Author: Alistair Nunn

Small Things Like These (2024)

Profoundly sad film of the impact of small acts, with a soul-searching lead performance

Director: Tim Mielants

Cast: Cillian Murphy (Bill Furlong), Eileen Walsh (Eileen Furlong), Michelle Fairley (Mrs Wilson), Emily Watson (Sister Mary), Clare Dunne (Sister Carmel), Helen Behan (Mrs Kehoe), Zara Devlin (Sarah), Mark McKenna (Ned), Agnes O’Casey (Sarah Furlong)

Sometimes the only hope for change, is that the balance of small acts of kindness outweighs the mass of indifference and blind-eye-turning. Claire Keegan’s acclaimed novella is about exactly such a moment. In the small town of New Ross, Wexford, just before Christmas in 1985, coal merchant Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) works hard to provide for his family and look out for those around him. Bill is struggling with insomnia, haunted by memories of his mother’s (Agnes O’Casey) death when he was a boy. One day he witnesses something unsettling at the local convent: a young woman (Zara Devlin) begging not to be left there. A few days later he arrives at dawn to find her locked in the coal shed. The Mother Superior (Emily Watson) assures him it is nothing to worry about and sends him on his way with a giant tip. But Bill can feel in his bones something is not right.

Small Things Like These is a sombre investigation of how an appalling scandal like the Magdalene Laundries could continue for years. The convent’s influence touches every inch of the town. Social life revolves around the Church and even organise the town’s Christmas lights. They run the school – with the Mother Superior heavily implying Bill’s actions will have a profound impact on his children’s educational prospects – and they are treated with awed deference from everyone. You slowly realise many people know things are not right at the Convent – but no one wants to rock the boat (Bill’s wife even begs him not to and the pub landlady warns him to put his own family first).

In a world like this, bad things flourish because people don’t want to put themselves and their loved ones at risk. People must hear the wailing of babies from the convent and decide to keep walking. It’s not just the convent: New Ross is full of people looking the other way to poverty and misfortune. Bill quietly does his best to help people – a generous Christmas bonus for his workers, a handful of whatever change he has to a young boy walking home alone – but even he can only look on in slack-jawed sorrow when he sees a shoeless child in the middle of the night drinking from a cat’s bowl.

Mielant’s film brilliantly captures not only the drab, gloomy atmosphere of this poor Irish town – every shot is soaking in shades of grey, brown and coal dust black – but also the grim sense of things constantly being watched passively from a distance. The film is awash of shots that frame events through doorways or at a distance, be it from across the street or in mirrors or reflections. Small Things Like These is an oppressive, claustrophobic film, largely taking place in dusk or night-time darkness, where things go unspoken and unconfronted.

The burden of inaction has had a huge impact on Bill, in a mesmerising performance by Cillian Murphy. Quiet, awkward and shy, Murphy makes Bill weighed down by an impossible burden of sadness. Large chunks of the film simply allow us to study Murphy’s face, and few actors can convey inner turmoil as beautifully as Murphy can. You feel there is a poet’s soul buried in Bill, in Murphy’s eyes haunted with an impossible melancholia: Murphy brilliantly embodies a quiet, decent man who knows the world isn’t right but is deeply torn about what he can do about it, while haunted by his own lingering childhood pain at witnessing his mother’s death and never knowing his father.

It’s interesting that this past is one of the most brightly filmed parts of Small Things Like These. Bill’s natural empathy towards the young woman he encounters at the convent – and his desire to care and provide for his own family – is rooted in his own past. Growing up without a father, the child of the maid of a wealthy family, we realise it is only due to an act of decency that Bill’s life developed as it did. As a single, unmarried woman, his mother could easily have ended up in the Magdalene Laundries herself, with Bill taken at birth to be fostered by strangers. It’s only the kindness of her employer (a tender Michelle Fairley) that saved him – though Bill still grew up bullied and mocked for his illegitimacy.

Perhaps Bill realises more the lucky escape he had, when confronted by Emily Watson’s chillingly authoritarian (under a mask of genial indulgence) Mother Superior. What would his life have been like if his mother had been crushed by someone like this fierce woman, resolute in her self-righteousness? Bill’s shame and guilt is superbly conveyed by Murphy as he leaves with a previously disputed bill settled in full (and then some) and a promise of future favours to come. The message is clear: this is how the world works and Bill should get with the programme.

That’s how wicked deeds flourish among decent people. Small Things Like These may spin an old-fashioned Edmund-Burke-inspired line, but it’s hard not to argue with its honesty, conviction and the air of impossible sadness that drips from every frame of it. At points it’s decision to leave so much unspoken does create more ambiguity than I think it intends. In particular, the music choices for some flashbacks imply shocking revelations that never arrive. Which are in fact utterly counter to the film’s eventual, slightly open-ended, reveal of Bill’s past (contrary to the more explicit book) but this a refreshingly quiet, thoughtful and meditative film (with a brilliant, grief-stricken lead performance) – that in its gentle way carries real emotional force but leaves you feeling hopeful.

Benediction (2021)

Davies’ final film is a beautifully made, deeply sad, exploration of the long-term impact of trauma

Director: Terence Davies

Cast: Jack Lowden (Siegfried Sassoon), Peter Capaldi (Older Siegfried Sassoon), Simon Russell Beale (Robbie Ross), Jeremy Irvine (Ivor Novello), Kate Phillips (Hester Gatty), Gemma Jones (Older Hester Gatty), Ben Daniels (Dr Rivers), Calam Lynch (Stephen Tennant), Anton Lesser (Older Stephen Tennant), Tom Blyth (Glen Byam Shaw), Matthew Tennyson (Wilfred Owen), Geraldine James (Theresa Thornycroft), Richard Goulding (George Sassoon), Lia Williams (Edith Sitwell), Julian Sands (Chief Medical Officer)

Few generations carried scars as deep as that which saw millions of their fellows mown down in the endless bloody slaughter of World War One. For us, whatever understanding of the horrors of that conflict we have is often filtered through the war poets, who fought in unimaginable conditions. Terence Davies’ final film explores the life of Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden, ageing into Peter Capaldi) whose life never escaped the shadow of those terrible sights and awful losses.

Benediction is a sombre, mellow, deeply sad portrait of a man who spent a lifetime searching for something, anything to fill the void the war had left in him. Following Sassoon’s life in a series of tableaux-style scenes that mix poetry reading, period music, news footage with flash-forwards to the tetchy, weary older man he will become, it’s a sad, reflective work that presents memory as a sort of prison that consigns everyone to a life sentence. Davies catches this beautifully in his stately, melancholic film where survival guilt goes hand in hand with bitter regret at missed opportunities.

It opens with Sassoon’s protest against the war – denouncing its content from his first-hand experience. Saved from the possibility of a firing squad by influential friends (chief among them, Simon Russell Beale’s good-natured Robbie Ross) Sassoon is dispatched to an Edinburgh military hospital to “recuperate”. There he meets and falls in love with the sensitive, shy poet Wilfrid Owen (Matthew Tennyson), a love he is scared to confess. After Owen is killed, Sassoon commits himself to a series of romantic relationships with selfish, bitchy men including Ivor Novello (a marvellously supercilious Jeremy Irvine, whose eyes are stone cold) and the shallow, vain Stephen Tennent (Calam Lynch, full of Bright Young Thing smugness, turning into a lonely, tragic Anton Lesser). As an older man, he converts to Catholicism and struggles to understand his son George (Richard Goulding).

Davies’ film posits a Sassoon who never recovered from grief at the death of Wilfrid Owen and could never truly forgive himself for being too timid to express his feelings. Davies films Sassoon and Owen in scenes that sing of unspoken intimacy, from an overhead shot of a swimming pool dip that feels like a pirouette, to the matching body language they exhibit while sitting watching a variety show at the hospital. They laugh and dance together, but at parting Sassoon cannot move himself beyond a tightly clasped handshake and a whispered urge to stay a few minutes longer.

