Author: Alistair Nunn

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

Gandalf prepares to take on many foes – not least the script and editing – in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Martin Freeman (Bilbo Baggins), Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Richard Armitage (Thorin Oakenshield), Luke Evans (Bard), Evangeline Lilly (Tauriel), Orlando Bloom (Galadriel), Aiden Turner (Kili), Lee Pace (Thranduil), Ken Stott (Balin), Cate Blanchett (Galadriel), Ian Holm (Old Bilbo), Graham McTavish (Dwalin), Christopher Lee (Saruman), Hugo Weaving (Elrond)

I feel like I’m running out of things to say about this desperately flawed trilogy – but here we go… Peter Jackson finally finishes his great contractual obligation, serving up another film that expands out a slim couple of chapters of a children’s book into something that strains so heavily for the feel of something epic and world shattering, it feels like a constipated man struggling on the loo.

We’ve finally made it to the Lonely Mountain. Smaug is killed by Bard (Luke Evans) during his attack on Lake Town, while Thorin (Richard Armitage) seizes control of the fortune under the mountain. However, the mountain now becomes a struggle point between the dwarves and their allies: Bard and his people and Thranduil (Lee Pace) and his elves, who are all looking to gain control of its treasures. While Bilbo (Martin Freeman) attempts to make an increasingly maddened Thorin see sense, Gandalf (Ian McKellen) brings warning of an imminent attack by an army of Orcs – will this mutual enemy bring our heroes together at last?

The Battle of the Five Armies is the moment where you knew this sprawling, sausage-fest of a trilogy had lost what soul it had. Almost the entire runtime is given over to battle sequence, seems to go on forever and ever with no respite. We see a host of clashes that carry none of the poetry of The Lord of the Rings, and a host of characters we don’t really know fighting with each other. Frankly, it’s hard to care. It looks great, but it’s just empty spectacle, sound and fury signifying absolutely nothing at all. In fact, it’s all so unclear that watching this movie for a third time I still have absolutely no fucking idea what this battle is even about! What are the Orcs doing? Why are they attacking?

As always character moments are constantly sacrificed. The dwarf company are ruthlessly trimmed of screen time–even Ken Stott’s Balin doesn’t get much of a look, bizarre as he’s been established previously as Thorin’s confidant. Apparently James Nesbitt nearly wept when he saw this film – not surprising since he must barely be on screen for more than five minutes. Crucial moments that should make us care about these characters are constantly lost: Thorin’s descent into madness occurs completely off camera, Gandalf’s struggle to keep the peace gets glanced over, Bilbo nearly gets completely lost in the shuffle from special effect to special effect.

Tragically, far too much screen time is given to two characters Jackson has parachuted into the film. Weaselly Lake Town official Alfrid is given seemingly endless scenes of “comic relief” – a shame since he’s about as funny as being hit in the mouth by a hammer. I understand Jackson must find this character funny, and that he felt some comic relief was needed amongst all the fighting – but quite frankly he’s wrong. Alfrid is not funny – I think you’d go a long way to find anyone who liked him – and secondly if they needed comic relief characters, why not let one of the dwarves fill that function rather than introducing a new character 2/3rds of the way into the story?

The second character who gets far too much to do is our old friend Legolas. The elf’s plot line is given never-ending minutes of screen time, his struggles and conflicts given (it feels) even more screentime than Bilbo’s. Do we really need to see Legolas searching for the orcs? Do we really need to see him doing ridiculously impossible feats in the middle of combat? Are we given any reason to care about him at all, other than the fact we remember him from Lord of the Rings?

Legolas’ inclusion demonstrates almost everything wrong in this series. Did Jackson include so much of him because he didn’t need to think quite so much about what to do with the character, being already so familiar with him? When Legolas (at best a secondary supporting character in the story) has his battle with some random Orc, intercut (and even prioritised in the edit) over Thorin’s climactic battle with Azog, the clash the entire trilogy has been building towards, you know something is seriously wrong.

On top of which, Legolas’ inclusion undermines Jackson’s other big invention, the Legolas-Tauriel-Kili love triangle. Really this should be a Tauriel-has-to-marry-Legolas-but-wants-to-marry-Kili structure – that at least would work, right? We’d understand her struggle and division – and it would add a lot more weight to her feelings for Kili. Instead, Jackson is worried this might make Legolas look unsympathetic – so instead Tauriel is sorta in love with both with them, a confused, messy structure that makes no real sense. To add insult to injury, when Tauriel and Kili are threatened by random nasty Orc, who saves the day? Legolas. Who fights Tauriel’s battles for her? Legolas. Jackson introduces a love triangle, and then undermines it because he doesn’t want to criticise his beloved character. He introduces a female character, only to reduce her to a victim obsessed with lurve. It’s a disaster.

You feel Jackson threw in this plot because not a lot actually happens in this movie. Doubly annoying then that so many plots we do care about disappear so swiftly. The Arkenstone, the cause of so much struggle, is completely forgotten half-way through. The fate of Bard and the Lake Town survivors is glossed over. The dwarves get benched from the action for ages. The plotline around the Necromancer is wrapped up with embarrassing and confusing swiftness. Thorin’s plotline is rushed together at the edges, with the focus constantly on getting more fighting in shot.

It’s a real shame that the actors don’t get the time they deserve to really let their performances flourish. Armitage is, as always, superb as a Thorin who loses himself in greed and desire for gold, and becomes cruel and bitter before remembering his nobility. Martin Freeman is still great as Bilbo, honest, normal and delightful despite being given little to do. Ian McKellen still has all the Gandalf qualities of wisdom and grandfatherly authority. Among the rest of the cast, Luke Evans continues to be a stand-out as the noble Bard.

There are moments of action that really work. Smaug’s attack on Lake Town is the film’s dramatic highlight – shame its over in 12 minutes. But it’s brilliantly shot, has moments of heroics and looks great. Thorin and Azog’s battle really works because Thorin is just about the only character in the film we really care about. But much of the rest of the fighting is just silly – gravity-defying bashing (Legolas and Saruman are particularly guilty of this) or never-ending struggles in the battle itself – in which by the way, only men seem to be allowed to be seen doing anything brave.

The Battle of the Five Armies is in many ways a fitting conclusion to the series. Millions of dollars are spent on making a brilliantly designed and shot series of images. But no time is spent on making us care about anything. We invest almost nothing emotionally in the story at all. While we might be a bit sad at seeing people die, we know so little about many of them their deaths hardly stick with us. Why did Jackson not see this? Yes Lord of the Rings was a masterpiece and tough act to follow – but when you see the love and care dripping from every frame of that 12 hour trilogy, and then you move to this mess, you can’t help but think: where did it go wrong? It’s not a complete disaster – the films are always watchable – but they could have been so much more. Instead, they’re the bloated, incoherent footnotes to a great trilogy.

Ex Machina (2015)

Alicia Vikander: is she human or not? The question that troubles the cast of Ex Machina

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Domhnall Gleeson (Caleb Smith), Alicia Vikander (Ava), Oscar Isaac (Nathan Bateman), Sonoya Mizuno (Kyoko)

It’s the age-old story of creation: man yearns for the power of the gods. There is something intrinsically god-like about the desire to create life and to develop a new creation. Ex Machina is a film that precisely explores this idea (along with a host of others). In the struggle to create an artificial intelligence, are we motivated to further mankind – or is it a perverse desire to become God ourselves?

Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a low-level coder working for a Google-like organisation founded by genius inventor Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). Caleb wins a competition to spend a week at the reclusive home of Bateman, a solitary modernist house cumresearch station in the middle of a secluded forest. Nathan wants Caleb to conduct a series of interviews with his new invention – an android named Ava (Alicia Vikander), as part of a Turing Test to ascertain if she is truly intelligent or not. However, over the week, the mysteries of the house darken – and, as Caleb begins to develop strong feelings for Ava, the question arises of who is manipulating whom.

Ex Machina is a confident, fascinating piece of film-making from first-time director Alex Garland, who also writes a screenplay stuffed with ideas. It challenges and provokes discussion, carefully outlining a story of deception and counter-deception, demanding multiple viewings to unpick truth from lie. Garland is also a brilliant chamber-piece director, drawing fantastic performances from his cast, and shooting the secluded house in such a range of styles and angles that it feels both expressive and claustrophobic. Ex Machina is an extremely intelligent small-scale discussion piece, which would make as terrific a play as it does a film.

Among its themes is the question of man striving for god-like control. Nathan, a prickly, socially uneasy and unempathetic person, wants God’s mantle – and is willing to treat his creations with the same ruthless indifference, he demonstrates to Caleb, and the users of his search-engine. His knowledge of humanity is based on essentially stealing an understanding of our thoughts and desires from our search histories, so creating artificial intelligence is simply a progression from the control he already has.

It’s especially creepy that the androids Nathan creates are all attractive young women. Throughout, the film explores the attitudes men have to women. To Nathan, it’s increasingly clear they are objects. He proudly brags about how Ava is both sexually attractive and fully capable of experiencing sex. He treats his housemaid (and sexual partner) Kyoko with a contempt bordering on outright cruelty. Nathan is possessive – and you suspect it’s logical to him to make the first in the next generation of his perfect race as a woman, subservient to him.

Caleb has a healthy but romanticised view of women –he wishes to see himself as white knight, sweeping in to save the woman he loves. He has a lovestruck, teenage protectiveness and devotion towards Ava – qualities, the film suggests, make him ripe for manipulation (the question being from whom). Caleb’s entire attitude towards women is protective – he is increasingly disgusted by Nathan’s vileness – but still in its way paternal. Caleb is naïve and strangely innocent, prone to hero worship – and his initial devotion to Nathan slowly transfers to Ava.

A lot of this works because Alicia Vikander’s Ava is such a fascinatingly elliptical figure. Vikander and Garland skilfully leave you guessing: just how human is Ava? Under observation from Nathan, her discussions with Caleb seem cold and functional. During the many brief power cuts that blight the lab, when they are alone from CCTV, she appears to be far more emotional and tender. But what does she feel for Caleb? Is it genuine feeling – or an approximation designed to draw Caleb in? Her desire for freedom is a genuine human feeling – but how is she going about this? In scenes where we glimpse her alone, Vikander’s movement and expression are neutrally unreadable. It’s a fascinating superb performance from Vikander, both tender and gentle and also unsettling and creepy.

The script never loses its way, and never gets overwhelmed by cheap thrills. There are moments of violence and danger – and the ending of becomes increasingly dark – but it all seems a very natural progression. Because the ideas of seeking freedom from oppressive masters – and mankind looking to abuse the powers of the gods over their creations – feel very real and true. These are ideas that are endlessly fascinating – and the film explores them in brilliant detail, without ever flagging, becoming bogged down in tedious discussion, or letting its ideas overwhelm the plot.

Ex Machina is a fascinating film, brilliantly acted – Isaac and Gleeson are quite simply superb as two very different tech geeks, struggling with ideas about humanity they can scarcely begin to understand and express. The effects to create Ava are extraordinary (and Oscar-winning). Alex Garland makes himself as a director of true promise – and Ex Machina is a film that can take its place as one of the compelling, intelligent and intriguing science-fiction films of the 2010s.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

Harry Potter friends confront wanted killer Sirius Black in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley), Emma Watson (Hermione Granger), Julie Christie (Madam Rosmerta), Robbie Coltrane (Rubeus Hagrid), Michael Gambon (Albus Dumbledore), Richard Griffiths (Vernon Dusley), Gary Oldman (Sirius Black), Alan Rickman (Severus Snape), Fiona Shaw (Petrunia Dursley), Maggie Smith (Minerva McGonagall), Timothy Spall (Peter Pettigrew), David Thewlis (Remus Lupin), Emma Thompson (Sybill Trewlawney), Julie Walters (Molly Weasley), Mark Williams (Arthur Weasley), Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), David Bradley (Argus Filch), Robert Hardy (Cornelius Fudge), Pam Ferris (Marge Dursley)

Well this is more like it. The first two films set the tone and established the universe. But Prisoner of Azkaban – filmed after a year’s break from the back-to-back filming of the first two films – is such a notable step-up in quality from the previous films, it completely stands alone as a marvellous piece of cinematic storytelling, not just as part of a franchise.

Why is this? Well I think the answer is pretty clear. After the solid, but unspectacular, direction from Chris Columbus, the reins were handed to a gifted filmmaker in Alfonso Cuarón. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban has all the visual invention and dynamism the first two films lacked. Alongside that, Cuarón tells the story with a brilliant mixture of light and dark. For the first time, the adaptation also escaped the need to dramatise everything in the book onto the screen – this film is a good 20 minutes shorter than Chamber of Secrets but immeasurably superior.

Prisoner of Azkaban looks fantastically gorgeous, and is brilliantly shot. The production and costume design has been spruced up, to give the film a sort of steam-punk 1950s look, as if the wizarding world had slightly arrested a few decades behind the rest of the world. Cuarón was also one of the first directors in the series who seemed relaxed enough to let the children act like children – so we get scenes of them mucking around in the dormitory or dressed with a teenage coolness. Hogwarts becomes a castle of shadows and gloom, in a magical, wintry whiteness and Scottish Highlands shades of greens and blues. More than any of the previous films, its a world that feels ‘real’ and lived in. It’s a style that would dominate all the remaining films: Cuarón essentially set the tone for the rest of the series to come.

It also helps that Cuarón was blessed with perhaps the strongest of Rowling’s stand-alone stories, a tight and taut thriller that reaches a surprising conclusion and features playful use of things like time travel and illicit magic. Cuarón, however, really embraces the emotional core of that story, and allows all these characters to expand in richness and depth. Harry faces real torment and anger when confronted with the story of the death of his parents, and his desperate yearning to have some sort of connection with them is a key thread that runs through almost every scene.

The film highlights the growing flirtation and connection between Ron and Hermione. Hermione herself is increasingly shown as a level-headed, empathetic young woman, who really understands the feelings of her friends. Several other characters are allowed to show depths: don’t forget this is the film where we see Snape’s first reaction when confronted with a werewolf is to put himself between it and the children. Rickman, by the way, is brilliant in this film, giving us the first hints of the deep and abiding feelings Snape held for Harry’s mother in his bitter anger at Sirius.

As always the film introduces some fantastic new characters into the mix. Gary Oldman is simply superb as Sirius Black, bringing to life his torment and rage, but most especially Blacks warmth and generosity (as well as his boyish enthusiasm). It was a major change of pace for Oldman, who has credited the film with changing his image in Hollywood away from one-note villain. Emma Thompson is very funny as (possibly) delusional divination teacher Sybil Trelawney. David Thewlis though waltzes off with the movie as a sad-eyed Remus Lupin, a man who clearly has known great losses. Thewlis plays Lupin with a caring, scruffy charm, an ideal teacher and mentor – generous but also firm when needed. It’s impossible not to end the film caring deeply for him. He’s terrific – it’s a real shame he never got another real showpiece scene in the rest of the franchise.

