THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

The greatest of all monster movies and a classic of its kind, this hoary old melodrama, a superior sequel to "Frankenstein", has become something of a legend not least for the performances of Karloff, (billed without the 'Boris'), magnificent as the monster, Elsa Lanchester in the dual role of his 'bride' and in the prologue as Mary Shelley and Ernest Thesiger going completely over the top as the mad, bad and dangerous to know, Dr. Pretorius, offering the monster a cigar, 'It's my only weakness'.

Despite being often preposterous it completely transcends camp and is visually extraordinary. It also had a great script by William Hurlbut and John L Balderston that is far more complex than anything else in the genre. Mel Brooks may have lampooned it perfectly in "Young Frankenstein" but this James Whale movie is the real
McCoy. Gods and monsters, indeed.

THE YARDS

Another tale of family living and operating on the wrong side of the law. "The Yards" of the title are the railway yards in Queens and James Caan is the crooked and corrupt operative who supplies the rolling stock, bribing the city officials in the process. Other various family members include Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix, Ellen Burstyn and Faye Dunaway and Charlize Theron while singer Steve Lawrence turns up as one of the corrupt officials. When a strong-arm operation goes wrong, ending in a killing, things go downhill very quickly for everyone concerned.

On the surface, James Gray's movie might read like any other crime drama but this magnificent film is much more complex and intelligent and the relationships between the characters are beautifully delineated and totally believable, (even a fight sequence looks like the kind of fight that would happen in real life and not in the movies). There's a depth here rare in a film of this kind. Superbly written by Gray and co-scenarist Matt Reeves and brilliantly acted by everyone, (Wahlberg is particularly good), "The Yards" has all the makings of a bona-fide American classic and is certainly one of the best American films of the last 20 years and yet it wasn't really that big a success and today is virtually forgotten. Do yourself a favour and seek it out; you won't be disappointed.

THE COUNSELLOR

Ridley Scott's "The Counsellor" is a mess, particularly in its extended cut, but it's a magnificent mess. It's virtually plotless or rather it has a plot so complicated it's virtually impossible to figure out what's going on or who's doing what to whom, suffice to say it has something to do with drug cartels operating along the US/Mexican border. The counsellor is Michael Fassbender who's a kind of go-between between the various parties, one of whom is Javier Bardem's over-sexed drugs lord. Another is Brad Pitt's mysterious cowboy who claims he can walk away from it all as needs be. There are two women involved as well; Penelope Cruz as the counsellor's long-suffering girlfriend and Cameron Diaz as Bardem's woman and the one who totes the guns and wears the pants in that relationship. Other sundry characters drift in and out and there are some brilliantly staged action sequences but mostly this is a talkative picture comprising long stretches of dialogue between just two characters. Luckily the script is by Cormac McCarthy so the talk is always good even if we think it's not always leading us anywhere.

The acting, too, is all over the place. Fassbender may be the central character yet his role feels underwritten; it's an awkward and unconvincing performance. A better actor could have worked wonders with this part, Cruz, too, is simply wan. On the other hand, both Bardem and Diaz have a lot of fun as a couple of nut-jobs and Pitt walks off with the movie as the philosophising gangster. It also looks magnificent thanks to Dariusz Wolski's superb cinematography. For the most part the critics hated it, (my friend Murtaza Ali being a rare exception). It's certainly hard work; with a more comprehensible plot it might have been a masterpiece. As it stands, it's a failure but it's still a lot better than many more 'successful' films I've seen this year and it really shouldn't be missed.

LE SOLEDAD

Third World poverty is a subject the cinema seems unwilling to tackle, perhaps understandably so since the movies are fundamentally a commercial enterprise and 'entertainment' is the name of the game. When 'western' cinema tackles the subject, (and I am thinking here of Hollywood cinema), it tends to romanticise it or make it the subject of a thriller so it's often left to 'native' cinema to deal with their own issues and a lot of the time, when they do, the subject is turned around and treated as an 'action' flic or simply ignored altogether. "La Soledad" is mercifully, and thankfully, the exception.

Jorge Thielen Armand's film hails from Venezuela where poverty and crime are debilitating issues. In a society ruled by violence Negro and his family have virtually nothing, living on the edge and with the likelihood of being thrown out of the crumbling mansion where they are virtual squatters. There is no melodrama in the telling of their tale and little drama either. Armand simply observes his characters as they struggle from one day to the next. This could be a documentary and his cast, all playing themselves, respond with extraordinarily naturalistic 'performances'. The tragedy lies in our knowledge that for many people in Venezuela life is unlikely to get any better than it is shown here. 'Action', for want of a better word, when it happens does so off-screen and yet, never for a moment, could you describe this film as boring; the potential for violence never actually seen is never far from the surface. Let's hope this extraordinary film finds the audience it deserves.

