Author: Alistair Nunn

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.

The Critic (2023)

McKellen’s familiar star turn is the only life in an otherwise unremarkable film

Director: Anand Tucker

Cast: Ian McKellen (Jimmy Erskine), Gemma Arterton (Nina Land), Mark Strong (David Brooke), Lesley Manville (Annabel Lord), Romola Garai (Cora Wyler), Ben Barnes (Stephen Wyley), Alfred Enoch (Tom Tunner), Nikesh Patel (Ferdy Harwood), Claire Skinner (Mary Brooke), Ron Cook (Hugh Morris)

The murky streets of 1930s West End London are the kingdom of Daily Chronicle theatre critic Jimmy Erskine (Ian McKellen), famous for his poison-inked, vitriolic reviews of the many shows that fall beneath his high standards. But the times they are-a-changing, not least at the Chronicle where the former owner (a Rothermere-like bully who loved Jimmy’s take-no-prisoners prose bullying) is replaced by his son David Brooke (Mark Strong), a softly-spoken liberal who wants to take the paper in a new direction. With the arrogant Erskine on a knife-edge (not helped by his risk-taking penchant for rough-trade sex encounters with gentlemen in the park), Brooke is about to unknowingly discover how far the famed critic will go to cling onto his job and reputation – and how easily he will embroil an ambitious young actress, Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), in his schemes.

The Critic starts far more interestingly when it ends. It’s easy criticism, but you can well imagine it falling foul of Erskine’s fury if he had seen it unfold before him in a West End theatre on a Tuesday night. Despite the best efforts of all involved, it all too quickly becomes the sort of routine revenge-murder-conspiracy potboiler that relies a little too much on contrivance and coincidence, the stench of familiarity all over it. Atmospheric as it is – set in a dimly-lit, fog-bound London and in the plush retiring rooms of the rich and famous – and well-selected as its selection of faux theatrical memorabilia that litters Erskine’s home is, the actual story becomes all too predictable.

The main thing it has going for it is a fine performance by Ian McKellen, even if the part plays so neatly to his strengths you feel he could play it standing on his head. McKellen has long mastered mixing the twinkle of the bon vivant with the vicious, cold-eyed cruelty of the sociopath, even having recently done the same thing in The Good Liar. Erskine is selfish, demanding, cruel with a self-destructive streak (both financially – living a ruinous life well beyond his means – and his frequent drunken pride and stubbornness). He bitterly believes himself to deserve acclaim and standing (denied to his failed acting career) and treats almost everyone around him with contempt hidden behind a raised eyebrow or pursed lip. His primary motivation, to the very end, is that his theatrical writing should become a collected volume in every home cementing him as a sort of Wildean wit.

The Critic toys with a more interesting view of Erskine as not entirely unsympathetic. His homosexuality – and the abuse and persecution it has bought him – shows him fall foul of encounters with the police and sees him challenging preening National Front blackshirts. He’s disgusted by Fascism and despises racism, promoting his young Black lover, secretary and amanuensis Tom Tunner (a fine performance of mixed loyalty and Stockholm-syndrome-like support from Alfred Enoch). He’s genuinely touched when Nina Lane – who has lambasted for years in print – tells him his writing made her want to act. But these shades of grey get largely ditched for as the film focuses on darkening his shadow as the plot descends into conspiracy, blackmail and murder.

McKellen does provide the film’s best entertainment. He knows how to deliver a line, how a splutter can communicate outrage, how an intake of breath can communicate fury, how the eyes can turn any smile insincere. He’s long since mastered Iagos and if The Critic doesn’t ask him to do anything he hasn’t done before, he can still do it like an absolute pro. There are other decent performances. Mark Strong plays against type as a man as (surprisingly) decent and kind as he seems. Gemma Arterton expertly plays both “bad” and “good” acting as would-be theatrical giant Nina Lane, while mixing desperation and self-loathing in her off-stage persona. On the other hand, the film wastes Romola Garai as Brooke’s Nazi-sympathising daughter and Lesley Manville as Nina’s chatterbox mother.

The Critic builds up a contrived (and inadvertently creepy) plotline that links both Brooke and Nina – most convenient for Erskine’s improvised blackmail scheme – and that melodrama eventually suppresses The Critic’s more interesting moments. A film that looked at Erskine’s character having been formed in a world where his sexuality was a persecuted crime might have made for a more intriguing storyline. Or which explored how Erskine settled for being court jester to powerful, clubbing homophobes – so much so he actively resents the more liberal Brooke. Or looked at the creeping onset of fascist sympathy in the upper classes. Or one which took a more expanded look at Tom’s struggles in a defiantly non-diverse 30s London (instead the significance of Tom’s skin colour fluctuates according to plot requirements and its awkward uniqueness is undermined by the fact the theatre director is played by Nikesh Patel). It avoids all this for all too familiar tropes.

