RIDE WITH THE DEVIL

 Ang Lee's "Ride with the Devil" deals with an aspect of the American Civil War usually ignored by the cinema; not the great battles between the Yankee and Confederate armies but the brutal and bloody skirmishes carried out by those Southern 'gentlemen' and farm boys who didn't join up and this, being an Ang Lee film, is remarkably faithful to the period both in look and in the patina of James Schamus' antiquated dialogue from Daniel Woodrell's novel "Woe to Live On".

Lee cast the film mostly with young actors whose careers had yet to take a foothold, (Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, Jim Caviezel, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Jeffrey Wright and the singer Jewel who really is excellent), and the pace of the film is certainly measured. The action scenes are indeed bloody and the film's one great set-piece, (an attack on a town by Quantrill's Raiders), is suitably savage but Lee prefers a slow, almost documentary-like approach to his material and the film often goes in directions we don't expect. This is definitely a post-modern western and in the Lee canon it's been largely overlooked but it remains one of his very best pictures, one that makes no concessions to its potential audience. It really is very fine.

PROVIDENCE

 Filmed in English, (though originally in France with the actors dubbed into French then 'dubbed' back again for an English-speaking audience), from a screenplay by David Mercer yet unmistakably Resnais and set mostly inside the head of dying novelist John Gielgud. I have to admit I hated "Providence" when I first saw it finding it both arch and pretentious and at the time I couldn't quite understand why so many international critics thought it was a masterpiece.

Maybe it seemed to me to be an old man's movie or at least a middle-aged man's movie, a picture about being old and dying but now that I'm a relatively old man myself I finally 'get' it and "Providence" does indeed feel like a masterpiece and a worthy companion piece to "Last Year at Marienbad".

As I said it takes place mostly inside the mind of dying author Gielgud who spends his long sleepless nights mostly drunk and in pain, this thoughts a mixture of memories, some real, others imagined and amalgamated with ideas from the novel he's writing and in which his family are the characters. Dirk Bogarde, (superb), is his fey son, at least fey in Gielgud's mind. Ellen Burstyn is Bogarde's wife, Elaine Stritch his mistress and his mother depending on Gielgud's point of view and David Warner both Burstyn's lover and Bogarde's half-brother.

Like "Marienbad" it's a memory piece, even at its most fantastical and, of course, it's highly literate as perhaps you would expect from a film about a writer and it's often very funny. It may never be as profound as it thinks it is, a smart doodle by a great director enjoying playing with his audience and this time round, to quote a particular Oscar-winning actress, I liked it...I really liked it.