THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS

"The Sugarland Express". Although "Duel"did eventually get a cinema release it was made for television so this very different kind of road-movie was really Spielberg's official big-screen debut and it's brilliant. (It's also very underrated, both in the Spielberg canon and in that series of road movies that came out of America in the seventies). It's a fact-based tragi-comedy about a young woman, (Goldie Hawn, remarkably good), who breaks her husband (William Atherton) out of prison so they can go get their child out of foster care. On route to Sugarland (great name), where the child is being kept, they hi-jack a police-car complete with patrolman, (Michael Sacks), and in the process become celebrities of a sort. This period marked something of a golden age for American movies and this is both a key film in that Renaissance, (it's surely one of the best American films of that decade), as well as being a very entertaining one. It confirmed Spielberg as a major new director, Hawn's status as an actress of real potential and newcomers Atherton and Sacks as actors of considerable promise. The marvellous script was by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins and it's a great satire.

THE TIN STAR

Anthony Mann made this superlative western after completing the last of the Jimmy Stewart westerns, ("The Man from Laramie"), and before he made the Gary Cooper starring "Man of the West" and somehow it got lost along the way despite having been nominated for a BAFTA Best Film award. Instead of either Stewart or Cooper, Mann cast Henry Fonda as the laconic, decent bounty hunter who take a greenhorn young sheriff, (a beautifully cast Anthony Perkins), under his wing.


It's a very simple, traditional piece, shot in black and white by Loyal Griggs and dealing very much in black and white issues. It is a movie with straightforward heroes and villains, (Neville Brand is principal among the bad guys), a strong heroine, (Betsy Palmer), and even a sweet, likeable kid, (Michael Ray). If it lacks the psychological undercurrents of other Mann westerns it more than makes up for it in good old-fashioned action and suspense and of all his westerns this may be the most underrated

ZULU

A kind of British "The Alamo" and one of the great action epics, "Zulu" was a huge popular success, at least here in the UK but was otherwise underrated, (it was completely overlooked by both Oscar and BAFTA). It's about the Battle of Rorke's Drift in which a battalion of 100 British soldiers held out against a Zulu army of 4,000, suffering great losses in the process. Cy Endfield directed the picture and co-produced with Stanley Baker who also stars as the commanding officer though it is Michael Caine, in his first notable part, as Baker's second-in-command, who walks off with the picture. Since almost all the black actors are nothing more than cannon fodder it's unlikely it would be made today but as a picture of men in war it is very fine indeed.

THE KREMLIN LETTER

Just how seriously John Huston took any of this is hard to say but "The Kremlin Letter" is still one of his most entertaining pictures. A shaggy dog story with a plot that is virtually impossible to follow, it's possibly his daftest picture since "Beat the Devil". An all-star cast play various spies, both Russian and American, and they would all seem to be after the letter of the title; that much is clear...or is it! Huston himself wrote it, together with Gladys Hill, from a novel by Noel Behn though like "Beat the Devil" you feel as if they're making it up as they go along, which is all part of the fairly nasty fun. The superb cast act with the straightest of faces, (there's a great cameo from Orson Welles while Max Von Sydow and Bibi Andersson as usual walk away with it). Sold at the time as a serious antidote to the Bond movies the film wasn't a success but is now seen as a cult classic.

BALLAD OF A SOLDIER

Grigori Chukhrai's "Ballad of a Soldier" was one of the first post-war Russian films to enjoy international success, (it won the BAFTA for Best Film and its screenplay was nominated for the Oscar). Of course, it isn't hard to see why the film proved so popular in the West. In many ways it's a typical Hollywood love story, as lyrical as anything Frank Borzage might have made. These Russians weren't 'the red menace' and could just as easily have come from the American Midwest. Its hero is Alyosha, (Vladimir Ivashov; handsome, boyish, nineteen, a Richard Barthelmess of the Steppes), and the film recounts his last journey home from the Russian Front during World War 11. Not a great deal happens; he helps a soldier who las lost a leg get home and he meets a girl and falls in love. It might even be banal were it not for the artistry and the poetry which Chukhrai puts into every frame, (Vladimir Nikolayev and Era Savelyeva's cinematography is superb; there are scenes, particularly in the closeups, that could have come from the best of silent cinema). And it is this artistry which elevates the picture beyond anything Hollywood was making at the time, (compare this to Dmytryk's really banal "The Young Lions"). Its simplicity may no longer be fashionable but it's a great film nevertheless.

DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT

Jan Nemec's 1964 masterpiece "Diamonds of the Night" is rightly considered one of the cornerstones of the Czech New Wave. It's a relatively short film, (only 66 minutes), but from its astonishing opening in which two boys race across fields while gunfire rings out around them, it never lets up. Virtually without dialogue, flashbacks or just thoughts in the boys' minds tell us they are fleeing from a train taking them to a concentration camp and that we are probably in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

So extraordinary is Nemec's handling of this fictional situation, we could be watching a documentary, (it's shot in black and white and often with a hand-held camera). The boys themselves were not professional actors, (one of them, Antonin Kumbera, never made another film), and their plight as they make their way through forests to their inevitable capture, is distressingly real and the luminous images have, what best could be described as a 'terrible beauty'. Once an art-house favourite, the film is seldom seen now but its recent release on Blu-ray should hopefully change that.

STOKER

If Chan-wook Park had directed "Shadow of a Doubt" instead of Hitchcock or it had been written by Truman Capote during his "Other Voices, Other Rooms" phase then if might have turned out something like "Stoker", a deliriously over-the-top eye-popper of a chiller in which Uncle Charley comes to stay with intentions towards niece India that are probably less than wholesome. This is Park's English language debut and while not as initially gruesome as some of the movies that made him famous, there's still plenty here to make you squirm; I, for one, was wriggling in my seat in blissful satisfaction.

Charley is Matthew Goode and very good he is, too. India is Mia Wasikowska whose dark eyes and vacant stare is enough to convince you that she may be more than a match for Uncle Charley should his lascivious charm get out of hand. Mom is Nicole Kidman, a mite too fond of the booze and her dead husband's younger brother and perhaps not fond enough of her daughter. (Kidman is fast becoming the character actress of choice for this kind of sleazy, noirish thriller). The stunning cinematography is by Chung-hoon Chung; you would need to go back to Minnelli or Sirk to find a director who uses colour as imaginatively as Park does here. To say too much about the plot would be to reveal too many of the film's many pleasures. Just race to see this one for yourself.

I AM CUBA

"I am Cuba" has some of the greatest tracking shots in all of cinema. Here is a film that practically reinvents cinema. It was made by the Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov in the early sixties as a kind of love-letter to the island and the Revolution. He filmed it like a documentary but with a scripted narrative and using 'actors' to tell the story of the Revolution and what lead to it but unaccountably the film was neither popular with the Cubans or the Russians. Did they really think it lacked revolutionary fervour? Yet this isn't a film you watch for the narrative alone but for the technique employed and visually this is one of the greatest of all films. Almost every shot is a stunner and like all great visual films the intensity of the images take on a life of their own turning the somewhat didactic 'story-telling' into real poetry. The script may be propaganda and the acting wooden but the imagery is so strikingly vivid it forces you to care about the characters and there are scenes in this film that rank with the finest in all of world cinema. Indeed, I think this film is up there with "The Battle of Algiers" and Salvatore Guiliano" as one of the great revolutionary pictures. 'Lost' for almost 30 years it was finally re-released through the auspices of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. We owe them a considerable debt of gratitude.

THE INFORMER

When "The Informer" first appeared in 1935 it was hailed as a masterpiece and for many years was even thought of as one of the greatest films ever made. It won its director, John Ford, the first of his record-breaking four Best Director Oscars as well as a Best Actor nod for its star Victor McLaglen and there's no denying that at times it does touch greatness. The long, wordless opening is so incredibly good you wish the whole film were silent, (it's superbly shot by Joseph August in the style of the German Expressionists).

It's set in Dublin in 1920 at the time of the Black-and-Tans and the Irish 'Troubles' and it tells how Gypo Nolan, (McLaglen in a remarkably raw performance), betrays his friend Frankie McPhillips, ( a very good Wallace Ford), for £20 and is then wracked with guilt, Where it falls down is in the miscasting of Preston Foster as the IRA commandant and Margot Grahame as Gypo's girl. Grahame has the face of a soiled Madonna but neither she nor Foster could really act and the drag the film down. So, too, do the many scenes of Gypo going on a spending spree with the blood money he's earned which allows Ford to indulge in too many stage Oirishisms. But every now and then it lifts its head above the parapet and overall it's a powerful, elemental piece of work, maybe not the masterpiece it was first thought to be but an absolutely essential part of the Ford canon nevertheless and a key American movie of the thirties.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

The more I see of Theo Angelopolous' work the more convinced I am that he was possibly the greatest director in the history of the movies and yet at almost 3 1/2 hours long "Alexander the Great" is not an easy film to sit through. You know while watching it that he could have made a much shorter film if he had wanted to without sacrificing any of the plot but Angelopolous is a man who likes to hold shots even when nothing much is happening in them; in other words he gives you time, (and lots of it), to take in the action or lack of it.

