The Long Voyage Home (1940)

Ford’s stylistic triumph is weak on narrative but strong on expressionist visual beauty

Director: John Ford

Cast: John Wayne (Olsen), Thomas Mitchell (Driscoll), Ian Hunter (Smitty), Barry Fitzgerald (Cocky Stuart), Wilfrid Lawson (Captain), John Qualen (Axel Swanson), Mildred Natwick (Freda), Ward Bond (Yank), Arthur Shields (Donkeyman), Joseph Sawyer (Davis), J.M. Kerrigan (Crimp)

John Ford is most associated with the grand vistas of the West. But ask him what film he really admired, and he was likely to answer FW Murnau’s Sunrise. The atmospheric beauty of the only ever winner of the Oscar for Unique and Artistic Picture inspired Ford to make this adaptation of four one-act Eugene O’Neill plays. The look and feel was so important to Ford, he even willingly shared his title card with photographic maestro Gregg Toland. The Long Voyage Home is not always a film of outstanding narrative, but it can claim to be possibly the most visually striking film Ford ever made.

The story focuses on the crew of the British merchant ship Glencairn, making its way from the West Indies back to England during the Second World War. Captained by a distant skipper (Wilfrid Lawson), the moral leader of the mostly Irish crew is boisterous, good-natured Driscoll (Thomas Mitchell). His shipmates include genial young Swede Ole Olsen (John Wayne), brooding, suspicious Englishman Smitty (Ian Hunter), trouble-maker Cocky (Barry Fitzgerald), burly bruiser Yank (Ward Bond) and timid Swede Axel (John Qualen). During the voyage, tragedy will occur, suspicion of treachery will fall on Smitty and Olsen will struggle to return to his family after ten years away.

The Long Voyage Home mashes the plots of these four O’Neill play into one loose narrative (and it is very loose), where you can almost see the joins as we progress from one play to another. But O’Neill loved the end result – he claimed to have watched his print of the film so often it wore out. Essentially, every twenty-five minutes or so, a new crisis or plot point kicks off and runs its course towards a (usually) tragic ending, all of which serves as a neat reminder that serving at sea is a tough life with more than a few perils, made even worse when you do it during war time.

But The Long Voyage Home is really an impressionistic Murnau film populated by the sort of amiable, good-natured, hard-drinking, quick-to-fight-quick-to-laugh Irishmen Ford loved. It’s a sort of Quiet Man Goes to Sea (a double gag now, since Wayne is the quietest man in it), with Thomas Mitchell’s larger-than-life mix of sentimental affection and roaring, fist-throwing joi d-vivre driving the narrative. It’s Driscoll who smuggles on Caribbean lovelies and alcohol for the crew before departing the West Indies, leads the way in any fights, but also comforts the dying and casts a fatherly arm over those in need. He’s the heart in Ford’s experiment in pushing the stylistic envelope.

It’s a very successful pushing, because The Long Voyage Home looks fabulous. This is possibly some of the finest photographic work Gregg Toland ever did – on the basis of this, Welles decided Toland was the man for Citizen Kane. From its opening, Long Voyage Home is a sumptuous collection of moody, fog-filled shots, where streaks of light cast powerful shadows over multiple scenes. Toland opens with a deep focus shot of the ship at sea, with West Indian women foregrounded from the opening and moves from there to mist being sliced through by searchlight torches to reveal the ship.

It’s a stylistic benchmark the film maintains throughout. Only Ford and Toland may have been brave enough to use light and shadow so strikingly. Some scenes are even lit facing into a strong light, casting long shadows towards the camera from which characters emerge. The ship is shot from unique and imaginative angles, most strikingly a low angle lens that Ward Bond’s luckless Yank is washed towards like a mannequin. The sort of striking visual imagery from The Informer is pushed even further. A character dies in a row boat, suddenly peppered by a Luftwaffe machine gun, his leg hanging over the side. The English port sees light dance off the cobble-stones and dingy pubs turned into places of shadow-filled beauty. A final punch-up is partly shot through dropped torches and lit matches. It’s a visual masterpiece.

The fact it’s not more highly regarded in Ford’s cannon is possibly because the episodic story is not always the most compelling, largely because it lacks a true through-line as it moves from event-to-event. But, in many ways, the way it plays a bit fast and loose with O’Neill is to its credit. No slavish, stagey reprise here (unlike, say, Ford’s less successful Mister Roberts). But it does make it a film that’s easy to drop in and out of, and one hard to summarise other than “(mostly) Irish sailors shoot the breeze on a ship”. Many of these chapters are striking, but it’s a film lacking narrative force.

What it’s straining towards is the idea that these men – all of whom are almost like big kids on a day trip – are deeply in love with the freedom of the sea, while also feeling trapped in its embrace. And that, perhaps, with the tendency to drink and fight at the drop of a hat, makes them their own worst enemies. Nearly every crisis in the film comes out of one or other of these demons. I suspect the idea doesn’t crystalise because Ford can’t shake his affectionate regard for exactly those qualities. (It’s also an unremarked irony that for nearly all these guys, this is not a ‘voyage home’ at all).

It’s also perhaps overlooked because people can’t wrap their head around the on-paper bizarre casting of John Wayne. The Duke, surely, was literally no one’s idea of a Swede. It’s a reminder of what a star Wayne was that your eye is so constantly drawn to him, considering how little he does for most of the film. He makes a noble attempt at an accent, but it must have been even worse than what we end up with considering Ole barely speaks for almost an hour and twenty minutes. Ford, who wasn’t that convinced by Wayne’s acting at the best of times, clearly cut some losses here.

The Long Voyage Home is at its best when it focuses on the visuals, and when it falls back on the natural charisma and easy-bond between its character actor stars, in particular Mitchell and Fitzgerald (Mildred Natwick also gives a fine performance as a guilt-ridden good-time girl). The atmospheric, brooding intensity is outstanding and, perhaps more than any other Ford film, it has shots you could hang in a gallery. It’s a lovely reminder of what an artist, the hard-drinking tough-guy really was.

Gangs of New York (2002)

Scorsese’s epic missed-opportunity, a film full of merits but overall unsatisfying

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Amsterdam Vallon), Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Cameron Diaz (Jenny Everdeane), Liam Neeson (“Preist” Vallon), Jim Broadbent (William “Boss” Tweed), John C Reilly (“Happy” Jack Mulraney), Henry Thomas (Johnny Sirocco), Brendan Gleeson (Walter “Monk” McGinn), Gary Lewis (McGloin), Stephen Graham (Shang), Eddie Marsan (Killoran), Alec McCowen (Reverend Raleigh), David Hemmings (John F Schermerhorn), Lawrence Gilliard Jnr (Jimmy Spoils)

Gangs of New York: the film Scorsese always dreamed of making. I wonder if it’s now the film he dreams most about getting another go at? It needed serious money to make it, from the pockets of Harvey Weinstein (oh dear God). It’s well-known that Weinstein – then infamous as ‘Harvey Scissorhands’ before far more revolting revelations – and Scorsese fought throughout (so much so Scorsese considered quitting cinema). Scorsese has always claimed the unevenly paced final film is his ‘director’s cut’ – but considering his more recent films with even-more-bottomless-pocket backing (Netflix and Apple) were nearly four hours a piece, that’s increasingly hard to believe.

Set mostly during the horror of the American Civil War, Gangs of New York bites off an awful lot. A depiction of an entire era of American culture, exploration of migration and race in America, corruption in New York politics, gang warfare on the streets of Victorian New York, a son looking for revenge… Gangs of New York tries to cover it all and with very mixed success. Irish migrant Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo Di Caprio) grows up an orphan after his gang boss father ‘Priest’ (Liam Neeson) is killed by nativist gang leader Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis). He returns to New York, bent on revenge, working his way into Bill’s confidence, while Civil War tensions bubble and burn in New York.

