Author: Alistair Nunn

The Right Stuff (1983)

Patriotic heroism subtly retold as shrewd satire – no wonder the film bombed

Director: Philip Kaufman

Cast: Sam Shepard (Chuck Yeager), Scott Glenn (Alan Shepard), Ed Harris (John Glenn), Dennis Quaid (Gordon Cooper), Fred Ward (Gus Grissom), Barbara Hershey (Glennis Yeager), Kim Stanley (Pancho Barnes), Veronica Cartwright (Betty Grissom), Scott Paulin (Deke Slayton), Charles Frank (Scott Carpenter), Lance Henriksen (Wally Schirra), Donald Moffat (Lyndon B Johnson), Levon Helm (Jack Ridley), Mary Jo Deschanel (Annie Glenn), Scott Wilson (Scott Crossfield), Kathy Baker (Louise Shepard), David Clennon (Liaison man), Jeff Goldblum (Recruiter), Harry Shearer (Recruiter)

During the Cold War, the US and Russia had to fight with something – from proxy wars to chess, but most famously with Space: the competition to go further, faster and higher among the stars. The Right Stuff focuses on the Mercury Seven pilots at the centre of the US response to Soviet success including Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), John Glenn (Ed Harris), Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) and Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid), a mix of the cocksure and the confident. But in a space programme where a monkey is an acceptable “pilot” for this human cannonball, do any of them have “the right stuff”? Could any of them match the skill of legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) – one of the guys who scorned this astronaut programme for being “spam in a can”?

The Right Stuff, adapted from Tom Wolfe’s book, seemed destined to become a patriotic smash-hit. Despite its eight Oscar nominations (and four wins) it was, in fact, a catastrophic bomb. Perhaps that was because it subverted its patriotism so well. The Right Stuff is, in fact, a subtle, anti-heroic satire (told at huge length) masquerading as a patriotic yarn. It’s marketing avoided that meaning those most likely to enjoy didn’t go and see it, and those who went for that felt alienated. While largely respecting the astronauts, it suggests space race triumphalism was a sort of mass hysteria, with limited results, inflated into something mythic by political expediency, media spin and industrial might. Not the happy, flag-waving message Reaganite America expected or wanted.

Kaufman’s sympathy instead lies with an older, “truer” America. The Right Stuff is an intensely nostalgic film: but for a completely different time. It is in love with Frontier America, where men-were-men and the daring proved themselves in taming the frontier, in this case the sky itself. Our tamer is Chuck Yeager, played with a monosyllabic Gary-Cooper-charisma by Sam Shepard. Yeager is the last of the cowboys (even introduced riding a horse in the desert), taking to the skies like an old frontiersman hunting down that “demon” who lives at the sound barrier.

This is the sort of America The Right Stuff celebrates, and Yeager is the guy who has it. Unlike the Mercury programme, Yeager isn’t interested in showbiz and self-promotion (his reward for breaking the sound barrier? A free steak and a press embargo), just the quiet satisfaction of having done it. It’s the old, unflappable, quietly masculine confidence of a certain kind of American tradition and it’s totally out of step with the world the media is now celebrating with the astronauts. Instead, these effective passengers in the rocket will be hailed as the great pilots.

Kaufman’s film is a long, carefully disguised, quiet ridicule of many of the aspects of the Mercury programme. It’s conceived, in a darkened room, by a group of politicians so clumsy they can’t even work a projector. It’s head, Lyndon B Johnson (Donald Moffat on panto form) is a ludicrous figure, at one point reduced to an impotent tantrum in a car when he doesn’t get his way. The NASA recruiters are a comedy double act – Goldblum and Shearer sparking wonderfully off each other – who first suggest (in all seriousness) circus acrobats as pilots and then fail to identify Yuri Gargarin. The programme begins with a series of failed launches that travel tiny distances before exploding, culminating in one attempt ending with an impotent pop of the cap at the top of the rocket.

NASA is slightly ramshackle and clueless throughout. Far from the best and brightest, Kaufman is keen for us to remember that many of the scientists fought for the Germans in the war, that decisions were often made entirely based on what the Russians have just done, that the astronaut recruitment tests are a parade of bizarre physical tests because no one has a clue what to test for, and that the final seven selected aren’t even the best just the ones who persevered through the tests and (crucially) were small enough to fit in the capsule. That doesn’t stop the media – played by a San Francisco physical comedy troop – from turning them overnight from jobbing pilots to superstars.

The astronauts status is frequently punctured. Scott Glenn’s granite-faced Shepard is strapped into the cockpit for hours on his first flight, until finally he begs to pee (followed by a montage of coffee being slurped, hose pipes blasting and taps dripping) before being instructed to release his bladder into his suit, meaning he heads into space sitting in a puddle of his own piss. Dennis Quaid’s cocksure Cooper has an over-inflated idea of his skills and is prone to dumb, blow-hard statements (arriving at Yeager’s Air Force base he non-ironically states he’ll soon have his picture up on the deceased pilot’s memorial wall). Fred Ward’s Gus Grissom is a slightly sleazy chancer – controversially The Right Stuff presents him as panicking on re-entry from his first mission, blowing his hatch and sinking his ship, something he categorically denied (and was later proved not to have done).

Even John Glenn, played with a sincerity and decency by Ed Harris (if this had been a hit, Harris’ career of playing hard-heard would have been totally different), is subtly lampooned. So straight-laced he literally can’t swear (his attempt to say ‘fuck’ never gets past a strained Ffff), he’s introduced via a ludicrous TV quiz show and his square-jawed morals frequently tip into puritan self-importance. Undergoing physical tests, Kaufman even cuts from his grimacing face to a grinning chimp on the same test (and who will beat him into space). Compared to Yeager, who can correct a plane on a desperate nose dive and beat the skies into submission (and has the only outright heroic refrain in Bill Conti’s Oscar-winning score), none of them have that right stuff.

Do they get it? In a way: but their triumph is establishing their character, not their skills. Kaufman uses Yeager to point us towards this (his seal of approval is vital for the film): after Grissom’s debacle, he defends him in the bar and praises their courage in essentially sitting on top of a massive bomb.
Tellingly, the astronauts’ most courageous moment in the film isn’t in the cockpit at all: it’s Glenn supporting his stammering wife’s refusal to go on air with LBJ, despite the pressure from NASA bigwigs – and the other astronauts uniting in fury when Glenn is threatened with being dumped from the next flight. The others become more noble through maturing and casting aside fame’s temptations.

In a way they prove their spurs, even if Kaufman’s film makes clear none of them can match Yeager’s traditional values. The film ends with Yeager, maverick to the last, undertaking an unauthorised test flight in a desperate attempt to keep funding for his jet programme going. Even with this final flight – dressed in a bastardised version of a space suit – Yeager shows he’s not lost it, a man so undeniably superhuman in his American resilience that even a bit of fire won’t slow him down.

The Right Stuff celebrates Yeager, but he’s the B-story – and the film frames him as a forgotten figure, left behind by a world obsessed with the bright and shiny. The Right Stuff has to centre the astronauts but it doesn’t focus on the missions (which, apart from Glenn’s, barely receive any screen time – certainly not compared to the time given to Yeager’s flights) or the glory, only quietly implies there was a slight air of pointlessness about the whole thing – that the space race was perhaps just a dick-waggling competition between superpowers. It makes for interesting – if overlong – viewing, but as punch-the-air entertainment, no sir. No wonder it bombed.

The Outfit (2022)

Theatrical, twisty-and-turn filled thriller, with a very fine leading performance

Director: Graham Moore

Cast: Mark Rylance (Leonard Burling), Johnny Flynn (Francis), Zoey Deutch (Mable Shaun), Dylan O’Brien (Richie Boyle), Simon Russell Beale (Roy Boyle), Nikki Amuka-Bird (Violet LaFontaine), Alan Meddizadeh (Monk)

In the 1950s “English” Leonard Burling (Mark Rylance) has fled haunting loss at home to Chicago. A veteran of Savile Row, Leonard is a “cutter” (definitely not a tailor – that’s any fool with a needle and thread) who crafts tailor-made suits for the wealthy. But in Chicago, the wealthiest clients are also the most dangerous: the Boyle family, an Irish mob run by Roy (Simon Russell Beale) whose impulsive son Richie (Dylan O’Brien) hopes to succeed him – as does Roy’s enforcer Francis (Johnny Flynn). The Roys use Leonard’s tailor shop as a dead drop – Leonard scrupulously doesn’t want to know – and Richie is secretly dating Leonard’s shop assistant Mable (Zoey Deutch), who Leonard sees as a surrogate daughter. But, when the Roys discover they have a rat in their turf war with the LaFontaine gang, Leonard’s shop becomes the setting for one long night of cross and counter-cross, where Leonard will need to all his wits to survive.

