THE POWER OF THE DOG

 I hope the uncalled for comparisons with "Heaven's Gate" and, for that matter, "Brokeback Mountain" don't hurt the chances of "The Power of the Dog" doing well, either at the box-office or come awards season. This is Jane Campion's first feature film since "Bright Star" twelve years ago and it may be a masterpiece. It's a 'contemporary' western in that it's set in 1925 and is about two brothers, both ranchers, one 'good', (Jesse Plemons), and one 'bad', (Benedict Cumberbatch), and what happens when Plemons brings home a new wife, (Kirsten Dunst), and her teenage son, (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

It's a slow, visually stunning, (Ari Wegner is the DoP), character-driven piece written by Campion from Thomas Savage's novel and it deals with both the themes of revenge and redemption. Cumberbatch may appear to be the conventional villain but it's clear quite early on there are a great deal more shadings to his character and Cumberbatch is superb in a role he took over from Paul Dano. Plemons, on the other hand, never quite develops beyond being the decent family man though both Dunst and Smit-McPhee are excellent.

You could say the other major 'character' in the film is the house where they live. A great gothic pile standing in the middle of nowhere, (the film was shot in the vast open spaces of New Zealand standing in for Montana), this house is as memorable as those in "Giant" and "Days of Heaven". As with all of Campion's films nothing here is rushed. This is no more an action film than something Terrence Malick might turn out, (Malick is another point of reference), and consequently will be more suited to the art-house than the multiplex but in its simple, direct and unadorned way it's as good as anything you will see this year and it shouldn't be missed.

THE PHENIX CITY STORY.

 Probably the most brutal and certainly one of the best of the docudramas popular in the forties and fifties and dealing with crime in American cities, "The Phenix City Story" begins as a piece of pure photo-journalism as journalist Clete Roberts introduces some of the real-life people whose stories shape the events of the movie.

It's fundamentally a B-Movie that sets out to condemn vice and violence by showing it and it's photographed with enough documentary-like realism to hit home, mostly in the streets where the action took place. Also by using actors who were not exactly 'names', (John McIntire, in a rare leading role, was probably the best known face), adds to the feeling that everything we see is the Real McCoy. A critical success, (Martin Scorsese rates it among his favourite films), it has now achieved cult status.

AT LONG LAST LOVE

 Peter Bogdanovitch was on a roll when he made "At Long Last Love". He already had "Targets", "The Last Picture Show", "What's Up, Doc?", "Paper Moon" and "Daisy Miller" behind him and was building up something of a stock company of his own when he had the idea of a musical-comedy built around the songs of Cole Porter. Could this be his masterpiece? Well, let's start with the pluses. Firstly there are the songs which are some of the best ever composed so the musical part should have been a cinch but then Mr Bogdanovitch chose to cast it with performers who could act but not necessarily sing or, at least, sing to the level these songs demanded.

Another plus was the look; filmed in colour but with the black-and-white Art Deco style of a Fred and Ginger movie it looked fabulous so perhaps a combination of the look and the score should have been enough but in the end that's really all we get. Any decent musical-comedy needs jokes but unfortunately Bogdanovitch's gags mostly fall flat. Indeed, his script sucks so the best you can say is that this is a good idea that needed a writer. Between the songs, "At Long Last Love" dies a rather painful death.

Madeline Khan comes out of it largely unscathed and Cybill Shepherd is surprisingly charming but Burt Reynolds goes through the movie as if his trousers were pinching him down below while Duilio Del Prete shows he clearly deserves better. Eileen Brennan, on the other hand, is simply an embarrassment. The film flopped though it has now built up something of a cult, (some people really love it), but in the end even those great Cole Porter tunes can't save it and set beside 'proper' musicals it's a bit of a disaster. See it if you must but maybe you'd be better off staying home and listening to Ella's Cole Porter Songbook instead.

ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY

 Paul Mazursky's best film but then he was working with great material, in this case Issac Bashevis Singer's novel about a Holocaust survivor who, having moved to America after the war, finds himself with three living wives; he's a bigamist more by design than choice, believing his first wife died in the concentration camps, he remarried in America, (now wife number three is a whole different story).

This is a great tragi-comedy; the situation is farcical and sometimes very funny but the horror of the Holocaust permeates every frame and Mazursky treats the material with the respect it is due. This is a movie that comes close to perfection from the superb period design down to the faultless performances of the entire cast.