This, like so much of his work, is a film told almost entirely in images rather than words and every shot is composed for the maximum dramatic effect. Working again with cinematographer Ghiorgos Arvanitis there are images here as fine as any in cinema. Even if the film does seem overlong it is always visually stunning. The Alexander of this film isn't the great Greek warrior but a bandit who has kidnapped a party of English aristocrats and holds them to ransom while at the same time taking over the village commune in the mountains where his presence is virtually that of a warlord.



As with other Angelopolous political films this, perhaps unfortunately, tends towards the polemical rather than the dramatic. The aristocrats, for example, are used purely as props and even Alexander himself is more of a figurehead rather than a character in his own right. Angelopolous' habit of shooting mostly in long-shot means we never get close enough to any of the characters to really get to know them. Here we have a film in which there are only groups rather than individuals and narratively this is a difficult film to follow. Time and again I lost track of who was doing what to whom. Perhaps this is why, however great the film looks, it is never the historical epic that say, Visconti's "The Leopard" was. Yet this remains a considerable achievement. Films, particularly epics, this rigorous don't come along very often. This is a film that demands a great deal from its audience but stick with it and you will be amply rewarded. Like all of this great director's work it is a film you will take with you and brood over for a very long time. It may not be his greatest film but even Angelopolous working just below his best is still stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries.

FREUD

"Freud" is John Huston's amazingly level-headed, clear-eyed biopic, not so much of Freud himself, but of psychoanalysis and it grips you like a good thriller should. The problem is it's so level-headed at times it feels almost simplistic; it's like a horror story that could just as easily have been called 'Demons of the Mind', and while it's superbly shot in widescreen black and white by Douglas Slocombe the images are almost oppressive. (Jerry Goldsmith's score doesn't help; it's like a prequel to his work on "The Omen"). However, the script by Wolfgang Reinhardt and Charles Kaufman is very fine; complex ideas are presented coolly and intelligently and if the dreams seem to be interpreted a little too matter-of-factly then that is probably down to what we already know; we have already assembled the jigsaw puzzle in our heads. Such 'big' revelations as we blame our parents for our sexual hang-ups hardly feel new. It is also very well acted. Montgomery Clift is a superb Freud; this was the last really good thing he did and there's very good work from Susannah York as one of his patients, the girl who desired her father and wished her mother dead and who comes out with the classic Freudian slip of saying 'prostitute' rather than 'Protestant'. So despite its faults it remains something of a key work in the Huston canon, sitting very comfortably along side such 'literary' works as "Reflections in a Golden Eye", "Moby Dick", Wise Blood" and "The Dead". At the time of its initial release it was treated very shabbily by the critical establishment; its recent release on dvd should go some way to making amends.

WILD AT HEART

Demented good fun from a time when Nicholas Cage was one of the best actors on the planet and David Lynch was the best director working in America, "Wild at Heart" is a bombed-out, blitzed-out masterpiece that takes pulp fiction to an altogether higher plain. There really isn't anything to compare it with and it's still Lynch's most enjoyable film. This tale of Sailor and Lulu's odyssey across America's South is like "Badlands" on acid, a Wizard of Oz for dirty-minded grown-ups fit to bursting with Lynchian surrealism. What we have here are a couple of babes in the wood running for their lives complete with their very own Wicked Witch of the West in hot pursuit. Sailor, (Cage), has broken his parole, (he beat a man to death in self-defence), and he's taken to one of Lynch's lost highways with his girlfriend Lulu. On their trail is Lulu's mad momma, (a gloriously uncontrolled Diane Ladd), and her henchmen Harry Dean Stanton and J E Freeman. She wants Sailor dead because he knows too much about her nefarious past and prefers her daughter to her. It's a typically hard-boiled noirish plot shot through with one hell of a dose of adrenalin. Both Cage and Laura Dern, (Lulu), are terrific and the supporting cast are close to perfection, (others involved include Willem Dafoe and Isabella Rossellini). This is a classic ripe for re-discovery.