The Outfit’s title has a double meaning – referring both to the obvious and the Capone-founded crime syndicate the Roy’s dream of joining – and that dual nature is a pointer to the film as a chamber piece where almost nothing or anyone is exactly as it seems. With all its action taking place within the confines of Leonard’s shop it means The Outfit best resembles a decent play. Certainly, it has a theatrical love for its tricksy structure of move and counter-move (perhaps a little too much) and gives rich, chewy dialogue relished by its cast of experienced theatre performers.

At its heart is a very fine performance of Mark Rylance. Few actors can more skilfully suggest deeper depths, below a softly spoken, quiet exterior. Leonard appears to be a mild-mannered, obsessive crafter of suits, slightly lonely who wouldn’t say boo to a goose or take even a moment to involve himself in anything beyond his shears (and you bet those are going to come into play at some point). He’s fastidious and exact – reflecting a craft where every cut must be made to perfection. Rylance perfectly captures the fastidious timidity of a humble, unquestioning man, cowed by his interaction with blow-hard, trigger-happy gangsters.

But he also subtly implies at every moment there is more to Leonard than first appears. With his gentleness and genuine concern for the well-being of Mable – excellently portrayed by Zoey Deutch as a head-strong, kind young woman making impulsive, reckless decisions while dreaming of an exciting future – it’s a surprise that when guns start appearing he’s fairly calm. Despite protests, when asked to sew up a gunshot wound he doesn’t even flinch. When bodies start to pile-up, he’s able to suggest courses of action without any trace of doubt.

Slowly we realise Leonard is thinking fast on his feet to get him – and Mable – out of a lethal situation. That he is a far more shrewd, resourceful survivor than we first thought. While fearing the dangers of the gangsters he interacts with, they don’t terrify him into inaction. We start to notice he can lie with ease, string out a yarn and think on his feet. That years of judging what clothes will fit a man have made a swift and accurate observer of details and human nature.

Rylance is able to convey all this with an assured skill. In many ways the most compelling thing about The Outfit is watching this consummate actor slowly reveal various cards in his hand, brilliantly balancing the quiet, shy persona with shrewd cunning. It’s also a brilliant camouflage for people to underestimate him – which of course they do – but Rylance also manages to lull the audience into constantly underestimating him as well.

It’s the gangsters who end up looking slightly out-of-the-depth. Ritchie Boyle – who Leonard timidly calls “Master Ritchie” throughout, like he was the scion of a lord of the manor – is a young-man desperate to prove his worth, but hopelessly incompetent and over-confident in his skill as a rough-and-tough man of the street. The real threat emerges as enforcer Francis (played with a sullen sharpness by Johnny Flynn), a born survivor with a ruthless streak a mile wide. Simon Russell Beale is slightly odd casting as a tough Irish gangster (I never quite buy it), but he and Rylance spark off each other brilliantly and Beale gets a great sense of sociopathic lèse-majesté about this crime boss who likes to see himself as a benevolent community improver but is in-fact a ruthless killer.

The Outfit offers an array of twists and turns – and more than a few shocks – and Graham Moore’s direction of his own script keeps up the tense atmosphere in its tight theatrical setting. There is more than enough mystery in exactly how events will turn out and there is enough doubt in the viewer about who is coming out of this alive. It’s final act, however, tips events a little too far – and certainly offers one reveal too many, that comes a little too much of the blue and gilds the lily too much as well as (for me) slightly undermining some of the character work the film works hard to do, as if Moore was trying a little too hard to top what’s come before. But before then this is an engaging theatrical plot-boiler, powered by an excellent Mark Rylance performance.

Skyfall (2012)

Bold, beautiful and brilliant Skyfall is probably my favourite Bond film ever – sorry folks!

Director: Sam Mendes

Cast: Daniel Craig (James Bond), Judi Dench (M), Javier Bardem (Raoul Silva), Ralph Fiennes (Gareth Mallory), Naomie Harris (Eve), Bérénice Marlohe (Sévérine), Albert Finney (Kincade), Ben Whishaw (Q), Rory Kinnear (Bill Tanner), Ola Rapace (Patrice), Helen McCrory (Clair Dowar MP)

As I watched Skyfall for the umpteenth time it suddenly occurred to me. I know I should say Goldfinger but I think this might just be both my favourite and the best James Bond film ever made. Released to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Doctor No, Skyfall manages to be an anniversary treat the celebrates Bond not with an ocean of call-backs but by telling a gripping story which plays to the star’s strengths and riffs imaginatively in both a literal and a metaphorical sense with our understanding of the legacy of the world’s best-known secret agent.

After a mission gone wrong leaves a list of undercover agents out in the open and Bond (Daniel Craig) presumed dead, MI6 comes under fire from a secret assailant seemingly determined to destroy the reputation of M (Judi Dench). With M already hanging on by a thread after that disastrous mission – Chairman of the JIC Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) is threatening her with removal – she has no choice but to lure Bond out of hiding and back into the spy game. But is the slightly out-of-shape, wounded spy ready for the challenge? The trial to find their mysterious enemy leads to Shanghai, Macau and the secretive island home of Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a Bond-like former British agent with a vendetta against M. Cure a battle of wits and wills between ‘these two last rats standing’.

Skyfall pretty much does everything right. Directed with verve, energy, intelligence and wit by Sam Mendes at the top of his game (Skyfall restored him to the front rank of British film directors), it mixes sensational action with well-acted, equally exciting character beats. It gets the balance exactly right – in the way that Quantum of Solace failed – between giving you the thrills but also really investing you in the drama. And it builds towards a final face-off that is, almost uniquely in the series, small-scale, intimate and personal (admittedly via a conflagration that consumes an ancestral Scottish castle and most of the Highlands). There is so much to enjoy here that you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be entertained. No wonder it’s the franchises biggest hit.

Mendes was brought on board at the suggestion (and persuasion) of Craig, eager to work with directors who would be recognise character was at least as important as fast cars and explosions, but also had the skill to deliver both. Skyfall is perfectly constructed to play to Craig’s strengths. His Bond reaches its zenith, a world-weary cynic with a strong vein of sarcasm, covering up deeply repressed unreconciled trauma. Craig is wonderful at conveying this under a naughty-boy grin.

Skyfall dials down the romance, Craig’s weakest string – it’s the only film in the franchise with no Bond girl (after QoS where, for the first time, Bond didn’t sleep with the Bond girl). Aside from a brief fling (with a character who is, perhaps a little tastelessly, all to dispensable – the fate of Sévérine being fudged with an uncomfortable flippancy) it’s Judi Dench who is the really ‘Bond Girl’ here. Judi Dench is fabulous in her swan-song, from taking the tough calls, voicing small regrets and quoting Tennyson. Skyfall acknowledges the surrogate parent relationship between M and Bond, something that was there from the day of Connery – every M has always inspired a filial loyalty from their 007. It’s a loyalty Skyfall reveals M ruthlessly exploits, extracting personal dedication from a host of agents, including both Bond and Silva – a man who (only half-jokingly) repeatedly calls her “Mummy” and has redefined his life around taking revenge on her.

It makes a gift of a part for Javier Bardem, channelling his eccentricity into a character who often yings when he should yang. When he’s angry he laughs, when he’s overjoyed he gets quieter. Softly-spoken, almost effeminate, he’s also a ruthless killer – his studied manner of unpredictability a superb reflection of Bond’s own tightly constructed personality. Even their first meeting together is unusual and different – far from threatening Bond, Silva seems intent on seducing him, batting his eyes, stroking his bare chest with a finger and all but inviting him for a quickie (Bond’s classic response – “What makes you think this is my first time?” surely launched a thousand slash fictions).

