Author: Alistair Nunn

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Nicholson gives a scintillating performance as a self-loathing soul in this searing drama

Director: Bob Rafelson

Cast: Jack Nicholson (Robert Eroica Dupea), Karen Black (Rayette Dipesto), Susan Anspach (Catherine Van Oost), Lois Smith (Partita Dupea), Ralph Waite (Carl Fidelio Dupea), Billy “Green” Bush (Elton), Irene Dailey (Samia Glavia), Toni Basil (Terry Grouse), Helena Kallianiotes (Palm Apodaca), William Challee (Nicholas Dupea), John Ryan (Spicer)

Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson) is a man out of place. From a family of musical prodigies, groomed from childhood to become a leading concert pianist, he now works as an oil rigger out West. Turns out Robert isn’t content anywhere: he’s too rebellious for the upper-classes, too contemptuous to be part of the working classes. His life is one of running away, moving from place-to-place, avoiding emotional responsibilities, commitment and honesty, constantly seething with feelings he lacks the ability to process, unable to know what he wants with a self-destructive chasm a mile wide that swallows anyone that gets near it.

Five Easy Pieces is an intelligent, quiet, thoughtful character-study of a man who defies all possible labels and doesn’t fit comfortably into any pigeon-holes. Heavily influenced by the European artistes of the 60s, it’s a film that engages with class alienation in America more than almost any other, placing at its heart a man who refuses to compromise with anyone (to his own detriment) and whose selfishness and willingness to hurt other people constantly challenges the level of sympathy we are willing to give him. Despite this though, Rafelson has created a quiet domestic tragedy, with a man at its heart who is both unbearably selfish and unendingly vulnerable and scared at the world, who only knows how to react with bursts of resentful anger and whose instinct is to run away when things get either too tough or too involved.

Five Easy Pieces splits into three acts: the first sees Robert quietly snobbily bucking up against the working-class environment he’s chosen to live in; the second the long car journey to his family home while he struggles to find outlets for his tension; the third his return to the upper-class environs of his family where he can’t hide his contempt for their closeted privilege. What’s consistent is Robert is as constantly ashamed of himself as he is of his environs: a man of class and culture who longs to be working joe, a manual worker who yearns for sophistication around him. Robert’s tragedy is he can never square this circle.

It’s a role that calls for an actor at the top of his game, which it gets with Jack Nicholson. There is a moment near the start, where Nicholson does a little half-pivot skip while going round a corner into this home. It’s a small moment, but it’s a flash of something playfully real and endearingly childish that explains why we bear with him, even while he’s blowing things up around him. Nicholson’s performance is extraordinary. Robert has a constant simmering tension to him, but it’s a born of deep personal discontent. Nicholson perfectly brings to life a man constantly trying to seem assured, carefree and cool – but always with a nervous fear of what people think of him. Do the workers, and his friend Elton, realise he’s as posh as he is? Will his family look down on his waitress girlfriend?

One of the things Nicholson brings so brilliantly to Robert is his unease with talking: sure, he can barnstorm a self-righteous speech, but when it comes to actual conversation or talk about personal emotions he’s as timid and lost as a child. The idea of having roots is anathema to him (he’s perfectly willing to abandon Rayette when he thinks she’s pregnant) but it’s clear he also wants to belong somewhere. His tragedy is, as soon as he finds himself part a community all he feels is contempt for them – as if, like Groucho Marx, he can’t imagine joining a club that would have him as a member.

In fact, it becomes clear, Robert probably hates himself. He dismisses his accomplishments: inveigled into playing piano by his brother’s fiancée Catherine (a lovely performance of misguided sensitivity by Susan Anspach) he responds to her emotional reaction with dismissive rage, belittling his playing and questioning her feelings. It’s a mark, again, of the vulnerability and sensitivity Nicholson balances in this tempestuous, angry man that after this takedown we still believe she goes to bed with him. The tension of Robert’s loathing of himself never needs much to be released in anger against strangers: be it ranting at cars pointlessly blaring horns in traffic jams or an argument with a waitress who refuses to bring him toast that ends with glasses thrown petulantly across the floor. Nicholson never lets the pain of dealing with the world escape from Robert’s eyes, even when he’s at his most abrasive.

Robert’s inability to place himself in either world is perfectly captured in his relationship with waitress and would-be country singer Rayette, played with an endearing honesty and affection by Karen Black. If Robert could compromise, they would be well-suited: they both love music and share a sense of rootlessness. But he makes no real room for her. He can’t hide her contempt for her liking the wrong sort of music (country is no Chopin), he fills their house with little touches of art and scoffs at her inability to appreciate them; then he defends her working-class-honesty against his family’s snobbish friends while also being mortified by her artless, uneducated conversation among his family.

Fundamentally, Robert only cares for Rayette in relation to how she makes him feel about himself in the moment. She is a safe, undemanding comfort blanket – someone who will accept anything from him. His first instinct before returning to his family is to ditch her. Nicholson (in a superb sequence) shamefacedly mutters apologies between angry self-justifications while packing his bags – before a burst of self-loathing in his car sees him return. He then drags her across country only to park her at a motel while he sees ‘how things are’, clearly hoping she may decide to head home without him. When she instead turns up, he’s as ashamed of her as he as of his family’s wealth.

Like his siblings, Robert has never really grown up. His kindly sister Tita (a beautiful performance by Lois Smith) bounces around with enthusiasm, twiddles with a ping-pong bat with teenage glee while she flirts with her father’s nurse and seems utterly cossetted from the outside world. His brother Carl (Ralph Waite, very funny) has the distracted air of a natural eccentric, who has never had to engage with reality. But are they that different from Robert, who has a childish tantrum when he loses a bowling match? Five Easy Pieces suggests a difficult, distant relationship with his domineering father (now confined to silence in a wheelchair) in an astonishingly raw scene from Nicholson – but goes far from giving Robert a pass, his self-destructive self-loathing being far more of an inbuilt character flaw.

In fact, Robert suffers from an ennui that suggests he will never be happy wherever he lands – and he lacks either the self-knowledge or willingness to change. Above all, and it’s clear in every frame of Nicholson’s searing performance, Robert is a man who despises some part of himself so much, that all he can feel for those who show him warmth is contempt. After all, if he doesn’t care for him, why would anyone do so? It’s a pattern that is destined to leave him forever unhappy, forever hurting people, for ever lashing out. It’s a brutal honesty that makes Five Easy Pieces in some ways one of the bleakest, least hopeful of American films.

Hold Back the Dawn (1941)

A potentially cynical drama becomes a sweet romance, with three excellent lead performances

Director: Mitchell Leisen

Cast: Charles Boyer (Georges Iscovescu), Olivia de Havilland (Emmy Brown), Paulette Goddard (Antia Dixon), Victor Francen (Professor van der Luecken), Walter Abel (Inspector Hummock), Curt Bois (Bonbois), Rosemary DeCamp (Berta Kurz), Eric Feldary (Josef Kurz), Nestor Paiva (Fred Flores)

Refugees flock at the USA-Mexican border, desperate to squeeze into the Land of the Free, only to meet with a stringent border control and tight rules on immigration quotas. No, it’s not a story from today – it’s from the 1940s, with Mexico awash with refugees from Europe, fleeing Hitler. But the USA only has a certain quota of refugees it will accept from each country – and Romanian Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer) finds he’s got no less than a five to eight year wait before his quota number will come up. His ex-flame Anita (Paulette Goddard) suggests there might be a way around this: if Georges can get married to an American citizen, he will fly through the border on a green card. Georges sets his eye on spinsterish teacher Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland) marrying her in a whirlwind romance – only to find feelings of guilt and growing affection for Emmy making his plan more difficult.

