PHANTOM LADY

Robert Siodmak's masterpiece and one of the greatest, and least known, of all film-noirs "Phantom Lady", adapted by Bernard C Schoenfeld from a Cornell Woolrich novel, published as William Irish, and stunningly shot in black and white by Elwood Bredell, even manages to overcome the one-dimensional performances of Alan Curtis and Ella Raines as Siodmak wastes absolutely no time in getting down to basics. Curtis is the engineer whose wife is murdered. His alibi is that he met a mysterious woman in a bar and spent the evening with her but when he tries to track her down she has not only disappeared but no-one else remembers seeing her and it's left to his secretary, (Raines) to prove his innocence.

The plot doesn't really stand close scrutiny but Siodmak handles it with tremendous brio with several scenes worthy of Hitchcock at his best. The real killer is revealed midway through but again, with a typically Hitchcockian flourish, Siodmak shifts our attention to the killer and his efforts to make sure Raines doesn't achieve her goal. The movie is a classic but the best we can say is that's a cult classic and one that shouldn't be missed.

DARLING

"Darling" is John Schlesinger's 1965 film about living La Dolce Vita and hating every boring, opulent minute of it. It's all about Diana who sleeps her way to the top, marries a prince but is terribly unhappy. No, not that Diana and not that prince; that's an entirely different movie! This Diana is called Scott, not Spencer, and she's played by Julie Christie and she's stunning. Christie came from nowhere, (well, "Billy Liar"to be exact), and was enough of a breath of fresh air in sixties cinema to get her the Oscar. Among the men she picks up and drops, or who drop her, are Dirk Bogarde, (superb, and winning a BAFTA), Laurence Harvey and Ronald Curram. Bogarde leaves his wife for her, Harvey's a heel, (isn't he always), and Curram's gay so her interest in him is purely platonic. It was a huge hit and writer Frederic Raphael also won the Oscar for his highly original screenplay. It was also the film that established Schlesinger as an international director of note. Now, of course, it's something of a period piece as so many mid-sixties movies are, (and it's at its worst in the obligatory orgy sequence), but there's so much talent on view that it's a very difficult film to dislike and it's still surprisingly entertaining.

FIRST MAN

In the opening moments of Damien Chazelle's new movie "First Man" we encounter Neil Armstrong on the periphery of space in a rocket that isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's a terrific scene, genuinely frightening, (even if we know Mr Armstrong is going to come out of it in one piece), shot up close and personal and superbly edited and directed by young Chazelle, (he's the youngest person ever to win the Oscar for Best Director). That's just the beginning of this brilliant film about the Gemini and Apollo Missions that saw Neil Armstrong become the first man to walk on the moon and there are several other heart-stopping moments to follow. This is the most authentic looking of all the manned space mission movies to date and Chazelle films it as if it were a documentary, which isn't to say he ignores the human side.

Armstrong is played by that most taciturn of actors, Ryan Gosling, and here the silences, the 'meaningful' stares really work for him. A lot of the time Chazelle chooses to shoot him in close-up and in Gosling's face we can read everything the man is feeling. He is matched by the much more pragmatic performance of Claire Foy as his wife. There is also not a jot of sentimentality on display despite there being every opportunity to milk it, (early on Armstrong's young daughter dies, several of his colleagues are killed and then, of course, there is the triumphalism of the ending). Instead Chazelle gives us a level-headed view of those years, even going so far as to paint Buzz Aldrin as a somewhat vain individual and including, at one stage, the protest number 'Whitney on the Moon'. The quietude of the ending is also deeply affecting and if Chazelle were to win his second Oscar for this I certainly won't be complaining.

LATE CHRYSANTHEMUMS

Unlike those of his contemporaries, Mizoguchi, Ozu and Kurosawa, the films of Mikio Naruse are mostly unknown in the West and yet they are just as relevant and just as powerful. The "Late Chrysanthemums" of this extraordinary film are four ageing former Geishas with money problems and this is one of the most insightful of films dealing with the role of women in post-war Japanese society and not just the women at the centre who once sold their bodies but who now have nothing to barter but also the daughter of one of them who is prepared to marry an older man for financial security. Money is at the basis of everything that happens in the film and it taints the lives of all the characters.

It is superbly played, particularly by those great Japanese actresses Haruko Sugimura as the moneylender Okin and Chikako Hosokawa as the drunken Otamae. Like Naruse, these two actresses never really 'crossed over' to the West and yet their work in Japanese cinema is as fine as any to have graced international cinema while this is a film on a subject that, in hindsight, would never have been tackled in Western cinema at this time. Of course that, in itself, does not make it a masterpiece but a masterpiece it is, nevertheless. It is one of the greatest of all films on the disappointments that life throws at us.

