Category: Coming of Age film

Lady Bird (2017)

Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalfe are mother and daughter with more in common than they think in Lady Bird

Director: Greta Gerwig

Cast: Saoirse Ronan (Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson), Laurie Metcalfe (Marion McPherson), Tracy Letts (Larry McPherson), Lucas Hedges (Danny O’Neill), Timothée Chalamet (Kyle Scheible), Beanie Feldstein (Julie Steffans), Lois Smith (Sister Sarah Joan), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Father Leviatch)

In Sacramento, California, in 2002 Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is a self-consciously assured teenager, constantly pushing to define herself as new and original, down to giving herself a new name (“Lady Bird”) and playfully enjoys pushing against the limits of what is acceptable at her Catholic school. She however butts heads with her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalfe), a hard-working nurse, supporting the family as her husband Larry (Tracy Letts) is unemployed and out-of-step skills-wise with the jobs market. Mother and daughter though are strikingly similar people, independent minded but with a streak of loving kindness.

It’s the relationship between these two characters that is the heart of Gerwig’s gently made coming-of-age (of a sort) drama. The key scenes that power the film are both the clashes and moments of fun between these two. There are feuds and angry words – but they often sit-by-side with a loving regard and a shared world perspective. Gerwig gets superb performances from both actors, with Ronan every inch the difficult teenager, full of promise but overwhelming with arrogance and mistakes that constantly hurt those around her. Metcalf is equally good as a woman weighed down with cares, who constantly makes time for others – and therefore finds her daughter’s lapses into selfishness all the more infuriating as they fly in the face of everything she values in life.

The film opens with a fight between these two that just seems to capture the moment. After a long drive to a perspective college, they finish an audiobook of The Grapes of Wrath both overcome with emotion from the stories end. Seconds after it finishes, Lady Bird goes to turn the radio on, her mother asks for a moment of reflection – and we are off from a shared emotional experience into a mother-daughter row. Setting the tone of how many of these will go – and the characters they display in the film – Lady Bird impulsively throws herself out of the car when she feels she is unable to come up with a decent comeback to a point. It’s a plaster cast she will wear for a large part of the film – and an example of the impulsive addiction to terrible decisions that seems to be constantly on the edge of ruining her friendships and chances.

A lot of this material is, to be honest, pretty standard stuff for movies of this genre. And Lady Bird herself is at times a rather irritating and even annoying lead character, one who seems to be constantly hurting people around her with very little regard for their feelings and seems to be continually forgiven regardless. Her treatment of her best friend Julie (a fine performance of endearing sweetness by Beanie Feldstein) sees her drop her and then pick her back up again with a suddenness that feels like it has missed the hurt and pain she has caused.

But then other parts work so well because the script approaches them with a quirky eye for a good joke and a sharp line. There are some very fine jokes among the script, a high point being a PE teacher turned drama director who directs his plays in the exact way he would plan out a football game. Little moments of character observation and behavioural ticks often strike home and frequently raise a smile.

But it also carries across the same observational honesty to less savoury attitudes of being a teenager. The selfishness, the feuding. Lady Bird’s sexual awakening of course happens with a self-obsessed arrogant would-be-poet aiming at a higher plane of intelligence (played with an assured arrogance by Timothée Chalamet). Lady Bird’s striving to constantly to be more or have more than she has always feels very teenager – life can’t just be what she has, she must need or be destined for greater things, or to improve in some way, to make it to the college she wants, to find some deeper meaning, to live a life that expands beyond her horizons and make her stand out.

But, the film suggests, she actually seems destined to become someone more like her mother –decent, kind, gentle, perhaps with a greater artistic calling, but fundamentally a thoughtful person. One early boyfriend – very well played by Lucas Hedges – who is revealed as unsuitable in a way not-at-all surprising when you consider he is the lead actor of the school drama group – is someone she accepts and comforts with a complete emotional openness. Her father’s travails in the job market is something she feels great empathy for. When returning to the company of her friend Julie, she is warm, caring and full of energetic affection.