This is also our first introduction to Michael Gambon as Dumbledore – a replacement for the late Richard Harris. Gambon plays the part with a curious twinkly cheekiness, and a greater physical robustness, along with a faint Irish twang which feels like a homage to Harris. It’s a slightly uncertain start, but Gambon’s unusual, slightly-faded-hippie take on the part stands out from Harris’ austere wise-man very nicely. His lightness makes the moments of power all the more awe-inspiring. It also rather fits in with the tone of Cuarón’s slightly off-beat style.

Cuarón has a real eye for the offbeat gag – from a cleaner almost being blown away by a monster’s howl in the Leaky Cauldron, to the kids eating animal sweets in their dormitory, to Dumbledore’s off-camera delay tactics with Fudge (“Well it is a very long name minister” he says when asked to sign something), there are many delightful sight and sound gags throughout the film to make it a joy to discover. His balance of this with the heart of the story is brilliant: the inflation of Pam Ferris’ vile Aunt Marge is both brilliantly funny, but also clearly motivated by the revolting things she openly says to Harry about his parents. It’s a great balance the film pulls off time and time again.

The film is wonderfully structured and beautifully paced. It’s got a very clear five act structure, and thematic thread running through the whole film of grief and needing friends to help cope with this. The parts of the book that don’t contribute to this have been skilfully trimmed down. Cuarón then brilliantly interweaves set-piece moments, many of them introduced with an off-the-wall inventiveness, such as the umbrella dancing in the wind before the storm-swept Quiddich match (is there any health and safety in this school at all by the way?).

By the time you hit the final sequences, thanks to the film’s structure, you’ve no doubt about the revolting dangers of the Dementors. These spectral creatures are returned to again and again by Cuarón’s careful editing, as we see them drifting around the borders of Hogwarts, killing flowers and freezing lakes by their very presence. These terrifying creatures are the creepy stuff of nightmares – and Cuarón doesn’t flinch from this. It also makes Harry’s successful conjuring of a Patronus at the film’s conclusion a stirring and triumphant moment, a suitable triumphal ending to the film.

Cuarón’s direction of this film re-set the table for the entire franchise. Both Mike Newell and David Yates would follow in his footsteps, and present the world as Cuarón imagined it: dark blacks, and muted primary colours, as much a world of creepy, unsettling threat and danger, as it was of delight and wonder. From this point on the films would start to stand on their own feet, focusing on exploring the themes and emotions of Rowling’s story, rather than covering every scene. Prisoner of Azkaban is the best of the Harry Potter films and the most important landmark in the series. It’s not just a great Harry Potter film, or a great fantasy film or kids’ film. It’s a great film.

Lion (2016)

Dev Patel searches for his past in Lion

Director: Garth Davies

Cast: Sunny Pawar (Young Saroo), Dev Patel (Saroo Brierley), Rooney Mara (Lucy), Nicole Kidman (Sue Brierley), David Wenham (John Brierley), Abishek Bharate (Guddu), Divina Ladwa (Mantosh Brierley), Priyanka Bose (Kamla Munshi), Seepti Naval (Saroj Sood)

In 1986, Saroo (Sunny Pawar) is accidentally separated from his brother Guddu (Abishek Bharate) and mother (Priyanka Bose) after being trapped on a train that travels 1,600km to Calcutta. Unable to find his way home, and dodging the dangers of Calcutta’s streets, he eventually ends up in an orphanage. He is adopted by an Australian couple, the Brierleys (fine and tender performances Nicole Kidman and David Wenham). Twenty years later, a chance meeting with a group of Indian students brings Saroo’s (Dev Patel) memories flooding back– and dedicates himself to retracing his steps and finding his family in India.

Lion is an overlong expansion of a story that would really spark your interest when presented in a newspaper article. But Garth Davies’ film drains the dramatic life out of the story by ludicrously overextending the telling in order to try and eke as much emotion from the audience as possible. Lion is under two hours, but it really should be at most an hour and a half.

The problem is the central section in Australia, while our hero tries to locate his roots. It just isn’t quite interesting enough, despite sterling, committed and emotional work from Dev Patel. Put simply, even with an extraordinary story like this, the film can’t help but communicate Sarro’s obsessions through cinema’s clichés. So we get a madness board with pins and bits of string to link clues. We get Saroo increasingly dishevelled. We get him driving away family and girlfriend. We get moody, tearful glances into the middle distance. Even the final solution to the mystery occurs after a spark of inspiration during a rage fuelled “I’m going to wreck this board and give up” moment. This whole section just serves to reduce the story into movie-of-the-week territory.

The film just doesn’t quite connect with us as it should. Perhaps because of the amount of time given over to very slow Google Earth searches, or overblown camera tracking shots across train lines, or expansive slow, piano-scored moments of emotional torment from Saroo. It’s a shame because there are flashes of good material in there – Nicole Kidman’s has a stand out scene to explain why she chose not to have children – and Dev Patel is the best he’s been. But it doesn’t quite work. After Saroo’s emotional revelation at an Indian friend’s house and realisation that he is “lost” (and this quiet devastation from Patel is affecting), the story doesn’t really kick off. It just slows down.

It’s a shame as the opening third of the film with young Saroo lost in Calcutta is very well done, even if it seems virtually every male living on the streets is a paedophile. The early scenes with Saroo and his brother are very good, and establish the strength of their bond. Sunny Pawar does a marvellous job as the lost boy, and Garth Davies films Calcutta with an earthy realism, as well as having a wonderful sense of empathy for the vulnerability of children. It’s also striking to see how uncommented upon a child alone on the streets of Calcutta goes. The dangers Saroo dodges feel genuinely threatening, and helps us invest emotionally for the rest of the film.

The moments that flash back to this do get overplayed later. Much as I initially liked Saroo hallucinating his brother and mother appearing around him in the streets of Melbourne, it’s a card that quickly gets overused. Like many of the ideas in this film, it gets hammered home a little too much. It’s that whole middle section, with poor Rooney Mara saddled with the thankless part of supportive girlfriend. You could have cut it down by 20 minutes and had the same impact. Garth Davies’ direction simply gets carried away with the lyrical sadness, to try and tug our heartstrings.

The problem is the most moving part of the film is the final sequence where we see the real people meeting in the streets of Khandwha. Nothing else in the film really measures up to this genuine emotion. Particularly after we’ve watched a man searching Google and behaving moodily for well over forty minutes. It’s a film that loses its way because it’s moments of emotional reality like that which make these stories truly profound – and a dramatisation can never provide that. With the film also unable to find a way to make the search as dramatic and engaging as the getting lost and being found, it also flounders in the middle, taking way too long to get us to the destination. It’s got its moments, but it’sa well assembled film that outstays its welcome.

The Heroes of Telemark (1965)

Kirk Douglas runs rings around the Germans in The Heroes of Telemark

Director: Anthony Mann

Cast: Kirk Douglas (Dr Rolf Pedersen), Richard Harris (Knut Straud), Ulla Jacobsson (Anna Pedersen), Michael Redgrave (Uncle), David Weston (Arne), Roy Dotrice (Jensen), Anton Diffring (Major Frick), Ralph Michael (Nilssen), Eric Porter (Josef Terboven), Sebastian Breaks (Gunnar), John Golightly (Freddy), Alan Howard (Oli), Patrick Jordan (Henrik), William Marlowe (Claus), Brook Williams (Einar)

During the Second World War, Telemark in Norway was the main production factory for Heavy Water, a key component for the German nuclear programme. Norwegian commandoes were ordered to destroy the factory, which they did with a cunning plan. This film dramatizes the story – adding more guns and violence – but does at least make the lead characters Norwegian. Knut Straud (Richard Harris) is the leader of the resistance, Rolf Pedersen (Kirk Douglas) the professor who identifies what the factory is churning out. Parachuted back into Norway after secretly travelling to Britain to discuss issues with the allies, they start to plan a raid.

