OTHELLO

Trimmed to a sharp ninety or so minutes and 'told' in flashback, (Othello's dead, Iago's a prisoner), Welles' version of "Othello" is naturally more Wellsian than Shakespearean and is none the worse for it, (no written credits; they are spoken by Welles and it's visually stunning despite, or perhaps because of, the five credited DoP's).

It had a troubled production and was filmed over a period of three years so it's not just remarkable that it's as good as it is but that it exists at all. It's not perfect and purists may hate it but if it seems less than great Shakespeare, it's certainly great Welles. He's a wonderful Othello yet even he is upstaged by Micheal MacLiammoir's Iago. Suzzane Cloutier's Desdemona is a weak link as is Michael Laurence's Cassio but when everything else is so good that's a small price to pay. It's also a hundred times better than Welles' disastrous version of "Macbeth".

THE BALLAD OF TAM LIN

 Probably no period in the last one hundred plus years has dated as badly as 'the swinging sixties'. Looked at today the fashions, music and behaviors in general of that decade now seem as remote as Ancient Greece though Roddy McDowall's sole effort as a director, "The Ballad of Tam Lin" made in 1971 but clearly a product of the sixties, tries to circumvent that by making a 'Wicker Man' style piece of folk-horror.

Ava Gardner is the undeniably beautiful, 'ageless' but ageing Earth Mother who seems to keep her youth, not in a box at the bottom of the bed as the old joke goes, but by surrounding herself with beautiful young things, chief of whom is current lover Ian McShane but when McShane sets his sights on vicar Cyril Cusack's daughter Stephanie Beacham, (yes, she too was young once), Ava doesn't take too kindly to it.

Nicely shot by Billy Williams around the Scottish borders and actually rather well played by Gardner, Beacham and a surprisingly good Richard Wattis in a rare dramatic role as Ava's sinister secretary this is a lot better than its reputation would suggest, (a commercial flop, it disappeared and is now considered something of a cult movie). It may not work as a 'horror' film, (it's really rather silly), and yet McDowall handles it all with considerable brio. It's certainly stylish and suggests McDowall could have had a future as a director. Good music, too, from the folk group Pentangle.

 

MY HONORS FOR FILMS SEEN BETWEEN 1ST JANUARY 2023 AND 31ST DECEMBER 2023

 

Best Film: KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (Scorsese)

Runner-up: Past Lives (Song)

 

Best Director: AKI KAURISMAKI for FALLEN LEAVES

Runner-up: Celine Song for Past Lives 

 

Best Actor: BRADLEY COOPER for MAESTRO

Runner-up: Bill Nighy for Living

 

Best Actress: SAOIRSE RONAN for FOE

Runner-up: Carey Mulligan for Maestro

 

Best Supporting Actor: ROBERT DE NIRO for KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Runner-up: Robert Downey Jr. for Oppenheimer 

 

Best Supporting Actress: CATALINA SAAVEDRA for ROTTING IN THE SUN

Runner-Up: Julianne Moore in May December

 

Best Original Screenplay: DAVID HEMINGSON for THE HOLDOVERS

Runner-Up: Celine Song for Past Lives.

 

Best Adapted Screenplay: ERIC ROTH and MARTIN SCORSESE for KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Runner-Up: Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer 

 

Best Cinematography: MATTHEW LIBATIQUE for MAESTRO

Runner-Up: Rodrigo Prieto for Killers of the Flower Moon

 

Best Production Design: SARAH GREENWOOD for BARBIE

Best Costume Design: JACQUELINE DURAN for BARBIE

Best Film Editing: JENNIFER LAME for OPPENHEIMER

Best Sound Recording: OPPENHEIMER

Best Special Effects: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE

 

Best Music Score: OLIVER COATES, PARK JIHA and AGNES OBEL for FOE

Runner-Up: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for The Killer 

 

Most Promising Director: CELINE SONG for PAST LIVES

Most Promising Actor: EDEN DAMBRINE for CLOSE

Most Promising Actress: LILY GLADSTONE for KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON 

 

Best Comedy: SICK OF MYSELF

Best Thriller: HOLY SPIDER

Best Musical: MAESTRO

Best Western: KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Best Horror Film: THE MENU

Best War Film: ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Best Documentary: ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED and NAVALNY (tie)

Best Animated Film: CRYPTOZOO

Best Action Film: BULLET TRAIN

Best Entertainment: THE KILLER

Most Imaginative Film: BEAU IS AFRAID 

 

Most Disappointing Film: ASTEROID CITY

Most Overrated Film: ANATOMY OF A FALL

Most Underrated Films: BEAU IS AFRAID and FOE

Most Neglected Film: FOE

 

Best Classics seen for the first time: BATAILLE DU RAIL and THE SAGA OF ANATAHAN 

 

Best Re-Issues: BLOW UP, CLUNY BROWN, THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE, THE NIGHTS OF CABIRIA and REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT

 

And Six Turkeys: A HAUNTING IN VENICE, A VIGILANTE, ENYS MEN, FAYA DAYI, MARLOWE and PLEASE BABY PLEASE.