It makes for a gentle and engaging film – perhaps nothing you haven’t really seen before, but presented with a lot of assurance and freshness by Gerwig, who is a director with an eye for the moving moment (a scene where Tracy Lett’s father sees his son go-up for the same job as him – a job for which the son is more qualified – is unmatched in its sad mix of acceptance and pride) and more than a taste for the eccentric comedy that brings spark to the drama. Powered by two excellent performances by Ronan and Metcalfe, Lady Bird may, like many teenagers, be difficult to like sometimes but has lots of promise.

Toy Story 4 (2019)

Woody is tempted by a new life in Toy Story 4

Director: Josh Cooley

Cast: Tom Hanks (Woody), Tim Allen (Buzz Lightyear), Annie Potts (Bo Peep), Tony Hale (Forky), Keegan-Michael Key (Ducky), Jordan Peele (Bunny), Christina Hendricks (Gabby Gabby), Keanu Reeves (Duke Caboom), Ally Maki (Giggle McDimples), Joan Cusack (Jessie)

Probably the hardest thing about making the fourth film in an acclaimed, perfectly-formed trilogy (yup) is justifying its existence in the first place. That’s basically the main task that faces Toy Story 4 – does it manage to exist without ruining the other three? And was there any need to go back to a story that had already been pretty much finished perfectly.

After the third film, Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen) and friends are now settled with their new child, Bonnie (an imaginative 6 year old). But Woody is being played with less and less, and is struggling with the adjustment from being Andy’s most important toy to becoming a little-used toy in the box. Taking it upon himself to accompany Bonnie to her first day at kindergarten, he sees her use an art-class to turn a spork into a toy – a toy that quickly comes to life as Forky (Tony Hale). As Bonnie’s parents try to ease her anxiety about starting kindergarten by taking her on a road-trip, Woody obsessively tries to train the reluctant Forky – who doesn’t want to be a toy – in how to be a favourite toy.

When Toy Story 4 rapped up, I basically said I didn’t really need to see it again. That’s quite a sad statement to make considering the original trilogy of films are so damn good. But this never really feels like it does justify its existence. Toy Story 3 finalises the whole saga so well with Woody and the other toys coming full circle, having helped Andy grow up and now being passed to Bonnie to help her deal with her childhood. It’s a beautiful, heart-warming story – and there isn’t a need to see what happens next. 

Toy Story 3 ended with Woody accepting that Andy has grown up, choosing to stay with his friends as a toy rather than going to college with Andy. But here we need to hit the reset button so that Woody is now missing Andy and his previous status – but is also in denial about this. I think there is something in this that is working towards Woody working out whether he wants to continue with a life of dedicated service or whether he wants to move on and change his life completely. Of course the scales are weighted a bit by the fact Woody is no longer a favourite toy and – worse! – is gathering dust in a cupboard. But it’s all a bit unclear and gets a bit lost.

Part of this is the amount of time given over to Forky, a rather trying and faintly irritating “comic” character, whom I could certainly have done without. He exists primarily as a motivation for Woody to remain at the funfair the road-trip gets stuck at, but the long stretch of time they spend apart means the mentor-mentee relationship the film starts with trails off and disappears for a large chunk of the film. As a mirror on Woody, the part is a failure.

In fact most of the plot gets stuck at the funfair along with the road trip, as the film introduces Gabby Gabby (voiced by Christina Hendricks) a voice-box doll from the 1950s with a misfunctioning voice box who has lived her life in an antiques store and dreams of being a real toy. Gabby’s obsessive belief that gaining a working voice-box (from Woody!) will get her the love of a child drives most of the rest of the film, a slightly rambling action-adventure that features Woody, Buzz and a gang of newly-met toys breaking in, then out, then back in to the antiques store. It’s a sprawling series of adventure scenes, that seems a million miles away from the film’s original opening of Bonnie dealing with going to school for the first time.

In fact, poor Bonnie gets almost completely shelved after the first act of the film, along with the rest of the original cast who barely appear. Jessie, Rex, Slinky Dog, Hamm and co are left “guarding the base”, hardly having any impact on the film and kept separate from Woody and Buzz for ages. Since the first three films revolved so heavily around the “family” mechanism of the group of toys, to shelve most of them into background characters seems a real shame. 

