INSIDE OUT

Have you noticed that the best, and certainly the most intelligent, children's films of recent years have been cartoons? Alright, animated films; cartoons, I've been told, are so yesteryear! The "Toy Story" trilogy were not just great adventure movies that adults as well as children could enjoy but profound meditations on what makes us tick. What grown-up can watch any of those films without welling up? "Inside Out"
, then, would appear to be the next logical step because this is a movie about nothing else but our emotions; joy, anger, sadness, fear and disgust and how all the things going on in our head, (or, in this case, in the head of an 11 year old girl whose family up sticks and move from the Midwest to San Francisco), can affect our core being. This is a movie that is as profound as anything by Resnais or Bergman but a lot more fun, designed for adults and children alike. It looks great and sounds even better thanks to the best original screenplay of the year. Here is an animated film that is guaranteed to win this year's Oscar for Animated Feature and, if there is any justice, should also end up among the Best Picture nominees as well.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN

"A Raisin in the Sun" is one of the great plays of the American Theatre, a kind of African-American "Death of a Salesman" that shows, not only the turmoil of one African-American family in Chicago, but goes on to recount the history of black people in America from the time of slavery to the time the play was written in the late fifties in language that is almost poetry. It was written by the 29 year old Lorraine Hansberry and was her only work of note; she would be dead within 5 years of this film version, (the song 'To Be Young, Gifted and Black' was written to honour her). 

This screen version isn't much of a film. As directed by Daniel Petrie it's hardly a film at all but at least it's an honourable recording of this great play, allowing millions of people the chance of seeing it, perhaps in the way Hansberry would have wanted since she herself did the screenplay. Petrie hardly ever opens it out beyond its one room set; a few flashy camera angles being as close as he comes to acknowledging we are watching a film and not a play while his decision to keep the original Broadway cast is a considerable bonus though admittedly the acting is often more theatrical than cinematic.

Sidney Poitier is magnificent as the son with big dreams of becoming a businessman unlike his labourer father. Diana Sands is the sister exploring her heritage with dreams of becoming a doctor and is the character most likely to be based on Hansberry and Ruby Dee, the wife who just longs for a home of her own and some peace in her marriage while Claudia McNeil is tremendous as the mother whose inheritance of a $10,000 insurance policy on her husband is the cause of most of the trouble in the family.



There are certainly melodramatic touches and at times you feel Hansberry has bitten off more than she can chew; there seems to be enough material here for two or three plays but the writing and here, the acting is all that it should be, making this an impressive addition to filmed theatre.

THIS LAND IS MINE

"This Land is Mine"is, perhaps, Jean Renoir's finest American film and certainly his most underrated. Initially it may seem like just another piece of anti-Nazi propaganda centering on the heroism of the occupied French and in particular on the eventual heroism of a mild-mannered schoolteacher, (Charles Laughton, superb), but as scripted by Dudley Nichols this is a very different kind of war-film from others of its ilk; words are primarily the weapons here and unusually for an American film of its period the Germans aren't painted as total monsters. Naturally, the arguments are weighed heavily in favour of the downtrodden and rightly so but there's a great deal of intelligence on display in the way these arguments are presented and the relationships between all the central characters are beautifully developed by Renoir. As well as Laughton those fighting on the side of freedom include Maureen O Hara, (surprisingly good), Kent Smith and Philip Merivale while fascism is represented by Walter Slezak. The quisling is George Sanders and there's a surprisingly energetic performance from Una O'Connor as Laughton's possessive mother. Laughton's lengthy monologue at the end may go on a bit longer than necessary but there's no denying the sincerity. Essential viewing both for aficionados of the director and of Laughton.

THE RIDER

"The Rider" of the title is Brady Blackburn and he's played by Brady Jandreau, a non-professional who is basically 'playing' himself as indeed are everyone else in the cast. Chloe Zhao's film isn't a documentary but it may as well be since everything that happens is basically 'real', even if it is scripted, (by the director herself). Zhao has fashioned a scenario that in the hands of a more seasoned director would have smacked of Hollywood but this indie is totally unadorned and yet is ravishingly beautiful in a Malick kind of way, (it was actually filmed in the Badlands of Dakota). It could have been made in the seventies but then it would have had a professional cast and would have been the product of an established studio.