Hold Back the Dawn is well-assembled, well-paced mix of romance and black-comedy which pulls its jet-black punches in favour of a more conventional happy ending. Perhaps that’s why it was the last Billy Wilder script (working with regular collaborator Charles Brackett) he didn’t direct himself. You can imagine a director as prone to the cynical as Wilder, may not have settled quite as happily for the more optimistic and reassuring film Hold Back the Dawn becomes. Wilder was also unhappy with how he felt the film pruned back the more cutting political criticism of America’s immigration policy. As a refugee from Hitler himself, Wilder knew of what he was talking about.

However, that’s not to say Hold Back the Dawn isn’t awash with Wilder and Brackett’s patented mix of waspish character comedy and sharp dialogue tinted with more than a touch of arch cynicism. Mitchell Leisen’s success here, is to smooth the wheels to allow enough of this mix of black and absurdist humour to carry through a film you feel the studio has attempted to shoe-horn into being a conventional ‘love conquers all’ narrative (not least with its ending, which has the look and feel of a mix of hurried re-shoots and re-purposed footage to create a late upbeat ending, filmed after de Havilland was no longer available from her loan from Warner Brothers).

Hold Back the Dawn doesn’t shirk on the vicious, oppressive cycle of being stuck in a holding pattern waiting to be allowed into the US. Georges only gains his room in the overstuffed hotel because the previous tenant hangs himself (the manager matter-of-factly says he’ll have the room ready shortly). There is quite a lot of both dark humour (from Georges and Anita’s nakedly opportunist cadism) to little touches of high farce (a pregnant woman gaming the system to give birth on US soil) and the faintly surreal (a would-be refugee who might just be a descendant of honorary US citizen Lafayette). Throughout most of Hold Back the Dawn this never feels out of keeping with the slow-burning romance between Georges and Emmy.

A lot of this is also due to Charles Boyer’s highly successful performance in the lead role. Few actors were as skilled at mixing suave European class and louche rotter-ness than Boyer, and Georges is a gift of a part. A playboy stuck in a boring, dead-end purgatory of a town (one he aimlessly walks around time and time again to kill the hours), Boyer makes Georges believable charm personified – certainly enough to back the film’s implication he keeps himself afloat as a gigolo for tourists. Boyer’s arch voiceover relays every-step of the nakedly self-centred plan he initiates to squirm his way over the border. His performance is full of charm, tender shyness and love-struck adoration to Emmy, punctured throughout by Boyer’s canny side-eye to check on the effect of his shameless lies (there is a glorious moment when Boyer checks himself and cocks an eye when walking down a street, to make sure Emmy is following him).

The character works though because Boyer is a master at balancing this ruthless, self-serving charm with a general decency just below the surface that, no matter how hard he tries, he can never quite dampen down. It excels in the film’s middle act as the couple’s ‘spontaneous’ (so Georges can escape the notice of Walter Abel’s excellently shrewd immigration inspector) honeymoon in Mexico. Boyer brilliantly demonstrates through the slightest of vocal inflections and subtle shifts in body language (there is a point during a village fiesta where his face lights up with a genuine smile the like of which we have never seen before) that make us totally believe this is a man who, much to his surprise, is actually falling in love.

It helps with this that he shares scenes with such a winning presence as Olivia de Havilland as Emmy. Oscar-nominated, de Havilland takes a role (a spinsterish frump, who has never been loved) that could be ridiculous and makes it utterly and completely real. Throughout Georges initially cynical courting, there is a little sense of doubt throughout in de Havilland’s manner (she knows instant love is too good to be true), but such is her loneliness we can see and feel her willing herself into belief. As she does so, de Havilland lets the shy Emmy flourish into a woman of greater confidence, wit and burgeoning sexual desire (hilariously, the increasingly shamed Georges begins to event injuries to put off the consummation of this marriage). De Havilland makes Emmy a living, breathing person, someone miles away from the joke she is set up as initially: instead she is a genuine, true-hearted, increasingly brave woman whose decency and sense of warmth we grow to love as much as Georges does.

She makes an excellent contrast with Paulette Goddard’s ruthlessly amoral Anita. In one of her finest performances outside of her work with Chaplin, Goddard makes Anita utterly ruthless in seeking out what she wants and full of a hilariously honesty about her willingness to use anyone and anything to get it. She’s Georges even darker reflection, Goddard’s dialogue awash with brutal firecracker one-liners. But even she is capable at points of depth, a late act of petty cruelty awakening in her underlying feelings of sympathy and empathy that seem to surprise even her. It’s a lovely performance of darkly comedic ruthlessness.

These three leads all elevate a film that at times compromises on its vision of the harshness of the system these people are all stuck in. Hold Back the Dawn doesn’t want to make a statement as such – it wants to offer a more reassuring vision of hope and decency. This it does well: the film is even built around Georges pitching it as a possible film project to the actual Mitchell Leisen (effectively playing himself, on set shooting a real film with the real Veronica Lake and Brian Donlevy). After a start that suggests something darker and more dangerous, it ends as a comforting and safe picture – but one that works extremely well.

Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

Cruise’s final mission is really a tribute to the star himself and his never-ending force of will

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Cast: Tom Cruise (Ethan Hunt), Hayley Atwell (Grace), Ving Rhames (Luther Stickell), Simon Pegg (Benji Dunn), Esai Morales (Gabriel), Pom Klementieff (Paris), Henry Czerny (Eugene Kittridge), Angela Bassett (President Erika Sloane), Holt McCallany (Serling Bernstein), Janet McTeer (Secretary Walters), Nick Offerman (General Sidney), Hannah Waddingham (Rear Admiral Neely), Tramell Tillman (Captain Bledsoe), Shea Whigham (Briggs), Greg Tarzan Davies (Theo Degas), Charles Parnell (Richards), Mark Gatiss (Angstrom), Rolf Saxon (William Donloe), Lucy Tulugarjuk (Tapeesa)

Almost thirty years after the first film trotted into the cinema, Tom Cruise signs off (he claims) his franchise of death-defying stunts with a final entry that dials the global threat up so far you can almost hear the desperate whirring as the doomsday clock tries to keep up. Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is big in every single way, packed with set-pieces, dense procedural plot mechanics that require reams of exposition, global annihilation round every corner and at the centre the towering, chosen-one aura of Ethan Hunt himself, the only man who can save the world.

The Final Reckoning takes off a few weeks after the now-rechristened Dead Reckoning (after it under-performed they didn’t want to scare people off with a Part 2 subtitle). AI demigod The Entity is hellbent on gaining control of the world’s nuclear arsenals so that, having presumably binged Terminator, it can SkyNet-like wipe out humanity. Ethan (Tom Cruise) is on the run, but he has a plan. Dig out the sunken Russian sub where the Entity was ‘born’, fish out its source code, hook it up to an Entity-killing virus and trap the AI would-be-overlord in what’s essentially a glowing USB drive. This mission will involve lots of running, fighting, defusing of nukes, diving to the bottom of the ocean, jumping between bi-planes mid-flight… he might as well chuck the kitchen sink as well.

Mission: Impossible: Final Reckoning has plenty of fun, even if it is hellishly overlong. It’s the sort of crowd-pleaser that gets people clapping at the end (as several people in my packed-out screening did). When the stunts come, they’re hugely well-staged. As always the Tom Cruise USP is front-and-centre: if you see him do it, he did it. Yes, Tom really did jump out of a naval helicopter into the raging Atlantic. Yes, that really is Tom, climbing over a speeding bi-plane thousands of feet-up with only a pair of goggles to keep him safe. It’s no-coincidence the villain is an AI who creates an artificial digital reality. The Mission: Impossible films are all about it keeping it solidly real.