In discussions with his doctor and friend Rivers (a lovely tender cameo from Ben Daniels), Sassoon tearfully talks of his fear of expressing his own emotions. Perhaps this, coupled with his self-blame, is why Sassoon placed himself in so many relationships with such transparently flamboyant shits? Davies certainly seems to suggest so: Sassoon had less fear of “being himself” when he was with arrogantly confident men like Novello and Tennant. Did he also, the film suggests, feel so crippled with regret and survivor guilt, that he couldn’t believe himself worthy of the love of gentle, decent men, such as the Owen-like Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth).

Sassoon becomes a man who can never fully escape the never-ending hurt of memories. Even as an older man, Davies shows Capaldi’s Sassoon sitting in his garden, the background replaced by news footage of slaughter in the trenches. It’s mixed in with the shame Sassoon felt at his “stand” against the war being, in the end, a moment that changed nothing. Davies further paints his poetry as declining post-war, as if parts of his creative life never survived the shocks he experienced.

And always he hopes something might make him whole again. Sassoon races through these false dawns during the film: relationships with men, marriage to Hetty (Kate Phillips as the younger Hetty is nearly as oppressed with unspoken sadness as Sassoon), the birth of his son – all fail to deliver. So as an older man – in a neat CGI transition during a 360 camera move – Davies transforms Lowden to Capaldi as he tries Catholicism (there is another wonderful cut that takes us from young Sassoon’s silver military cross being dropped into a river, that transitions into the grey-suited older Sassoon lying in a crucifix position on the floor of a church).

But the tragedy of Benediction – and there is no denying it’s a deeply sad and even slightly depressing film – is none of these attempts fill his soul. The older Sassoon – sharp, prickly and with a stare that goes on and on from Capaldi – snaps at things he doesn’t understand, cruelly dismisses the older Tennant and bitterly complains at the lack of recognition his later work received. He’s a man desperate for companionship, but comfortable only on his own.

It’s particularly sad having seen the brighter, passionate and warm man he was. Much of Benediction succeeds due to an exceptional performance by Jack Lowden. Lowden brilliantly conveys Sassoon’s lingering depression and loss under the surface of every interaction. The cheery wit that covers the self-loathing that leads him into destructive relationships and painful situations is as well captured as the self-deceiving optimism he had that everything could be different. Lowden ends the film with an extraordinary emotional moment – filmed in tight one-shot by Davies – where we see, one the last day of the war, his impossible burdens lead him to a single, quiet, emotional outburst of the vast reams of pain that then continued to burn inside him for the rest of his life.

Benediction is about guilt, loss, regret and denying yourself opportunities at happiness and joy through an internal determination that it is not for you. There is something profoundly personal in this – Sassoon’s life in this film, mirroring many of the regrets Davies spoke of in his own life – a fact increased by the heartfelt, gentle construction of the film with its melancholic air and rich sense of empathy for its subject. As a final work, it’s a fitting tribute to both the poet and its director.

The Fallen Idol (1948)

Brilliant thriller about how hard the world is for a child to understand

Director: Carol Reed

Cast: Ralph Richardson (Baines), Michèle Morgan (Julie), Sonia Dresdel (Mrs Baines), Bobby Henrey (Philippe), Denis O’Dea (Chief Inspector Crowe), Jack Hawkins (Detective Amos), Walter Fitzgerald (Dr Fenton), Dandy Nichols (Mrs Patterson), Geoffrey Keen (Detective Inspector Davis), Bernard Lee (Inspector Hart), Dora Bryan (Rose), Karel Stepanek (First Secretary), Torin Thatcher (Constable)

We’ve all had heroes we worship haven’t we? Few hero worships burn as brightly as a child’s. Eight-year-old Philippe (Bobby Henrey), son of a foreign ambassador in London, is awe-struck by the embassies English butler Baines (Ralph Richardson), a kind, decent man with a twinkle in his eye who enjoys spinning stories for Phil about his exciting life in India. The highlight of Phil’s day is spending time in Baines’ parlour. For Baines though, his highlights are the snatched moments of release from his domineering, unloving wife (a masterfully tough-to-like Sonia Dresdel) that he spends with embassy secretary Julie (Michèle Morgan).

The affair is obvious to us in seconds. But Phil – from whose perspective we see large amounts (but, crucially, not all) of the film play-out – is of course oblivious, readily accepting Baines awkward assurance Julie is just his niece. The Fallen Idol – the middle film in Reed’s astonishingly high-quality run of films that includes Odd Man Out and The Third Man – is a brilliantly tense, very moving story of how adrift children feel in the adult world, how easily they misinterpret signals and misread social cues. Superbly filmed, with a wonderful script by Graham Greene (from his own novel) it’s a masterclass in how the simplest situation can lead to the most intense drama.

It revolves around a fatal trap for Baines. Believing his wife is away for the weekend (she has in fact concealed herself in the embassy mansion), Baines treats himself to a day and night with Julie. Discovered, the confrontation leads to Mrs Baines dead at the bottom of the stairs. The argument is partially witnessed by Phil – but crucially, only glimpses of it as he runs down the exterior fire escape, peering in through windows as he goes – but in full by the viewer. It’s clearly a terrible accident, taking place after Baines had left. But Phil is convinced he has witnessed a murder – and so passionate is his hero worship of Baines (and loathing of Mrs Baines), he decides to do everything he can to protect the butler.

The genius of Reed’s The Fallen Idol is that we are always know more than any of the characters. Just as we can tell immediately from witnessing Baines and Julie’s whispered, Brief Encounter-ish meeting in a London coffee shop that they are in the midst of a passionate affair, so we also know much faster than any character that Mrs Baines is still in the house and that her death is a clumsy accident. We can also see, in ways Phil cannot, that his desperate lies only undermine Baines honest version of events. We know all the details well ahead of the police, watching them misinterpret clues and behaviour in the worst possible light. The entire film shows how damning circumstances and coincidences can fold up into a vice-like trap from which there is almost no escape.

The Fallen Idol is a film awash with lies. In many ways it’s a heartbreaking reveal of how quickly the compromises and selfishness of the adult world corrupts the child’s. At the heart of these lies is Baines himself. The role is beautifully played by Ralph Richardson, utilising his eccentric cuddliness to exceptional effect, but also perfectly capturing the selfishness, weakness and cowardice of Baines. Because Baines is a liar – not only to his wife, but also to Julie (he spectacularly lacks the guts to ask his wife for a divorce, despite what he tells Julie) and, walking Phil back after he has crashed Baines’ tea-time meeting with Julie, urgently instructs him to lie if he is ever asked about what happened that afternoon. Baines doubles down on his duplicity by using the unwitting Phil as a shield to cover a zoo-trip date with Julie, and even his adventure stories to Phil are all slightly self-aggrandizing tall tales.

One of the toughest things about The Fallen Idol is that hero-worship is a confused one-way street, especially when children are involved. Baines is fond of Phil but often treats him with distracted affection out-of-kilter with the earnest, devoted adoration Phil pours on him. This devotion from Phil is so great, even his belief that his hero is a murderer makes no impact on him. Having taken his idol’s lessons to heart, about what to do when questioned about anything to do with Julie, Phil lies and lies to the investigating officers, corrupting himself (he believes, after all, he is helping a killer) while also making the innocent Baines seem guiltier-and-guiltier with every word.

Carol Reed draws a superbly natural performance from Bobby Henrey, in a performance utterly lacking in childish, mannered acting tricks. It’s a hugely natural performance, over-flowing with innocence making Phil a character we end up deeply caring for. The early half of the film throws us perfectly into the excited world of a child with a whole mansion to run around in, cuddling his pet snake close to his chest. Reed also brilliantly captures how a moment of trauma confuses and terrifies an innocent into not knowing what action to take. Fleeing the house barefoot – clearly terrified and heartbroken – immediately after the death, Phil is petrified when he encounters a policeman not because he is intimidated, but because he fears inadvertently betraying his idol.

