PAIN AND GLORY

With this gorgeous and unashamedly autobiographical memory piece, Pedro Almodóvar returns to his very best form and certainly gives us his best film in over a decade. "Pain and Glory" finds director Salvador Mallo, (Antonio Banderas in a career-best performance and clearly modelled on Almodóvar), looking back over his life and loves as he deals with his addictions, his chronic pain and a newfound appreciation of his work. It's a film that is both honest and deeply moving but one that is often very funny, too. Almodóvar wouldn't be who he is without that wicked sense of humour that made his early films so enjoyable but this is an altogether deeper and more profound film than anything he's done in years.

Cross-cutting between his childhood with a loving mother, (Penelope Cruz, wonderful), and a largely absent father and his present as he revisits his past in the form of the men in his life, the actor who once let him down and to whom he hasn't spoken in 30 years and the former lover who comes to visit. Salvador is a man determined to lay his ghosts to rest as I am sure Almodóvar wants to here. Banderas, as I said, has never been better and as the men in his life, Asier Etxeandia (the actor), Leonardo Sbaraglia, (the lover) and Cesar Vicente, (the boy who becomes Salvador's 'First Desire') are all outstanding  while both Cruz and Julieta Serrano perfectly capture his mother at different stages in his life. This is a remarkable film from a great director too long absent from our screens and one we thought long past his best. This is proof he's home and hopefully, home for good. 

NOTORIOUS

"Notorious" is one of Hitchcock's greatest films, (it may be his best of the forties); sexy, suspenseful and perhaps the most perfectly cast. The hero is Cary Grant, the heroine Ingrid Bergman but neither of them is spotless; he's something of a heel and she's something of a tramp. The villain is Claude Rains who is actually more sympathetic than the good guys were it not for the fact that he's a Nazi and has a particularly nasty mother who looks like she might eat little boys for breakfast. She's played by the great Madame (Leopoldine) Konstantin. They are all superb, of course. Ben Hecht did the script and it's brilliant. The McGuffin is uranium hidden in wine bottles in Rains' cellar and which would be used to build Atomic Bombs unless Grant and Bergman can put a stop to it but in order to do that Bergman must first marry Claude and move into his nest of Nazi spies. The setting is Rio and the set pieces are great and plentiful. Like all of the best Hitchcocks you can view this again and again and never get tired of it.

THE COLLECTOR

William Wyler made "The Collector",, partly in England in 1965, and it earned him his 12th Oscar nomination as Best Director. At first glance it seems an unusual film for Wyler, small and introspective, a virtual two-hander, (there are only two other speaking parts), as psychotic Terence Stamp graduates from collecting butterflies to collecting a pretty girl, Samantha Eggar, and keeping her in his cellar. Both players are, of course, superb, (Wyler was always a great director of actors), and they both took acting prizes at Cannes. Eggar, too, was nominated for the Oscar as Best Actress as were script-writers Stanley Mann and John Kohn who did the fine adaptation of John Fowles' novel. It works both as a character study and as an extremely effective thriller, (though we could do without Maurice Jarre's highly intrusive score), but over the years its reputation has waned somewhat. It certainly not one of Wyler's masterpieces but it is very good and worthy of reassessment.

FAT CITY

One of John Huston's late masterpieces. In fact, if "Fat City" were the only John Huston film you were ever to see you would still know you were watching the work of a great director. Leonard Gardner adapted his own novel about a punch-drunk boxer hoping to make a comeback and Huston transformed it into a sad, funny elegy on the themes of loss and survival; every scene makes a point, every scene hits home.

It's also magnificently acted. Stacy Keach is Tully, the boxer who's a born loser. Jeff Bridges is the younger boxer who's 'soft in the middle' and who's no more likely to make it than Tully. Nicholas Colasanto steals almost every scene he's in as their manager, sadly another loser and there's a phenomenal performance from Susan Tyrrell as the lush Keach takes up with. She was Oscar-nominated and she should have won. This is also one of the greatest boxing pictures ever made.