But, once the initial adrenaline rush subsides, I’m wondering if its pumped-up thrills are going to be a bit more wearing second-time around. What struck me about The Final Reckoning is, that for all the huge amount of stuff going on, there is precious little heart in it. More than any other M:I film since the little-loved M:I:2 (practically the only film in the franchise not to get a shout-out here), the act of saving-the-world here is a job for one never-wrong superhuman. Cruise does almost everything, his team’s main role being getting into the right place to send him a message or wire up a computer. On top of that, the best of the series set-pieces had flashes of Ethan’s stress, fear and sense of ‘I cant believe I have to do this’ humour – all of that is mostly missing here.

The Final Reckoning loses a lot of the heart of what made the earlier films so rewarding. It loses the moments of friendship or sparky interplay between the team. Cruise and Pegg, the series main comic relief, share almost no scenes together. Klementoff and Davies do virtually nothing as new team members, other than shoot guns and get captured. Cruise shares more time with Atwell, but the bizarre is-it-a-romance-or-not between them is as oddly undefined as Ethan’s relationship with Rebecca Ferguson’s Elsa was (in fact it makes you realise the most sexual thing Ethan has done since film three is hold someone’s hand). Cruise is so often on solo missions, that the film could probably have dispensed with the team altogether with only a small plot impact.

The film only affords to slow down to give Ving Rhames (the only other guy to appear in every film) a moment of genuine emotion – though special mention must go to Rolf Saxon and Lucy Tulugarjuk who from small moments craft characters I genuinely grew attached to and worried about. Otherwise, the bonds of friendship that powered the franchises most successful non-stunt moments are absent. In fact, also missing are the heist caper set-pieces – even the famous face-masks are only employed very briefly.

The Final Reckoning dials the stakes up so much, they are effectively meaningless. In previous films, high-stakes were mixed with personal ones: we were always more invested in whether Ethan save his friends rather than the word. The film also struggles without a real antagonist. Its nominal human opponent, Esai Morales’ Gabriel, little more than a smirk and an obstacle. Shorn of the most-interesting element of his character – his fanatical loyalty to his AI master – Gabriel is neither particularly interesting or a threat. In its vast runtime, Final Reckoning has no time to actually explore what the personal link between Ethan and Gabriel actually was, making you wonder why on earth they bothered to put it in both films in the first place.

It’s not helped by the fact that the film is so constantly in motion, that virtually every single scene of dialogue is about communicating what’s going to happen next. There are constantly (admittedly skilfully batted around) conversations explaining why Ethan has to go there, get this, bring it here, do this to it, put it in that all within a ridiculously small window of time. Sometimes, to shake it up, we cut across to the US bunker where a gang of over-qualified actors (Bassett, Offerman, McCallany, McTeer and Gatiss) similarly explain what the Entity is doing to each other. (Although, like Rhames, Bassett gets the most interesting stuff to actually act as a President facing a Fail Safe like terrible choice).

What you realise is that The Final Reckoning is pretty confident that what really pulls the audience in is Tom Cruise doing crazy stunts, so that’s what it gives us. In fact, rather than a tribute to the series (despite closing plot points from Missions 1 and 3) what the film really feels like is a tribute to Cruise, the last man-standing among the old-fashioned superstars. Most of the dialogue puffs up Cruise’s Ethan into Godlike status (it’s not quite “living manifestation of destiny” like Rogue Nation put it, but close). Cruise carries out two extended fight scenes in his pants (though if I looked like that at 61 so would I). No other actors intrude on his stunts or messianic sense of purpose.

Which is amazingly done of course. Literally no-one does it better than Cruise. The fact that the movie feels like Cruise effectively shot most of it alone with just the crew, means it almost doesn’t matter that its plot is merely to link together set-pieces. And if someone deserves a victory lap – which is what this is – then that guy is Cruise. I’d have wanted more of the fun, humour and warmth that made most of the other films such massively rewarding hits. But The Final Reckoning gives more of what the series does that no other series does. And I guess that’s a fitting finale.

Alexander the Great (1956)

An odd epic, which both loathes its subject and also presents him as a golden-boy

Director: Robert Rossen

Cast: Richard Burton (Alexander the Great), Fredric March (Philip II), Claire Bloom (Barsine), Danielle Darrieux (Olympias), Barry Jones (Aristotle), Harry Andrews (Darius), Stanley Baker (Attalus), Niall MacGinnis (Parmenion), Peter Cushing (Memnon), Michael Hordern (Demosthenes), Marisa de Leza (Eurydice), Gustavo Rojo (Cleitus the Black), Peter Wyngarde (Pausanias), William Squire (Aeschenes)

No one in history achieved so much, so young as Alexander the Great. He conquered most of the known world before he was thirty and left a legend that generations of would-be emperors found almost impossible to live up to. He did all this, while remaining a fascinatingly enigmatic figure: either a visionary nation-builder or a drunken man of violence, depending on who you talk to. Alexander the Great, in its truncated two hours and twenty minutes (sliced down from Robert Rossen’s original three-hour plus) can only scratch the surface of his story and that’s all it does.

As the great man, Richard Burton flexes his mighty voice in a film that splits its focus roughly equally between the early days of Alexander and his troubled relationship with both his father Philip II (Fredric March) and his mother Olympias (Danielle Darrieux) and his own kingship and conquest of the known world until his early death. Surprisingly, perhaps because the world is so vast, it’s the first half of the film that’s the most interesting – perhaps because showing up the internecine dynastic squabbles between petulant royals are more up director and writer Rossen’s alley than global dominance.

Perhaps as well because it feels pretty clear Rossen doesn’t particularly seem to like Alexander. Over the course of the film, the pouting monarch will prove to have a monstrous ego (even as a teenager fighting Philip’s wars, he cockily re-names a sacked city after himself), ruthlessly slaughters opponents after battles, is prone to fits of rage, informs his followers with wild-eyes that he’s God himself, leads his army into the dried out hell of the deserts of the Middle East and turns (at best) a blind eye to his mother’s plans to assassinate his father and then murder his father’s second wife and baby son.

The film culminates in a shamed Alexander kicking the bucket more concerned with maintaining his legend for future generations than assuring any kind of future for his kingdom. But the sense of hubris destroying the great man is never quite captured. This is partly because the grand figure we are watching lacks any personal feelings or fear. He can’t seem to experience loss or grief and only understands negative events in terms of their impact on his reputation. And he never seems to truly learn from this – even when he harms friends, his regrets are based around the impact such action will have on how those around him see him. At the same time, Rossen can’t quite follow his heart and make a real iconoclastic epic meaning he instead leaves titbits here and there for the cinema-goer to hopefully pick up among the spectacle.

As such, Alexander is still pretty persistently framed as we expect a hero to be, with a rousing score backdropping Burton’s speeches and poses, even while the film seems deeply divided about whether this guy who conquered most of the known world and lay waste to Babylon was a good or bad thing. While acting half the time like a egomaniac tyrant, the film still carefully partially shifts blame for his character flaws onto his mother’s Lady Macbethesque influence (Darrieux does a good line in whispering insinuation) or Philip’s bombastic egotism (March, growling with impressive vigour).

Rossen has far more admiration for people like the fiercely principled Memnon (a fine Peter Cushing) who refuses to compromise only to be rewarded by a post-battle one-sided butchering from Alexander after his offer to surrender and spare the lives of his men is turned down. Even Michael Hordern’s Demosthenes comes across as a man of principle, certainly when compared to Alexander’s Athenian-of-choice Aristotle, interpretated here as a pompous windbag cheer-leader for dictators. Oddly even Harry Andrews (possibly, along with Niall MacGinnis’ wily Parmenion, the films finest performance) as Darius comes across as a man of surprising human doubt under his regal exterior. But, perhaps because of choppy-editing cutting down a complex story into just over two hours, Alexander the Great can’t resist framing its hero as a sun-kissed golden-boy, towering above everyone else in the film.