There is a fabulously, just-below-the-line meta slice of fun going on in Skyfall. It brings Bond back from the dead (after its pulsating opening scene ends with him falling lifelessly to a watery grave), but burdens him with a host of scars. In a series of MI6 tests he completely misses a target, collapses to the floor after a workout, blows a psychological test and is repeatedly told he’s a borderline alcoholic. (In case we miss the point, Q meets him in front of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire and pointedly comments on the over-the-hill wreck being dragged back to port). Back in the field, his gunshot wounded shoulder gives out while holding onto the underside of a rising lift and Silva asks the question we’ve all asked at time or another: Mr Bond hasn’t it all gone on long enough?

While it can seem odd that two films ago Craig was introduced as a fresh-faced youngster and now embodies all fifty years of franchise ‘mileage’, it doesn’t really matter since he so triumphantly (of course!) reasserts his relevance. It’s a lovely, not too heavy-handed, piece of meta-commentary I think is both funny and human. It also means most of the call-backs to the gloried past of the franchise are metaphorical rather than literal – making a huge change from the Easter Egg stuffed nonsense you get from other franchises. It also means the one major piece of fanservice – the return of the Goldfinger car (the film is hilariously vague on whether this means Craig’s Bond and Connery’s Bond are one-and-the-same, a thing that really annoys some people who should really get a life) – really lands with a punch-the-air delight.

Skyfall is similarly astute with its characters. When Ralph Fiennes’ Gareth Mallory is introduced, we take him for an obstructive bureaucrat, flying his desk. Each scene in Fiennes’ perfectly pitched performance peels away layers to reveal a hardened professional (a decorated Army Colonel no less) and ally. It’s hard not to cheer when he takes up arms during Silva’s attack on a Parliamentary committee (with a gunshot wound no less) just as it’s hilarious to see Bond teasingly wink at Mallory before shooting out a fire extinguisher right next to him. Q returns, embodied by a perfectly cast Ben Whishaw, as a computer genius (in another gag at the franchise he’s scornful of ‘exploding pens’ and such like gadgets). Naomi Harris is very good as (it’s probably not a surprise any more to say) a Miss Moneypenny who’s a field agent in her own right. Skyfall even cheekily serves as a sort of back-door ‘origins’ story, leaving us with a very Fleming-Universal-Exports set-up.

It throws this all together with some sensational action scenes. The opening sequence is one of the best in the series, a manic chase through Istanbul that starts on foot in a darkened room (a nice reminder of M’s ruthlessness that she orders Bond to abandon to his certain death an injured agent) cars, bikes on rooftops, trains, diggers on trains and train rooftops (via a witty cufflink adjustment). There is a gorgeously shot fight-scene in a Shanghai rooftop (Roger Deakins pretty much makes Skyfall the most beautiful looking Bond film there has ever been) and a pulsating (and very witty) chase through the London Underground before that gripping Parliamentary committee gunfight. Mendes mixes excitement with plenty of neat jokes throughout and it works a treat – and the film plummets along at such speed you can forgive the little nits you can pick (like how does Silva know where to plant a bomb on the underground eh? And why did that train have no passengers?).

It culminates in a Home Alone inspired booby-trap rigged house in Scotland (wisely a Sean Connery cameo idea was nixed, with the legendary Albert Finney cast instead) and an Oedipal confrontation in a tiny Highlands church. At the end, it gave us thrills while bringing Bond home (in every sense) and was brave enough to focus on excellent actors play in a human story of regret, loss and betrayal. It’s a film which positively delighted me in the cinema and hasn’t stopped thrilling me the innumerable times I’ve seen it since then. And I can’t imagine it won’t continue to do so!

The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936)

A visionary struggles against the blind in this genre-defining slightly cosy biopic

Director: William Dieterle

Cast: Paul Muni (Louis Pasteur), Josephine Hutchinson (Marie Pasteur), Anita Louise (Annette Pasteur), Donald Woods (Dr. Jean Martel), Fritz Leiber (Dr. Charbonnet), Henry O’Neill (Dr. Emile Roux), Porter Hall (Dr. Rossignol), Raymond Brown (Dr. Radisse), Akim Tamiroff (Dr. Zaranoff), Halliwell Hobbes (Dr. Joseph Lister), Frank Reicher (Dr. Pfeiffer)

Jack Warner was convinced no one would want to watch the life story of some crusty old scientist. But Paul Muni insisted they would – and he was a star – so with a threadbare budget and host of re-used costumes (many not from the correct period) and sets The Story of Louis Pasteur came to the screen – and much to Warner’s surprise was a hit. It can look like an oddly cliché-ridden affair today: until you realise many biopic tropes we’re used to were virtually coined here.

The Story of Louis Pasteur remixes huge portions of Pasteur’s life to make it more dramatic: the man who was the leading scientist in France for almost thirty years is repackaged as an outsider and laughing stock, constantly scorned by the medical establishment until (but of course!) he is triumphantly hailed as a genius by the same doctors who mocked him for years. Sound familiar? The film charts Pasteur’s efforts to discover vaccines, first for anthrax in sheep (leading to a famous test where 25 sheep were vaccinated and 25 were not, then all of them exposed to the disease, killing all the unvaccinated sheep) then rabies in dogs and treating those bitten by rabid dogs. Pasteur uses his unparalleled knowledge of microbes which (but of course!) every other doctor says cannot possibly have anything to do with infection.

There is a lot to enjoy in The Story of Louis Pasteur, an undeniably old-fashioned “Great Men” view of history that manages to turn bacteriology into effective entertainment. It recasts history into an easily digestible tale of visionaries and scoffers – but, crucially, no real baddies – crafting a series of small steps towards scientific discoveries into flashes of inspiration and triumphant revelations. Science is made simple, plain and understandable with Pasteur to talk us through a few shots of microbes under microscopes. At its centre we have a stubborn maverick determined that it is his way or the high-way and who won’t listen for a second to anyone questioning his theories.

There is something rather touching about the film’s admiration for science and celebration of an altruistic quest to make the world a better place. It carefully outlines the dangers of surgery and poor hygiene in medical practice – it opens with a doctor murdered for failing to save his killer’s wife, the reason for his failure pretty clear from the haphazard way he chucks medical equipment into a bag (dropping some of it on the floor en route). This lack of hygiene affects rich and poor (even Duchesses are not safe), in particular women in childbirth. Its truly the enemy of mankind, as a caption explaining the 1870 war stresses (European squabbles being a distant second). This is a problem that is truly noble to take on.

And it motivates Pasteur. Paul Muni is on Oscar-winning form as Pasteur, brilliantly precise and superbly conveying great intelligence mixed with an arrogant self-assurance. But Pasteur’s egotism comes not from vanity but from simply knowing more of which he speaks than anyone else. He’s also a man consumed by a sense of duty to the world: when his work can literally save lives (be they either animal or human) he will not let scorn stand in his way. Muni captures all this wonderfully, creating a prickly man with a playful streak determined to do the right thing the right way (Pasteur may disagree with his critics, but woe-betide their assistants disrespectfully doing the same).

Dieterle’s film crafts a series of excellent set-pieces to present Pasteur as a visionary ahead of his time. To make this really land, he’s therefore completely altered into being seen as a crank and pariah by everyone around him, rather than the influential scientific leader he actually was. This might be poor history, but it’s much better drama. From a furious encounter with Napoleon III (who won’t wear the idea his hand-picked doctors might be wrong about sterilization) to the Medical Academy publicly poo-poohing Pasteur’s outlandish ideas that vaccines might prevent anthrax. To give a face to this mocking of Pasteur (from an establishment we are told is totally wrong on every count) the film invents Dr Charbonnet (well played by Fritz Leiber), an honest but pig-headed critic who exists to be wrong (for noble reasons) on almost every single issue.

Noble as important: this film want to stress everyone acts for decent reasons, so that its final celebration of Pasteur is unblemished by deeply personal rivalry. Charbonnet and Pasteur are both framed as decent men and their relationship allows for plenty of fun melodrama, such as Charbonnet injecting himself with Pasteur’s (fortunately for him) weak rabies sample to ‘expose’ his ideas. When Pasteur’s daughter falls ill in childbirth, but of course Charbonnet is the only doctor available: he humours Pasteur’s sterilisation rules in exchange for a signed letter from Pasteur rubbishing his own theories (Muni’s shuffling flash of conflict that flows across his face at this moment is very well done). But of course, Charbonnet and Pasteur eventually reconcile in honour and decency.