Nothing happens. When the film opens Brady has suffered a serious head injury after being thrown at a rodeo and for the next two hours the film simply observes him adjust to a more sedentary kind of life but one that also includes a new-found relationship with a new horse. It's utterly unromantic and while clearly aimed at the festival circuit it's a film that deserves to find an audience and a life of its own long after the festivals finish. It's also one of the best films I've seen this year.

THE THIRD MAN

"The Third Man" isn't just the greatest thriller ever made but one of cinema's great masterpieces. There isn't a single redundant shot or moment in the entire picture which has become one of the most 'quoted' of all time. If you've seen it you will already know the brilliance of its relatively simple plot; if you haven't then I envy you the luxury of experiencing it for the first time. Everyone connected with it, both in front of and behind the camera, was working at the top of their form. Graham Greene concocted it and it's one of the great scripts, (even if the 'cuckoo clock' speech is reputed to have been written by Orson Welles).

Welles plays Harry Lime and he is one of cinema's most iconic characters; he may be in only three scenes but he dominates the picture. Joseph Cotten is his friend, Holly Martin, an American writer determined to find out what happened to Lime. Trevor Howard is the British major out to expose him and Alida Valli is the actress in love with Lime. Robert Krasker's expressionistic black and white cinematography is among the most luminous in all of film; he shot it mostly in the ruins of Vienna and won a richly deserved Oscar while Anton Karas' zither music is justly famous. The director was Carol Reed who out-Hichcock's Hitchcock in his handling of the material. It was once voted the best British film ever made; who am I to disagree?

NO LOVE FOR JOHNNIE

"No Love for Johnnie" is that rarest of beasts, a film about British politics and, more over, a highly intelligent one though perhaps the biggest surprise is that this first-rate film came from the Betty Box/Ralph Thomas stable. This producer/director team were hardly noted for good, serious movie-making but they hit pay dirt here. Peter Finch is outstanding, (he won both a BAFTA and a Best Actor at Berlin), as the highly ambitious Labour MP whose extramarital affair could be his downfall though this isn't so much a film about sex and scandal as it is about the cut and thrust of British politics. Consequently it's a lot less melodramatic than it might have been. Finch dominates, (he's hardly ever off the screen), in a film that boasts an outstanding supporting cast, though to be fair, few others are given much of a chance to shine. This is Finch's film and it marked a huge step forward in bringing intelligent, adult fare into British cinemas in the early sixties.

THE CINCINNATI KID

Norman Jewison may not have been one of the greatest of directors but he did give us a couple of the most sheerly enjoyable films ever made, one of which, "In the Heat of the Night", won the the Oscar for Best Picture. Two years before, he gave us "The Cincinnati Kid". It didn't pick up a single Oscar nomination but it probably provided more pleasure than any of the films that were nominated that year, including "The Sound of Music".

Some people describe it as 'The Hustler' of poker with Steve McQueen as The Kid who wants to be The Man. The Man is actually Edward G Robinson and he's simply magnificent here. You feel this is the part he was born to play and not 'Little Caesar', but then every part is perfectly cast. As well as McQueen and Robinson there's Ann-Margaret, (a bad girl and Oscar-worthy), Tuesday Weld, (a good girl), Karl Malden, Rip Torn and a terrific Joan Blondell as Lady Fingers.

The brilliant screenplay is by Ring Lardner Jr. and Terry Southern from the novel by Richard Jessup, (the film is at least the equal of the book and probably better), and it's superbly photographed, designed and scored. It is, of course, a much cosier picture than "The Hustler", a real crowd-pleaser but one that courted its share of controversy at the time by showing a white man in bed with a black woman. Nevertheless, it was a huge hit and further enhanced McQueen's reputation as the coolest man on the planet and even if you know the outcome it's a film you can watch again and again without ever getting bored.