Watching Alexander the Great you get the feeling the film has effectively entombed him as a marble statue, so devoid is he of fundamental humanity. Perhaps this was Rossen’s solution to shooting a film about someone he seemed so devoid of human interest and sympathy for. There is a reason why Charlton Heston – the first choice for the role (can you imagine!) – called Alexander the Great “the easiest kind of picture to make badly”. Frequently Alexander the Great tips into a sort of sword-and-sandles camp made worse by how highly serious it takes itself. Not helped by Burton’s all-too-clear boredom with the part and contempt for the material, Alexander strikes poses and delivers speeches as if he’s been ripped straight out of Plutarch or a bust display in a museum.

Apart from rare moments – usually in the first half as he processes his complex feelings of love and loathing for his overbearing father – he is almost never allowed to be human. His friends – most notably his famed best-friend (and lover) Hephaestion – are reduced to a gang of largely wordless extras and only Claire Bloom’s Barsine is given any scope to talk to him as if he’s a man rather than just a myth. It gets a bit wearing after a while as you long for something human about the man you can cling onto.

It’s also a shame that Rossen seems uncomfortable with shooting the battle sequences. The battles of Granicus and a combined Issus-Gaugamela look rather like damp scuffles over shallow streams than some of the mightiest clashes of the Ancient world. Rossen communicates no visual sense of either strategy or scale (despite the bumper budget). Similarly, the grand sets look too theatrical and never quite as impressive as they should do, despite some fine painterly compositions. Rossen can never quite find a way to make his hundreds of extra seem like thousands and he falls back in the second half to communicating Alexander’s success through a tired combination of map montages, voiceover and repeated shots of men marching left to right and burning cities.

Alexander the Great is a deeply flawed epic. It’s neither swashbuckling fun that bowls you along, or a breath-taking piece of historical spectacle. Nor is it psychologically adept or insightful enough to show you something truly different about its hero. Instead, it tries to straddle both ways of thinking and ends up collapsing in the middle. If only Rossen had found his own Alexanderian solution to cutting this Gordian knot. Instead, the film just ends up a cut-about mess that fades from memory all too soon.

Moonstruck (1987)

Charmingly romantic comedy with little touches of Shakespeare in its celebration of family love

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Cher (Loretta Castorini), Nicolas Cage (Ronny Cammareri), Olympia Dukakis (Rose Castorini), Vincent Gardenia (Cosmo Castorini), Danny Aiello (Johnny Cammareri), Julie Bovasso (Rita Cappomagi), Louis Goss (Raymond Cappomagi), John Mahoney (Perry), Feodor Chaliapin (Old man), Antia Gilette (Mona)

People do strange things all the time. We don’t always understand why, so why not say it’s a midsummer madness caused by the moon. Moonstruck seizes that old superstition of blaming the position of our nearest celestial neighbour for sending us all a bit barmy, and weaves it into a film that’s both a playfully eccentric romantic comedy and a sweet tribute to the power of a family’s loving bonds. John Patrick Shanley’s (Oscar-winning) script pulls these strings together so well, it’s not a surprise it’s the sort of a film that frequently ends up on people’s ‘favourite film’ lists.

Loretta Castorini (Cher) is an Italian-American widow, living with her parents, who is starting to wonder if she is cursed with spinsterhood. As the moon reaches its bright zenith, she agrees to marry her terminally dull, utterly unromantic boyfriend Johnny (Danny Aiello), because anything’s better than nothing (despite the fact he seems to see her as much a substitute for his mother as a romantic partner). She agrees to mend the bad blood between him and his younger brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage). Ronny is a picture-postcard of an eccentric, a one-handed baker (blaming his brother for that) prone to melodramatic fits of rage and outbursts of Operatic passion. Loretta and Ronny – blame that moon – are instantly smitten with each other. Who is going to sort that out?

It all pulls together into a sort of modern fairy tale, where everything has an air of gently heightened reality. It’s also the sort of thing that wouldn’t seem out-of-place in Shakespeare’s lightest comedies: people fall in love on a sixpence, feuds are fixed in minutes, cheating spouses instantly return to their wives and jilted suitors smile and join in the celebratory drinks. In this world of theatrical, fairy-tale comedy, it’s quite easy to buy that an exceptionally bright moon is sending everyone a little bit crazy (like Shakespeare’s Dream lovers in the forests outside Athens, going through one crazy doped-up night before settling suddenly into two loving couples) and eventually you just run with it in Jewison’s charming film.

With a script full of witty lines and theatrical bits of bombast (which Cage in particular, inevitably, rips through), Moonstruck is also one of those endlessly charming, relaxing and pleasant films where fundamentally everyone is at-heart decent. Sure, mistakes are made throughout; harsh words and truths are spoken, but within a film where everyone cares for each other. Ronny may (rather unjustly) blame his brother for briefly distracting him at work into losing his hand, but deep down he’s just waiting for an excuse to forgive his brother. Loretta may have a prickly relationship with her mother, but it’s roots are really firm and based around both protecting the other from knowledge of the knee-jerk philandering of her father. It takes the influence of the moon to suddenly spark these people into a few days of crazy behavior that changes their lives and leads them to re-address their relationships with each other.

It also makes Loretta, in an Oscar-winning comedic turn from Cher, face up to the fears about where her life is going. In a performance that is remarkably unglamourous – Cher plays every inch of the reliable window settling into spinsterhood and the film never falsely ‘transforms’ her – Cher invests Loretta with a deep fear and resignation below her surface of reliability and unflappability. Loretta is so used to being practical and dependable, organising the lives of everyone (even patiently instructing the confused Johnny on how to propose marriage), part of her romantic relief with Ronny is being able to let rip a more sensual and vulnerable part of herself. Cher lets the mask slip, as if having had love potion dripped into her eyes, letting her express her deeper feelings.

It makes sense then that she should fall in love with someone as self-willed and resistant to being mothered as Ronny. In an early role that straight away captures Nicolas Cage’s willingness to rip into a scene (what other actor would feel like such a natural fit for a lovably blow-hard, one-handed, baker melodramatically prone to threatening no end of harm on himself?), Ronny has all the sort of wildness and uncontrolled energy and excitement the rest of Loretta’s life doesn’t have. And he doesn’t want her to fill a surrogate role for another family member – he wants her to be part of an equal relationship on her own terms with him.

It’s probably the sort of relationship Loretta’s parents had at one point. Before her mother Rose (another Oscar-winner, Olympia Dukakis) become cynical and shut-off from her husband Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia). Cosmo has let his decency get squashed under a fear of growing old, clinging to a younger girlfriend (Anita Gillette) who he conducts an affair more out of habit more anything. No wonder Rose considers flirting with John Mahoney’s constantly-jilted professor (in a touch that hasn’t aged well, he keeps trying to date his students), but not going the whole hog, while Cosmo tries to feel young again by doubling-down on his quietly dying affair.

What’s surprising then is that Moonstruck bubbles all this romantic back-and-forth into a warm celebration of familial love. While romantic bonds are firey, they are transient – the bonds of family last. Moonstruck culminates in the family putting the sort of romantic divisions that have kept them apart aside to come together in a warm celebration: like Shakespeare’s lovers they have woken up and found out everything is in fact fine. There’s something really reassuring and hopeful about this – that our feuds and divisions can bring us together as much as they can tear us apart.