TOO LATE BLUES

John Cassavetes produced and directed "Too Late Blues", as well as co-writing it, in 1961. It was his second film, after "Shadows", but he never really rated it, feeling the studio imposed restrictions on his 'style' and that the end result was too conventional. It wasn't. It may not be quite in the same class as "A Woman Under the Influence" or "Opening Night" but it is still remarkable in its free-wheeling, semi-improvisational way.

It's about jazz musicians and in particular Bobby Darin's pianist and Stella Steven's singer and their on-again, off-again romance. They are both terrific, particularly Stevens, (I think it's one of the great overlooked performances by an actress in the movies), and there is an equally brilliant performance by Everett Chambers as Darin's Machiavellian agent. Indeed the entire supporting cast are outstanding confirming, even at this early stage, that Cassavetes was a great director of actors. The superb black and white photography is by Lionel Lindon and naturally there is some great jazz on the soundtrack.

LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE

This early masterpiece from Robert Bresson is just as austere as any of the films that followed it but his use of professional actors gives the film a kind of distance, an almost Hollywood gloss and you can almost see in Maria Casares' magnificent performance as the vindictive Helene a touch of Bette Davis. Bresson did the adaptation from a book by Diderot but Cocteau supplied the terse, pointed dialogue where every word counts and where every word could be used as a weapon.

It's a tale of revenge. Jean has fallen out of love with Helene but she decides to trap him by telling him first that it is she who has fallen out of love with him. When he tells her he feels the same way she takes her revenge, a woman scorned and all that, by seeking out a sad little strumpet, Agnes, introducing her as a friend and then organizing it so that Jean falls in love with her. She then plans on telling Jean he has given himself to a whore. It's a chilly, almost savage film that takes a novelettish situation and turns into something approaching tragedy. The director draws superb performances from everyone, not just Casares in what may be her greatest role but also from Paul Bernard as Jean, Elina Labourdette as the unfortunate Agnes and Lucienne Bogaert as her complicit mother. One wonders if Hollywood had remade the film would any studio or any director be so single-minded, so absolute in their portrayal of evil. An astonishing film.

PETULIA

Richard Lester may have had the most chequered career in all of movies. There are some deep troughs, ("The Bed Sitting Room", "The Ritz", "The Return of the Musketeers"), but the peaks were remarkable, ("The Knack", "The Three Musketeers", "The Four Musketeers", "Robin and Marian"), but perhaps "Petulia" was the greatest peak of all. Lester liked to take risks but perhaps never more so than here, taking an already rich and emotionally complex tale and chopping it up every which way so an audience really has to work to take it all in. Superficially it's about the on-again, off-again love affair between a divorced doctor, (George C. Scott), and a somewhat off-the-wall married woman, (Julie Christie). His ex-wife is a luminously beautiful Shirley Knight while she is married to Richard Chamberlin, (superb), who likes to beat her up. It's not told chronologically. There are flashbacks or are they flash-forwards? Others in the superb cast include Arthur Hill and Kathleen Widdoes as another married couple and Joseph Cotten as Chamberlin's father. Adding to the film's texture and to its success is Nicolas Roeg's stunning cinematography and the uses he makes of the San Francisco locations. When I first saw it I chose it as the year's best film from any source, (over Kubrick's 2001). I thought that with the passage of time, (I haven't seen it since), I might find it dated and perhaps a tad pretentious. Not a bit of it; this is a film for the ages and it looks and feels as 'modern' today as it did in 1968. A masterpiece.

ORDINARY PEOPLE

It was fashionable to knock Robert Redford's film of "Ordinary People" almost from the moment it won the Oscar as the year's Best Picture almost as a kind of backlash for the snubbing of  "Raging Bull" and Martin Scorsese and yet this was, and still is, one of the great movies about psychiatry, the way we handle grief and, above all, that phenomenon known as the American WASP. Or maybe people couldn't reconcile that a movie this fine could have been made by Robert Redford. If that is the case reflect on the fact that as an actor Redford was at his best playing the WASP hero of  "The Way We Were".