There genuinely is a lot to enjoy in Gangs of New York. Not least the huge scale of it. Dante Ferretti went to town recreating the slums of nineteenth century New York, chucking in the sort of details which reflect what must have been hours scrutinising historical records. Unlike other Scorsese films, Gangs drips in colour, with the various street groups showing off their panache with colourful, distinctive clothing – just as the posh knobs of uptown New York flaunt their wealth in their threads. This all gives a huge amount of scope for Scorsese’s superb camerawork, very lusciously shot and with sequences cut to perfection by Thelma Schoonmaker (Howard Shore’s score is also good, although you can tell listening to it, he was still immersed in Middle Earth).

And of course, when the story is boiled down to it’s the principles it is most engaged in, it is a decent story of a son revenging a father by taking out a man he almost begins to see as a surrogate father. The casting of Liam Neeson as Amsterdam’s lost pop is a masterstroke. Neeson’s charismatic presence easily convinces an audience that of course characters would still be talking about him decades later and even his enemies would dream of becoming him. Gangs tries to wrap its fingers around a Homeric plot: new boss Bill is consumed with boredom at his mastery of the world and wants a challenge, so almost deliberately restarts the earlier cycle, casting DiCaprio’s Amsterdam as a younger version of himself (with himself as Neeson’s Priest). In turn, as is often the case with Scorsese, we’re left in tenterhooks to see if Amsterdam is savvy enough to get out of a life of crime or if he will double down.

This plot is also the most engaging as it revolves around Daniel Day-Lewis’ larger-than-life Bill the Butcher. Plucked from a supposed retirement (in the years leading up to this, urban rumour had it Day-Lewis worked as cobbler somewhere in Italy), Day-Lewis rips into Gangs with the sort of towering commitment that saw him tapping a glass contact lens on his eye with a knife dozens of times a day so he could do it without flinching on camera. But Day-Lewis doesn’t just chew the scenery. He makes Bill as poetic and reflective as he is impulsively violent. His triumphs give him only passing pleasure and he feels like a relic clinging to a dying past. Day-Lewis has a knock-out, early-morning monologue (draped in an American flag) which he gives just the right spin of vulnerable regret and desire for an equal, even while talking about the unrelenting violence of his rise and the fear it’s based on. He’s the primary reason to continue watching the film.

Because aside from that, you are picking out only scenes and performances that survived the ruthless cutting down to the two-and-a-half hours we have. Day-Lewis gets more than his fair share, and there are fine performances from Brendan Gleeson as a principled club-for-hire, Jim Broadbent as a jovially corrupt politician and John C Reilly as a sleazily sadistic policeman. The film’s opening, a pitched street-battle, is shot and directed with real gusto, as are later scenes of New York Draft riots. Dynamic filming ideas abound, like a striking scene that tracks in one-shot Irish immigrants arriving, being pelted with stones, signing up for the army and boarding a ship out of New York to almost certain death on the front lines. But it’s only flashes of brilliance.

The overwhelming feeling otherwise is how fast everything is going and how half-formed plot ideas feel. Characters who were surely once more important in a longer cut, linger on the edges of scenes (or are billed prominently without even having names). The film relies so much on the vast background and research in its making that many of its scenes require DiCaprio to frequently limber up for an intermittent voiceover to force-feed us historical context on everything from the Five Points to pick-pocketing to the passing of the Draft Act. Several scenes – often involving Broadbent – feel like bullet points of longer, denser conversations rammed with historical details.

The vast amount of stuff the film tries to cover in its non-epic running time leaves so much feeling under explored or box-ticked. I can imagine a cut where more time given over to nativist fury at Lincoln’s slavery emancipation would have led to a more complex plot for Lawrence Gilliard Jnr’s Jimmy (the only Black character in the film), instead of him being treated as just one of a crowd until he’s unceremoniously lynched in a riot. Or the hypocritical church, which drives out the poor from their only refuge to build a church to tend to them, would have been seen as real antagonists. Or the wealthy, preening themselves during sight-seeing tours to the Five Points, may have been used to explore the class tensions in a country where the poor were being shipped to the Civil War front lines to die. All of these ideas, and more, get their five minutes in the sun but leave little real impact.

It also doesn’t help that both DiCaprio and Diaz feel out of the depth. Perhaps this role, and the chance to work with Scorsese, was something DiCaprio didn’t feel ready for. He finds little of interest or life in Amsterdam, who feels moody and sullen rather than a conflicted angel of revenge. He’s also struggling with the accent; but not as much as Diaz, fighting a losing battle with her Irish lilt. Diaz never really convinces as a working-class pickpocket (she feels far too modern and middle class). She also has the most cliched role as (essentially) a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, pushing her man to leave revenge behind. Both actors, you feel, were part of Weinsteins box-office plan (Weinstein also vetoed any physical consequences for the ferocious beating Amsterdam takes at the halfway point – within ten minutes of screentime he looks no worse than he would sleeping off a big night).

Gangs of New York feels like a sort of Spark Notes version of a much-longer, more-complex, multi-faceted film on race, class, gender and immigration in Civil War New York. All that stuff is in there but skirted over so fast with such little depth you can very easily watch the film a couple of times and not spot it at all. Which I suppose makes it a tragedy of sorts, a real could-have-been. Its noticeable that, twenty years later, no-one seems inclined to look back at Gangs of New York and re-evaluate it as some sort of misunderstood masterpiece. Instead, it feels like the film as forgotten now as it was at the Oscars with its eleven nominations and zero wins.

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

Lubitsch’s touch doesn’t fail him in this light and frothy but charming comedy

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Cast: Maurice Chevalier (Lt Niki von Preyn), Claudette Colbert (Franzi), Miriam Hopkins (Princess Anna), Charles Ruggles (Max), George Barbier (King Adolf XV), Hugh O’Connell (Niki’s Orderly)

Lt Niki von Preyn (Maurice Chevalier) has it made. An officer in the Royal Guard, he’s the toast of Vienna. When he joins married friend Max (Charles Ruggles) as a wingman for a café trip to check out glamourous violinist Franzi (Claudette Colbert), he snaffles her from under Max’s arms and falls head-over-heels in love. So much so, he can’t help but smile at her while he’s on duty. Problem is, he does it while the visiting King (George Barbier) and Princess Anna (Miriam Hopkins) of Flausenthurm are driving past, and they are convinced he was laughing at her. Niki defuses the potential diplomatic disaster – but Anna falls in love with him and Niki finds himself married to her, while still in love with Franzi. How will this be solved?

Ernst Lubitsch brings his touch once again to the grand courts of Europe – Austria and the fictional land of Flausenthurm – in a light, witty and quietly rather naughty La Belle Époque drama, that’s crammed full of fabulous lines and cheeky gags. It’s almost a retread of The Love Parade and the set-up remains as light and frothy as before, with Chevalier pretty much playing the same role: a suave, likeable playboy roped into a dutiful marriage which (spoilers) eventually works out. Lubitsch lets both comedy and drama glide by incredibly smoothly, with a Wildean wit – and you could argue the greatest Lubitsch touch of all is presenting a comic romance where the man ends up with the “wrong” girl.

He does so because our Niki is a regular horn-dog under his Chevalier-esque charm: all that’s needed for him to look at Princess Anna as something other than a checkers-partner is for her to ‘jazz up her lingerie’ (an actual song title – welcome to pre-code Hollywood), puff a cigarette, smarten up her blonde locks and burn her dull nightwear. What’s a neat reversal is that this make-over comes courtesy of Franzi, who may look like a nightclub charmer but has the heart-and-soul of a true believer in marriage. More than enough – with a warm farewell letter – for Niki to refocus on his loving wife. Would any other director have managed to have his cake and eat it like this? (People have also enjoyed, for decades, the lesbian subtext in the scenes between these two – hilarious as well since they allegedly didn’t get on).