In most ways The Critic has its moments but fundamentally fails to deliver. And, perhaps worst of all, it does so in a way that doesn’t even really raise the critical heckles. Instead, you’re overwhelming feeling when this sub-Christie drama comes to its close is that it was okay. The sort of film Jimmy Erskine would have dismissed in a few short sentences.

Das Boot (1982)

Perhaps the definitive submarine film, a terrifying masterpiece of claustrophobia and suspense

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Cast: Jürgen Prochnow (Kapitänleutnant), Herbert Grönemeyer (Leutnant Werner), Klaus Wennemann (Chief engineer), Hubertus Bengsch (First watch officer), Martin Semmelrogge (Second watch officer), Bernd Tauber (Chief HelmsmanKriechbaum), Erwin Leder (Chief Mechanic Johann), Martin May (Ullmann), Heinz Hoenig (Hinrich), Uwe Ochsenknecht (Boatswain Lamprecht), Claude-Oliver Rudolph (Ario), Jan Fedder (Pilgrim), Ralf Richter (Frenssen)

In the annals of submarine movies, few have taken such a hold of the imagination than Das Boot. This is particularly remarkable since it follows the struggles not of Allied sailors but members of the German Kriegsmarine, the U-Boats who patrolled the Atlantic to sink as many merchant ships as they could, all in the service of aiding the Nazi war effort. But the sea knows no flags and holds no allegiances: to the watery deep, men are just men, and a small, rusty metal box is fragile at 280 metres no matter who sails in it. And the men sailing U-96 are just ordinary, regular men, with wives, girlfriends and regrets back home who above all just want to survive to see them again.

Wolfgang Petersen’s is a masterclass in immersing us in a claustrophobic world. The crew of U-96 are led by the captain (Jürgen Prochnow), a hardened, cynical veteran is out here to do a job, not fight for radical cause he has little time for. Instead, his concern is to preserve the lives of his men, all younger (in most cases almost twenty years so) than him, during their time at sea where days (and even weeks) of bored inaction are interspersed with interludes of sheer terror as the submarine desperately runs from depth charges and dodges Allied destroyers.

Das Boot was filmed over almost a year, in chronological order. The actors practically lived in their confined set (deafened by the sound of its mechanics), their hair growing out to match their characters and their skin taking on a pallor from not enough time in the sun. For hours at a time we never leave the confines of the submarine – if you don’t count the odd trip to the ship’s bridge, where those lucky enough to venture up-top are lashed with salty sea water from near constant Atlantic storms. Aside from that, they are in what is effectively a 60m metal corridor, a specially designed camera operated by cinematographer Jost Vacano, tracking swiftly behind the frenetic pace of the sailors as they dive through hatches and pound along dripping quarters.

It’s a film where you cannot escape the tight confines of this boat, the sound track filled with groans and shudders as the boat cracks under the weight of water or buckles from high-pressure depth charges. When under attack, bolts burst out of pipes like machine gun bullets and water (which is obviously freezing) gushes through opened valves. It mixes with the sweat in the characters tension-filled faces. There is no comfort and no privacy under the water, bunks positioned on the edges of the ship’s corridor. The only food is whatever was taken aboard last time the ship was at shore – and if that means cutting layers of green mould off weeks-old bread, so be it.

Petersen’s capturing of this sense of a tiny, pressure-filled world is superb and he succeeds masterfully in getting the audience to feel the character’ stress and fear. When the film opened in America, crowds cheered an opening caption which details the losses the Kriegsmarine suffered during the war: at the end, the same audiences were reported stunned into sympathetic silence. None of these men are detestable Nazis. One man writes never-ending letters to his French fiancée. Another is a devout Christian. The Chief Engineer clasps tight photos of a skiing holiday with the wife he has not seen in months. Another is frustrated at radio reports of his football team losing a key match. All of them are haggard, unshaven and scruffy. None of them feel safe for a moment.

Only the first watch officer utters anything approaching true believe in the Nazi regime (he is also the only man to try and maintain some semblance of military smartness – at an encounter with a German merchant ship, he is inevitably mistaken for the captain). But his belief comes from naïve optimism: he has no wider idea of the world around him and his statements of trust in the regime noticeably dry up over time. For the rest: who has the time for ideology when you could be crushed by a mountain of water at any time? Captain Thomson (Otto Sander) opens the film by making a drunken speech at the launch of U-96, lambasting Hitler – a speech that is met with shocked silence because its being said rather than because of the content.

The sea also builds subconscious bonds for those who share its dangers, even with enemies. After returning later at night to the scene of a sinking ship (their only successful operation throughout the whole film), the Captain and his officers are horrified to find the Allied ship has not had its crew evacuated – a fact they notice too late, having already sent two more torpedoes into the water to finish the ship off. Haunted, the Captain orders U-96 to back off: after all, he knows (as we do) it will be impossible to take any survivors aboard his tiny boat. Even this successful mission is tinged with horror: the rest of their encounters mostly feature desperate attempts to dodge British destroyers.