It's also a superbly well-acted picture. Timothy Hutton won a richly deserved Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the troubled boy whose guilt at the death of his older brother has lead him to attempt suicide. As his parents Redford cast actors who were perfect for their roles rather than actors who might have proved a bigger box-office draw. Cast against type Mary Tyler Moore is extraordinary as the mother with ice water in her veins. It was a very brave piece of acting from someone better known as a much loved television personality and it should have won her the Oscar, (she lost to the infinitely more likeable Sissy Spacek in "Coalminer's Daughter"). As the soft-hearted and caring father Donald Sutherland was never better though he went unrecognized by the Academy. In smaller parts Judd Hirsch, (the psychiatrist), and Elizabeth McGovern and Dinah Manoff, (the two girls in Hutton's life), are all outstanding. Like all great films this has stood the test of time. Maybe it cut too deeply into the American psyche to have proved truly popular, certainly amongst Americans. I thought it was a masterpiece in 1980 and I still do.

SATAN IN HIGH HEELS

One of the great things about exploitation movies is that being made 'on the hoof', so to speak, using non-professional actors or at least actors without much talent, and often filmed in real locations and in black-and-white, there is often an almost documentary-like naturalism to proceedings. Of course, that doesn't mean they are necessarily any good; the scripts are often terrible and that lack of acting talent can be laughable but once in a while, one hits pay-dirt. If it's "Carnival of Souls" it can build up a critical and cult reputation that far exceeds its merits while others, like "Satan in High Heels", can slip through the cracks.

This is no masterpiece and the acting from its mostly Z-Grade cast is no better than we have any right to expect but hey, what's this, an Oscar nominee billed second from the top? Yes, this is the same Grayson Hall who only two years later would be nominated for her role in "Night of the Iguana". Here she's running the club that our heroine, (Meg Myles), ends up in and yes, once again Grayson is playing a somewhat butch lesbian. (Oh, and that really is the same Sabrina who was in "Blue Murder at St. Trinians" cast as 'herself').

This may be a cheapie but the direction values are surprisingly good and there's even a sprinkling of good lines and a few decent songs on the soundtrack. The director was someone with the unlikely name of Jerald Intrator but I often think movies like this direct themselves. It's not the gem I had hoped it might be but neither is it as big a dog as its lurid title and Poverty Row production values would suggest.

THREE COMRADES

"Three Comrades" was one of the few films on which F. Scott Fitzgerald got a writing credit. He co-wrote it with Edward E Paramore Jr from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque who wrote "All Quiet on the Western Front" and it's a beautiful job of work. It's set in Germany after the First World War, (you'll have no trouble accepting the American cast as Germans), and is about three friends, (Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone and Robert Young), and their relationship with a frivolous, sophisticated and dying girl. She's played magnificently by Margaret Sullavan, (she won the New York Film Critic's prize for Best Actress), and she's the lynchpin of this Frank Borzage classic which is deeply romantic and highly intelligent at the same time. It's a love story that doesn't shy away from the political situation pertaining in Germany at the time without ever being preachy. Indeed, it's one of the great films about friendship and it's very easy to accept Taylor, Tone and Young as men who really care for one another, (Tone is superb and even Taylor and Young don't let the side down), but this is Sullavan's movie. It's a luminous performance, perhaps her finest. Her disappearance from the movies and tragically early death was one of the cinema's greatest losses.

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

Wes Anderson makes films that aren't like the films of anyone else. That may or may not be a good thing, depending on whether you 'get' them. I've always felt his films were like live action versions of the cartoons in 'The New Yorker'; sometimes they're funny, most of the time they're clever and always they seem to be designed for the intelligentsia. Perhaps that's why Wes Anderson's films don't make lots of money or win Oscars. Even the 'intellectual' New York comedies of Woody Allen have a wider appeal, not that their films have a great deal in common except, perhaps, their 'smartness'.

Although "The Grand Budapest Hotel" has secured a multiplex release I doubt if it will wow them in Des Moines which is a pity since this is a film of considerable charm and a good deal of wit. OK, it's hardly laugh-out-loud funny but I had a silly grin on my face from start to finish. Like all his films it's set in what we might call 'Andersonland', a totally fabricated country made up of scraps from his favourite fiction, in this case the writings of Stefan Zweig who gets a special dedication at the end. It's literary in that words matter a great deal and play an important part in the development of the story and it's a film in which stories are crucial, (it's divided, like a novel, into chapters).