The Smiling Lieutenant has prepared the ground with a parade of cheeky gags along the way, dripping with innuendo and suggestive flirtation. Niki only meets Franzi as he’s been asked to assess her as a possible new mistress for Charles Ruggles (who never looked more like a bank manager as he does here) and promptly steals her away. He’s got several advantages of course: he ‘plays the piano’ so they can do some ‘chamber music’, and these men in uniform are catnip to the girls. Lubitsch making the point with a wonderful sequence as Niki walks Franzi home past a parade of cannoodling officers who ‘jump to attention’ as he passes – culminating in an officer who suddenly emerges from behind the bushes to do the same. Niki and Franzi’s late night discussion culminates in a long discussion about having dinner together – or even better breakfast. Pretty clear what they have in mind. The Smiling Lieutenant manages to make this relationship heartfelt and sweet: so much so, we’re not surprised Niki is giddy on duty.

Possibly only Lubitsch could present the royal family of a small nation as practically rubes in the big city. For all King Adolf complains that the Habsburgs, with a mere 700 years of power, are new kids on the block, the guys from Flausenthurm don’t have the refinement of Viennese. The Austrian Emperor prioritises greeting a train of cows over them (adding insult to injury, said cow train even passes them on their way into the city), they can’t even import a decent Schnitzel. George Barbier’s King Adolf feels more like a bluff country squire than the fifteenth of his name. Poor Anna, played with a wide-eyed naivety by Miriam Hopkins, is a dowdy princess, whose only education comes from Encyclopaedias with ‘all the interesting things left out’.

It makes quite a contrast with Claudette Colbert’s sensual but surprisingly sweet Franzi who is a knock-out on the violin (and other things). Colbert is, naturally, very good bouncing brilliantly off Chevalier who could play these likeable, honourable rogues standing on his head. Princess Anna can look quite dull and dowdy next to her, but Miriam Hopkins manages to suggest decades of repressed sexuality in her, desperate to burst out. She just can’t get it right. Meaning, even with royalty as part of the deal, Niki is like a horse who can be bought to water but can’t be made to drink. Niki’s desperation to get out of a marriage he doesn’t want his hilarious, not least a Catch 22 conversation with Adolf where it’s explained that whether his intentions were honourable or dishonourable both means he has to get married.

The Smiling Lieutenant has the sort of professional lightness and ‘winking’ cheeky comedy that Lubitsch made his own. With wonderfully light comedic performances from its leads – Chevalier was happier breaking the fourth wall with a cheeky grin than any other actor working – and a parade of excellent jokes and one-liners in every scene, combined with Lubitsch’s ability to find a suggestive risqué or hilarious sight gag at the right time, The Smiling Lieutenant is a light sophisticated comedy. Sure, you can argue that Niki’s swerve from loving Franzi to embracing Anna is driven by showing a bit of leg, but when the entire confection is as frothy as this you can’t mind.

Colonel Redl (1985)

An impressively filmed, intelligent, if slightly slow, epic with a barnstorming central performance

Director: István Szabó

Cast: Klaus Maria Brandauer (Colonel Alfred Redl), Hans Christian Blech (Mj General Von Roden), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Archduke, Heir Apparent), Gudrun Landgrebe (Katalin), Jan Niklas (Colonel Kristóf Kubinyi), László Mensáros (Colonel Ruzitska), András Bálint (Dr. Gustav Sonnenschein), László Gálffi (Alfredo Velocchio), Dorottya Udvaros (Clarissa), Károly Eperjes (Lt Jaromil Schorm)

Colonel Alfred Redl was head of the Austo-Hungarian counter-intelligence corps in the build-up to World War One. He was also, possibly, blackmailed due to his homosexuality, into being a Russian double agent and was eventually left in a hotel room with a pistol to do ‘the honourable thing’ after he was caught, a year or so before the war that toppled the Empire began. That’s the basis for Szabó’s film, a reteaming with Brandauer after the success of Mephisto, which fictionalises Redl into a self-loathing mass of every trait the autocratic Austrian army hates.

Colonel Redl revolves around another tour-de-force performance by Brandauer, in a very different vein to his triumph in Mephisto but another searing embodiment of a man selling his soul for precious little return. Redl is a cold, distant, reserved man who on the surface seems to be a robotic machine of career advancement. But Brandauer masterfully makes him a man seething with self-disgust, loneliness and above all fear. Redl always seems on in dread of being found out: as working class, as a repressed homosexual, as a Rutherian, as a Jew. He’s trying to assimilate into a system that despises everything he is, and no amount of being more Austrian or Emperor-worshipping than anyone will change that. Szabó’s introduces him via his reflection in close-up and he’s a man who becomes the mask he’s practicing.

In Szabó’s classical, reserved film, Redl is forever the little boy who, on visiting the home of his aristocratic friend Kubinyi, panics because he doesn’t know how to turn a samovar off. His whole life is waiting for the inevitable moment when he’ll stand in a puddle of tea, desperately asking for help. Throughout the film, Brandauer’s Redl will lash out with terror when encountering people that compromise his carefully preserved exterior. He berates a Jewish man who invites him to a Friday Night dinner and remains petrified that contact with Jewish people will somehow pollute him. He practically throws money at his poor sister when she visits his office and commands her never to return. Brandauer’s face is awash with tortured shame, and Redl doesn’t shirk at condemning himself, even writing “insincere” as a character note in his army records.

This entirely constructed man reveals parts of himself to no-one. His one early bond is with aristocratic Hungarian friend Kubinyi, strikingly played with a mix of hauteur and entitled decency by Jan Niklas. From childhood, Redl covers for this indolent, rebellious friend – even breaking the school code by naming others for Kubinyi’s rule-breaking at their military academy – and continues to do so as an adult, protecting him from the consequences of a duel and carrying his friend with him in his early rise in the ranks. But Kubinyi, with all the privilege of rank, can afford to mock, criticise or even attack the Austrian system Redl dedicates his life to. A reaction that leads to a break between them that never really heals.

It’s a break partly brought about by Redl’s affair with Kubinyi’s sister Katalin, very well played by Gudrun Landgrebe. The two are drawn together by their shared past and unhappy, lonely lives. But it doesn’t stop Redl from confessing, during their first night together, he was thinking of Kubinyi. His suppressed, confused longing for his friend is evident from an early sexual encounter with a prostitute. There, he feels more interested in the prostitute’s previous encounters with Kubinyi – and Redl only feels stimulated after he spies on Kubinyi in the throw’s of passion with another woman. Redl and Katalin share an emotional closeness – Redl confesses he has told her things he has told no-one – but their sexual bond feels like one of convenience. Redl can later barely raise interest in the sickly Helene, who he marries to ward off rumours of homosexuality.

Redl has dedicated himself to a life of service to the Austro-Hungarian empire. An empire which, he slowly realises, is doomed to wither and die for many of the reasons he embodies. It’s a decaying, rigid system that treats anyone who deviates from its personal ideal with contempt. Throughout his career, Redl is given glimpses of the rotten regime he’s serving or encounters those like Lt Schorm (a world-weary Károly Eperjes) who are more far-sighted than in him in seeing the flaws. Even Kubinyi thinks the empire is doomed and is laying the groundwork for an independent Hungary. But Redl dedicates himself to the constructed version of himself he made in childhood.

But it’s not enough. Colonel Redl spends much of its slower-paced second half walking through a web of state-sponsored deviousness that isn’t always explained clearly (or compellingly) in the film’s narrative. Needless to say, Redl’s loyalty and hard work end up counting for very little when he is the perfect fall guy for a confusedly ill-thought out idea the Heir (Armin Mueller-Stahl, excellent as a fictionalised version of Franz Ferdinand rife with power-hungry self-confidence) has to unify the army via a scapegoat trial. The ideal target is a man of very specific national and religious background – in fact, Redl’s doppleganger – and when that man inconveniently commits suicide by cop, Redl quickly suspects his own corrupt investigation is now being targeted at him.

Redl, it’s clear, has wasted his life defending, for no thanks, a crumbling regime ripe to fall. Colonel Redl grasps at some of the extensive nationalist and religious tensions that existed in the Austro-Hungarian empire. It doesn’t always do this completely successfully – even in its vast run time, it finds it hard to juggle making these complexities clear while also telling the personal story of its anti-hero. But it does make clear the misguided effort Redl has dedicated his life to: and, also, the strange relief he finds in finally being ‘discovered’. Even if the discovery is something he hasn’t done.

