SAINT MAUD

 Horror movies come in all sorts of disguises that not everyone can recognise but then we all have our own horrors and our own definition of horror. Who can deny the horror of a lynching or being in a high-rise apartment as bombs fall on it from the sky but are movies about such things ever really thought of as 'horror' films. "Saint Maud" is a genuine horror movie and it's about the horror of not belonging, the horror of being so self-aware you actually go mad or insane and the horror of pain, both self-inflicted and inflicted on others; yes, there is a lot of horror in "Saint Maud".

Of course, there's a clue in the title; it's also about the horror of religion. 'Maud', (a truly terrific Morfydd Clark), is a young nurse and carer whose latest assignment is looking after Amanda, (an equally terrific Jennifer Ehle), a former dancer now confined to a wheelchair and close to death. Described early on in the film as being something of a Norma Desmond, Amanda is also something of a bitch who nevertheless finds herself somewhat sympathetically attracted to the waif-like Maud who is convinced God has put her on earth for a purpose and that purpose is to 'save' Amanda.

The opening shot is also something of a dead giveaway. You know from the moment you see her that Maud is no Saint Bernadette. She believes that to follow Christ you have to go the way of the cross; in other words you must take on board Christ's sufferings on earth and all the horrors they entailed, physically, if not quite in Maud's case at least, spiritually.

This extraordinary film is  brilliantly written and directed by Rose Glass and superbly shot by  Ben Fordesman and  unnervingly well scored by  Adam Janota Bzowski and its horrors work because they are fundamentally  real, (the more fantastical moments are clearly  figments of Maud's warped imagination). Maud sees the visitors to Amanda's sprawl of house on its hill as spawns of the devil that she must battle by whatever means she sees fit but unlike other 'possession' films this is totally grounded in a horrible reality; the house and its location, (the seaside resort of Scarborough in the North East of England), feel just like the kind of places where Maud's obsessiveness could fester and Maud herself is like an open wound. An astonishing debut for Glass and I can't wait to see what she does next.

PIERROT LE FOU

 Godard made "Pierrot Le Fou" in 1965 in widescreen and colour and he wanted it to look like a Hollywood film...except that he didn't really. From "Breathless" on, Godard made films that paid homage to the Hollywood of the Fifties but which subverted both the style and the content of what Hollywood was turning out. "Pierrot Le Fou" looks like it could have been made by Sirk or Minnelli on acid, visually as gorgeous as anything they had made but as crazy as a Samuel Fuller film and in case we miss that reference, who turns up at a boring party but Fuller himself.

Of course, being Godard, don't expect too much in the way of plot. Belmondo, now wearing a suit and living in a fancy bourgeoisie apartment, is Pierrot, (though he keeps insisting his name is Ferdinand), who walks out of that boring party and offers to drive the babysitter home, (she's Anna Karina, who else, and looking more stunning than ever), so they climb into his car and drive off together, (they had been lovers before), but there are guns involved, dead bodies and mysterious gangsters who seem to be after Karina.

None of this so-called plot matters, of course. This is a road-movie, (they drive from Paris to the South of France), that you might dream rather than experience or maybe it's just a parody of a road movie, an American thriller or a romance, (it's source is Lionel White's novel "Obsession"), and even if Belmondo and Karina weren't the lovers at the centre you'd still know you were watching a Godard film. Nobody, but nobody else, made movies like this in the Sixties and probably still don't and in its way this is just as influential as "Bonnie and Clyde", (come to think of it, this would make a great double-bill with Penn's masterpiece). A cineaste's movie to be sure and if it doesn't look quite as fresh today as it did back then, it's still essential.

RIO GRANDE

 A masterpiece. "Rio Grande" was the last in what became known as John Ford's Cavalry Trilogy and, of course, it's deeply sentimental in the very best Ford tradition. It's also one of the greatest westerns ever made. The plot may be flimsy but it's beautifully written by James Kevin McGuinness, superbly shot in black and white by the great Bert Glennon and has one of the best casts in the Ford canon. Wayne is still in charge as Lt. Col. Kirby Yorke, (it's a great performance), Maureen O'Hara is the long absent wife suddenly reunited with Wayne when their young son, (Claude Jarman Jr.), is posted to Wayne's command. Then there's the obligatory Ford stock company; Victor McLaglen, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., not to mention the Sons of the Pioneers bursting into song at every opportunity while the fairly broad comedy and the sentiment go beautifully hand-in-hand. There's also enough action to satisfy any western aficionado and the set pieces are splendid.