Indeed, the story that makes up the body of the film is told as a story within a story begun by elderly author Tom Wilkinson informing us of how he first met the owner of the The Grand Budapest Hotel many years before when we was a young writer, (played by Jude Law), and the owner was an old man, (an excellent F Murray Abraham), who in turn tells the story of when he was a mere lobby boy, (newcomer Tony Revolori), under the tutelage of the hotel's concierge and the films central character, M Gustave, (a superb comic performance from Ralph Fiennes). It's when we get back to this point in time that the dimensions of the screen change from today's customary widescreen to the box-like dimensions of '30's cinema. It's as if Anderson is paying tribute, not just to writers like Zweig, but to film-makers like Ernst Lubitsch as this is a Ruritanian romance set in the kind of Mitteleuropa so beloved of Lubitsch and others of the period. All it lacks are the characters periodically bursting into song.

If the film doesn't quite live up to its predecessors such as "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Life Aquatic" I think it's because there's no emotional commitment to the characters, It's too skittish, too self-consciously smart to draw us in. On the other hand it looks amazing. The hotel itself is like a giant cake that the baker in the film, M Mendl, might have made, and then there's always that extraordinary cast to keep us entertained. The film reads like a Who's Who, not just of Anderson regulars, but of moviedom's best character actors. None of them are, of course, remotely 'realistic', not even Fiennes. They remain the stock characters we find in those 'New Yorker' cartoons but they remain good company nevertheless. One thing is guaranteed, of course; you won't find anything else like it, at least not until Anderson makes his next movie.

A GIRL IN BLACK

Ellie Lambetti's performance in "A Girl in Black" is one of the greatest performances by an actress in all of cinema and yet hardly anyone has seen it. Michael Cacoyannis made this film for virtually nothing on the Greek island of Hydra after achieving international success with "Stella". It's a beautiful looking film, (the great Walter Lassally was the photographer), and the simple island setting suited the simplicity of the style perfectly. Early in the film one of the character says that everything is exposed by the light, even men's sins and that is the theme of the film.

When two strangers arrive on the island their presence arouses passions among the locals that were always there but kept simmering just below the surface. Eleni Zafiriou is the widow who bestows her favours a little too freely, (the islanders are a very unforgiving lot), Lambetti is the daughter tainted by her sins, Anestis Vlachos is the son who is shamed by her, the better-known Greek actor Georges Foundas, (he was in "Never on Sunday"), is the fisherman who wants Lambetti and Dimitri Horn, the man from Athens, who gets her. It's a contemporary Greek tragedy on a small, but no less terrible, scale and it's heartbreaking. In America the film won the Golden Globe but it is seldom revived. See it at all costs.

THE AMERICAN FRIEND

"The American Friend" is Wim Wenders' great existential thriller about a dying man hired to commit a murder so that his family can be looked after when he's dead. The source was Patricia Highsmith's novel "Ripley's Game" though Tom Ripley is something of a secondary character. The central character of the dying killer is Jonathan Zimmermann, (beautifully played by the late Bruno Ganz), and the film is less of a thriller, though the murders, (there is more than one), are brilliantly handled by Wenders if not by the killers, (there's more than one), than it is about how doing things contrary to our nature can be a form of catharsis.

It's also another love letter to the cinema from its movie-loving director who casts Dennis Hopper as Ripley and the directors Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller in smaller parts and using locations in Paris, New York but mostly Hamburg to brilliant effect but unlike other directors who might find themselves classed as 'fanboys' Wenders never draws attention to his homages; they are just there, intrinsically worked into the film's fabric. He also doesn't make a big deal out of killing someone or of dying of leukemia; his genius has always been for observation and by making the act of murder something mundane he honors the legacy of Highsmith. A great film by one of cinema's great masters.

THE WOUNDED ANGEL

In Kazakhstan life is hard and childhood, as we know it, is virtually non-existent. Children and adults alike do what they can to get by. Emir Baigazin's remarkable. virtually plotless film is divided into a number of chapters, each one examining boys struggling with the pain of the everyday and a life, if a life it is, far removed from what we in the West are used to.

I don't know if any of the 'actors' are professionals but the performances Baigazin draws from his mostly young cast are extraordinary. There is no music score and little dialogue, (which is just as well as the subtitles on the print I saw were poor). It is, of course, deeply depressing, as grim a picture of childhood as the cinema has given us yet filmed with a startling purity. This is only Baigazin's second film but, if given the distribution it cries out for, it should establish him as a major player in world cinema.

