MONOS

 Boy soldiers are nothing new in international cinema with killers as young as ten gracing our screens in movies like "Beasts of No Nation". In the Colombian film "Monos" the soldiers are a mix of young men and women guarding an American hostage, (Julianne Nicholson), firstly on a remote mountainside and then in some unforgiving tropical jungle. Who these teenage warriors are fighting or why is never explained in a scenario that is part Kafka, part William Golding and part Werner Herzog.

There's only a slim semblance of a plot; instead director Alejandro Landes simply films his young cast, (who go by names like 'Bigfoot', 'Wolf' and 'Dog'), as they mostly fight among themselves, have sex or simply try to survive and what begins as just the kind of art-house movie designed to give art-house movies a bad name becomes, in its second half, the kind of savage 'adventure' movie Coppola might have made back in the seventies, indeed did make back in the seventies; there are sequences here as breathtaking as any in recent cinema. I simply couldn't take my eyes off it but whether it finds its audience is another matter entirely.

TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN.

 Another Minnelli movie about the movies and better, in its trashy, glossy way, than his overrated "The Bad and the Beautiful", (cleverly incorporated into this scenario to let us see what Kirk Douglas' character was like as a younger actor). This time he's a washed-up actor offered two weeks work in a film being shot in Rome's Cinecitta studios and directed by Edward G. Robinson with whom he's had a love/hate relationship stretching back awhile.

He's also got an oversexed ex-wife, Cyd Charisse, and women problems generally, (the cast also includes Daliah Lavi, Rosanna Schiaffino and Claire Trevor as Robinson's venomous wife). There's also a talentless young hack involved and he's played very well by George Hamilton. We are, of course, very much in "La Dolce Vita" territory or at least in the world of Eurotrash or Cannes where topless starlets meant more than the films being screened. The film itself is highly artificial which is just as it should be, pitched at just the right level of hysteria. Not a Minnelli masterpiece perhaps but essential nevertheless.

THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION

 Clearly a prestige production, (you only have to look at the credits, both in front of and behind the camera), yet this Sherlock Holmes movie wasn't really a success. Perhaps Holmes was out of favor by the mid-seventies or perhaps the frivolous tone put people off, (it's certainly not in the same class as Billy Wilder's "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes"), and yet it's a difficult film to dislike even if the ridiculous plot is something Robert Downey's Holmes might have found himself caught up in.

Firstly there's the cast. Nicol Williamson is Holmes, Robert Duvall with a plummy English accent is Watson, Laurence Olivier is Moriarty and Alan Arkin is Sigmund Freud, attempting to cure Holmes of his cocaine addiction, (hence the title). Then there's Vanessa Redgrave, Samantha Eggar, Joel Grey, Jeremy Kemp and Charles Gray while Nicholas Meyer's screenplay from his own novel certainly errs on the smart side and therein lies the problem; this is a spoof that is just too clever for its own good.

Herbert Ross both produced and directed the picture and he gives it that bland touch of class he often brought to his movies while Ken Adam's Production Design and Oswald Morris' Cnematography ensures it's always easy on the eye - there's even a Stephen Sondheim song on the soundtrack. Of course, what audience it was aimed at is something of a mystery; perhaps one even beyond the powers of the great detective himself.