SCARFACE

Not so much a remake as a reinvention of Howard Hawks' 1932 classic, Brian De Palma's SCARFACE gave Al Pacino one of his greatest roles as Tony Montana, the Cuban immigrant who comes to Miami and embraces capitalism in the only way he knows how. Violent, excessive and almost 3 hours long, De Palma's movie is something of classic itself and Pacino's admittedly wildly over-the-top performance is nevertheless hugely enjoyable. He is also the only one to get his name above the credits but a supporting cast that includes Michelle Pfeiffer, (the gangster's moll he takes for himself), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, (the sister for whom he harbours almost incestuous feelings), Steven Bauer, (his partner in crime) and Robert Loggia, F Murray Abraham and Harris Yullin as sundry bad guys, are all excellent. The first rate script is by Oliver Stone and visually the film often resembles something Stone might have directed rather than De Palma.

LIBERAL ARTS

As writer, director and star of LIBERAL ARTS Josh Radnor really makes an impact. In this little gem Radnor is a 30-something academic who, on a visit back to his alma mater, starts to rediscover his youth in the form of a fling with the daughter of one of his old professor's best friends who just happens to be 16 years his junior. Richard Jenkins is the professor being put out to pasture and Elizabeth Olsen is the girl Josh falls for and they are both excellent. It's a very romantic rom-com but it's also smart, intelligent, funny and surprisingly literate and it's beautifully played down to the smallest part with Zac Efron turning in a lovely cameo as a spaced-out matchmaker. It's not really the kind of film that packs the multiplexes which is a pity because this is a considerable cut above most of the other rom-coms that have come out in the past few years. It's also a very good New York picture and you should seek it out.

FAIL SAFE

The same year Kubrick brought us to the edge of the apocalypse with DR STRANGELOVE, Sidney Lumet did it again, only this time without the laughs. Indeed I can think of few more sobering films than FAIL-SAFE which has an almost identical scenario to Kubrick's film but plays it for melodramatic suspense. This time it's a mechanical fault that sends six bombers past their fail-safe point en route to Moscow and possibly World War Three.

Made at the height of the Cold War the film is an earnest and sometimes hysterical plea for nuclear disarmament that at the time would certainly given you pause for thought and a few sleepless nights. If Walter Bernstein's script lays on the arguments a tad too thickly you can't fault Lumet's handling of the material, (dispensing with a music score, for example), nor the terrific performances of most of his cast. If Walter Matthau comes across as nothing more than a sounding board and Fritz Weaver's degeneration into madness, a bit too obvious then Dan O'Herlihy, Frank Overton, (it's his best role), a young Larry Hagman and, best of all, Henry Fonda as the President forced into making the hardest decision of his life, more than compensate. Indeed this is one of Fonda's best performances; he's as believable an American President as I've seen on screen, making you wonder, had the actor chosen to go into politics, just how far he might have gone. Gerald Hirschfeld did the brilliantly bleached cinematography.

SABRINA

Billy Wilder in a benign mood but then what other kind of mood could he be in when his title character, SABRINA is none other than Audrey Hepburn. She's the chauffeur's daughter in this charming Cinderella tale, who leaves Long Island for Paris where she's to learn cooking, (yes, like me, you may think her chauffeur father a tad extravagant when it comes to his daughter's education), only to return, no longer an ugly duckling, (as if she ever was one in the first place), but a fairy-tale princess. Her Prince Charming is William Holden but he's slightly tarnished, (he's actually something of a heel), and Audrey has been too busy gazing longingly at him to notice it's his older brother, sweet, old-fashioned Humphrey Bogart, that she really loves.

It's based on a play by Samuel Taylor and Taylor, Wilder and Ernest Lehman did the adaptation and it's very fine. Wilder directs with the lightest of touches and his cast responds accordingly. Hepburn, acting and looking more beautiful than ever, is charm personified, Holden displays a rare comic streak and seems much more comfortable than in many of his dramatic roles while Bogart is the revelation here. Of course, he played comedy before, (and won the Oscar for it in THE AFRICAN QUEEN), but he's so good, (and so relaxed), here it makes you wish he had done comedy more often. A huge hit, the film has remained a perennial favourite. It was remade with Julia Ormond as Sabrina and Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear in the Bogart/Holden roles. It wasn't a patch on the original.

