A PATCH OF BLUE

 It could have been worse. The problem with 'problem pictures' is that mawkishnness often rules the day and instead of genuine emotion we are left with great dollops of sentimentality and if the problem is a mental or physical handicap, reason hardly enters into it. Throw in a second 'problem' and you're really in danger of messing things up. In "A Patch of Blue" blindness is the handicap with Elizabeth Hartman as the blind girl living with a harridan of a mother, (it was the mother who blinded her), who one day meets a nice man in the park; the 'problem' is he's black, doubling the movie's potential for mawkishness. It's a 'Guess Who's Coming Dinner' romance but with a blind heroine who can't see the potential 'problem' in front of her.

The director was Guy Green who made the not dissimilar "Light in the Piazza" and he does very well with material that would defeat a lesser director, helped by a cast headed by Sidney Poitier, (who else), Hartman, Shelley Winters, (winning an Oscar and chewing the scenery as the mother), and Wallace Ford and a screenplay, (Green was also the writer), that sidesteps both mawkishness and sentimentality for most of the time.. The film's heart is certainly in the right place and Poitier, as always, is superb. Today, of course, neither Hartman's 'handicap' or Poitier's skin colour would be a problem so a movie like this is something of a period piece but, remember, back in 1965 it was both controversial and challenging. It may be no classic but it's no disaster either.

THE LOST PATROL

 Lost indeed; this John Ford film has largely been forgotten and yet "The Lost Patrol" is a classic of its kind. The title says it all; a group of soldiers finds itself lost in the Mesopotamian desert, going mad or being picked off one by one by unseen Arabs. It's very much an actor's piece with Victor McLaglen, Boris Karloff, Wallace Ford and Reginald Denny taking the lion's share of the honours, working from a very good Dudley Nichols screenplay. Of course, it could just as easily have been about a cavalry patrol in the American West and if had been perhaps its reputation might have been greater. It may not be one of Ford's masterpieces but it's still well worth seeing.

WINGS

 "Wings" was the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and now, fully restored, it stands up remarkably well almost one hundred years later. It also set a standard in terms of size; this war film and tale of rivalry, on the ground and in the air, between two flyers was an epic in every sense with leads Clara Bow, Charles 'Buddy' Rogers and Richard Arlen ensuring it appealed to the largest possible audience. Certainly it was the action scenes and the flying sequences that people remember and they are magnificent but director William Wellman also handles the 'romantic' moments with great restraint and while obviously sentimental in the extreme it remains a remarkably touching picture and both Rogers and Bow are excellent. It also features an early Gary Cooper performance, displaying real star quality in only a few minutes of screen time.

HAPPY END

The bourgeoisie family at the heart of "Happy End" are totally lacking in charm, discreet or otherwise, but then, this being a Michael Haneke film, perhaps that's only to be expected. Eve, (Fantine Harduin), is the precocious pre-teen girl given to poisoning her pet hamster and probably her mother too, so when mum overdoses and is rushed into hospital Eve goes to live her with estranged father Thomas, (Mathieu Kassovitz), his new wife Anais, (Laura Verlinden) and his larger family, (aunt Isabelle Huppert, cousin Franz Rogowski and grandfather Jean-Louis Trintignant), and this being a Michael Haneke picture they make for an icy bunch of relatives to say the least and in typicial Haneke fashion, nothing seems to be going well for them.

Since "Funny Games" the horrors inherent in Haneke's work have slipped further into the background but they are still there; little by little things happen to ensure that for this family a happy end isn't really on the cards. There's a hole where their hearts should be and even though she was raised away from them, their malaise has affected Eve, too.

I've heard "Happy End" described as a comedy or, at best, a satire but essentially it's just a continuation of Haneke's journey to his heart of darkness, immaculately directed and superbly performed by the entire cast and, of course, Haneke wouldn't be Haneke without a wider malaise lurking around the corner, in this case the immigrant crisis but again, Haneke being Haneke, he keeps this element very much on the fringes. These bourgeoisie are quite capable of messing up their own lives without worrying too much about their North African servants or the immigrants who wander around Calais, where the film is set, and whom errant son Rogowski brings to a family celebration. To my eyes, this is yet another perverse masterpiece in the Haneke canon.

DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST

 A virtually plotless meditation on a sphere of the African-American experience most people will be unaware of, Julie Dash's extraordinary "Daughters of the Dust" is one of the most beautiful looking films ever made as well as being one of the greatest of independent American films though its lack of 'plot' and its languid pace were never likely to lead to queues around the block; this is a film that requires an amount of work from its audience.

You could, of course, simply let its beauty wash over you but for a truly immersive experience you need to pay close attention to writer/director Dash's elliptical dialogue and what is happening, or indeed not happening, on the screen. It is a film without stars but rather a cast of wonderfully naturalistic actors who fully embody their characters. This is the film that should have established Dash as one of the most important directors working in cinema at the time but which was obviously too esoteric for mass consumption. Now that it's been rediscovered we should treasure it.

THE TURIN HORSE

 A man and his daughter in the middle of nowhere, though presumably somewhere in Hungary, at an indeterminate time, pass their days cooking potatoes, getting water from the well and saying almost nothing to each other while a storm rages outside. They have a horse which looks like it's on its last legs and mostly refuses to move. They appear to collect its manure. The film, of course, is Bela Tarr's "The Turin Horse", hailed by critics around the world not just as a masterpiece but quite possibly one of the greatest films ever made and it's proof that a beautifully constructed piece of film-making, (and it is brilliantly filmed and superbly shot in just 30 takes), can also be incredibly boring.

Films can, of course, be about anything. Stories can be as short as a few pages in a book or as long as 'War and Peace' and Tarr does have a story, of sorts, to tell; whether you find it interesting or not is another matter but he takes what is a plausible account of man versus nature, (and man versus man, I suppose), and which might have made a good 30 minute short and dragged it out for a punishing 145 minutes and no-one will ever convince me that just because this is a 'different' kind of film and totally unlike most films made today, (shot in black and white it has the look of a film made 90 years ago), that it's a masterpiece.

Of course, with a good deal of cutting it might well have been but making your audience go through the rigours of the characters on-screen dosen't in itself add anything to your film except perhaps, in this case, length. "The Turin Horse" is a classic example of a film made for film snobs, art-house aficionados who first check if their film is sub-titled, preferably from Eastern Europe and in black and white and by a director whose reputation for putting audiences to sleep goes before him; in other words, the kind of film art-houses and film societies were made for. Yes, it is radical and yes, I was certainly impressed by the technique but I think I would rather stick pins in my eyes than sit through it again.

YI YI

 It begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral and you might say that inbetween all human life is there. Edward Yang's masterpiece "Yi Yi" is a film about family or families, each with their own set of problems, each with their own reasons for getting up in the mornings and getting on with life. Yang's genius is for taking what we think of as the mundane and showing us just how much real drama there is in what appears to be routine. Domesticity, business, religion, sex and education are all interlinked whether you're old and close to death, middle-aged and wondering if you've made the right decisions in life or very young and questioning all you see or perhaps don't see.

This is a funny, serious and often very moving picture where almost everything that happens is instantly recognizable. These are people we all know and have met at some stage in our lives. It has a large cast and it's beautifully acted, (and as the little Yang-Yang it has in Jonathan Chang one of the great child performances). Yes, there are story-lines here that we would call melodramatic when Yang borrows liberally from the kind of American films Sirk or Delmer Daves was giving us in the late fifties and early sixties yet this feels perfectly in keeping with his vision of cinema as a whole and at three hours it certainly has the feel of an epic but I wouldn't want it a moment shorter; if anything I could have spent another hour in the company of these amazing, everyday people. Great cinema and worthy of all the praise it's received.