Reed superbly captures the desperate vulnerability of children, the nightmare of not having your voice listened to as adults talk over and around you. The Fallen Idol (with its careful use of disjointed angles and God-like, wide-angle shots from above) has a superb sense of the horror of being caught in a situation you neither fully understand or can influence. It’s echoed perfectly by Baines’ increasingly defensive panic as each denial falls on all-too-obviously deaf ears. Phil also misinterprets almost everything he is told in the film, right up to when the sympathetic Julie (a lovely, warm performance from Michèle Morgan) begs him that only the truth can help Baines.

The Fallen Idol spices this up with superb moments of comedy. Dora Bryan has a delicious cameo as a ‘lady of the night’, called upon to by the flummoxed policemen at the station Phil has fled to, to try and draw some words out of the stubbornly silent child – and who can only fall back on the cliches of her profession (‘Can I take you home dearie?’). An Inspector (a lovely cameo from Bernard Lee) called in to translate in the embassy is begged by the first secretary to drop his inept schoolboy French. A tense interrogation of Baines is interrupted when a pedantic embassy staffer insists he must be allowed to check the clocks in the room (Reed wittily shows the characters revolving, clockwork like, impatiently on the spot in the background while this interminable check goes on).

But the great strength of The Fallen Idol is how it captures the joyful innocence of childhood and the Kafkaesque confusion the adult world can have on a child. Poor Phil never really understands anything that goes on (although the film ends with a sweet irony of Phil being the only person who perhaps understands a vital ‘clue’ only to be completely ignored) while we are always in complete understanding. Reed’s direction is faultless, both from his work with actors to his masterful use of camerawork and editing to really capture the confusing, unreadable adult-world from a child’s perspective. It’s a masterful, gripping, heart-rending film – a small scale classic that perfectly mixes tension and wit.

Basic Instinct (1992)

A sensationalist hit, this Trashy Hitchcock-pastiches looks very pleased with its own naughtiness today

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Michael Douglas (Detective Nick Curran), Sharon Stone (Catherine Tramell), George Dzundza (Detective Gus Moran), Jeanne Tripplehorn (Dr Beth Garner), Dorothy Malone (Hazel Dobkins), Denis Arndt (Lt Philip Walker), Leilani Sarelle (Roxy Hardy), Bruce A Young (Detective Sam Andrews), Chelcie Ross (Captain Talcott), Wayne Knight (Assistant DA John Correli), Stephen Tobolowsky (Dr Lamott)

If there is one thing Basic Instinct proves for sure, it’s that Paul Verhoeven is a very naughty boy. A sensational smash hit in 1992, largely because of the instant iconic status of that scene (you know which one), Basic Instinct remixes Hitchcock (especially Vertigo and Psycho) with lashings of explicit sex and violence, a touch of The Silence of the Lambs and a dollop of Fatal Attraction. It’s a deeply silly, dirty film that was a sort of Fifty Shades of its day: vanilla porn for those who feel too self-conscious to actually go and watch a real one.

Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone) is number one suspect for the murder of her boyfriend (or rather as she describes him “the guy I was fucking”) for two reasons: one she published a novel a few weeks earlier where she explicitly described the crime in detail and two she’s an obvious Hannibal Lector-ish genius psychopath. Doesn’t stop weak-willed detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) from becoming obsessed with her, sucked into a wild sexual affair. But is Catherine a misunderstood unlucky victim, or the genius manipulator her old college rival Dr Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn) – also Nick’s on-and-off girlfriend and psychiatrist – says she is?

Basic Instinct was the most expensive script ever sold, earning Joe Eszterhas $3million for what he claimed was fourteen days’ work. And you can see why – it’s got everything audiences could need for an addictive, trashy bit of fun. A femme fatale who is also a genius psychopath! A handsome macho cop! Brutal murders! A puzzle interesting enough to keep ticking over but obvious enough that you don’t need to think about it too much! And of course, lots and lots and lots of sex! And then even more sex! No wonder people saw dollar bills – at the very worst they had a chance at a so-bad-its-good box office smash.

But the good stuff. Basic Instinct’s comic-book Hitchcock pastiche actually works rather well, helped enormously by a marvellous Oscar-nominated score by Jerry Goldsmith, which brilliantly channels Bernard Herrmann’s luscious Vertigo strings. It’s no exaggeration to say Goldsmith’s score dramatically improves the film, from adding tension to a drawn-out elevator trip to adding a film noir lyricism to Catherine and Nick’s rather forced sexualised banter. Verhoeven also really knows his business: the film’s famous interrogation scene works as well as it does through his skilful editing between wide angles, close-ups and POV shots, aided by the striking uplighting from cinematographer Jan de Bont.

That scene – and the film – also works because of Sharon Stone. Taking on a role turned down by almost every single woman in Hollywood, Stone seizes hold of a part she knew was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Nick may be the lead – and Douglas, in the middle of his run of weak modern American men bewitched by strong women, may have been the high-paid star ($14 million to Stone’s $550k) – but both knew this was Catherine’s movie. Stone plays the role with a playful, sensual confidence and arrogant defiance, knowing full well she can seduce anyone. Despite the clunky dialogue, she makes Catherine sexy, smart and just about vulnerable enough to make some viewers doubt whether she’s the killer or not. (I mean she blatantly is, the film doesn’t really try and pretend otherwise. Most of the fun is seeing how shamelessly she can parade it and still get away with it.)

Away from that though, Basic Instinct is a terribly silly film, a well-made pandering to our lowest desires. Opening with an extremely graphic post-coitus stabbing frenzy (with blood spray everywhere and a nose skewered by an ice pick) – it then teases us three times that it will repeat this again after nearly every explosive session of rumpy-pumpy. Ah yes, the rumpy-pumpy. Basic Instinct slows at the half-way mark for an almost five-minute extended multi-angled, orgasm packed bit of horizontal jogging that Nick then rather pathetically spends most of the rest film bragging about being “the fuck of the century”.

But then Nick is a pathetic figure. Somehow keeping hold of his badge, despite gunning down two tourists while high on cocaine, he’s got such an addictive personality he makes Lloyd Bridges’ (“I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue!”) air traffic controller in Airplane look like a model of restraint. After internal affairs-mandated therapy (how’s that for a slap on the wrist) – hilariously compromised by Jeanne Tripplehorn’s Dr Garner crossing all ethical lines by repeatedly shagging him – Nick has proudly quit drugs, drink, smoking, and shooting before asking questions. Needless to say, under Catherine’s influence, he embraces all of these again, all while still managing to be the sort of middle-aged loser who wears a pullover to nightclub.

Eszterhas’ script mixes awful “tough” dialogue (“Looks like he got off before he got offed” Nick’s partner jokes over a victim) with clumsy psychological insight (my favourite is Tobolowsky’s consultant who confidently states two options: Trammel either did or didn’t do it – inevitably this childishly empty insight is met with the manly ‘tecs muttering “In English Doc!”) and blunt statements of the obvious (“She’s brilliant! And Evil!” screams poor Tripplehorn). The flirty banter is largely sold by Sharon Stone’s confidence, since the lines (“I’m not wearing underwear”) are hardly Double Indemnity. The film’s mystery is so irrelevant to its appeal (and, in many ways, plot), it merrily gets bogged down in several off-screen murders of characters we’ve never met.

Today Basic Instinct feels like a bizarre museum piece. George Dzundza’s sidekick cop is intended as comic-relief but comes across like a little ball of toxic masculinity. An early sex scene between Nick and Beth is pretty much impossible to watch today without thinking “yeah that’s rape”. The film uses bisexuality (though we only, of course, get girl-on-girl – Douglas made it clear he ain’t gonna kiss no man) as raw titillation, an entre for the soft porn of Douglas and Stone noisily going at it for about 10% of the film’s run time. Even the famous scene is uncomfortable to watch, since Stone has since made it clear she didn’t consent to that shot.

Basic Instinct is a deeply silly piece of trash. But then that was its appeal back then – no one felt they were actually watching Hitchcock when they sat down to this rip-off of the master (in fact Basic Instinct makes you feel it’s probably a relief the production code meant Hitchcock couldn’t give into his Verhoevenish instincts). Today most like to think of it as a sort of well played card trick. However, it’s hard not to feel a bit for Sharon Stone to whom it became a millstone (which she eventually exploited for a terrible belated sequel for which she pocketed $13.5million), despite being the person possibly most responsible for its success. So maybe Nick won in the end after all.