 

MY TEN BEST FILMS OF THE YEAR.

 

1) KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (Scorsese)

2) PAST LIVES (Song)

3) FALLEN LEAVES (Kaurismaki)

4) OPPENHEIMER (Nolan)

5) CLOSE (Dhont)

6) BROKER (Kor-eda)

7) THE HOLDOVERS (Payne)

FOE (Davis)

9) NAVALNY (Roher)

10) MEMORIA (Weerasethakul)

THE HOLDOVERS

 Christmas movies I tend to avoid; Alexander Payne movies I race to see and all the better if Paul Giamatti is in there somewhere. In "The Holdovers", (a Christmas classic and certainly the best you will see this season), Giamatti isn't just in there, he's right at the centre and giving an Oscar-worthy performance. 'The holdovers' of the title are boarding school boys who don't get to go home for the holidays and Giamatti is the housemaster whose job it is to hold them over and ensure they have a good Christmas; the trouble is, he's a curmudgeon.

Of course, Payne may have put a curmudgeon up front but he makes sweet movies; sweet and funny with perhaps a slightly bitter edge to them and ten minutes in I'm sure you'll see the ghost of "Dead Poet's Society" standing in the wings just as you know Payne will never pull out the sentimental stops that that movie did and that's still in the sure and certain knowledge that nobody can play a curmudgeon as well as Paul Giamatti.

But there is someone else being 'held over' during the holidays, too; the school's kitchen manager, cook and general dogsbody with a heart twice the size of her ample figure, no husband and a dead son and you know if anyone can melt Giamatti's cold, cold heart it'll be her and she's underplayed superbly by Da'Vine Joy Randolph almost certainly on her way to the Best Supporting Actress Oscar but then all the performances are superb with newcomer Dominic Sessa outstanding. Yes, this is a Christmas movie to melt the hardest of hearts and one of the best films of 2023.

SALTBURN

 If you think "Brideshead Revisited" by way of "The Talented Mr. Ripley" you will certainly be on the right road to "Saltburn" which is the title of Emerald Fennell's very dark comedy...and therein lies the problem; we have been here before though to be fair to Fennell perhaps not quite as perversely as this. It is the story of Oliver, seemingly from a broken home and fresh up at Oxford on a scholarship, who casts his eyes over the unapproachably gorgeous Felix, (Jacob Elordi, soon to be seen as Elvis in "Priscilla"), and says to himself, 'I want him' or at least, 'I want what he's got'. When he tells Felix he can't face going home for the summer Felix invites him to spend it with his obnoxiously eccentric family at Saltburn.

So far, so familiar but all isn't as it seems with Oliver, played magnificently by Barry Keoghan and cast at last as the main actor. For starters, there's another house guest at Saltburn, (Archie Madekwe as Farleigh, a petulant little snob who has it in for Oliver), but then Oliver isn't quite as backward as he lets on to be. Mooching nicely between satirical dark comedy and outright thriller material "Saltburn" looks, for about three quarters of its length, like it mightn't be going anywhere special; just another movie redeemed by Keoghan's acting but then Fennell gives us and the film that ninety degree turn we have been waiting for but didn't see coming so the final half hour is one nasty, brilliant hoot.

Not only that, but the film's actual ending is the best I've seen this year and ten out of ten to both Fennell and Keoghan for pulling it off. If only we could have had more of this earlier on. All the performances are fine, of course. Fennell, being an actress herself, clearly knows how to bring out the best in her cast. Elordi hasn't just got the looks but the acting chops to go with them. As ever Rosamund Pike as the superficial sweetness and light mother steals all her scenes and there's a terrific cameo from Carey Mulligan as another house guest but again it's Keoghan's film from first to last; he might just be the best actor of his generation.

RANCHO NOTORIOUS

 Fritz Lang's superlative western teeters dangerously on the edge of camp, (it's that infernal 'Legend of Chuck-a-Luck' ballad pounding away on the soundtrack, continually reminding us that this is a tale of 'hate ... murder and revenge'). Then, of course, there is that great gay icon Marlene Dietrich, looking extraordinary at fifty one as Altar Keane, boss of the outlaw hideout Chuck-a-Luck where Arthur Kennedy comes seeking the man who killed his girl in a robbery. In many respects the film is a perfect companion to Nicholas Ray's not dissimilar "Johnny Guitar", made around the same time and both featuring dominant women and weaker men and both dealing explicitly with 'hate, murder and revenge'.

This is a very tight piece of work, thematically dense and psychologically astute and directed by Lang in a truly classical style. It affords all the pleasures that a really good western should while still falling perfectly within a milieu recognizable from many of Lang's American works. "Johnny Guitar's" veiled lesbianism together with Nicholas Ray's growing reputation may have given it the edge but this, too, is a remarkable film, an essential work by one of the cinema's greatest directors.

BLUEBEARD'S EIGHTH WIFE

 One of Ernest Lubitsch's lesser known films but an essential part of the canon nevertheless and why wouldn't it be with its Charles Brackett/Billy Wilder screenplay and with Cooper and Colbert as the leads. It's as frivolous as they come with Cooper and Colbert meeting cute over a pair of pajamas and marrying in a flash making Colbert Cooper's eighth wife but one determined that if there is to be a ninth then at least Claudette will come out of it rich.