It’s relentless. Life under water is dull, but inescapable but could be broken at any moment by life-threatening terror, perhaps hours of shaking and leaking under depth charges explode around them. Even the most experienced can crack – Johann, the ship’s chief mechanic, at one-point breaking under the pressure, his wide-eyes desperately searching for some escape as he ignores orders. War correspondent Lt Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer) goes through the same experiences we do: his assumptions about brave soldiers and ice-cold professionals, breaking down as he and we realise these are ordinary people just trying to stay alive.

Their lives are the principle concern of the Captain, superbly played by a stoic Jürgen Prochnow, as a man who keeps his emotions on a tight leash because letting them slip may see them never getting under his control again. The Captain is a default father to his men, concerned above all with preserving their lives, over and above the war he is bitter and cynical about. Now of course, you can argue Petersen is stacking the deck by presenting a German crew with not a (determined) advocate for Nazism among them: but so superbly does the film bring-to-life the pressures, risks and terror of U-96, you fail to be surprised that they would come to focus overwhelmingly on their own survival rather than the gnomic ideology of the murderous dictator who started the whole thing.

By the time the film has send U-96 to the near bottom of the ocean, forcing the crew to battle against the odds to restore power and save it from sinking (it’s the golden rule of all submarine films, that the recommended depth should be exceeded and for the ship to sink like a stone), you will be rooting for these pressured-but-capable professionals to save themselves. The overall feeling you take from Das Boot is the futile, pointlessness of it all: months at sea almost for nothing, acts of extreme bravery rendered moot by flashes of ill luck and chance, the utter lack of having any to show for it when the boat returns to port. Das Boot understands the futile horror, the grim pressure and punishing impact of war, placing people into terrible situations for no real purpose. It’s that which helps make it one of the defining war films – and the great submarine film.

Training Day (2001)

Pulsating corrupt-cop drama, highly entertaining with a full-throttle Denzel Washington

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Cast: Denzel Washington (Detective Alonzo Harris), Ethan Hawke (Officer Jake Hoyt), Scott Glenn (Roger), Tom Berenger (Stan Gursky LAPD), Harris Yulin (Doug Rosselli LAPD), Raymond J Barry (Lou Jacobs LAPD), Cliff Curtis (Smiley), Dr Dre (Officer Paul), Snoop Dogg (Blue), Macy Gray (Sandman’s wife), Charlotte Ayanna (Lisa), Eva Mendes (Sara)

“King Kong ain’t got nothing on me!” That’s the mantra of larger-than-life legendary cop Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington), who has immersed himself so much in the dirty neighbourhood gangland of LA that it’s hard to see where cop ends and crook begins. Alonso claims to believe to keep the town clean, you gotta break a few rules. But then he also believes in filling his own pockets with stolen money. It’s all going to come to a head in one day: first day on the job for ambitious boy-scout officer Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) who thinks he’s auditioning to join an elite squad only to find he’s the victim of a series of elaborate mind-games and dodgy moves by Alonzo, testing to see whether he is potential asset or sacrificial pawn. It’s going to be a long day.

Training Day is basically a massive dance with the devil, offering his little Faustus all the wonders of the world in return for his soul. It’s all there for Hoyt’s taking: respect, glory, standing – and of course oodles of plastic-wrapped dollar bills. All he has to do is sacrifice every inch of his integrity and personal morality to Alonzo Harris, a grandstanding Mephistopheles. This first day is all about Harris pushing Hoyt to see how far he will go. Will he smoke a little dope so he could pass as an undercover druggie? Will he search a house under a false warrant? Will he rough up a suspect? Will he murder a drugdealer and steal his cash?

Throughout all this, Denzel Washington barnstorms to fantastic Oscar-winning effect. This is a delightfully Devilish performance, Washington leaving it all out on the pitch. Alonzo Harris has inhabited the persona of the gangsters he follows for so long he’s basically become one. Harris is scarily charismatic, the unshakeable confident cool he uses to cow and terrify criminals and punks on the street, also making him a hugely attractive figure. This is despite his complete amorality, his ruthless capacity for violence and his shocking willingness to abuse and use almost everyone around him. He does all this by convincing Hoyt for long stretches that his poor treatment, abuse and deception of him is all in Hoyt’s own interest: to toughen up this naïve puppy into a killer.

Hoyt spends half the time if this is some elaborate show-and-test. Who can blame him? Washington’s exuberance plays masterfully on the edges of someone putting on a massive performance. There are neat moment where we see how fragile some of Harris’ control is, once he is outside of his comfort zone: he’s in hoc for millions to Russian gangsters and as events of the day pile up his thermonuclear self-confidence tips into moments of impotent fury. Washington is fantastic as this street monster, whose seductive lines on modern policing (do a little bad to do a greater good) start off sounding like common sense before you realise they tip quickly into justifying open criminality. It’s a performance of perfect physical swagger matched with his limitless charisma, inverting the qualities that made him a perfect Steve Biko or Malcolm X into a Lectorish monster.