Evil Does Not Exist (2024)

Haunting, enigmatic parable on nature and modern society that leaves a lingering impression

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Cast: Hitoshi Omika (Takumi Yasumura), Ryo Nishikawa (Hana Yasumura), Ryuji Kosaka (Takahashi Keisuke), Ayaka Shibutani (Mayuzumi Yuuko), Hazuki Kikuchi (Sachi Minemura), Hiroyuki Miura (Kazuo Minemura), Yûto Torii (Tatsuki Sakamoto), Takako Yamamura (Yoshiko Kizaki), Takuma Nagao (Tomonori Hasegawa), Yoshinori Miyata (Akira Horiguchi, Takahashi), Taijirô Tamura (Ippei Suruga)

Imagine a beautiful Japanese mountain village, where the water is so clean, jugs of are taken straight from the stream to the local restaurant where its unique taste adds to the food’s beauty. Everything here is in careful harmony. Until a corporation reckons it’s the perfect site – keen to exploit, while it can, lingering Covid subsidies – to build a glamping site with a 95% effective septic tank (because that’s fine with government regulations). The corporation hosts a charade of a consultation where the plans are rejected by the community, unconvinced by the ‘trickle down’ wealth promised and more concerned with that 5% sewage being tipped into their gloriously pure water supply.

Perhaps the point of Evil Does Not Exist is that there is no real malevolence here. The corporation that wants to effectively shatter the harmony of this community isn’t doing it because they are cruel, they’re just doing what they do to create profits. And they genuinely don’t really see the problem because with a classic lack of empathy they’re convinced what is good for them is good for everyone. And that deep-down everyone shares their outlook. The villagers are just angling for a bigger pay-outa and they don’t really need to fix the septic tank because it falls within the rules and the water will still be okay with a little bit of sewage in it.

Evil Does Not Exist it seems, because most of the bad stuff happening in the world is because of empathy-free systems, people not really caring about impact of their actions and a general lack of interest in long-term impacts over short-term gain. Hamaguchi’s beautifully filmed, Godard-inspired (from title fonts, to shooting-style to Hamaguchi’s use of non-professional actors) environmental parable carefully and subtly deconstructs a world where the beauty of nature can be rinsed away simply out of a sense of inevitability and quick-buck expediency.

Originally envisioned as a short film that would showpiece the beautiful orchestrations of its composer Eiko Ishibashi, Hamaguchi expanded it as he shot more and more material, eventually developing it into a fascinating and open-ended parable about our relationship with nature. Nature here is an elemental and unknowable force: the first five minutes of the film is a sustained tracking shot through the trees, the only sounds we hear being Ishibashi’s music. It’s almost ten minutes before we hear any dialogue. The village’s ‘odd-job man’ Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) is very much one with the natural world around him, taking only what he needs and living in gentle, stoic harmony with the environment.

Hamaguchi’s film – utilising his careful, Ozu-inspired camerawork and Godardian love of realist observation – creates a natural world which is both beautiful and hauntingly mysterious. In the film’s calm shots of nature, the forest becomes a haven but one strangely inhuman. There is a feeling of unknowable, unrelatable forces in this world, an organic Gaia understanding that the villagers are unconsciously plugged into, which governs the ‘rules’ of existence. It’s an understanding utterly inaccessible to those who arrive from the city and want to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

Evil Does Not Exist pivots around its consultation meeting, which takes place in a town hall, chaired by initially bored consultants going through the motions with a slide deck they don’t understand and a ring-binder of notes they are unfamiliar with. As the villagers quickly discover (their adroit questioning taking the under-prepared consultants off guard), this consultation is a sham – anyone with any control over the fate of the project isn’t there and the glamping site is happening regardless of anyone’s feelings. All this meeting is about (as the head of the company later says, dialling in to chat to his consultants on a video call) is demonstrating the company has ‘listened’ and to tweak a few token issues (it’s telling that the head of the company describes the disastrous meeting as a complete success). None of this is evil of course: it’s just the bureaucratic acquisitiveness of the modern world, which values procedures and rules over impacts and end results.

Both consultants however find themselves taken with the village. But Hamaguchi demonstrates this is always rooted in a patronising sentimentality that’s as much about themselves as it is the actual village. Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) in particular, a disaffected company drone, spontaneously decides he can just jack it all in and become a skilled man of the wilderness like Takumi. Takahashi comes across as an embarrassing romantic, identical in many ways to the likely glamping customers (who want a sense of the nature without actually living there). He’s hideously clueless about the fauna of the forest and his practical skills (captured in a hilariously awkward attempt to chop wood) are woefully inadequate. None of this stops him from assuming he can fit right in on a whim with no preparation or training. Takumi’s just an odd-job man, how hard can that be to pick-up?

It doesn’t kid Takumi, who stares at him with an impassive face that hints at a range of emotions from contempt to humorous indulgence. Perhaps he’s aware that Takashi (again patronisingly) sees him less as an individual and more as his personal Yoda, placed on earth to mentor Takashi’s personal growth: to the outsiders the village and its inhabitants are always filtered through what they can do for them. Takashi’s patronising expectation that Takumi will welcome a ‘student’ isn’t wildly different from the company’s view that Takumi can be won over to supporting the project because they’ve offered him a job and a semi-decent salary.

This all culminates in a mysterious, open-ended conclusion which sees Hamaguchi lean into hints of folk-horror. Does the conclusion of Evil Does Not Exist show the dangerous consequences of mankind’s interference of nature on the most innocent? Does Takami represent a resentful natural world biting back? Questions hang over the film’s cryptic ending, which has been neatly foreshadowed throughout.

Evil Does Not Exist has a quietly hypnotic quality to it, but also a haunting chill behind its beautiful imagery. But it also asks subtle but intriguing questions about our link to nature and how a myopic focus on our own interests and needs inadvertently damages the world far more than actively ‘evil’ acts ever could.

CODA (2021)

Surprise Oscar-winner is reassuring, unsurprising feel-good fare, charming but crammed with familiar beats

Director: Sian Heder

Cast: Emilia Jones (Ruby Rossi), Marlee Matlin (Jackie Rossi), Troy Kotsur (Frank Rossi), Daniel Durant (Leo Rossi), Eugenio Derbez (Bernardo Villalobos), Ferdia Walsh-Peele (Miles), May Forsyth (Gertie)

Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) feels like she has been working her whole life. The only hearing person in a deaf family, she’s both translator and interpreter. She works early morning shifts on their fishing ship with her father, the imposing-but-playful Frank (Troy Kotsur), and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant), and butts heads with her former-beauty-queen mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin). After graduating from high school, Ruby assumes this will be the rest of her life: until music teacher Mr Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) helps her discover her gift for singing and, suddenly, a new future of Berkle Music College is possible. But can she balance the conflicting demands of her family and dreams?

CODA is an eminently likeable, thoroughly unchallenging film. If someone dumped a pad down in front of you and asked you to guess, sight unseen, what its main plot beats would be, pretty much anyone who has ever seen a movie would nail 90% of them. But it’s a well-told, charming small-scale story, with a positive perspective on disability and tugs heartstrings with the assured skill of a master. In the end it doesn’t really matter that nothing in it is remotely surprising, challenging or unexpected, because it delivers exactly the emotional response the viewer is likely to want from it.

It’s a film about communication. The Rossi’s need Ruby’s ability to hear, and her ease with spoken English, to navigate the world around them in the fastest, smoothest way. Ruby, meanwhile, is struggling to communicate her own passions, after a lifetime of adapting herself to her family. Unlike them, she wants more than a life on the docks. This guilty conflict with the family she adores ironically makes her constantly avoid communication both with her family and her music teacher (investing his personal time and money in her) about the pressure slowly crushing her.

