Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)

Herzog’s visionary epic remains one of the most impactful, haunting films in history

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Klaus Kinski (Don Lupe de Aguirre), Cecilia Rivera (Flores de Aguirre), Ruy Guerra (Don Pedro de Ursua), Helena Rojo (Inés de Atienza), Del Negro (Brother Gaspar de Carvajal), Peter Berling (Don Fernando de Guzman), Daniel Ades (Perucho), Armando Polanah (Armando), Edward Roland (Okello)

I first saw Aguirre, Wrath of God when I was young, a late night BBC2 showing. I’d never seen anything like it – and, to be honest, I’m not sure I have since. But then I am not sure anyone has. Aguirre was Herzog’s calling card and its haunting bizarreness, unsettling intensity and its mixture of extremity and simplicity is echoed in almost everything the eccentric German has made since. It seeps inside you and is almost impossible to forget, offering unparallelled oddness and lingering new nightmares every time.

It’s based on a heavily fictionalised piece of history, a rambling, possibly invented (and certainly over-elaborated) event: the mutiny of Don Lupe de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) during the Conquistador campaign in the Amazonian remains of the Incan Empire. Pizarro has led an overburdened expedition into the depths of the rainforest searching for the untold (and fictional) riches of El Dorado. Don Pedro du Ursua (Ray Guerra) is sent with a party to explore down the river, with Aguirre as second-in-command. Further disaster occurs, as Aguirre launches a coup, installs puppet ‘emperor’ Don Guzman (Peter Berling), decides to seize El Dorado for himself and descends into a megalomaniacal madness, dreaming of building grandiose castles in the sky and toppling the Spanish monarchy.

Herzog filmed this fever dream of exhausted, starving and lost characters (and, indeed actors!) struggling to tell truth from mirage. The stunning visuals and locations are matched with the immediacy of water-splashed, mud-splatted lenses capturing the action. Aguirre is one of the most immersive films ever made, not least because as we watch cannons being dragged through rainforest, actors trudge down the side of mountains in the rain or cling to barely submerged rafts through rapids, we seem to sharing the experience of people doing all this for real.

Aguirre is book-ended by two of the most haunting shots in cinema history. Herzog’s opening flourish pans down the side of a mountain – one side of the shot showing the mountain, the other the mist – its disconcerting orientation (it’s easy to think you are seeing a birds-eye view, until you spot the actors climbing down the narrow path) made even more unsettling by the electronic mysticism of Popol Vuh’s music. This shot’s beauty and subtle terror is topped only by the final shots, of Aguirre prowling alone on a ruined raft surrounded by the dead and a ‘wilderness’ of monkeys (bringing to mind Shakespeare vision of a land not worth the cost in love). Between these bookends unfolds a film that will long live in the memory.

Aguirre is about obsession and madness but also failure. It’s so steeped in failure and hubris, it practically starts there. What else are we to think as we watch the conquistadors flog through the forest, dressed in hideously unsuitable clothes (armour for the men, dresses for the ladies), dragging cannons, relics and luckless horses behind chained Incan slaves? From the moment Pizarro calls a halt, it’s clear the search has failed. What the rest of the film demonstrates is how this failure only grows under the burden of relentless greed and vaulting ambition.

Greed powers everyone down this river: greed for the El Dorado’s gold and the power it might bring. It’s leads men to follow Aguirre’s mutiny and sustains them as their journey becomes ever more wild-eyed. No one is exempt: certainly not the Church, represented by hypocritical yes-man Brother Gaspar (Del Negro) who responds to mutiny by muttering that, regretfully, the Church must be ‘on the side of the strong’ – but doesn’t let that regret get in the way of serving as prosecutor, judge and jury in a kangaroo court for Don Ursua or happily stabbing to death an indigenous fisherman (who he gives the last rites) for blasphemy after the poor man confusedly drops a Bible on the floor.

But Aguirre’s hungers seems purely for power, with gold almost an after-thought. He’s far different from the mission’s newly elected ‘Emperor’, bloated glutton Guzman, who veers between stuffing his mouth with the limited rations or passing ludicrously high-handed regal pronouncements. Aguirre wants something more: complete and utter willpower over his surroundings. He doesn’t need to be commander for this: knowing he holds the power is enough, the ability to control life and death for his men.

Much of Aguirre’s magnetic, horrifying dread comes from the qualities in the man who plays him. Kinski’s performance is strikingly terrifying, his stiff-framed walk (based on Aguirre’s real-life limp) as judderingly disturbing as the retina-burning glare of his stare, the bubbles of incipient madness and the relentless determination to do anything (from blowing up a raft of his own men to beheading a potential mutineer) that will keep his will predominant. Aguirre’s perverse desire for control extends to an unhealthy interest in his daughter (something very unsettling today, with our knowledge of Kinski’s own appalling actions) and curls himself into the frame like a hungry tiger waiting to pounce, unleashing himself for demonic rants to cement his power and ambitious plans.

As with so many Herzog films, the longer the journey, the more fraught it becomes with perils, greed and madness. The film invites us to watch an expedition that started teetering on the edge of sanity, topple into violence, death and despair. Perhaps that’s why Ursua is spared, to join us in watching in stubborn, appalled silence the rafts drift aimlessly down river, men picked off one-by-one by unseen forces while their minds slowly fracture. Herzog uses the mute Ursua as a horrified surrogate for us, his blank incomprehension mirroring our shock at how far men can slump.

The worst elements of many of them emerge. The monk who preaches the word while complacently doing nothing and dreaming of a golden cross. Guzman’s obese Emperor, guzzling food while his desperate men starve. Aguirre’s psychopathic sidekick Perucho, who whistles casually when taking on Aguirre’s dirty work. Others collapse into shocked stupor: Aguirre’s daughter, who can’t seem to process what’s happening around her; Ursua’s lover Ines (Helena Rojo) whose hopes to reverse the mutiny tip into suicidal defiance and the stunned, tragic, imprisoned Incan prince re-named Raphael, forced to witness the self-destruction of men who looted his country and are never satisfied.

Aguirre’s Conrad-istic vision reeks of colonial criticism. As these arrogant ‘civilised’ men, charge downriver into madness and death, they remain convinced they can control the environment around them. The people of the Amazon to them are savages or slaves in waiting, any gold they find theirs by right. Aguirre himself is like some nightmare collection of every single rapacious European ruler who wanted to tear a chunk off a map and claim it as his own: even in failure and death, he still sees no reason to stop, only to press on, claiming more land, wealth and power. It’s this terrible truth that give Aguirre such continued power and relevance.

Herzog’s film builds beautifully to inevitable destruction, but it matters not a jot to Aguirre, content with his complete control over a raft of dead men. Herzog films it unfold in a haunting mixture of static shots, carefully framed compositions inspired by Spanish paintings (including a bizarrely formal coronation shot of Guzman), accompanied by a chilling silence or the unsettlingly eerie sounds of Vuh’s music or the pipes of an Incan bearer. Aguirre, perhaps more than any other film, exposes the horrific hubris of empire building, the pride and greed that lies behind it and the piles of unsettling bodies (guilty and innocent) left in its wake.

It’s a film that deserves to be famous for more than just the crazed stories of its making. The clashes between Kinski – an impossible, wicked, man but a celluloid-burning presence – and Herzog are legendary (it was the film where Herzog threatened to shoot the ferocious star and then himself if Kinski followed through on walking out mid-shoot). But just as stunning is the film’s haunting, lyrical mysticism and the fierceness of its savagery. It can have a vision of a ship in the heights of the trees and a head that finishes its countdown separated from its body. It can leave you so deeply unsettled, so hauntingly present that it will stick with you as it has stuck with me for over twenty years, giving new remarkable visions every time I re-watch it.

Seabiscuit (2003)

Earnest and decent crowd-pleaser, that wears it’s emotional messages a little too heavily

Director: Gary Ross

Cast: Tobey Maguire (John ‘Red’ Pollard), Jeff Bridges (Charles S Howard), Chris Cooper (Tom Smith), Elizabeth Banks (Marcela Zabala-Howard), Gary Stevens (George Woolf), William H. Macy (‘Tick Tock’ McLaughlin), Eddie Jones (Samuel Riddle), Michael O’Neil (Mr Pollard), David McCullough (Narrator)

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, so many people felt lost and powerless, that anything that gave them even a smidgen of hope had great power. Which is why perhaps, on 1 November 1938 40 million people tuned into the radio to listen to the ‘Race of the Century’, as Seabiscuit (the little horse that could) took on War Admiral (mighty champion of the track). This forms the background to a sentimental crowd-pleaser from Gary Ross, a people’s champ rather like the horse itself.