A GHOST STORY

Aficianados of the horror movie will hate "A Ghost Story" for this tale of a lonely ghost moves at a snails pace, (writer/director David Lowery isn't built for speed). A little like Anthony Mingella's "Truly Madly Deeply" before it, it's about grief and loss and not letting go. Early in the film the character played by Casey Affleck is killed off, only to return as a ghost, rising from his mortuary slab under a large white sheet with holes for eyes like someone playing at being a ghost on Halloween. He spends the rest of this virtually silent film searching, though I'm not sure he quite knows what he's searching for.

Nothing very much happens and when any of the tropes of the horror movie do raise their head they are quickly dismissed and forgotten. In the films most memorable scene he simply stands and watches his grieving widow, (Rooney Mara), as she sits and eats a very large pie. In a conventional horror film he would fly across the room to terrify her and us but here it's she who races from the room to throw up.

There's little dialogue and no real action yet the film is incredibly moving; ghosts, it seems, are everywhere, waiting for something or someone that may or may not come. Death, like life, holds its disappointments. This is not a movie for everyone but if you're in the mood for a languorous, ruminative meditation on life after death it's certainly the film for you.

CLASSE TOUS RISQUES

Both Bresson and Melville are reputed to be big fans of "Classe Tous Risques" and it's easy to see why; either man could have directed this classic French gangster picture. The actual director was Claude Sautet and it's one of the greatest second films in movie history, (in the 15 year period between 1956 and 1970 Sautet made only 4 films). He made this one in 1960 around the time of the New Wave and while it's more traditional than something Godard or Truffaut might have done, nevertheless Sautet brings to it a freshness of approach that other gangster pictures of the period seem to lack. From the absolutely stunning opening sequence it's clear that this film will be infused with a good dose of existential angst as well as the requisite thrills that a really good gangster movie needs.

Two fugitives, (Lino Ventura and Stan Krol), have decided it's time to get out of Italy and back to France as the net closes in around them but they need money. They commit a foolhardy, though daring, daylight robbery and go on the run. This opening and the chase that follows is as good as anything in crime movies. The money they make, however, is hardly enough to sustain them, (Ventura has a wife and two sons to support), so they must rely on a network of friends and criminal associates and men on the run, already operating on the very edge, need all the friends they can get, however untrustworthy they may be and these guys friends prove to be very untrustworthy indeed but when tragedy strikes Ventura seems to have no option.

With the possible exceptions of Dassin's "Rififi" and several of Jean-Pierre Melville's classic gangster pictures this remains one of the greatest of genre films and is all the better for being, fundamentally, a low-key character piece. Ventura is perfect as the world-weary thief who would really rather just settle down and raise his family and he is matched by a young Jean-Paul Belmondo as the stranger who becomes his only real friend and ally. The brilliant black and white cinematography is by Ghislain Cloquet, (it was shot largely on location), and it is beautifully adapted by Sautet, Pascal Jardin and Jose Giovanni from Giovanni's novel.

NEBRASKA

Alexander Payne could now best be described as a world-class director whose every film is an event to look forward to and to celebrate and to paraphrase John Ford when he said "I make westerns", Payne could just as easily say "I make road-movies", and he makes road-movies unlike anyone else. Like Ford, Payne's films deal with small people in large landscapes coping with the daily grind of the mundane, the comical and the tragic. Death, loss and regret figure prominently in Payne's landscape but he handles these subjects with a remarkable lightness of touch and his films deal with journeys, both literal and metaphorical, that end in an epiphany.

In Payne's latest film, "Nebraska", the journey is of a father and son, (and latterly a mother), back to the place of the father's upbringing. But this is no nostalgic bonding exercise; the father, (a magnificent Bruce Dern, in a career-defining performance), believes he has won a million dollars and must travel to Lincoln, Nebraska to claim his prize. The son knows it's all a scam but indulges his father's whim and drives him there, mostly because there is nothing much else going on in his life. The journey, like the journeys in "About Schmidt", "Sideways" and "The Descendants" is, of course, about more than the literal travelling from one place to another and about moving to another place within ourselves that we had either lost or have yet to find. Dern is a simple man who believes anything he is told and everyone who tells him. Consequently he is taken advantage of by everyone around him and it's only his son, (a lovely, subdued Will Forte), who is prepared to tell him the truth yet even he is prepared to hide those truths that he knows will hurt his father.