This forms a fun thread throughout the movie, that’s never less than well-staged by Dieterle, with pace and energy. The anthrax test is very dynamic – all celebrating crowds and circus side-shows – and the dramatic appearance of a host of Russian peasants (led by Akim Tamiroff’s bombastic doctor) desperate for a cure for rabies-induced sickness is well-executed. Some beats work less well than others. Donald Woods gets dealt a rotten hand as the dull son-in-law of Pasteur. The women in Pasteur’s family get even worse, with most of Josephine Hutchinson’s lines being of the “stop trying to cure anthrax and come to bed Louis” variety. The costumes are bizarrely all-over-the-place (the women look more like Southern Belles) and there is a reassuring cosiness about everything.

But that’s also one of its most successful features. The Story of Louis Pasteur is a little twee – but it’s also effective. It’s why it laid down a template that worked for countless films that follow (A Beautiful Mind pretty much follows its model and won an Oscar for it 65 years later). That’s because there is also a feel-good factor to see someone who is, without doubt, in the right triumphing over the stubborn. With a great performance by Muni, it’s a rewardingly entertaining biopic.

Dune: Part 2 (2024)

Villeneuve’s triumphant sequel continues to raise the bar for science fiction films

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Cast: Timothée Chalamet (Paul ‘Muad-Dib’ Atreides), Zendaya (Chani), Rebecca Ferguson (Lady Jessica), Javier Bardem (Stilgar), Josh Brolin (Gurney Halleck), Austin Butler (Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen), Florence Pugh (Princess Irulan), Dave Bautista (Rabban Harkonnen), Christopher Walken (Emperor Shaddam IV), Léa Seydoux (Lady Margot Fenring), Souheila Yacoub (Shishakli), Stellan Skarsgård (Baron Vladimir Harkonnen), Charlotte Rampling (Gaius Helen Mohaim)

Denis Villeneuve had already taken on the near-impossible in adapting the unfilmable Dune into a smash-hit admired by both book-fans and initiates. In doing so he set himself an even greater task: how do you follow that? Dune Part 2 (and this is very much Part 2, picking up minutes after the previous film ended) deepens some of the universe building, but also veers the story off into complex, challenging directions that fly in the face of those expecting the sort of “hero will rise” narrative the first Dune seemed to promise. Dune Part 2 becomes an unsettling exploration of faith, colonialism and cultural manipulation, all wrapped up in its epic design.

Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) have escaped the clutches of their rivals House Harkonnen and it’s corrupt, sadistic leader Baron Vladimir (Stellan Skarsgård). Escaping into the deserts of Arrakis, they take shelter with the Fremen, vouched for by tribal leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem). It transpires Paul fits many of the conditions of the prophecy of the Mahdi or Lisan al Gaib, the promised messiah of the Fremen. Paul is uncomfortable with this – and the growing devotion of the likes of Stilgar – but also recognises the potential this has for marshalling the Fremen for his own revenge on the Harkonnen’s. Its further complicated by his knowledge the prophecy was embedded into their culture by the mysterious Bene Gesseri, the religious order that quietly controls much of the Empire, not to mention the hostility of Chani (Zendaya) the woman he loves, as she believes the Fremen should save themselves not rely on an outsider.

These complex ideas eventually shape a film that avoids simple good-vs-evil narratives and subtly undermines the very concept of the saviour narrative. Dune’s roots in a mix of Lord of the Rings and Lawrence of Arabia have rarely been clearer. Not least in the perfect casting of the slightly androgenous and fey Timothée Chalamet as Paul (with more than a hint of Peter O’Toole), barely knowing who he is, drawn towards and standing outside an indigenous community based on strong tribal loyalty, tradition and the grim reality of life in a hostile environment.

A large part of Dune 2 deconstructs Paul’s heroism and his (and Jessica’s) motives. When Jessica – who takes on a religious figurehead role with the Fremen – starts stage-managing events to exactly match the words of the prophecy, does that count as a fulfilment? Paul is deeply uncomfortable with positioning himself as messianic figure for an entire race, effectively weaponising their belief for his own cause. But he’s also nervous because he is also an exceptionally gifted person with powers of persuasion and prophetic insight that mark him out as special. As Paul allows himself to more-and-more accept the role he has been groomed for, how much does it corrupt him? After all, he gains absolute power over the Fremen – and we all know what that does to someone…

Paul’s messianic possibility is also spread on very fertile ground. Javier Bardem’s Stilgar represents a large portion of the Fremen population, who belief in this prophecy with a fanatical certainty. The dangers of this is subtly teased out by Villeneuve throughout the film. At first there is a Life of Brian comedy about Stilgar’s wide-eyed joy as every single event can be twisted and filtered through his naïve messiah check-list (“As is written!”) – even Paul’s denial he is the messiah is met with the response that only a messiah would be so humble! This comedy however fades as the film progresses and the militaristic demands Paul makes sees this same belief channelled into ferocious, fanatic fury that will leave a whole universe burning in its wake.

Much of Paul’s hesitancy is based on his visions of a blood-soaked jihad that will follow if he indeed “heads south” and accepts the leadership of the Fremen’s fanatical majority. The question is, of course, whether the desire for revenge – and, it becomes increasingly clear, a lust for power and control – will overcome such scruples. Part of the skill of Chalamet’s performance is that it is never easy to say precisely when your sympathy for him begins to tip into horror at how far he is willing to go (Villeneuve bookends the film with different victorious armies incinerating mountains of corpses of fallen foes), but in carefully calculated increments the Paul we end up at the end of the film is a world away from the one we encountered at the start.

Villeneuve further comments on this by the skilful re-imagining of Chadi, strongly played by Zendaya as an intelligent, determined freedom-fighter appalled at the Fremen exchanging one dogma for another. In the novel a more passive, devoted warrior-lover of Paul, in Dune Part 2 she becomes effectively his Fremen conscious, a living representation of the manipulation Paul is carrying out on these people. In her continued rejection of worship – even while she remains personally drawn to Paul – she provides a human counterpoint to Paul’s temptation to follow his father’s instructions and master “desert power” to control the worlds around them.

Deplorable and evil as the Harkonnen’s are, do Paul’s ends justify his means? And where does it stop? Dune Part 2 sees the Harkonnen’s subtly reduced in status. Dave Batista’s brooding Raban proves an incompetent manager of Arrakis. Stellan Skarsgård’s Baron is crippled by an assassination attempt and increasingly buffeted by events rather than controlling them. The film’s clearest antagonist becomes Austin Butler’s chillingly psychopathic junior Baron Feyd-Rautha, a muscle-packed bald albino, obsessed with honour and utterly ruthless towards his own subordinates. (Introduced in a stunningly shot, black-and-white gladiatorial combat scene that showcases his insane recklessness and twisted sense of honour.) But increasingly they feel like minor pawns in a game of international politics around them.

Villeneuve allows Dune’s world to expand, delving further into the cultural manipulations of the Bene Gesserit. This ancient order not only controls the Emperor – a broodingly impotent Christopher Walken – but also manipulates the bloodlines of great houses for their own twisted breeding programme, as well as inject cultures like the Fremen with perverted, controlling beliefs. While Villeneuve still carefully parses out the world-building of Dune – you could be forgiven for not understanding why the Spice on Arrakis is so damn important – it’s a film that skilfully outlines in broad strokes a whole universe of backstairs manipulation.

Among all this of course, Dune remains a design triumph. Grieg Fraser’s cinematography ensures the desert hasn’t looked this beautiful since Lawrence. The production and costume design are a triumph, as is Hans Zimmer’s imposing score. Above all, the film is brilliantly paced (wonderfully edited by Greg Walker) and superbly balanced into a mix of complex political theory and enough action and giant worm-riding to keep you more than entertained.

Dune Part 2 is a rich and worthy sequel, broadening and deepening the original, as well as challenging hero narratives. It turns Paul into an increasingly dark and manipulative figure, whose righteous anger is only a few degrees away from just anger (he’s no Luke Skywalker), who starts to see people as tools and moves swiftly from asserting Fremen rights to asserting his own rights (overloaded with different names, its striking when Paul chooses to use which names). In a film that provokes thoughts and thrills, Villeneuve’s Dune continues to do for fantasy-sci-fi what Lord of the Rings did for fantasy, creating a cinematic adaptation unlikely to be rivalled for decades.