Seabiscuit is framed around the impact this plucky, temperamental but never-say-die horse had on three damaged men who pulled together as an unlikely trio to pull him towards success. First is his owner, automobile empire owner Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) who is mourning the loss of his son. Second, grizzled trainer Tom Smith (Chris Cooper) whose purpose is vanishing with the Wild West. Third, jockey John ‘Red’ Pollard (Tobey Maguire), a never-say-die fighter himself (literally) who has never got over his resentment about being left by his bankrupt parents. All three will find the success they meet with Seabiscuit helps to re-build their lives.

This personal story does rather overwhelm the Depression-era background, with Seabiscuit playing the “we fixed him and he fixed us” card rather heavily. Much of the film’s dialogue plays up this link between man and beast and the context of the wider impact of this horse’s success doesn’t always come across – perhaps correctly Ross calculated that a personal story brings a greater emotional bond than a piece of social issue. As such, much of the social background is deposited into a Ken-Burns style series of stills and voiceover (so Ken Burns inspired, his old mucker David McCullough even narrates the thing), which never quite links up with the personal stories unfolding.

These stories are presented with mixed success. The death of Howard’s young son – the pre-teen driving a truck to the fishing point cutting to a toy truck lying sideways – is told with a level of restraint that tugs the heartstrings. Ross’ cut from the accident, to a toy car, its wheels spinning, carries impact. Bridges plays the quiet pain and hurt Howard carries with him throughout with an effective level of subtlety. He further gives a neat sense of a page heavily turning in his life, from this shining optimism of his early years as a prodigious car salesman to his quietly more reserved later life as a man who has carefully buttoned up his pain and found solace in a happy marriage (to Marcela, played with genuine warmth and charm by Elizabeth Banks).

It’s a shame the film feels the need to constantly take opportunities to relentless hammer home for us the surrogate parent feelings he starts to feel towards Red (in real life, Howard had several children, but that wouldn’t have made as good drama, would it?). It’s as if Ross worried we might not notice the possibility by ourselves. A relationship where there is more than enough on the page for us to work out for ourselves, is instead often pummelled into us, never allowing us to doubt for a moment than when Bridges worries about Maguire being injured, it is his own son he’s thinking about.

It’s a similar blight that affects even more Red’s resentment at being abandoned by his parents. It’s possible the quietly distraught performance of Michael O’Neil unbalances things here: it’s so painfully obvious his parents don’t want to leave him, you wonder why Red hasn’t worked that out. The film needs to hammer the point home for him, and insist his parents never wrote to him again (something that feels massively out-of-kilter with the emotional sympathy Ross frames them with early in the film). It feels like Seabiscuit didn’t want to lose any possible emotional moment, even if presenting his father as distant and uncaring may well have been far more effective for the story. As it is, Red’s inner pain is also relentlessly telegraphed to us.

Maguire looks the part of the jockey (he lost several bulky Spider-man muscles for the role), but the film keeps needing him to whack the button of anger and self-destructive aggression to re-enforce his broken nature. It’s a good performance, even if it’s hard to see the faultlessly polite Maguire as a rough-and-tumble wild-boy who never met a fight he doesn’t want to throw himself into. Like Bridges, Maguire has a lot of emotional heavy-lifting to carry (as well as parental abandonment, he gets blinded in one eye and goes through a crippling accident that threatens to end his career) and the burden of it eventually rather overwhelms a thinly written character.

More successful is Chris Cooper, who gives a fine performance of avuncular dedication as a horse trainer worried that fences and modern technology are rendering his old horse-whisperer skills increasingly obsolete. Perhaps it helps that Cooper isn’t given an overly forceful backstory to juggle, and that Cooper’s underplaying gives his gruff old-timer schtick real charm. Interestingly, for all the forceful attention paid to the other’s backstories, it’s Cooper’s gentle thawing to others, his kind attention to animals and his patient balancing of horse racing tactics actually involves the audience more. Just as William H. Macy, shorn of carrying any plot at all, leaves a delightful impression as he has a whale of a time with a quietly-drinking radio commentator, supplying his own audio effects in between breaks in his fast-paced patter.

The other most enjoyable note of the film is its capturing of the high-octane world of horse racing and the way it communicates the huge physical and tactical effort of actually being a jockey. From knowing the right time to break, to controlling a racing animal that wants to follow its instincts to chucking up before a weigh in to reduce your load, being a jockey is far from an easy-ride. The racing footage in Seabiscuit is well-filmed and, like the rest of its period detail, magnificently well-observed and its superb dramatic rendition of the thrills of racing makes these scenes genuinely engaging, as well as selling a lot of the ‘plucky underdog’ story the film flourishes in.

It’s also refreshing that the film resists the temptation to try and endow Seabiscuit himself with human qualities. For all our heroes delight in his company, he is always a horse to them (and to us) with just a horse’s instincts and understandings. It’s a winning note in this story of the “little horse that could”, certainly more so than the occasionally overly-insistent dialogue. It may let its attempt to link a personal story to a wider depression-era perspective fall at an early hurdle, but it’s still an effective crowd pleaser.

The Brutalist (2024)

Stunningly filmed, ambitious epic brilliantly unpacks patronage, immigrant experience and the American dream

Director: Brady Corbet

Cast: Adrien Brody (László Tóth), Felicity Jones (Erzsébet Tóth), Guy Pearce (Harrison Van Buren), Joe Alwyn (Harry Lee Van Buren), Raffey Cassidy (Zsófia), Stacy Martin (Maggie Van Buren), Alessandro Nivola (Attila Miller), Emma Laird (Audrey Miller), Isaach de Bankolé (Gordon), Ariane Labed (Adult Zsófia), Michael Epp (Jim Simpson), Jonathan Hyde (Leslie Woodrow), Peter Polycarpou (Michael Hoffman), Maria Sand (Michelle Hoffman)

As long as there have been artists, there have been patrons: wealthy men who provide the finance for the artist to create. The relationship between them has quietly defined our cultural history, the legacies of famed artists whose work fills galleries and public spaces coming about due to the wealth and ego of those behind them. It’s one of many themes explored in Brady Corbet’s epic The Brutalist, the mix spiced by placing its powerless, traumatised artist as a friendless stranger in a strange land, escaping a lifetime of persecution: a Holocaust survivor making a new start in the Land of the Free.

László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a famed Jewish Hungarian architect who narrowly survived the inhumanity of Buchenwald, arrives in America in 1947. Greeted with exploitative warmth by his wife Erzsébet’s (Felicity Jones) cousin Atilla (Alessandro Nivola), an Americanised furniture salesman, László’s skills are poorly exploited until Atilla is commissioned to build a library for billionaire Harrison van Buren (Guy Peace) by his son Harry (Joe Alwyn) as a surprise birthday present.

Van Buren, who loathes surprises, reacts with rage until, years later, an architectural magazine commends László’s library as a work of genius. László, thrown out by Atilla (who blamed him for losing the van Buren’s as clients) is hired by van Buren to build a gigantic community centre: a concrete cathedral on a hill. Van Buren helps arrange the immigration of Erzsébet in the country, but both Tóth’s discover van Buren’s darkly sinister passion is control, the two struggling against constant obstructions and László’s self-destructive qualities in a country where they are always strangers.

Corbet’s epic film partly becomes an exploration of the struggles of an outsider in a new land. It’s made abundantly clear that, far from a land of equality, America is a country of fierce hierarchies where those with money and power have almost complete autonomy to do whatever they want, and those at the bottom can be bought and sold. And few are as low and unwanted as the immigrant (it’s striking László’s closest friend is Gordon, a unemployed Black single father, another walking symbol of the underclass).