MILLIONS LIKE US

Long before the British 'New Wave' and the 'Kitchen Sink' there were movies like "Millions Like Us",  pieces of wartime realism filmed on authentic locations and peopled with actors who talked and looked just like the people sitting in the stalls. The acting may have been a tad ropy but the characters were believable, the approach taken akin to that of documentaries. "Millions Like Us" was the work of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat who began their careers as writers, (they wrote Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes"), before taking over the director's reins as well. They were always overshadowed by Powell and Pressburger and yet they made several outstanding films and this is one of them, honest and, although very moving, totally lacking in sentimentality, unlike similar products being churned out of  Hollywood at the same time.

ON APPROVAL

The most English of all English comedies and something of a tour-de-force, particularly for Clive Brook who produced, directed and adapted Frederick Lonsdale's play as well as taking the lead as a penniless Duke in love with an American heiress. She's Googie Withers but she doesn't love him back. They end up as chaperones, he to Roland Culver and she to Beatrice Lillie, on a Scottish island where Lillie has brought Culver for a month 'on approval' to see if she likes him enough to marry him. All four are superb but Lillie, in one of her few major film roles, walks off with the movie as the obnoxious Maria, though in the acting stakes Brook does give her a run for her money. The film is seldom revived, however; could it be just too sophisticated for mass consumption?

MY DARLING CLEMENTINE

John Ford is reputed as having once introduced himself with "My name is John Ford; I make westerns". He won a record four Best Director Oscars yet none of them for a western. You might say that testifies to his versatility; I think rather it says more about the Academy's disdain for the western, as if horse-operas were nothing more than fodder for the masses yet several of John Ford's westerns are among the finest films ever made anywhere by anyone. A few years back his movie "The Searchers", largely dismissed by critics at the time of its release, was named in Sight and Sound's ten best films ever made.

In 1946 he made "My Darling Clementine", yet another take on the saga of Wyatt Earp, the Clantons and that gunfight that took place at the OK Corral and it's a masterpiece, a luminous, poetic and deeply moving account of life on the frontier. Ford shot the film in his beloved Monument Valley and while he claims the actual gunfight was historically accurate, little else belonged to historical fact. It's a 'print the legend' kind of movie and the legend here lies in Henry Fonda's magnificent performance as Earp as well as a number of set-pieces as good as anything in American movies; Earp's first meeting with Doc Holliday, Earp stepping out with Clementine at the church meeting, Alan Mowbray as a ham actor reciting Shakespeare in the bar-room. It also boasts probably the only really good performance ever given by Victor Mature as Doc Holliday. I have seen this film many times over the years and like all great movies it only improves with age.

JIMMY'S HALL

At his best Ken Loach makes films that are as emotionally engaging as any in world cinema and while he has on occasions disappointed, every Ken Loach film is worth seeking out. "Jimmy's Hall" sees him return, in some respects, to the territory he explored in "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" and it is one of his very best films. Again we are back in Ireland but 10 years after the end of the Civil War. Old wounds haven't healed, (they still haven't healed completely to this day), and like "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" the divisions here are much more political than social and almost as violent.

It deals with the very specific conflict between those who opposed the Treaty, those who supported it and the dominating Catholic Church when one, Jimmy Gralton, returns from 10 years exile in America and reopens a community hall that was the source of all his trouble in the first place, against the express wishes of 'Holy Mother Church' and those who backed it.


As scripted by Paul Laverty it is, of course, a deeply political film but Loach is the most humanist of political film-makers; consequently it is also a deeply moving (and, at times, very funny) picture. At its centre is a magnificent performance from Barry Ward as Gralton and he is backed beautifully by Jim Norton and Andrew Scott representing the clergy as well as a host of wonderfully naturalistic Irish actors, some professional, some not. Loach may now be in this seventies but this feels as fresh and as relevant as anything he did fifty years ago. I think it's the equal to both "Land and Freedom" and "The Wind that Shakes the Barley".

WILDLIFE

Paul Dano is one of the best actors in the world today though not too many people seem to recognize the fact, or maybe it's just the Academy since Dano has yet to be Oscar-nominated for any of the extraordinary performances he has given. Now he's turned his hand to directing and with "Wildlife" he has made one of the best directorial debuts in American cinema. I haven't read the Richard Ford novel that he and his partner Zoe Kazan have adapted for the screen but I honestly believe Dano's film version is as fine as movies can get.

