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?

Marty Supreme (2025)

Tension and anxiety overwhelm a dark caper film that’s easier to respect than enjoy

Director: Josh Safdie

Cast: Timothée Chalamet (Marty Mauser), Gwyneth Paltrow (Kay Stone), Odessa A’zion (Rachel Mizler), Kevin O’Leary (Milton Rockwell), Tyler Okonma (Wally), Abel Ferrara (Ezra Mishkin), Fran Drescher (Rebecca Mauser), Luke Manley (Dion Galanis), John Catsimatidis (Christopher Galanis), Géza Röhrig (Bela Kletzki)

It’s 1952 and Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) is in the gutter aiming for the stars. A prodigiously talented table tennis player, he’s convinced it’s his destiny to become the world champion and face of the sport. To achieve this, he’ll go to any lengths lying, cheating and stealing. Marty relies on his relentless charisma to rope people in to support his increasingly risky scams and ploys. Among these are Rachel (Odessa A’zion), the married childhood friend he has got pregnant and Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) a retired Hollywood star, married to ruthless billionaire Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary).

Marty Supreme initially feels like it’s going to be a plucky underdog sports movie, with triumph due to defeat over adversity. What it actually turns out to be is something far closer to Safdie’s Uncut Gems, an immersive, sometimes hard to watch study in a man almost unaware of how frantically (and self-destructively) he is trying to keep lots of balls in the air. The bulk of the film focuses on Marty going to increasingly desperate lengths to secure the funding to get to the Tokyo World Championships. This picaresque journey sails into a swamp of stress and tension, involving gangsters with missing dogs, gun-toting New Jersey rednecks, sporting jocks furious at being hustled at table tennis, corrupt policemen in Central Park and constant parade of dangers, humiliations and threats with the odd spark of jet-black humour.

This is shot with a close-focused, shaky-cam series of close-ups, jerkily edited that practically spreads the stress of the on-screen desperation and disguised fear to the audience. The dialogue is frequently a parade of shouting, as the furiously deceived or exploited scream in between the never-ending stream of bare-faced, confidently delivered lies from Marty. And at its heart is charismatic dreamer Marty, who believes rules don’t apply to him and whose chaotic impulse control constantly pushes things further than can safely go, leading to him constantly seizing failure from success. Go into this expecting a lot of fun and laughs and you are probably in for a disappointment: go on expecting to be put through the wringer, and you will be better prepared!

Marty is a not a million miles from a Trump or Boris: a man of charisma and persuasion able to influence people to things, despite his shameless track record of instinctive lies and selfishness. Chalamet gives an extraordinary, screen-burningly vivid performance creating a man of total and complete certainty that he has a special destiny and therefore the normal rules of life do not apply to him, making him completely comfortable with routinely using and then abandoning the people around him. The fact he does this but still makes it constantly understandable why so many people keep coming back to Marty (despite being constantly stung) is a tribute to his soulfulness.

Beyond his in-the-moment confidence, Marty is a desperate, almost-principle-free force-of-nature, constantly re-spinning himself and his actions to new circumstances or audiences. Outrages become triumphs, lovers become sisters, compromises become commitments… Nothing is as it seems. His ego is also stunning: he demands tournament organisers put him up in the Ritz (where he eventually abuses the free bar), seduces Paltrow’s movie star largely it seems out of wanting to be seen as an equal and throws a colossal temper tantrum when outmatched at a tournament.

He’s constantly reinventing himself. Ideas he rejects as ridiculous or humiliating – a tour as half-time entertainment for the Harlem GlobeTrotters or an exhibition match with his Japanese rival – are later repackaged by him as his own flashes of inspiration when he eventually decides to do them. He genuinely can’t understand why others don’t see his greatness, or why the table tennis authorities can’t see his grandstanding and temper on court might be the best thing to grow the sport in the American market.

Marty believes he has all the tools for success, but his vaulting ambition and relentless energy is constantly undermined by his recklessness and tendency to act and, most especially, speak before he thinks constantly blows him up. He frequently turns on would-be supporters and friends with spontaneous abuse or smart-arse comments. He isn’t cruel (he says “I love you” persistently after various rude comments), but the damage is done. Over the course of film he’ll make a shockingly off-colour Holocaust joke (even he clocks the reaction, nervously saying it’s okay he’s Jewish), mocks Rockwell’s loss of his son fighting the same Japanese he’s now doing business with and bluntly tells Rachel she can’t understand him because she is not special (like he is).

