LAND OF THE PHARAOHS

 Stick a director at the helm of an epic and he's sure to become a cropper. Of course, that old adage is a fallacy; you just have to look at "Spartacus" or "El Cid" to see what a Kubrick or an Anthony Mann can do for the genre but for every "Spartacus" you've got "The Robe" or "Cleopatra", neither of which represent the best of anyone. Indeed "The Robe" has a lot to answer for; as the first Cinemascope picture it sparked a fondness for Roman, Egyptian and Biblical epics, very few of which are worth remembering and it seemed in the fifties every director worth his salt wanted to have a go. Even Howard Hawks wanted to get in on the act.

"Land of the Pharaohs" came out in 1955 and was both a critical and financial disaster but Hawks isn't easily written off and over the years this has built up something of a reputation. It's no masterpiece but neither is it a turkey and it's certainly strange enough to be of interest. Here was an epic, (and a fairly short one, clocking in at under two hours), about nothing more than the building of a tomb. The tomb in question is that of Khufu, Egyptian Pharaoh, and it's to be a pyramid greater than any other. Of course, if you want an audience you have to throw in a little sex and violence, a lot of spectacle and a few stars. The sex comes in the form of the Pharaoh's scheming wife who's also the instigator of the violence while spectacle there's aplenty. Remember this was long before CGI so every extra up on the screen is a real person costing real money and with two DoP's, Lee Garmes and Russell Harlan, it certainly looks the business.

Unfortunately all the money, (it went way overbudget), went on the spectacle so there was nothing left for 'stars'. Jack Hawkins, (hardly likely to set the box-office on fire), was Khufu while his wife was Joan Collins, who was certainly no Liz Taylor. The supporting cast was made up largely of Brits speaking in plummy voices, a few lesser known Europeans and Dewey Martin in a skirt. However, one of the three credited scriptwriters was none other than William Faulkner, though listening to the fairly banal dialogue you would never know it. This was to be a prestige production and Faulkner's name on the credits was part of that prestige but to the masses that meant nothing and the lack of epic 'action' scuppered the project.

Now, of course, it's a curiosity; a gloriously bizarre folly that might have ended another director's career but Hawks lived to fight another day and to make his late masterpiece "Rio Bravo" and no Hawks aficionado can afford to miss "Land of the Pharaohs". You might wonder what the hell he thought he was doing but you can't say he didn't make the most of what he had been given. A one-off and, if it's not among Hawks masterpieces, it's still an essential part of his canon.

PARADISE LOVE

 You know where you stand with a Ulrich Seidl film; usually on the edge of a precipice and you know whichever way you fall the outcome is unlikely to be pleasant. Seidl is a director out to shock us; you may hate his films and see them as exploitative but you are unlikely to ever forget them. "Paradise Love" was the first in a trilogy very roughly based around the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity but if you're unfamiliar with his work, be warned; piety and what we perceive as the attributes usually associated with religion are conspicuously absent.

This first film in the trilogy is set in Kenya and deals with sex tourism, in this case women who go there with the sole purpose of having sex with the boys who hang around the beach and outside the hotels. Sex is their profession and it seems everyone is on the make. The tourists exploit the locals who exploit them in return. Seidl films all of this in the most matter-of-fact way; we could be watching a documentary.

What plot there is revolves around Teresa, (a superb and utterly fearless Margarete Tiesel), an Austrian woman who comes looking for sex but wanting love and who falls under the spell of Munga, (Peter Kazungu, one of many non-professionals in the cast). At first he's the boy who doesn't harass her on the beach or seems interested in her money but he has his own agenda and while other directors might milk this material for purely 'dramatic' effect, Seidl approaches it more as an anthropologist might, studying both sides at once and treating no-one with much respect. This is a film about racism and it leaves a very sour aftertaste. In its clinically chilly fashion it's a horror movie that will alienate many.

THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK

 A year before M.A.S.H. shot him to international fame, and ignored at the time of its release, Robert Altman made "That Cold Day in the Park", an adaptation by Gillian Freeman of Peter Miles' novel. It's like "The Collector" with the roles reversed. Sandy Dennis is the young woman who brings an apparently homeless boy back to her apartment, (so he can dry off, out of the rain she tells him), and then does her damnedest to make sure he doesn't leave. The title is apt; this is a chilly movie in every detail, in the Altman canon more in keeping with films like "Images" and "Quintet" than later masterpieces like "Nashville" and "Short Cuts".