In dramatic terms not a great deal happens yet you could say all human life is here. Most of the characters are old and have lived lives of little consequence in the greater scheme of things yet they are mostly happy. They haven't missed what they haven't had. Life hasn't passed them by; it's just something they've observed from the sidelines and a million dollars will buy Dern the new truck he has always wanted and the compressor he gave to an old friend thirty years before. That's all a million dollars means to him.

It is, of course, a comedy; as funny and as sad as "About Schmidt" and "The Descendants" and like those films the humour is largely organic, stemming from the characters and not the situations. There are scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny while others will move you to tears and it's beautifully written, (by Bob Nelson), and played, not just by Dern and Forte but also by June Squibb, (Nicholson's wife in "About Schmidt"), as the foul-mouthed mother, Stacy Keach, in a stunning return to form, as Dern's old friend and nemesis and a whole load of faces so lived in they don't seem to belong to actors but the people they are playing.

Payne chose to shoot  "Nebraska" in monochrome, conjuring up images and memories of a past literal and cinematic. In that respect it sits well beside Bogdanovitch's tributes to Ford and earlier cinema, "Paper Moon" and "The Last Picture Show" as well as a number of classic Ford films going all the way back to "The Grapes of Wrath".  It's as good as anything I've seen this year and it confirms Payne as a master.

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

Savaged by the critics, (except perhaps for the over-praised Saul Bass designed credit sequence of a prowling cat), Edward Dmytryk's film version of Nelson Algren's 'scandalous' novel "Walk on the Wild Side" isn't nearly as bad as its reputation suggests. It's certainly unevenly acted, (a miscast Laurence Harvey is terrible and perhaps surprisingly Jane Fonda isn't much better but Barbara Stanwyck is terrific as a very butch lesbian madame and Capucine is surprisingly good as the object of both Harvey and Stanwyck's affection), and naturally it fudges the central issues of prostitution and lesbianism but it's very well shot by Joe MacDonald, beautifully designed and the screenplay by John Fante and Edmund Morris does manage to keep some of Algren's original poetry. Dmytryk was always a better director than critics gave him credit for and if he was often constrained by the studio system he was no slouch either. If this isn't the best film he ever made it still has much to recommend it.

THE DEER HUNTER

When I first saw "The Deer Hunter" I positively hated it, dismissing it as nothing more that a piece of right-wing, macho posturing much preferring Cimino's follow-up "Heaven's Gate", still perhaps the most underrated film of all time. However, I'm always willing to give every movie a second chance even if, in this case, it has taken over 30 years. It's still macho and it's still, if not exactly right-wing, then very Republican in its outlook, but now I can appreciate it for the near-masterpiece it almost certainly is. I still don't 'like' it exactly but then liking this picture has never really been an option. Here is a film that looks into the heart of darkness that was Vietnam as well as being an authentic piece of Americana in much the same way as "Nashville".

The film's lengthy opening of an orthodox wedding and the deer hunt that follows is as masterly as, and may owe a lot to the opening of "The Godfather", just as this film presents an equally haunting portrait of the immigrant experience while the Vietnam sequence represents the most powerful vision yet of that particular conflict. It is also magnificently acted; De Niro, Walken, Savage, Streep and Cazale are all superb in a remarkable ensemble in which no-one puts a foot wrong. Of course, it remains a difficult and deeply unpleasant film and I am sure it will continue to divide audiences even after three decades. Nevertheless, if like me you condemned it first time round, I would urge you to give it another chance.