These increasingly conflicted desires and choices form the film’s heart. Will Ruby make her own life, or stay with her family for as long as they need her? It’s not helped by the fact that her talent (out of all the talents in the world) is one her family can’t fully share in, meaning they struggle to understand her dilemma. (Her mother outright sees Ruby’s singing as nothing more than teenage rebellion – stating if her parents were blind, Ruby would have embraced painting). On top of which, Ruby’s genuinely loving (but insular) family have been her whole world for as long as she can remember.

The Rossis are vibrant and warm-hearted with a salty sense of humour and a stubborn independent streak. Jackie and Frank are so infatuated with each other (even after decades of marriage) they frequently engage in noisy sex (much to the embarrassment of Ruby, when a visit from a would-be boyfriend is interrupted by some extremely loud, bed pounding coitus from next door). They delight in teasing each other – from Leo and Ruby’s inventive sign-language insults for each other to the hilariously intentionally explicit sign-language safe-sex lecture Frank gives Ruby and her prospective boyfriend. But they are also a tight-team, seeing themselves as having to fight for their place in the world and discussing problems with the low income of the fishing business as a unit.

CODA is keen to establish the Rossis not as victims or people the audience should feel sorry for, but as a warm and loving family of everyday working-class Americans, who just happen to be deaf. It’s part of the film’s challenging of perceptions around disability. Frank continues a fishing business started by his father, which he intends to hand to his son, and (eventually) steps up to become a leader in his community. Jackie is a chippy, opinionated woman who still loves the glitz and glamour of her old beauty pageant days while getting stuck into managing the family’s new business interests. All of them are vibrant and romantic, sexual people, confident in themselves and who they are, far from the passive recipients of charity and help that so many disabled people in film have been.

But CODA dodges more challenging questions around disability. It never really engages with the implication that the Rossi family have got so used to having a full-time, free translator, that they have become disconnected from the world around them. I can’t help but feel there is a germ of a more interesting film here about the family (however inadvertently) allowing themselves to be cut off from others. They have let their ability to lip-read slip, filter all their communication with anyone outside the family through Ruby, and have grown so used to her manning the radio for their fishing business that they can’t run the boat effectively without her (leading to inevitable coastguard trouble).

It’s also had a knock-on effect in the fishing community: the other fishermen have clearly never had to really build a relationship with the Rossi’s (after decades, no one on the docks has learned even the most rudimentary sign language or any communication techniques like moving lips clearly when speaking). Jackie is outright resentful of the hearing wives of the other fishermen and neither she nor Frank can imagine actually running a business without Ruby’s to handle literally all the verbal communication involved. The closest the film comes to addressing this is Leo angrily telling Ruby the family aren’t helpless – they managed before she was born and they will if she leaves. But the film doesn’t want to explore the implication that the Rossis allowed themselves to slip into a comfort zone that ultimately proves isolating and even damaging for them.

CODA does get some good material from their struggle to engage with music (even if this is an uncomfortable cliché for some in the deaf community). There are well-staged moments, such as the Rossis attending Ruby’s graduation concert, where we “hear” what they hear (nothing) and need to judge the performance, like they do, from the reactions of those around them. A scene where Frank finally appreciates part of his daughter’s skill by feeling the vibrations of her singing is done with real emotional force. However, it cheats by feeding this into an off-stage conversion where the family switch (overnight) from hesitant to “all-in” for a classic last-minute-dash to get Ruby to her audition.

That’s representative of CODA shifting away from more complex, challenging themes and issues for a heart-warmingly positive tale, familiar from dozens of movies past. Saying that, Heder does a good job pulling together the familiar elements, and Troy Kotsur (Oscar winning) and Marlee Matlin both give emotionally rich performances as the parents. Ruby is excellently played by Emilia Jones – who spent months learning sign language in order to perform the part and improvise with the other actors. But CODA feels like a gentle, consensus film full of pleasant moments and reassuring insights that love will overcome, which perhaps explains why it won an Oscar in a year of more divisive films. There is nothing in it that could possibly rile you up or shake your faith in the decency of ordinary people. CODA is a film designed to wrap around you like a comfort blanket.

Megalopolis (2024)

Coppola’s ambitious epic commits the cardinal sins – boring, hard to follow and immensely tedious

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Adam Driver (Cesar Catilina), Giancarlo Esposito (Mayor Franklyn Cicero), Nathalie Emmanuel (Julia Cicero), Aubrey Plaza (Wow Platinum), Shia LaBeouf (Clodio Pulcher), Jon Voight (Hamilton Crassus III), Laurence Fishburne (Fundi Romaine), Jason Schwartzman (Jason Zanderz), Kathryn Hunter (Teresa Cicero), Dustin Hoffman (Nush Berman), Talia Shire (Constance Crassus Catilina)

I wanted to like it. Honestly I did. I really respect that Coppola was so passionate about this dream project that he pumped $120 million of his own money into it to make it come true. You can’t deny the ambition about a film that remixes modern American and Ancient Roman history, within a sci-fi dystopia. But Megalopolis is a truly terrible film. Coppola wanted to return to the spirit of 1970s film-making: unfortunately what he’s produced is one of the era’s self-indulgent, overtly arty, unrestrained and pretentious auteur follies where an all-powerful director throws everything at the screen without ever thinking about whether the result is interesting or enjoyable.

In New Rome (basically New York), Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a visionary architect and inventor, who created ‘megalon’, a sort of magic liquid metal. His vision is to use it make a glorious new Rome. He’s opposed by Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) who wants to focus spend on practicalities rather than castles-in-the-sky. This leads to a series of increasingly dirty political flights between Catilina, Cicero and Catilina’s cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf) the degenerately populist nephew of super-wealthy banker Crassus (Jon Voight), who is married to TV star and ambitious social climber (and Catiline’s former girlfriend) Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza). Catilina is also in a tentative relationship with Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). Or yes and he can mysteriously stop time. Somehow. Even he doesn’t know how.

The film is a sympathetic portrait of Catiline, a powerful Roman who (probably) caused a scandal by shagging a Vestal Virgin then attempted to mount a coup with a heavily pandering populist set of promises which led to his suicide (after defeat in battle) and his followers being executed by then-consul Cicero. Megalopolis’ version mixes this with elements of Caesar’s career and remixes Cicero, Claudius Pulcher and Crassus into versions of their historical forbears. It’s a neat idea, but it’s utterly bungled in delivery. Megalopolis is a film practically drowning in pretension, bombast and self-importance, its script stuffed with faux-philosophy and clumsy political points, its Roman history crude and obvious.

It feels pretty clear Megalopolis should be three to four hours and has been sliced down to two and a quarter. The problem is it feels like it goes on for four hours and practically the last thing I could imagine wanting as the credits roll was watching yet more of this nonsense. The most striking thing about Megalopolis is how boring it is (I nearly dropped off twice – and I was in an early evening showing). It hurtles through a series of impressive-looking-but-dramatically-empty set-pieces that often make no real narrative sense and carry very little emotional force. Characters are introduced with fanfare and then abruptly disappear (Dustin Hoffman’s fixer gets a big moment then literally has a building dropped on him) and the final forty minutes is so sliced down it loses all narrative sense.

Megalopolis feels like a bizarre art project, a collage of influences, opinions, concepts and inspirations, as if Coppola had been collecting ideas in a scrapbook for forty years and then put them all in. His heavily-penned script forces clunkingly artificial lines into its character mouths, frequently feeling like a chance to show off his reading list. Marcus Aureilus, Goethe, Rousseau and Shakespeare among others showily pop-up, alongside speeches from the real Cicero. Driver even does a (to be fair pretty good) rendition of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, though it’s a sign of the film’s self-satisfied literariness that I can’t for the life of me work out why he launches into this at a press conference. Laurence Fishburne delivers the occasional narration with such poetic clarity, you almost forget it’s full of dull, gnomic rubbish, straining at adding depth to bland, fortune-cookie level statements.

