IF I HAD LEGS, I'D KICK YOU

 'Therapist on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' or perhaps right in the middle of one might have been a better title for "If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You" as therapist Linda tries to cope with an ailing daughter, an absent husband and a great big hole in her ceiling. Described, at least by the folks who give out the Golden Globes, as a comedy this is indeed a darkly funny but deeply disturbing picture of a mental breakdown seen from the perspective of the woman having the breakdown.

In this role, Rose Byrne, (never off the screen), is terrific, terrifyingly so in fact. Writer/Director Mary Bronstein has given her the part of a lifetime and Byrne grabs it with both hands and then shakes it to death but while Byrne may never be off the screen it's far from being a one-woman show. 

On her road to unraveling we also get to know her own therapist, (a beautifully cast Conan O'Brien), her very unstable patient, (a superb Danielle Macdonald), the drug dealer next door, (rapper A$AP Rocky) and her daughter's doctor, (Bronstein herself). All are beautifully played and provide much needed relief from Byrne's very obvious pain, not than I would have wanted to miss a minute of it.

The movie itself is far from an easy watch. Bronstein films Byrne's fractured life in a fractured style, for example we never see the child's face until the end, we just hear her demanding voice and is that hole in the ceiling a portal to the Twilight Zone? It might as well be for all that Bronstein shows us. Yes, this is a strange movie but also a brilliant one and I found it a pleasure welcoming Bronstein back into the cinematic fold. Others haven't been so forgiving; go expecting a comedy and you are bound to be bitterly disappointed.

THE ICE TOWER

 The movie "The Ice Tower" is as cold as its setting or indeed any of its characters. Lucile Hadzihalilovic's painfully slow tale of obsession is the kind of European art-movie that gives art-movies a bad name.  Jeanne, (Clara Pacini), is the young girl who runs away from home and stumbles on the set of a film version of "The Snow Queen", (a book that, coincidentally, she happens to be hooked on). Adopting someone else's identity she gets a job as an extra on the film and then develops something of a crush on the actress playing The Snow Queen, (Marion Cotillard at her most glacial), a crush the actress reciprocates in her strange and demanding way.

This, however, is no "All About Eve" and Jeanne dosen't have the wherewith all to be much of a schemer. Rather she's a young girl in love with an ideal and a diva incapable of returning her love and, as the song says, 'unrequited love's a bore'. About the midway point it would seem that Jeanne's fantasies and the film she's appearing in become intertwined just as we kind of guessed they might, (films like "The Ice Tower" are very easy to read), but by then I had given up the ghost. Others, however, have found it to be the veritable bee's knees and "The Ice Tower" has been figuring in many end-of-year best film lists. All I can say is, for those who like this sort of thing this is the sort of thing they like.

BLUE MOON

 "Blue Moon" is a great play but it isn't on the stage; it's on the screen, an original screenplay by Robert Kaplow, (inspired by the letters of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland), but basically staged on one set, Sardi's, on the opening night of 'Oklahoma', the first musical Richard Rodgers wrote with Oscar Hammerstein after ditching his song-writing partner of more than 20 years, Lorenz Hart and it's Hart, not Rodgers and certainly not Hammerstein, who's the main attraction.

This is the story of a brilliant but bitter alcoholic, a homosexual who probably wanted to be heterosexual and who perhaps convinced himself, if no-one else, that he was heterosexual and he's played magnificently by Ethan Hawke, (digitally reduced in height), in a performance that, had it been in the theatre, would have become the stuff of legend and which might still do here on film.

Everyone else are just supporting characters in Hart's world but at least they are memorably played by Bobby Cannavale, (Sardi's lone barman), Andrew Scott, (Rodgers), Patrick Kennedy, (the writer E.B. White), and best of all Margaret Qualley as Elizabeth, the girl Hart worships as the very epitome of beauty,

It's a sad but ultimately uplifting movie, (how could any movie featuring the music of Rodgers and Hart be anything but uplifting), and it shows once again the command director Richard Linklater has over almost any material be brings to the screen. Yes, this might make a great play but Linklater keeps it highly cinematic, using every inch of the Sardi's setting beautifully. Moving and not in the least sentimental.

WEAPONS

 This twisted variation on 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' is undeniably entertaining but I'm not sure it would have been as much fun if  director Zach Cregger had decided to film it in strictly chronological order. Rather "Weapons" keeps doubling back on itself telling its totally bizarre tale of disappearing children from several perspectives as chapter headings inform us whose story we're getting at any one time.

Fundamentally this is a warped fairy-tale and, as in all good fairy-tales, children are really at the heart of it; children and a real-life wicked old witch, superbly played by Amy Madigan in a performance that will certainly bring her an Oscar nomination at least. In fact, Madigan is the films dark heart and soul although there is also good work from Julia Garner, Josh Brolin and Alden Ehrenreich but ultimately it's thanks entirely to Madigan that by the time we get to the totally daft and very grisly finale I was completely won over.

HARVEST

 Set in an indeterminate period in the past and presumably in Scotland judging by the accents "Harvest" could best be described as folk-horror but not as we might know it. This may be a difficult film to pin down but it's utterly absorbing. Director Athina Rachel Tsangari seems to have found a way to transport us back to the Middle Ages while keeping a very 21st century eye on things.

It hasn't much of a plot as such, just a community so close to nature that it dictates their every waking moment but it's a nature which, together with the outside world, seems intent on destroying the community with every day that passes. It's also stunningly photographed by the great Sean Price Williams while heading an extraordinary cast of actors and musicians are Caleb Landry Jones and Harry Melling. They are the faces we recognize in what is essentially an ensemble piece, (Neil Leiper, Rosy McEwen, Arinze Kene and Frank Dillane are all excellent).

Of course, it won't appeal to everyone, most particularly to horror fans. This is an art movie almost experimental in its execution but if you give yourself over to it then there are treasures to be found in almost every frame.

MISERICORDIA

 If there was ever a movie you had to piece together yourself it's "Misericordia". It's the kind of movie Hitchcock might have made if he were gay and French, (think a more twisted "Rope" laced with a dose of "The Trouble with Harry"), but I doubt if even Hitchcock at his most contrary would have made anything as off-the-wall as this. 

At the beginning if you join the dots you assume they will add up to...what? Only to find it going into places you didn't see coming as it gets progressively weirder by the minute and, I might add, surprisingly funny in a way that Hitchcock would definitely have appreciated. Of course, what the characters in "Misericordia" get up to may defy belief but as Mr. Hitchcock himself would have said, 'It's only a movie' but one you're unlikely to forget in a hurry.