ORDINARY DECENT CRIMINAL

 Based, for the most part, on the same real-life character who inspired John Boorman's "The General", "Ordinary Decent Criminal" suffers in comparison but while it's far from being a great film it's a reasonably enjoyable one nevertheless with a highly unlikely Kevin Spacey cast as Ireland's master criminal and number one gangster 'Michael Taylor''. We're not talking Spacey the double Oscar winner here but Spacey the actor prepared to take on any role and run with it and he seems to be laughing up his sleeve with us or perhaps just at us.

That fine and yet largely unknown Irish director Thaddeus O'Sullivan helmed the picture from a good screenplay by Gerard Stembridge and he's assembled a first-rate cast that also includes Linda Fiorentino, Peter Mullan, StephenDillane, Helen Baxendale, David Hayman and Patrick Malahide as well as Colin Farrell and Christoph Waltz early in their careers.

The tone is largely comic though the material is fundamentally serious and today the film feels a bit like a fish out of water; you might even say it's all a bit tasteless given the state of Irish 'gangsterism' in the last decade but if it's closer to "Father Ted" than "The General" maybe it's not such a bad thing. A little too broad at times but somehow it call comes right at the end.

THE LAST FRONTIER

 "The Last Frontier" is one of Anthony Mann's very best and yet least known westerns, beautifully shot in Cinemascope by William C. Mellor and with a fine cast headed by Victor Mature, Guy Madison, Robert Preston and, in one of her earliest roles, Anne Bancroft. Mature and co-star James Whitmore are trappers coaxed into becoming scouts for the Cavalry by Madison's decent captain. Preston is the martinet colonel who believes the only good Indian is a dead Indian and Bancroft is his young wife.

It was one of the last movies to deal with the Indian Wars but Mann treats the Indians with, if not quite respect, at least with their dignity intact making Preston the film's only real villain. It's a surprisingly intelligent picture although perhaps the film's biggest surprise is Mature delivering one of his best performances here and Mann handles the conflict between him and Preston with the same aplomb as he does between the cavalry and the Indians not to mention a very well developed sub-plot involving a sexual triangle between Mature, Preston and Bancroft. Now largely forgotten it deserves a much higher place in the Mann canon than it's received.

SUMMER WIITH MONIKA

 The summer Harry spends with Monika defines much of the rest of his life. They meet in the city, quit their jobs and spend one passionate summer together during which he gets her pregnant forcing them to marry young. Ingmar Bergman's early work "Summer with Monika" is much closer to the British Kitchen-Sink movement than anything Bergman did later. It's like a Swedish version of "A Kind of Loving" and while in the Bergman canon it may count as a minor work it's also bold, imaginative and yes, depressing. It also features a terrific performance from a 21 year old Harriet Andersson as Monika. Bergman wrote the film for her and it certainly paid off, launching her on an international career. As Harry, Lars Ekborg is also excellent, though he never quite had the career he deserved, dying from cancer at the age of 43. Not a Bergman masterpiece, then, but certainly worth seeing.

UN CARNET DE BAL

 One of the great classics of 1930's French cinema and one of cinema's great ;memory' pictures, "Un Carnet de Bal" has, sadly, fallen out of fashion in these more cynical times despite its being a surprisingly hard-nosed and often bleak movie. The plot revolves around recently widowed Christine as she tracks down the men she danced with from an old dance programme of twenty years before, (when she was sweet sixteen). Of course, each of them has changed drastically, almost to the point where they are no longer recognizable; in fact two are already dead and as Christine explores her past some harsh truths emerge.

Marie Bell is a luminous Christine, the great Francoise Rosay is magnificent as the mother of a boy who may have killed himself for love and a whole host of great French actors of the period play the survivors and potential suitors. There are flawless performances from Harry Baur, Pierre Blanchar, Fernandel, Louis Jouvet, Raimu and Pierre Richard-Willm. It also represents the high point in Julien Duvivier's career and was at one time considered among the greatest films ever made. It cries out for rediscovery.

MEMORIES OF MURDER

 Before his Oscar-winning success with "Parasite" Bong Joon-Ho was already a master in the genre of off-the-wall and decidedly creepy thrillers that marked him out as one of the best directors of his generation. Like a Korean David Fincher he is more interested in the minutiae of a criminal investigation than in the crimes themselves. In "Memories of Murder" a number of young girls have been raped and strangled in a remote Korean community and the incompetent local police are only too happy to pull in the first suspect they find. It takes an outsider, a young inspector from Seoul, to at least look in a different direction.

As I said this is a thriller that is forensically detailed, a 'whodunit' where 'who done it' hardly matters; what does matter is the journey rather than the destination which isn't to say that the journey isn't at times edge of the seat exciting. Bong Joon-Ho knows exactly how to play his audience, feeding us information in much the same way as the police get theirs and as serial killer movies go this is something of a classic. Beautifully directed and superbly acted and yes, as good as the best of Fincher.

POSSESSED

 Joan going out of her mind over no-good Van Heflin. "Possessed" was the 1947 melodrama that found Miss Crawford at her Oscar-nominated best and under Curtis Bernhardt's beautifully nuanced direction it's a picture that has much to recommend it. It begins with a near catatonic Joan wandering the streets of Los Angeles before being taken to hospital where she spills her back-story to Dr. Stanley Ridges.

That involves being a nurse to an invalid, a suicide, a loveless marriage and finally to a ... well, you can see what's coming from a long way off. A superb Raymond Massey is the man Joan marries on the rebound but this is The Joan Crawford Show from start to finish. Massively underrated by almost everyone other than Terence Davies who named this as one of his ten best pictures in the recent Sight and Sound poll. It's hardly that but it's certainly well worth seeing all the same.