Ethan Hawke is also extremely good as his polar opposite, the eager to please rookie who realises there is a lot more going on here than he thought. Training Day suggests there may well be a middle ground between Hoyt’s straight-as-an-arrow idea of policing and Harris’ corruption – and it’s part of Harris’ appeal that his perverted mentoring ends up making Hoyt a tougher, more unrelenting (better?) cop than he was before. But also, Hawke is great at showing that Hoyt (under his sheen of moral uprightness) is also a tough, hardened professional. In classic story-telling style, Harris is a dark reflection of Hoyt: they share a stubbornness, a conviction that they are right, a refusal to be intimidated (Hoyt may nervously try to please Harris at first, but once he realises the score he refuses to be forced into doing anything he doesn’t want to do) and a capacity for throwing themselves into decisive action. There is a reason why this rookie can get the drop on Harris – much to his wicked mentor’s delight and admiration – in a way no one else can.

That alone shows the dark magnetism of people like Harris: like Hoyt we end up wanting their approval even when we hate or fear them. Even as he holds a shotgun to his head, there is a part of Hoyt you suspect is proud that Harris’ gut reaction is to shout an impressed “My man!”. Of course Harris knows his validation is important to people. Monsters like this know the weaker-willed crave their respect. But then Harris also knows no one else in his team – all of them weak-willed bullies, desperately trying to imitate them – have even a quarter of the independence of mind Hoyt has.

What Harris under-estimates is Hoyt’s survival instinct. The final third of the film, the clash that has been building inevitably between these two, again demonstrates both their similarities and their fundamental differences. The main difference between them being Hoyt cares for, and protects others, and Harris cares only about himself. Hoyt’s humanitarianism will save him from dangerous situations and even Harris’ girlfriend (a tough-but-cowed performance from Eva Mendes) recognises Hoyt has shown more concern for her son in a few minutes than his father, Harris, ever has in his whole life.

The final act of Training Day hinges a little too much on one whopper of a coincidence: the sort of narrative contrivance so colossal that, in a less magnetic film, you’d be throwing stuff at the TV shouting “oh come on!” It’s final, inevitable, confrontation between Harris and Hoyt feels rather too much like many, many other films before it in every single beat, while the ending has a whiff of Hays Code morality (all wrongs righted!) about it that rather undermines the edgy, unpredictable film it precedes.

But when Training Day focuses on the sound and the fury of Washington and the Faustian dance on the deep grey lines of street policing, this is a sensational, energetic and highly watchable cop thriller, pulsatingly directed by Antonie Fuqua. With Washington superb and Hawke easy to overlook as his straight-laced partner, it’s a character study that constantly shifts our expectations and leaves us genuinely worried about the fate of its hero. The sort of slick entertainment Hollywood does at its best.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

Durkin’s debut is atmospheric but not quite satisfying enough look at the danger of cults

Director: Sean Durkin

Cast: Elizabeth Olsen (Martha/Marcy May), John Hawkes (Patrick), Sarah Paulson (Lucy), Hugh Dancy (Ted), Brady Corbett (Watts), Christopher Abbott (Max), Maria Dizzia (Katie), Julia Garner (Sarah), Louisa Krause (Zoe)

When 22-year-old Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) surfaces after two years off-the-grid, seeking help from her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and Lucy’s husband Ted (Hugh Dancy), they think she’s still the same slightly selfish screw-up she’s always been. But unknown to them, Martha has spent those missing years rechristened as Marcy Man in a patriarchal Manson-like cult in the Catskills run by charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes). As Martha attempts to readjust, she is haunted by flashbacks to the cult and a growing paranoia that her escape from Patrick’s clutches might only be temporary.

Durkin’s debut film is a masterclass in unsettling atmosphere. With its gloomy photography and stretches of unsettling silence, it never lets the viewer relax. Lucy and Ted’s luxury country house ends up feeling as unsafe and uncertain as the cult’s rickety farm. Well-handled cuts take us suddenly from present to flash-back – for example, a cut sees Martha dive from Ted’s boat to land in the waterfall near the cult’s farm. Auditory and visual transitions run throughout the whole film – Martha’s sleeping positions in the house suddenly mirrored in flashbacks, or food preparation in one timeline transitioning to the same task in the other. It makes everything feel as disjointed and jagged to us as it does to Martha.