THE PRODUCERS

Peter Sellers and I have at least one thing in common; we both agree that Mel Brooks' masterpiece "The Producers" is the funniest film ever made. I've watched it countless times just as I've watched the competition countless times, ("Airplane", "Les Vacances du M Hulot" perhaps some Keaton or Chaplin or maybe even Preston Sturges' "The Palm Beach Story"), but no other film creases me up or causes me such delicious pain as "The Producers". Of course, it isn't to everyone's taste. The great British critic Dilys Powell was appalled by it. Dilys had lived through the War and didn't think Hitler or the Nazi Party was anything to joke about and yes, I know there are some things that are still sacred but I'm also inclined towards the dictum that nothing's sacred if it's funny and how can anyone not find "The Producers" funny?

It was Brooks' first feature and he won the Oscar for his screenplay, (something of a feat in itself for a comedy). Later films such as"Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein"were more polished but great as they are they never quite scale the dizzy heights of bad taste and quick-fire brilliance that "The Producers" does and they lacked one crucial element namely Zero Mostel whose performance as Max Bialystock might arguably be the finest by any actor in any comedy ever. Brooks subsequently turned it into a Broadway musical which was in turn filmed by that show's director, Susan Stroman. It was fun but it's no classic.

THE WIFE

So the plot may be predictable and the ending a little too tidy but there are other things that can hold you in a vice-like grip at the movies. Perhaps you do need a director who knows what he's doing and a screenplay that doesn't insult our intelligence and "The Wife" certainly has both but the real pleasure to be had from this movie lies elsewhere. I have often said great acting is its own reward and this predictable and tidy film is blessed with, not one, but two great performances, (and several very good ones from among the supporting cast).

It is a love story and it's about a woman who has lived in her husband's shadow. He is a writer and he has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature and she is a former student who has become his second wife. They are played by Glenn Close, the wife, and Jonathan Pryce, the prize-winning husband, and they are both magnificent. Indeed, I don't think Close has ever been this good before. Her downward glances, (modesty or maybe something else?), her silences are devastating. She is a woman with secrets, a bomb that might explode at any moment or one that may have been diffused years before. Close draws us in to this woman's hidden world and keeps us guessing. This is great acting indeed.

Pryce, too, matches her; an obvious adulterer and not the most likeable of men, his bombast and his bonhomie nevertheless seems false. He also has his secrets and the pleasure one gets from watching them together really is enormous. There are flashbacks to their earlier lives; he is played then, and very well, by Harry Lloyd and she is played by Close's real-life daughter Annie Starke. They also have a son, an aspiring writer beautifully played by Max Irons, also living in the shadow of his more famous prize-winning father just as Irons has lived in the shadow of his own more famous Oscar-winning father, (was he cast for this very reason?), and Christian Slater is excellent as Pryce's slimey, would-be and very unofficial biographer.

Of course, without the intelligence of the dialogue and the probing direction of Bjorn Runge neither lead might have risen to the occasion but rise they have. It's rare today to see a mainstream film that holds you, not by action but by words and by what the performers bring to the table. Close certainly deserves an Oscar but so, too, does Pryce. This is one film that really must be seen.

COLD WAR

 There are two cold wars going on in Pawel Pawlikowski astonishingly good film, (he won the Best Director prize at Cannes). The most obvious one is the one between East and West during the period in which the film is set, (it covers the years 1949 to 1964), a time when, simply moving from one country to another 'illegally' is enough to get you called a spy and sent to a prison camp for 15 years but the other cold war is the one between its protagonists, Wiktor, (an excellent Tomasz Kot), and Zula, (a stunning Joanna Kulig), who are almost crazy with love for each other but who can't live together or, it would appear, apart.

We first meet them in Poland in 1949 when Wiktor is one of a group of musicians touring rural Poland in search of authentic folk artists that they would mould into a musical company. Zula is the exceedingly pretty and talented young girl who catches Wiktor's eye; in time they have sex and start a love affair. Years pass; they meet and part and move from East to West and back again. The Cold War going on around them does little for their self-esteem. As Wiktor tries to hold it together, earning a living playing piano in a Parisian jazz club, Zula hits the bottle. Hollywood has done this kind of thing in the past but seldom with this degree of fierceness.