The Heroes of Telemark is sub-par boys-own action stuff, a sort of cross between Where Eagles Dare and The Guns of Navarone but nowhere near as good as either. Despite being crammed with derring-do, it’s strangely unmemorable, and although the stakes are really high, you never feel like you care. Everything in the film, bizarrely, feels a little bit easy. Our heroes are not particularly challenged (Nazi bigwig Terboven even berates his guards at the base for letting our heroes walk in and blow up the factory all while wearing British uniforms) but there isn’t any real price paid. The only heroes who bite the bullet are so heavily signposted for death, you actually spend most the film waiting for them to cop it.

Part of the problem is both Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris feel miscast in the lead roles. It’s also pretty clear (alleged) on-set tensions carried across into shooting – not only do the two characters not really seem to like each other, you don’t get any feeling of a growing bond between them as the film goes on. You end up not really caring about either of them – and since virtually everyone else on the team is hardly defined at all as a human being, that’s quite a big loss.

Douglas plays a bizarre professor of physics whose character varies wildly from scene to scene depending on the plot. Introduced making out with a student in a dark room, Pedersen initially denounces the boys-own heroics of the resistance. No sooner is a gun placed in his hand though, than he starts turning into a regular “ends justify the means” superman. Marry his new-found ruthlessness with his regular horn-dog attitude to women, and he’s a hard guy to like. I’m not sure a hero today would climb into bed with his estranged wife (a glamourous and pretty good Ulla Jaconssen) and then get shirty when she fails to put out. The part feels like an anti-hero role, reworked to give the Hollywood mega-star some action.

Richard Harris is similarly out-of-place as Knut Straud (a character based on the real commando who carried out the raid). He spends the whole film looking sullen and furious – he’s going for intense devotion to duty, but instead he looks like the whole thing is a tedious chore. Harris isn’t really anyone’s idea of an action star, and he’s an odd choice for the film altogether. For different reasons, just like Douglas, his stubborn touchiness makes him hard to like.

Following these rather disengaging figures means the derring-do constantly falls flat. It doesn’t help that Anthony Mann’s direction lacks thrust, drive and energy and never really gets the pulse going. Even during the most daring commando sequences, it never feels particularly thrilling. It’s a very easy film to drift away from, never managing to be as taut or tight as it should. The world-shattering stakes of the German nuclear programme are never clearly explained, or kept at the forefront. Chuck in some rather obvious doubles work (no way is Douglas that good a skier) and a few wonky model shots (the boulder Harris and co roll down the hill to try and take out Terboven’s car is all too clearly made of papier mache) and you’ve got a film that never gets going.

It also lacks an antagonist. Eric Porter has a couple of decent scenes here and there as Reichskommisar for Norway Josef Terboven, but he disappears from the film for ages. The Nazis end up as a faceless bunch of German soldiers, and are so easily overcome or fooled that they hardly count as challenges. As such, the clashes and arguments really come within the commando organisation itself, but since Harris and Douglas so clearly don’t like each other, even their brief reconciliation doesn’t ring that true.

The Heroes of Telemark will pass the time on a bank holiday afternoon. You get some decent performances – Roy Dotrice is very good as a possible quisling – and the odd good scene (Redgrave gets a good death scene) but it never really comes to life like it should. Mann’s direction is too plodding, and the pacing of the film so slack that it never becomes exciting or engaging. There are so many better movies on a similar theme you could be watching.

The Incredibles (2004)

The Incredibles swing into action in this brilliant superhero-action-comedy

Director: Brad Bird

Cast: Craig T. Nelson (Bob Parr/Mr Incredible), Holly Hunter (Helen Parr/Elastigirl), Sarah Vowell (Violet Parr), Spencer Fox (Dash Parr), Samuel L Jackson (Lucius Best/Frozone), Jason Lee (Buddy Pine/Syndrome), Brad Bird (Eda Mode), Elizabeth Pena (Mirage), Wallace Shawn (Gilbert Huph)

In a world awash with superheroes, what if they were suddenly found legally responsible for all the destruction and chaos that surrounds their battles to save the world? If it suddenly became illegal to be a superhero? That’s exactly the world that spins out in The Incredibles: one where secret identities aren’t just a matter of choice, they are legally enforced by a government?

After all superheroes are banned, because clearing up the legal after-effects of the heroics is just too damn expensive, they retire into “ordinary life”. Fifteen years later, Bob Parr aka Mr Incredible (Craig T Nelson), is working in a dead-end job for a tight-fisted insurance company, whose values are the antithesis of his own, and moonlights, doing small superhero acts where he can. Meanwhile his wife Helen aka Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) raises their children, who have their own super-powers. One day Bob is contacted by a secret government agency to re-start his superhero work, and he jumps at the chance – but quickly finds he’s in over his head.

The Incredibles is pretty much a perfect film. I think it might just be one of the finest films Pixar has produced (and that is saying a lot). It’s not just a brilliant family comedy, it’s also a superb action adventure. In fact, its super-hero action is so well done, it trumps nearly any live-action film you can think of. Brad Bird pulls it together with aplomb and gives the film its own brilliantly distinctive visual style, a jazzy 1960s look with cool angles and heightened reality backgrounds. It’s terrific. And it’s really, really funny.

Just the very idea of superheroes being sued is funny. A series of newspaper headlines early in the film covers everything from train crash survivors suing for trauma, to a hero with x-ray vision being accused of being a peeping tom. From there the film has huge fun with superhero tropes –it’s just inherently funny to see these god-like heroes going through the tedious 9-to-5 and school runs the rest of us need to put up with. Throw in plenty of hilarious sight gags, plus some brilliant comic diversions (not least a brilliant monologue on cape-based disasters, that really pays off at the film’s end) and you’ll not stop laughing even after umpteen viewings.

It also balances all the humour and super-heroics with very real-world problems. It’s an animated family comedy that looks at the impact of a male mid-life crisis on family dynamics, and the impact that a distant, disengaged father can have on his children. Not the usual Disney content is it? Bob Parr is a frustrated, bored man, who feels trapped by missing the excitement and drama of his youth. He wants to recapture his glory days, but is overwhelmingly worried about whether, frankly, he’s up to it any more. He’s overweight, out of shape and past his best.

It’s also funny that Bob’s midlife crisis expresses itself in listening to police scanners, and roping best friend Lucius (a put-upon Samuel L Jackson) into carrying out acts of derring-do on the sly. “Just for once, can’t we just go bowling” Lucius complains. Not that it stops Lucius from throwing down later on in the action (after a brilliant “Where’s my super suit?” argument with his wife).

Poor Bob. Compared to Helen’s intelligent resolve and strength of mind, he’s also emotionally under-developed and unable to articulate his feelings. If you’d like to criticise the film you could say that it falls very much into the standard clichéd family structure (father is the breadwinner who feels trapped, mother is at home being a domestic hero), but the film gets past it because it always pulls itself up when it feels like its heading that way – even if it needs someone like Edna Mode to literally slap Elastigirl around the face and tell her to pull herself together.

And you have to give a pass to a film that has such empathy for its characters, not least the two kids. A cripplingly shy, moody teenage girl whose power to become invisible – no wonder she’s too shy to talk to boys. A hyperactive boy, whose power expresses itself in raw speed. These two kids feel really real, and the relationship (and loving rivalry with each other) really works. It’s clear the family bonds between the four are very strong.