THE PAINTED BIRD

 Vaclav Marhoul's film of Jerzy Kosinski's novel "The Painted Bird" has already been described as one of the great films about the horrors of war and with a child at its centre has drawn comparisons with both "Ivan's Childhood" and "Come and See" but this terrible film, (terrible in its depiction of the terrors our young hero endures), surpasses them both in some ways though many will find it an almost unendurable watch. The setting is Eastern Europe, the period sometime during World War Two and The Boy, (nameless throughout and superbly played by young Petr Kotlar), is the child literally abandoned with nothing and forced to survive in the harshest of landscapes.

He's an infant Candide in the worst of all possible worlds and each encounter he makes is more terrible than the one before. Sometimes, and perhaps mercifully, these encounters are so extreme as to transcend reality. Surely nothing 'real' could be quite as awful as this and while we may be in the middle of the 20th century these people and this landscape is positively medieval. Shot in luminous black and white by Vladimir Smutny the film does indeed have a terrible beauty; this is one of the most visually arresting black and white films ever made and it is one of the most effective of horror films with a bleakness that is certainly overpowering.

A plethora of 'named' actors, (Udo Kier, Stellan Skarsgard, Harvey Keitel, Julian Sands, Barry Pepper), may be there to give the film international appeal but outside of a select art-house audience I can never seen this being 'popular'. There's only so much misery a person can take and, at close to three hours, the horrors of "The Painted Bird" seem never-ending.

WILLARD

 Ask almost anyone which animals or creatures they are most afraid of and they are more likely to say spiders or rats rather than tigers or bears and anyone with a real aversion to rats might best be advised to give "Willard" a miss. Daniel Mann's 1971 classic about a boy and his pet rats, a whole army of them, that he trains to take revenge on anyone who wrongs him, is a Grade-A horror comedy with a Grade-A cast headed by a young and brilliant Bruce Davison as Willard. Others in the cast include Sondra Locke as the girl he attempts to have a relationship with, Elsa Lanchester, (superb as ever), as his demanding mother and a brilliant Ernest Borgnine as his thoroughly nasty boss. It was successful enough for a sequel, "Ben", named after one of Willard's rats, but despite a title song sung by Michael Jackson, it never really lived up to its predecessor.

POINT BLANK

 "Point Blank" was one of the landmark films of the American New Wave that began in the late sixties and continued into the seventies. It was directed by Britain's John Boorman and looked at today is fundamentally more European art-house than conventional Hollywood but it had Lee Marvin as Walker, the eponymous hunter of Richard Stark's novel, out to get the man who shot him, left him for dead and stole his $93,000, was magnificently photographed in Panavision by the great Philip H. Lathrop and was suitably violent for the times. In other words, this tale of dishonor among thieves had everything going for it, one would have supposed, to please the punters.

Boorman, of course, had other ideas. This was an esoteric gangster flic, more akin to the French New Wave rather than the American and just as the French embraced the American gangster films of the fifties it seemed that now Boorman was repaying the compliment. Whether audiences quite 'got it' is hard to say but it was a hit, (Marvin drew the crowds), and its classic status is assured. Marvin aside it also had the perfect supporting cast. John Vernon, relatively unknown at the time, was the double-crossing shooter, Angie Dickinson was beautifully cast as the sister-in-law who tries to help Lee while Lloyd Bochner and especially Carroll O'Connor and Keenan Wynn, both never better, made for a splendid trio of bad guys. It was only Boorman's second feature and it's still one of his best.

AJAMI

 Whatever we think we know about the Arab/Israel conflict on the ground, we probably don't and we are unlikely to learn much about the political side of the conflict from Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani's remarkable debut. "Ajami" might feel at times like a scripted documentary or at least a piece of neo-realism and deals, not with the wider picture but with a series of vignettes, told in chapters, of everyday life within the Ajami community where Muslims, Jews and Christians co-exist together. To complicate matters, the chapters don't run chronologically and the stories and characters seem only tenuously linked and although we frequently hear the words 'Jews' and 'Arabs' tossed about these stories could take place in the slums of Naples or in New York's Hell's Kitchen. In other words, this is closer to a gang movie than a political film though, of course, set as it is in Israel it is very much a political film.