Marty is, however, a phenomenally gifted table tennis player. Marty Supreme’s shooting of the sport is electrically fast (Chalamet trained for months to master the fast-pace, wildly aggressive style Marty plays with) and its staging of the matches is a surprisingly relaxing and entertaining. Especially when compared to the nerve-shredding anxiety-inducing terror of Marty’s less than successful hustling and scam career. Chalamet’s injects subtle panic and desperation under his relentless confidence.

Confidence is secretly what is lacking from retired Hollywood star Kay Stone, played with a wearily amused energy by Gwyneth Paltrow, both flattered and intrigued by the much younger Marty’s interest (you can see In Paltrow’s face the enjoyment behind her surface exasperation), This helps spark a desire to kickstart her career with a Broadway play – an awful looking Tennesse Wiliams pastiche, co-starring a self-important Brando-style method actor she despises (and Marty humiliates, to her delight). Her desire to be loved again is clear. There is a lovely shot where an entrance applause sees her turn away from the audience and her face to break into a radiant grin. It’s the same buzz of feeling desired and loved that keeps her connected to the disastrous Marty.

It’s also an escape from a life comes under the domineering control of her husband, pen-magnate Milton Rockwell (a reptilian and superbly vile Kevin O’Leary). Rockwell’s selfishness and manipulation of people is far more ruthless than Marty’s naïve, childish self-focus. It’s one of a host of great supporting turns. Odessa A’zion gives Rachel a scammers natural instinct (pregnancy and all) under her genuine devotion to Marty. A’zion is terrific, genuinely confused about her own feelings for Marty, anxious but determined and as prone to self-destructive gambits as he is. Tyler Okonma is similarly excellent as his best friend constantly dragged into Marty’s dangerous, half-baked crazy schemes at high risk to himself.

Marty Supreme throws all this towards with a relentless cavalcade of energy which is often easier to respect than to really enjoy. It’s such an anxiety inducing film, both in its plot and the shooting style, that it can leave you feeling genuinely uncomfortable in your chair. Does it offer any hope for Marty? It’s ending can suggest a level of personal growth: but seeing as we have witnessed throughout the film flashes of instinctive decency from Marty that have been cast aside for his own ambitions, I wouldn’t be confident. But that discomfort is probably right for a film that’s almost trying to make you feel sweaty and uncomfortable in your chair.

Madame Curie (1943)

Halting science biopic, that’s really an attempt to make a spiritual sequel to Mrs Miniver

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Cast: Greer Garson (Marie Curie), Walter Pidgeon (Pierre Curie), Henry Travers (Eugene Curie), Albert Bassermann (Professor Jean Perot), Robert Walker (David le Gros), C. Aubrey Smith (Lord Kelvin), Dame May Whitty (Madame Eugene Curie), Victor Francen (University President), Reginald Owen (Dr Becquerel), Van Johnson (Reporter)

Marie Curie was one of History’s greatest scientists, her discoveries (partially alongside her husband Pierre) of radioactivity and a parade of elements, essentially laying the groundwork for many of the discoveries of the Twentieth Century (with two Nobel prizes along the way). Hers is an extraordinary life – something that doesn’t quite come into focus in this run-of-the-mill biopic, that re-focuses her life through the lens of her marriage to Pierre and skips lightly over the scientific import (and content) of her work. You could switch it off still not quite understanding what it was Marie Curie did.

What it was really about was repackaging Curie’s life into a thematic sequel to the previous year’s Oscar-winning hit Mrs Miniver. With the poster screaming “Mr and Mrs Miniver together again!”, the star-team of Garson and Pidgeon fitted their roles to match: Garson’s Marie Curie would be stoic, dependable, hiding her emotions under quiet restraint while calmly carrying on; Pidgeon’s Pierre was dry, decent, stiff-upper-lipped and patrician. Madame Curie covers the twelve years of their marriage as a Miniver-style package of struggle against adversity with Pierre’s death as a final act gut punch. Science (and history) is jettisoned when it doesn’t meet this model.