Those battles are quite something by the way. Helped a great deal by Michael Giacciano’s terrific score – inspired by half a dozen 1960s and 70s spy and action franchises – these scenes are dynamic and electric. Brad Bird shoots the film like a real action film, and packs it with some brilliant humour. This is easily the most thrilling children’s animated film you’ll never see. Its action is a mixture of pure Bond and superhero thrills. And while some scenes are just plain grippingly cool to watch – is it a surpise that Syndrome geeks out? – others are a perfect balance between drama and action. A sequence with Helen piloting a jet, targeted by missiles, demanding Violet create a forcefield around the jet, and then desperately making a shield around the children using her own body is both stirring and moving (who can’t empathise with a child who feels they have let their parent down?).

The film also has an imaginative and fun spin on the standard super-villain in Syndrome and a decent mystery thriller that unfolds especially well over the film. Throw in plenty of small moments – many of them supplied by Brad Bird’s brilliantly voiced cameo as costume designer Enda Mode (a wonderful pastiche of Edith Head) – and you’ve got a gem for all ages. The entire cast is excellent – Craig T Nelson and Holly Hunter in particular are superb. The Incredibles ticks so many boxes I hardly know where to begin. Want a brilliant animation? Check. Want a hilarious superhero parody? Check. Want a family comedy? Check. Want a thrilling action film? Check. This film delivers on so many levels it should have a PhD. It’s simply sublime film making and story-telling. It’s hard to beat.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

Could Daisy Ridley be The Last Jedi in this controversial new Star Wars chapter

Director: Rian Johnson

Cast: Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Carrie Fisher (General Leia Organa), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Kelly Marie Tran (Rose Tico), Andy Serkis (Supreme Leader Snoke), Lupita Nyong’o (Maz Kanata), Domhnall Gleeson (General Hux), Laura Dern (Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo), Benecio del Toro (DJ), Gwendoline Christie (Captain Phasma), Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), Frank Oz (Yoda)

Spoilers! OK I’m really trying my best to not have too many spoilers in here, but you know it’s pretty much impossible. So you should do what I do and go to the see the film knowing almost nothing about it. That would be much better than reading any reviews!

It’s pretty clear the Star Wars franchise is going to be with us for some time. So eventually it’s going to have to move past telling similar stories, with familiar characters, in very familiar settings, and branch out into something new and a bit more daring. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is an attempt to do this. Is it completely successful? No, probably not. Does it try and push the franchise into a slightly new direction? Yes it does.

The film starts moments after the end of The Force Awakens. Rey (Daisy Ridley) has met with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) on the remote planet he has spent the past decade hiding on. She believes (as do we!) that he will train her in the ways of the Jedi – instead he tells her to leave, and firmly states that the Jedi are a failed organisation that don’t deserve to continue. Meanwhile, during a speedy evacuation of the resistance base – covered by a suicidally reckless military operation by Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) that costs the lives of dozens of resistance ships and pilots – General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) is incapacitated, and the surviving rebel ships find themselves relentlessly pursued by the First Order. While the new leadership of the resistance seems to be offering no alternatives, Poe and Finn (John Boyega) hatch a plan to travel to a distant planet and recruit a codebreaker, to help them hack into the First Order flagship and disable the tracker it’s using, allowing the fleet to escape.

The Last Jedi is a film that has had a mixed reception from the fandom. After spending a couple of days thinking about it, this might be because the film so completely inverts expectations and refuses to play it safe. It’s a film about loss and disillusionment, but also about hope against adversity. It would have been very easy to transform Luke into a new Yoda, to make Poe and Finn heroic guys whose actions save the rebellion over the heads of their stuffed-shirt commanders. To build Kylo Ren further towards a redemption arc. These are all things you could expect – none of them happen.

Subverting these expectations has angered a lot of people – fascinatingly the same people who complained The Force Awakens was too similar to Star Wars. So I guess that kinda shows you can’t keep the Internet happy – so why even try. The main issue has been the re-imaging of Luke Skywalker. The man the first trilogy presented as the universe’s bright-eyed-boy, our new hope: here he’s a bitter, depressed man who has lost hope and his love for the Jedi. He’s a man who confesses to dark thoughts, who it transpires considered acts of murder, who has failed at almost everything he’s touched since the conclusion of Return of the Jedi. This is a big turnaround for the franchise’s hero, and yes it is jarring. Is this what people expected after the end of Force Awakens? It sure ain’t.

But, after the play-it-safe Rogue One and the thrilling remember-what-you-used-to-like-before-the-prequels joy of The Force Awakens, the franchise needed something like this. A shake-up, a repositioning of the universe. It’s not always bright and hopeful, and our heroes are flawed people who make huge mistakes. It’s in many ways a logical extension: if Rey is the new hope, than something must have gone wrong with the old hope. Luke has failed totally in the same way both his mentors (Yoda and Obi-Wan) did – he encouraged and honed the viper-in-the-nest.

As that viper-in-the-nest, we’ve got the terrifically complex Kylo Ren. Ren’s path in this film is the most inverted, unexpected and unusual development in the series so far. Adam Driver was superb in Force Awakens, and he’s great here once again as a very different type of villain. Ren is strong in the force, but in almost every other way he’s hugely weak: a sullen, moody man-child, straining for greatness, a tearful brat easily led, driven by his emotions, trying to take on a mantle of greatness he is psychologically ill-equipped for. He seems barely aware of what he wants from life, except for a vague wish to pull the world down – like any teenager, angry at his parents, which is what he is.

Pulling the world down seems to be Rian Johnson’s aim as well. An early attack wipes out the resistance leadership – Admiral Ackbar! No! – and the resistance itself is eventually reduced to a single ship, desperately running from the far stronger First Order. Never mind Empire Strikes Back, the resistance has never been so pummelled, its military achievements so minor. Even their one victory in the film – the destruction of a fearsome First Order ship – carries such a huge cost of men and equipment that Leia strips Poe of his rank for even attempting it. Thereafter, the only victory the resistance can hope for is to survive. No other Star Wars film has ever allowed such monumental failure to be the main plotline for our heroes. Johnson is clearing the decks and resetting the tables – he even wraps up lingering mysteries from The Force Awakens with such abruptness you wonder if he wanted to kill parts of the Internet dead.

Failure also ekes through the Poe/Fin subplot. Every single decision these characters take in this film is wrong, misguided, hugely costly or all three. If the film does have a major flaw it’s that Finn’s journey to the gambling planet is a cul-de-sac of plot development, that could have easily hit the cutting room floor and probably cost the film very little indeed. It never really goes anywhere, other than to allow Johnson to make some points about arms traders selling weapons to both the First Order and the resistance. It also introduces into the mix Benecio del Toro’s fantastically annoying, overly-twitchy performance as the hacker DJ – Del Toro seems to be getting more and more prone to “Deppism”, where a good actor succumbs to twitches and quirks rather than acting.

What is most interesting about this plot-line though is its very pointlessness. The plan (major spoiler here) doesn’t work at all, in fact it leads to many, many, many more resistance lives being lost, and wrecks Hondo’s secret plan which would have saved everyone’s lives. The film doesn’t quite have the courage to pin the blame for this disaster directly on Poe and Finn. In fact the film gets a bit confused here about the message it wants Poe to learn – it’s something about costly actions in war not being worth mindless sacrifice, but then this is a film that at its conclusion celebrates another character making a huge sacrifice. Unclear? A bit. Anyway: the point however is: you can’t imagine previous Star Wars films allowing our characters to so completely fuck up here as Poe and Finn do – and give them no moment of triumph to make compensation later in the film.