Corbet signals all in America will not be plain sailing on László’s arrival at New York – after a virtuoso tracking shot (one of many in this lusciously filmed epic) – László stumbles out to the deck of the boat and cranes upward, the camera following him to see an upside-down vision of the Empire State Building. This is not an image of hope and expectation. The immigrant, even the Holocaust survivor, is an unwelcome figure. Alessandro Nivola’s Attila has bent over backwards to hide his roots – changing his name and accent and pouring all his self-loathing into the thin charity he offers László (a poorly furnished room at the back of his shop, a blasé offer of an invite to the odd meal). Flashes of generosity don’t hide the fact László is first for any blame.

It’s just a warm-up though for László’s life as architect-in-residence for Harrison van Buren. Played with a smarmy grandiosity with a streak of reptilian cruelty, Guy Pearce makes Harrison a true monster, a Medici for the modern ages with László as a Michaelangelo, whose flourishes are tolerated only while his artistry reflects glory onto Harrison. Harrison, with his studied references to art, understands he has no legacy of his own (other than money) and demands one created for him by László. It’s his name that will be on the van Buren centre, his glory that will be embodied by it.

Van Buren, like many powerful businessmen, talks art but his real interests are control and power. Asserting his control over László, as if wanting to absorb his creativity into himself, is crucial to him. This sees him set up László in a poorly furnished house on his estate like a pet, interjecting tiny modifications and his own controlling placemen into the project, revelling in his control over every element of László’s life. He takes a sadistic pleasure in alternating praise (his constant refrain of the greatness of László feels incredibly self-aggrandising, as if László was just another one of his bottles of fine wine) and casually cruel jibes at his accent, dress sense and lack of drive.

These are qualities instantly recognised by Erzsébet, played with a fiercely restrained passion by Felicity Jones. Open-eyed at the restrictive oppression of van Buren over her husband – after decades of first the camps and then the brutal oppression of Soviet Hungary – it is she who has more overt fight then the naturally quiet, oppressed László brings. But even she knows they are dependent on van Buren’s patronage to exist (especially after her husband’s offer to sacrifice his salary to maintain crucial elements of his design is gladly accepted), urging her husband that he must do everything possible to maintain van Buren’s passion and interest. She knows to the tasteless van Buren this cathedralic construction is little more than a kitchen renovation.

The building itself is an intriguing concrete monolith, that slowly takes shape over the course of the many years the film covers, like a medieval cathedral. Imposing pillars, and vast ceilinged rooms tower above the skyline. It’s hard to shake the feeling that, for all the passion and fire László pours into its building, it feels a dark, punishing place. Its structures reflect the concrete towers of death camps. This committed Jew might be pouring years of his life into a building crowned by a colossal cross. Its bowels fill like the water sewers so many of his people were forced to try and escape through. Its rooms feel less inviting and more like prisons with the hope of skylights and vast upward spaces. It feels at times that the building itself is a tribute to the psychological damage László has had inflicted on him by his experiences.

Experiences he cannot bring himself to speak about. His scars are less visibly clear than the wheelchair Erzsébet has been confined to, or the wordless dumbness his niece Zsófia, wonderfully played by Raffey Cassidy, suffers. But it’s there in every inch of Adrien Brody’s tortured face. Few actors are more perfectly suited to embody tortured, long-suffering perseverance than Brody (his famously broken nose is even worked into the script), and László is a tour-de-force, an austere, proud man who will not beg but also will not fight, who on some level accepts repression.

Brody’s Oscar-winning performance is a portrait of a mix of unacknowledged PTSD, self-destructive impulses (he remains a heroin addict for much of his life), survivor’s guilt and a quiet willingness to accept abuse that makes him a life-long victim. From the chaos of his own life, full of trauma, his art is all about clear, clean, ordered lines. His genius is also his curse, lifting him to the attention of monsters who exploit and take advantage of his talents for their own ends and offer him no loyalty in return. While The Brutalist could suggest László has his own secret intentions with his grand construction, the film could just as well close in its epilogue that László is trapped, wordlessly and powerlessly, within the giant edifices he has built, doomed to continuously relive in different ways the horrors of his experiences during the war.

László’s whole life feels like a quiet inversion of the American Dream. The idea that anyone can come to the country and make a future for themselves is for the birds. It’s all a roll of a dice and depends on entirely on chance and whim: without a magazine taking an interest in van Buren’s library, László could have just as easily died as an obscure docks worker. America is shown as no land of opportunity, but one where those in power control everything, get away with anything they please and pass their power and influence on to their children. Where László and his like are tolerated as exotic points of interest at the dinner table, but are never really equals. Van Buren exploits and uses László for as long as his interest holds and humiliates him (and much worse) at any point when the architect starts to forget that he is not just an extra in van Buren’s American dream.

These complex and fascinating ideas and interpretations line the walls of Corbet’s own grand edifice: The Brutalist is a film of powerful epic sweep, stunning VistaVision images and looming, ominous intensity. Stuffed with wonderful performances, it’s the sort of ambitious, epic film-making that the cinema sorely needs to hold its place as an art-form. And in its sweep and Hopper-esque artistry, it’s a superb advert for American film-making.

Hamnet (2025)

A powerful film about grief that works best in its smaller moments rather than its grand ending

Director: Chloé Zhao

Cast: Jessie Buckley (Agnes Shakespeare), Paul Mescal (Will Shakespeare), Emily Watson (Mary Shakespeare), Joe Alwyn (Bartholomew Hathaway), Jacopi Jupe (Hamnet Shakespeare), Olivia Lynes (Judith Shakespeare), Justine Mitchell (Joan Shakespeare), David Wilmot (John Shakespeare), Bodhi Rae Breathnach (Susanna Shakespeare), Noah Jupe (Hamlet)

“Grief fills the room up with my absent child”. It’s possibly one of the most profound things said about grief and loss. Naturally, it came from Shakespeare who, more than any other writer, could peer inside our souls and understand their inner workings. Grief can strike anyone, and overwhelm them, leaving them hollowed out husks, uncertain how to carry on. It’s a terrifying force that grows to dominate Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s literary best seller: how it creeps, unexpectantly, into lives that are contented and happy and works to tear down their foundations.

Hamnet imagines the emotional impact of the death of a young boy on his parents: those parents in this case being Will (Paul Mescal) and Agnes (Jessie Buckley) Shakespeare. The film takes us from courtship to marriage, Agnes pushing Will to follow his dreams in London, the birth of their children and death’s seizure of their son Hamnet (Jacopi Jupe). It will have a deep impact on their lives: for Agnes a world of grief and isolation, for Will a cathartic injection of his grief into his new play, Hamlet.

There are many things in Hamnet that work extremely well, not least it’s strong emotional force. Much of the film’s second half is extremely moving, a lot of that from the gentle build of its first half. Grief isn’t an expectant force – it bursts, unannounced into lives. The first half of Hamnet is romantic and optimistic. Will and Agnes’ courtship, two awkward outsiders in a small, rural town, is touchingly portrayed, full of awkward gestures and flashes of joy. Their marriage – over the objections of many, but with the endearing support of Agnes devoted brother, played with real heart by Joe Alwyn – is very happy and they have delightful children who they love very much.

There are tensions: it’s tough to live under the roof of Will’s parents. His father John (David Wilmot) is an abusive bully, his mother Mary (Emily Watson, on excellent empathetic form under a harsh exterior) judgemental. Will is desperate for something more than being a second-rate glove-maker. It’s actually sweet that Hamnet interprets their living apart not due to marital troubles, but a recognition that their love doesn’t need constant contact. Will’s need of London’s bustle is balanced by Agnes’ desire for nature and (ironically) to protect her children from the disease-ridden big city.

It’s the first hour’s playful, graceful unfolding that makes much of the second half hit home. Zhao’s film has an ethereal romanticism, with the camera gliding with patient, unobtrusive warmth around Agnes and Will. While dealing with raw emotions, Zhao brings a sense of magical realism to the film without overplaying her hand. A large part of Agnes outsider status is based on perceptions of her as a witch, who spends her time in the forest building her herbal knowledge (Zhao introduces her with a phenomenal birds-eye shot, nestled womb-like in the roots of a large tree), trusts her dreams and has formed a deep link with a pet hawk. This other-worldly presence in Agnes, carries across in the film’s vibrant, dreamy nature – and shows why Agnes is so drawn to the shy, awkward poet, who similarly feels most alive in his own visions and dreams.

