BENEDETTA

 A Paul Verhoeven movie about nuns? Do I need to say more? Well, perhaps. Of course, we get our fair share of nude nuns minus, in this instance, those big guns and a copious amount of sex and violence but this is no cheap exploitation picture even if it is unlikely to recieve the Vatican's Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Verhoeven's "Benedetta" doesn't just sail close to the wind but to Christians, and to Catholics in particular, is positively sacrilegious.

It's the story of a nun, Benedetta, in 17th century Tuscany, (Virginie Efria), whose devotion, first to the Virgin Mary and then to Jesus, takes, shall we say, somewhat extreme forms. As a 'Bride of Christ' Benedetta sees him not just as a vision but very much in the flesh and tends to take her wifely duties literally though she is also inclined to dally in her more earthly sphere with another nun, (Daphne Patakia). Naturally, this leads Benedetta into all sorts of trouble with the Church authorities.

Verhoeven tends to take all of this fairly seriously though the nudity, the violence, the visions and the swearing do add to a sense of jocularity as well. It's certainly a terrific looking picture with a real sense of period and without the sex and violence it could fit quite easily into the category of 'religious epic'.

There's a lot here we've seen before but equally there is a lot that is both new and shocking but shocking in a very Verhoevenian kind of way. Even at its most serious I kept feeling his tongue was lodged very firmly in his cheek, certainly by the time we move into the territory of "The Devils" and "The Exorcist". The one member of the cast who seems to know exactly what is intended is Charlotte Rampling as the Mother Superior and once again Rampling simply walks off with the picture. Unfortunately, in the version I saw, the subtitling was very poor, even to the extent of distorting the meaning. What is certain is that "Benedetta" is no 'Sound of Music' and this is one nun's story unlikely to be shown in the convent anytime soon.

TUNES OF GLORY

 One great performance in a film is indeed a treat but two is something of a rarity. Ronald Neame's "Tunes of Glory" starred Alec Guinness and John Mills and they are both magnificent. I won't say these are career-best performances from either actor but they are great nevertheless. Guinness is the acting colonel of a Scottish regiment based in Edinburgh Castle who is being replaced by Mills, their styles of command as different as chalk and cheese. Guinness is lackadaisical and takes the soft approach while Mills is a martinet; a clash of wills is inevitable.

Neame was always a fine director if never quite an auteur but this may be his masterpiece. It's based on a James Kennaway novel and Kennaway himself did the screenplay and as well as Guinness and Mills there is a first-rate supporting cast, (Dennis Price, Duncan Macrae, Gordon Jackson, Kay Walsh as well as a young John Fraser and Sussanah York, making her screen debut). It's the kind of intelligent, 'adult' British picture popular at the time though this is still a cut above most and even without those two great performaces at the centre it would be exceptional. With them, it's something of a triumph.

THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS

 As Miss Jean Brodie once observed, 'for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like' and enough people liked the original "The Matrix" to turn it into a trilogy. "The Matrix" movies were technical marvels full of gobbledygook and it hardly mattered that they didn't make much sense but strung together they added up to almost seven hours of screen time and that's an awful lot of gobbledygook and time spent inside what is basically a computer game. After the third "Matrix" film the Wachowskis decided to call it a day, wisely I thought, so why now 'the Resurrections'? Don't filmmakers know when to leave well enough alone?

Anyone coming fresh to "The Matrix Resurrections" won't have a clue what's going on and even if you've been here before you still won't have a clue what's going on. These are movies for gaming nerds and computer geeks who can't tell pretentious bull from real life, (btw, I think I just cracked a Matrix joke!), so now Lana Wachowski has come up with the idea of making a self-reverential sequel to the trilogy that tells us we're watching a Warner Brothers sequel to the trilogy and she's 'resurrected' Keanu Reeves, (you know, the actor with the personality of artificial intelligence minus the intelligence), as Thomas Anderson aka Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity while Morpheus is now a lot younger and sexier than Laurence Fishburne ever was.

