THE PAPER CHASE

 "The Paper Chase" is one of the few 'college' films, (in this case, Harvard Law School), to concern itself almost exclusively with studying. Yes, there is some sex and a bit of partying but essentially this is about what happens in the classroom and the cut and thrust between professor and student. It's a highly intelligent ,well acted picture but it's also a bit on the slow side and even rather dull; there's only so much contract law you can take in one picture.

Timothy Bottoms is the law student in a relationship with his professor's daughter, (that's the sex bit), and John Houseman is the professor, (superb in an Oscar-winning turn). It's certainly not a bad movie but it might have been easier to like had Bottoms' character been more sympathetic. You know the world will be his oyster but somehow you don't really care.

TRUE ROMANCE

 Quentin Tarantino wrote "True Romance", with some help from an uncredited Roger Avary, but Tony Scott was the director which might account for why, at times, it's a sickeningly violent, exploitative mess of a movie redeemed by the brilliance of Tarantino's dialogue and its terrific cast.

Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette are the young lovers on the lam with $500,000 worth of cocaine stolen from the Mob while Christopher Walken, brilliant as always in his one-scene cameo, and James Gandolfini are among those on their trail. Movie references abound, of course, but it needs a firmer hand on the helm. There's fun to be hand here but it's also really rather unpleasant.

JULIET OF THE SPIRITS

 "Juliet of the Spirits" may be 'minor' Fellini, the first of his films to feel like an indulgence more than anything else and also his first film in colour; of course, it looks gorgeous. You might call it a 'divertissement' and it moved further away from the realism of anything he had done previously and, of course, it's yet another love letter to his wife, Giulietta Masina.

She's the Juliet of the title, a bourgeoisie housewife whose fantasies, mostly revolving around her husband's potential infidelity, make up most of the film's running time. It's as if Fellini were taking those fantastical elements of his previous couple of films,  serving them up as a beautifully over-the-top extravaganza and in glorious colour. In its way it's quite as radical as "8 1/2" if not in the same class, (there is no real depth to it, everything is on the surface), but you certainly couldn't mistake it for the work of anyone else and maybe that is praise enough.

JOCKEY

 There's nothing particularly original about "Jockey"; we've been down this Indie road numerous times before and yet Clint Bentley's debut feature is a constant pleasure nevertheless, a throwback to something Bob Rafelson might have made in the seventies and which Chloe Zhao has been turning out in the last few years. The lack of originality lies in the screenplay which is about an ageing jockey, (a superb Clifton Collins Jr., in what might be a career best performance), coping with the onslaught of a debilitating illness while dealing with the revelation that the up-and-coming young jockey on the horizon, (Moises Arias), may be his son.

What gives this film its considerable edge is director Bentley's superlative handling of familiar material and the brilliant performances of Collins Jr,, Arias and Molly Parker as the warm-hearted trainer with more than a soft spot for Collins while the luminous cinematography of Adolpho Veloso perfectly captures the ambiance of the circuit of horses and their riders.  Of course, don't expect this little gem to turn up at your local multiplex but seek it out wherever it's showing. I guarantee you won't regret it.

BAD TIMING

 It's Nicolas Roeg so you know it won't be straightforward and it isn't. It opens with Klimt on the credits and Tom Waits at his smokiest and then we're at the beginning of the story or maybe we're at the end. Time doesn't really stand still in the first five minutes . All we really know is that a comatose Theresa Russell is being rushed to the emergency ward accompanied by a not-too-worried looking Art Garfunkel while the film jumps back to when they met withour really explaining who they are.

"Bad Timing" isn't a pleasant film and I didn't like it first time round but with Roeg it's easy to recognize the brilliance, the construction and even people who don't like Roeg often admire his work and there are a few of his admirers who consider "Bad Timing" his masterpiece. Yes, it's a director's picture but it's also an actor's picture though you may feel Garfunkel hopelessly miscast as a brilliant psychoanalyst; after all, wasn't he the 'lesser' half of Simon and Garfunkel.

Actually I've always thought Garfukel a very fine actor and he's very fine here; blank, chilly and not at all likeable, a man living entirely within himself. Russell's teriffic, of course. Like Monroe she was never a great actress but like Monroe she could be great, fully embodying the character she was playing and pouring more of herself into the part than may have been necessary. The supporting cast includes Harvey Keital and Denholm Elliott and they are excellent even if Keitel is a very American Austrian policeman. The brilliant cinematography is once again by Anthony Richmond and Yale Udoff wrote the elliptical screenplay. I still didn't like the film but I can see the brilliance.

THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT

 There's an awful lot of plot to get through in Nunnally Johnson's slick, long (153 minutes), highly melodramatic screen version of Sloan Wilson's bestseller "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit". It's a Darryl F. Zanuck production made for Fox in Cinemascope and colour in the mid-fifties. The kind of 'big' picture designed to bring people back to the cinema in the blossoming age of television and it's certainly a handsome looking movie though not a very good one.