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

Playing like a double-length TV episode with some embarrassing humour, not enough special about Insurrection

Director: Jonathan Frakes

Cast: Patrick Stewart (Captain Jean-Luc Picard), Jonathan Frakes (Commander William Riker), Brent Spiner (Lt Commander Data), LeVar Burton (Lt Commander Geordi LaForge), Michael Dorn (Lt Commander Worf), Gates McFadden (Dr Beverly Crusher), Marina Sirtis (Counsellor Deanna Troi), F. Murray Abraham (Ru’afo), Donna Murphy (Anji), Anthony Zerbe (Admiral Doherty), Gregg Henry (Gallatin), Daniel Hugh Kelly (Sojef), Michael Welch (Artim)

After the smash-hit success of Star Trek: First Contact, the Next Generation franchise had a golden opportunity. Like never before, Paramount put the cash up (almost twice what it did for First Contact) and geared up to make Insurrection a smash-hit. But then it all went a little wrong. There’s nothing particularly offensive about Star Trek: Insurrection – apart from that fact that there is nothing particularly outstanding about it either.

The Enterprise crew are called to a secluded planet in the middle of a nebula after Data (Brent Spiner), on secondment to an undercover mission observing the peaceful pre-Warp Ba’ku people, suddenly goes berserk and holds the rest of the mission hostage. Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the crew recapture and repair Data – only to find that the android flipped out after being injured discovering a secret conspiracy. Misguided Starfleet Admiral Doherty (Anthony Zerbe) is working with the shady Son’a, led by the clearly maniacal Ru’afo (F. Murray Abraham), to force the Ba’ku to leave the planet so the Federation and Son’a can mine (aka steal) the planet’s atmospheric particles which can regenerate humanoid bodies (the whole planet is basically the fountain of youth). Outraged, Picard and his crew decide this will not stand and rebel to stop it.

Now I love Star Trek: The Next Generation. If I had seen Star Trek: Insurrection in two parts, with a year-long cliff-hanger in the middle after Picard chucked in his com badge and went rogue, I’d probably think this was one of the best episodes ever. But as a film? It feels like an episode unwisely moved to the big screen. I can totally see why this failed to be the same breakout hit First Contact was. That dialled the stakes up to the Nth degree and felt cinematic: Insurrection feels like it could have sat quite nicely in two 45 minute, 4:3 chunks.

Even worse, despite the money lavished upon it, it actually looks cheaper than First Contact. This is partly because a large chunk of the money was poured into location shooting. While it must have felt very different to the cast and crew – used to sound stages and the odd trip out to the Californian valleys for an exterior – to suddenly be out in Sierra Nevada, honestly it doesn’t look that different to a host of other planets the crew visited in the show. Neither does the Ba’ku village look that different from the homespun, pre-Warp villages the crew visited at least a few times a season.

It doesn’t help that the Ba’ku are exactly the sort of new-age windbags the franchise has always had an inexplicable fondness for. In their cream robes, mouthing new-age mantras about putting self-discovery first and the beauty of self-improvement, they come across like a gang of smug hippies, rubbing their perpetual youth in the viewer’s face. Throw in the fact that they contribute little to their own defence, other than patronising shakes-of-the-head towards the Son’a, and it’s rather hard not to feel they deserve to be taken down a peg or two. And really, hoarding these life-changing regenerative particles so that only an elite few (happy to expel dissenters from their world) benefit rather than the billions in the galaxy, is a harder-sell the more you think about it.

Mind you, it doesn’t help that the Son’a are a gang of less-than-compelling heavies, clinging to what’s left of their youth by constantly subjecting their bodies to a series of bang-on-the-nose cosmetic surgeries (nothing in Insurrection is remotely subtle). Blatantly untrustworthy villains from the start – it’s inexplicable to me why anyone would even consider working with these transparent gangsters from the get-go – their characterisation is one-note with Ru’afo, our villain, played in lip-smackingly precise tones by a slumming-it F. Murray Abraham. The more interesting by far villain is the deeply conflicted Admiral Doherty, a decent performance of “trying-to-do-the-right-thing” desperation that sees him edging towards damnation one tiny step at a time.

While some riffs land better than others, Insurrection unwisely plays the comedy card heavily. Picard, Worf and Data singing HMS Pinafore during their capture of the confused android is pretty droll (not least Michael Dorn’s excellent line in stunned reluctance), while Marina Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes actually manage to inject the re-discovered romantic spark between Riker and Troi with genuine playfulness that is rather sweet. But other stuff is the sort of gag-work that makes fans like me place fists in our mouths and hope no one catches us watching this. Beverly and Deanna talking about their boobs firming up anyone? Worf getting a pimple? Data playing in a haystack? Jesus Christ, no wonder I never told girls I liked Star Trek.

The comedy – and an awkwardly unconvincing romance between Picard and the frankly deeply annoying Anji, played with an irritating Earth-mother purity by Donna Murphy – often undermines the action and lowers the stakes. Although there is a noble attempt to engage with the moral complexities here – a classic “good of the many” situation – the film boils most of this down into a single crucial scene, which relies a lot on Patrick Stewart’s unmatched ability with a speech (Picard here is more like the character in the TV series then he is elsewhere in the film series) but the film isn’t deft enough to centre its moral dilemma. You end up wondering why the crew take such a radical stand. Its uncinematic stakes don’t help – it all feels similar to the sort of situation our heroes waded into exactly 175 times before over seven years. Why take it so much to heart now?

When action does kick-in, Jonathan Frakes does a decent job of directing it. Some of the Sierra Nevada-set action as Picard and his crew march the Ba’ku to the hills to prevent them being picked off the planet by the Son’a has a decent Western feel to it (including a Leone-homage series of frowning forehead shots). There is a decent space battle between the Enterprise – helmed by Riker – and the Son’a. I’ll even admit that the ridiculous “manual steering column” (essentially a joystick Riker uses to fly the Enterprise) is fairly entertaining. Like First Contact – and Nemesis would finally peak in this regard – the ending involves a Die Hard style smack-down between a trigger-happy, shirt-clad Picard and the villain on an utterly unconvincing set (which looks like they didn’t bother to finish the blue-screen work). But all this stuff never feels different from anything we’ve seen before.

So used, it seems, to making less stretch to more, I think the crew – and Frakes – didn’t know what to do when actually given more. They focused instead on all the wrong things: huge sets we almost never see, location shoots that don’t look that different from dozens of other films, more extras. Match that up with a bland story, unconvincing and plain irritating guest characters, and a tonal mess that slipstreams between half-hearted comments on ethnic cleansing to awkward pratfalls and Star Trek: Insurrection is the worst thing a Trek movie can be: a double-length episode which, if you missed, it wouldn’t really matter.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)

Savage satire on the cruelty of entertainment, heavy-handed at times but also ahead of them

Director: Sydney Pollack

Cast: Jane Fonda (Gloria Beatty), Michael Sarrazin (Robert Syverton), Susannah York (Alice LeBlanc), Gig Young (Rocky Gravo), Red Buttons (Harry Kline), Bonnie Bedelia (Ruby Bates), Michael Conrad (Rollo), Bruce Dern (James Bates), Al Lewis (“Turkey”), Robert Fields (Joel Girard), Severn Darden (Cecil), Allyn Ann McLiere (Shirl), Madge Kennedy (Mrs Laydon)

Wheeling out the desperate for entertainment was a mainstay of TV for much of the early noughties with the Simon Cowell factory repackaging human lives for entertainment. But it’s hardly a new phenomenon. During the Depression in 30s America, the country was gripped by a new craze: dance marathons. In exchange for prize money and (perhaps!) a shot at stardom, regular people came off the streets to dance (or at least move around the dance floor) for as long as possible (with short breaks every hour). These shows went on and on, hour after hour, day after day for months at a time, with the audience paying to pop in and gawp.

It doesn’t take much to see how class comes into this. The competitors are the unemployed and out of luck, attracted as much by regular food and a roof over their head. The audience are rich and comfortable, tossing sponsorship bones towards the manufactured ‘stories’ that take their fancy. The event is controlled by a manipulative, alcoholic MC (Gig Young) spinning stories and drama for the crowd. As days turn to weeks the contestants become ever more haggard, drained and physically and emotionally shattered: cynical Gloria (Jane Fonda), homeless Robert (Michael Sarrazin), aspiring actors fragile Alice (Susannah York) and distant Joel (Robert Fields), retired sailor Harry (Red Buttons) and bankrupt farmers James (Bruce Dern) and his heavily pregnant wife Ruby (Bonnie Bedelia).