Ron Silver is superb as Herman, a man confident enough to try to balance three relationships at once, convincing himself he loves all the women in his life, Angelica Huston, the wife who returns from the dead, Margaret Sophie Stein as the simple servant girl he marries after the war and Lena Olin as the clinging beauty who emotionally blackmails him into marriage. Herman is a liar and a cheat and a shyster but Silver makes him hugely sympathetic, an amoral man who, nevertheless, wants to do right by everyone but who is constantly doomed to failure. This is a great movie that deserves to be better known.

THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE

 A Z-Movie classic. Hard to believe that "The Devil Thumbs A Ride" only clocks in at sixty-two minutes since there are enough characters for at least three movies, not to mention a great plot about a murderer, Lawrence Tierney, (the only real 'name' in the cast), who hitches a ride with somewhat inebriated travelling salesman, Ted North, picking up Nan Leslie and Betty Lawford on the road. Director Felix Feist also wrote the cracking script from a novel by Robert C. DuSoe and there isn't a wasted frame. If the cast weren't particularly well-known, Tierney excepted, the performances are surprisingly good and, best of all, nothing really happens quite the way you expect it to. This is, in fact, a gem that has built up a considerable cult reputation over the years and is infinitely better than many major studio pictures of the period.

THE GRIM REAPER

 One of the most assured debuts in all of cinema, Bertolucci was only twenty-one when he made "The Grim Reaper" from a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It's definitely a young man's film, a police procedural in which the police remain off-screen. A prostitute has been murdered and we see the events leading up to her death through the eyes of the various suspects, all of whom have reason to lie, but what interests Bertolucci and Pasolini isn't so much the crime itself but the lives of these young men and the conditions in which they live.

Using a mix of professional and non-professional actors Bertolucci aims for a new kind of realism but one that is closer to early Rosselleni than the more polished films Fellini was turning out at the time. The Grim Reaper of the title isn't so much the one that robs the prostitute of her life as the one who steals away the will to live from everyone else. Each 'chapter' is filmed in a distinctive style that signalled Bertolucci as a director of considerable originality and made us aware a new wunderkind had arrived.

AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS

 One of the great films about childhood and certainly one of Louis Malle's very finest films, "Au revoir les enfants" is set in a boy's boarding school in German-occupied France during World War Two and tells of the friendship that develops between two boys, one a well-to-do French boy and the other a Jew, hiding out in the Catholic run school and whose identity is a secret from all but the teaching staff.

It's deeply moving as you can imagine while also working as a wartime thriller, (it's one of a handful of French films to deal with those who were collaborators), but it's in the minutiae of everyday life within the school and in the interaction between the boys, all superb and all superbly directed by Malle, that the film really scores. The adults are mostly in the background; the children are the stars here and both Gaspard Manesse and Raphael Fejto as the two boys at the centre are outstanding. A classic of French cinema that demands to be seen.

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS

 I guess it was inevitable that the Coen Brothers would do a portmanteau picture, little pieces resembling short stories or comic strips brought to life. Wasn't that what "Raising Arizona" was, a Roadrunner cartoon with actors? Of course, anyone can do a portmanteau picture and add nothing to the segments other than a fundamental blandness. The Coens, however, have distinguished themselves from the beginning with a style unlike that of any of their contemporaries. You can recognise a Coen Brother's film from a distance. In the end, they may all look and sound the same but that's their signature just as we know a Fellini or a Bunuel or a Hitchcock.

"The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" is six tales of the Old West; part pastiche, part homage, part realism, very funny certainly but philosophical and deeply moving, too. The link lies in the Coen Brothers' style and the depth of feeling they bring to the individual pieces. The title comes from the first story, a surreal comedy-western inspired in part, perhaps, by Mel Brooks as a vehicle for the great Tim Blake Nelson as a singing cowboy who isn't quite what he seems. It's very funny and is closest in style to "Raising Arizona".

The second story is a gorgeous black joke about an incompetent bank robber played by James Franco in dead-pan style. The third segment, "Meal Ticket" is virtually a two-hander and is a small masterpiece of visual storytelling with wonderful performances from both Liam Neeson and a remarkable Harry Melling and it shows the Coens can do 'serious' impeccably and the same can be said for the fifth and longest segment, "The Girl Who Got Rattled", a tale of the Oregon Trail that again never goes where we expect it to and taken on its own is one of the very best things the brothers have ever done.