Throw in David Niven, Edward Everett Horton, Franklin Pangborn and Elizabeth Patterson and you have the perfect cast. Of course, it's all very silly but it may also be proof that silliness might just have been what Cooper was best at while his leading lady is simply perfection. Belly laughs are largely absent; this is a slight affair by Lubitsch standards but even minor Lubitsch is a treat.

EXPERIMENT PERILOUS

 This highly unusual B-Movie has been totally forgotten even among aficionados of both its star, Hedy Lamarr and its director, Jacques Tourneur. It's hardly one of Tourneur's masterpieces but it's a fascinatingly noirish mystery nevertheless and Lamarr is excellent as the beautiful woman who may or may not be mad or the victim of a controlling husband. He's Paul Lukas who, despite winning an Oscar for playing a sympathetic anti-fascist, was always at his best playing the bad guy. The hero is George Brent, the good doctor trying to figure it all out and make sense of a chance meeting on a train.

In many respects it's a fairly typical 'women's picture', closer to a Gothic Romance than a film noir and its period setting may remind you a little of "Gaslight" and there's good supporting performances from the likes of Albert Dekker, Margaret Wycherly and George N. Neise. If Lamarr was no Greta Garbo she was still one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the screen and if you need proof of that you need look no further than here. More than a curiosity, this has a lot to recommend it.

THE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE

A year before Basil Dearden's groundbreaking "Victim" Ken Hughes gave us "The Trials of Oscar Wilde" and while the word 'homosexual' is never uttered no other mainstream film before it tackled the subject with such a degree of frankness, leaving audiences in no doubt as to what the film was 'about' from the very opening scene. Of course, Wilde's 'trials' are of great historical importance in that, not only was the reputation of a great artist destroyed, but subsequently the case opened up a debate of homosexuality that lasted for several decades. It could even be argued that this film, as much as "Victim", was tantamount in helping change the law in the UK.

It is a deeply serious film with none of the anachronisms we usually associate with biopics and historical dramas and it's beautifully acted by the entire cast. Peter Finch is a superb Wilde, (he won a BAFTA for his performance), John Fraser. A perfectly petulant Bosie, Nigel Patrick, a suitably sardonic defender and Yvonne Mitchell, a wonderfully underplayed Constance while James Mason is brilliant as Sir Edward Carson, defender of the Marquis of Queensbury in the initial case, (his cross-examination of Wilde is a tour-de-force).

It is also a beautiful looking film, superbly photographed in widescreen by Ted Moore and designed by Ken Adam. At exactly the same time as the Hughes film came out there was another version of the same events simply entitled "Oscar Wilde" with Robert Morley in the title role and while Morley was splendidly cast the film itself was vastly inferior.

 

BLIND CHANCE

 Best known for his 'Decalogue' and 'Three Colors Trilogy' Krzysztof Kieslowski isn't really thought of as an overtly political film-maker but his 1987 "Blind Chance" is a deeply political film but also one that is as emotionally intense as the largely humanistic films that followed it. It is, in fact, three stories in one with Witek, (an excellent Dlugosz Linda), the hero in each as he strives to be the maker of his own destiny.

Each begins with Witek, a medical student, racing to catch a train. In the first he catches it, (barely), meets an elderly communist and becomes a party member and then finds his ideals put to the test when he falls in with a group of radicals. In the second scenario he misses the train, having knocked over a guard and is arrested, leading to his involvement with the underground and with religion and in the third he again misses his train but this time stays with the woman he loves, marries, continues his studies and becomes a doctor.

The idea isn't new, of course, though usually it's the stuff of romantic comedy but Kieslowski's genius is to show how such a seemingly random act can have such a profound effect on an individual's life and how love, faith and politics can be so irrevocably intertwined. The ideas presented are undeniably complex and yet Kieslowski makes it all look so simple and the end result is really quite extraordinary. This isn't just a key work in the Kieslowski canon but one of the best Polish films of the last forty years or so.

DRIVE

 Nicolas Winding Refn's tremendously stylish crime flic is the epitome of neo-noir as Ryan Gosling's monosyllabic getaway driver falls for neighbor Carey Mulligan and then finds himself embroiled in a heist involving her husband, Oscar Issac and some very unsavory gangsters in an Edward Hopperesque Los Angeles. Like all of Refn's films "Drive" looks terrific but it also pulses with a sense of danger thanks in large part to the presence of bad guys Ron Perlman and an unlikely Albert Brooks, (brilliant as usual), as well as some incredible outbursts of violence from an otherwise seemingly docile Gosling.

Indeed, this is a movie that is perfectly cast throughout. Gosling, Mulligan, Issac, Bryan Cranston and Christina Hendricks are all excellent even if it is the stunt drivers who are the real stars. Also the triangular relationship between Gosling, Issac and Mulligan is unusual and beautifully handled in a way that noirs of the past would almost certainly have ignored. A small classic and one that has already achieved cult status.