Not only Garson and Pidgeon, but Travers, Whitty, producer Sidney Franklin, cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg, composer Herbert Stothard and editor Harold F Kress among others all returned and while Wyler wasn’t back to direct, Mervyn LeRoy, director of Garson’s other 1942 hit Random Harvest, was. Heck even the clumsily crafted voiceover was spoken by Miniver writer James Hilton. Of course, the Miniver model was a good one, so many parts of Madame Curie that replicate it work well. But it also points up the film’s lack of inspiration, not to mention that it’s hard to think either of the Curies were particularly like the versions of them we see here.

Much of the opening half of Madame Curie zeroes in on the relationship between the future husband-and-wife who, like all Hollywood scientists, are so dottily pre-occupied with their heavy-duty science-thinking they barely notice they are crazy for each other. Some endearing moments seep out of this: Pierre’s bashful gifting of a copy of his book to Marie (including clumsily pointing out a heartfelt inscription to her she fails to spot) or Pierre’s functional proposal, stressing the benefits to their scientific work. But this material constantly edges out any space for a real understanding of their work.

It fits with the romanticism of the script, which pretty much starts with the word “She was poor, she was beautiful” and carries on in a similar vein from there (I lost count of the number of times Garson’s beauty was commented on, so much so I snorted when she says at one point she’s not used to hearing such compliments). Madame Curie has a mediocre script: it’s the sort of film where people constantly, clumsily, address each other by name (even Marie and Pierre) and info-dump things each of them already know at each other. Hilton’s voiceover pops up to vaguely explain some scientific points the script isn’t nimble enough to put into dialogue.

It would be intriguing to imagine how Madame Curie might have changes its science coverage if it had been made a few years later, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been eradicated by those following in Curie’s footsteps. Certainly, the film’s bare acknowledgment of the life-shortening doses of radiation the Curies were unwittingly absorbing during their work would have changed (a doctor does suggest those strange burns on Marie’s hands may be something to worry about). So naively unplayed is this, that it’s hard not to snort when Pierre comments after a post-radium discovery rest-trip “we didn’t realise how sick we were”. In actuality, Pierre’s tragic death in a traffic accident was more likely linked to his radiation-related ill health than his absent-minded professor qualities (Madame Curie highlights his distraction early on with him nearly being crushed under carriage wheel after walking Marie home).

Madame Curie does attempt to explore some of the sexism Marie faced – although it undermines this by constantly placing most of the rebuttal in the mouth of Pierre. Various fuddy-duddy academics sniff at the idea of a woman knowing of what she speaks, while both Pierre and his assistant (an engaging Robert Walker) assume before her arrival at his lab that she must be some twisted harridan and certainly will be no use with the test tubes. To be honest, it’s not helped by those constant references to Garson’s looks or (indeed) her fundamental mis-casting. Garson’s middle-distance starring and soft-spoken politeness never fits with anyone’s idea of what Marie Curie might have been like and a bolted-on description of her as stubborn doesn’t change that.

Walter Pidgeon, surprisingly, is better suited as Pierre, his mid-Atlantic stiffness rather well-suited to the film’s vision of the absent-minded Pierre and he’s genuinely rather sweet and funny when struggling to understand and express his emotions. There are strong turns from Travers and Whitty as his feuding parents, a sprightly cameo from C Aubrey Smith as Lord Kelvin and Albert Bassermann provides avuncular concern as Marie and Pierre’s mentor. The Oscar-nominated sets are also impressive.

But, for all Madame Curie is stuffed with lines like “our notion of the universe will be changed!” it struggles to make the viewer understand why we should care about the Curie’s work. Instead, it’s domestic drama in a laboratory, lacking any real inspiration in its desperation by its makers to pull off the Miniver trick once more. Failing to really do that, and failing to really cover the science, it ends up falling between both stools, destined to be far more forgettable than a film about one of history’s most important figures deserves to be.

Performance (1970)

An almost undefinable mix of gangster and philosophy, almost unique in its eccentric oddness

Director: Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg

Cast: James Fox (Chas), Mick Jagger (Turner), Anita Pallenberg (Pherber), Michèle Breton (Lucy), Ann Sidney (Dana), John Binden (Moody), Stanley Matthews (Rosebloom), Allan Cuthbertson (Lawyer), Anthony Morton (Dennis), Johnny Shannon (Harry Flowers), Anthony Valentine (Joey Maddocks), Kenneth Colley (Tony Farrell)

Performance seems to slop out of the swinging sixties dark side, a brash and darkly disturbing explosion of style and intellectualism. There are few films like it out there: its a sometimes tough but haunting watch, crammed with mind-bending imagery and swimming in strange and unsettling ideas. It’s both a gut punch and an unsettlingly erotic massage.