The setting is Vancouver and the film has a European art-house feel to it like something Bergman might have made on an off-day and it was clearly never destined for commercial success. Dennis, usually the most mannered of actresses, gives a stiff, starchy performance and it's Michael Burns as the boy in question who gives the more naturalistic  performance even if his initial silent acceptance of Dennis' hospitality is a bit hard to swallow while his later motives in going along with things is never really made that clear. It has now built up something of a cult reputation though I doubt most people would give it the time of day were it not an Altman movie.

RAGTIME

 E.L. Doctorow's picaresque novel was always going to be one of the great unfilmable books until Czech director Milos Forman, working from a Michael Weller screenplay, brought it to the screen in 1981. It might have been better if he had left well enough alone. It's reasonably entertaining but the novel's several interlinked stories never gel on screen so it's left to Forman's large cast to carry the picture and a number of them very ably do so with Howard E. Rollins Jr.'s Coalhouse Walker Jr. coming off best.

The various tales involves the murder of Stanford White, (Norman Mailer) by Henry Thaw, (Robert Joy), over Evelyn Nesbit, 'the girl in the red velvet swing', (which was the title of an earlier film dealing with this incident with Joan Collins as Nesbit, a part much better played here by a young Elizabeth McGovern). Then there's the story of Brad Dourif's initial courtship of Evelyn before getting involved in the Coalhouse yarn while yet another tale, (the weakest), follows Mandy Patinkin's down-and-out inventor who becomes a famous movie director all culminating in the Rollins' story of a proud African-American taking his revenge on those who abused him and which takes up the final section of this long film.

For this story Forman was able to coax James Cagney out of retirement to play the city's Chief of Police while other 'oldies', mostly guesting in the cast, include Donald O'Connor, Pat O'Brien and Bessie Love. It's not a bad film, just a meandering and disappointing one that, despite all the dramas onscreen, never really builds up a head of steam and when it's over it all feels very anti-climatic.

ANOTHER ROUND

 Most films that deal with the demon drink have been po-faced manifestos on the dangers of alcohol and there are very few films that celebrate drunkenness and those that do usually do so for comic effect. Thomas Vinterberg's "Another Round" is something of a rare exception. It's a film about drinking to excess that's indeed both funny and tragic in equal measure as it explores the theory that we all seem to have a blood alcohol level that is 0.05% too low and that we should drink enough, during daylight hours at least, to raise it to that level, where 'psychologically' we should all be at our best.

The protagonists are four Danish school teachers at the same school who decide to test this hypothesis with mostly disastrous results; like all good drinkers they either forget when to stop or simply choose not to. But Vinterberg's film isn't so much about the alcohol as it is about four sad men whose lives have stagnated and who find that drinking actually makes them happy in ways that sobriety never could. It doesn't hold back on the dangers but neither is it an outright condemnation. Ultimately this is a character study with alcohol a supporting player, albeit a major one.

It's also superbly acted and in particular by Thomas Bo Larsen as the sports teacher who really doesn't know when to stop and by Mads Mikkelsen, in what might be a career-best performance, as the history teacher caught in a failing marriage and it's Mikkelsen who delivers the film's coup-de-theatre, performing a remarkable dance sequence at the climax that could just earn him an Oscar nomination. "Festen" not withstanding, this might also be Vinterberg's best film to date and, as predicted, if does win the Best International Film Oscar it will, indeed, be a worthy winner.

JOE KIDD

 Excellent and certainly underrated Clint Eastwood western, this time directed by John Sturges and designed very much to cash in on the Spaghetti Westerns Eastwood made with Sergio Leone; you only have to look at the credits to see the wealth of talent involved including a screenplay by none other than Elmore Leonard. Clint is the titular "Joe Kidd" who finds himself in the middle of a war between cold-blooded landowner Robert Duvall and a group of Mexicans lead by John Saxon. There's nothing very original about the plot but it gallops through its less than ninety minutes running time and makes for a very entertaining Saturday Afternoon Matinee movie. It's also well cast throughout and boasts some beautiful location photography by the great Bruce Surtees.