Szabó’s stately film – and its rich cinematography which moves from the chilly blues of Redl’s academy days, to the muted, fade that fills the screen during the court scenes, undermining their grandeur with grubby colours – sometimes gets itself slightly lost in this labyrinth, its pace slowing to a crawl. Some of its narrative ground echoes Mephisto, but with less of that film’s purist riff on Faust. But it is brought firmly back into life by Brandauer’s stunning, humane performance. Other actors would have been constrained by the rigid Redl, but he makes him a buttoned-up morass of barely suppressed tensions, who rarely feels relaxed and sometimes feels as unreadable to us as he does to those around him. And Brandauer deserves every plaudit for his extraordinary suicide scene, a burst of nervous, terrified energy that fills the final moments of the film with real emotional force.

Colonel Redl looks at the corrupt, failing flaws of Austro-Hungary and links it to the Stalinist trials and state control that would follow after another war. It’s less purely compelling than Mephisto and has a plot that sometimes feel a little too dense. But it hosts a fantastic Brandauer performance and finds a real tragedy in a man who would otherwise have felt coldly unknowable and distant.

Sense and Sensibility (2026)

Very much a response to the last adaptation, full of strange moments that never feel like Austen

Sense and Sensibility (2026)

Director: Georgie Oakley

Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones (Elinor Dashwood), Esmé Creed-Miles (Marianne Dashwood), Caitriona Balfe (Mrs Dashwood), Bodhi Rae Breathnach (Margaret Dashwood), Frank Dillane (John Willoughby), Herbert Nordrum (Colonel Brandon), George MacKay (Edward Ferrars), Fiona Shaw (Mrs Jennings), Stacy Martin (Fanny Dashwood), Tom Brooke (John Dashwood), Turlough Convery (Sir John Middleton), Chloe Pirrie (Lady Middleton)

Shortly before this I rewatched the Emma Thompson/Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility, which despite being over thirty years old is still fresh as a daisy. It’s one of two iconic 1995 adaptations of Jane Austen novels – the other, of course, being the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice – that so completely nail Austen, all other adaptations pretty much feel superfluous. I went into this hoping I’d feel different after watching Georgia Oakley’s film. And No, I very much did not feel different.

You know how it goes. Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) are the Dashwood sisters: one is sensible (introduced dutifully doing household accounts) the other is sensibility (introduced whirling in the country, running through the wheat fields like a wildfire Theresa May). With their mother (Catriona Balfe) and younger sister Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), they are turfed out of their family home after the death of their father – but not until Elinor has fallen in love with Edward Ferrars (George Mackay). Arriving in the country, Marianne in turn falls in love with dashing Willoughby (Frank Dillane), ignoring stoic Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum).

Let’s be fair and talk about what works. Much of the first half-hour, focusing on the gentle courtship between Elinor and Edward, is well done. Daisy Edgar-Jones, gifted at showing deep emotions under a reserved exterior, is perfect casting as Elinor. She has great chemistry with the equally good George Mackay. The sisterly bond between Elinor and Marianne is front-and-centre and feels completely real. Narrative changes actually help make this strong, such as their continued sharing of a bedroom (unlike the novel, here Edward accepts taking one of the sister’s Norwood bedrooms and their pokey cottage also requires them to share a bed). Austen’s best lines still work and there are fine supporting performances, particularly Chloe Pirrie as an awkward Lady Middleton incapable of talking about anything except the weather.

That’s the good. After the first half hour however, despite flashes of decency, the wheels wobble and eventually fall off. What’s most striking about the mess this eventually becomes, is how (despite having some of the right trimmings) it begins to feel nothing like Austen at all. Austen’s work is very much set in a world of restrictions and carefully unexpressed feelings, leading to misapprehensions and misunderstandings. Not a problem here: in this film pretty much everyone utters exactly what they are feeling all the bloody time, as if they were in Wuthering Heights. The clumsy telegraphing of these subtle feelings is like getting walloped by a Bronte collected works every few minutes.

On top of not feeling like Austen, it doesn’t look like Austen. Look I get they wanted a different palette from Ang Lee’s film, full of sun and brightness. But the muddy browns and gloomy overcast skies feels like you watching it through a muddy puddle. It makes the film feel more like it’s a Thomas Hardy adaptation. That would actually match the wild country yokel feeling they’ve given Devonshire, as well as the Tess of the d’Urbervilles like bubbling, openly expressed emotions present all the time. It’s a response, obviously, to the 1995 film but it also doesn’t really feel like Austen at all.

That sense of running scared of its illustrious predecessor also seems to be the reason behind an increasingly bizarre series of changes. Marianne saved by Willoughby from tripping up on a beach rather than tumbling in the rain? Edward Ferrars rocking up to confess the details of his engagement to Elinor rather than Lucy Steele? This change, presumably because they were worried otherwise a modern audience might think Edward was playing fast-and-loose with Elinor, is staggeringly nonsensical. Even within this adaptation, they do not remotely feel like people who would openly state their emotions as they do here. The backstory is made ludicrously complex: apparently Edward’s mother ordered him to marry Lucy Steele, then changed her mind when Lucy lost her money, but Edward stuck with it. It’s an attempt to make Edward not seem remotely cavalier – rather undermined when he later tells Elinor he will ditch Lucy on a word from her (what a prince!). It’s not quite the worst change.

Marianne’s reaction to Willoughby’s jilting bubbles less with shattered idealism and more like a teenager who’s been stood up on prom night (bizarrely Elinor ends up defending him). She doesn’t seem heartbroken, more furious – as if the film was worried that she would otherwise look weak. She then walks through the rain to scream at his house, before coughing and being pronounced at death’s door, before an immediate recovery … Yes this is as much a mess as it sounds. The absolute pits are hit when Brandon and Willoughby fight a spontaneous pistol duel (did Brandon bring them with him on the off-chance?) in front of a Dashwood audience, that’s so left-field that the audience in the cinema I saw it in laughed out loud.

The crude clumsiness of the dialogue, with all those subtle Austen feelings dumped on the table like the dead pheasants Sir john Middleton keeps giving the Dashwoods, is echoed in many of the performances. Creed-Miles can’t find the poetic romanticism in Marianne and has zero chemistry with Dillane. Perhaps not a surprise, since Dillane plays Willoughby’s caddishness from the start (how could anyone not notices this guy’s a rotter?). Their romance is captured in a thinly sketched scenes which don’t ring true either romantically or in period (gossiping on the stairs at a party or lying together in the fields). The real low though is Herbert Nordrum, who clearly read Brandon’s stoic reservedness as “he is boring”, and gives us the most tedious, charisma-free Austen hero ever, someone so dull even Austen would probably rather spend time with the weaselly Willoughby.

The mess just gets worse and worse. The film doesn’t even attempt to re-stage the actual romantic confessions and ending of the book (and the 1995 film), ending where it started but with a different Dashwood galumphing through the fields. But then they couldn’t do the original ending in any case, because these characters have stated their love for each other twice already. It’s also strangely appropriate to end it with Elinor and Edward virtually screaming their emotions at each other on a moor. After all, everyone has been doing the same thing with every thought crossing their mind during the film.

Look I know it had to be different. But this is frequently too far, as if the team working on it would rather have made either Wuthering Heights (but damn, Emerald Fennell got there first) or Far from the Madding Crowd (but damn, Austen is better box office). It frankly doesn’t feel anything like the source and doesn’t do anything entertaining enough to make up for that. Every adaptation is a response to adaptations before. The only response to this, is to watch the 1995 one again.