Chas (James Fox) is a ruthless gangland enforcer for mob boss Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon). Ambitious but instinctively violent, he’s a slim, tall cocktail of anger and predatory resentment – so it’s not a surprise that he eventually provokes a minor gangland dust-up, which leads to him killing a rival against Harry’s orders. His life in danger, Chas retreats to a convenient bolthole. Passing himself off as a travelling juggler (!), he wheedles his way into the home of reclusive pop star Turner (Mick Jagger) who lives a life of philosophy, drugs and free love in a beat-up house in Notting Hill. There Chas and Turner will form an unusual connection as a mixture of drugs and repressed yearnings and longings see their personalities begin to mix and merge.

It was born from the mind of Donald Cammell and was originally commissioned as a sort of 60s romp. Many of the money men signed on, under the impression they would be getting a sort of A Hard Day’s Night for The Rolling Stones. God alone knows what they made of the nightmare fuel they ended up (rumour has it, the wife of one executive vomited at an initial screening). Cammell, heavily influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, created a dak dream-like work where questions of identity and sex get wrapped up in a surreal framework where reality bends around the crazy logic.

It’s reflected in the film’s artistically discordant style, re-edited to deliberately blur linear lines and (increasingly) tip the film into dream-like logic. From the opening ten minutes we start switching between different, complementing, tones. In this case between Chas and his cronies in a car and a stereotypically upper-class lawyer (Allan Cuthbertson at his most imperial) speaking in court to a pompous jury who themselves merge with the dirty-old men watching a cheap porno flick in one of Chas’ stopping points.

This surrealistically toned cutting – married to strikingly beautiful, unusual colour-filled lighting from Nicolas Roeg (who co-directed the film with Cammell, delivering much of its visual look) – lays the groundwork for a film that increasingly shifts into something strange and constantly unsettling, where we can never be quite sure where we are. Characters merge into each other, brief cuts showing Jagger switch places with Fox and Pallenberg (at one point Chas and Turner appear in bed together before Turner is replaced in the next cut with Lucy), sequences take place that must be fantasy and the real-world disappears in a finale that lays the entire film open to interpretation.

What’s striking about Performance is that, even with stylistic flourishes, much of the opening section plays like a hard-boiled gangster film. There is a marked reality about Chas’ moving around the streets of London, roughing up taxi firm owners, threatening rivals and intimidating the loose lipped. Surprising as it might seem, it reflects Chas’ conservativeness: a self-made man, Chas takes inordinate pride in his freshly-cut suits and perfect hair, lives in a flat that’s like an interior design brochure and has contempt for arty free-spirits. The film’s opening matches his everyday aesthetic.

He’s played with a snarling aggression by James Fox, a hugely successful piece of counter-intuitive casting. Fox makes Chas tense, cocky and no-where near as clever as he thinks he is. He’s a bully who delights in terrifying a posh chauffeur and resents taking orders. He’s vain– his apartment littered with glossy photos of his own half-naked athletic body – and his sadomasochistic sex with his girlfriend is carried out with hand-held mirror so he can watch himself. This is a rich, primal, brilliant performance by Fox, latching into a dark energy he rarely touched again.

What’s also striking though is that there is a vulnerability and emptiness to Chas. Odd as it might seem, it’s also a mirror-image of Fox in The Servant: there a naïve young man absorbed by his butler – here a seemingly worldly gangster, totally unsettled and slowly changed by a new domineering force in his life. Chas may believe himself to be the master, but he’s a rat in a maze in the psychedelic craziness of Turner’s world, with a freedom, wildness and gentleness completely alien to Chas’ ordered world.

Whipper-thin and with a natural charisma that almost masks his fundamental weakness as an actor, Jagger sashays into the film as a softly spoken force of nature, the sort of artist who pops pills then reads philosophy. His house, all ramshackle opium den chic, is a hedonistic place of relaxed freedoms where Turner lives in a menage with Pherber and Lucy (there was much scandal at the time about whether Jagger and Pallenberg had sex for real during filming). It’s a surrealist den, shot from unusual or unsettling angles with an oddly precocious child (whose gender seems to change from scene to scene) running around.