It’s not just literary influences. The film is awash with pleased-with-itself cinematic references. Most obviously, Metropolis homages abound in its design, while Coppola’s breaking the film up with stone-carved chapter headings is a silent-film inspired touch. As well as Lang, there are clear nods-of-the-head to Abel Gance’s Napoleon (most obviously in its troika shots) while the smorgasbord of influences checks off everything from Ben-Hur to Vertigo to The Greatest Show on Earth (and damningly not as good as any of those, even DeMille’s clunker). All of this is combined with a wild mix of cross-fades, double exposures, sixties-style drug-induced fantasies and half a dozen other filmic techniques that are all very impressive but feel like a young buck looking to impress, rather than providing a coherent visual language for the film. Catiline’s time-stop abilities are some sort of clumsy stand-in for the powers of the film director – calling cut whenever he wants – but what we are supposed to make of the point of this in a film as randomly chaotic as this I have no idea.

The entire tone is all over the place. A scene of tragic maudlin grief will immediately be followed by sex farce. An attempted murder by a Buster Keaton inspired pratfall. A speech so overburdened with philosophical and literary allusions it practically strangles the person speaking it will lead into a joke about boners. The cast splits into two halves: one seems to have been told this is a serious film which requires deathly sombre, middle-distance-starring pontificating; the other half that they are making a flatulent satire. The random mix of acting styles has the worst possible effect: it makes those in the first camp seem portentous and dull; and those in the second like stars of an end-of-pier adult pantomime.

Driver makes a decent fist of holding this together, even if Catiline is an enigmatic, hard-to-understand character whose aims and motivations seem as much a mystery to Coppola as they do to the poor souls watching. But he can deliver a speech with conviction and seems comfortable mixing soul-searching with goofy dancing. Nathalie Emmanuel, though, is utterly constrained by taking the whole thing so painfully seriously that the life drains out of her. On the other side, Aubrey Plaza is the most enjoyable to watch by going for out-right-comedy as a vampish, power-hungry woman who uses her body to dominate men. Shia LaBeouf also goes so ludicrously overtop as a faithful version of the seriously weird Claudius Pulcher – he engages in cross-dressing, murder, incest and drums up crowds by quoting Trump and Mussolini – that it’s either daring or just as much of an unbearably self-satisified art project as the rest of the film depending on your taste.

But the main problem with Megalopolis is that its smug, pat-on-the-back, aren’t-I-clever artistic self-indulgence makes the film painfully slow and terrifically boring. How could a film that features riots, assassination attempts, orgies, murders, an actual meteor strike and magic time-stopping be as dull as this? When everything is thrown together without no emotional coherence whatever. Characters we don’t relate to or understand, who are either po-faced ciphers or flamboyant cartoons, stand around and quote literature at each other, while the director tries a host of flashy tricks he’s liked from other movies and never gives us an honest-to-God reason to give a single, solitary fuck about anything that’s actually happening at any point to anyone in the film.

It is perhaps the ultimate auteur folly. A director creating something that only appeals to him, at huge expense (and I suppose at least he paid for it himself rather than wrecking a studio) where no one was allowed to say at any point “this makes no sense” or “this is heavy-handed” or “this scene doesn’t mesh at all with the one before it”. Instead, it throws a thousand Coppola ideas at the screen, in a film designed to appeal to pretentious lovers of art-house cinema who like to tell themselves Heaven’s Gate is the greatest film ever made or the artform peaked with Melieres and it was all down-hill from there.

To approach the film in its own overblown style: whenever an auteur crafts, Jove plays dice with the Fates to decide on the cut of the cloth for Destiny’s Loom: should it come up sixes, the Muses smile, but should it be Snake Eyes, Pluto himself shall claim his due from those who would seize Promethean fire.

That makes as much sense as chunks of the film.

Yojimbo (1961)

Kurosawa’s dust-filled samurai actioner is a very Japanese Western and huge fun

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshiro Mifune (“Kuwabatake Sanjuro”), Eijirō Tōno (Gonji), Tatsuya Nakadai (Unosuke), Seizaburo Kawazu (Seibei), Kyū Sazanka (Ushitora), Isuzu Yamada (Orin), Daisuke Katō (Inokichi), Takashi Shimura (Tokuemon), Hiroshi Tachikawa (Yoichiro), Yosuke Natsuki (Farmer’s Son), Kamatari Fujiwara (Tazaemon), Atsushi Watanabe (Coffin maker)

An unknown stranger arrives in a dust-filled border town and finds himself stuck in the middle of a long-running feud between two gangs with only his wits and skill with his weapon for any advantage. If you had any doubt about the influence American Westerns had on Akira Kurosawa, look no further than Yojimbo. Perhaps the most purely enjoyable movie Kurosawa ever made, Yojimbo can also lay claim to being one of the greatest Westerns ever made, given greater depth with Kurosawa’s subtle social satire on Japanese samurai culture. This is Kurosawa at his best: stripped-back and dynamic with a weight behind the fun.

Our unnamed samurai is (Toshiro Mifune), now a wandering ronin. The gangs: on one side Seibei (Seizaburo Kawazu) the town’s long-term boss, whose ruthless wife Orin (Isuzu Yamada) is the power behind a throne she intends to pass to their timid son Yoichiro (Hiroshi Tachikawa). On the other: Ushitora (Kyū Sazanka), Seibei’s former number two furious at being passed over as heir apparent, backed by his brothers, dim but strong Inokichi (Daisuke Katō) and would-be gunslinger Unosuko (Tatsuya Nakadai). The rivalry has bought the town to the edge of ruin and our unnamed samurai – giving himself the spontaneous pseudonym “Kuwabatake Sanjuro” (literally “Mulberry Field aged Thirty”) – use his wit and ingenuity to play both sides against each other to get rid of them.

The Western influences in Yojimbo are immediately obvious. The town looks like a Fordian dustboal frontier towns, Kurosawa delighting in the widescreen, windswept streets the site of so many slow-burn face-offs. Rivals meet on main street, facing each other at opposite ends, like High Noon. Seibei operates out of a worn-out brothel, Sanjuro stays in a saloon run by a weary old-timer, a local sheriff is a hopelessly inept foreluck-tugger, Sanjuro has the same gruff excellence with a sword as John Wayne and Alan Ladd had with a gun. By the time Unosuko turns up clutching the town’s only gun and preening like Jack Palace in Shane, it’s impossible to miss we are in the Old Japanese West.

This is a town in total breakdown, where the coffin-maker makes a huge income creating piles of tombs for the rival gangsters who fall in constant duels. Both gangs are in, their way, pathetic. Far from intimidating, Seibei (a hilariously whiny Seizaburo Kawazu) is a puffed-up old man, easily brow-beaten by his wife. Unosake has more swagger and guts, but he’s as cluelessly inept as Seibei. Both gangsters have crews stuffed with fighters but lack almost anyone with any actual skill. When the gangsters are first manipulated into facing-off, they posture and feint at each other like blow-hard school bullies then seem relieved when the arrival of a local official leads to a sudden ceasefire.

Parodying the old Samurai class, Sanjuro is a million miles from the sort of elite honour-bound soldier we expect. In one of his finest performances, Toshiro Mifune is scruffy, cynical and works very hard to give the impression he’s more interested in his immediate needs than any higher purpose. Mifune is gruff, constantly scratching or chewing: he’s a prototype Clint Eastwood (and Yojimbo was ripped off by Leone for A Fistful of Dollars, leading to a Toho Studios legal case), a morally ambiguous figure who does the right thing when it coincides with his own interests. His motives are unknowable. Why does he set-out to destroy both gangs? Is it sympathy for the mess of the town, or is it because he sees a chance to make a quick buck from the mess? Is it because he’s bored (and eventually annoyed) and does it for his own amusement?

The brilliance of Mifune’s shaggy-dog performance is that it could be all or none of these things. Sanjuro does just one, unmistakeably, decent, selfless thing in the film: saving Ushitora’s unwilling mistress and her downtrodden family. What does it get him? Their near suicidal deference and ostentatious gratitude drives him nearly to distraction and leads to a near-fatal beating. But it really rankles Sanjuro because it’s possible he despises the idea of decency in himself, an intriguing insight into what could be unknown darknesses in his past. Does he know selfless acts can become the only chink in your armour?

