GREEN DOLPHIN STREET

 There's enough plot in "Green Dolphin Street" for a dozen movies and here the central plot is pretty ridiculous and while the film has no artistic merit it remains a great guilty pleasure. Based on Elizabeth Goudge's best-seller and set both in Europe and New Zealand but filmed on the MGM lot in Hollywood it's hugely entertaining as newcomer Richard Hart finds he's the object of affection of two sisters, Lana Turner (surprisingly good) and Donna Reed. He's in love with Reed and she with him but in a state of intoxication sends his marriage proposal half way across the world to Turner who then ups sticks and travels to New Zealand.

Being a man of honor he marries her while all the while it's his partner, Van Heflin, who really loves her, (I hope you're following this and I haven't even mentioned how the sisters' mother, (Gladys Cooper, naturally) was once in love with Hart's father, (Frank Morgan, looking like a refugee from Oz). Indeed the supporting cast ham it up very nicely, treating the material with a good deal more respect than it deserves. Throw in a lot of cardboard sets, some revolting natives and an Oscar-winning earthquake and what's not to love? If the dialogue is pure Mills and Boon, the style is classic Hollywood and no-one can fault director Victor Saville for holding it all together. It will never make any list of great films but as camp classics go it's at the top of the pile.

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN

 Despite some excellent scenes of aerial combat and an all-star cast of the cream of British acting talent "The Battle of Britain" isn't much of a movie which may account for why it isn't revived much. The director was Guy Hamilton and while he was usually a proficient craftsman he never showed a great deal of imagination in his work so this is pretty much business as usual with the big name thespians playing the Brits and a host of actors we've never heard of, with the exception of Curd Jurgens, and he's out of the picture before the credits, cast in the German roles.

It soars when it's in the air but grinds to a halt on the ground with scenes of banal romantic domesticity and of little aeroplanes being pushed around on big boards. Cast as Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding only Lord Olivier acquits himself with dignity while Susannah York, as the wife of Christopher Plummer, is so shrill I kept hoping she might be dispatched early on by one of Herr Hitler's many bombs. Unfortunately for us, she survives.

MALCOLM X

 Spike Lee's finest film, "Malcolm X" is a vast, sprawling three hour plus epic built around a magnificent, career-best performance from Denzel Washington and opening with credits that might recall "Patton" as Washington castigates White America over images of the American flag as it bursts into flames. Of course, it was inevitable that a biography of Malcom X, one of the great figures of the 20th century, would be filmed at some stage and equally inevitable, given his track record, that Lee would be the man to do it.

As a political picture it does follow a predictable trajectory but from the beginning it's obvious that Lee wants to make something more than just a conventional biopic. Lee's film is nothing less than an epic account of the history of Black America in the second half of the twentieth century. It's tragedy isn't only that Malcolm X was assassinated but that very little has actually changed in the interim despite Obama's tenure in the White House.

Washington may dominate the picture but there's superb work too from Delroy Lindo, Albert Hall and Al Freeman Jr. in Lee's huge cast and thanks once again to Ernest R. Dickerson's cinematography it's also a fantastic looking film. Naturally, in 1992, the Academy almost totally overlooked the film with only Washington and Ruth E. Carter's costume designs getting nominations. As I said, very little has changed and it's taken a rule change by the Academy for diversity to fully get the recognition it deserves. Had it been made today, this might actually win Best Picture.

LIBELED LADY

 A classic screwball comedy but it's also one of the least known. "Libeled Lady" boasted a cast headed by William Powell, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow, all brilliant and yet it's Harlow who almost steals the show. Loy is the libeled lady, Tracy the newspaper man who libeled her, Harlow is Tracy's fiancee who has to marry Powell, (don't ask), and Powell is the guy who has to seduce Loy, (again, don't ask). As in the best screwball comedies nothing goes according to plan. There's a host of great one-liners and it has one of the funniest fishing scenes ever committed to film. Walter Connolly's in it, too, which is just an added bonus. A real treat.