What this does though, is Rey to be repositioned at the real hope – although the film goes about inverting her as well, with several suggestions that she is far more open to the dark side of the force might have thought. Daisy Ridley is very good as Rey, juggling conflicting pulls on her personality, her desire to redeem both Ren (and there is a great sexual chemistry between these two) and Luke, and the different directions these desires pull her in. Rather than seeing the force as a binary good/bad thing, Rey seems to want to find a balance between the two of them. Johnson explores this via a number of visually interesting scenes, not least Rey in a cave from the dark side, full of endless reflections. It’s an unexpected re-working of the Luke/Yoda relationship and works very well.

The Last Jedi is not a perfect film. For all its interesting inversion of old tropes, and the lack of triumph it allows our characters, it’s way too long. It could easily have been cut down by half an hour at least. Although some plots are designed to be expectation-defying dead-ends, they still end up feeling less than interesting (and ripe for fast forwarding on later viewings). Despite an attempt to include some scenes of deliberate humour, the film has less spark and joie de vivre than many of the other entrances in the franchise. Structurally, it’s not always clear what the timeline of events is between the different locations (weeks seem to go past for Rey, while only hours go by in the rebel fleet), and some of the points the film wants its characters to learn are unclear or hard to understand (I genuinely don’t know what Poe was supposed to have learned by the end of this film).

Its strength though are the characters – building on the groundwork from The Force Awakens(and very differently from Rogue One) this film is full of characters we care about. John Boyega and Oscar Isaac continue to excel as Finn and Poe (and still have great chemistry, shippers…) – Boyega in particular is quite the star. Ridley and Driver are superb. Hamill was never the strongest actor in the world, but he gives his most complex performance yet as Luke. The film mostly rattles along very nicely, and has plenty of action and excitement as well as “race against time” structure that works very well. Interestingly, its main handicaps are that it defies expectations almost a little too much (so it demands second viewing and reflection) and that it’s overlong and at times unclearly structured. But as a step forward for the franchise it’s still a good thing. A new hope indeed.

Coda: The film’s main sadness is the premature death of Carrie Fisher. One problem watching the film was that two or three times I was convinced that the film was about to show us Leia’s death. Johnson avoids changing the film from its original plan (Episode IX was intended to be “The Leia film” after films focusing on Han Solo and Luke), but it does seem a shame that Fisher’s good work wasn’t crowned by the sort of iconic final scene she deserves. The Episode IX planned will now never happen – but it would have been great to see Fisher really head centre stage in that film. RIP.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

Daniel Radcliffe discovers dark goings on in the bowels of Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Director: Chris Columbus

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley), Emma Watson (Hermione Granger), Kenneth Branagh (Gilderoy Lockhart), John Cleese (Nearly Headless Nick), Robbie Coltrane (Rubeus Hagrid), Christian Coulson (Tom Riddle), Richard Griffiths (Vernon Dusley), Richard Harris (Albus Dumbledore), Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy), Miriam Margolyes (Professor Snout), Alan Rickman (Severus Snape), Fiona Shaw (Petrunia Dursley), Maggie Smith (Minerva McGonagall), Julie Walters (Molly Weasley), Mark Williams (Arthur Weasley), Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), David Bradley (Argus Filch), Toby Jones (Dobby), Gemma Jones (Madam Pomfrey), Robert Hardy (Cornelius Fudge), Matthew Lewis (Neville Longbottom), Julian Glover (Aragog)

Another movie, and time for another everyday school year for Harry and friends: classes, exams, sports days and saving the entire population of the school from a grisly death. It’s a tough job but someone has to do it right? So welcome to the second Harry Potter film, that mixes the fun of flying cars and tricky elves with giant spiders and ferocious snakes.

Chris Columbus and team went virtually straight from the first film into making this one, and it’s pretty clear they had learned a lot from the last one. Sure, Columbus is still a safe pair of hands rather than an inspired director, but there is a bit more flair from cast and crew here. It also manages to look a lot less like a primary colour explosion or an illustrated version of the book, and more like a piece of film-making. Maybe this can be attributed to new cinematographer Roger Pratt, who gives the film a far more imaginative palette of darks blacks mixed with beautiful core colours (no surprise he returned to shoot Goblet of Fire). In addition, both design and costumes are far more adult and less Dickensian-robey than I remembered (though there’s still a way to go until we get to the steampunk 50s look of Prisoner of Azkaban that would dominate the rest of the films).

It also helps that the introduction to the wizarding world was covered so well in the first film. In fact, this is the last film where anyone felt it necessary to shoe-horn recaps into the dialogue, reminding us of who (and what) everything is. A particular moment of irritance for me is the first entry of Dumbledore and McGonagall: met with Harry breathlessly saying their names – just in case you were one of those people who didn’t contribute to the $1billion the first film made worldwide, or who hadn’t read any of the books by this point.

Anyway, Columbus got the principles out of the way in the first film so he could focus a bit more on this slightly darker, more developed story (just as Rowling was able to do in the books). The mystery of the Chamber of Secrets is more compelling than that around the Philosopher’s Stone in Potter’s first outing, and this is the film where we properly meet the series antagonist Voldemort – here played with a smarmy, casual cruelty by Christian Coulsen (it’s a shame this didn’t lead to bigger things for Coulsen). Radcliffe gets the chance to get his teeth into a decent final confrontation – and also the series’ first big action set-piece, quite well-shot with a creepy menace – as he takes on a basilisk.

In fact Radcliffe is much stronger in this movie – more relaxed, more confident and embracing Harry’s essential decency and sense of honour (the qualities that are always duller to play as an actor). He’s still struggling a bit at the moments that call for real emotion – but he does very well here indeed. Most importantly, you believe him and everything he does – which is quite something for a child actor to accomplish.

He gets more depth and range to play with than Rupert Grint who was already being shoehorned into being gurning comic relief. There are few faces Grint isn’t asked to pull in this movie – and get used to that sad-sack downward grin, or the teeth-clench of terror, because these are going to become major weapons in his arsenal. Watson doesn’t actually get a lot in this movie, but even by this point it was becoming clear that she was pretty much a perfect fit for the character.

The series also confirmed it had great roles for the cream of British acting – and that it was going to be a fine pension plan for most of Equity. Jason Isaacs plays the wicked Lucius Malfoy with relish and a scowling, patrician pride – no wonder he became not only a regular in the series, but one of its champions. He’s very good here indeed, as is other new addition Mark Williams, a perfectly charming shambolic dad as Arthur Weasley.

The show however is carried off by Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart. Branagh offers a performance close to of self-parody of his public perception, as a swaggering self-promoter, a preening egotist who can’t help but brag about his (almost non-existent) achievements and accomplishments. Branagh is deliriously funny as Lockhart, not only getting a lion’s share of the best scenes, but also bringing out some delicious comic rebuttals from the rest of the teachers – not least Rickman and Smith – who clearly can’t stand Lockhart. It’s a great performance – cocky, old-Etonianesque, full of surface charm and puffed up pride, but with a nasty selfish mean steak just below the surface.

It all feels part of the generally more free and engaging direction this film takes compared to the first one. Some of the best actors from the first film get relegated in screentime, but it shows the greater confidence the filmmakers have in the kids. The film really begins to introduce the ideas of good vs evil and the principles of friendship, humanity and love that differentiate Harry from Voldemort. Columbus isn’t quite the director to bring all this together into an epic vision, but he is good enough to deal the cards effectively. He gives it enough pace and shine so that we are never bored, though we’re also never wowed.