This unsettling uncertainty, where the “safe” environment of Lucy and Ted’s house increasingly mirrors the unsafe world of the cult, is a neat way of suggesting the struggle of people like Martha to truly escape. It also complements a very effective, star-making turn from Elizabeth Olsen. At times hostile, Martha is just as likely to withdraw, Olsen showing her deeply unsettled by everyday acts like her sister combing her hair (an act reminiscent to her of the cult’s sexual abuse), or blankly not comprehending the society’s everyday rules. Desperate for reassurance, she still clings to the cult’s empty mantras, lashing out with furious venom when she feels vulnerable. It’s a soulful, damaged and delicate performance that carries much of the film.

Martha Marcy May Marlene captures the horrific, insidious manipulation of the cult. John Hawkes is very good as a quietly charismatic, intimidating man who, without ever raising his voice, controls every situation he is in through self-confidence and absolute certainty. The cult is firmly hierarchical, with Patrick at the top, men below and women at the bottom, serving the men – from cooking food (and not eating so much as a crumb until they are finished) to taking part in partner-swapping orgies watched by Patrick. All women are initiated into the cult through a “cleansing” ritual – being drugged by the other women, then raped by Patrick and they and the other members are brain-washed into pride at being “chosen” for Patrick’s wisdom.

Durkin leaves the nature of the cult deliberately ill-defined, in itself a comment on the shallow emptiness of these movements and the intellectual mediocrity of their leaders. When a row develops over dinner, Martha responds to the (admittedly smug) Ted by angrily parroting the cult’s empty, depth-free anti-money and anti-capitalist statements. The cult roughly follows the Manson Family playbook in breaking into homes and stealing (or worse) to fund its activities. Its main function is dehumanising its members, so they will think nothing of killing and abandon all personal boundaries. Martha still suffers from the latter: used to sleeping in communal rooms, she thinks nothing of wandering into Ted and Lucy’s room and lying down to sleep on their bed while they noisily have sex in the other half of it (they are not pleased, much to her bemusement).

There is good stuff here – which makes it disappointing that the film ends up, for me, feeling slightly unsatisfying. We get no real sense of what made Martha join this cult, or who she was before it sunk its claws into her. We also get very little sense of what made Martha decide to escape. The film suggests maybe her reaction to the murder of the owner of one of the wealthy homes they break into: but since the film later suggests that murder (and Patrick’s teaching that killing is somehow doing people a favour) is a fairly regular occurrence in the cult, this also feels unlikely.

The film also avoids really diving into interesting questions about readjustment and de-programming from traumatic experiences. For all it brings Martha’s PTSD to the fore, it doesn’t really show much development in either Martha’s feelings towards the cult or her understanding of her experiences. Now it’s true the road to recovery isn’t a straight line of narratively smooth continual healing, but a long, complex journey with many setback. But as a film, focussing solely on this part of her life ends up rather repetitive, like we’re struck watching just part of a longer story.

Durkin’s film is instead really a study of paranoia – Martha’s growing, unspoken, fear that the cult is coming for her and her family. But for those fears to really work, we need to feel the cult is capable of pre-meditated murder – the only killing we see is sudden and unprepared, other house entries showing the cult go to great lengths to be undetected. The film caps with a deliberately ambiguous sequence that may or may not be a mix of reality, chance, coincidence and Martha’s paranoid fears. But it’s a sequence that feels like it’s been created to conclude the film, rather than something that grows organically throughout, blunting some of its impact.

It’s a shame as there is a lot to like in this impressive, atmospheric debut, not least Durkin’s coldly unsettling direction, Olsen’s terrific performance and very good supporting turns from an exasperated-but-patient Sarah Paulson as Lucy and Hawkes’ dark, quiet charisma. But Martha Marcy May Marlene eventually boils down to telling you that being in a cult is traumatic, without really exploring the nuances of the struggle to overcome that or what pulls you into that situation in the first place. By focusing on paranoia, it feels like it tells only part of a wider, more interesting story.

Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Bergman’s gorgeous final film, a sublime family saga, that leaves you thinking for days

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Bertil Guve (Alexander Ekdahl), Pernilla Allwin (Fanny Ekdahl), Ewa Fröling (Emilie Ekdahl), Jan Malmsjö (Bishop Edvard Vergérus), Gunn Wållgren (Helena Ekdahl), Erland Josephson (Isak Jacobi), Jarl Kulle (Gustav Adolf Ekdahl), Allan Edwall (Oscar Ekdahl), Pernilla August (Maj), Mona Malm (Alma Ekdahl), Börje Ahlstedt (Carl Ekdahl), Christina Schollin (Lydia Ekdahl), Harriet Andersson (Justina), Stina Ekblad (Ismael Retzinsky), Mats Bergman (Aron Retzinsky), Gunnar Björnstrand (Filip Landahl)

After many years (and masterpieces) Bergman wanted to move on from film: but before he went, there was time for one more magnum opus, a sprawling family saga that would throw a host of his interests (death, family, sexual openness, God, theatre, infidelity, the unknowable) onto one grand, sprawling canvas. Fanny and Alexander would be a truly personal film, featuring a young protagonist with more than a passing resemblance to Bergman himself. Despite this it’s an irony Bergman might like that the finest version of this film we have is actually a five-hour recut for television (the limits of run-time from distributors being one of many things Bergman was tired of). That version is a beautiful, life-affirming, gorgeous piece of film-making, an extraordinarily humane story tinged with the supernatural told on a luscious, Visconti-like scale. It’s a fitting sign-off from a master.