Pollack’s viciously nihilistic satire throws all these into a hellish never-ending treadmill of physical movement and psychological torture that leaves each character washed out, drained, doused in sweat with sunken, sleepless eyes. You can clearly see the links from They Shoot Horses to Rollerball all the way to The Hunger Games. It’s a grim look into part of the human psyche that, ever since the Colosseum, takes pleasure out of watching the suffering of others for entertainment. The crowded audience – eating popcorn and cheering on their favourites – are as indifferent to the sufferings of the contestants as the organisers with their quack medical teams.

Designed to gain the maximum sense of claustrophobia – once we enter the hall for the dance competition, we never see the outside again for virtually the whole film – the film constantly grinds us down with the exhausting relentlessness of the show. Pollack intercuts this with brief shots of Robert being questioned by the police – moments we eventually realise are flashforwards, making it clear tragedy is our eventual destination. A siren that sounds like nothing less than an air raid warning is repeatedly heard, warning competitors any brief respite they have is coming to a close. The actors become increasingly shuffling, wild-eyed and semi-incoherent in their speech and actions, grimly embodying characters acting on little sleep, in situations of constant strain.

But then that’s entertainment! Part of the thrill for the crowd – whipped up by Gig Young’s showman, a man who oscillates between heartless indifference and flashes of sympathy for his stars (hostages?) – is watching them push on through never-ending pressure. It’s clear to us as well – from their desperate, fixed determination to complete any physical challenge set and the relish with which they consume any food given – that the contestants will tolerate anything just to have, for a few weeks, a taste of something they couldn’t hope to get living on the streets.

Their desperation doesn’t even enter into the moral calculations of those running the show. In fact it’s something that makes them easier to manipulate. Part of the MC’s calculations is creating a relatable story of suffering for the chosen few ‘leads’ any one of which can lead to a triumphant feel-good ending. Potential love-matches are pushed together, sentimental favourites are promoted. Alice’s fine clothing is quietly destroyed by the team running the show because it doesn’t fit a narrative of penniless dreamers. The participants are crafted into “characters”: the ageing Harry as the “Old Man of the Sea”, Gloria and Robert – thrown-together, last-minute partners –as star-cross’d lovers (despite their extremely tense personal relationship).

It all gets too much for the contestants. Serious medical conditions are not unusual – the frequent refrains from the (so-called) medical staff that “we’ve got a dead one” before exhausted, unresponsive contestants are slapped or thrown into ice baths to revive them speaks volumes. When a contestant does indeed die, the event is quietly hushed up for the audience with another feel-good fantasy of noble retirement. Those desperate for a shot at stardom – something they have no hope of getting from a show designed to turn them into drained-out zombies for the entertainment of the masses – are reduced to quivering messes. None more so than Alice – played with a heart-rendering fragility by Susannah York channelling Streetcar Vivien Leigh – who begins the film confidently performing a Shaw monologue and it ends it barely connected to reality.

York’s fine performance is one of several in the film. Young won an Oscar as a MC Rocky, the consummate showman who sometimes surprises us with flashes of humanity (which he clearly drowns with the bottle) before his professional ruthlessness kicks in. Red Buttons is excellent as the rogueish Harry who realises he’s out of depth far-too-late, Bedelia and Dern very good as an experienced couple earning a desperate living from marathons. Particularly fine is Jane Fonda who grounds the film with a gut-punch of a performance of barely concealed rage, deep-rooted self-loathing and brutal, angry cynicism as a woman who understands exactly the show she is in but has no choice but to play along, while hating herself for doing it.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They feel in many ways ahead of its time and for all time – after all, entertainment like this hasn’t died out. Pollack’s film is harshly lit, and his direction is very strong, even if the film does sometimes make its points with a little too much repetitive force. It’s also a film – with its metaphor of suffering horses standing in for suffering people –a fraction too pleased with its own arty contrivance (a slow-mo and sepia tinged opening lays on its symbolism a little too thick, while its flash-forwards yearn a little too much for a French New Wave atmosphere). Michael Sarrazin isn’t quite able to bring depth to the – admittedly deliberately blank Robert – making him an opaque POV character, a role he effectively surrenders on viewing to Fonda.

But despite its flaws, They Shoot Horses Don’t They is a remarkably hard and incredibly bleak film on human nature, which doesn’t let up at all as it barrels to its almost uniquely grim and nihilistic ending. It offers nothing in the way of hope and paints a world gruesomely corrupted and completely indifferent to the thoughts and feelings to the most vulnerable in it. It is ripe for rediscovery.

Cries and Whispers (1972)

Bergman’s heart-rendering, challenging and compelling family drama: a slice of raw pain

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Harriet Andersson (Agnes), Ingrid Thulin (Karin), Liv Ullmann (Maria), Kari Sylwan (Anna), Anders Ek (Isak, the priest), Inga Gill (Aunt Olga), Erland Josephson (David), Henning Moritzen (Joakim), Georg Årlin (Fredrik)

It came to Bergman in a dream: a red-lined room, where four women dressed in white whisper intimate secrets to each other. It became one of his most elliptical, horrifying and haunting films, a cryptic puzzle about life and death, faith and despair, love and hate, sex and violence and almost every human experience in between, all filmed within an imposing (and beautifully shot) red-walled house that turns more-and-more into a nightmareish Satre-style trap. Cries and Whispers sits alongside Persona as one of Bergman’s most successful reaches for the sublimely unknown and if it doesn’t quite touch Persona’s astonishing mastery, it’s remarkable by every measure.

Two sisters gather to nurse a third as she goes through the final days of a long, painful illness. Karin (Ingrid Thulin), the oldest, is professional, distant and repressed; Maria (Liv Ullman) the youngest is sensual, flighty and slightly selfish. The dying Agnes (Harriet Andersson) yearns for love and affection, but is a natural outsider. Agnes is most devotedly cared for by the maid Anna (Kari Sylwan), a young woman who lost a child a few years ago. As Agnes’ final days approach, all four mull on life, their decisions and choices, each trying to grasp some understanding about the great mystery of life.

Cries and Whispers feels like a savage slash of raw pain. Perhaps no other film in Bergman hits like such a punch to the gut. In this red-lined house, everyone is silently screaming behind the whispers (literally so in Agnes’ case, the film opening with Harriet Andersson writhing in wordless agony on her bed for an almost unbearable shot held for almost four minutes). All four of these characters are carrying mountains of disappointment, despair and disillusionments on their shoulders, none of them able to see a way out of the constant grind of simply struggling through existence. You could argue that Agnes has the easiest path in death.

The overbearing red walls – not to mention the fades to ‘red-out’ that seem to drown out the faces of the four women as each stares into the camera before their own memory or dream is staged by Bergman – begins to feel increasingly like a trap. The lack of natural light adds even more to the sense that this is taking place in some sort of prison or oppressive womb, cooking up traumas. There doesn’t seem to be any escape from this pressure-cooker atmosphere (rather like the claustrophobic trappings of The Silence and Persona), with reality starting to fracture and dissolve.

It becomes clear there are decades of unspoken tensions between the three sisters. Karin and Maria seem to be tending for their system more out of duty than love: Maria sleeps through her watch, while Karin feels like a dutiful professional rather than a loving sister. There is precious little sense of intimacy between them. So much so, that both sisters will utterly reject (in a late dream sequence that topples into a nightmare) even the hint of tenderness or contact with the deceased Agnes (Maria will run, screaming, at the very idea). It’s the same between Maria and Karin, who seemingly have nothing except blood in common.

But then they could hardly be two more contrasting women. Liv Ullman is superbly multi-layered as a woman who feels at first flirtatious and light-hearted but emerges as manipulative and selfish with a rich vein of self-loathing, compensated by a malicious pleasure in hurting other people. Her sexual fascination with Erland Josephson’s aloof doctor is based less on his qualities and more on his frank deconstruction of her physical flaws, accentuated by the deep pain and distress the affair causes her husband. Similarly with Karin, she alternates between reaching out to in shared sisterly closeness, then denying she ever felt or said such things a day later.