It makes the second half particularly impactful, as the truly shocking death of a child (surely one of the most traumatic child deaths put on screen, devoid of peaceful, Little Nell-like beauty and with Hamnet suffering in prolonged, agonising pain) rips into the happy haven of this life. Zhao’s compassionate distance works brilliantly here, as the film brings us into the pained lives of these bereaved parents, without every once making us feel like intruding voyeurs. Instead, we feel every blow of the film’s perfectly observed exploration of the mundane reality of grief.

A lot of that is also due to Jessie Buckley’s searing performance as Agnes. Buckley is perfect as this slightly jagged, eccentric but determined women who knows her own mind and refuses to bend to others, full of an earthy romanticism. Her vulnerability is there – there is a very moving moment during her twin’s birth, when Buckley rests her head on Watson’s shoulder and weeps pitifully for her (deceased) mummy. But it doesn’t prepare us for Buckley’s perfectly judged raw emotionality. From an agonised, near silent scream at Hamnet’s death, Buckley shifts brilliantly into a shocked quiet whisper that she must tidy up the mess. Over the next few scenes, she collapses into herself, berating her husband with cold fury, wanting him to feel as paralysed with grief as she is. This is a fabulous performance by Buckley, well-matched by Mescal, whose pained soulfulness is perfect for a man processing grief through drama.

But I found the transition of this grief into the creation of Hamlet strangely less moving and more contrived. I’ve always found the attempts to use Shakespeare’s work to fill historical gaps in his biography tiresome. Hamnet studiously ignores that the role was played first by the middle-aged Richard Burbage, rather than a young actor – Noah Jupe, brother to Jacobi playing Hamnet – resembling the late Hamnet. Hamnet carefully re-cuts and selectively stages scenes of Hamlet to present it solely as the tragedy of a lost, sensitive soul. Lord knows what the emotionally enthralled Agnes made of the parts of Hamlet the film doesn’t stage: Polonius’ murder, the abuse of Ophelia, Hamlet making “country matter” gags and so on. Fundamentally it’s a lazy conceit that art can only come by replicating someone’s real experience and is presented in an obvious way designed to score straight-forward emotional points.

Hamnet gets so much right, it hurts that it doesn’t always work. There is an emotional anachronism to the central concept that didn’t land with me: was Hamlet just an inspired, cathartic therapy session for Shakespeare (unlikely since he ripped the plot from an older Danish legend called Amleth)? It lifts me out of things, just as the production and costumes frequently feels a little too clean, a little heritage (even more so considering the raw emotions). Moments of dialogue don’t quite ring true and little things like Shakespeare’s swimming ability (a skill possessed by virtually no one in Tudor England) or its coy dance around confirming Agnes’ historical illiteracy that jar. I’ll also confess I’m irritated by the film’s carrying across of the books conceit in avoiding naming Shakespeare for as long as possible (for almost 100 minutes), while making it clear from quotes throughout exactly who Mescal is playing.

But of course, I know, it’s an emotional fantasia, so perhaps it doesn’t matter that it feels like something shot on a National Trust property. When Zhao’s poetic, observational realism works, it carries real impact. There is a moment at the film’s end when a mirrored overhead shot with the film’s opening, and a look of such radiant hope crosses Buckley’s face, you forgive the manipulative and obvious musical choice accompanying it. Hamnet works best, not in its final showboating act, but in the raw, quiet, everyday moments that show both happiness and grief it gets close to an emotional force that leaves a lasting impact.

Senso (1954)

Visconti’s grand tale of romantic obsession is an engrossing film to lose yourself in

Director: Luchino Visconti

Cast: Alida Valli (Livia Serpieri), Farley Granger (Franz Mahler), Massimo Girotti (Roberto Ussoni), Heinz Moog (Court Serpieri), Rina Morelli (Laura), Christian Marquand (Bohemian official), Sergio Fantoni (Luca)

It probably felt like a real shock when Visconti made a sharp turn from neorealism into luscious costume drama. But, in a way, isn’t it all the same thing? After all, if you wanted to get every detail of a peasant’s shack just so, wouldn’t you feel exactly the same about the Risorgimento grand palaces? So, it shouldn’t feel a surprise that Visconti moved into such stylistic triumphs as Senso – or that an accomplished Opera director made a film of such heightened, melodramatic emotion as this. Chuck in Senso’s political engagement with the radicals fighting for Italian independence, and you’ve got a film that’s really a logical continuation of Ossessione.

Set in 1866, the rumblings of unification roll around the streets of Venice – the city still under the control of the Austrian empire, despite the city’s Garabaldi-inspired radicals. In this heated environment, Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli), cousin of radical Roberto (Massimo Girotti) finds herself falling into a deep love (or lust?) for imperiously selfish Austrian officer Franz Mahler (Farley Granger). It’s an emotion that will lead her to betray everything she believes she holds most dear and lead to catastrophe.

It’s fitting Senso opens at a grand recreation of La Traviata at the Venetian Opera. Not only was Visconti an accomplished director of the genre, but as Senso winds its way towards its bleakly melodramatic ending, it resembles more and more a grand costume-drama opera, with our heroine as a tragic opera diva left despairing and alone, screaming an aria of tormented grief on Verona’s streets. You’ll understand her pain after the parade of shabby, two-faced treatment the hopelessly devoted Livia receives at the hands of rake’s-rake Franz, a guy who allows little flashes of honesty where he’ll confess his bounder-ness between taking every chance he can get.

What Senso does very well is make this tragic-tinged romance so gorgeously compelling, that you almost don’t notice how cleverly it parallels the political plotlines Visconti has introduced into the source material. Because Franz’s greedy exploiting of Livia for all the money he can get out of her, the callous way he’ll leave her in dire straits or the appallingly complacent teenage rage where he shows up and inserts himself into her country palace (with her husband only a few rooms away) is exactly like how Austria is treating the Italians, stripping out their options, helping themselves to what they like and imposing themselves in their homes.

Livia’s besotted fascination with Franz kicks off at the same opera where the Garabaldi inspired revolutionaries disrupt events by chucking gallons of red, white and green paper down from the Gods onto the Austrian hoi-polloi. And their destructive relationship will play out against an outburst of armed revolutionary fervour, both of them stumbling towards a dark night of death and oppression in the occupied streets of Verona. Livia’s obsession will damage not only herself, but these same revolutionaries who be left high-and-dry when Livia prioritises Franz’s well-being over the revolution’s survival, by funnelling the gold she’s concealed for the purchase of arms into Franz’s wastrel pockets.

But it’s impossible to not feel immensely sorry for Livia, because her desperation and self-delusion is so abundantly clear. Alida Valli is wonderful as this woman who only realises how lonely she is when she finds someone who can provide the erotic fire her detached, self-obsessed husband never has. It’s a brilliantly exposed performance: Valli actually seems to become older as time goes on, as if collapsing into the role of wealthy sugar-mummy to an uncaring toy boy.

Before she knows it, she will be wailing that she doesn’t care who knows of her feelings, before dashing across town to where she believes Franz is staying (it turns out instead to her revolutionary cousin, her husband assuming her feelings are revolutionary sympathies not infidelity). She knows – God she clearly knows! – Franz is not worth the love she is desperately piling onto him, but her need for him is so intense, that we can see in her eyes how desperate she is to persuade herself otherwise. Valli sells the increasingly raw emotion as she can no longer close her eyes to Franz’s selfishness and cruelty and her final moments of raging against the dying of her light are riveting.

Opposite her, Farley Granger (dubbed) may not have enjoyed the experience (he refused to come back and film his final scene, which was shot instead with a partially concealed extra) but his selfish youth and cold-eyed blankness is perfect for a man who cares only for himself. There are parts of him that need to be mothered, and he’s not above throwing himself on her covered in gratitude. Sometimes he’ll advise her he’s not worth it, or sulk like a petulant kid if he feels he isn’t getting enough attention. But he’ll always come back for more wealth.

His shallow greed is appalling. His eyes light up when Livia gives him a locket with a lock of her hair in it. Sure enough, she’ll find that hair discarded in his apartment when she searches him, the locket sold. His fellow soldiers know all about his roving, careless eye – he’s “hard to pin down” one knowingly says, so clearly indicating Franz’s lothario roaming that it’s hard not to feel desperately sad for Livia. The vast risks she takes for him, he’ll chuck away on the next shiny thing (or woman) to catch his eye. But he can also be charming or vulnerable – or at least fake these qualities – so well that Livia continues to persuade herself he is someone she can ‘save’ from his flaws.