On a technical and visual level this movie is still a marvel but sadly it takes itself very seriously when it's really a spoof, or should be, of the earlier Matrix movies. Come to think of it, the second and third Matrix movies should have been spoofs of the original rather than sequels while Reeves cements his reputation as the world's worst actor. On the plus side there's Jonathan Groff and Neil Patrick Harris as the bad guys and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is excellent as the new Morpheus.  Reeves spends a good deal of time saying 'this can't be happening'; unfortunately it is, on a screen near you. I have a feeling even nerds are going to be disappointed this time round.

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

 As well as being a smart, infectiously enjoyable entertainment Edgar Wright's "Last Night in Soho" is also a real treat for the cineaste in us. Yes, it's a fantasy and a slasher movie but it's a terrific throwback to the kind of British cinema that all but disappeared in the seventies as well as a love-letter to London, past and present.

Eloise, (Thomasin McKenzie, excellent), is a design student in the present who, on her first trip to London, enters the wonderland that is Soho in the sixties, quite literally just like Alice, becoming, it would appear, her glamorous alter-ego Sandie, (a fantastic Anya Taylor-Joy), whose dream it is to become a singer. Did Eloise dream this or did she really go back in time and where did she get that love bite on her neck?

Wright's sixties London is an amalgam of real streets and the studio-bound London of so many movies, now shot in gloriously garish colour and the more Eloise retreats into Sandie's past the more she seems to become Sandie and the more the 1960's become the film's third character and, in so far as they are still around, Wright peoples his film with throwbacks from the period like Terence Stamp, Rita Tushingham and a superb Diana Rigg in her final film, filling the soundtrack with a roster of classic pop, (the film's title comes from a song by the little-known band Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich).

What begins as a love letter, however, soon turns into a poison-pen letter and the movie that most readily comes to mind is Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" as Eloise's dream becomes a nightmare, (there are murders and there are ghosts as Eloise goes from victim to girl detective and back to victim again), as past and present finally meet and it's clear that Wright is as much in love with films like "Beat Girl" and "The Flesh is Weak" as he is with cinema in general. This is a deliciously dark and hugely enjoyable film and one that Wright can be rightly proud of.

DUNE

 Firstly, let's be clear; Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" is really only part one of what Villeneuve hopes will be a two-part film. I say 'hopes' as part two now seems to depend on just how commercially successful this one is. Unlike other two-part films, the cameras don't appear to have even started rolling on the second film yet. It is, of course, a remake of David Lynch's film and an adaptation of Frank Herbert's cult novel but listening to the opening narration this could just as easily be the next episode in the 'Star Wars' saga.

Now there's something else I want to get clear; I hated the Lynch version which seemed to cram huge swathes of plot, and impenetrable plot at that, into its opening scenes. This is much more clean cut, almost overly simplistic in fact, with none of the so-called 'depth' that "Dune" aficionados claim of it and it's all the better for it.

From the beginning Villeneuve's "Dune" is a visually stunning sci-fi epic and just as dumb as sci-fi epics often are which is fine by me. When I go to a movie like "Dune" I'm not looking for "Hamlet" but to be transported to another world, (literally, as in another planet or universe), where good guys and bad guys fight each other over something they want, in this case 'the spice', (yes, it is that simplistic), and very much to Villeneuve's credit I was certainly transported. As sci-fi epics go, "Dune" is at the very top of the pile.

Of course, all attempts at profundity fall flat. We have a Messiah character in the form of Paul Atreides, (a wan-looking Timothee Chalamet), who is to learn he is a saviour and not just some boy wonder and a saviour with a mother who also seems to have been chosen, (you can see where this is going), but so long as you don't take any of it too seriously there is a great deal here to enjoy.

The special effects are out of this world, so to speak and Greig Fraser's cinematographjy is often breathtaking. The pseudo-significant screenplay may err on the daft side and it hardly affords the starry cast the kind of roles that will win them Oscars, though Stellan Skarsgard, doing his best Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz impersonation, is good fun, but smart dialogue and great acting isn't what we go to movies like "Dune" for as I've said. There's no more depth here than there was in "Forbidden Planet" but taken on its own terms, "Dune" is really quite extraordinary. Part One, at least, knocks Lynch's version for six and will figure very high indeed in my films of the year.

