was this just one of those movies that was destined to become a classic from the pre-production phase? Like I said, nothing else Rosenberg ever did came close.

HEREDITARY

"Get Out" made horror films respectable again, or at least Oscar-friendly again, in a way they hadn't been since "The Exorcist". I've seen Ari Aster's terrific feature debut "Hereditary" compared to "The Exorcist" or at least mentioned in the same sentence. Possession, of a kind, and a grieving mother are the only tenuous links I could make out but like "The Exorcist" I can see "Hereditary" picking up a slew of Oscar nominations next year; Toni Collette is virtually a shoo-in for her magnificent performance as the beleagured mother and it's actually the better film.

Indeed for the first hour or so I wouldn't have called "Hereditary" a 'horror' film at all but a serious and deeply disquieting study of a woman cut off from her family by grief. When it does change midway through the jolt is sudden and hardly subtle but the effect is considerable. If, in the end, this is 'just' another horror film it's still pretty damn scary with the emphasis on jump-in-your-seat scares and a real sense of dread rather than guts and gore. I'm sure there must have been horror films as effective as this or more so since that Exorcist guy did what he had to do to get the devil out of Regan but this is still a superior frightener, very well written and directed by novice Aster and beautifully played by everyone with Collette and Ann Dowd outstanding.

Fans of the genre will find much to savour here though personally I think I would have been happier if the film had stuck to its original path and jettisoned any hint of the supernatural. I enjoyed it hugely; I just didn't take it very seriously nor will I ever listen to Joni Mitchell's song 'Both Sides Now' quite in the same light again.

LE QUATTRO VOLTE

You could mistake LE QUATTRO VOLTE for a documentary, but it isn't. All the tiny, seemingly inconsequential events and details that make up this mesmerizing film from fledgling director Michaelangelo Frammartino have been staged. This is fiction; the people on screen are playing a part, in places and settings that are 'real', just like in the kind of 'documentaries' that Flaherty might once have made. There is no plot to speak of. We simply observe the passing of time in a small Italian hill-town, firstly through the eyes of an old goatherd and then, you might say, through the eyes of his goats and finally through the eyes of ... well, no-one at all. There is also no dialogue; what scraps of dialogue there appears to be in the background doesn't warrant sub-titles. Everything is given to us in purely visual terms and the cinematography of Andrea Locatelli is magnificent. Some people will, of course, find it boring. Today's cinema is mostly about action and movement whereas this is about inaction and stillness but give yourself over to it and you will see a masterpiece.