It leads to disaster for all, a personal tragedy swarming and soaking up thousands of others. Her revolutionary cousin Roberto will be collateral damage, Visconti capturing this in two exquisitely staged battle sequences (one utilising a stunning near 360 camera turn to take in the catastrophic after-effects of a failed advance by the revolutionaries). This is the grand destruction that wraps around the Operatic failed romance at the height of Senso: it’s a sign that the all-consuming lust that consumes its lead has reached out and crushed almost everything around it.

It makes sense then that the luscious colour and gorgeous design of Visconti’s film comes to its conclusion in dreary streets, nighttime confrontations and a final mood that feels nihilistic and destructive. Senso is a wonderful exploration not only of the senseless destruction of romantic obsession, but also of the wider damage where this negative energy shatters a host of high-flown, optimistic political ideals leaving only ruins and disaster behind. Visconti’s masterful balancing of all of this makes Senso a shining example of both gorgeous film-making and a wonderful mix of compassion and the high-blown. A wonderfully engrossing film to soak in.

Sentimental Value (2025)

A autuer director tries to bond with his daughters in this heartfelt drama of family dynamics

Director: Joachim Trier

Cast: Renate Reinsve (Nora Borg), Stellan Skarsgård (Gustav Borg), Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (Agnes Borg Pettersen), Elle Fanning (Rachel Kemp), Anders Danielsen Lie (Jakob), Jesper Christensen (Michael), Lena Endre (Ingrid Berger), Cory Michael Smith (Sam), Catherine Cohen (Nicky), Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud (Even Pettersen), Øyvind Hesjedal Loven (Erik), Lars Väringer (Peter)

Famed auteur director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) has seen his career quietly stall in the past fifteen years. He frequently failed as a father to his two daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) now a leading classical actor and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) a married academic researcher with her own son, who she and Nora give a care and attention they never received from Gustav. However, Gustav has an olive branch for Nora – a semi-autobiographical film about his mother that he wrote for Nora. When she rejects him, he secures funding with Hollywood star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) and remains a presence in their lives as he plans to shoot the film in their family home.

Trier’s compelling portrait of a family confronting their feelings, explores the bonds that tie families together and if they go deeper than just sentiment. Superbly directed, it masterfully explores the confused, awkward tensions between children and their father and is blessed with three superb performances from Reinsve, Lilleaas and Skarsgård that genuinely feel like a family unit. With a naturalness in their comfort with each other, all three give a master class in micro-reactions (and aggressions) that show the raw nerves a father can touch with his clumsy attempts to connect with his daughters.

The connection between Reinsve and Lilleaas is so intensely moving, it’s hard not to believe they aren’t sisters. These two extraordinary actors share scenes of sisterly love that are heartfelt in their simplicity. Just as their pained, struggling to hold back tears when expressing their feelings carries a huge impact. Beneath all the snapped words, both daughters have a genuine need to love and be loved by their father, someone they clearly don’t always like but who they also need – and, in a strange way, understand.

Reinsve (absolutely brilliant) shows Nora hiding her emotions but collapsing into herself when distraught. She’s reduced to shocked hostility when re-encountering her father, who she blames for her struggle to form emotional bonds with others. Reinsve is compelling as this fragile, empathetic person who has buttoned herself into a protective shell: she has a beautiful moment after opening her heart to a fellow married actor she is having an affair with, only for her to recoil with pain when he politely rejects her. Nora invests so much of her feelings in her acting, that it leaves her with crippling stage-fight before performances (a brilliantly staged scene sees her demand to be practically man-handled on stage mid-stage fright, which anyone whose acted can sympathise with). The more we learn about her pained background, the more Reinsve invests this character with a deeply affecting sadness just under the surface, making us more and more aware of her vulnerability.

She’s equally matched by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as Agnes, who feels she must provide the emotional glue to hold this strange family together. She has built the warm, protective home for her family which the others are drawn to (both Nora and Gustav are devoted to her young son Erik), but Lilleaas shows Agne has worked to re-channel her feelings. Having once played the child-lead in one of Borg’s films, she painfully tells him it was the best summer of her life as it was the only one where she had her father’s full attention. It’s a generous, subtle and deeply affecting performance, of emotional bravery as we discover the depths of her love and loyalty to her sister.

Skarsgård, meanwhile, gives one of the finest performances of his career as the egotistical but regretful Borg, whose pain at his growing artistic and familial irrelevance is clear. He’s full of charm and warmth, but also ruthlessness: he forms close bonds with those he’s working with, but moves on the second the project completes. It’s an attitude he has extended to his family, which he wishes to change, but lacks the emotional intelligence to do so, as the charm he uses for the festival circuit fails to land with his family. He’s a man who can only express his true feelings in the language of film, through art rather than his own words. It’s a superb performance.

Sentimental Value is frequently shrewd and funny about filmmaking. Borg is facing the dying of the light, making his film for Netflix and looking intensely pained when its suggested it may never be screened in a cinema. There is a brilliant joke where he gifts Erik a hideously inappropriate collection of DVDs (including The Piano Teacher and Irreversible) made even funny when Agnes says they don’t even own a DVD player. If there is one way Borg does differ from Bergman (his clear inspiration), it’s his boredom with theatre: he has never seen Nora act, clumsily assumes she is playing Orphelia in her next show (she’s actually playing Hamlet) and tells her (one of Norway’s leading stage actors) that appearing in his film could be ‘a big break’.

But in the film world, Borg is clearly a master: calm, patient and able to inspire with enthralling descriptions of proposed shots, able to tease out beautiful work from actors. No wonder Rachel Kemp wants to work with him. Elle Fanning is excellent in a nuanced, intelligent performance as a gifted Hollywood starlet who begins to instinctively feel she is wrong for the lead in a European auteur-epic blatantly written for someone else. Fanning has an extraordinary scene, where she gives a reading of a key monologue from Borg’s film: her talent is immediately clear, but her skilled emotional reading is also completely out-of-tune for the mannered, imagery-dense text. Fanning makes this character empathetic, respectful, earnest and a true artiste, Trier inverting our expectations of any pop at Hollywood self-obsession.

A beautifully played chamber piece, it’s not just the Bergman-inspired career of Borg (his proposed film is pure Bergman stylistic homage) that makes Sentimental Value feel like it has a little touch of the master. Trier brings his camera to focus intensely on his actors, to let their emotions fill the screen and play in front of us. He even indulges a Persona style flourish where their three faces merge and combine with each other, under-lining the essential bonds that tie them together.

In a classic Bergman-style metaphor, the film is framed around ancestral family-home which literally has a flaw crack running through it. The film opens with Nora recounting a school essay she wrote imagining her house responding to events filling it – a mix of her childhood play and ferocious parental arguments. Sentimental Value subtly layers in roots of adopted trauma, with memories of Gustav’s mother (an imprisoned and tortured resistance fighter) who committed suicide when he was a young boy, which deepen the emotional complexities and fraught baggage every character carries.

What’s also beautiful about Sentimental Value is that it always feels true. There are not artificial moments of actorly grand-standing leading to emotional breakthroughs, but quiet (and even more moving) moments of genuine truth and honesty. Trier isn’t afraid to make the film funny, but also brilliantly shows that there is a lot more than just sentiment drawing families together, with a revelation that while Borg may never be able to express it the way his daughters want, he understands and loves them in ways no-one else can. It’s a beautiful, masterfully made, deeply thought-provoking and emotionally mature work that continues to mark Trier (and his actors) as major talents.

Roman Holiday (1953)

Gorgeously light romantic comedy that invented and mastered a whole genre

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Gregory Peck (Joe Bradley), Audrey Hepburn (Princess Ann), Eddie Albert (Irving Radovich), Hartley Power (Hennessey), Harcourt Williams (Ambassador), Margaret Rawlings (Countess Vereberg), Tullio Carminati (General Provno), Paulo Carlini (Mario Delani), Claudio Ermelli (Giovanni), Paola Borboni (Charwoman), Alfredo Rizzo (Taxi driver)

Everyone loves a fairy tale, which is probably why Roman Holiday remains one of most popular films of all time. The whole thing is a care-free, romantic fantasy in a beautiful location, where it feels at any time the chimes of midnight could make the whole thing vanish instantly in a puff of smoke. It’s like a holiday itself: a chance to immerse yourself in something warm, reassuring and utterly charming. This fairy tale sees a Princess escape to freedom. Only she’s not escaping imprisonment by some ghastly witch or terrible monster: just from the relentless grind of never-ending duty.