In 1907, the wealthy Ekdahl family live in a luxurious apartment block, their rooms filled with the rich detail of their love of art and culture. Ten-year-old Alexander’s (Bertil Guve) father Oscar (Allan Edwall) and mother Emilie (Ewa Fröling) run the Ekhdal theatre, where his wealthy grandmother Helena (Gunn Wållgren) once performed. After a fabulous Christmas celebration, Oscar dies after a stroke while rehearsing the role of the Ghost in Hamlet. After a period of mourning, Emilie remarries to the older Bishop Edvard Vergérus (Jan Malmsjö), who turns out to be a domestic tyrant, obsessed with the letter of religious and family law. Will Alexander, his younger sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) and their mother escape from Vergérus’ controlling clutches?

What really strikes you first and foremost about Fanny and Alexander is its gorgeous warmth – hardly the first quality you traditionally associate with Bergman. It opens with a prolonged (over an hour) Christmas celebration, with the family and their servants eating, laughing, telling stories and dancing through their gorgeously furnished apartment. It should feel indulgent (and I suppose it is), but this warm reconstruction of an at-times-flawed, but fundamentally loving and vibrant family is actually deeply moving and heart-warming.

The Ekdahls have a bohemian freedom, with their love of theatre and art (only Uncle Carl, a manic depressive businessman, feels slightly out-of-place and even he takes the children to one-side during the festivities to entertain them by blowing out candles with his farts). Their house is charmingly egalitarian, with the servants treated as part of the family, loyalty they return. The theatre troupe (led by Bergman regular Gunnar Björnstrand in his final, small, role) – are equally part of this extended family, the theatre a second magical home where the children take small roles in various productions and delight in the stagecraft and costumes behind-the-scenes.

Fitting a Bergman family (and the Ekdahl’s share some elements with parts of Bergman’s family) they are extremely forward-looking in their morality. Uncle Gustav Adolf (played with bombastic, gentle charm by Jarl Kulle) is a notorious ladies man, but goes about it with such innocence and near-childish openness his patient wife Alma (Mona Malm) indulges him because in all other respects he’s a loving husband and father, and his overall fidelity to her is never in doubt. Alma restricts herself to a single slap of his new lover, maid Maj, but otherwise treats her like a sister. Pernilla August is hugely endearing as this caring young woman, swiftly absorbed into the wider Ekdahl family who value her care for others. The Ekdahl’s have no time for conventional morality, led from the front by matriarch Helena (Gunn Wållgren is fantastic as this wordly-wise, ideal grandmother figure) who has lived a life of sexual openness with her husband and values people not societal conventions.

Oscar, their father (wonderfully played by Allan Edwall as a bashfully mediocre actor and a quietly shy but warm man) takes his role as the leader of this company very seriously, but with a light touch (modestly bemoaning his lack of statue compared to his father). Bergman uses a myriad of small moments to make this father an ideal parent, not least a late-night fantastical story he improvises for the children, spun around their nursery room chair, one of the most tender moments of parent-child bonding in the movies. (This despite hints that Oscar, who has allowed the younger, more sensual Emilie to conduct her own affairs, might not be their true father).

The stunning production and costume design (which won Oscars for Anna Asp and Marik Vos-Lundh) are essential for creating this immersive, rich and vibrant life: one which will be exploded in Dickensian tragedy by the death of Oscar and the arrival of the Murdstone-like Edvard Vergérus (played with chilling, smug hypocrisy by Jan Malmsjö under a fake smile) who is everything the Ekdahls are not. Where they are warm and egalitarian, he is cool and elitist, he is a prude with no regard for art and his home is in bleached-out puritan stone, devoid of personal touches – it literally looks like a different world to that we’ve spent the first few hours in, full of untrustworthy people (like Vergérus’ maid played by a wonderfully two-faced Harriet Andersson).

Vergérus is all about control, something we suspect from the start with his aggressively tender manhandling of Alexander, his hand slamming into the back of his neck. He worms his way into the affections of Emilie – a woman who, with her earth-shattering wails over the body of Oscar, is clearly vulnerable in her raw grief (Ewa Fröling is extraordinary as this gentle figure, prone to appalling judgement and unexpected strength of character) – and then sets out their marriage terms with controlling agendas, not least that in arriving in his house, she and her children must shed every inch of their previous life, from personal connections to the knick-knacks they have grown to love. He’s a poor advert for a God Alexander is already cursing for taking his father (his attic, filled with crumbling religious symbols, feels of a part of Bergman’s world where God is at best a passive observer, at worst a near malicious presence).