It’s another reason as well why this is a popular film. It’s helped of course by John Patrick Shanley’s well-crafted script, and the terrific playing of the actors. Cher and Cage both have great chemistry and get the tone of the eccentric but touchingly tender unlikely romance just right. Dukakis and Gardenia are both funny and sweet as their parents, Aiello gives a very generous performance as a dutiful-boy-who-never-grew-up and there’s a scene-stealing cameo from Feodor Chalipin as Loretta’s eccentric grandfather. Above all, Moonstruck is a playful, feel-good film that doesn’t take itself too seriously and lives you feeling hopeful that everything can work itself out – even when the magic of the moon sends us a little crazy.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023)

Transformers serves away from the charm of Bumblebee back to the tedious machismo of Bay

Director: Steven Caple Jnr

Cast: Anthony Ramos (Noah Diaz), Dominique Fishback (Elena Wallace), Dean Scott Vazquez (Kris Diaz), Luna Lauren Velez (Breanna Diaz), Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime), Ron Perlman (Optimus Primal), Peter Dinklage (Scourge), Michelle Yeoh (Airazor), Pete Davidson (Mirage), Liza Koshy (Arcee), Colman Domingo (Unicron)

Somehow the Transformers franchise lucked out and managed to make a film I actually wouldn’t feel awkward showing to a child. Bumblebee avoided the crude sexualisation and graphic violence (hidden by the fact you are watching CGI engine oil and bits of metal flying around, rather than blood and bits of human flesh) of Michael Bay’s films. I really enjoyed it. I can’t really say the same about this follow-up. I’d at least let a child watch it – although it’s the cinematic equivalent of letting them have a Big Mac for dinner.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts could have continued in the tone of Bumblebee, a delightful mix of cartoon and Buster Keaton/Laurel and Hardy. Instead, it takes tiny elements of that, then mashes them up with the throw-it-all-at-the-screen style of Bay. It’s not a happy marriage, and Rise of the Beasts is tired and overly familiar, crammed with crude banter and the sort of mass smackdown we’ve seen done time-and-time again. Give me strength. Rise of the Beasts isn’t really a sequel to Bumblebee – the events of that film are referred to only in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference. The boyish charm of Bumblebee is drenched in audio clip quotes from Scarface and the like. Instead, it’s another “end of the world seconds away from a giant robot monster” flick.

Far in the future Unicorn (voiced with regal indifference by Colman Domingo), the planet eating robot from the 1985 film (when he was voiced by a final pay-cheque collecting Orson Welles) is trapped in another dimension, but wants to break into ours. He sends his minion Scourge (Peter Dinklage, dialling it in big time) to 1990s Earth to hunt down the MacGuffin that will do it. Only Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and his Autobots can stop him, allied with an ex-soldier desperately trying to help his kid brother Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) and Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) a junior archaeologist who can unearth the MacGuffin from where it has been hidden centuries ago by the Maximals, a group of transformers descended from our Autobots who transform into giant mechanical animals (their leader Optimus Primal is a Kong style ape).

It all seems a million miles away from the charm of the first film, with a teenage girl bonding with her first car who just happens to be a clumsy robot. There is precious little charm at all Rise of the Beasts. The human characters are either faintly forgettable, loud and brash or serve only as plot points. Anthony Ramos has to do a lot of digging to find any depth in a character given only a cursory plotline of desperation to provide for his mum and brother. Dominique Fishback’s archaeologist has the faintest of backstories about being cheated out of the credit for her work, before she’s fiddling with MacGuffins with handwave lines. The action zips across two universes and two continents, but never seems to really find firm grounding for itself.

There’s also something rather sad about the film swopping out the fairy tale elements of Bumblebee with a far more conventional Bro-romance. Ramos’ street-wise ex-soldier is paired up with Peter Davidson’s Mirage, a loud-mouthed Autobot who, despite a few witty lines, basically comes across as a street-wise bro with a hot streak of immaturity. There is a streak of laddish banter throughout the film – none of it, thank God, as appallingly sexist or racist as what passes for this sort of chat in Bay’s films – that essentially doubles down on restoring the franchise to something that appeals only to teenage boys and adults who wish they still were teenage boys.

After the broadening out of Bumblebee with a female lead given actual agency, this feels like a retrograde step. Rise of the Beasts does manage to pay this Bros plotline off with a surprisingly effective scene of self-sacrifice – but does so while not shirking on red-blooded (or red-oiled) young men whooping and cheering as they blast stuff out of the sky. It’s a step firmly back towards a territory that places male relationships at a premium – be it bros or actual brothers – and the bonds between men a world that leaves women on the outside looking in.

Not to mention the plot continually readjusts its stakes and characters depending on the requirements from scene to scene. Scourge is an unstoppable killing machine… until the plot requires him not to be. Characters are killed off… until the plot needs them to come back to life. Characters are fixated on their own needs… until the plot needs them to be altruistic. It combines that up with a final battle sequence that feels painfully derivative of the end of Avengers: Endgame, with Scourge mustering an army of rent-a-baddies to slow down the heroes while he slowly plugs a thingamee into a do-hickey.

Even Optimus Prime takes a backward step. While Bumblebee salvaged some likeability out of this hero, Rise of the Beasts very much returns him to Bay form: a deeply flawed leader with anger-management issues, who slices and dices foes with reckless abandon, rips off heads and uses neat kiss-off lines like “Then DIE”. I suppose he doesn’t execute at point-blank range a surrendering foe begging for mercy (Bay did this twice!) but he still hardly feels like an admirable hero. Rise of the Beasts vaguely acknowledges this by having Prime go on a loose arc of learning to put the needs of humans on a level with the Autobots (yup he’s also a proto-racist at the start) but it’s a very loose peg to hang a hero on.

Rise of the Beasts gives up on any pretensions of doing something fresh, engaging or different with the series. Even the beasts, for all their animalistic looks, are basically barely characters, more different looking toys imported into a flagging cinematic universe (Ron Perlman and Michelle Yeoh lazily yawn their way through terminal dialogue). While Bumblebee took the starting principles of the franchise and found the joy in them, Rise of the Beasts is a teenage wet dream of toys hitting each other to no great purpose, that places male relationships at its heart and leaves you with nothing to really care about. It’s a callback to everything bad about this franchise.

Cabaret (1972)

Fosse’s influential adaptation reinvents the musical into a superb exploration of sexuality and wilful blindness

Director: Bob Fosse

Cast: Liza Minnelli (Sally Bowles), Michael York (Brian Roberts), Helmut Griem (Baron Maximilian von Heune), Joel Grey (MC), Fritz Wepper (Fritz Wendel), Marisa Berenson (Natalia Landauer), Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel (Fräulein Schneider)

Some say Life is a Cabaret (old chum) – but they may well be closing their eyes to what’s really going on around them. Much harder to do that in Cabaret, a dark study of Weimar Germany, the quintessential time-period where everyone was so wrapped up in having a good time they failed to notice the world was beginning to burn down around them. Fosse’s version is a musical, but song and dance fills just over a quarter of the runtime. At its heart, it’s a character study of two young people in a particular time and place with very different perceptions of the dangers around them. It makes for a dark, inventive re-working of the Broadway original with Fosse stretching his wings into the sort of complex work culminating in the forensic self-examination of All That Jazz – and make Cabaret one of the most unique and exceptional of musicals.

Our Babes in 1931 Weimar Berlin are Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) and Brian Roberts (Michael York). Sally is a would-be superstar, plying her trade singing and dancing at the Kit Kat Klub. The host of erotic and blackly comic numbers there is the unsettling MC (Joel Grey). Brian is an academic, a reserved and very English young man with a preference for other men. Housemates in the same boarding house, the two become very close – and both very close indeed to happy-go-lucky Baron Maximilian von Heune (Helmet Griem). Sexual, romantic and emotional feelings ebb and flow while in the background the Nazis march relentlessly towards power along a path of violence.

Fosse was desperate to direct Cabaret, a film he felt certain would be a hit– and producer Cy Feuer was keen to bring his raunchy, dynamic choreography to the seamy world of the Kit Kat Klub. But Fosse also wanted to do something very different to the original musical. He wanted to return more to it literary roots, the semi-autobiographical works of Christopher Isherwood. He also felt, based on his experience directing Sweet Charity, that realism and bursting into song didn’t work. So the original script was jettisoned in favour of a new story junking most of the musicals plot (and several key characters), change its male lead from a straight American back to a queer Brit and cut all but one song not inside the Kit Kat Klub, making them a commentary on the action.