SILENT SOULS

Clocking in at a very economical 78 minutes Aleksey Fedorchenko's "Silent Souls" is a remarkable and remarkably beautiful Russian film dealing with both grief and identity but in a manner that is both uplifting and almost surrealistically comic. It is the kind of film that Abbas Kiarostami might make or, in a much broader fashion, the Coens. The plot is both simple and minimalist. A man's wife has died and he wishes to take her body to be buried in the spot where they had spent their honeymoon, and in the custom of their race, but he does not want to involve the authorities so he enlists the help of a colleague, Aist, the film's narrator and its central character and it becomes a road movie unlike any other.

Almost nothing happens and yet there is a great feeling that in the midst of death life goes on and that people continue to struggle for happiness at all costs. It's a melancholy subject but it isn't treated in a melancholy way. Little is actually said; these are indeed silent souls and what little story there is unfolds in almost totally visual terms and the cinematography of Mikhail Krichman is superb. An outstanding film that certainly doesn't deserve to get away.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

"There will be Blood" confirms my long held belief that Paul Thomas Anderson is the finest director of his generation working anywhere today. His achievement is all the more remarkable from being so different from what he has done before. Well, maybe not that different; in adapting Upton Sinclair's novel "Oil" for the screen, Anderson has zoned in on the relationship between the central character, Daniel Plainview and his nemesis, the young preacher Eli Sunday, and on the inner turmoil that drives Plainview, in a way that recalls the fundamental relationships in his own movies, "Hard Eight", "Boogie Nights", "Magnolia" and "Punch Drunk Love". However, this is the first time he has gone to another source for his material and the end result is electrifying.

This is an epic full of expansive, large-scale spaces marking it out as a different kind of epic from "Magnolia" or "Boogie Nights" but it is an intimate epic often told in close-up and with dialogue divided between only a very few characters. (It's like "Giant" but pared down to its very basics). It may also remind you of Huston's "The Treasure of Sierra Madre", (men, who in a different set of circumstances might be deemed as 'good', driven to terrible acts through greed), and "Greed" itself, Von Stroheim's great silent 'epic' also comes to mind. The first fifteen minutes or so are wordless and it comes as something of a shock when we first hear Plainview speak. It sounds like a narration in which he is addressing us, the audience, before the camera reveals him addressing a room full of people whose land he needs so he can drill for oil.

The comparison, too, with "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" is driven home when we first hear him speak. Surely, this is the voice of Huston himself. I am not sure if the decision to play Plainview in the vocal style of Huston was the director's or the actor's choice but in doing so Daniel Day-Lewis creates a singularly memorable character whose vocal tics, nevertheless, don't distract from our appreciation of him. It is a performance that, once-and-for-all, establishes Day-Lewis as the premier actor of his generation. He isn't above playing to the gallery or revelling in the role to such an extent that his pleasure becomes somewhat contagious but like Brando and Olivier before him he can now afford to wink at and nudge his audience in the sure knowledge it's the character and not the actor who is hamming it up. Plainviw is one of the screen's great mad men and Day-Lewis imbues that madness with a Lear-like intensity.

So good is his performance there is a danger that Paul Dano, (the only other actor to really register), will be over-looked and this was certainly the case when the Oscar nominations were being dished out. Dano is superb as the sanctimonious 'false prophet' Eli Sunday and there are a few scenes when both actors are squaring up to each other that are master-classes in the art of acting. Dano disappears from the film about two-thirds of the way through only to return for a coda that brings the film to a memorable, if abrupt, close.

Like "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights" this is a long film but it never seems so and I could have been doing with more of it. It is a beautiful film to look at, (Robert Elswit winning an Oscar for his cinematography), and Jonny Greenwood's ominous, symphonic score greatly adds to the drama. It has also been called a classic in the making but it is not self-consciously so. Rather it feels like a natural progression for its director, delving further into the psyches of his protagonists to discover what it is that drives them to do the things they do. Plainview may be a figure from an historical past but he could just as easily have been the father of Jason Robarts or Philip Baker Hall in "Magnolia" or the grandfather of Cruise in that same film or of Adam Sandler's quirky, volatile and maybe just slightly insane Barry Egan in "Punch Drunk Love".

TAB HUNTER; CONFIDENTIAL

Tab Hunter was almost certainly the best looking actor ever to grace a movie screen and one of the few major players ever to come out as gay. His book, "Tab Hunter, Confidential" is a hugely readable account of Hollywood in the fifties and now it's been turned into a brilliant and moving documentary by filmmaker Jeffrey Schwarz. Watching this, two things struck me about Mr Hunter; on a purely superficial level, for a man in his mid-eighties, he's still incredibly handsome, (and certainly doesn't look his age). Secondly he comes across as one hell of a nice guy, a man to be deeply admired for staying true to himself.