Gregory Peck is his customary wooden self as the man in question, a former soldier haunted by his actions in the war, (including fathering a child with Marisa Pavan), and now working on Madison Avenue where his integrity is further tested. Fredric March is his boss, a decent man with problems of his own and as was so often the case with March, he walks off with the movie. There's a large supporting cast, none of whom are given much to do, and as I said it does go on a bit. It's not dull exactly despite Peck's best efforts to make it so and while it was a hit at the time it was ignored by the Academy and hasn't been seen much since.

CENSOR

 Horror movies about horror movies are nothing new. You could say the "Scream" franchise really started a trend for self-referential horror films while here in Britain we had "Berberian Sound Studio". Now we have first-timer Prano Bailey-Bond's "Censor" which is again a film about horror cinema, or in this case 'video nasties', as it delves into the mind of '80's film censor Enid, (an excellent Niamh Algar), who becomes a target for abuse when she passes a picture that is linked to a violent crime but just when you think this might be a film about a girl being menaced by some right-wing slasher it veers off in an altogether different direction.

You see, Enid had a young sister who disappeared, and is presumed dead, some years before and one day she thinks she recognizes her in one of the video nasties she's watching. This may not be a particularly original idea but Bailey-Bond handles it superbly, teasing us with just the right amount of gory schlock-horror while at the same time making us question why we watch films like "Censor" in the first place.

Of course, the question we have to ask ourselves is whether the girl in the film is the missing sister or has Enid been watching too many horror films, (Polanski's "Repulsion" is another point of reference and there is a killer moment just over half way through that sets the tone for most of what follows). It's hardly subtle but it certainly does what it says on the tin, disturbing us and chastising us at the same time. I think Miss Bailey-Bond is definitely a name to watch.

SMOOTH TALK

 An 18 year old Laura Dern is astonishingly good as a precocious over-sexed teenager who falls victim to a much older, predatory male, (a terrific Treat Williams), in Joyce Chopra's indie classic "Smooth Talk" though I have a feeling the film's 'classic' status may be based primarily on Dern's performance since the film itself meanders along rather slowly for a good deal of its running time.

This is a film that requires you pay close attention to its various nuances and it's certainly one of the best films ever on what it's like to be a teenage girl, (there's great work, too, from the undervalued Elizabeth Berridge as Dern's sister)

Midway through it moves into chiller territory as Williams' handsome stranger arrives at Dern's screendoor when her family are out with intentions that sound a little more than creepy and even if Laura seems like a girl who can take care of herself, Treat's intrusion into her life means she has to grow up fast. Based on a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, this still remains one of the best Independent American movies of the eighties.

I FIDANZATI

 Giovanni is an engineer who leaves his fiancee in the North of Italy for promotion in Sicily but once there finds it very different from what he expected. Like "Il Posto" before it, Ermanno Olmi's masterpiece "I Fidanzati" uses mostly non-professional actors and a documentary-style approach to chronicle the everyday life of ordinary people in, for Giovanni at least, an alien environment. Sicily may as well be the surface of the moon though it does have its own rarefied atmosphere.

Olmi's genius has always been for focusing his gaze on the simple things of life. There are no great dramas going on; some may even find "I Fidanzati" boring and yet there is more truthfulness and beauty here than most films can only dream of. I could watch Giovanni drift through his less than exciting life until the cows come home and Carlo Cabrini's 'non-performance' as Giovanni is quietly magnificent, perfectly in keeping with Olmi's vision of the man. Not as highly thought of as "Il Posto" but just as fine, "I Fidanzati" is one of the greatest of Italian films and, sadly, one of the most underrated.

GRAND SLAM

 This Italian heist movie was released in English with about 90% of the cast dubbed though it was clearly sold on the casting of Edward G. Robinson as the elderly professor who plans the heist and Janet Leigh as the girl who just happens to get her name at the head of the cast. As heist movies go, "Grand Slam" is hardly memorable but, despite the not totally convincing dubbing, is still a lot of fun with director Giuliano Montaldo making excellent use of his locations while, even in such a small part, it's always a pleasure watching Robinson steal a movie from under the noses of his co-stars.

The largely international cast also includes Klaus Kinski, again fun to watch in any language, Robert Hoffman and Adolfo Celi and the plot has to do with a diamond robbery worth over ten million dollars but, of course, no matter how well thought out nothing seems to go quite according to plan and naturally, as a homage to "Rififi", the robbery has to be performed in complete silence. This is certainly not in the same class as Dassin's masterpiece but it's a very serviceable guilty pleasure nevertheless.

FELLINI'S CASANOVA

 Carry on Casanova; like a series of dirty postcards painted by a Titian or a Carravaggio and with a (badly) dubbed Donald Sutherland as the great lover, "Fellini's Casanova" is another magnum opus from the maestro that takes him further and further away from reality into an admittedly beautifully heightened series of tableux to tell Casanova's story while another gallery of gorgeously costumed giants, dwarfs and eccentrics hover around him. It certainly looks the part but is impossible to take seriously and at over two and half hours seems to go on forever making you long for the Fellini of old; "La Dolce Vita" has a lot to answer for.