COQUETTE

 This early talkie, and the film for which Mary Pickford won her only Oscar, was based on a play and boy, would you know it; all that's missing is the Proscenium Arch. It's a melodrama that by today's standards would put "Madame X" to shame and as the "Coquette" of the title, a Southern Belle whose actions cause nothing but tragedy of the Greek kind and which are so over-the-top it looks like a spoof, (it isn't), Pickford just about redeems the picture and exudes something like star quality.

As the handsome lug who falls for her, (more fool him), Johnny Mack Brown isn't bad while director Sam Taylor is also credited with supplying the appalling dialogue. I suppose the best you can say about it is that it's an historical curiosity and a film that would never be made today. It's terrible but it's so bizarre neither can it be totally dismissed.

NIGHTMARE ALLEY

 Edmund Goulding's 1947 film "Nightmare Alley" is one of my all-time favourite noirs and it's the film in which Tyrone Power certainly gave his finest performance. Of course, not having read William Lindsay Gresham's original novel I can't say how faithfully it stuck to its source material any more than I can say that this Guillermo del Toro remake, clocking in at 40 minutes longer than the first film, is a faithful adaptation. I did expect del Toro's version to be more 'explicit' than Goulding's but would it capture the seedy vibe of the deliciously unpleasant 1947 classic or would this simply look like a 21st century over-art-directed period piece?

The good news is, that in typical del Toro fashion, it looks great and the period detail is perfectly captured without seeming overdone and it's also brilliantly cast. Bradley Cooper is a lot less appealing than Power as the carny with a dubious past and an uncertain future, which is just as it should be, while as the three women who impact on his life, Toni Collette, Rooney Mara and especially Cate Blanchett are all excellent and there's first-rate work from Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins and, walking off with the picture, David Strathairn.

The bad news is del Toro certainly drags it out. This is definitely a movie that could do with some trimming and worse, apparently there's an even longer director's cut out there somewhere. It's a good yarn and it's well told and as remakes go, it's a cut above but it won't supplant Goulding's classic in my affections nor does it approach "The Shape of Water" in del Toro's canon.

RIDE THE PINK HORSE

 Robert Montgomery not only took the lead in "Ride the Pink Horse" but directed it as well. It's a good noirish thriller that takes place in the New Mexico border town of San Pablo, or at least the studio where said town is 'constructed', as Montgomery's Lucky Gagin seeks out mobster Frank Hugo, (an excellent Fred Clark), presumably with the intention of killing him or, as it turns out, blackmailing him. With a screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer it's certainly intelligent and Montgomery handles the decent plot with real skill.

Unfortunately his performance doesn't quite measure up; he's just a little too laid back and perhaps just a tad too old for the part and it's left to the supporting cast, including an Oscar-nominated Thomas Gomez, to carry the picture. It's definitely got an unusual plot that never quite goes where you expect it to and while it's not a memorable picture it's sufficiently off-the-wall to be of more than passing interest. It's not much seen these days but it's still worth seeing.

THE BROTHERS RICO

 Phil Karlson may not be one of the 'great' American directors but he was a very fine genre director, specializing in tough, gritty gangster thrillers of which "The Brothers Rico" is just one.  Richard Conte is the retired mob accountant who finds himself drawn back to his criminal past when one of his former associates asks him for a favour on the same day his brother confesses to carrying out a hit and Larry Gates is excellent as the mob boss who drags him back in. Others in a decent cast include Dianne Foster as Conte's wife, James Darren as the younger brother whose actions set the plot in motion, Kathryn Grant as Darren's wife and later director Lamont Johnson as one of the few 'good' guys.

The source material was a story by none other than Georges Simenon though you probably would never guess it. This is a good, old-fashioned mob movie, the kind that would sit nicely on a double-bill with either Siegel's "The Killers" or Boorman's "Point Blank". Conte spends most of the movie chasing after Darren while Gates' heavies close in and until the end action is kept to a minimum. You could say this is an American gangster film reflected through a European art-house lens. With a better actor than Conte in the lead it might have been a classic but even with Conte it still exerts a grip while the excellent black and white cinematography was the work of the great Burnett Guffey.