The Yearling (1946)

Sentimental family drama has a slightly harder edge than you might expect

Director: Clarence Brown

Cast: Gregory Peck (Ezra ‘Penny’ Baxter), Jane Wyman (Ora Baxter), Claude Jarman Jnr (Jody), Chill Wills (Buck Forrester), Clem Bevan (Pa Forrester), Margaret Wycherly (Ma Forrester), Henry Travers (Mr Boyles), Forrest Tucker (Lem Forrester)

Based on a beloved best-seller, The Yearling is set in the Florida farmlands of 1878 where the Baxter family is struggling to make ends meet in tough conditions. Pa Ezra (Gregory Peck) and Ma Ora Baxter (Jane Wyman) have already buried at least two children, which has made Ma prevent herself from getting too close to their 12-year-old son Jody (Claude Jarmon Jnr). Jody has the love of his decent Pa, but his heart needs filling. He finds some of that missing love when he adopts Flag, an orphaned fawn. But a yearling isn’t the best house guest for a farm…

There is something very reassuring on the surface about The Yearling, a seemingly cosy film where the Baxter’s literally call each other Ma and Pa and are hard-working, honest Christian types. However, Clarence Brown’s film mixes sentiment with just enough bitter realism to make for a harder-edged experience than you might expect. That seeps through no matter how much the film is wrapped in gorgeous technicolour. The Oscar winning photography by Arthur Arling, Charles Rosher and Leonard Smith is full of gorgeous skylines and striking warm reddish firelight glows in huts, skilfully mixing locations and studio, all washed down with Herbert Stothart’s richly romantic score.

But it’s often the case films about children and animals are as much tragedies about an absence of love as they are about the sweetness of a child’s bond with one of God’s creatures. That’s certainly the case with The Yearling, a beloved family film that is more hard-hitting than you might expect, not least in the shocking ending of Jody and Flag’s friendship that traumatised generations. The real reason for Jody’s unbreakable love for this wild animal is knowing he’s been effectively rejected by his distant mother who has bottled up her emotions so tightly, only her husband knows how much she cares.

Jane Wyman is arguably the finest part of the film – and one of the easiest to overlook. Wyman’s Ora is beaten down by years of grinding work, relentless poverty and the never-ending blows of child-loss. She can seem humourless and sour, her contribution to a night of family storytelling being a flat, fact-filled statement. Wyman isn’t afraid to make her feel like a strict, hard-to-love mother who constantly corrects Jody. But there are hints throughout, from her quiet delight at the gift of fabric to her anxiety when Pa plans to take their son bear hunting, that lets us know this is a woman of great emotion, terrified to let it show. It’s a tough line to walk, but Wyman does it really well.

But you can still understand why young Jody is wary of her – and why he is invested in his relationship with his father. This father is of course Peck, in a role tailor-made for the most decent and unimpeachable of Hollywood’s leading men (even if the patrician Peck is not your first thought for a farmer). Manly but in touch with his feelings, doting but still a firm dad, He can talk to Jody about life but still stare into the middle distance with a mix of grandiosity and sober mannerism with grounded decency and gentleness. He even has a little touch of naughtiness, willingly misleading a bull-headed neighbour on the value of useless dog without once telling a lie about its qualities.

Arguably The Yearling would work better if both Jody’s parents were distant. It would make even clearer the emotional hole in his life that, like his sickly friend Fodderwig, he fills with creatures who are less complex than human beings. But much of the first hour focuses instead on Jody’s life on the farm, learning the ropes alongside his ever patient Pa. And there are lot of ropes: from managing feeble crops, to building fences and hunting. It’s also not exactly safe – something you realise clearly on watching the surprisingly ferocious bear-dog fight Brown stages (I was relieved, and also surprised, Animal Rights gave this the thumbs up) or Pa going to desperate measures to save himself from a snake bite.

Which all serves as a reminder that wild animals and farmland don’t go well together. Possibly because the deer was apparently such a nightmare to shoot – wild animals apparently don’t take direction – there is no attempt to anthropomorphise Flag. It’s clear from the start that, no matter how much this fawn follows Jody around, he’s a liability. One of the first thing Flag does is drink the carefully collected cows milk. As he gets older he tramples or eats crops and no matter how hard Jody slaves on fences and other means to try and stop Flag. This is the hardened realism under The Yearling’s romance.

Of course, Pa never should have allowed Jody to keep the animal in the first place. Ma certainly never would, but that’s probably why Pa does. It’s only storing up trouble for a sensitive boy. Jody is a caring boy who treats people with kindness, but also strikes out when he feels he is treated poorly (he even throws a stone at the daughter of the trading store who mocks his nervous affection). A more challenging film than The Yearling may well have pushed us to recognise the lack of human complexity in Flag is probably the main attraction to Jody, but you can still pick that up.

Claude Jarmon Jnr does a decent job as this young child, even if Clarence Brown lets him breakdown into tear-soaked blubbing once too often (even Peck later mocked the film as the one where “the kid cried too much”). But The Yearling is good at depicting the innocence of childhood, where every day is an adventure and a trusted Pa can make everything turn out well. Learning that the world is not exactly like that is the focus of The Yearling’s closing act, and while its answers are generally fairly simplistic and lean towards reassuring, they are delivered with a certain satisfying emotional heft.

It’s part of what makes it such an iconic family film. Because sometimes the ones that stick with us are the tough coming-of-age tales that start with the magic of childhood adventures and end with unbearable sacrifices on the way to cathartic emotional discoveries. The Yearling has a lot of this, probably why it’s been such a reliable crowd pleaser for decades.

A View to a Kill (1985)

Possibly the worst film of the entire franchise, not helped by Moore’s being well and truly past it

Director: John Glen

Cast: Roger Moore (James Bond), Christopher Walken (Max Zorin), Tanya Roberts (Stacey Sutton), Grace Jones (May Day), Patrick Macnee (Sir Godfrey Tibbett), Patrick Bauchay (Scarpine), Willoughby Gray (Dr Karl Mortner), David Yip (Chuck Lee), Desmond Llewelyn (Q), Robert Brown (M), Walter Gotell (General Gogol), Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny), Geoffrey Keen (Minister), Manning Redwood (Bob Conley), Alison Doody (Jenny Flex), Papillon Soo Soo (Pan Ho), Fiona Fullerton (Pola Ivanova)

After watching A View to a Kill Roger Moore declared he probably should have stopped after Octopussy (others would say For Your Eyes Only would have been even better). He’s not wrong. Putting aside the whole question of age (of which more later) A View to a Kill is one of the worst outings Bond ever had on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. A blatant Goldfinger rip-off, it’s full of the sort of ridiculousness Moore made his own but with plenty of the sort of violent rough-and-tumble the other action stars of the 80s were doing. It manages to be neither remotely funny or particularly exciting.

Bond (Roger Moore) is roped into investigate dodgy goings on in Zorin Industries, run by grinning psychopath Max Zorin (Christopher Walken), aided by his terrifyingly tough girlfriend and chief henchwoman May Day (Grace Jones). Zorin, it turns out, is planning a dastardly plan to sink Silicon Valley (wait a minute: Max all is forgiven!) by blowing a hole in the San Andreas fault. From Paris to San Francisco, Bond is on the trail to foil this scheme, helped and hindered (mostly the latter) by oil heir Stacey (Tanya Roberts).

The elephant in the room of course is Roger Moore’s age. It’s genuinely jaw-dropping to think Moore was younger when he made this film than Tom Cruise was when he made his final Mission: Impossible. Moore looks like a gun-toting Methuselah, the most active part of his lined and winkled face being his immortal arched eyebrow. A film with more courage or wit would have lampshaded this – though of course Bond was never going to go full on “I’m too old for this shit”. There is something insanely icky at watching this ageing lothario take to bed a ludicrously young glamourous agent in the film’s prologue (sliding into the sheets of their mini-sub’s bed, he looks like a dirty old man) or, for that matter, Stacey (so much younger than him, he cooks her a post-fight quiche omelette to sooth her nerve, like a loving uncle). As for when he beds Grace Jones… Genuinely it’s the only point in the film you feel worried about his safety.