Bergman makes clear Vergérus is a man who genuinely believes he is doing the best for his family and that the moral lessons he hands out, at the end of a cane, to Alexander are essential. A weak man who mistakes bullying for strength. In many ways the fact he is not vindictive just weak and convinced of his own moral certainty (re-enforced by his fawning family, who treat him like a sort of prophet). Sure, he’s capable of anger, anti-Semitic slurs and little acts of cruelty, but Malmsjö shows him as a man who is trying, in his own wrong-headed way, to win the love of his adopted wife and children and can’t understand why he is not met with gratitude and love.

Perhaps it’s this sudden dropping into a cold world (one not dissimilar from Bergman’s own troubled relationship with his priest father – in fact you leave Fanny and Alexander wondering if Bergman hated his own father as much as Alexander who literally prays for his death) that so sparks Alexander’s own links to a mystic world around him. There is a rich vein of something other throughout Fanny and Alexander, from the statues Alexander watches move in the opening sequence (not to mention the haunting spectre of Death he witnesses in the same moment), to Oscar constantly appearing to Alexander like Hamlet’s Ghost. Is this haunting Alexander’s guilt at this failure to face his dying father on his deathbed, or a link to a world beyond our understanding?

After all Oscar’s Ghost greets Helena at one point, the two entering into a loving conversation. And he’s not the only supernatural touch around Fanny and Alexander. Family friend (and Helena’s lover) the Jew Isak (a rich performance by Bergman regular Erland Josephson) lives in a house full of mystic puppets that might be able to breath and walk. Isak perhaps uses magic to help smuggle the children out of Vergérus’ house (making them appear in two places at once), while his androgenous son Ismael (played by a woman, Stina Ekbad) is implied to having the spiritual power to channel Alexander’s hatred of Vergérus into actual supernatural revenge in the real world (another classic literary touch, that plays on spirituality and the Mad Woman in the Attic in Jane Eyre).

Fanny and Alexander is an extraordinary film, I feel I have only begun to scratch its surface here. It’s both a Dickensian family fable and a semi-benevolent Ghost story. It’s a family saga and a careful look at a particular time and place. It’s funny and moving. It really feels like one final mighty effort from a master.

Seven (1995)

Darkly, unrelentingly unsettling, Fincher’s true-debut is an outstanding psychological thriller

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Brad Pitt (Detective David Mills), Morgan Freeman (Detective William Somerset), Gwyneth Paltrow (Tracy Mills), Richard Roundtree (DA Talbot), R. Lee Ermey (Police captain), John C McGinley (‘California’), Julie Araskog (Mrs Gould), Mark Boone Jnr (FBI man), John Cassini (Officer Davis), Reginald E. Cathey (Dr Santiago), Richard Schiff (Mark Swarr), Kevin Spacey (John Doe)

Set in a city where decency and humanity goes to die, daylight is a stranger and everything is covered with constant rainfall, Seven covers the most chilling week-in-the-life of two detectives. One, disillusioned William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), is counting down to his early retirement. The other, his cocksure replacement David Mills (Brad Pitt) thinks he’s unbeatable and indestructible. But they are going up against someone who will shake them to their core, a calculating serial killer dispatching victims he judges guilty of the seven deadly scenes, framing their bodies in grotesque rituals. Can they track him down before he completes his terrible work?

Seven is one of the finest, and most influential, of all serial killer films. Dark, haunting and relentless, it’s a perfect package of grim foreboding and nihilistic terror, expertly directed by David Fincher. Seven is very careful about what it shows you, trusting far more in the horror of suggestion and witnessing the reactions of the characters – you come out of it convinced you have seen more than you have. It never lets you relax for a moment, always dreading the worst – yet so many people never saw coming its infamous final act with its unexpected, horrifying, reveals and darkly, hope-free conclusion. Seven offers almost no comfort and never pets you at ease only a despairing look at how terrible the world can be and how desperate the struggle for goodness can be.

In a visual design that’s reminiscent of Blade Runner, the world of Seven is almost permanently dark, dingy and rain-soaked, the crime scenes filthy, terrifying haunted houses of grimness. The chaotic sounds of the city, mechanical and uncaring, are everywhere: Somerset even sleeps with a metronome ticking in an attempt to impose sone order on his world. The score uses base beats and near-industrial sound, the editing mixes smooth classic cuts and sudden shocks, the camera work is awash with tones from the green of greed to the blood red of lust. Not there there is any comfort in daylight, since the brightest, most open sequence of this claustrophobic film (even the Mills’ apartment violently shakes from passing trains, a subtle hint no where is safe) takes place in a pylon-stuffed field and it’s the most horrific, nihilistic of the lot.