If the other two stories don't quite measure up they are still remarkable in their intelligence and are beautifully played. The first is really a one-man show for Tom Waits while the closing segment is like something Guy De Maupassant might have written and the whole thing is stunningly photographed by the great Bruno Delbonnel. Made by Netflix it was rumoured that the film was originally to be a television series but now it seems it was never intended to be anything other than what it is and surely these combined stories must rank with some of the brother's very best work. I look forward to revisiting them frequently.

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS

 Like so many '50's movies that came out of Hollywood "All That Heaven Allows" was dismissed by the critics as just another 'women's picture' and so much romantic mush before being discovered by the Cahiers crowd. It's now rightly regarded as a masterpiece and one of the most biting critiques of American manners ever put on film. Fassbender paid tribute to it in "Fear Eats the Soul" and Todd Haynes virtually remade it as "Far From Heaven".

In this version, a widow in early middle-age, (Jane Wyman, superb), falls in love with her younger gardener, (a surprisingly good Rock Hudson), causing no end of scandal in the narrow-minded small town in which they live. It's a film about class and prejudice and the passing of time and, of course, it's also a great love story. For producer Ross Hunter, it probably was just 'romantic mush' but director Douglas Sirk turned into something genuinely subversive, finding the worm in the apple, (an what an apple, photographed by the great Russell Metty in colours that seem at times positively psychedelic).

Haynes, of course, took it a step further. The gardener was black and the woman at the centre had a husband who was homosexual, (was this a direct reference on Haynes' part to Hudson's homosexuality or was it simply that by the time "Far From Heaven" came out such things were no longer taboo?). Of course, it's also easy to take it at face value but read between the lines, paying attention to Sirk's 'mirror' shots, (is what we're seeing simply a reflection of a way of life?), and you will have found one of the great American films of its time.

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT

 "Embrace of the Serpent" is one of the most astonishing films you will ever see. It could be a documentary, though it clearly isn't. It's scripted and based, we are told, on the diaries of Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes and it's acted, magnificently in the case of Nilbio Torres and Antonio Bolivar playing the same character at different stages of his life, (neither is a professional actor and this is the first time they have appeared in a film). It is also breathtakingly well photographed in black and white in the Amazon region where it is set. It's an adventure story, an ethnographic study, a film about friendship, an account of a journey and an attack on organised religion and it's a masterpiece.

It begins in the past and then moves to 'the future' as we meet its four central characters, one of whom, Karamakate, is as I've said, played by two different men and throughout its two hour running time it moves back and forth over an unspecified period of years. A seriously ill explorer, Theo, is brought upriver by his Indian friend, Manduca, to a lone shaman, Karamakate, to be healed. At first the shaman is reluctant to help him until he learns from Theo that members of his tribe are still living in the jungle and together the three embark on a river journey in search of both a healing plant and Karamakate's people. Years later another explorer, Evan, seeks out the same shaman and the journey is, in some ways, repeated.

With its jungle-river setting, its strange river-dwelling communes and its constant threat of violence it's like a pared down version of "Apocalypse Now" but without Coppola's bombastic flourishes. The director is Ciro Guerra but it never feels like it is being directed; every incident, every moment of this great film, feels like it's happening naturally as if we've slipped into the lives of these characters without having any right to be there. A phenomenal achievement, both technically and artistically, under no circumstances should this film be missed.

JINDABYNE

 Ray Lawrence has only made three films in a career that began in 1985 with "Bliss" which was enough to get him noticed but he didn't direct again until 2001 when he made "Lantana" and five years later he made "Jindabyne". He's done nothing since but on the strength of "Lantana" and "Jindabyne" alone he should be considered among the best directors to have emerged in the last forty years. "Jindabyne" is based on a Raymond Carver story, the same one Robert Altman used in "Short Cuts", but Lawrence has expanded it so that it now deals with issues beyond those in the original story.

The central premise is the same; four men on a fishing trip find the naked body of a young woman in the river but instead of reporting it straight away, they go on fishing, having tied the body to a tree and naturally their actions have devastating consequences both for the men and their families. But Lawrence has set his film in Australia and the girl, who has been raped and murdered, is Aboriginal and that fact alone has consequences.

Superbly written, directed and acted, (in particular by Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne), this is a genuinely disturbing film and, while anchored very specifically in a certain place, its themes are universal. It was a critical success at the time but didn't prove popular with the public and is now thought of largely as a cult movie. Seek it out; I think you will astonished.