HOSTILES

Scott Cooper doesn't make films for a mass audience nor indeed does he make films to please the Oscar-givers, (with the exception admittedly of his debut film which won Jeff Bridges the Best Actor Oscar), but he is still one of the best directors working anywhere in the world today. If there are common themes running through his work you might say they are masculinity and that of the outlaw; the outlaw as in men who stand on the other side of the law. His films are usually violent and relentless, his debut "Crazy Heart" being the rare exception, though it too dealt with a kind of outlaw, a country-and-western singer unwilling to conform. 

"Hostiles" is a western but while in style it adheres very much to the kind of classic westerns John Ford himself might have made, the plot is very different from what we have become used to. It stars Christian Bale, (outstanding, but when is he ever less than outstanding), as the soldier tasked with escorting an Indian chief and his family back to their homeland and through 'hostile' territory. On route he meets a woman, (the excellent Rosamund Pike), whose family have been massacred and he is forced to bring her along.

It is a totally uncompromising film and deals with the kind of subject matter, (guilt, grief, redemption, forgiveness), that the commercial cinema often overlooks and Cooper handles these themes with a rare seriousness. As I said, he is a director who makes few concessions; he seems unconcerned with who will watch his films. "Hostiles" has all the hallmarks of a great western but despite the violence and its action sequences is unlikely to appeal to a mass audience any more than his last two films did. Nevertheless, he remains one of the few directors whose next film I really look forward to seeing.

COMANCHE STATION

"Comanche Station" was just one of a handful of truly great westerns that Randolph Scott made with director Budd Boetticher over a five year period between 1956 and 1960. It may be the best; these short, lean, psychologically astute and hugely exciting pictures defined the West without romanticising it in any way. Often they dealt with the themes of revenge and retribution with Scott's character seldom lily-white. There was usually a journey involved and a woman, more often than not in need of Scott's protection, and several villains, so beautifully drawn in the scripts of Burt Kennedy that they usually transcended the caricatured villainy of western bad guys to emerge as altogether more complex characters.

In "Comanche Station" Scott finds himself rescuing white woman Nancy Gates from the Comanches and escorting her back to her husband. They are joined on the way by Claude Akins and his gang whose motives in wanting to keep Gates alive are, shall we say, somewhat less noble. The younger members of Akins' gang are played by Skip Homeier and Richard Rust and there is an almost homoerotic element to their relationship. You could always rely on Kennedy and Boetticher to dig deeper than the surface. It was also magnificently photographed in Cinemascope by Charles Lawton Jr. Essential viewing.

ALL IS LOST

It takes a very bold film-maker, in this age of blockbusters and youth-orientated cinema, to make a film with only one actor on screen for all of its two hours and to cast in that part a man already well into his seventies but that is precisely what writer/director J C Chandor had done in "All is Lost", a very exciting, deeply moving and, in the end, rather profound account of one lone sailor's struggle to survive after his yacht is ruptured in the middle of the ocean by a large floating crate, an act as ironic as it is tragic. The actor involved is Robert Redford who responds to the challenges of the role with a stoic intensity you might have thought him incapable of. (He won last year's New York Critics prize and his failure to be at least nominated for the Oscar is yet again something the Academy should hold its collective head in shame over). It's a career-best performance and also almost entirely silent, (I mean, who's he going to talk to?), which makes the skill with which Redford inhabits his character all the more remarkable.

Of course, I can see why some people might find this boring. There are long stretches when very little happens; the drama comes, not from the 'big' events, but from the simple, almost mundane acts of having to climb a mast in order to fix a sail or from fiddling with a broken radio in an attempt to contact the outside world. When something big does occur, (a ferocious storm, for instance), it's all the more jarring and all the more terrifying. (Frank G DeMarco's superb cinematography puts us right in the thick of it). Indeed, here is a film as rigorous and as unrelenting as a European art-house movie set in the confines of monk's cell except that in this case 'our man', as he is simply known, must battle the elements rather than his conscience.

I'm not sure if Chandor really believed there would be a mass audience for this, (there wasn't), or if it was simply a labour of love he had to undertake but in years to come, looking back on what I'm sure will be a long and fruitful career, I don't doubt for a moment that he will give "All is Lost" pride of place.