It’s a master-stroke, making Cabaret both a compellingly staged musical, but also a dark social issues piece and exploration of sexuality. In fact, you could watch Cabaret and wonder if Fosse didn’t really want to direct a musical at all. His heart, I feel, lies in the increasingly sexually charged and fluidic relationship between the three lovers at its heart: Sally’s vivacious enthusiasm, Brian’s careful guardedness and Maximilian’s shallow glee. It’scaptured beautifully in a late-night drinking scene in Maximilian’s palatial house, with the camera sensually close as the three dance together, their lips inches away from each other, the desire bubbling between them.

There’s a striking comfort with sexual freedom in Cabaret. Brian’s homosexuality – or bisexuality after he and Sally together discover his previous disastrous liaisons were clearly with “the wrong three girls” – is treated unremarkably by all: after all the Kit Kat Klub has its share of drag queens (one of them sharing a telling look with Brian after they surprise each other at the urinal). It’s all part of a wider bohemian lifestyle, exemplified by Sally who is always dreaming that a big break is just around the corner. This is the decent, brave and accepting side of Weimar Germany.

But Cabaret is also about the danger all around the characters, which too many of them ignore. Brian is the most conscious and politically aware, for all his English reserve. But Sally’s major flaw is that she chooses to pretend it’s not happening. Minnelli’s gorgeous rendition of ‘Cabaret’ at the end is so often seen as a triumphant embracing of life on her own terms, that its overlooked Sally performs it having decided to turn her back on broadening her own life outside her comfort zone and is singing to a room increasingly full of Nazis who will stamp out the very life she’s dreaming about.

Sally is bought to life in a superb, Oscar-winning performance by Liza Minnelli. Minnelli’s singing is of course extraordinary – her rendition of ‘Maybe This Time’ is one for the ages – but she’s also superb at bringing to life Sally’s bubbly naivety and kindness while also suggesting the fragility and desperation to be liked under the surface. There’s something very innocent about her, for all her hedonism: her attempted seduction of Brian has the clumsy brashness of an over-eager virgin, and while instinctively keen to help others she’s clueless at dealing with real emotional problems (there’s a wonderful moment when Minnelli looks sideways in panic as Maria Berenson pours her heart out to her, as if trying to find a way to escape). It’s a gorgeous, endearingly sweet performance – and perfectly counterpointed by Michael York’s career-best turn as the sharp, gentle, thoroughly decent Brian, with his own unique moral code.

Around them, Fosse uses the musical numbers to darkly comment on the action, helped by the demonic feel of Joel Grey’s sinister MC (the first real shot of the film is Grey’s face looming up from below to flash a Lucifer grin), whose manner becomes increasingly cruel, Fosse cutting to brief shots of him knowingly grinning as the dangers of Nazism become increasingly hard to avoid. Grey (who originated the part on stage) has a look of Joseph Goebbels about him, and it’s hard not to feel he’s some sort of manic sprite given even more life and energy as the world fills with horrors around him.

The musical numbers are extraordinary, brilliantly assembled by Fosse and full of seedy glamour – there is a gorgeous shot in ‘Willkommen’ when the camera whips around the high-kicking chorus line that’s like a shot of adrenaline. They mix between the darkly funny – the troubling romantic longing of ‘If You Could See Her’ – and the gorgeously inventive, with the tightly choreographed movements of ‘Money, Money’. Grey is a crucial part of this, his charismatic singing and dancing burning through the celluloid – who can forget his cruel glee under the comic interplay of ‘Two Ladies’ – and the use of him as a cryptic chorus who never speaks except on stage is a master stroke.

From its early scenes, we are left in no doubt of the violence many are choosing to ignore. From a street lined with ripped up election posters which Sally and Brian stroll down, to cut aways to stormtroopers brutally beating opponents, we can’t escape the inevitable death of this happy-go-lucky world. It’s also Fosse’s masterstroke to make the only musical ‘number’ outside the Klub not only goose-bumpingly powerful but also a skin-crawling piece of Riefenstahl-framed Nazi triumphalism.

Cabaret superbly captures in this one moment the seductive power of Nazism. As an Aryan boy sings ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ (a slow camera pan reveals his SA uniform) at a beer garden, gradually the crowd joins in. The song builds into a resounding crescendo, people’s faces beaming with pride, full of fixed fanaticism, all of them sharing a special, powerful moment of belonging. Fosse’s unbelievable nerve is to present this utterly straight (someone with no knowledge of Nazism would be deeply moved watching it), making its seductive power even more chilling: because you can’t watch without also feeling a nausea inducing feeling of goose-bumps.

Hard not to agree with Brian when he wryly asks the smug Max whether he’s still sure the Nazis can be controlled. (Max parrots the upper class view that the Nazis are useful tools for getting rid of the socialists). It’s much easier for us to understand why Fritz Webber’s scruffy charmer Fritz (hiding his scuffed shirt cuffs) is scared of revealingly his Jewish heritage, even if it’s all he needs to do to win the love of Marisa Berenson’s shopping mall heiress. You don’t want to pop your head over the parapet in this world.

What’s clear in this superb film, is we can applaud the characters only so far: after all they decide to avoid the obvious that hedonism must be put aside to see the world for what it really is. There is a tragedy, in Sally in particular, that she can’t or won’t do this. As beautiful as her optimism is, it eventually becomes wilful blindness. This is part of what makes Fosse’s extraordinary film one that transcends its source material to become something truly unique. It’s a calling-card of a great director.

Sinners (2025)

Coogler’s mix of political statement and horror flick is overlong but very effective

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Michael B Jordan (Elijah “Smoke” Moore/Elias “Stack” Moore), Hailee Steinfeld (Mary), Miles Caton (Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore), Jack O’Connell (Remmick), Wunmi Mosaku (Annie), Jayme Lawson (Pearline), Omar Miller (Cornbread), Delroy Lindo (Delta Slim), Li Jun Li (Grace Chow), Yao (Bo Chow), Buddy Guy (Old Samme)

In 1932 twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B Jordan, pulling double duty) return to the racist South of Mississippi after years of war service followed by time spent working for the gangs of Chicago. They dream of setting up a juke joint for the Black community, flying in the face the racism of local Mississippi. But the dangers of the KKK pale slightly, when their opening night coincides with the arrival of vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) who dreams of forming a new family of the dead – and wants to recruit Mississippi’s Black community, with promises of equality in his world they could never have in their own. Holed up in their juke joint, can the brothers and their families and friends survive a night long siege until dawn?

The basic set-up of Sinners is, to be honest, familiar. It delights in hueing close to Vampire mythology – garlic, wooden stakes, silver and sunlight are the key weapons here and the vampires are powerless to cross a threshold until they are invited – and the ‘base under siege’ that occupies the film’s final act is essentially taken direct from the sort of set-up John Carpenter excelled at in his heyday. What makes Sinners really stand-out is the richness of its character relationships and its social context.

That social context is, of course, the Jim Crow South. Sinners is a film steeped in the racial injustice of a particular time-and-place. In 1932, Black workers still pick cotton on plantations in exchange for wooden nickels. Families live in shanty towns and use different shops than the white folk (local goods dealers the Chow’s run two convenience stores, on opposite sides of the street, to serve their two clienteles). The danger of lynchings are everyday threats (Delroy Lindo has a haunting monologue, beautifully delivered, as Slim recounts the lynching of a former band partner, who unwisely produced his stuffed wallet at a train station). Virtually the only white people we see (other than Rennick) are KKK members.