BELFAST

Kenneth Branagh's "Belfast" is a love letter to the city in which he was born and raised but it is also so much more; a film about family and about history, both recent and history going back a few hundred years. It is obviously made with great affection and considerable ambition and it gives us a strife-torn Belfast as seen through the eyes of a child, (the young Branagh, here called Buddy), but as someone who, as a young adult lived through 'The Troubles', it isn't 'as it was'.

That hardly matters, of course. If the film never feels wholly authentic, (it's at its weakest in the scenes of violence), Branagh's childlike vision of Belfast in 1969 gives it a mythic, almost surreal, quality greatly enhanced by Haris Zambarloukos' superb cinematography, mostly in black and white. The events it portrays did happen if not quite in the way Branagh imagines, rather than remembers, them and happily the history takes a backseat to his beautifully realised picture of a family, (his family), at the centre.

His original screenplay is both funny and intelligent and he gets wonderful performances from his adult cast, (Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe as his parents; Ciaran Hinds and Judi Dench as his grandparents). Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Jude Hill, an untried young Belfast boy, as Branagh's alter-ego. Hills is not a natural actor and his line-readings are amateurish at best and he's onscreen for most of the film. He doesn't destroy the picture; he just lets it down.

Of course, if you haven't grown up here in Northern Ireland and have no first-hand knowledge of the events, the film's sweet sentimentality and Branagh's obvious skill as a filmmaker should win you over and there is already talk of Oscars, (Hinds, Balfe, Zambar.loukos and Branagh as writer would be deserving nominees), while the songs of Van Morrison greatly enhance the soundtrack.

 

THE LAST DUEL

 It's a brave man who will tell his tale in the manner of "Rashomon", particularly when he's as reliant on CGI as Ridley Scott is here but then Scott, now 84, has never been one to shy away from a challenge. Even without its 'Rashomon'-style telling, (different versions of the same events), setting your dark epic at the end of the Dark Ages, risks alienating your audience. "The Last Duel" is said to be based on true events but whose truth? In the end that hardly matters. Messing with the narrative is a good deal of the fun and Scott certainly gives us a big, bloody and savage movie. Indeed of all his films this could be the one most likely to appeal to fans of "Gladiator".

It's a fantastic looking film, stunningly shot by the great Dariusz Wolski and superbly designed but fidelity to the period doesn't really extend to the screenplay, co-written by co-stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck together with Nicole Holofcener from Eric Jager's book, and it's all the better for it. The 21st century colloquialisms give the movie an accessibility it might otherwise have lacked. Unfortunately neither Damon nor Adam Driver add much depth to their characters though an almost unrecognisable Ben Affleck seems to be enjoying himself and a post-Killing Eve Jodie Comer has no problem walking off with the movie as the wife who may or may not have been raped.

Indeed, there is so much about "The Last Duel" that is smart, funny and totally unexpected that if just might turn out to be the most unlikely multiplex movie of the year but whether audiences respond to a movie largely devoid of action until the final duel is a different matter. This isn't Marvel territory but a movie for grown-ups that deserves a grown-up audience. Let's hope it gets the recognition it deserves.

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI

 Shot entirely in a series of single takes, Hsiao-Hsien Hou's "Flowers of Shanghai" is set in the flower houses, (brothels), of 19th century Shanghai and the flowers are the courtesans. The film, based on the novel by Bangqing Han. Is a sumptuous, leisurely portrait of life there, comprising mostly of petty squabbles between the girls over their 'gentlemen callers'. In dramatic terms not a great deal happens. Hou's slowly moving camera becomes an interloper, picking up snatches of dialogue and conversations between the girls and their patrons, the subject almost always involving money; sex is conspicuously absent, at least on-screen. Eating and drinking seem to be the predominant past-times.

Superbly acted and directed and stunningly photographed and designed this magnificent film has already figured in polls of the greatest films ever made. 'Pure cinema' in the very best sense of the term and yet it could just as easily exist on the stage, (there are no exterior shots). Midway through it flirts with melodrama as movies involving jealousy are prone to do but Hou keeps even this at arm's length. It would appear that emotions in China are more restrained than some of those high-kicking action films might suggest. Gorgeous and surprisingly moving and with a surprising streak of humour, this is one of the greatest of all period films. A masterpiece.