The heir to the throne of an unnamed country (one of those Ruritanian neverwheres you’d find in a Lubitsch movie), Princess Anne’s (Audrey Hepburn) every waking moment is a never-ending parade of social and political functions. Just for once she’d like to do what she wants to do for the day. Something she gets when she escapes into Rome (after being given a dopey-inducing drug to sleep) and finds herself in the company of American newshound Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck). Joe quickly works out he’s harbouring the most famous woman in the world and dreams of the scoop of the century. Pretending not to know ‘Anya’s’ identity, they spend the day shooting the breeze in Rome – only to find themselves falling in love. Will Joe sell the story? And will Ann stay free or return to her duties?

Truth be told, like many fairy tales, it’s a very light story that leads towards familiar (and reassuring) morals, with a big dollop of romance along the way. It works however, because it’s told with such lightness, playfulness and gentle innocence, that it washes over you like a warm bath. A director like Lubitsch would have found sharper wit (not to mention sexual tension) in the material, but Wyler’s decision to hold back arguably works better. It lets the magic of the plot weave without directorial flourishes overbalancing things. It works because it’s so soft touch and unobtrusive in its making that it allows the actors to flourish.

It helps as well that they had Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn’s entire life changed with Roman Holiday (surely the last time she could have walked through Rome unnoticed!), winning an Oscar for the sort of dream-fit role that comes once in a blue moon. Hepburn looks perfect as a fairy-tale Princess, but her performance succeeds because of her gift for light comedy and flair for slapstick. She’s an acutely funny and hugely endearing performer, and your heart warms to her instantly. From stretching her foot and losing a shoe (under her billowing dress) in the film’s opening reception, Hepburn launches into a perfect low-key comic routine as she attempts to restore it. That comic physicality carries through her doped-out first night of freedom, including an impressive roll across a bed into a sofa, fully committed to the word-slurring ridiculousness. She’ll bring the same daft energy to her disastrous Vespa riding. Hepburn has become such an icon of class, it’s easy to forget what a bouncy comedian she was.

These comic touches make us root for her, and it’s made even easier through Hepburn’s ability to make naivety combined with touches of austere distance effortlessly charming. Watching her react with blithe confusion (and then charmingly embarrassed realisation) as she accepts shoes and flowers from retailers without realising they expect payment is never less than charmingly hilarious. Her wide-eyed excitement at everyday things like ice cream or getting an (iconic) haircut is winningly loveable. You find it funny rather than frustrating that she expects help undressing (much to Joe’s flustered surprise) or for problems like policemen to melt away. Hepburn’s performance is nothing less than transcendent, a sprinkle of Hollywood magic.

Opposite her, the film wisely casts that bastion of decency Gregory Peck. Other actors would have leaned into Joe’s background as a fast-living reporter constantly in hock to a parade of gamblers, landlords and newspaper editors. But Peck is so clean-cut he feels like Walter Cronkite on leave and removes any audience concern that Joe might do something caddish. We never once feel for a moment Anne is at risk of being taken advantage of when she sleeps in his apartment (would we have felt the same certainty with, say, Tony Curtis or even Cary Grant?) and Peck is so straight-shootingly decent, the implied threat that he may betray Anne by reporting her day of freedom as a glossy tell-all of outrageous behaviour very easily drifts from the audiences mind when watching the film. We all know Peck would never do that!

All this allows us to fully relax and enjoy the bulk of the film, which is essentially watching two beautiful, likeable people have a lovely day looking among the gorgeous sights of the Eternal City. It’s hard to credit it, but the Roman authorities initially refused the right to film as they were worried it would demean the city. Just as well they changed their mind, as perhaps no film has driven more people to Rome. Roman Holiday (even the title is a subliminal suggestion to the viewer) is full of wonderful locations, from the Trevi fountain to the Spanish steps and it single-handedly turned the Mouth of Truth into a must-visit tourist spot – not surprising, as Peck’s improvised pretence to lose his hand and Hepburn’s wails of laughter are one of the film’s most lovable moments.

Moments like that showcase the natural warmth and chemistry between the two actors, and Roman Holiday leans into it to create one of the most romantic films ever made. There is a genuine palpable spark between the two, from their meet-cute in a taxi (a dopey Anne confusedly mumbling that she lives in the Colosseum) to the ice melting between them, to the little glances they give each other as they make each other laugh on Vespas or their bond growing as throw themselves into fending off a parade of besuited goons from Anne’s embassy (this moment includes the hilarious moment when Hepburn bashes a goon over the head with a guitar).

It’s all leading of course to the inevitable bittersweet ending – because, such is the decency of Peck and Hepburn, we know they are never really going to chuck it all aside when duty and doing the right thing calls – which is equally delivered with a series of micro-reactions at another interminable function that is genuinely moving in its simplicity. Even Eddie Albert’s hilariously cynical photojournalist gets in on the act.

It’s the perfect cap to a wonderfully entertaining, escapist fantasy which never once leaves you anything less than entertained. You could carp that there is never any threat or peril at any point – and that the paper-light plot breezes by – but that would be to miss the point. But Roman Holiday invented and mastered a Hollywood staple: two likeable people fall in love in a gorgeous location. And who hasn’t dreamed of a holiday like that?

Belle du Jour (1967)

Buñuel’s sensual mix of fantasy and reality, asks intriguing and searching questions with ambiguous answers

Director: Luis Buñuel

Cast: Catherine Deneuve (Séverine “Belle de Jour” Serizy), Jean Sorel (Pierre Serizy), Michel Piccoli (Henri Husson), Geneviève Page (Madame Anaïs), Pierre Clémenti (Marcel), Francisco Rabal (Hyppolite), Françoise Fabian (Charlotte), Macha Méril (Renée), Maria Latour (Mathilde), Marguerite Muni (Pallas), Francis Blanche (Monsieur Adolphe), François Maistre (The professor), Georges Marchal (Duke)

Desire can be a scary thing; a deep dive into the things that excite and titillate us can be deeply unnerving. That’s the heart of Buñuel’s compellingly intriguing Belle de Jour, where dreams and fantasy merge with confused and repressed desires struggling to find an outlet. It makes for a fascinating, unsettling and erotic film, powered by a fearlessly superb performance by Deneuve. Buñuel’s film avoids judgement, frequently inverting lazy moral judgements in a film that flirts with playfulness and dark dangers.

Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) is happily married to Pierre (Jean Sorel) but seems unable to find any sexual satisfaction with him. Sleeping in separate beds, the couple are supportive and loving but chaste. Séverine’s fantasy life though is awash with day-dreams of erotic, sadomasochistic desires in which she is degraded and humiliated, scenarios clearly alien in her marriage. Séverine finds an outlet for her desires by taking an afternoon job as a prostitute in Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page) high-class brothel, where she can experience an erotic thrill in debasement that she barely understands herself. But can her secret survive the probing of sinister Husson (a brilliantly creepy Michel Piccoli) or her confused fascination with gangster Marcel (Pierre Clémenti).

Belle de Jour explores the dark desires many of us hold but never acknowledge – either to the world at large or to ourselves. It’s told with Buñuel’s masterful control, moves with smooth narrative economy and throws our expectations off kilter with carefully controlled switches from reality to fantasy. Buñuel’s unsettling opening shows Séverine and Pierre riding in a carriage through a tree lined country lane, their conversation tinged with hostility. We wonder what film it might be – we probably don’t expect Pierre to order the carriage to stop, demand the drivers drag Séverine from it, take her into the woods, flog her bare back and then allows one of his burly men to have his way with her. Just as we don’t expect the look of pleasure on Séverine’s face.

Fantasies like this re-occur time-and-time again throughout the film, as Séverine’s only way of truly explore sexual fantasies her husband is (presumably) unable to fulfil. In her fantasies she is abused, tied up, has mud flung at her and services men in the full knowledge of her husband. Buñuel presents this, as you might expect (for a man whose foot fetish has become something of a running joke) with a striking lack of judgement or moral ticking off. Instead, it feels more like Séverine is a woman trapped between two stools of seemingly knowing what she might want, but struggling to find the sexual and emotional confidence to acknowledge it. None of this, in any case, has any impact on her love for her husband or the importance she places on their marriage.