Like other Bergman films there is dark implication of incest in the relationship between Maria and Karin. In their moments of reconciliation, their physicality (all stroking and kissing) stinks of sexuality, their unheard whispers incredibly suggestive. Is this a foul secret what that has made Karin so deeply disgusted by physical intimacy? This is after all a woman who (in a flourish where I feel Bergman goes too far) cuts her vagina with a piece of glass and defiantly smears the blood over her face in front of her husband to prevent him from claiming his conjugal rights.

Ingrid Thulin is extraordinary as Karin, a deeply repressed woman utterly bereft in the world, who secretly yearns for closeness and contact. She seems though to have a very little idea how to build emotional bridges with people, her manner reserved and cold, unable to even treat the dying Agnes as anything other than a duty. If Maria quietly delights in making people feel bad and is disturbed by feelings of warmth, Karin is unable to even begin to arouse feelings of any sort from other people. She lives in an isolation that has left her deeply unhappy.

Strangely, Agnes herself might even be the happiest – and she’s dying. Agnes is the only person Bergman allows to narrate her own flashbacks (the other three are all introduced in voiceover by Bergman himself). Beautifully played by Harriet Anderson as a woman full of hope, despite the appalling pain of her illness, she is a strange beacon of contentment. The priest at her wake (a beautifully delivered monologue from Anders Ek) even confesses he cannot help but question the strength of his own faith compared to the spirituality of Agnes. What sign is there of God in this world when he punishes with such excruciating pain the purest person in the film?

Harriet Andersson’s performance is not only almost unbearably in its raw physical commitment to pain, but also a quietly moving in its emotion. Agnes is a woman longing to be closer to her sisters – envying Maria’s closeness to their mother as a child (the mother is also played by Liv Ullman) – feeling closer to her mother only when observing her in solitary moments of pain. Her happiest memory is of the three sisters as adults, contently laughing together on a swing. This willingness to embrace love – always a matter of key importance to Bergman – singles her out from the two-faced Maria or the repressed Karin.

It also explains the link to Anna, played with a quiet observance by Kari Sylwan. Frequently silently, moving through the frame or performing duties, Anna is the only person in the house who categorically loves and respects Agnes. It’s she who cares for her, who tends her, nurses her through her pain and most readily responds to her desire for closeness. There is, in fact, a hint of sexual familiarity between the two – it’s very possible to imagine them as lovers. Do Agnes’ family recognise – and envy – that breach of distance, that leads them to offer only the smallest reward for her service and a curt dismissal after Agnes’ death?

Or are Anna’s motives as clear cut and noble as they appear? Grieving the (clearly relatively recent) death of a child, perhaps Anna uses Agnes to fill emotional holes in her own life. Her dream-like fantasy of Agnes’ after death rotates around Anna taking almost complete possession of her deceased mistress, dismissing the sisters and cradling the dying Anna in a pieta like grasp that resembles a mother and child rather than lovers. Is Anna desperately using this moment of death, just as Karin and Maria do, to fulfil longings in herself?

All these ideas are superbly explored in Bergman’s beautifully paced and powerful work, like the best of his films a hauntingly intriguing and challenging work that lingers long in the mind after it finishes. With four very different, but extraordinary performances, at its heart it may at times be a little too intellectual and Bergman may at times go a little too far, but for its extraordinary exploration of raw, vicious pain it can be hard to beat. A challenging but extremely necessary film.

American Fiction (2023)

Intelligent, challenging satire mixes with moving family drama in this excellent debut

Director: Cord Jefferson

Cast: Jeffrey Wright (Dr Thelonius “Monk” Ellison), Tracee Ellis Ross (Dr Lisa Ellison), Issa Rae (Sintara Golden), Sterling K. Brown (Dr Clifford Ellison), John Ortiz (Arthur), Erika Alexander (Coraline), Leslie Uggams (Agnes Ellison), Adam Brody (Wiley), Keith David (Willy the Wonker), Okrieriete Onaodowan (Van Go Jenkins), Myra Lucretia Taylor (Lorraine), Raymond Anthony Thomas (Maynard)

Dr Theolonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is fed up. His new book is getting no traction with publishers, who want a “Black book” not the classics-inspired literary novels Monk writes. His family life is at a point of crisis: his mother (Leslie Uggams) has rapidly onset dementia, his doctor sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) is divorced and tired of being the only child looking after her, his plastic surgeon brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) is embracing his coming-out and divorce with drugs and a parade of younger boyfriends. In need of money to pay for his mother’s care, Monk pours his frustrations into writing exactly the sort of book publishers want: My Pafology, a crime-drugs-and-deadbeat filled stereotypical low-brow “Black” novel that he submits as a joke. Needless to say, the liberal white publishers come back with bank-busting advances, wowed by this “authentic Black voice” – much to Monk’s disbelief and self-loathing indignation.

This satire is the flashy clothing American Fiction dresses itself up in. In this impressively confident debut from writer-director Cord Jefferson, it frequently pulls out some whipper-sharp comic lines as it skewers the guilt-ridden pretentions of the liberal white elite, so concerned with being seen to care about embracing Black culture, that they don’t even notice they have effectively ghettoised Black culture into exactly the sort of crime-and-drugs nonsense Monk satirises in his fake novel. It’s a good joke, and the fact that Cord Jefferson’s film wears it a bit thin (the parade of self-congratulatory white people falling over themselves to praise the novel are fundamentally reprising the same joke each time – nothing new is added once you’ve got it the first time) doesn’t change that.

Interestingly, as I sat in an Oxford cinema-screening exclusively filled with white people laughing, I realised American Fiction is its own sort of meta-satire. How many people in the cinema I sat in realised they were proving the point of the film? American Fiction displays to white people a funny sketch about our own concerns to be seen to be saying and doing the right thing. We laugh at these idiots and reassure ourselves that we would never be so utterly unaware about our patronising gate-keeping, while also embodying many of the attitudes the film is skewering. We want to be seen to be right-on and laughing at the right things. It’s a neat way for Jefferson to both entertain and challenge us.

Jefferson’s film is partly about urging us to break beyond our shallow ideas of what “Black America” must be. Monk comes from an affluent middle-class family that, skin colour aside, wouldn’t like out of place in the Hamptons. His background is one of beach-house second-homes, art on the walls, lacrosse sticks in his bedroom and a family where everyone has a doctorate. He even has a devoted housekeeper, expertly played by Myra Lucretia Taylor, who’s both an honorary aunt and also a shrewd commentary on stereotypical Black servants, calling the children “Mr Monk” and “Mr Cliff”.

While Monk writes about the urban ghetto with satiric anger, it’s clear that world is almost totally alien to him. The film itself acknowledges it: in an intriguing exchange, Issa Rae’s author of a more stereotypical ‘Black’ novel (We’s All Lives in the Ghetto) even calls out Monk for us air of class-based judgement around other parts of the Black community, social commentary I would have liked the film to challenge more (The film encourages us to question Monk, a snob and arguably a slight bully, but frequently gives him a pass by contrasting him to the ridiculous and more selfish characters around him). It would have been interesting to see more of the reaction to the book from Black readers, not just white ones eager to show their credentials.

American Fiction though takes on the targets it goes for with a certain aplomb. Publishers, literary prize givers and the overtly-but-dutifully-PC are effectively skewered. It’s also one of the few books that really gives a sense of writing. Monk’s drafting of the novel sees the characters he is bringing life to appear in his study with him, parroting his dialogue and then turning to discuss character, motivation and make suggestions to the author. More of this, giving us more insight into the novel and the assumptions that underline Monk’s writing of it, would have given an interesting extra dimension to the film’s satire.

Jefferson’s clever and vibrant film suckers us in with satire, but really flourishes as a complex family drama. He offers an affecting and compassionate storyline of siblings who have grown apart due to their natural inclination to independence, distance and repressed emotion. (It’s suggested this is a trait inherited from their father, a famed surgeon with a rollcall of infidelities.) American Fiction beautifully sketches very natural portraits of siblings who know exactly how to push each other’s buttons, but also quickly fall back onto a shared language of memories and mutual experience. For all the satire, it’s as a heartfelt, small-scale family piece that the film really excels.

This is partly because it gives such wonderful opportunities to a fabulous array of actors. Jeffrey Wright, so often a supporting player quietly adding depth to a series of under-written franchise films, is excellent as Monk. Wright perfectly captures his hangdog resentments, his bitterness at not getting a fair deal and middle-age ennui. He also brings to life the pre-emptive walls Monk has built up to keep pain (and other people) out, the same intellectual distance that makes his books hard-sells. Combine that with Wright’s expert comic timing – not only his awkwardly uncomfortable shifts into his urban persona, but also his head-in-hands exasperation at the shallowness of the world – and this is a brilliant showcase for a consistently impressive actor.