On top of this, you can’t help but wonder how much work Moore did on this film. He clearly never visited the Arctic, where the films skiing action entre takes place: a stunt-double zooms around the glaciers, while Moore pops up to raise an eyebrow in close-ups in front of a blue screen. It’s painfully obvious to see the stunt men take over all the driving and a large portion of the fighting (Glen probably deserves some sort of medal for framing so much of this action to not show Bond’s face). His horse-riding sequence is obviously Moore on a hobby horse (to be fair, it’s the same for Walken), while his stunt doubles climb around a fire truck ladder on a racing truck in San Francisco.

It’s all even more painfully in-your-face, because the costume designers clearly decided to dress Moore like a man thirty years younger to disguise his creaking joints. Tank tops and leather jackets? Even when he was in his 20s, Moore (a polo shirt or suit guy) would have looked ridiculous in this garb. They even throw in Patrick Macnee as an even older action star (he might as well be called John Unsteady). At one point these two dress up in dark leather jackets to raid a warehouse, theming look like two lost granddads trying to brazen out a tough Friday night on the town after the pubs have closed.

It’s particularly noticeable how doddering Moore is when he’s constantly being compared to the energetic youngsters he’s up against. Grace Jones is of course a lean strip of muscle and macho attitude. She may not be the greatest actor in the world – her range rarely stretches beyond ‘angry’ – but she sure can kick, punch and throw. Similarly, Christopher Walken lets his signature staccato delivery rip under a mop of blond hair and a wild-eyed grin. Zorin is a demented Nazi genetic experiment – like the wet dream of the baddies in The Boys from Brazil (he even has a Mengele-style daddy in Willoughby Gray’s monocle-clad scientist) – who throws himself into judo and action sequences with a sweaty-browed enthusiasm Moore could never match.

Zorin is possibly one of the meanest, most psychotic villains in Bond films. So much so, he sometimes feels a little out of place in the comic world of Moore’s Bond films. (Rather like everything in Moonraker being double-taking pigeons until a woman gets ripped apart by dogs). View to a Kill gives us goofy gags such as a bizarre Poirot parody (with the ludicrous name Achille Aubergine which is stupid rather than funny) who gets knocked off by a poisonous model butterfly (don’t ask) during a high society dinner. Then later it’s happy to give us a prolonged sequence of Walken machine-gunning underlings at point blank range while giggling like a schoolboy. That’s how far A View to a Kill can ying and yang.

It’s blatant Goldfinger rip-off is most obvious in its virtual replay (but less than half as good) of the villain’s briefing of his crony’s scene (right down to a flunky saying he’ll have no part of this madness and getting instantly dispatched), but it’s there throughout. Substitute horse-racing for golf, Silicon Valley for Fort Knox, a zeppelin for a bi-plane, throw in a last-minute bomb foiling and various offed side-kicks in cars and you’ve got Connery’s calling card. With the exception that Stacey Sutton is no Pussy Galore. A tiresome, whining and terminally stupid character (in a Bond Girl low point she fails to hear a slow-moving zeppelin noisily approaching her from behind) with whom Moore has no charisma (and, in fact, barely seems to like).

A View to a Kill stumbles through our geriatric lead tagging in and out with stunt-men, bumbling through set-pieces that never quite click into place, such as the otherworldly lack of danger to anything. How can a chase up the Eiffel Tower feel so dull? A car chase through San Francisco feel like it’s just killing screentime? Jokes rarely land, the villains feel like they are in a different film, the tone never seems consistent and most of it makes no real sense. It’s not really Moore’s fault – frankly, even a Connery or Craig couldn’t have saved this from being a pretty bad film. But it doesn’t change the fact that the only memorable thing about this that’s good is a knock-out Duran Duran song.

Superman II (1980)

An odd mish-mash of styles and strange jumps in logic make this a less successful sequel

Director: Richard Lester

Cast: Christopher Reeve (Clark Kent/Superman), Gene Hackman (Lex Luthor), Ned Beatty (Otis), Jackie Cooper (Perry White), Sarah Douglas (Ursa), Margot Kidder (Lois Lane), Jack O’Halloran (Non), Valerie Perrine (Eve Teschmacher), Maria Schell (Vond-Ah), Terence Stamp (General Zod), Susannah York (Lara), Marc McClure (Jimmy Olsen), EG Marshall (President), Clifton James (Sheriff)

Superman started with Brando’s Jor-El condemning Kryptonian criminals General Zod (Terence Stamp) and his sidekicks Ursa (Sarah Douglas) and Non (Jack O’Halloran) to ‘living death’ in the Phantom Zone. Decades later, Superman (Christopher Reeve) accidentally releases them by deflecting a Parisian Hydrogen bomb into space. They arrive on Earth with the same powers as Superman, hell bent on revenge. Unfortunately, Superman is unaware of this, whiling away time in the Fortress of Solitude with Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) who has learned his identity. Sacrificing his powers to live a normal life, how will he stop the world’s population “kneeling before Zod”.

Superman II was to be filmed simultaneously with Superman. At least that was the idea. But as producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind’s tenuous control of finances spun further and further out of control, efforts refocused on finishing the first one. When that was a hit, work was due to re-start on Part 2. That’s where the trouble began. The Salkind’s relationship with director Richard Donner was already heavily on the rocks. Further disputes over the tone of the sequel – Donner claimed he wanted a serious film and that the Salkinds wanted a kid-friendly, gag-heavy chortle – led to Donner’s sudden sacking and replacement with the Salkind’s favourite director, Richard Lester.

To say the style of these two didn’t mesh would be an understatement. Donner was all about making the high-blown and ridiculous feel full of po-faced seriousness (you could say self-importance). Richard Lester, on the other hand, was the man who turned Juggernaut, a film about a murderous bomber, into a work-place black comedy. Any film that used an odd combination of both man’s material was probably doomed to be a Frankenstein’s monster, neither one thing or another.

That’s pretty much what Superman II is. In many ways, with Lester taking over 75% of the way through – and then looping back and re-shooting several scenes to ensure he had directed over 60% of the film and guarantee (after Donner refused to take any credit) that the film would have someone as a credited director – it’s a miracle it makes any sense at all. As it is, the tone varies wildly at times from scene-to-scene: a prat fall gets followed by a death, a romantic riff by a mortal threat. From it’s Parisian opening with its incompetent bombers (one of whom is played by Richard Griffiths of all people), through to its goofy comedy as villains trash a mid-Western town, each set piece is two thirds drama to one third farce. In addition, the long break in filming means the actor’s appearance switches and changes frequently and important plot developments suddenly spring out of nowhere.

A lot of that came from contract disputes. Original top-billed star Marlon Brando was suing the Salkinds, convinced they were stiffing him on his 11.75% box office share from Superman. Since Brando was entitled to the same share of this film if he appeared in it, every single frame of him was cut. Which would have been fine – if Brando’s Jor-El hadn’t been pivotal to a de-powered Superman regaining his powers. Lester had already re-shot several Fortress of Solitude scenes with the more amenable (and cheaper) Susannah York taking over as tutoring hologram. Clearly, they ran out-of-time – or just didn’t think anyone would care enough – about also getting her to reshoot a scene to take the place of the last vestige of Jor-El in the Fortress’ computer erasing itself to restore Clark’s powers. Instead, Clark just gets them back off-camera, no problem.

There are touches of this throughout the film. Hackman had refused to return after Donner’s firing, his scenes all too obviously finished by a stand-in with his back to the camera while another actor gives a nearly-but-not-quite impersonation of Hackman on the soundtrack. Several times scenes with Hackman suddenly stop, which feels odd – and then you realise they were impossible to finish. It also means poor Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine also fade into the background or disappear (presumably because it would have been hard to do her scenes with the camera fixed behind a double’s back).