In this world of radical injustice, it’s fascinating that Coogler suggests, in some ways, the afterlife of a Vampire is more just and fair than actual life. Rennick, himself the relic of a long-oppressed pagan Irish community, makes solid points about Smoke and Stack facing a losing battle trying to play by the white man’s game as entrepreneurs and would-be local businessmen. He even, genuinely, states he would be happy to kill the entire KKK just to wipe their hatred from the Earth. There is a certain truth in the fact that, in the legions of the undead, all are equal and race means nothing. That getting bit could be a doorway to a new world, free of racial oppression – even if it also seems to mean living in the sort of community Rennick alone crafts.

It becomes a fascinating idea, joined with the fact that Rennick also points out Christianity is a spirituality forced on the Black community. Unlike the blues music, that gifted young cousin to the brothers, Sammie (a lyrical performance in every sense from Miles Caton) plays so well it can cross the bounds of space and time joining Black souls together, the enslaved people didn’t bring Christianity with them across the water. It was forced on them, as much as the labour in the fields. Sinners isn’t quite brave enough to explicitly denounce the Church as just another wing of enslavement (even if Sammie’s preacher father uses trauma to hammer conversion on people, rather than offering comfort). But it does make clear that Sammie’s ‘coming-of-age’ is whether he will choose the culture of his ancestors or the culture of his oppressors.

This is thought-provoking stuff – and Coogler does a superb job of threading it through the blood-spurting, neck-biting, stake-hammering action that fills up a large portion of the film’s conclusion. Sinners is dripping in Blues music, which artfully and beautifully wraps itself around the film to perfectly capture its tone and pitch. The sequence where Sammi’s music fills the juke joint, is transcendent in more ways than one, powerful and transporting in its musicality and passion (Ludwig Göransson’s score, created in partnership with several Blues artists and the actors is exceptional). Coogler matches it with one his trademark, virtuoso, one-take shots, the camera seamlessly weaving in and around the juke joint as our 1930s characters dance alongside modern club dancers and musicians as well as tribal African musicians of the distant past.

It also rewards more as Coogler takes his time throughout the film’s long opening act to really establish the characters and their relationships. You can argue that Sinners is over-indulgent in the sometimes overlong (well over an hour) long ‘recruitment’ sequence as Smoke and Stack assemble family and friends for their opening night. But this careful exploration of the closeness and warmth between these people – their loving sense of family, loyalty and sometimes painful shared history – pays off in spades when they begin one-by-one to turn to Rennick and then on each other. Coogler then makes these corruptions of the living into the hungry undead really sting, just as we feel the pain of those left among the living who must stake their nearest and dearest.

That carries further impact from the strength of the acting. Jordan, one of the most charismatic actors out there, gives a superb double-performance as the two twins, expertly sketching out their contrasting personalities and their deep love for each other. He makes Stack charismatic, gregarious and fun, and Smoke gruff, reserved but endlessly loyal and protective. They are too sharply humane turns, with Jordan so naturally playing off himself you forget both are played by the same actor.

Equally fine are the rest of the cast. Miles Caton is youthful idealism being shaken by traumatic events on the greatest night of his life. Wunmi Mosaku gives Smoke’s wife Annie a moral authority and deep sense of lingering grief. Hailee Steinfeld is vivacious but similarly burdened by disappointment and pain at chances lost as Stack’s one-time girlfriend that prejudice thwarted. Delroy Lindo’s soulful skill invests Slim with a real grace under the drunkenness. Even O’Connell, at times transformed into an Orlock-like nightmare, has a lonely humanity behind his ruthless, never-ending desire to build a new community (which he controls) around him.

There are powerful subtexts throughout here, even if parts of Sinners could at times benefit from a little tightening. Coogler effectively gives a rich hinterland to some familiar genre settings: and he surprises us with two codas, one rich in satisfying revenge violence the other with a rhapsodic melancholy which feel like natural ends for both their characters. Sinners mixes its Spike Lee influences with its John Carpenter ones with excellent effect, and is another firm reminder of the visual flair and piercing individualism of Coogler as director.

The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Superb gangster film, that sums up a whole era of film-making with a fast-paced grit

Director: Raoul Walsh

Cast: James Cagney (Eddie Bartlett), Priscilla Lane (Jean Sherman), Humphrey Bogart (George Hally), Gladys George (Panama Smith), Jeffrey Lynn (Lloyd Hart), Frank McHugh (Danny Green), George Meeker (Harold Masters), Paul Kelly (Nick Brown), Elizabeth Risdon (Mrs Sherman), Joseph Sawyer (Sgt Pete Jones)

Three guys fall in a foxhole, might sound like the beginning of an odd wartime joke but it’s the encounter that begins The Roaring Twenties. Framed as both a period piece, looking back to a time already a decade away from the contemporary audience, and a sort of memorial piece to a whole cycle of bootlegger gangster films. It’s also a film far too regularly overlooked when discussing that cycle: in my opinion it’s one of the finest and possibly Cagney’s most complex gangster role (with apologies to White Heat). It’s a fast-paced, hugely entertaining slice of crime drama, with fascinating, multi-faceted characters and an intriguing level of social depth.

Those three foxhole guys are Eddie Bennett (James Cagney), destined to run a bootlegging empire in Chicago; George Hally (Humphrey Bogart), destined to become his sociopathic ruthless partner; and Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn), destined to become a lawyer walking an awkward line. Returning from World War One, Eddie finds little welcome for returning servicemen, but his pluck and sense of personal loyalty eventually see him stumble into, and then embrace, the bootlegging business with glamourous hostess Panama Smith (Gladys George). Problem is danger abounds in the crime-ridden city and its impossible to work in this business without getting your hands dirty. Throw-in Eddie’s candle-holding love for the quietly uninterested Jean Sherman (Priscilla Lane) and you have a recipe for long-term disaster.

The Roaring Twenties is a punchy, well-cut, overlooked gem. From its opening montage that rolls back over newsreel from 1940 to the trenches of World War One to its closing tracking shot that culminates in Eddie’s fatal tumble on the steps of a church (as always in the gangster film, no-one escape death’s moral judgement no matter how psychologically complex they are) it’s a feast of fast-moving entertainment. Along the way Walsh throws in everything, from gun battles to musical numbers, by way of comedy, obsessive love and social commentary. The Roaring Twenties is arguably a nostalgic cocktail with a dim view of its decade: one of crime, hedonism and hypocrisy.

And it’s corrupted Eddie. This is Cagney firing on all cylinders: and it’s remarkable how skilfully he creates a complex, sympathetic character out of similar material to his despicable hood in Public Enemy or the flat-out psychopath he forged in White Heat. Eddie is in many ways a decent man who finds all the dreams he’s been clinging too are fantasies. He can’t land the mechanic job he dreamed of, his uniform is the subject of mockery, the woman he’s been corresponding with turns out to be a teenager (Cagney’s disappointment, discomfort and faint attraction when he first meets Jean Sherman’s skipping late-teens Priscilla is beautifully done). Eddie is left bumming around town desperate for any opportunity.

Cagney’s performance really works, because Eddie – even with an angry streak that means he can knock out two chucking goons with one punch – is fundamentally a decent bloke, corrupted by circumstances. He sees the liquor-brewing game as a short-term fast buck, which he stumbles into because he’s too chivalrous to allow Panama to take the wrap for a bootlegging delivery he’s made. He’s loyal to his friends and tries to solve problems amicably. He’s got a charming, barrow-boy entrepreneurship to him, brewing booze in his bath and selling it as a high-quality import. Cagney shows how desperately Eddie clings to his self-image that crime isn’t a lifestyle choice, but a short-term necessity he’ll jack in one day for the peace and quiet of running a taxi company.