Like Tab's book, Schwarz's film is, of course, a great portrait of Hollywood, (even if there is something gruesome about seeing old movie stars who haven't weathered the years quite as well as Tab has), but it's also refreshing to see these people talk so openly and honestly about Tab's sexuality in the knowledge that Tab is more than happy for them to do so.

Could he act? Most definitely, though he was never given a part that really stretched him, (it's just a pity that "Gunman's Walk" was never taken that seriously). Maybe if he had been more successful it would have been a lot harder for him to be as open but his honesty, and not just about his sexuality, but about his talent, (and he was also a champion show-jumper and a fine figure skater), and his career makes this one of the best films of its kind I've seen.

THE WRONG MAN

Forget "Psycho" and forget "The Birds", the grimmest film Alfred Hitchcock ever made was "The Wrong Man". It's the true story of a musician called Manny Balestrero who was wrongly accused of a series of armed robberies and it's a remarkably fine piece of movie-making, utterly devoid of sentimentality or even conventional thrills. This film has an almost Bressonian rigour to it which is probably why it's never really proved to be that popular; (until he's finally shown to be innocent it's a downward spiral that fundamentally destroy's Manny's life and that of his wife).

Henry Fonda is superb as the totally innocent 'wrong man' and Vera Miles is surprisingly good as the wife unable to cope with events. It's shot, very appropriately and superbly in black and white, by Hitchcock regular Robert Burks and the splendid, and again very appropriate score, is by Bernard Herrmann.

FOOTSTEPS IN THE FOG

A gloriously guilty pleasure. "Footsteps in the Fog" wastes no time in getting down to business and the twists and turns of the plot are a constant delight. Stewart Granger, (surprisingly excellent), has just poisoned his wife but maid Lily, (a superb Jean Simmons), has sussed him out and starts blackmailing him and if you think you know where any of this is heading, think again. Before it's over there's another murder and even a trial. This Edwardian melodrama looks great, has a cracker of a script by Dorothy Davenport and Lenore Coffee and a stellar British cast that includes Belinda Lee, Bill Travers, Finlay Currie, Ronald Squire and William Hartnell while director Arthur Lubin shows that with the right material he could certainly deliver the goods; remember he did do the 1943 version of "The Phantom of the Opera". This may be far from a great movie but it is a hugely enjoyable one.

L'ARGENT

Marcel L'Herbier's "L'Argent" clocks in at 195 minutes. Nothing strange about that you might think but this is a silent film, made in France in 1928 and dealing, not in the epic themes of a "Ben Hur", an "Intolerance" or a "Napoleon" but in the contemporary, in the everyday, though not in the mundane. The title translates as 'Money' and money permeates every aspect of this picture which is 'inspired by' rather than based on a novel by Zola. It may not be a masterpiece but it is quite extraordinary just as it is extraordinary to think audiences ever took to this film, set largely in the world of stock exchanges and high finance, which isn't just on the long side but is also sophisticated and challenging. It requires more than patience; it requires intelligence. The plot may be melodramatic, necessary at the time perhaps to draw its audience in, but it is a film that deals in depth with unusual themes. It is also superbly acted, (the large cast includes the great Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel and in a small part, Jules Berry), photographed and edited. Indeed, this is one of the great 'lost' silent pictures and it really needs rediscovery.

THINGS TO COME

I have to admit I haven't seen any of the other films to have been directed by Mia Hansen-Love but if they are as good as "Things to Come" she will already have made her mark as one of the great directors working today, not that a great deal happens , in the conventional sense of 'cinematic action', in "Things to Come". This is simply a portrait of a woman, (Isabelle Huppert), who has settled into middle-age, neither particularly happy nor particularly unhappy. She is a teacher and writer of philosophy who uses the philosophical treatises she's always lived by to get through her largely uneventful life.

She has a dull, middle-aged husband who also teaches, two grown children and an ageing, ill mother, (Edith Scob from "Eyes Without a Face"), when suddenly her life is thrown into disarray, Nevertheless she copes, mainly due to her friendship with a younger man who was once one of her students, There is a suggestion that they might become romantically involved but it's just a hint in a film full of hints.

This is serious stuff, intellectually rigorous and yet full of humor; a film for intelligent, grown-up audiences who like to take their brains with them when they go to the pictures and Huppert, who is never off the screen, is stunningly good. Every gesture she makes, the way she walks, tells us something about this woman as much as what she says. This is great acting.
Everyone else follows suit. Roman Kolinka as Fabien, the New-Age would-be anarchist she comes to rely on, if only for company, could have been such a cliche but Kolinka brings depth and shadings to the role and makes him likeable and interesting. Even Andre Marcon as the dull husband is dull in a way that makes him sympathetic rather than a figure of fun.
By now you might have realised that I loved this film as much as any I've seen this year. Is it a masterpiece? Probably not. In the end it's gossamer thin but it is also a gem, a beautiful uncut diamond of a movie. See it at all costs.