Fundamentally, there are really only four characters. Jerry Brinson, (Jake Gyllenhaal), his wife Jeanette, (Carey Mulligan), their 14-year-old son Joe, (Ed Oxenbould), and the middle-aged man, (Bill Camp), the wife meets after Jerry 'deserts' his family to go and fight wildfires, (the setting is a picturesque but lonely looking Montana). The period is 1960, beautifully evoked in the settings, the costumes and even in the language the characters speak, while the film is about a marriage that is neither happy nor unhappy and with characters who are just making do, (the 14-year-old son is the most mature character on screen).

It is a deeply sad and pensive film; there are times I was reminded of Bergman but it certainly doesn't feel like a rip-off or even a homage. Dano handles individual scenes magnificently. There is a lengthy sequence where the mother and son are invited for dinner to the home of the man the mother has met that is a master-class in what, I suppose, you could call the cinema of embarrassment. The mother gets drunk and flirts, the man makes a pass at her and the boy is shocked and then it ends almost as suddenly as it began. It is a scene reminiscent of real-life and not of what we are used to seeing at the movies.

The whole film is beautifully acted. Perhaps it is Dano's brilliance as an actor that enables him to draw performances of this quality from his players. Gyllenhaal may have the smallest part, (he's absent for much of the film's middle section), but he's perfectly cast. Bill Camp has finally got a part worthy of his talent but it is Mulligan and young Oxenbould who carry the film. Oxenbould is astonishingly good as the boy trying to live a normal life in what is really an abnormal situation and Mulligan has probably never been better than as a woman who married too young and is now regretting it. Near the end, it threatens it dip into melodrama but it doesn't. As in life, things don't go quite the way you anticipate and like life, you just get on with it. "Wildlife" is a great film and was totally ignored by the Academy last year; once again I say, shame on them.

HIGH AND LOW

As the trajectory of Ozu and Mizoguchi continues to rise so that of Kurosawa continues to fall. Critics have always preferred the esoteric and Kurosawa has always been seen as the most Westernized, the most commercial of Japanese directors. He was, of course, best known for his historical epics and samurai films but he also made many contemporary movies including a number of first-rate thrillers of which "High and Low" may be the best.

It takes Ed McBain's novel "King's Ransom" and deposits in a post-war Japan that could just as easily be New York or Chicago or LA but for the fact that this is a country of two halves, a society divided into 'high' and 'low', of those who have made it in the years after the nation's defeat and those who haven't. It's about a kidnapping that has gone askew; the wrong boy has been kidnapped, not the son of the rich industrialist but the chauffeur's son. Does the industrialist pay the ransom and ruin himself, (he has put his entire fortune into a take-over bid), or does he risk the boy's life? The film itself is divided into two halves, both equally exciting; the first dealing with the kidnapping and the second with the hunt for the kidnappers while the plot is further complicated by the industrialist, Gondo's (an excellent Toshiro Mifune), involvement in the take-over.

This is a terrific police procedural picture as detailed as something David Fincher might make today, superbly shot in black and white Cinemascope and it displays the same kind of raw urgency one might associate with Samuel Fuller. In other words, there is nothing artsy, esoteric or precious about this film yet it displays all the skills of a great director working at the top of his game. Perhaps it is time to return Kurosawa to his rightful place at the top of the critical canon.

TRAPEZE

Almost a great circus movie, (if such a thing could exist), "Trapeze" comes closer than most to capturing the tawdry excitement of the milieu. While most circus pictures are aimed at kids this is aimed, if not quite at adults, then at least at older kids. It's sexy and it makes the whole business of being a trapeze artist seem like the sexiest, most exciting thing in the world.

It's about the rivalry that can develop, both professionally and romantically, between artists and the director, Carol Reed, gives the film a charge that his more famous and infinitely more civilized films don't have. As the trio of artists who are almost consumed by their passions Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Gina Lolobrigida have an instinctive rapport. Lancaster and Curtis' performances here seem like a dry run for their work a year later in "Sweet Smell of Success" and Lolobrigida never looked or acted better. Although Lancaster wasn't young when he made this, he's like the biggest kid in the playground and seems to be having a hell of a time while Lolobrigida is a dynamic tease.