NIGHTCRAWLER

Sitting somewhere in the ether between "Network" and "Taxi Driver", and the equal of either, is Dan Gilroy's terrific "Nightcrawler". The blackest of black comedies and a pulsating thriller, this is the kind of movie that will become legendary just as Jake Gyllenhaal's career-defining performance will become legendary. He's Lou Bloom, (yes, if you want to you can read into Lou's travels through night-time LA something akin to Mr Joyce's Leopold Bloom's journey through Dublin's 'Nighttown', but only if you want to), and Lou's vocation in life is to film the dead and the dying, particularly the victims of violent crime, and share his work with the world on television. Of course, he's an obvious sociopath but he's probably psychopathic as well which makes Gilroy's film very scary as well as very exciting. As a character he's up there with Travis Bickle and, as has already been suggested, Rupert Pumpkin whose delusions of a kind of grandeur, (he keeps spouting the same kind of aphorisms), are both funny and very frightening. Gyllenhaal is never off the screen and should be a front runner in next year's Oscars. In fact, this would have been a one-man show were it not for the brilliant supporting turns of Rene Russo as the TV station's voracious news editor, (she makes Faye Dunaway's Diana Christiansen look like a pussycat), and Riz Ahmed as Lou's greedy and none too bright assistant. I did say that this was the blackest of black comedies and I did chuckle a lot, almost in disbelief, knowing all the time that Gilroy has put nothing on screen that isn't already out there in the public domain. "Nightcrawler" isn't telling us anything new; there are no limits anymore and everything is up for grabs but if there is nothing new under the sun then at least we should be grateful we're getting it as full on as this. I loved every delirious, scary, funny minute of this amazing movie.

I, DANIEL BLAKE

After seeing "I, Daniel Blake" there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Ken Loach isn't just the best director to have come out of Britain in the last 50 years but one of only a small handful of great directors still working today. Of course, his films are not merely 'entertainments'; he is the most unashamedly political director there is and "I, Daniel Blake" is his most unashamedly political film, certainly since "Cathy Come Home". It is also possibly his best.

Once again the writer is Paul Laverty who was worked with Loach numerous times in the past, (theirs is the among the greatest of all cinematic partnerships), and his superb script cuts to the bone. As someone who has sat on both sides of a Benefits Office counter I can honestly say that no-one strikes a false note here. Loach is famous for working with non-professionals or largely unknown actors, (Carol White, a fresh face when she made "Cathy Come Home", David Bradley in "Kes", Crissy Rock in "Ladybird Ladybird"), and "I, Daniel Blake" is no different.

The title character is played by stand-up comic Dave Johns and the young, single mother he befriends is Haley Squires. Add in an extraordinary cast of British character players and you have a film that oozes a documentary-like realism from every pore. Of course, at times it is virtually unwatchable. This is a film about victims and the appalling bureaucracy that sees them slip through the net. You could say it is a film about the failure of the Welfare State. Unlike "Cathy Come Home" however, I can't see it touching the hearts and minds of our present Tory Government which surely is shameful. Brexit, we have been told, is about taking back control but control of what; an appallingly defunct system where to care or show feeling is almost a sackable offence? The film was rightly applauded at the screening I attended and is the best I have seen this year.

SUSPIRIA

Sacrilege I know but I'm not a great fan of Dario Argento's "Suspiria". Yes, I know it's visually dazzling and a boldly executed piece of cinematic horror but its descent into madness feels to me too much like a descent into daftness so I confess I was somewhat surprised when I heard that someone with as distinguished a pedigree as Luca Guadagnino should want to remake it; I thought the territory might be closer to Rob Zombie. Of course, what Guadagnino serves up is nothing like the original. Yes, he keeps the basic plot; young American girl in Europe, (here, 1970's Berlin), enrols at an upmarket dance academy which is really a front for a coven of witches, then adds another hour to the running time and casts Tilda Swinton in a triple role, including that of an aged male doctor then makes it even more extreme and violent than the original as he equates dance with body horror in all its forms.