AFTER THE STORM

"After the Storm" is just the kind of film you can imagine Hollywood making in the seventies with Hoffman or Pacino or even Elliot Gould in the role of the private investigator with his own family problems. It's low-key, character driven and intelligent but it's also a Hirokazu Koreeda film and it displays all the characteristics we associate with this director's best work. If you can trace its lineage back to another time and place it also speaks for the universality of cinema; be it, say, Los Angeles in the seventies or Japan in the present, nothing really changes.

Here, Hiroshi Abe is the failed novelist, failed both as a writer and as a husband and father, now forced to work as a somewhat sleazy private-eye, specialising in divorce cases and the film deals with his relationships with his mother, sister, wife and young son as well as his colleagues. It's a leisurely, beautifully acted picture, (Kirin Kiki is superb as his elderly mother), and it builds so much out of so little. It is neither a drama nor a comedy but a combination of both and despite the Ozu-like disappointments at the centre, it should make you feel good about life in general.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

Let me say straight off that I was never a fan of Queen or of Freddie Mercury, (too anthemic for my tastes), and I have always thought 'Bohemian Rhapsody' the most overrated song of all time, (though apparently the music press didn't think too highly of it when it came out and it was left to the public to make it a hit), so I approached Bryan Singer's Mercury/Queen biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody" with a certain amount of trepidation. You might say I went to scoff and stayed to cheer.

As biopics go, it's reasonably conventional. We begin with Freddie about to go on stage at Live Aid then we flash back to the beginnings, circa 1970. It makes his talent clear from the start and it ticks all the right boxes as it chronicles Queen's rise and as a dip into the business known as show-business it's almost perfect. It's at its best when it dissects the songs, and in particular the title song, to show their genesis and, speaking as someone who never really liked them in the first place, all of this came as something of a revelation. I am now hearing Queen's songs in an entirely new light.

Of course, Mercury is the central figure throughout and is virtually never off the screen. At first Rami Malek looks strangely bizarre, more like a young Mick Jagger, and those extra teeth don't help but as the film progresses he grows into the part. His foibles are basically overlooked while his minder and his manager become the villains of the piece. Freddie is positively Christ-like when set beside Allen Leech's Paul Prenter. Leech, best known from "Downton Abbey", is superb here, a truly hissable villain if ever there was one while other members of the band are convincingly played by Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy and Joseph Mazzello. As the real love of Freddie's (early) life Lucy Boynton is excellent in an underwritten role
.
The film ends as it began with Queen's appearance at Live Aid and director Singer gives us the entire set, a rock-and-roll tour-de-force lasting a good twenty minutes or so. When it was over there wasn't a dry eye in the house, (mine included), while the elderly couple beside me stood and lead the cheers.

MR KLEIN

Joseph Losey's brilliant thriller "Mr. Klein" is about a well-off French art dealer in Nazi occupied Paris who suddenly finds he is being 'mistaken' for a Jewish man with the same name. Like Joseph K he can make no sense of what's happening to him or why. It's this Kafkaesque air of unreality that makes Losey's film so disquieting. There's no room for logic; events unfold like a bad dream which is how it must have been for so many in Europe at this time. The film opens with medical examination of a woman to determine if she is Jewish or not; it beggars belief that such practices went on and yet in view of what history has told us, why should we doubt it. This is a nightmare from which there really isn't any waking and which Losey films in the same cold, glacial style he brought to "Eve" and "The Servant" and "Accident", (in other words, it's a thriller almost devoid of 'conventional' thrills). As Klein, Alain Delon is superb, though were the film not in French one could see Losey regular Dirk Bogarde in the role just as easily, (indeed Bogarde played a not dissimilar if considerably more mannered part in Fassbinder's "Despair", a film not unlike "Mr. Klein" in some ways). But it's also somewhat unusual for Losey in that you engage a lot more with Delon's Klein than many of Losey's other so-called heroes and it's also a lot more suspenseful.  A critical success at the time, it's since been passed over in favour of Losey's British, (and earlier American) films. It's time, I believe, it was reassessed, not just as one of Losey's key pictures but as one of the key European films of the seventies.