Pawlikowski shoots his relatively short film, (it clocks in at under 90 minutes), in a series of compact scenes that simply fade to black, mostly to denote the passage of time, in stunning black and white, (his DoP is Lukasz Zal). He also uses music to great effect, both Eastern European folk and in the second half, American jazz. If the term 'musical-comedy' is an over-used one then let's call this extraordinary film a 'musical-tragedy'.

LIFE DURING WARTIME

If you can imagine a postscript to Todd Solondz's "Happiness" but done as a kind of comic-strip in bright, rainbow colours, (Ed Lachman did the photography), then you're about halfway to getting "Life During Wartime". A sequel of sorts to "Happiness", this takes place several years after the events of that film but Solondz has completely recast it, (in one case a character who was white in the first film is now an African-American), and opens the film with an almost identical reprise of "Happiness'" opening scene.

It really shouldn't work at all; surely "Happiness" was good enough 'to stand alone' but it does work thanks to Solondz's skewed, if deeply funny, vision of humanity and to his extraordinary new cast who fit perfectly into the shoes of their predecessors, even down to that racial crossover. It's almost impossible to single out anyone over anyone else but as the three tragic-comic sisters Allison Janney, Shirley Henderson and Ally Sheedy are terrific while Irish actor Ciaran Hinds gives a much steelier edge to the paedophile father than did Dylan Baker. Of the new characters Michael Lerner is outstanding as Janney's Jewish suitor. This is indeed a black comedy that can rightly take its place beside the movie it follows and it simply shouldn't be missed.

CRY-BABY

 How could you not love any movie with a cast like this? John Waters' homage to "Grease" may prove to be something of a disappointment to fans of "Pink Flamingos" and "Desperate Living" but it's still a kitsch classic nevertheless and it has a fifties rock 'n roll score to die for. The plot hardly matters, (bad boy falls for good girl), but Waters' cast of resurrected 'stars' of the sixties and earlier, (spot Troy Donahue, David Nelson, Susan Tyrrell, Polly Bergen, Joey Heatherton), as well as icons like Joe D'Allesandro, Iggy Pop, Ricki Lake, Mink Stole and, in a cameo, Willem Dafoe make this a camp treat. Hard to believe that these already over-aged teenagers are now almost thirty years older than they were when this was made

A FACE IN THE CROWD

"A Face in the Crowd" is one of Elia Kazan's largely forgotten films, (it never achieved the success that "A Streetcar Named Desire" or "On the Waterfront" did). It's a sour and not very pleasant picture but it's brilliantly done. It's the story of 'Lonesome' Rhodes, a drifter first seen in a county jail. You could say Lonesome is a cross between Will Rogers, Woody Guthrie and Joe McCarthy; in other words, he's not as homespun as he first appears. He's played by Andy Griffith who, you might say, had a face built for radio. Griffith may not have had the looks of a young Brando or Newman but he had all of their charisma in spades and under Kazan's intuitive direction he gives a superb performance. He's matched every step of the way by Patricia Neal, magnificent in a career-best performance, as the homely Southern belle who first discovers Lonesome while Walter Matthau, Anthony Franciosa and Lee Remick are all terrific as satellites in Lonesome's orbit. It was written by Budd Schulberg who dissects the media and all its power with a razor sharp intensity to match Paddy Chayefsky and "Network", at least up to its final stretch when it loses its satiric edge and dissolves into melodrama. It was also completely ignored by the Academy.

OUR CHILDREN

"Our Children" deals with the subject of infanticide which doesn't make it the easiest film to watch though the bulk of the film is taken up with the fraught relationship between a young married couple and the husband's 'adopted' father, a doctor who has the taken the man, who is Moroccan, under his wing, treating him like a son. It's a relationship that finally drives the wife and mother to commit that most terrible of crimes. (I'm not giving anything away as the film opens on the aftermath  of this act). It's a film that depends almost entirely on the interplay between the three main characters and in these roles Niels Arestrup, (the doctor), and Tahar Rahim and Emilie Dequenne, (the couple), are superb. (Dequenne won the Best Actress award at Cannes). In fact, so good are these players it makes the downward spiral into violence extremely uncomfortable viewing; those opening scenes preparing you for what's in store and yet the director, Jaochim Lafosse, always manages to keep us at a discreet and safe distance, at least until that point when things become too much for the young woman, (and us), to bear. There's a clinical detachment to the way things are viewed in this film that would be unheard of in a similarly themed American film, just as the strange relationship between the two male characters would not be touched on. Indeed, you could say this is the kind of film that only a European director might make; America take note.