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH

 A knowledge of American history over the last fifty years and, in particular, a knowledge of what went down in the Black Panther Movement would help but is far from essential in getting a great deal out of Shaka King's superb new film "Judas and the Black Messiah" which tells the story of how Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was betrayed by F.B.I. informant Bill O'Neal leading to his assassination by J. Edgar Hoover's thugs supposedly acting in the name of the law. It's a shocking story and since I wasn't aware of these events before I suppose I approached the film like a piece of good fiction, (it's certainly not trying to be a documentary), and it grips like any really good thriller should.

A terrific Daniel Kaluuya, (in Oscar-worthy form), is Hampton and the consistently brilliant LaKeith Stanfield is just as good as his Judas while Jessie Plemons has his best big-screen role to date as the F.B.I. agent who recruits O'Neal. Dominque Fishback is also very good as the activist who falls for Hampton and has his son. This is an actor's piece in the best sense of the term and it's beautifully shot by Sean Bobbitt. Of course, it's also a deeply political film and the audience for political films is limited and without that prior knowledge I spoke of, you might find some of it confusing but as a thriller about betrayal and as an expose of how ruthless governments can be, (nothing new there, of course), it works superbly and ultimately that's all that matters. How much of it actually happened in the way King tells it I have no idea but it certainly feels right and it deserves to be widely seen.

SHIRLEY

 Elisabeth Moss, like Jennifer Jason Leigh before her, is fast becoming one of those 'actresses' actresses', happy to appear in critically successful but commercially ignored movies, usually made independently. Her latest is Josephine Decker's "Shirley" in which she plays the novelist Shirley Jackson, author of 'The Haunting of Hill House' and Decker, as you may know, is one of the newer directors, praised for her ability to draw exceedingly strong performances from her actors. "Shirley", then, is an actor's piece as well as a highly unconventional biopic.

It's also a period piece, (it's set in the 1940's), and thanks to Sturla Brandth Grovien's luminous cinematography and Sue Chan and Kirby Feagan's production design it looks it. Knowing nothing about Shirley Jackson's life I have no idea if any of this happened but Decker's treatment suggests this is a work of pure fiction based on a real person. Moss is, as always, terrific in the title role as is Michael Stuhlbarg as her cheating husband. The plot revolves around a young married couple who become Shirley's initially unwelcome houseguests. As the wife, Odessa Young is outstanding though Logan Lerman is given little to do as her ambitious husband.

Shirley herself is probably alcoholic and clearly has mental issues and she likes to treat her guests in much the same way as Martha did in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", (like George, her husband is a professor), and while she refrains from seducing Lerman she does develop a kind of lesbian attachment to Young's pregnant wife. She also has a morbid fascination with the disappearance of a young female student who becomes the subject of her next book. This is also Decker's most accessible film to date, a perfectly realised psychodrama that could have come from the pen of Jackson herself and hopefully it will attract a larger audience that Decker is used to.

POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES

 For his final film Frank Capra chose to remake his 1933 "Lady for a Day". It might be a long way from his best work but shooting in Panavision and colour and with an all-star cast he conjured up a sumptuous entertainment even if it did feel more than a little old-fashioned by 1961. It's the old Damon Runyon story about an old apple seller, basically a beggar, with a daughter in Europe who thinks her mother is some kind of New York socialite. When the daughter decides to visit, and bring her future husband and his father, (Spanish aristocracy, no less), with her it's left to mum's gangster friend to turn her into that 'lady for a day' or in this case, a week.

You could describe it as return to Capra-corn at its most schmaltzy but with Bette Davis as the apple seller, Glenn Ford as the gangster, an unlikely Hope Lange as Ford's girlfriend and a supporting cast that includes an Oscar-nominated Peter Falk, Arthur O'Connell, Thomas Mitchell, Edward Everett Horton, (almost walking off with the film), and a newcomer by the name of Ann-Margaret it's hugely entertaining and its two and half hours running time flies by. Davis may be miscast, (we always preferred Bette as a bitch), and her role is never fully developed but everyone else is fine and while it may be no late masterpiece it's still a solid conclusion to a distinguished career.