LEK AND THE DOGS

"Lek and the Dogs" is the most overtly experimental of Andrew Kotting's films, the one closest to the art-gallery rather than the art-house. It is based loosely on the play "Ivan and the Dogs" about a boy who leaves his home in Russia and goes to live with a pack of wild dogs though there is nothing theatrical or even concrete about Kotting's handling of the material which is composed of a series of images linked to some degree by a series of chapter headings and Lek's narration, each complimenting the other.

You could say it's aimed, not at a cinema audience, but to those who prefer watching video installations though it might also sit well on a double bill with Wes Anderson's "Isle of Dogs" while the Russian connection should remind you of Tarkovsky. It's also more approachable than it sounds thanks in large part to the casting of Xavier Tchili as Lek who seems to live and breathe the role until it ceases to be a performance. Top marks, too, to the remarkable sound design and to Nick Gordon Smith's extraordinary cinematography. Definitely a key work in experimental cinema.

HOTEL SALVATION

 The journey of old people towards death is a theme not unknown in the cinema, sometimes treated comically but more often treated tragically yet always with a great deal of affection and by some of the cinema's greatest directors. "Hotel Salvation" is the first feature by the 26 year old Indian writer/director Shubhashish Bhutiani but it could have come from Satyajit Ray. Daya, (lalit Behl), is the 77 year old who, convinced he is going to die, asks his son Rajiv, (Adil Hussain), to take him to the holy city of Varanasi where he will find salvation. 

Bhutiani treats his subject not as gloomy tragedy about the end of life but as a comedy that celebrates life in all of its forms, shot in glorious colour by his cinematographers David Huwiler and Michael McSweeney and displaying a deep affection for its characters and the traditions they hold dear and he has drawn wonderful performances from his entire cast, (Anil Rastogi is outstanding as the proprietor of the hotel).

An American or British film dealing with the same subject would be mawkish beyond belief and the jokes would probably fall flat. Of course, it's also unlikely that someone like Satyajit Ray would have taken such a broad outlook or have his characters 'find themselves' quite as enthusiastically as they do here. That said, this is a remarkable debut and a film to make you feel good about yourself and about life (and death) in general.

THE PARALLAX VIEW

One of the best of all conspiracy theory movies and a brilliant political thriller, "The Parallax View" came from a time in the mid-seventies when American cinema appeared to have reached a peak in providing intelligent, grown-up entertainments that were both fun to watch and which required bringing your brain into the cinema with you rather than leaving it in the foyer with the popcorn. It begins with a political assassination on top of Seattle's Space Needle. At this stage the audience doesn't have apply any guesswork; we can see the set up. We can see the killing of the apparent assassin and we can see the real assassin get away.


Step forward three years to a grubby Warren Beatty, who was there that day working as a reporter and who is now being contacted by another reporter, (Paula Prentiss in a tight cameo), who was also there and now fears for her life. It seems almost anyone who was there at the time is already dead; cue Warren off to uncover the truth. If the plot feels reasonably predictable, the treatment is superb. Alan J Pakula was the director, working from a screenplay by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr and the great Gordon Willis was the cinematographer, working a lot more in the light for a change and there's an excellent supporting turn from Hume Cronyn as Beatty's editor and a brilliant one from the underrated William McGinn as the guy tasked with recruiting assassins. There's a twist in the tale you will probably see coming but it doesn't lessen the effect. As I said, this is a smart piece of multiplex entertainment from a time when movies like this were commonplace. Those, as they say, were the days.

MEN IN WAR

Another movie long considered 'lost', and now mercifully restored, Anthony Mann's "Men in War" is a war film worthy to take its place beside Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line", (you can see its influence on Malick's masterpiece); in other words, this is a near-masterpiece and certainly one of Mann's greatest films. The war in question is the Korean and another American patrol find themselves caught out in the open, like so many before them in so many other war films, as they try to survive and like Robert Aldrich's brilliant "Attack" is as much about the conflict between an officer and a sergeant as it is about the external conflict with the enemy. The principle protagonists are Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray whose contempt for each other is only matched by their contempt for the enemy. Both actors are outstanding and others in the exceptional cast include Robert Keith, Vic Morrow, Nehemiah Persoff, James Edwards and L Q Jones.