Seven though is also darkly seductive: it plays on our fascination with the dark ‘genius’ of Hollywood killers, their love of patterns and the twisted purity of their quest for perfection. The film’s opening sequence, showing the killer’s preparations in a series of jagged, disorienting cuts, even places us in his perspective. When he is revealed, he mixes prissy politeness with dark, obsessive love for his work. Seven understands out fascination with the pattern killer – just as we were obsessed with Hannibal Lector and the Terminator, the guy in control is intriguing. It punishes us for this by stressing the horrific impact of his crimes and the traumatic impact on the survivors, is nihilistic ending even more effective for all the dark enjoyment the viewer has taken out of Seven’s grim momentum.

It’s also benefits hugely from its play on the conventions of the odd-couple detective pairing. Somerset and Mills are chalk-and-cheese: Somerset is calm, methodical and professionally distant, Mills is volcanic, lacks focus and becomes terribly personally invested. One of the films few touches of humanity and hope is the growing friendship between these two – slow-burning to say the least – that sees them go from butting heads to sharing jokes and supporting each other’s calls.

The performances are excellent. Brad Pitt (whose clout helped ensure producers couldn’t neuter the film’s shocking ending) is full of jittery energy masking his insecurity, doubt and fear; so worried about looking weak he resorts constantly to anger. Lacking patience (hilariously he can’t bring himself to read Dante and Chaucer, as Somerset recommends, instead resorting to hiding Cliff Notes books in his desk) he investigates the crimes with gusto, focused on the exterior not the interior. He can’t only see the killer as a lunatic, an under-estimation that makes him easy to manipulate.

The moral centre is Morgan Freeman’s Somerset, a superb performance. Somerset is completely disillusioned, convinced any trace of goodness in the world has disappeared. Despite this, events prove him wise (but not above terrible errors) and determined with a strong moral centre. He’s empathetic about crime in ways Mills isn’t (at an early crime scene, one of his first questions is if the victim’s kid has seen the body, a question dismissed as irrelevant by his colleagues) and investigates from inside the killer’s psyche, seeking to understand his motives. Perhaps no other film than Seven has given Freeman so perfect a vehicle, his expressive eyes full of sorrow and regret, his careful decency a mask of detachment that he slowly lets slip to Mills and his wife.

As that wife, Gwyneth Paltrow gives a striking, endearing and perfectly judged performance in a small but crucial role. Tracy Mills is the one unquestionably decent person in this crap-sack world, perhaps why she and Somerset are drawn together. Seven has a wonderfully quiet, humane moment in all this horror, when the two meet to discuss parenthood, a beautifully played exploration of doubt and fear from Paltrow and quiet semi-regret from Freeman. It’s a role pivotal for the film, Paltrow leaving a deeply tender impression on the viewer.

It’s vital for the film’s final act pay-off. Seven is perfectly constructed, both in its pacing of the murders and in not dragging out the mystery of the motive too long (it knows, of course, that everyone watching the film is ahead of the detectives on that score). It’s crammed with stand-out sequences: a SWAT team house storming promises drama but turns into a dark twist on the wrong-door routine; a chase sequence after a chance encounter with the unseen killer gives a perfect shot of adrenalin. It’s all unbalancing us for a shockingly unexpected move by the killer (the actor’s identity carefully kept a secret in advance, meaning his reveal is a genuine shock for the uninitiated) leading to its horrifically nihilistic ending that I defy anyone to anticipate (except its now probably as famous as the identity of Rosebud or Keyser Soze).

Seven is astonishingly brave in all its pulsating thrills and perfectly judged tension for offering very little hope. This is a film where good is essentially powerless against evil: Somerset is too detached to beat evil, Mills so invested in his own black-and-white world he’s easy prey for the coldly manipulative. The film’s conclusion is a punch to the gut, but logical in a film where we’ve seen ordinary people indifferent to the worst of humanity and evil being so devilishly determined and ingenious in its actions no one stands a chance to beat it. You can criticise Seven for its small beats of misogyny: while Tracy is pure, like a fairy-tale princess, the two female victims are a shallow, preening model while the lust victim is not the man who uses prostitutes but the prostitute herself – an attitude we shouldn’t be surprised the killer has, but is unquestioned by any of the (all-male) investigators. (I was uncomfortable with this when I first saw it in the nineties, and time hasn’t changed my mind).

But aside from that, Seven is a darkly compelling masterpiece, a brilliantly unsettling film from David Fincher, at last allowed to deliver a film that exactly matched his vision (in a way Alien 3 did not). The battle to keep its nihilistic dark and shocking ending was a battle well-won, and it makes for a film that is a chilling exploration of evil in the world as well as a compelling, darkly-bloody film noir set in a world of unrelenting hopelessness. One of the greatest serial killer films ever made.