LEAVE NO TRACE

Homelessness takes on a whole new meaning in Debra Granik's magnificent new film "Leave No Trace". Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie are brilliant as a father and his teenage daughter who choose to live wild in the woods until one day they are found and forced to conform. I mean, who would want to live as a modern day Thoreau when you can have a nice new modern home? Based on Peter Rock's novel 'My Abandonment' this is a film of real intelligence and insight, not afraid to be funny when it needs to be but also deeply moving, both a character study and a picture of an America we rarely see. It's like a Malick movie but one that moves with a somewhat greater speed and with none of the pretentious we sometimes associate with Malick. Indeed this is one of the most heartfelt films I have seen in a very long time and one of the greatest father/daughter movies in all of American cinema. Beautifully written, directed and acted down to the smallest part it's the kind of film that really deserves a mass audience and a fistful of awards.

THE IMMORTAL STORY

Certainly not the late masterpiece some people have claimed it to be but Orson Welles' "The Immortal Story" is still extraordinary in ways so many films aren't. It clocks in at under an hour so it really is the perfect miniature. It is a film about the art of story-telling with only four main speaking parts. Welles could just as easily have done this on the radio and yet visually this is extremely beautiful, (it was his first film in colour), and still typically 'Wellesian'.

He adapted it from a novel by Isak Dinesen and he, himself, plays the role of the old merchant in the 'story' of the old merchant who hires a young sailor to sleep with his young wife, (Jeanne Moreau is the woman hired by the merchant to play the wife in the story). The sailor is played by the English actor Norman Eshley and he's painfully wooden but he doesn't upset the flow of the piece; in fact, his banal, robotic diction actually fits it. No masterpiece then, but this short piece, which almost feels thrown together, stands head and shoulders over the best work of many lesser directors.

ONCE UPON A TIME ... IN HOLLYWOOD.

It was inevitable that, sooner or later, QT would get around to a film focusing entirely on the film-making process and the town he loves so well. The only question was, when? Well, at last he's done it, one film away from what he says will be his final film and as the title attests "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" is set in the past but again, typical of its director, he sets it at a very specific time, 1969, and around a very specific event. the murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by the Manson Family, and this just might be his masterpiece.

Knowing the subject in advance, of course, might lead us to suppose that Tarantino could still go down the road of earlier pictures like "Django Unchained" and "Inglorious Basterds", brilliant but mostly tasteless and jokey explorations of violence like an A-Movie version of a B-Movie aesthetic...but he doesn't. This is a love-letter to Hollywood, to the movies and to actors. Yes, the final half hour or so is dark and deeply disturbing, (yet it's also Tarantino funny and black as hell), and it might be too dark for the Academy but the rest is glorious; highly intelligent talk and often, (surprise, surprise), very moving.

There are three main characters, two fictitious and one real. The fictitious characters are actor Rick Dalton and his stunt double, Cliff Booth; the real character is Sharon Tate who, with her husband Roman Polanski, happens to be Dalton's next door neighbour. The film covers a period of three days, two in February and one in August. Dalton is an actor past his sell-by date, reduced to playing villains on TV and advised, (by a magnificent Al Pacino), to go to Italy and play the hero in Italian westerns. His stunt double and best friend has also seen better days. They are played superbly by a hardly ever better Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Indeed I think DiCaprio has only topped this performance once before when he played Jordan Belfort in "The Wolf of Wall Street".

It's a film full of set-pieces and both DiCaprio and Pitt have their fair share; Leonardo most memorably in one of those television westerns where his acting is Emmy-worthy until … (Tarantino even manages to cleverly put him into "The Great Escape" in the part actually played by Steve McQueen, very nicely reincarnated here by Damian Lewis), while Pitt has a scene of superb menace at the Manson ranch, one of several scenes where Tarantino pulls the rug out from under us with a punch-line that isn't what you were expecting