While Argento's film was Grand Guignol silly, this is genuinely disturbing. There's a real sense of evil here that transcends mere shock tactics. It's also got a terrific performance from Swinton that again transcends the mere novelty value of prosthetic make-up, particularly when she's playing the head of the dance academy and number one witch. It's also nice to see Angela Winkler in the meaty role of her opposite number. Indeed Guadagnino's handling of his mostly female cast is sublime. This is a horror movie for our time but it's also a work of art and a very worthy addition to its director's canon.

AN ACTOR'S REVENGE

A masterpiece and one of the finest uses of widescreen in all of cinema. Kon Ichikawa chose to film "An Actor's Revenge" in the style of Kabuki Theatre since that, indeed, is the film's subject or at least part of it. Yukinojo, (a magnificent Kazuo Hasegawa), is the leading actor and female impersonator in a theatre troupe when, one evening, he spies in the audience the men responsible for his parent's deaths and immeadiately he swears his revenge. What follows is a blackly comic tragedy, at once theatrical and yet wholly cinematic and quite unlike anything in Western cinema. The fact that Hasegawa is playing a dual role only adds to the magic and the mystification. Utterly extraordinary.

VIVA L'ITALIA

I think you need some knowledge of Italian history to full appreciate Roberto Rossellini's "Viva L'Italia" which has now largely been forgotten, (it's certainly no "The Leopard"), but this account of Garibaldi's fight to unify Italy still has a lot to recommend it; the battle scenes alone are some of the best on film and Rossellini shoots a lot of it in the same neo-realist style with which he made his name. It's less successful when it comes to the somewhat heavy-handed dialogue sequences and the largely wooden performance of its lead, Renzo Ricci as Garibaldi.

Like Visconit's "The Leopard" it was fundamentally butchered by its American distributors who cut the film, dubbed it, consequently altering Rossellini's message but they couldn't alter the look of the film; visually this is one of the most beautiful of all Rossellini's work and its recent rediscovery is certainly welcome.

THERESE RAQUIN

Not the best of Marcel Carne by any means but an intelligent, measured if somewhat conventional screen version of Zola's novel, nevertheless. Simone Signoret is "Therese Raquin", the married woman whose affair with truck-driver Raf Vallone leads to murder and blackmail. She is, of course, excellent but this is Vallone's movie; it is an effortless performance of an ordinary man caught up in events over which he has no real control. It's also superbly shot in Lyon by Roger Hubert and the updating to postwar France fits the plot perfectly. In an American setting this could be by James M. Cain though the climatic twist is neater than anything Cain might have given us.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Another literary classic gets the Hollywood treatment . What this 1935 version of "A Tale of Two Cities" lacks in sophistication it certainly makes up for in vigour. Jack Conway directed, (though Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur are credited with the handling of the crowd scenes, which are magnificent), and Ronald Colman is a splendid Sydney Carton doing a far, far better thing than he had ever done, The supporting cast are something of a mish-mash; Elizabeth Allan and Donald Woods are drips as Lucie and Charles Darnay but Edna May Oliver is terrific as Miss Pross and Blanche Yurka, a suitably terrifying Madame De Farge, knitting shrouds like there's no tomorrow which, of course, for many there wasn't. Subtle it isn't but even now it's still one of the most enjoyable epics of its period and vastly superior to the tepid British remake with Dirk Bogarde playing both Carton and Darnay.

KING OF KINGS

One of the most politically charged of all Biblical films, Nicholas Ray's "King of Kings" was almost universally condemned at the time of its release, (wags dubbing it "I Was a Teenage Jesus"), it's now rightfully come to be regarded as one of the most intelligent and least sentimental of all
Biblical epics. Jeffrey Hunter makes for a highly photogenic Jesus, heading a remarkably good cast that includes Siobhan McKenna as his mother, Hurd Hatfield as Pilate, Viveca Lindfors as Claudia, Harry Guardino as Barabbas, Robert Ryan as John the Baptist, Rip Torn as Judas and Ron Randell as the centurion Lucius.