Turner finds Chas fascinating – and it’s here the film’s title comes to life as Cammell muses how much is Chas’ personality an affectation, a construct that he has built? Doped up on magic mushrooms, Turner (and the film) explore and deconstructs the sort of man Chas is. From Turner dressing-up as and impersonating Chas, to Chas himself stripping down physically and mentally, both in the sort of bohemian clothes he despised and even trying on feminine garb with face paint. It unpeels the construct of Chas hyper-masculinity to find a more tender, less egotistical man below.

And what better construct, you might argue, than gangsters? These are people living an eternal front (Flower’s office is awash with brash touches – like an equestrian painting of himself – that hide his closeted and violent nature; he’s clearly inspired by both Krays). It’s a front the openly hedonistic and relaxed Turner can shake up: Jagger sings ‘Memo From Turner’ in a surreal dreamish sequence, where he takes Flowers place and encourages his fellow gangsters to literally strip. Performance deconstructs this, using editing to merge Turner and Chas, as two sides of the performance coin.

The film spirals further down this rabbit hole of personality shifting, as Chas becomes more and more like the softly waif-like Turner, just as Turner experiments with the flouting masculine aggression of Chas. Mirrors allow us to visually mix and merge characters and strange cuts take us on an increasingly non-linear journey. This remains unconfirmed and undefined – one critic wrote it was easier to write a book about Performance than a review and he’s probably right – and the further down this metaphorical (and, in its final sequence, almost literal) rabbit hole you go, the more the surreal questions remain unanswered. What is going on in the end? Is it real? Who absorbs who? All questions remain enigmatically open and rife to multiple interpretation.

Performance is hardly an easy watch. I can easily imagine the wrong person at the wrong time finding it either disturbing or (probably more likely) a pile of pretentious wank. But it’s a daring, undefinable and unreadable film that offers itself up to ripe interpretation and re-interpretation while remaining playful. And that is one heck of a difficult performance to pull off.

Boomerang! (1947)

Effective journalistic investigation into a murder case turns into engaging courtroom melodrama

Director: Elia Kazan

Cast: Dana Andrews (State’s Attorney Henry Harvey), Jane Wyatt (Madge Harvey), Lee J Cobb (Chief Harold Robinson), Cara Williams (Irene Nelson), Arthur Kennedy (John Waldron), Sam Levene (Dave Woods), Taylor Holmes (TM Wade), Robert Keith (‘Mac’ McCreery), Ed Begley (Paul Harris), Karl Malden (Lt White)

In Bridgeport, Connecticut, a popular priest is gunned down in the street, the killer escaping into the night. The police are baffled. The city turns against the reformist mayor’s administration. Then, after several weeks, there is a lead as twitchy ex-soldier John Waldron (Arthur Kennedy) is dragged in and, after hours-and-hours of interrogation without sleep, signs a confession. But who cares about small details like that, when everyone is sure the police has their man? But State’s Attorney Henry Harvey (Dana Andrews) has doubts – and no pressure from the public or officials will make him build a case against an innocent man.

Based on an actual 1924 murder case, Boomerang! is told with journalistic sharpness by Elia Kazan that smoothly moves from investigative into courtroom drama. Boomerang! was cited by Kazan as when he started to find his voice, establishing a style that would carry him to Oscar-winning success in On the Waterfront and beyond. Shot largely in location (though admittedly in a different Connecticut town than Bridgeport), it’s full of the immediacy of the streets, avoiding sets and forced studio locations. Kazan leans into the journalistic feel, with a voiceover explaining events and an earnest attempt throughout to make it feel like we are watching real events unfold.

It captures people going about their everyday lives: gossiping over laundry, strolling down streets, pounding typewriters in press rooms, gathering in church and shops. This is a film designed to convey a full sense of a real world. That goes as well for reflecting the investigation, which is full of the visceral pounding of pavements and hustling of suspects into police cars as well as the interrogations of the worn-down Waldron, taking place in an inhospitable room where never-ending questions means Waldron’s head has to be literally picked up to continue answering the questions.