The thrown-together madness of the film can be seen in the bizarre story. Zod’s entire time on Earth seems to take place more-or-less in real time: arriving, terrorising a small town, capturing the White House. Meanwhile, Clark and Lois romance at Niagara Falls on a very poorly explained journalistic sting operation (including an embarrassing pre-fame Antony Sher as a lascivious hotel bellboy) and retire to the Fortress for a night of passion, a depowering and then travel from the North Pole to America (by boat and car presumably!), presumably all in the same day. You can’t blame the staff at the diner they stop at being flabbergasted at how many world-shattering events they’ve missed.

As to be expected, Donner’s grand, Fordian vision is sacrificed to Lester’s love for sight gags. Donner sure wouldn’t have used Zod and crew creating a mighty wind to blow away a Metropolis mob as an opportunity for ice cream cones, wigs and hen-picked husbands clutching telephones to be swept away. Throughout, people are forever crashing into puntastic advertising boardings or (a classic Lester touch) letting loose little muttered asides we only half catch. He even ropes in Clifton James to repeat his JW Pepper from James Bond performance in all but name.

That final Metropolis fight is still impressive in places, despite its obvious sound-stage setting – it’s important to remember it’s the first time anything like this was ever attempted on screen. The actors work hard to maintain a sense of menace and danger from our villains, despite the odd dorky moment. One decision that works extremely well, is Stamp’s underplaying of Zod as a perpetually unimpressed aristocrat, almost immediately bored by his God-like powers. By not straining hard for laughs, Stamp is frequently the funniest thing in the film (and its most memorable performer).

Reeve and Kidder do their best, but the film gives them considerably less to play with. Largely because their relationship feels very rushed, Clark’s decision to de-power himself coming almost from nowhere and lacking any real explanation for why it’s necessary, and neither the script or character being quite nimble enough to not make both Clark and Lois’ reaction to his being duffed up in a bar fight feel like two people who suddenly feel like in losing Superman they’ve got the raw end of the deal.

Superman II powers itself on with a dorky sense of energy, but really it’s a bizarre hotchpotch of the grand and mighty and the ludicrous and silly, that frequently tries to put both in the same scene at the same time. Not surprisingly, it means a film that’s half Donner and half Lester ends up feeling much worse than if it had been made alone by either one of them. Which is not to say either of those films would have any good either.

Masters of the Universe (2026)

Catnip to fans (like me) but honestly a tonal mess of a film with just enough fun to almost work

Director: Travis Knight

Cast: Nicholas Galitzine (Adam/He-Man), Camila Mendes (Teela), Idris Elba (Duncan/Man-At-Arms), Jared Leto (Skeletor), Alison Brie (Evil-Lyn), Kirstin Wiig (Roberto), James Purefoy (King Randor), Charlotte Riley (Queen Marlena), Morenca Baccarin (Sorceress), Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson (Fisto), Jon Xue Zhang (Ram-Man), Sam C. Wilson (Trap Jaw), Sasheer Zamata (Suzie), Christian Vunipoa (Huessein)

When I was very young I loved He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I had almost every toy, watched every cartoon, seen the live-action movie – I even continued watching the Further Adventures which took He-Man into space. So, I think its fair to say I am the exact target market for Masters of the Universe: a middle-aged man who hasn’t really grown up, who wants to soak in childhood nostalgia. On several of those scores, I can’t be disappointed with Masters of the Universe, even while recognising this is a deeply flawed film, with far less to entertain the non-fan.

Anyway, Adam (growing up to be Nicholas Galitzine) is the Prince of Eternia, who fled via a sword-of-power wormhole, to Earth after his planet was conquered by the evil Skeletor (Jared Leto). After losing the sword and being stranded on our world for 15 years, earning a crust as a sensitive ear in HR, Adam tells anyone who will listen he is actually a Prince from a far-flung world. When he finds the sword, he is rescued by old friend Teela (Camila Mendes) and taken back to Eternia where he finds the remains of the Eternia’s mightiest heroes struggling in the resistance to Skeletor. But perhaps Adam is the chosen one, who by the power of (Castle) Greyskull will become the mighty hero to defeat Skeletor?

Spoilers: of course he is. I’ll repeat, for the fan, there is so much to like about Masters of the Universe. First and foremost, the loving detail the characters have been bought to life, in all the bright primary colours and demented designs of the original. Did I ever imagine a world where I would see a live action film with a blue skinned Trapjaw with a green face, pinkish helmet and jaw and a mechanical arm that can turn into a hook or canon? Heck no, but I’m all for it.

Every single character has been bought to the screen like they’ve literally been ripped from the pages of my old comics, and given a steroids boost (although Skeletor’s old toys were as ripped as this). Not only that, but the film brings us obscure heroes like Moss Man (exactly what you’d expect) and Mechaneck (whose weapon is an extending mechanical neck). My hat guys. You can’t deny the love clearly there: so many of the cast and crew have talked about their deep-rooted affection for it (if I was a famous actor, I’d have loved to be in this). It’s strangely heart-warming.

But with my more critical grown-up head on – the one that isn’t bashing the action figures – is Masters of the Universe a mess? Yes, 100%. A fun mess for sure. Some decent laughs. Nicholas Galitzine is charmingly endearing as the gentle Adam. Camila Mendes revels in playing the film’s real tough guy, the good at almost everything Teela. Jared Leto has never been more enjoyable than as Skeletor, walking a tight rope between making the character absurdly pathetic and deeply horrible. It bounds along with real pace. As it should, since you can see much of its visual design, use of rock music and strongly tongue-in-cheek affectionate mockery is ripped straight from Thor: Ragnorak (you feel like its desperately trying to be a remake).

But thematically, it’s all over the shop. You feel the push-me-pull-me of different writing crews during the film’s tortuous production. It wants to explore questions of toxic masculinity and true strength coming from within. But does so ham-fistedly. For starters, the idea that Adam’s true powers come from his HR trained empathy is rendered hard to take seriously since (a) the film rips the piss out of HR speak every chance it gets, (b) Adam sounds ridiculous and uncertain and fails every single time he tries to defuse a conflict and (c) all his problems are solved through super strength. Not a single dilemma is resolved through negotiation or compromise.

Toxic masculinity coverage is also all over the shop. James Purefoy is presented as the model appalling dad, eternally disappointed in his sensitive son… until the film judderingly changes gear and tries to present this as well-meaning tough-love. Idris Elba’s Duncan collapses into a decade of drunken self-pity after his cocky self-assurance is torn apart. Does he get out of this spiral by acceptance or humility? No, he gets over it by blasting the hell out of stuff. Adam’s flatmate’s hiding his love of romcoms should be perfect for this but is only ever a punchline. Even Fisto’s masculine dismissal of Adam gets no blow back (the suggestion he’s full of cowardly bluster is similarly dismissed by the finale reaffirming he’s tough and therefore a hero).

Which makes the film’s moral (just like the cartoon, it ends with one!) feel pretty empty. Adam doesn’t even learn from his first brutally ill-thought out, violent attack on Skeletor’s HQ, which only succeeds in hurting people he cares for, that anger and pride are dangerous. He also quickly gets over his endearing squeamishness about ripping arms off androids or gunning down goons. Struggling to get out here is an idea of He-Man as still being the same sensitive twelve-year old – but it’s constantly cancelled out by the film needing He-Man to flex his muscles and skewer goons to the wall. A better film would have given He-Man his powers much later or explicitly have him earn them through demonstrating the qualities the film is pretending its praising (communication, honesty, sensitivity) rather than in his willingness to give a punch a go.

I could probably go on. I enjoyed the film. I did. But it’s sort of observed the arcs of Thor and Thor: Ragnorak, mixed it with some of the charm of Travis Knight’s Bumblebee, but still ended up completely missing the points it’s claiming to be making. And no amount of nostalgia-bait character design or (I can’t believe I’m typing this, even before news leaked he might have the same attitude to women as his character) fun from Leto or charm from Galitzine really makes up the difference.