Despite the increased darkness and greater emotional depth, Columbus never loses track of the sense that he is making a family entertainment. He may still not be able to bring an artistic flourish to events, but he balances the light and dark very well. Not least the fact that the racism under the surface of the wizarding world emerges here. In the first film Voldemort alone was the villain, but in this one we first hear the term “mud blood” bandied about to describe Muggle-borns. We also find out that the wizarding world has its own slave class in elves (given a sometimes irritating Jar-Jar Binks-lite face by Dobby, a character with far more appeal to the kids than the parents). These are complex ideas – and all part of the world becoming richer.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is still in the lower tier of Harry Potter films, but it’s a significant step-up from the first film. Visually it’s richer and more interesting. The stakes are higher, the themes deeper and more intriguing. It’s still very much a children’s film, and it still inclines towards being an over-faithful adaptation – it’s a bum-numbing 2 hours and 40 minutes so keen is it to not leave anything out – but this has far stronger material in it than the first film, and is a sure sign that this series was building a foundation it could flourish from.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Misguided principles are brilliantly mixed with an epic scale in this stunning prison camp film

Director: David Lean

Cast: William Holden (Commander Shears), Alec Guinness (Lt Colonel Nicholson), Jack Hawkins (Major Warden), Sessue Hayakawa (Colonel Saito), James Donald (Major Clipton), Geoffrey Horne (Lt Joyce), André Morell (Colonel Green), Peter Williams (Captain Reeves), John Boxer (Major Hughes)

“Madness! Madness!”Are there many better final lines of films – or any delivered with more emphatic, meaningful gusto than James Donald manages at the close of this David Lean classic? The Bridge on the River Kwai is a constantly reliable, wonderfully assembled classic film, and a never-ending joy to watch. It’s not only a gripping epic, it’s also a wonderful psychological study of a series of men and the impact war has on their psyches. It’s all madness after all.

In 1943, Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) and his men arrive in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Burma. Camp Commander Colonel Saito (Sesse Hayakawa) has been tasked with building a bridge over the river Kwai, and demands officers and men go to work. When Nicholson adamantly refuses to allow officers to do manual labour (as per the Geneva Convention), he and Saito are set for a clash of wills, in which the iron-willed, rigid certainty of Nicholson eventually triumphs. However, once Nicholson is released from solitary confinement, he is so horrified by the decline in discipline of his men, he decides building the bridge is the perfect opportunity to rebuild morale and demonstrate British character=. So he sets upon building a better, stronger bridge than the Japanese had designed. Meanwhile, fellow prisoner American Commander Shears (William Holden) escapes from the camp back to Allied headquarters – only to be forced to return to the jungle on a commando raid to destroy the bridge, led by Major Warden (Jack Hawkins).

Wow this is one hell of a film. It was garlanded with seven Oscars, and totally deserves each and every one of them. Kwai is a deeply engaging, wonderfully structured epic that balances perfectly the sweep of Hollywood cinema with a keen understanding of the complexities of psychologies under pressure. Because like Clipton says, this is a film about madness. Virtually everyone in this is mad in some way. Lean brilliantly positions these psyches in a series of conflicts and clashes: we have Nicholson vs. Saito, Nicholson vs. Shears, Shears vs. Warden – in every relationship in the film there is conflict and disagreement. It makes for extraordinary drama.

Pile on top of that the fact that David Lean is a consummate film maker. Every moment of Kwai is a display of wondrous visual storytelling, from the arrival of the British in the prison camp – a triumph of defiance, pride and hubris – to the final attack on the bridge. The final sequence around the bridge is exquisitely assembled. The editing is flawless, the tension build-up (nearly 20 minutes!) never flags, but carefully establishes the who, what, why and where. The sequence itself builds up both events and problems with daunting skill. In between, every sequence of the film has some masterful work in it.

The heartbeat is Alec Guinness, simply marvellous as Nicholson. It’s hard to believe watching it that he was not the first choice – in a parallel universe Charles Laughton starred opposite Cary Grant’s Commander Shears! – because he is superb in this Oscar-winning role. Guinness’s Nicholson is mad. Not in the cuckoo way or a cruel or arrogant way. He’s blinded by the rule book, by the middle-class values of duty, order and dignity that govern his life. Mad because he takes a task from his Japanese enemies and does it better than they ever could have: “Must we work so well? Must we build them a better bridge than they could have built themselves?” Clipton asks of him. Too true. Nicholson’s response? That one day people will remember the bridge was built not by “a gang of slaves, but soldiers, British soldiers…even in captivity”.

So Nicholson doesn’t see it that way. It doesn’t match his narrow world view of a place for everything and everything in its place. Because he has no vision beyond his own immediate circumstances. The important thing for him is to build the bridge, because it’s his duty to keep his men together, and demonstrate British resolve. So it’s Nicholson who visits Clipton’s sick bay and gently questions the wounded men, encouraging them to go back to work on the bridge so it can be finished on time (they ironically march through the graveyard of the camp on the way). For Nicholson the bridge is everything – and Guinness’ eyes are full of rigid monomania (needless to say, by the end of the film Nicholson himself off-handedly informs Clipton with pride that the officers have volunteered to work on the bridge to make sure it will be finished before the deadline).

His manner contrasts fascinatingly with Sesse Hawakaya’s Colonel Saito. Saito, a bank manager type if ever you saw one, clearly struggles with holding his command together and to deliver the bridge as planned. He has the strength of office, but not the strength of character of Nicholson. Hawakaya plays a weak man – and it’s fascinating how Lean charts the shift in power from Saito to Nicholson. Nicholson stands for principle and simply cannot imagine backing down – and then, with a sense of certainty and natural authority that governs his life, swiftly takes over the entire planning of the bridge from Saito. Poor Saito is a broken, weakened man: and in his own form of madness, is left with Nicholson alone as a confidant (the two of them talk more to each other about their loneliness and uncertainties than they do anyone else – Nicholson in particular gets a marvellous speech about the sad transience of the soldier’s life – “it’s a good life, but still there are times…”).

The madness doesn’t stop there. Jack Hawkins’ Major Warden is as fanatical as Nicholson: the mission is everything. Hawkins is excellent, turning Warden into a sort of over-grown schoolboy, playing at soldiers but with an adolescent aggressive willingness to sacrifice the pieces for the greater good. For Warden, no life in the team is sacred (including his own), and everything must be about the target. Warden’s gung-ho, take-no-prisoners attitude, his lack of empathy for the lives of those around him, makes him as much of an insane danger as Nicholson, perhaps more so.

Holden’s more humane Shears is the counterbalance with these three lunatics. Of course, Shears is sucked even more into the madness than anyone else – who else would escape from a prison camp, only to be forced to head back into the jungle on a fool’s errand? Holden is damned impressive as the naturally anti-authoritarian Shears, a man who never seems to have seen a boss without questioning him, who recognises the insanity of the war around him but when push comes to shove throws himself into the mission he has been given.

He’s the big addition to the original source material – but it’s an idea so good that Pierre Boullé said he wished he had thought of it himself. Boullé won the screenplay Oscar, but the writers of the script were really the black-listed Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman. These two put together a superb script, and the structure contrasting Shears with Nicholson works perfectly. These two are mirror images, but never really antagonists. Their final meeting towards the end of the film has a poetic sadness about it. It adds a whole extra dimension to the film – while one storyline sees the bridge being built, a parallel one prepares for its destruction.