The observational strengths of the film’s opening eventually moves into something more straight-forwardly melodramatic, but Kazan’s documentary restraint tries it best to not make this shift too jarring. As Harvey’s doubts grow, he becomes under increasing pressure from officialdom, principally from Ed Begley’s sweaty Paul Harris (who is too noticeably dodgy from the start for his villainy to be anything like a surprise). This is before a series of courtroom dynamics that hue towards the sort of fireworks you find in larger-than-life films than the journalistic reserve Boomerang! starts with.

Which isn’t to say that these courtroom dynamics are not very well-handled, especially by the under-rated Dana Andrews, who brings just the right amount of humanity and dignity to an otherwise stiff-on-paper character of a crusading, too-good-to-be-true attorney. Andrews delivers the courtroom speeches, and the detailed breakdown of the flaws in the police case, with a real quiet passion – just as he brings a nice degree of moral outrage to the bullying attempts to silence him.

Boomerang! provides several opportunities for compelling character actors, many of whom went on to work again for Kazan to great success. Lee J Cobb’s bulldog fierceness is perfect for put-upon police Captain Robinson who lets his determination to prove he can crack the case compromise his judgement. Cobb gives Robinson a powerful sense of authority – there is a wonderful scene where he faces down a would-be lynch mob with little more than growling disapproval. There is also a lovely moment, where he lifts the sleeping Waldron and carries him into his bed with all the care of a loving father. He’s well backed by Karl Malden as an eager-to-please inexperienced cop.

Arthur Kennedy produces one of his expert portraits in weakness as Waldron, an embittered veteran who has found peace offers little more than failure. While never losing track of what makes Waldron suspicious, Kennedy finds a neat line in vulnerability and fear keeps him sympathetic. Opposite him, Cara Williams explodes with righteous fury as a former girlfriend who believes herself wronged, eager to see Waldron condemned. It’s a more interesting role than any other female role in the film, although Jane Wyatt finds some engaging warmth in the dull role of Andrews’ loyal wife.

Boomerang! at heart is a film about the barrel being fine, aside from a few rotten apples. The crime takes place after the old machine politics system has been cast aside by new politicians, not beholden to the system, willing to introduce reforms. And, by and large, they are shown to really mean it – even if, at one point, some express the view that it doesn’t matter if Waldron is guilty or innocent, since winning means the reformists can remain in power. But all the real sins are collected in the hands of Begley’s character: even the police are absolved, despite the fact we watch them essentially brow-beat a man into confessing (a sergeant even suggesting they rough him up a bit to speed things along, which makes you wonder what the system was like for people are not veterans the police captain feels sorry for).

Boomerang! pulls any punches of really exploring systemic flaws, even while it covers an innocent man being bum-rushed into a trial. But then it puts complete faith in the idea that the same system will turn around and do its job by ensuring he is completely absolved – with the only danger from corrupt elected officials, not the blindness of a potential system. It’s a factor Kazan (to be fair) felt the film made too many compromises on – and he’s right. It might tell a scare story, but Boomerang! is fundamentally a reassuring film that is sure everything will turn out right in the end.

Rustin (2023)

Solid biopic tells an inspiring story in a straightforward way with a Domingo star turn

Director: George C Wolfe

Cast: Colman Domingo (Bayard Rustin), Aml Ameen (Martin Luther King Jnr), Glynn Turman (A Philip Randolph), Chris Rock (Roy Wilkins), Gus Halper (Tom Kahn), Johnny Ramey (Elias Taylor), CCH Pounder (Dr Anna Hedgeman), Michael Potts (Cleve Robinson), Audra McDonald (Ella Baker), Jeffrey Wright (Adam Clayton Powell Jnr), Lilli Kay (Rachell), Jordan-Amanda Hall (Charlene), Bill Irwin (AJ Muste)

Bayard Rustin was on of crucial the civil rights activists in conceiving, planning and organising the 1963 March on Washington. A proponent of nonviolence and equal rights for all, regardless of race, gender or sexuality, he was a close friend and colleague of Martin Luther King and a key figure in innumerable campaigns. Rustin partly exists to bring his life more to public notice, focusing on the build-up to the March on Washington and exploring Rustin’s struggles as both a Black man and a gay man.

At its heart is Colman Domingo, who delivers a sensational performance as Rustin, bursting with energy and emotional compassion. Domingo brilliantly captures Rustin’s loud-and-proud nature, his overwhelming commitment to being who he is, and his passionate commitment to social justice. This is a force-of-nature turn dominating the movie, breathing passion and fire into Rustin’s compulsive desire to speak out.