THE LONG GOODBYE

"The Long Goodbye"is one of several masterpieces from director Robert Altman. It was his contemporaneous take on a Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe novel transposed to the then present day Los Angeles, (it was made in 1973). Marlowe is Elliot Gould in a career-best performance, a louche modern-day cynic who lives alone with his cat and who is drawn into a complex plot of murder, suicide, robbery and adultery by his friend Terry Lennox, (Jim Bouton). Others involved include drunken novelist Sterling Hayden and his enigmatic wife (singer Nina Van Pallandt), vicious hood Mark Rydell and a possibly bogus doctor played by a mincing Henry Gibson. Nothing or no-one are quite as they seem. Of course, this isn't Chandler as we know him, (the brilliant script is by the great Leigh Brackett), and the film certainly isn't a 'thriller', (in the end it hardly matters who did what and to whom), but Altman's riff on an LA theme circa the early seventies. It's stunningly shot in widescreen by Vilmos Zsigmond and is one of the key American movies of its decade. Sadly neglected at the time of its release it is now being rightly reassessed.

SULLY

I have always maintained that Clint Eastwood may be the last of the great 'classical' directors still working in Hollywood, despite the fact that he has only been making films since the 1970's. Like Hawks and Wyler and, to a large extent his mentor Don Siegel before him, there is nothing ostentatious or showy about his films, preferring instead to rely on narrative and casting. His films are usually about strong, almost silent, men who prove themselves capable of almost superhuman displays of strength, if not in any literal sense, certainly of character. In the past he often took on that role himself but he's 86 now and is unlikely to appear in front of the camera again anytime soon.

In "Sully" the central character is played by that most unassuming of actors Tom Hanks in what may be a career-best performance. He is, of course, Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River on 15th January, 2009 with no loss of life. Hailed instantly as a hero by the world at large, Sully had still to clear his name with the aviation authority who initially claimed he could have safely returned the plane to La Guardia; Sully argued otherwise.

For a film where the outcome is already known it remains both incredibly exciting as well as deeply moving, testament to both Eastwood's direction and Hank's acting. He is the lynch-pin of a first-rate ensemble that includes Aaron Eckhart at his very best as his co-pilot and Laura Linney as Sully's wife. She literally phones in her performance, appearing on the phone in everyone of her scenes. She's still superb, proving yet again just how good an actress she is. When, I kept asking myself, is someone going to write a great role for Linney the way they do with a certain Miss Streep. As for the real Sully, I can't think of a more fitting tribute to the man than this. Eastwood's magnificent direction and Hank's magnificent performance do him proud.

DARK HABITS

Seeing the early Almodovars for the first time is like finding lost treasure. "Dark Habits"
has everything the later masterpieces have except, perhaps, real depth. In its place we have real feeling and a great deal of great comedy, all done in the worst possible taste. As you might guess, this is set in a convent run by the Sisters of the Humiliated Redeemer and they have names like Sister Rat, Sister Manure etc. The Mother Superior is a lesbian with a heroin habit, another drops acid and has visions, another keeps a pet tiger while another writes trashy novels under a pseudonym. Men are noticeably absent in this wild world and we can see the Almodovar stock company of actresses already being assembled. They are all wonderful and not a Sister Ingrid or Audrey amongst them. Glorious, surreal nonsense; I loved it.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES

That most monosyllabic of actors, Ryan Gosling, is even more monosyllabic than usual in Nicholas Winding Refn's mesmerising and highly stylised existentialist revenge movie ONLY GOD FORGIVES. Indeed, you could probably write all the dialogue spoken in this film on a postcard. The plot is indecipherable or so minimalist as to be totally simplistic, suffice to say it finds Gosling out to revenge, or not depending on how you look at it, the murder of his brother who, in turn, raped and murdered a 16 year old girl. It all takes place in Bangkok, almost entirely at night, (dimly lit interiors; dark, neon-tinged exteriors), with, as I've said, very little dialogue. Visually, however, it's extraordinary, unfolding like a dream, (and it's often hard to distinguish between what's a dream and what's real), or more appropriately, a nightmare as this is a very violent picture.