But Cagney never stops letting us see the corruption soaking in: Eddie is learning to heartlessly take what he can get, to forget the consequences of his actions and when violence comes he’ll shrug off deaths as ‘not his fault’ or respond with an increasing ease viciousness (in a nice call back, he even shoves a cigar into a goons face, an echo of his famous grapefruit scene from Public Enemy). When he faces news, he doesn’t like, or is denied the things he wants, lashing out is his first option – and once he starts necking his own product, his downfall is only a matter of time as he falls prey to the sort of ‘World is Yours!’ attitude that doomed Scarface.

From grasping ever more business opportunities to grooming (in more ways that one) the now adult Priscilla into his ideal girl (he can’t watch her perform without grasping the pained hand of Panama, his eyes locked in monomania desire that he’s clearly convincing himself is a sort of pure, brotherly concern). Eddie clearly sees her as his ‘reward’ for his hardwork, a fantasy that doesn’t have any place for her liking him but not loving him. But there is a neat touch throughout The Roaring Twenties – a momentum packed film that races through years in minutes – that Eddie fundamentally isn’t ruthless enough for this game.

Certainly not compared to Humphrey Bogart’s study in shallow, selfish cruelty. Shown early on grinningly shooting a fifteen-year old German soldier in the dying minutes of the war (“He won’t be 16!”), George Hally is the monster Eddie can’t be. A guy who doesn’t care for anyone, who betrays and kills at the drop of a hat, who doesn’t stop for any sense of form and decency. For all Eddie tells George that time has moved on and people like them don’t have a place in the Thirties, Bogart’s cold-eyed George feels like the sort of man who would flourish in the era to come.

Compared to him, Eddie and Panama are romantics. Gladys George gives a fascinating performance as Panama, one of the most complex gangster dames of all. George brilliantly walks a narrow line, clearly loving Eddie but accepting he doesn’t feel the same way – and (reading between the censor lines) entering a relationship with him anyway. Panama is half-partner, half-mother to Eddie giving him a sort of matronly support and tenderness and, when his fortunes drop off a cliff in the thirties, looking after the slubby, drunken figure Eddie becomes (Cagney looks more bashed up, scruffy and pathetic in the final act than almost any other star would dare).

Fascinating character relationships like this underpin a film that feels like a summation of years of Warner Bros gangster films. Walsh’s direction is pin-point sharp, from his montage construction (including a surprisingly surreal Wall Street Crash sequence with melting buildings), through the shoot-outs. The Roaring Twenties script – by Robert Rossen and Jerry Wald among others – offers characters who are complex, flawed and don’t quite seem to realise at times how terrible their world is.

When the end comes, and Eddie’s body slumps on the steps – after an inspired, sustained tracking shot that follows his teetering bullet-ridden body, the sort of athleticism Cagney was a natural at – it seems fitting the famous closing words are “He used to be a big shot”. That sums up not only the character, but an entire era of film-making being confined (temporarily) to the dustbin of history. It’s a melancholic note to end an extraordinarily good film, one of the great gangster films, in which Cagney, Bogart and George bring life to fascinatingly complex characters.

Alibi (1929)

Early talkie as flashes of interest here-and-there as it awkwardly adapts to sound

Director: Roland West

Cast: Chester Morris (Chick Williams), Harry Stubbs (Buck Buchanan), Mae Busch (Daisy Thomas), Eleanor Griffin (Joan Manning Williams), Regis Toomey (Danny McGann), Purnell Pratt (Sergeant Pete Manning), Irma Harrison (Toots)

After a long stretch, Chick Williams (Chester Morris) is finally out of the slammer – and he’s celebrating by getting married to Joan Manning (Eleanor Griffin), who just happens to be the daughter of Police Sergeant Pete Mannings (Purnell Pratt). But it’s all fine, because Chick is going straight. And when the police are convinced Chick killed a police officer during a bungled burglary, Joan is certain he didn’t. In fact, she can give him a cast iron alibi – they were at the theatre together and, even if the killing did happen when they were separated during the interval, he definitely didn’t do it. Or did he?

Alibi (an early nominee for Best Picture) is another classic example of both Hollywood adapting a melodramatic Broadway murder-drama hit to the screen and a silent film hurriedly (and sometimes awkwardly) retrofitted to sound. It makes it a strange beast, a hodgepodge of different acting styles with scenes ranging from dynamic and experimental camera movement with flashes of intriguing sound usage to painfully awkward dialogue scenes where most of the actors stand very still and enunciate very slowly and clearly to make sure the mics pick up every word.

We get an explosion of sound at the start – films of this era knew audiences were gripped by such humdrum audio marvels as prisoners marching out of cells, bells ringing and police rhythmically tapping nightsticks against a wall. West does shoot this with quite a bit of interest – in particular the sudden appearance of the prisoners from behind a row of doors that swing shut. It’s handsomely designed by William Cameron Menzies and there are the odd moments of flair: a camera that tracks from a low-angle into the hotel Chick and his associates use for their base of operations; a stool pigeon crumbling into panic with a nightmare vision of his interrogator’s heads swirling around him; a drunk leaning in towards a massive bottle in close-up; shadows are cast behind doors; there are some dynamic fights and punches and an impressive rooftop flight.

But it’s mixed with some painfully stilted dialogue scenes, with most of the cast shown up in a bad light. Scenes involving Sergeant Manning and his police cronies seem to take hours as the actors trudge painfully slowly through the dialogue, their voices at time sounding like the film has been caught in a projector reel. You really notice the difference when the actors do something silently, their bodies moving with a swift confidence they lose as soon as they speak. Several actors – most notably Eleanor Griffin – still rely on tried-and-trusted silent reactions, signposting reactions they are also communicating with dialogue.

It stands out when the film does use dialogue well. The stool pigeon interrogation sees the interrogators repeat “Who killed O’Brien” and “Come on, come on” over and over again with an increasing rhythmic pace which really captures the mood of relentless interrogation. A scene involving a police switchboard sees a line of operators all speaking, but each sentence we catch forms a coherent narrative whole. There are some relatively ambitious song and dance numbers in Chick’s club. It’s just a shame so many of the core dialogue sequences are so dire.

Alibi does throw in a few decent twists here and there. Today we are not a jot surprised that Chick is in fact a villain, but the film manages to play its cards fairly close to its twist. That’s largely due to Chester Morris’ (an Oscar nominee) very effective performance, easily the finest in the film. Morris has the air of a cocky James Stewart, a false small-town bonhomie covering his greed and arrogance. He plays the humble suitor well – but his smug grin to Sergeant Manning when Joan reaffirms her complete faith in Chick is a great insight to who he is. He’s also a bully and, it transpires, a complete coward – Morris nails a great breakdown scene late in the film where his assurance disappears in a cloud of begging.

Morris is probably slightly better than much of the film deserves. He’s also luckier than Regis Toomey, whose ‘drunken acting’ as booze-hound criminal (truly some of the worst bits of alcoholic acting I’ve ever seen) is still not really excusable, even when you find out it’s a double bluff on his character’s part. (It’s so awful I’m amazed anyone is fooled). Toomey is also the centre of a death scene so ridiculously overblown, maudlin and sentimental it’s far more likely to illicit laughs than tears today as it stretches out over almost five minutes of screentime.

There is the odd intriguing idea in Alibi. It’s remarkable how critical of the police it is – even if it defaults to framing them as heroes in the end. Joan tells her father she could never marry the copper suitor he favours, because she believes cops to be corrupt bullies. An idea you can see partially borne out when our stool pigeon is made to put his fingerprints on a gun and threatened with judicial fake-self-defence murder unless he confesses. Bullets are fired freely at criminals, who left alone to be roughed up and threatened when arrested. It’s not exactly the most flattering view of law enforcement, who (despite reverting to heroes at the end) are constantly shown to be willing to bend the word of the law.

These moments of interest just about sustain it, added to Morris and West’s touches of flair. But it’s also got some painfully dated, awkward moments as Hollywood still struggled to stumble from silence to sound.