Elsewhere, the real-life Sharon Tate, (a terrific Margot Robbie), is enjoying the fruits of her celebrity and also gets her set-piece when she visits a cinema showing "The Wrecking Crew", relishing her performance up on the screen. While hardly a downer on the film in general I did think Tarantino treated Miss Tate rather cruelly. Was she really this much of an air-head? Surely not or is he suggesting she only made it through the casting couch? Someone else he takes down a peg or three is Bruce Lee, (an excellent Mike Moh), in a very funny scene with Brad Pitt. In fact, his treatment of Lee has already lead to a few complaints from his friends and family. To that, all I can say is 'it's only a film'. And it's a great film. At two hours and forty minutes it isn't overlong even if the heart of darkness he finally uncovers did leave me feeling a little queasy. It's also full of great supporting performances and it blends fact and fiction seamlessly. His masterpiece? Probably.

BLONDE VENUS

Perhaps not the greatest of the Dietrich/von Sternberg collaborations but with so many masterpieces and near-masterpieces it's hard to choose. Here she's the cabaret singer who will do anything to save the life of her dying husband yet the plot is neither turgid nor sentimental though to see Marlene as a dull little housewife sitting at home sewing is a bit hard to swallow. The hubbie is Herbert Marshall at his stiffest and the man Dietrich turns to is Cary Grant, also not at his best. Of course, she looks fantastic, (Bert Glennon was the cinematographer), and once she glams up the film picks up considerably, (this is the one in which she puts on the gorilla costume and sings 'Hot Voodoo' and there are certainly oodles of plot to get through). It might have been better still if that most obnoxious of child stars, Dickie Moore, hadn't played the son. Luckily we don't see too much of him. It's also a pre-code movie so it's pretty risqué for the time.

BEDLAM

This Val Lewton 'horror' film isn't that well known but it is one of his best. Inspired by the 'Bedlam' plate from Hogarth's "The Rake's Progress" it's set in and around the notorious asylum in 18th century London, presided over by Boris Karloff's cruel Master Sims. For what is essentially a B-movie it's beautifully designed and very well written by Lewton himself, under the pseudonym Carlos Keith, and the director Mark Robson. Karloff is superb and there is an excellent performance from Anna Lee as the noblewoman who ends up as one of his 'patients' while the scenes set in the asylum are unusually powerful. If, like "Freaks", the film feels outwardly exploitative, at its core this is as much a social-conscience picture as "The Snake Pit" and it remains one of Mark Robson's best films

ADDRESS UNKNOWN

Long before "84 Charring Cross Road", there was "Address Unknown", another film based on letters between its protagonists, but this one is very different. The correspondence is between two business partners, one Jewish and living in San Francisco, the other a German who has returned to Germany during Hitler's rise to power and who has been seduced by Nazi propaganda. The film was made in 1944 and was yet another addition to the anti-Nazi pictures being turned out at the time. It was fundamentally a B-Movie, produced and directed by the great designer William Cameron Menzies and it looks terrific, (Rudolph Mate did the stunning, noirish cinematography; this is one of the greatest black and white films ever shot).

Paul Lukas, fresh from his Oscar success in "Watch on the Rhine", is the Nazi sympathiser and although the film is far from subtle it is very powerful and it has been shamefully underrated and ignored. The last section is like a nightmare out of Kafka but this nightmare is frighteningly real.
Perhaps after the War people felt there was no longer any need for films like this and it simply disappeared. I think it's a small masterpiece that demands to be seen, particularly now. Absolutely unmissable if you can track it down.

VIVACIOUS LADY

The brightest comedienne of the 1930's and the greatest actor who ever worked in any genre working together at the top of their game in a film directed by one of Hollywood's finest directors, at least until he started to take himself seriously as 'an artist'. Yes it's Ginger Rogers and Jimmy Stewart in George Steven's comedy "Vivacious Lady". It should be a classic but actually it's not that well-known, more's the pity. He's the professor and she's the showgirl he marries after just meeting her, (the way they do in the movies). The fun starts when he brings her home to the small college town where he works, all the while finding himself unable to tell his folks they're married. Beulah Bondi is the mother, Charles Coburn is the father and James Ellison is the cousin whose girl she was until she married Stewart. If it's not quite great screwball it is still very funny and is ripe for rediscovery. Check this one out.