You might call it an anti-war film since few films about men in conflict have painted such a dark picture of the costs of war and what it can do to men in the field. Indeed, this has even been called an 'art-house' war film which is probably just another way of saying that it's different and very intelligent. It's also stunningly well photographed in black and white by Ernest Haller and boasts another very score by Elmer Bernstein. How it ever came to be 'lost' in the first place is something of a mystery, (did audiences simply find it too bleak?). Let's just be thankful, then, that it's been 'found' again

COOL HAND LUKE

Nothing else in the Stuart Rosenberg canon quite prepares you for COOL HAND LUKE. It was an instant classic and it hardly mattered who the director was, (though I guess a bad director could have messed things up). This was the great anti-establishment movie of its day, (a late sixties REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE), with that blue-eyed beauty and most iconic of anti-establishment actors, Paul Newman, cast in the title role. As Fast Eddie Felson and Hud Bannon, Newman had already held two fingers up to the establishment and in many ways this was the role that came to define him.

The plot, by now, is familiar to generations of moviegoers. Newman is sentenced to two years on a chain gang for screwing the heads of parking metres, in itself something of a motiveless crime; he claims he was just settling old scores and you know from the second you see him he isn't going to stay put so it's a movie about a man who becomes a hero to his fellow prisoners for continually running away and for being continually brought back and it's full of classic scenes; the car-washing scene, the egg eating competition, the tar-rolling scene, the boxing match between Newman and George Kennedy.

The casting, of course, was crucial. It was a movie full of identifiable character parts where the actors cast as prisoners, the warden and the screws all had their marks to make, (though no African-American or gay prisoners)? Kennedy got the Supporting Actor Oscar and Strother Martin was magnificent as the warden but it has one of he great supporting casts, all brilliant and too many to mention with the wonderful Jo Van Fleet taking the only significant female role as Newman's mother. It was adapted by Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson from Pearce's novel, Lalo Schifrin did the score and Conrad Hall photographed it in Panavision so did it really matter who the director was or was this just one of those movies that was destined to become a classic from the pre-production phase? Like I said, nothing else Rosenberg ever did came close.

HEREDITARY

"Get Out" made horror films respectable again, or at least Oscar-friendly again, in a way they hadn't been since "The Exorcist". I've seen Ari Aster's terrific feature debut "Hereditary" compared to "The Exorcist" or at least mentioned in the same sentence. Possession, of a kind, and a grieving mother are the only tenuous links I could make out but like "The Exorcist" I can see "Hereditary" picking up a slew of Oscar nominations next year; Toni Collette is virtually a shoo-in for her magnificent performance as the beleagured mother and it's actually the better film.

Indeed for the first hour or so I wouldn't have called "Hereditary" a 'horror' film at all but a serious and deeply disquieting study of a woman cut off from her family by grief. When it does change midway through the jolt is sudden and hardly subtle but the effect is considerable. If, in the end, this is 'just' another horror film it's still pretty damn scary with the emphasis on jump-in-your-seat scares and a real sense of dread rather than guts and gore. I'm sure there must have been horror films as effective as this or more so since that Exorcist guy did what he had to do to get the devil out of Regan but this is still a superior frightener, very well written and directed by novice Aster and beautifully played by everyone with Collette and Ann Dowd outstanding.

Fans of the genre will find much to savour here though personally I think I would have been happier if the film had stuck to its original path and jettisoned any hint of the supernatural. I enjoyed it hugely; I just didn't take it very seriously nor will I ever listen to Joni Mitchell's song 'Both Sides Now' quite in the same light again.

LE QUATTRO VOLTE

You could mistake LE QUATTRO VOLTE for a documentary, but it isn't. All the tiny, seemingly inconsequential events and details that make up this mesmerizing film from fledgling director Michaelangelo Frammartino have been staged. This is fiction; the people on screen are playing a part, in places and settings that are 'real', just like in the kind of 'documentaries' that Flaherty might once have made. There is no plot to speak of. We simply observe the passing of time in a small Italian hill-town, firstly through the eyes of an old goatherd and then, you might say, through the eyes of his goats and finally through the eyes of ... well, no-one at all. There is also no dialogue; what scraps of dialogue there appears to be in the background doesn't warrant sub-titles. Everything is given to us in purely visual terms and the cinematography of Andrea Locatelli is magnificent. Some people will, of course, find it boring. Today's cinema is mostly about action and movement whereas this is about inaction and stillness but give yourself over to it and you will see a masterpiece.