Buñuel captures this brilliantly with her hesitancy to follow through on her desire to knock on the door of hostess Madame Anaïs (an excellent Geneviève Page). We watch Séverine dawdle outside the apartment block, doubling back, staring blankly at shop windows and waiting until she cannot be seen and then shuffling up the stairs and back-and-forth outside the door. Buñuel repeats the trick later (with a shot focused on her feet) as she hesitates about whether to push her way through the door again next week.

In the bedroom, Séverine frequently feels awkward and uncertain (even a little embarrassed), which is striking until you realise this is less of the fear factor and more a kink one. She’s fails utterly with the Professor (François Maistre), a client who desires to be punished, a lust completely counter to her own desires. However, she ends a session with a burly Japanese customer, whose physicality terrifies the other girls (he also carries with him a mysterious buzzing box – Buñuel joked he was asked more about the content of this box than anything else in his films), exhausted but with a look of reclining, feline satisfaction on her that we don’t see before or since.

Buñuel’s film slips and slides ever more intriguingly into oblique uncertainty as Séverine explores the further reaches of her sensuality. A fascinating sequence tips uncertainly between dream and reality. Séverine encounters a mysterious nobleman (an austere Georges Marchal) during a casual café pick-up. But his coach drivers are the same as those from her earlier dream (tellingly, Buñuel also makes a Hitchcockian cameo as a café customer –tipping the wink this might not be reality). At the Duke’s home, Séverine lies in a coffin (in another dream call back, the butler is ordered to keep the cats out, the same bizarre cry Séverine made during her woodside thrashing) while the Duke masturbates under the coffin before flinging her out of the house like trash. Fantasy or reality? Is exposure to wider sexual desires expanding Séverine own dreams?

How much has she told Pierre about what happens in these dreams? It’s hard to believe Jean Sorel’s straight-shooting doctor would be as blasé as he appears about a recurring fantasy of his wife on a carriage ride followed of sexual humiliation. Did she just tell him about the first part? Séverine seems determined to shelter Pierre from her desires, part of compartmentalising her inner and outer lives. You could argue the general autonomy and respect he gives her not only powers her love for him, but also runs so counter to her inclinations that she finds it represses all desire for him.

Belle du Jour sees no contradiction between a desire for casual, need-filling sex with strangers and a loving marriage. You could argue Buñuel’s film suggests Séverine’s problems only start when she finds emotional bonds blurring in a fascination with Pierre Clémenti’s brutal, scarred gangster Marcel, who arrives like the violent embodiment of her dreams and who she longs to see again and again. Only when genuine feelings start to intrude, does what she is doing even begin to feel like any sort of betrayal. Buñuel presents Marcel as a destructive raging id, impulsively violent. But he also plays with our expectations of moral punishment for Séverine, throwing in a moment of Pierre studying an abandoned wheelchair with such jarring foreboding it’s easy to see it as a subtle joke on our expectations for Séverine’s expected narrative punishment.

The ending tips back into fantasy, presenting us with a choice of how much we choose to believe is real or not. While Séverine fears Pierre’s discovery of her secret, you can also imagine the shame and humiliation she would feel would also satisfy many of her deeper fantasies, with her fantasies of Pierre routinely berating her as a slut. Buñuel’s brilliant merging of fantasy and reality, with audio and visual hints and call backs that intrude into and loop back over both worlds is brilliantly suggestive.

Belle de Jour also owes a huge part of its success to the sensitive, non-judgemental performance of Catherine Deneuve which is brilliantly subtle and ambiguous, never presenting us with a constantly shifting range of possibilities about Séverine’s emotions. Deneuve is compellingly sympathetic and frustrating in equal measure, perfectly attuning herself to Buñuel’s complex canvas. That is a picture of puzzles and possibilities, that asks us to take deep and unsettling looks at ourselves and our own desires. Buñuel’s gift here is to take what could be red-light zone smut and turn it into something profoundly, challengingly opaque and intriguing.

Sahara (1943)

Bogart does desert warfare, in this tense, very well-made war film both men-on-a-mission and a siege film

Director: Zoltán Korda

Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Sgt Maj Joe Gunn), Bruce Bennett (Waco Hoyt), J. Carrol Naish (Giuseppe), Lloyd Bridges (Fred Clarkson), Rex Ingram (Sgt Maj Tambul), Richard Nugent (Captain Jason Halliday), Dan Duryea (Jimmy Doyle), Carl Habord (Marty Williams), Patrick O’Moore (Bates), Louis Mercier (Frenchie), Guy Kingsford (Stegman), Kurt Kreuger (Captain von Schletow), John Wengraf (Major von Falken)

Sahara was ripped from the headlines: with the war still in full swing. So much so, it not only told a tale of a battle effectively still being fought but is also perhaps the only American film in existence to credit a Soviet film for providing the original story. It’s 1942 and the British army are in full retreat from Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Among them is Sgt Joe Gunn (Humphrey Bogart) and his tank Lulubelle, one of a small group of American tanks getting some real life combat experience with the Brits. Heading South through the desert, Gunn and his crew, Waco (Bruce Bennett) and Joe (Dan Duryea), pick up a motley collection of Allied soldiers led by Captain Dr Halliday (Richard Nugent) including Sudanese sergeant Tambul (Rex ingram) and his Italian prisoner Giuseppe (J. Carrol Naish). All of them are caught between two enemies: the Germans and the complete lack of water in the desert.

Sahara is an exciting, assured war film that combines a ‘men on a mission’ set-up with a classic ‘base under siege’ setting. Our heroes eventually find themselves at a dried-up desert well and the target of a desperately thirsty German battalion. Gunn decides to hold the dry well to slow the German advance down, fighting a gruelling siege, desperately waiting for relief, as the battle takes a terrible burden. This is Boys Own Adventure stuff, but told with a genuinely affecting sense of duty and sacrifice, as our heroes knuckle down in impossible circumstances.

At the heart of it, Bogart delivers exactly the movie star charisma the film needs while. Rudolph Maté’s photography is extraordinary, transforming the Californian desert into the African sands. Sahara brilliantly understands the importance of resources in the desert, and Korda captures perfectly the sweaty, sand-covered desperation for liquid. Sahara is tense, exciting and surprisingly hard-hitting with a strong cast.

What it really is of course, is a celebration of the attitudes that separate the Allies from those nasty Nazis. The Allies are a smorgasbord of nationalities, all of whom are shown (after some clashes) to work together with respect, admiration and a shared sense of purpose. Richard Nugent’s medical officer modestly defers leadership to the tank-and-combat experience of Bogart’s sergeant – no awkward arguments of seniority. Despite the collection of Americans, Brits, a South African, a Free Frenchman, a Canadian and a Sudanese sergeant, there is almost no trace of either national or racial clashes.

These men work in partnership, deferring to other’s areas of expertise to survive. Rex Ingram – excellent as Sergeant Tambul – instantly proves himself invaluable with his survival knowledge and ability to locate water. It’s Tambul who is at the heart of a tense search for any moisture in the seemingly dried up well our heroes hole up at, and later he is pivotal in the defence of the well. Saraha has a marvellously low-key but affecting scene of cross-cultural understanding as Tambul and Bruce Bennett’s Texan Waco jokingly compare outlooks on the world that are far more similar than they expect.

The message here is clear: teamwork, respect and the ‘dignity of freedom’ gives the Allies the moral edge over the Axis. The supportive respect, good humour and unflashy bravery of the Allies who get on with it and put duty first while respecting the rules of war is contrasted with the Germans. Bogart may flirt with the idea of abandoning Giuseppe in the desert (to preserve their water supply) but of course, when push comes to shove, he won’t (as Waco and Jimmy suspected he wouldn’t). Later, Bogart will even share the same limited water ration with their German prisoners.

Compare and contrast with the Germans. Their main representative, captured pilot von Schletow (played with a wonderfully smug viciousness by Kurt Kreuger), is portrayed as an instinctive racist (he’s the only character to make any slur towards Tambul), a bully and fanatic. There’s very little trace of decency in him: he’s confrontational, two-faced and dripping with nationalist superiority. The other Germans we see aren’t much better: a German soldier turns on his companion for a drop of water, a senior German officer breaks on a truce and the Germans fight as individuals rather than a supportive unit.