Saying almost nothing Gosling, nevertheless, turns in a terrifically intense performance matched every step of the way by Kristin Scott Thomas' turn as his vicious, drug-dealing, revenge-seeking mother. Of course, few films in recent years have quite divided critics in the way this one has, hailed as a masterpiece by some and dismissed by others as the worst film of the year. I'm firmly in the former camp. This is pure cinema; bold, imaginative and brilliantly directed. It won't appeal to thrill seekers; however, anyone who  loves movies will get one hell of an adrenalin rush.

LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE

The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made "Like Someone In Love" in Japan but it could have been set anywhere for this is a film that knows no boundaries or borders. As you would expect from Kiarostami it's brilliantly written and directed and beautifully played, particularly by Tadashi Okuno as an old professor whose loneliness draws him to a young student supplementing her income by working as an escort. He's not looking for sex, just conversation and company and when, the next day, they run into her jealous boyfriend the old man allows himself to be mistaken for her grandfather ... and then the boy finds out the truth.

It's a film of mostly small dramas and when violence finally erupts Kiarostami keeps it off screen. For the most part these people simply talk, about their problems, their relationships and life itself and Kiarostami films sequences in 'real time' and with a fixed camera just as he does in his Iranian films. I found it mesmerising, at times funny, sometimes moving and in the end, really rather shocking. It makes for essential viewing.

BLACK '47

The '47 refers to the year 1847 when Ireland's potato famine was at its height and the black to the colour of the crop and to the future of most of the country's inhabitants but don't go to "Black '47" expecting a serious, philosophical account of a little talked about period in Irish history. Lance Daly's superb film is a simple revenge 'western' with a very high body count.

Of course, the Famine is a seldom discussed time in Irish history as if it were a kind of national disgrace rather than a national disaster and has been superseded in both literature and cinema by the Easter Rising and the Civil War so for Daly and his writers P.J. Dillon and Pierce Ryan even to tackle the subject at all seems to me to speak volumes, (in some respects the Famine was almost as divisive a period for the Irish people as the later Civil War).

The story is very simple. Martin Feeney has returned home after fighting for the English overseas, (in Afghanistan of all places). Although 'he took the King's shilling', making him already an outcast among his own people, he has deserted and is a wanted man. He returns to an Ireland devastated by famine to find his mother dead and his brother hanged. After his nephew is killed as the family are being evicted from the hovel they call home, he sets out for revenge.

Calling this an 'Irish Western' isn't far off the mark. As Martin goes about his murderous business in some very inhospitable landscapes the ghosts of Ford and Peckinpah are conjured up. Action and not morality is the order of the day. Dialogue is kept to a minimum and the film doesn't delve very deeply into Ireland's relationship with England, while the soldiers sent to hunt him down could be Custer's cavalry and the Irish, the American Indian; an image rather wittily evoked at one point.

Daly has also assembled a terrific cast of fairly major players to enact his tale. As Martin, James Frecheville is a suitably brooding and mostly silent killer. Hugo Weaving is outstanding as a former soldier who fought with Martin in Afghanistan and is now called to track him, along with Freddie Fox's foppish young officer, Barry Keoghan's young private, sympathetic to the Irish cause and Stephen Rea, (brilliant), as the guide who wants to live long enough and see the outcome so he can tell the story, rather like the Hurd Hatfield character is "The Left Handed Gun" while Jim Broadbent gives considerable shadings to his role of the landlord who sees the famine as a godsend in clearing the peasants from his land.

Whether you take the film purely on face value or see it as a fine introduction into Irish history it remains a wholly admirable piece of work and there's no reason why it shouldn't attract a large audience. For me it is one of the best films of 2018.