All these threads come together beautifully on the morning of the bridge’s opening, after a triumphant celebration by the prisoners on the completion of the bridge – a moment Nicholson describes to them as “turn[ing] defeat into victory”. He is of course both right and wrong – and the triumph of the film is that you can’t help but share Nicholson’s desire to save this bridge that we have seen so much work, effort and love go into constructing.

“Madness”. That’s how Clipton sees it – James Donald is by the way wonderful as the one sane man – and yes of course he’s right. It’s all part of what is a masterful film made by a master storyteller, beautifully filmed and edited. Alec Guinness gives a performance for the ages as stubborn, small-minded man whom we somehow still end up strangely admiring and respecting. Holden, Hawkins and Hayakara offer intelligent, engaging portrayals. The Bridge on the River Kwaiis a film that you can watch again and again. In fact you should, because Lean here marries an epic scale with a story that feels small, personal and deeply felt – that places the psychology of real people at the centre of an epic stage. It’s simply a classic.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Dev Patel is the Chaiwala living the dream in Slumdog Millionaire

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Dev Patel (Jamal Malik), Freida Pinto (Latika), Madhur Mittal (Salim), Anil Kapoor (Prem Kumar), Irrfan Khan (Inspector), Ayush Mahesh Khedehar (Jamal [Child]), Tanay Chheda (Jamal [Teenager]), Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail (Salim [Child]), Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala (Salim [Teenager]), Runbina Ali (Latika [Child]), Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar (Latika [Teenager]), Saurabh Shukla (Constable Srinivsas), Mahesh Manjrekar (Javred), Ankur Vikal (Maman)

Re-watching Slumdog Millionaire, it’s surprising to think that back in 2008 this film was so garlanded with awards (EIGHT Oscars!) and heralded so quickly as a classic. While it’s a well-made and at times rather sweet (with a hard-edge) fable, it’s also seems slightly less unique and genre-defying than first appeared. Never mind a list of the greatest Best Picture winners, I’m not even sure it’s the greatest Danny Boyle movie. But saying this, it’s still a fine movie – and one I arguably enjoyed more re-watching it almost ten years on then when I saw it in the cinema.

Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is an eighteen year-old Muslim, a chaiwala working in a Mumbai call centre. He enters the Indian Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, hosted by egotistical Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor), and to the astonishment of everyone is one question away from the ultimate prize of 20 million rubles. Arrested by the police and questioned before his final show, he explains via flashbacks how his experiences allowed him to answer each question. His life-story is one of danger and conflict in the slums and criminal underworld of India, tied closely to his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) and their childhood friend Latika (Frieda Pinto), whom Jamal has loved his whole life.

Part social-realist tale, romance, family drama and fairy-tale, Slumdog’s main triumph is probably its ability to juggle half a dozen tones and genres so successfully. This is most strikingly demonstrated by fact that so many came out of a film that opens with its lead character being waterboarded and tortured by policemen, saying it was a brilliant feel-good movie! In fact, Boyle’s film is far more complex, touching on themes ranging from child exploitation and prostitution to gangland politics to social corruption, via murder, betrayal and mutilation. How does this a film crammed with this sort of material make you feel rather positive at the end?

Boyle’s, and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy’s, trick is to follow in the footsteps of that other great juggler of urban social comment and larger-than-life characters – Charles Dickens. Dickensian is perhaps the best word to describe Slumdog – it throws the viewer into the slums of Mumbai, glancing at this world with all the keen social commentary Dickens used to bring to Victorian London. As young children, Jamal and Salim are thrown in with a Fagin-like gang boss, while Latika develops an (admittedly much more gentle) Estelle-like connection with them both. Like David Copperfield, our hero moves from place to place (or frying pan to fire!), with an episodic charm, each event adding to the spectrum of his life. It works really well as it taps into a reassuringly familiar story structure that makes us feel narratively safe, no matter how much peril our heroes undergo.

What’s fascinating is placing this familiar material into (for us) a more exotic location. I suspect many American viewers watching were even less familiar with India as such a mixture of extreme wealth and poverty sit side-by-side so naturally (and again how Dickensian does that sound?). Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography is astounding for its energetic immersion in the streets of Mumbai –it’s like an explosion of Boyle’s high-octane, camera-shaking style seen in so many of his other films. It not only makes the film feel fresh and vital, it also manages to present India as something very different for those only familiar with the country as a Taj Mahal postcard.

The most compelling parts of the film are those in the first half that throw us into the Mumbai of Jamal and Salim’s childhood. Helped immensely by six terrific performances from the child and teenager versions of our three leads, these sequences (just over the first half of the movie) immediately involve the viewer in the fates and feelings of these characters. Perhaps because the film is shot in such an immersive style, you feel as if you have experienced the dangers (and occasional joys) alongside them, and developed a close bond with them.

Despite the romantic plot of the movie, the true story is the jagged relationship, with its loyalties and betrayals, between the innocent, gentle dreamer Jamal and the more ruthless, realist Salim. The film charts the lengths they will go to protect and help each other – or sometimes in Salim’s case not. Salim is a fascinating character – easily the deepest, most conflicted of the three – who even as a child has a moral flexibility, happy to gain the benefits of a ruthless criminal lifestyle, while still having enough conscience to know what he has done with his life is wrong.

In contrast, the relationship between Latika and Jamal is far less complex. Frieda Pinto doesn’t actually appear until almost two thirds of the way into the movie – and she and Patel have only really one dialogue scene together to establish a romantic link. The romance between them is in fact the standard fairy-tale – two young friends as children who become unknowing sweethearts. The film relies on us being invested in their fates as children to want to be together, rather than building a link between two grown adults. This is the structure of a Prince Charming and a Princess in distress rather than grown-up storytelling – but it clearly works because it taps into our own fundamental first experiences of how stories work.

Dev Patel is a very sweet and highly engaging lead – and how could we not be immediately on the side of a pleasant, gentle young man whom we first see hanging from a ceiling with electrodes on his feet? Patel has a low-key decency about him that becomes more engaging the more you watch the film. Since most of his narrative function is to offer linking scenes to the far more dynamic and exciting flashbacks – and since the character of Jamal has very little real depth to him beyond “he’s a good guy” (again like a fairytale his innocence is untouched by events) – it’s quite a testament to his performance that you end up feeling as close to him as you do.

But it’s clear to me second time around the framing device of the Who Wants to be a Millionaire contest is the most disposable, and least interesting part of the movie. It does have the film’s most outright enjoyable adult performance, a swaggering, ego-filled turn from Amil Kapoor, but it’s still all much more predictable, obvious and functional than the adventures we see as our characters grow up. We know Jamal is going to keep getting things right (and thank goodness each question he answers, he learned the answers consecutively through his life! What a mess that might have been otherwise narratively!), so the fact that Boyle keeps what is essentially the same scene each time seeming interesting is quite something.

The gameshow however is the “quest” of this romantic fairy-tale. And fairy-tale is really what the film is: Jamal is there to try and find and save Latika. So in the end it doesn’t really matter that Latika hardly feels like a character, or that we’ve been given no real reason to think she and Jamal are in love other than the film telling us that they are, or that the plot of the film is really as flimsy as tissue paper. The film is a dream, a romantic fable. The genius of Boyle is to use a whole load of familiar, Dickenisan-style tropes to place this into a social-realist travelogue, a dynamite dance of flamboyant film-making techniques. So perhaps that is the point about Slumdog: on repeated viewings, like fairy-tales, its plot tricks and narrative sleight-of-hand become more obvious. But you get more of a respect for the confidence with which the trick is played.