Caught in the middle? The Italians, represented by Giuseppe. J. Carrol Naish is excellent (and Oscar-nominated) as a soldier a million miles from Kreuger’s fanatic: a family man who keeps his word and just wants to go home. Naish has two knock-out scenes: the first a desperate pleading to Gunn to not be left to certain death in the desert and the second a contemptuous denunciation of German fanaticism to von Schletow: as he puts it, it’s a job to the Italians but a way of life to the Germans. Perhaps it was easier (with America’s large Italian population) to give the Italians more of a pass, but it allows the film to suggest there is some hope that behind the fanatics stood many regular people (something it’s hard not to see mirrored in the desperate German soldiers).

Sahara marshals all of this into a final siege that threatens to head the film into very dark territory indeed. Death is a constant in Sahara: the film opens with a view of the wreckage of battle, the unforgiving harshness of the desert is constantly stressed and we are shown repeated images of makeshift graves as bodies pile up and it becomes clear no-one is safe. Many heroic deeds have fatal outcomes and there is a hardened realism to the fighting. Like the Allies, the viewer ends up hoping for a miracle. It’s makes for a gripping and overlooked war film, that provides a genuinely hard-hitting taste of how unforgiving war can be. Tense, well-filmed and exciting it’s a little gem.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)

Chaney establishes his own legend in this crowd-pleasing epic, shot on the grandest scale

Director: Wallace Worsley

Cast: Lon Chaney (Quasimodo), Patsy Ruth Miller (Esmeralda), Norman Kerry (Phoebus de Chateaupers), Kate Lester (Madame de Gondelaurier), Winifred Bryson (Fleur de Lys), Nigel de Brulier (Dom Claud), Brandon Hurst (Jehan), Ernest Torrance (Clopin), Tully Marshall (Louis XI), Harry van Meter (Mons. Neufchantel)

If any film cemented Lon Chaney’s reputation as ‘Man of a Thousand Faces’ it was this. Chaney knew Quasimodo was a gift for him, securing the rights for himself and shipping them around the major studios until Universal Studios bit. Setting up the project as a ‘Super Jewel’ (with Chaney taking a handsome pay cheque), a near full scale reproduction of the exterior (and many of the interiors) of Notre Dame was built on the Universal set and the film became a smash hit.

Quasimodo (Lon Chaney) is the frightful bellringer of Notre Dame cathedral, a lonely hunchbacked man, mocked and scorned by Parisians. Half-deaf after years of bellringing, he is in thrall to his master Jehan (Brandon Hurst), brother of the saintly Dom Claud (Nigel de Brulier). Jehan tasks Quasimodo to kidnap the beautiful Roma girl Esmeralda (Patsy Ruth Miller), adopted daughter of Clopin (Ernest Torrance), ‘king’ of the beggars. It fails, but the arrested Quasimodo is treated with kindness by Esmeralda and falls in love with her. Esmeralda though is in love with roguish captain Phoebus (Norman Kerry), only to be accused of attempted murder after the jealous Jehan stabs him. Quasimodo rescues Esmeralda as the city collapses into revolt.

Brilliantly assembled by producer Carl Laemmle, Hunchback looks amazingly impressive. The reconstruction of Notre Dame (and the square around it) is genuinely stunning in its scale and detail. (Surely thousands of viewers believed it’s the real thing!) The sets inside the cathedral skilfully use depth perception to create cloisters that seem to go on forever. Crowd scenes fill the film with vibrancy: from the off, with its medieval feast of fools, it’s a dynamic explosion of energy, with everything from men dressed as bears to dancing skeletons, full of raucous naughtiness. Later battle scenes (including a cavalry charge) before Notre Dame’s doors brilliantly use the sets striking height.

The film’s finest effect though is Chaney’s Quasimodo, a portrait of sadness and timidity under an aggressive frame. Chaney’s physical dexterity and ability to bend and twist his body is put to astonishingly good effect, as a he swings on bells, clambers up and down the set and contorts his body into a series of twisted shapes that drip of pathos. He finds a childlike innocence in this man who knows virtually nothing of the real world and latches onto those who show him affection with a puppy-like adoration.

The film’s finest sequences show-case Chaney: whether that’s following his graceful descent down the walls of Notre Dame or seeing his fear and vulnerability exposed in front of the crowd. In a film of such vastness, perhaps its most striking moment is one of genuine intimacy. Tied to a wheel for a public lashing (taking the rap for Jehan’s misdeeds), Chaney retreats into shame and fear and recoils in terror when Esmeralda approaches him – only to soften and almost collapse into a pool of gratitude when she tenderly offers him water rather than the abuse the crowd gives him.

It’s a striking testament to Chaney’s mastery of physical transformation, but also his ability to humanise those who appear as monsters. Quasimodo’s genuine love for Esmeralda is very sweet, as his bubbly excitement at experiencing such feelings for the first time. Chaney’s determination to protect Esmeralda at all costs (including misguidedly defending Notre Dame from a gang of beggars as bent on protecting her as he is) is very touching. It’s a genuinely great performance.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame cemented the public image of the novel – most of the (many) later versions that followed used it as an inspiration. For starters, it moved Quasimodo into the most prominent role. Forever more, the public image of the novel was a lonely, tragic man, swinging on bell ropes and shouting sanctuary. Not just that: this film started a trend of splitting the novel’s hypocritical churchman Frollo into two characters (here a noble priest and his villainous brother) to avoid making a man of the cloth a villain. It also started the ball rolling on re-interpretating the selfish Phoebus as more of a matinee-idol romantic figure. Not to mention seeing the film as a gothic-laden, semi-romance with Hugo’s social and political commentary utterly shorn off.

Today we only have a reduced road-show cut of the film. This does mean Hunchback sometimes rushes or abandons plot points, or swiftly cuts off scenes with an occasional abruptness. An entire plot strand of Eulalie Jensen’s deranged old woman (secretly the mother of Esmeralda) is utterly abandoned without any emotional conclusion. Tully Marshall’s Louis XI pops up for a few brief scenes only to be ditched with brutal abruptness. Phoebus’ initial fiancée Fleur du Lys and her mother emerge for a few key scenes to be all but forgotten by the close.

Hunchback ditches many of the novel’s complexities. As mentioned, Phoebus – in the book a creepy semi-rapist – becomes a conventional romantic leading man. Hunchback has echoes of his novel’s more ambiguous original: his first scene flirting with Esmeralda features a cut to a spider spinning a web and Louis XI openly calls him a rogue. But his affection for Esmeralda is treated as genuine, allowing the film to excuse his shabby treatment of Fleur de Lys. Norman Kerry does his best with all this, although the audience is far more invested in Quasimodo’s unrequited love for Esmeralda.

Similarly, the social commentary around the beggar’s, led by a charismatic Ernest Torrence as Clopin, gets shaved back. Hunchback throws in a snide comment about ‘justice’ under Louis in its title cards as Quasimodo is thrashed for Jehan’s crimes and Esmeralda’s receives a farcical trial for murder (despite her ‘victim’ Phoebus still being alive) concluding with an iron boot being screwed onto her foot to extract a confession. But the beggar’s campaign for justice gets short-changed in the cut, and it’s just as easy to see them as a gang of troublemakers (who need to be restrained from a lynching at one point by Esmeralda).

Hunchback was directed by Wallace Worsley after other options, including Erich von Stroheim, Tod Browning, Raoul Walsh and Frank Borzage were rejected over concerns about their lack of budget control (an odd concern, seeing as they built a 225-foot replica of the lower front of Notre Dame, including each individual carving and gargoyle). Worsley brings professionalism, marshalling the vast crowd with great skill – promotional material made huge play of him casting aside his megaphone in favour of a radio to control the huge cast. There are few moments of genuine visual originality or inspiration in Hunchback, but Worsley captures the scale with some fine camerawork (especially striking images looking down from the top of Notre Dame).

Hunchback is an epic drama, a grand melodrama with a brilliant performance by Chaney. However, you can argue its focus is on entertainment rather than cinematic skill. There are genuinely very few truly memorable shots. It feels like a producer’s film, where resources are expertly managed and the money spent is all up on screen. But when its’ put up there as entertainingly as this, who can complain about that?