De Gaulle: Parts 1 and 2 (2026)

Old fashioned but energetic and engaging WW2 biopic with a fabulous central performance

Cast: Antonin Baudry

Cast: Simon Abkarian (Charles de Gaulle), Niels Schneider (Philippe Leclerc), Thierry Lhermitte (Henri Giraud), Karim Leklou (Blazej), Simon Russell Beale (Winston Churchill), Campbell Scott (Franklin D Roosevelt), Matthieu Kassovitz (Admiral Darlan), Benoît Magimel (Marie-Pierre Koenig), Félix Kysyl (Jean Moulin), Loïc Corbery (René Pleven), Florian Lesiuer (Fernand), Anamaria Vartolomei (Livia), Pip Torrens (General Montgomery), Daniel Betts (Dwight D Eisenhower), Tom Mison (Anthony Eden), Stephen Campbell Moore (Harold Macmillan), Anthony Calf (Anthony Spears)

In 1940 France was in ruins. Crushed in weeks by the Nazi war machine, occupied and run by a collaborating government, its army defeated, morale crushed and future open to question. Should the ragged remains of its army fight on or not? The overwhelming consensus seemed to be no. Hundreds of commanders, willingly or not, aligned with Marshal Petain’s Vichy government, on paper the only thing with a claim to being the legal government. It was not a view shared by Charles de Gaulle (Simon Abkarian), newly minted as a French General and determined, against all logic, to carry on fighting.

By doing so, he became a national hero. But that was very, very far from being a foregone conclusion. Something that comes out loud and clear in Antonin Baudry’s reassuringly old-fashioned slice of military biography, handsomely filmed on an epic canvas. De Gaulle doesn’t shirk at all in showing how frequently De Gaulle’s building of the Free French and gaining recognition as a legitimate ally was a Don Quixote like quest. De Gaulle is even given a Sancho Pansa: Blazej a Polish plumber recruited as loyal aide (an invented character, designed to subvert a negative French stereotype). It perhaps could only have been achieved by someone as relentlessly focused, committed, uncompromising and shrewdly cunning like Le General. Truly right-man-right-place.

Across its two parts (and over five hours) De Gaulle mixes an atmospheric look at the back-room struggles for power in the Free French – the anti-Petain French forces being rive with conflicting agendas and awash with Johnny-come-latelies and Nazi-sympathisers who smell the way the wind is blowing – with well-shot and edited WW2 battle sequences. The latter have the added advantage of being less well-known (outside France) battles: Bir Hakeim (1942) and Ksar Ghilane (1943). Both showpiece heroic against-all-odds stands by the French against overwhelming German forces. They both also serve as a clear indication of the extreme lengths the Free French had to go to both their worth. Near suicidal acts of courage, with a heavy cost, essential to establish their moral and political force.

De Gaulle himself is absent from the battlefield, but very much engaged in a long-running struggle to build a Free French movement. From arriving in England, he meets obstinacy and defeatism. De Gaulle is very good at showing how this organisation is slowly and painfully built, almost a recruit at a time. The very qualities that will make De Gaulle such a powerful figure later – stubbornness, bluntness and unbending determination – frequently put-off supporters (there is a great expectation-defying scene where De Gaulle gives a hilariously blunt recruitment speech to captured French naval men, who respond by almost to a man refusing). Most of Part 1 covers the incremental steps of turning the Free French from a room of believers, to an actual military force that’s part military movie, part caper (with De Gaulle and co smuggled over African borders). So well does the film stress the difficulty, that each step forward is enormously satisfying.

De Gaulle suggests the main advantage its subject had was Winston Churchill recognising the prickly maverick as a kindred spirit. De Gaulle’s main relationship – awash with arguments as it is – is the love-hate bromance between De Gaulle and the British leader. Francophile Churchill – talking in an easy if stilted French – sees a lot to respect in another leader taking a stand when all seems lost. Excellently played by Simon Russell Beale, Churchill is a mass of realpolitik and teary sentimentality, backing De Gaulle when no-one else will, then frequently demanding he be cut lose in favour of a more pliant leader. But De Gaulle returns time and again to the sentimental affection and respect between the two, for all their vast differences.

You can’t say the same for De Gaulle and Roosevelt. Interestingly, if De Gaulle has a villain its the US President. Sure, the Germans are enemies on the battlefield – and brutal occupiers and torturers in Occupied France – but they are mostly anonymous or glimpsed only through dust-filled binoculars on battlefields. It’s the De Gaulle-loathing Roosevelt, played with self-satisfied superiority by Campbell Scott, who becomes the face of every obstacle in the way of a Free France, depicted as planning to turn the country into a US-occupied colony (a real plan, that never advanced as far as it is shown here).

Roosevelt backs a wave of alternative leaders, from collaborationist Admiral Darlan (Matthieu Kassovitz, suitably arrogant and two-faced) to the deferential General Giraud (Thierry Lhermitte, brilliantly using bluffness to hide how out of his depth he is). He excludes De Gaulle from decisions and refuses to work with him. De Gaulle is keen to show other Americans – noticeably Eisenhower – unhappy with this. But it’s a sign of current Euro-US relations that De Gaulle presents the Americans more as obstacles than crucial allies. (De Gaulle also shows many of the Free French’s most effective soldiers are Africans from their colonies – all of them, to a man, banned from D-Day thanks to American segregationist policies).

De Gaulle runs a parallel storyline of the growth of resistance movements in France. It does this with surprising nimbleness, seeing the development through the eyes of two young idealists: Fernand (Florain Lesier) and the Jewish Livia (Anamaria Vartolomei). At first, both these characters feel like representative figures – it’s one of Part 1’s neatest tricks to reveal Fernand is in fact very much real with a crucial role to play in world events. Livia, very well played by Vartolomei, represents a host of brave women caught up in the tensions and terrors of the resistance. The resistance itself, like the rest of the Free French, is a hard-won battle to form, fought by Félix Kysyl’s Jean Moulin (a very much real hero of the French resistance) – like De Gaulle a stoic but determined man, willing to take risks to save France’s honour. These sequences – from early student protests met with hard-handed Petain responses to the growth of networks and tense rooftop escapes from the Gestapo – have a palpable tension.

But the heart of De Gaulle is the general himself. It’s lucky the film has landed such a perfect actor for the role. Simon Abkarian not only looks a great deal like this ram-rod military man, but also brilliantly mixes De Gaulle’s utter self-belief and domineering refusal to compromise with small moments of doubt. Abkarian’s fantastic performance has just enough humanity to keep us rooting for him. De Gaulle charts the subtle developments of his political skills – from the imperious man of the start of Part 1 who alienates as many as he wins over, to Part 2 balancing his stubbornness with wily politicking and weaponizing of his unassailable reputation.

One of De Gaulle’s key insights is that the battle for France was as much – if not more – about deciding who would represent the country, as much as it was defeating the occupying forces. If France was led by non-entities or those (like Darlan) tarred by working with Germans, its place on the world-stage post-war would have been a very different one. De Gaulle also understands that presenting unjust against-the-odds battles (both military and political) very quickly leads us to admire and root for the heroes struggling to do the right thing.

It may be, in many ways, an old-fashioned film, carefully laying out events and focused on a grand canvas of the war, rather than recent trends for biographies to focus on single, representative events in detail. There are, as a result, scenes where characters essentially tell each other news to keep the plot going. It’s easy to see spiritual similarities with Patton, another epic biopic of a prickly figure with a messianic complex (although De Gaulle is far less ambiguous about its lead). But De Gaulle tells a story that, certainly outside France, is far fresher and less familiar.

And it manages to make the struggle to win France’s freedom and honour constantly on a knife-edge. Either on the battlefield or in the committee room, the odds never favour De Gaulle. Desperate punts are made, some of which fail spectacularly. Humiliations are frequent. But they make the success sweeter. It’s that – and Abkarian’s excellent recreation of the future French icon – that makes De Gaulle such a satisfying watch. I’d be fascinated in seeing a sequel, covering De Gaulle’s post-war French leadership, (De Gaulle pointedly states at one point he has recognised the UK will always favour the US over Europe, a neat wink at his later political positions). But for now, this is an old-fashioned, grand WW2 epic that tells a less familiar story with a great deal of energy.