Equally fine is Sterling K Brown as Monk’s frequently selfish brother Cliff, trying to enjoy life while he can – like Wright, Brown’s comic and emotional touch are spot-on. The film touches on themes of generational homophobia – their increasingly senile mother, sensitively played by Leslie Uggams, is clearly disapproving of his sexuality – but doesn’t hit this beat too hard. Tracee Ellis Ross is a breath of life-filled air as Monk’s sister while Erika Alexander gives emotional weight and depth to a slightly underwritten part as Monk’s new neighbour turned girlfriend Coraline.

American Fiction is frequently stronger when it focuses on crafting this low-key, realistic family drama, refreshingly clear of manufactured drama. What people will remember though is funny (if slightly one-note) satire – Monk even turns his story into exactly the sort of cross-racial appeal movie ready to collect awards, that you could argue American Fiction itself is. American Fiction ends with several alternative endings, each of which just made me feel Jefferson himself wasn’t sure how to end it. But, on the whole, this is a highly promising debut from Cord Jefferson, crammed with excellent dialogue and performances, which casts a fresh and urgent eye on important questions.

The Godfather Part III (1990)

The third film in the series is a decent effort – but pales in comparison to the others

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Al Pacino (Michael Corleone), Diane Keaton (Kay Adams-Corleone), Talia Shire (Connie Corleone), Andy Garcia (Vincent Corleone), Eli Wallach (Don Altobello), Joe Mantegna (Joey Zasa), George Hamilton (BJ Harrison), Bridget Fonda (Grace Hamilton), Sofia Coppola (Mary Corleone), Raf Vallone (Cardinal Lamberto), Franc D’Ambrosio (Anthony Corleone), Donal Donnelly (Archbishop Gilday), Richard Bright (Al Neri), Al Martino (Johnny Fontane), John Savage (Father Andrew Hagen), Helmut Berger (Frederick Keinszig), Don Novello (Dominic Abbandando), Franco Citti (Calo)

Coppola wanted to call it The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. He got his wish decades later with a belated re-edit release. But at the time, the studio wasn’t having it: this would be a full-blown Third Part to The Godfather. Problem is, those are some very big shoes to step into and The Godfather Part III wasn’t the genre-defining masterpiece its predecessors was. Instead, it’s a decent, melancholic gangster film with touches of King Lear. However, when you are following the sublime being “pretty good” winds up looking like “pretty awful”. The Godfather Part III became the infamous “fuhgeddaboutit” chapter in the saga, the one for completists and those who watch out of duty. On its own merits its fine, but perhaps it was a doomed venture from the start.

It’s 1979 and Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has aged and mellowed. All his life he’s talked about getting out, and now it seems he finally has. He’s set up a charitable foundation, he’s been honoured by the Vatican and is rebuilding relationships with his children: daughter Mary (Sofia Coppola), now head of his foundation and son Anthony (Franc D’Ambrosio), an opera singer. Even Kay (Diane Keaton) is speaking to him again. Michael is grooming Vincent (Andy Garcia), illegitimate son of his brother Sonny, to take over the reins of the crime family. But then, they drag him back in. Bailing out the Vatican Bank, Michael finds is double-crossed by a collection of Euro-banking crooks, corrupt Church leaders and rival Mafiosi. Will he survive the dangers a return to Sicily will bring?

The unspoken secret of The Godfather is that everyone was always there for the money: they just also had something to prove the first two times and the fire in their bellies to turn gangster grist into cinematic beauty. Fast forward 15 years later, and there hangs an air of “give the studio what it wants” about Part III, coupled with a willingness to rest on laurels. Coppola agreed to do it because his last few films were bombs and he needed the money. Pacino demanded – and got – a massive sum. Keaton coined it. Robert Duvall asked for $1.5 million, didn’t get it and walked. Coppola agreed to turn the script around in lightening time to rush the film to the screen for the inevitable box-office and awards bonanza. No one involved really did the film for either love or passion.

Coppola’s script, written to a deadline, is torn awkwardly between two plots, neither completely satisfactory. His interest lies with the question of whether absolution (of any sort) for Michael is possible. This is the film Coppola wanted to make, but it keeps losing ground though to the other, a complex conspiracy thriller, riffing on real-life events in the Vatican. This conspiracy is frequently dense, difficult to follow and (frankly) not particularly interesting as it trudges through Papal politics and investment banking, seeming existing to provide faces for the inevitable violent montage of inventive hits.

A Part III that zeroed in on Michael himself, his guilts and shame, would have been both distinctive and unique. But The Godfather Part III fudges this. Crucially, the Michael we see here – for all he would have mellowed with age – feels very different from the cold, buttoned-down, calculating figure from the first two. Pacino – perhaps remembering the pressure of Part II that left him exhausted – invests it with more “hoo-hah”. This twinkly Michael, smiles to hide his regrets – when you feel, in reality, years of pressure would have turned him into even more of a murderous Scrooge. I also can’t believe he would be this close to his now adult children. Pacino embraces the moments of raw pain when they come, but this character just doesn’t quite mesh with his previous performances (and his hair looks just plain wrong).

The rushed production further fatally holed this personal plot below the water-line. Duvall was originally intended to serve as the film’s ‘antagonist’, the film planned as a very personal battle between the last two ‘brothers’. Duvall’s departure ripped the heart out of this script, his role redistributed between George Hamilton’s anonymous lawyer, Talia Shire’s Connie (now turned inexplicable consigliere) and Eli Wallach’s treacherous Don Altobello. None of these make any real impact. Rushed production also meant Winona Ryder dropped out of the crucial role of Michael’s daughter, Coppola taking the (disastrous) last-minute decision to cast his daughter Sofia instead.

Sofia Coppola has suffered more than enough from lacerating reviews of her performance (the level of vitriol poured on her is shocking to read today). Let’s just say, while a great director, she is no actor. But then, neither really is Franc D’Ambrosio playing her brother. Both children never become either interesting or dynamic presences. Since their relationship – and the flowering of it – with Michael is crucial to the film’s emotional impact, it’s a fatal flaw. No matter how hard Pacino works, these scenes just don’t ring true. There is no sense of decades of anger and resentment. The drama seeps out of the family scenes and Mary becomes such a flat and two-dimensional character that her impact on the other principle characters never engages.

Sofia Coppola similarly struggles in her romantic scenes with Andy Garcia, again despite his best efforts. Garcia is the best thing in the film, full of cocksure confidence and instinctive cunning, channelling the best elements of Sonny and Michael into a character we’d dearly like to see more of. His facing down of two murderous home-invading hoods is the film’s most memorable moment while Garcia also does excellent work charting Vincent’s slow acceptance of the tragic sacrifices – the killing of parts of your nature – that being ‘the Godfather’ demands. Diane Keaton is also excellent as a far more seasoned and stronger Kay than we’ve seen before.

The Godfather Part III has several fine moments, even if it never coalesces into anything more than a decent film. Coppola restages with assurance and poise versions of previous scenes from the saga – a Little Italy festival assassination, Sicilian countryside violence, an assassin surreptitiously moving through a quiet building, Kay closing a door by choice, the montage of killings – mixed with large scale moments (a helicopter attack on a crime boss meeting is the film’s most ‘action moment’). He works really hard to channel a sense of melancholy: Michael is crippled with diabetes, plagued with guilt for his brother’s death, running to stand still and do the right thing. Pacino’s strongest moments are these moments of rawer emotion: his cloister confession to the future Pope is a masterclass in letting simmering pain suddenly rush to the surface.

But The Godfather Part III always feels like a perfunctory re-heat of key moments, not quite mixed successfully with a redemption (or lack of) tale. This film needed to be a more sombre, focused story about an army of chickens coming home to roost. It needed a stronger sense of Michael desperately scrambling to bring back together the family he was so desperate to protect that he destroyed it. Instead, it’s torn between recapturing old glories and being hampered by fudged attempts to provide emotional depth, linked to a poor structure, unfortunate casting choices and lack of focus. It’s not a bad film – but it is not a great one. And for the third in the greatest series of all time, that wasn’t good enough.