While sticking to traditional stories of the New Testament, Philip Yordan's excellent screenplay then largely abandons the usual Biblical pieties in favour of more modern, colloquial speech while three Directors of Photography, (Manuel Berenguer, Milton Krasner and Franz Planer), ensure it's consistently good to look at. It's also surprisingly blood-thirsty, something else that might not have gone down too well with Christian groups and audiences at the time; however, both as a genre piece and as a crucial part of Ray's canon, it really shouldn't be missed.

FORTY GUNS

One of the strangest, and also one of the greatest, westerns ever made, Samuel Fuller's masterpiece "Forty Guns" has all the tropes of a conventional western but subverts them almost as wildly and as blatantly as Mel Brooks did in "Blazing Saddles", the difference being Fuller's movie has all the beauty of a great western as well as a degree of psychological depth unusual even in the late fifties. It also has Barbara Stanwyck in one of her greatest performances. If Joan Crawford came across as a camp icon in "Johnny Guitar", Stanwyck is the very personification of female sexuality, right up there with her performance as Phyllis Dietrichson.

Of course, she also wears the trousers on the Drummond ranch, commanding her forty guns and riding roughshod over what local law and order there is. That's mainly in the form of Dean Jagger's weak-willed sheriff who has the hots for Stanwyck and Jagger is magnificent in the role. The male lead is Barry Sullivan, (very good here), as the bounty hunter out to arrest one of those forty guns and falling foul of Stanwyck's vicious, rebellious younger brother, John Ericson, while falling in love with big sister at the same time. Naturally, this being a Samuel Fuller film, there's quite an emphasis on, shall we say, the more Freudian side of violence; the phallic nature of guns, Stanwyck's ability with a whip etc. and while it stops short of suggesting anything incestuous between Stanwyck and Ericson, their relationship is certainly on the passionate side. Not a great success at the time, it's now considered one of the definitive cult movies.

CLOSE-UP

Abbas Kiarostami's film "Close Up"isn't a documentary although it deals with incidents that have happened and 'the actors' are the real people involved 'acting out' those events, and it's a masterpiece. The events it depicts concern a Mr Sabzian who introduced himself to an Iranian family as the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, promising to put them in his new film, his arrest for fraud and his subsequent trial. Everything we see happened but what we get is a dramatic 'reconstruction', played out by the participants themselves. It's part of Kiarostami's genius that the 'performances' he gets are superb, particularly from Hossein Sabzian himself, (if this is 'acting' it may be the greatest performance by a non-professional ever). The result is a wonderful love letter to the cinema, to those who love it and, of course, to Sabzian that is both very funny and deeply moving as well as a brilliant deconstruction of the whole movie-making process. (Is the final sequence actually happening as in a real documentary or is it too a reconstruction?). It has just been voted the 42nd greatest film ever made; it's easy to see why.

THE MULE

"The Mule" is Clint Eastwood's 37th feature film as a director and it's a classic. Eastwood was 88 years old when he made it, directing and once again starring, this time playing a 90 year old drugs mule. It's not only one of his very best films, both as a director and as an actor but also one of the best American films of recent years. The cracker script by Nick Schenk is based on a Sam Dolnick New York Times Magazine article about a real 90 year old drugs mule and was, I guess, probably the perfect vehicle for Eastwood, (he's not only roughly the right age but still fit enough to carry it off).

Of course, Eastwood is also probably the last of the great classicists working in American cinema with a body of work as fine as any of the great traditional filmmakers of the thirties and forties and he just seems to get better with the passing of time. His performance in "The Mule" is superb and he's got a great supporting cast including Bradley Cooper, Michael Pena, Laurence Fishburne, Dianne Wiest, Ignacio Serricchio and Andy Garcia. There's nothing remotely ostentatious about his work here; like all of his best films this is simplicity itself. It's also supremely entertaining and often laugh-oud-loud funny and I urge you to see it.