Aside from that, his mastery of the situation is hugely entertaining. Never mind two steps, he seems a marathon ahead of the rest. Provoking a pointless early clash with Ushitora’s heavies, he bests them in seconds with a series of lightning fast sword strokes (Star Wars Mos Eisley-based Kenobi swordplaywas clearly inspired by this), establishing in seconds he’s the alpha both sides need to compete over. When action kicks in, Sanjuro is unmatched by the Dickensian collection of street thugs both sides have amassed, his swift reflexes and expert slices reducing even a hideously outnumbered fight into a curb-stomp clash. You can see Kurosawa’s influence over Leone here: clashes in Yojimbo have long build-ups and explosive, sometimes violently bloody outcomes (an arm severed here, a spray of blood there, characters bleeding out).

But Sanjuro’s other skill is his ability to appraise rivals instantly. None of them disappoint in their transparent greed and shortsightedness. Kurosawa visually embodies Sanjuro’s shrewdness by frequently having him climb up a tower platform on the main street to literally look down on the results of his manipulations. No one can match him. Orin – a pleasing twist on her Throne of Blood role as an ineffective Lady Macbeth by Isuzu Yamada – thinks she’s smart enough to double-cross him, but her brains only look impressive matched against the mediocrities of the town. Daisuke Katō’s Inokichi – so dim he can’t even count with the aid of his fingers – literally believes anything he’s told by the last person who spoke to him. Only Tatsuya Nakadai’s smug Unosuke is in anyway threat, but he’s a preening show-off whose only qualification for being the toughest guy in town is because he owns the only gun (which he can’t help fetishistically stroking at every opportunity).

The gun is another sign of a culture at crossroads – the major threat to Sanjuro comes not from any human, but from a distance-killing tool that could wipe out his vastly superior tactical and fighting ability in a second. Yojimbo is showing us a Japan tipping over the edge into a future where ruthless gangs, with more brawn than brain, will drive towns like this into the ground – but our hero, a symbol of a bygone age of heroics, isn’t traditionally heroic either: he’s a scruffy, self-interested loner, who despises nobility. Our other samurai, Seibei’s pet-trainer, is hardly a great advert for samurai either, peddling his skills for cash and huffily walking out when his value is not recognised.

All this is wrapped up in a film that is undeniably hugely entertaining. The action, when it comes, is truly exciting. Mifune is superb, charismatic, likeable with a wry charm and scruffy smile. Kurosawa’s dust-blown pseudo-western is brilliantly assembled, and its wry social satire on an increasingly disorganised Japan falling into chaos (with a golden age that wasn’t that golden behind it) never buries the thrills and spills of his masterfully constructed action drama. Yojimbo is certainly his most purely entertaining film, stripped back and avoiding the overindulgence and bombast of his less successful films. It’s a treat.

Lee (2024)

Kate Winslet plays with passion in an otherwise rather safe and traditional biopic

Director: Ellen Kuras

Cast: Kate Winslet (Lee Miller), Marion Cotillard (Solange d’Ayen), Andrea Riseborough (Audrey Withers), Andy Samberg (David Scherman), Noémie Merlant (Nusch Éluard), Josh O’Connor (Interviewer), Alexander Skarsgård (Roland Penrose), Arinzé Kene (Major Jonesy), Vincent Colombe (Paul Éluard), Patrick Mille (Jean D’Ayen), Samuel Barnett (Cecil Beaton), Zita Hanrot (Ady Fidelin)

“War? That’s no place for a woman!” That’s the message photographer Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) received when she applied to head to the Western Front for Vogue in World War Two. An experienced artist and photographer, with a strongly independent mindset, Miller wasn’t taking no for an answer: her stunning images of the horrors of war and the Holocaust would become a vital historical record.

That’s the key message of this well-meaning, rather earnest, slightly old-fashioned film, a callback to hagiographic biopics of yesteryear. It’s told through a framing device of an older Lee being interviewed in the 70s. The interviewer is played, in a thankless role, by Josh O’Connor (the character’s identity is a late act reveal that most viewers will probably guess early) and his dialogue is awash with either the sort of “and then you married and left France and moved back to London where you became the first woman photographer hired by Vogue” narration that links time-jumped scenes together, or blunt statements about Lee’s emotional state (“you must have been very frustrated”) that Winslet is definitely skilled enough to do with her face alone.

This was a passion project for Winslet, who spent a decade bringing it to the screen and which she bailed it out during a funding wobble, and she is the main reason to watch Lee. This strong-willed, take-no-nonsense bohemian turned hardened professional is a gift for Winslet, but she also gives Miller a strong streak of inner doubt and fear. Under her force-of-nature exterior, there is a strong streak of vulnerability in Miller, her life marked by past trauma. Winslet lets this rawness out at key moments, bringing great depth and shade to a character who could otherwise be blunt and difficult, and the film works best when it gives her free reign.

It’s unflinching but also tasteful in its depiction of war. Experienced cinematographer and first-time film director Ellen Kuras shoots its grimy, hand-held immediacy with an intensity that makes a lot of the film’s limited budget. Lee’s dirt and dust-sprayed combat scenes – with Miller dodging explosions and bullets to get into position to get the perfect shot – are tensely assembled and make a punchy impact. But Lee also knows when not to show us things, and its visual restraint when Miller and colleague David Scherman (Andy Samberg) photograph the horrific aftermath of Buchenwald and Dachau is admirable, the camera focusing on the characters’ stunned faces as they capture the terrible moments, with the horrific reality just out of focus.

There are some fine moments in Lee, which makes it more of a shame that so much of it feels safe, predictable and unchallenging. Lee focuses on Lee Miller as an artist and downplays her daring, unconventional life. Tellingly it’s adapted from a biographer by her son, titled The Lives of Lee Miller, which chronicles her life of constant reinvention. This is after all a woman who maintained a relationship with her Egyptian husband in the 30s, after meeting her second husband Roland who himself remained married for several years (they only married in 1947). She was a model, a surrealist artist, photographic pioneer, ahead of her time. That’s rinsed out to make her more conventional.

In the film, she and husband Penrose (a generously low-key performance from Alexander Skarsgård) have an uncomplicated meet-cute in a French villa owned by a friend (an extended cameo by Marion Cottillard) – admittedly it as at an outdoor picnic where Lee and others sunbathe topless – before settling into a life of middle-class suburbia (right down to Lee cooking meals for Roland when he returns from work). Hints that she has a consensual affair with Scherman linger, but the film seems prissily determined to reposition Lee as a far more conventional person than she really was. It’s a conservative attitude that comes from a good place – focusing on the work not the gossip – but it also makes her feel less unique or challenging than she was.

With the work as its focus, it’s surprising Lee doesn’t make more of the extensive collection of masterpiece photos Miller took. Although an inevitable credits montage shows how some of these were re-created for the film, actually including the images in the film itself might have carried more power and placed Miller’s work more prominently at its heart.

Lee also fumbles slightly with its final revelation of Miller’s past trauma. Shocking as this is, attempting to suggest what happened to Lee in her teens is on the same scale as the Holocaust or that she has a unique understanding of an act of ethnic genocide because she suffered in the past stinks. It’s especially notable since Lee does an excellent job of showing the quiet distress the Jewish Scherman feels as he realises only an accident of geography saved his life. Andy Samberg, in his first dramatic role, is extremely good in a role that clearly carries a very personal feeling for him.

Lee has things going for it, not least Winslet’s barn-stormingly committed and passionate performance. But in the end, it turns its lead character into someone who feels less provocative and revolutionary than she was. Its safely traditional structure and narrative approach turn her into a “role model” and make Lee the sort of middle-brow biopics Hollywood churned out in the 80s. It’s solid, interesting but essentially safe and forgettable.