Domingo matches this with a neat sense of comic timing (Rustin is frequently very funny) and a raw emotion. The emotional impact nearly all comes from Domingo. He’s genuinely moving when he misjudges the level of loyalty to him in the film’s opening act and has an offer of resignation accepted by the NAACP (after press reports suggesting he has seduced King). Even more so later in his emotional outpouring when the same NAACP members finally back him up. More focus on Rustin gaining full, unquestioning, acceptance from his colleagues could have offered a beating heart to the film.

Domingo’s performance elevates an otherwise, to be honest, fairly middle-of-the-road biopic that frequently wears its research heavily. It has an air of competent professionalism, with George C Wolfe’s direction lacking emotional or visual spark. Much of the dialogue – given a brush by Dustin Lance Black – frequently (and rather painfully) has the actors fill in historical context or clumsily shoehorns in real dialogue. There is very little spark to Rustin, as it dutifully ticks off events, building towards sign-posted emotional payoffs (and, admittedly, there are fewer payoffs more inspiring than a quarter of a million people gathering in Washington to cry for freedom).

This is not to say there aren’t fine moments and its recreation of the Washington March (some tight angles, well-chosen archive footage and subtle effects) works very well. There are some fine actors giving their all. Glynn Turman is a stand-out as the inspiring Randolph, savvy enough to play the game in a way Rustin isn’t. Aml Ameen’s capturing of King’s voice and mannerisms is perfect. Pounder, Rock, McDonald and others compellingly bring to life leading activists while Jeffrey Wright sportingly plays the closest thing to a heel as jealous congressman Clayton Powell.

However skilful reconstructions only take us so far. Often personal stakes are presented vaguely. The film avoids depicting Rustin encountering much personal homophobia – no member of the movement expresses negative views, with white pacifist campaigner AJ Muste (Bill Irwin) the only person to express openly homophobic opinions. The threat of someone discovering his past arrest (for a 1953 encounter with two men in Pasadena) is played as a core fear for Rustin, but the film is vague about the likely impact this revelation would have (since it seems to already be widely know). It’s astonishing that Rustin was so open when being so was a crime, but the film (aside from a brief moment when he considers a casual pick-up) risks underplaying the era’s prejudice and dangers.

To cover issues on homophobia and self-loathing guilt, the film invents a closeted reverend, well played with a tortured sense of shame and self-loathing by Johnny Ramey, who initiates a secretive relationship with Rustin. This fictional character absorbs all the fear and self-denial that many gay people felt at the time, allowing Rustin to show us what life was like for the many, many people who, for whatever reason, were not as outspoken as Rustin. But it does feel like somewhat of a compromise, and a character who feels a little too convenient, drifting to and from the story whenever it’s themes need a bit more of a personal touch.

It’s hard not to think the film could have gained more interest from exploring Rustin’s relationship with Tom Kahn (Gus Halper) – or even being clearer on the very nature of this relationship. An initial familiar intimacy indicates an established romantic relationship, but later scenes suggest instead a more casual flatmates-with-benefits set-up. Then we suddenly hit the inevitable moment when Kahn walks in on Rustin and Elias kissing and reacts like a betrayed partner. It finally decides Kahn is in love with Rustin, but Rustin hasn’t time for a relationship with so much work to be done. Despite this thought, the film wants to also say Rustin and Elias are profoundly in love, tragically only kept apart by social pressures. It’s trying to have its cake and eat it too. The cost to your personal life of being fully committed to a cause, or the awful pressures of loving someone in the face of prejudice, are both powerful stories. Settling on one and exploring it fully would have been more emotionally rewarding.

Rustin is a solid, well-handled, decent biopic. Bringing the life of a lesser-known civil rights activist to a bigger audience is a worthy aim, and Black and queer audiences (historically underserved) deserve to see films that centre their stories. It’s also refreshing to see a film zero in on the importance of logistics for major events (what other film has a scene where the fillings of thousands of sandwiches to be kept in the warm sunshine becomes a heated debate?) and its focus on the work recruiting attendees, buses and resources for the March is great.

But the real success in this sometimes workmanlike film is Domingo, who lifts the entire thing with an emotionally committed performance that is perhaps better than it deserves.