MEANTIME

 As the title of Mike Leigh's first film testified he had his bleak moments and "Meantime" was certainly one of them, He made it in 1983 for ITV and yes, it is funny in that very mordant, very sour Mike Leigh manner but it is so grim at times it's a difficult film to like or even fully appreciate. Set on a housing estate in London's East End it centres on one working-class family though neither the father, (Jeffrey Robert), nor either of his two sons, (Tim Roth and Phil Daniels), actually work and Leigh, at least initially, treats them with something bordering on middle-class contempt though by the end he seems to have mellowed into a kind of warped affection for them.

They are all portrayed as stereotypical yobs; one son appears to be mentally defective, the other corroded by cynicism with only the would-be middle-class aunt given any trace of humanism in Marion Bailey's superb performance. It's a deeply depressing film chock full of deeply depressing characters such as Gary Oldman's skinhead and lacks any of the basic warmth you might associate with Ken Loach. It's terrifically well-acted by everyone, (Oldman, Roth and Daniels are particularly brilliant), but it's also a very tough watch.

THE SAGA OF ANATAHAN

 By the time Josef von Sternberg made "The Saga of Anatahan" you might as well say his career was over. His glory days working with Dietrich were in the past and since the critical disaster that was "The Shanghai Gesture" in 1941 he had made only three other features, one of which, "Jet Pilot", wasn't released until after "Anatahan". He filmed "The Saga of Anatahan" in a studio in Kyoto 'especially built for the purpose' as an opening credit tells us, with a Japanese cast acting out a drama in an artificially constructed jungle, speaking Japanese but without subtitles. Instead von Sternberg himself narrates the film in English; he also wrote the film and photographed it in a black and white as evocative as that used in "The Scarlett Empress" or "Shanghai Express".

The story is a familiar one; a group of men find themselves stranded, in this case, on an island on which there is only one woman and set about destroying themselves over her. It was quite an erotic film for the period, featuring female nudity, something rare at the time. Indeed it was just the kind of film you might have found in a Soho or 42nd Street porno cinema rather than in the mainstream and for years it was thought of as a lost work but no von Sternberg movie, especially one as strange as this one, is going to remain lost for long and today is often considered something of a masterpiece.

It is certainly extraordinary; an avant-garde film totally unlike anything the director had done before and von Sternberg himself though it was his best film, a bold experiment that may have failed commercially but not artistically. If the acting is closer to Kabuki Theatre than mainline cinema it's because most of the cast came from the Kabuki Theatre. What audience did von Sternberg think would be attracted to such a film? Surely he knew it would be a flop but equally he must have known that a film as imaginative and as bold as this would not pass unnoticed. Although von Sternberg was never to work again he would live another sixteen years yet not long enough to see this extraordinary film reassessed and given its rightful place in his canon. See it and marvel for yourselves.

VENGEANCE

 This terrific little movie is going to disappear without trace because it's virtually unclassifiable. It's a comedy, it's a thriller and it's a satire about Trump's America, the so-called intelligentsia and social media in general and it's all the work of one man, the extremely gifted B. J. Novak who wrote it, directed it and plays the lead. He's a writer for the New Yorker who suddenly finds himself both exploiting and helping the family of a former girlfriend, (more of a casual hook-up, actually), who has been found dead in rural Texas. Did she OD or was she murdered?

Summoned to her funeral by her red-neck brother, (an excellent Boyd Holbrook), who intends for the two of them to avenge her death, he turns a very awkward situation into a podcast entitled 'Dead White Girl'. It's a funny and smart movie though perhaps Novak is aiming at too many targets; sometimes he misses but for a movie aimed at a general mass audience it shows real flair. Best of all it goes places you don't expect it to. It may not burn up the box-office now but I can see cult status beckoning.