War and Peace (1967)

Legendary Soviet Tolstoy adaptation, awe-inspiring in its scale and creative amibition

Director: Sergei Bondarchuk

Cast: Sergei Bondarchuk (Pierre Bezukhov), Ludmila Savelyeva (Natasha Rostova), Vyacheslav Tikhonov (Andrei Bolkonsky), Boris Zakhava (Mikhail Kutuzov), Anatoly Ktorov (Nikolai Bolkonsky), Antonina Shuranova (Maria Bolkonskaya), Oleg Tabakov (Nikolai Rostov), Viktor Stanitsyn (Ilya Rostov), Kira Golovko (Natalya Rostova), Irina Skobtseva (Hélène Kuragina), Vasily Lanovoy (Anatole Kuragin), Irina Gubanova (Sonya Rostova), Oleg Yefremov (Fyodor Dolokhov), Eduard Martsevich (Boris Drubetskoy), Aleksandr Borisov (Uncle Rostov), Nikolai Rybnikov (Vasily Denisov)

During the Cold War, the superpowers had to fight with things other than nukes. They raced to space. They were gripped by chess matches. And they made rival film productions of Tolstoy’s epic novel. War and Peace, a gargantuan production (it’s really four films and took literally years to make) was the Soviet answer to King Vidor’s War and Peace. If Hollywood thought it could own the greatest Russian novel ever written by making it an Audrey Hepburn vehicle, Mosfilm would take it back. The Soviet War and Peace would treat Tolstoy with the respect it deserved, honouring its literary richness, and putting it on a scale no film had ever seen before.

War and Peace was made with the state’s full backing. Its director would have anything he needed. Rebuild Moscow on the backlot (then burn it down)? Sure. Have historical artifacts from dozens of museums shipped to the film set? Boxed up and ready. Use tens of thousands of troops – and three war-hero Generals as assistant directors – to restage the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino? Thousands of horses were shipped to the set, while seamstresses worked on over ten thousand costumes. Moscow even created an arsenal of functioning cannons which shot 23 tons of gunpowder for the recreated battles. It’s no exaggeration that no film before or since could match this for scale. Avengers: Endgame eat your heart out.

To direct this gargantuan operation, Mosfilm and the Ministry of Cuture selected Sergei Bondarchuk, relatively young in his early 40s, over the seasoned veterans who expected the gig. Bondarchuk was by all accounts a hard taskmaster, who fought, bickered and bullied practically everyone on set (burning through three cinematographers), but also had a gift for marshalling effectively a small nation for years (though not without at least two heart attacks, one of which left him clinically dead for five minutes). He also had the chutzpah to audition nearly every actor in Russia before deciding the best man for the leading role of Pierre Bezukhov was none other than… Bondarchuk himself (for good measure, Bezukhov’s seductive screen wife would be played by his own wife Irena Skobtseva).

War and Peace could have gone two ways: its scale could have flattened a lesser director or led to the sort of middle-brow, stale traditionalist fare Hollywood hacks churned out for years. Instead, Bondarchuk was fascinated by the possibility of the medium and swept up in playing with the cinematic tricks explored by his heroes and contemporaries. War and Peace is a strikingly unique, often discordant, meditative film, full of visual invention that pushes the boundaries in the most inventive ways to present its colossal scale.

You can see traces of Abel Gance’s Napoleon in its evocative use of double exposure images (showing ghost like echoes of people appear in frame, most notably the near-death experience of Andrei Bolkonsky) and its extreme close-ups, not to mention the more obvious triptych homages for key moments (such as Napoleon and Alexander III’s meeting at Tilsit). Bondarchuk’s influences went wider than that: there is a social realist immediacy in several scenes, with their jittery camera-work, throwing us into confusing battles, that wouldn’t look out-of-the-ordinary among the Italian Neorealists. There are patches of Welles and Lang in the sweeping camerawork that stress the scale and geography of the sets. Panoramic aerial shots dial up the most ambitious work of Murnau and Gone with the Wind. Bondarchuk’s decision at key emotional moments to fade out all sound except for ambient noises, such as drips, breathing or birdsong feels like he’s been studying Tarkovksy – as does the beautiful, lingering shots of nature. Bondarchuk wasn’t just going to make a stately coffee-table book: he fused distinctive flourishes from the great film-makers, to wonderful effect.

In addition, Bondarchuk (also the co-screenwriter – did his chutzpah influence that similar wunderkind Kenneth Branagh, both obsessed with tricksy, inventive camerawork) wanted to pay tribute to Tolstoy. What’s remarkable about War and Peace is how much of Tolstoy’s meditation on the meaning of life is in the film. Sure, there are cuts – Nikolai Rostov, Sonya and Maria Bolkonskaya are reduced to the bare bones – but this film finds a great deal of time for its characters to muse (either in sometimes portentous voiceover, or a deep-voiced omniscient narrator) over the meaning of life, the quest of happiness and the nature of decency and nobility.

In fact, this is a particular surprise since this version War and Peace had its roots as a patriotic demonstration of Soviet film-making might. It’s particularly striking then that it ends with a sequence that stresses how ordinary soldiers (French and Russian) have more in common than not and how much links mankind together than drives them about. This is not pro-Soviet propaganda.

Not that War and Peace doesn’t take a few potshots at the effete, selfish rich, sitting in comfort while soldiers fight at the front. But it also finds time for the Rostov’s decency and self-sacrifice for and it doesn’t stint on the grandiosity of Tsarist Russia. A ballroom scene, site of Natasha’s meeting with Andrei Bolkonsky, is stunningly staged. In a huge mirror-laden ballroom, Bolkonsky’s camera bobs and weaves between dancers. Cinematographer Anatoly Petritsky suggested he filmed it while roller-skating, a genius innovation which creates a visual dancing effect as well as allowing us to be right among the literally hundreds of grandly costumed dancers (Bolkonsky skated alongside Petritsky, at times holding a fan slightly before the camera, to add to the effect).

The magnificence of this often gets forgotten in the awe-inspiring spectacle of the Russian military backed battles. Bondarchuk enlisted the Soviet Air Force for stunning, wide-angled aerial shots that revealed the stunning dimensions of the recreation. Petritsky also introduced a series of diving crane shots – like the camera has been set on a zip wire – that fly down from the heights into the battle’s chaotic maelstrom. (The battles are, as per Tolstoy, confusing messes where no one knows what’s going on but everyone pretends to be in charge). These battle images virtually redefine epic, mind-blowing in their scale – and the managerial and artistic force that must have been needed to organise and capture them all on screen as exquisitely as they are.

The same goes for the burning of Moscow, a dizzying outburst of flame, co-ordinated tracking shots (following Pierre through the burning wreckage) while crowds of extras run and panic. War and Peace also follows Tolstoy in being perhaps one of the grandest scale, anti-war films ever made. There are no real moments of heroism in the battle, soldiers march into injury and death and Bondarchuk frequently pans the camera across mounds of bodies or soldiers left mauled and dying on the ground. The retreat from Moscow sees Hellish suffering for the French, but that is balanced by the horrifying executions of civilians they carry out in Moscow, terrified men and boys led to stakes and gunned down in hard-hitting slow-motion. War and Peace doesn’t shy away from the suffering, pain and death that war brings, with very little glory or pride to show for it.

It’s also a film that’s often strikingly well-acted. Bondarchuk may be too old for Pierre, but his thick-set frame is perfect and his soulful eyes beautifully capture the character of a would-be-philosopher with no purpose. Vyacheslav Tikhonov makes Bolkonsky an imposingly distant man hiding his fragility. Perhaps most strikingly, ballet dancer Ludmila Savelyeva is a radiant Natasha, waif-like but bursting with energy and life, who tackles better than almost anyone else an impossibly difficult character. Bondarchuk frames her perfectly, back-lit to focus on her expressive eyes.

At times there is almost too much to everything in War and Peace. Bondarchuk is at times almost constitutionally incapable of shooting a simple scene, a relentless inventive energy that is perfect for the war but sometimes exhausting for the peace. The all-consuming screentime given to the scale of the battles and balls does eat into the time allowed to character and plot. But this is like complaining about being uncomfortably full after a generous rich meal. There is so much in War and Peace Bondarchuk gets right: from its respect to Tolstoy, but as an intellectual not as heritage figure to its stunning visuals, in every minute of its great length there is something to admire, thrill and strike you with awe. In this instance, the Soviets proved they could do Tolstoy better than the Yanks.