The cast are largely non-professional and it all feels very real yet the two directors film it in such a way that we are about half way through the film before the plot begins to tie together or to make sense. This is a difficult film, perhaps a little too clever at times for its own good, but it remains a superb first feature that dares to take what we might think of as familiar material and twist it into unrecognizable shapes. Perhaps this is the kind of film Tarantino should be making.

INSTANT FAMILY

 A comedy about a thirty something couple who foster three siblings is going to be sickeningly sentimental, right? Wrong! "Instant Family" is sentimental but also has the courage to poke fun at that very sentimentality and is genuinely funny thanks mainly to two first-rate performances from Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne as the couple and an excellent supporting cast that includes Octavia Spencer, Julie Haggerty and the great Margo Martindale. The kids, too, are just dandy and if the comedy is at times predictably broad it balances very nicely with the inevitable saccharine moment. In fact, this might be the perfect movie about kids for people who don't like movies about kids.

SOUL

 This year's sure-fire Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature and probably Best Original Score, "Soul" is a brilliant mess of a movie more likely to appeal to adults than to children who almost certainly won't 'get' it, (and they certainly won't get the references to "A Matter of Life and Death" unless they have sophisticated cineaste parents). In some ways it's both old-fashioned and ground-breaking, at least in its attempt to push the boundaries of children's animation while never reaching the sublime heights of say "The Incredibles" or "Inside Out". The animation may be extraordinary but we've been here before.

The title, of course, has more than one meaning. Soul might refer to what a good jazz musician puts into his music but more fundamentally here it also refers to what we are all said to carry within us. Quite early in the film our hero finds himself on a 'Stairway to Heaven' to give that Powell and Pressburger film its other title and from here on it alternates between the avant-garde and that old-fashioned Pixar formula right down to a talking cat, (big mistake). A brilliant voice cast, (Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Angela Bassett, Daveed Diggs and a surprisingly cast Graham Norton of all people), do what they can with the material but the script is uninspired and it is noticeably lacking in gags, (I think kids will get bored quite quickly). Not one of the greats, then and maybe not even the best animation of the current year.

THE RAIN PEOPLE

 Of all his films it would appear that Francis Ford Coppola is particularly fond of "The Rain People", a very modest and some might say 'arty' drama he made early in his career. Like a lot of American films popular at the time it's a 'road movie' with Shirley Knight as the young wife who ups and leaves her husband in the middle of the night, gets in her car and drives West for no particular reason she can think of, meeting on her journey James Caan, (brain-damaged football player), and Robert Duvall, (randy motorcycle cop). She also happens to be pregnant and, like so many Americans in movies at the time, has gone off to 'find herself'.

Coppola says it was a personal project and there are some people who think it's his first masterpiece but it wasn't a hit and despite Coppola's name on the credits has become something of a lost movie. Knight is excellent as she mopes about and, you might say, teasing any man who comes her way while Duvall and especially Caan match her at every turn. You could say it's a quintessential American film of its time, a 'movie-brat' movie if there ever was one and Coppola's first real 'signature' picture, (though I do have a soft-spot for the wonderful "Finian's Rainbow" which preceded it). If you do get a chance to track this down it is certainly well worth seeing.

THE EIGER SANCTION

 This Clint Eastwood spy thriller was never going to win Oscars but in its own thick-eared and rather tasteless fashion it's reasonably entertaining with Eastwood both directing and starring as the retired assassin brought back to perform one last 'sanction', (that's a 'hit' to you and me). He was a sprightly forty-five when he made it, a bit old, perhaps, to be scurrying up drain-pipes never mind the Eiger. You may also think him a sexist, mysogynist, racist, homophobe and for someone posing as a qualified art professor he also seems to be singularly lacking in brains; this is definitely not one of his better performances. In fact, until they get to the mountain it's really rather banal with a 'McGuffin' as daft and as obvious as any in the movies. Luckily for us, George Kennedy and Jack Cassidy turn up and in their over-the-top fashion give the movie a much needed kick in the rear but unfortunately at 129 minutes it's also much too long.