ORDINARY DECENT CRIMINAL

 Based, for the most part, on the same real-life character who inspired John Boorman's "The General", "Ordinary Decent Criminal" suffers in comparison but while it's far from being a great film it's a reasonably enjoyable one nevertheless with a highly unlikely Kevin Spacey cast as Ireland's master criminal and number one gangster 'Michael Taylor''. We're not talking Spacey the double Oscar winner here but Spacey the actor prepared to take on any role and run with it and he seems to be laughing up his sleeve with us or perhaps just at us.

That fine and yet largely unknown Irish director Thaddeus O'Sullivan helmed the picture from a good screenplay by Gerard Stembridge and he's assembled a first-rate cast that also includes Linda Fiorentino, Peter Mullan, StephenDillane, Helen Baxendale, David Hayman and Patrick Malahide as well as Colin Farrell and Christoph Waltz early in their careers.

The tone is largely comic though the material is fundamentally serious and today the film feels a bit like a fish out of water; you might even say it's all a bit tasteless given the state of Irish 'gangsterism' in the last decade but if it's closer to "Father Ted" than "The General" maybe it's not such a bad thing. A little too broad at times but somehow it call comes right at the end.

THE LAST FRONTIER

 "The Last Frontier" is one of Anthony Mann's very best and yet least known westerns, beautifully shot in Cinemascope by William C. Mellor and with a fine cast headed by Victor Mature, Guy Madison, Robert Preston and, in one of her earliest roles, Anne Bancroft. Mature and co-star James Whitmore are trappers coaxed into becoming scouts for the Cavalry by Madison's decent captain. Preston is the martinet colonel who believes the only good Indian is a dead Indian and Bancroft is his young wife.

It was one of the last movies to deal with the Indian Wars but Mann treats the Indians with, if not quite respect, at least with their dignity intact making Preston the film's only real villain. It's a surprisingly intelligent picture although perhaps the film's biggest surprise is Mature delivering one of his best performances here and Mann handles the conflict between him and Preston with the same aplomb as he does between the cavalry and the Indians not to mention a very well developed sub-plot involving a sexual triangle between Mature, Preston and Bancroft. Now largely forgotten it deserves a much higher place in the Mann canon than it's received.

SUMMER WIITH MONIKA

 The summer Harry spends with Monika defines much of the rest of his life. They meet in the city, quit their jobs and spend one passionate summer together during which he gets her pregnant forcing them to marry young. Ingmar Bergman's early work "Summer with Monika" is much closer to the British Kitchen-Sink movement than anything Bergman did later. It's like a Swedish version of "A Kind of Loving" and while in the Bergman canon it may count as a minor work it's also bold, imaginative and yes, depressing. It also features a terrific performance from a 21 year old Harriet Andersson as Monika. Bergman wrote the film for her and it certainly paid off, launching her on an international career. As Harry, Lars Ekborg is also excellent, though he never quite had the career he deserved, dying from cancer at the age of 43. Not a Bergman masterpiece, then, but certainly worth seeing.

UN CARNET DE BAL

 One of the great classics of 1930's French cinema and one of cinema's great ;memory' pictures, "Un Carnet de Bal" has, sadly, fallen out of fashion in these more cynical times despite its being a surprisingly hard-nosed and often bleak movie. The plot revolves around recently widowed Christine as she tracks down the men she danced with from an old dance programme of twenty years before, (when she was sweet sixteen). Of course, each of them has changed drastically, almost to the point where they are no longer recognizable; in fact two are already dead and as Christine explores her past some harsh truths emerge.

Marie Bell is a luminous Christine, the great Francoise Rosay is magnificent as the mother of a boy who may have killed himself for love and a whole host of great French actors of the period play the survivors and potential suitors. There are flawless performances from Harry Baur, Pierre Blanchar, Fernandel, Louis Jouvet, Raimu and Pierre Richard-Willm. It also represents the high point in Julien Duvivier's career and was at one time considered among the greatest films ever made. It cries out for rediscovery.