Instead the film starts to focus on Woody’s fear of being “a lost toy” – something put sharply into perspective by him re-encountering Bo Peep (Annie Potts) his sometime love-interest from films 1 and 2 (not present at all in 3). With a “nine years earlier” flashback opening the film, showing Bo Peep being gifted on to a new child, the film catches up with her having escaped from Gabby’s antiques store and now leading a free life, without a child, doing what she wants, when she wants. There is some decent chemistry between the two, but more could have been made of showing Woody slowly seeing that there are positives in not having a child as well as the negatives he has always associated it with. But like so many things in the film, with so much going on and so many new characters being introduced, the thematic issues get lost.

There is just too much plot. Essentially Forky exists to give Woody a reason to remain at the funfair. Gabby exists as an obstacle to stop them leaving. The funfair is a sort of existential trap for the heroes. But everything just bogs down the film, making the storyline increasingly top heavy. Buzz seems to have taken a step or two down in intelligence. Most of the new characters don’t engage as well as the old ones, even though Keanu Reeves has great fun as a nervous stunt toy. But the film has no economy, it gets crowded over with events.

Which is a shame as there is a simple thematic story here of Woody accepting that one stage of his life has finished and he needs to move on to the next. There was, I am sure, a way of telling this story that didn’t feature all these new characters, the confusing setting and the overlong adventure sequences. There was a way of doing this in parallel with Bonnie needing to grow up a little and start going to school. Of making it harder for Woody to think about leaving, because he has the whole family of toys with him (rather than on the sidelines). But the film doesn’t do it. It’s all too often flat footed, slow and missing the emotional target. It’s Toy Story so there are good moments. But they should have stopped at three.

Brooklyn (2015)

Saoirse Ronan excels as an Irish immigrant in the USA, torn between two loves

Director: John Crowley

Cast: Saoirse Ronan (Ellis Lacey), Emory Cohen (Tony Fiorello), Domhnall Gleeson (Jim Farrell), Jim Broadbent (Father Flood), Julie Walters (Mrs Kehoe), Brid Brennan (Miss Kelly), Eva Birthistle (Georgina), Fiona Glascott (Rose Lacey), Jane Brennan (Mrs Lacey), Jessica Paré (Miss Fortini), Emily Bett Rickards (Patty), Nora-Jane Noone (Shelia), Eve Macklin (Diana), Jenn Murray (Dolores), Eileen O’Higgins (Nancy)

In the 1950s, Irish immigrants flocked to Brooklyn to build themselves a new life. Those who made the move often found themselves torn between two worlds – the lure of the new life they were building across the water, and the pull of the land of their fathers. Brooklyn, based on a successful novel by Colm Tóibín, places this conundrum in an intensely dramatic context by making the conflicting calls on its central character as much romantic as they are emotional.

Ellis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) is our homesick young woman, eager to build a new life in America. Sponsored by kindly priest Father Flood (Jim Broadbent, with more than a passing resemblance to Tóibín) and living in the boarding house of kindly-but-no-nonsense Mrs Kehoe (Julie Walters, in a role surely written for her) she finds work in a department store and trains at night as book keeper. She meets and falls in love with a sweet Italian American plumber Tony (Emory Cohen), but when tragedy occurs back in Ireland, on her return there she is strongly drawn to her homeland and to kindly, handsome Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson). Which life will Ellis choose?

You can see why Brooklyn was so popular with Oscar voters, and why it struck such a chord with so many people. It’s reassuringly, warmly, old-fashioned, a big-hearted, brightly filmed, gorgeously mounted “woman’s picture”, the sort of story that Hollywood studios churned out in the 1940s and 1950s (you know, those sort of “who will she choose!” films). Crowley pulls the material together however with real emotional force, married with an interestingly different (if gently touched upon) theme of the immigrant experience.

Helped by a very good script by Nick Hornby, Brooklyn is not only emotionally moving but also much funnier than you might expect. Part of this is deliberate choice, expanding parts of the novel (particularly the dry humour of Mrs Kehoe, seized upon with relish by Julie Walters) that bring the funny, but also from the warmth, regard and humanity it invests its characters in. Ellis is a character so well drawn, whose feelings are so real, that we end up feeling deeply invested in her, and all the more ready to respond to her quick intelligence and dry (but gentle) wit. 

It’s a gift of a part for Saoirse Ronan, who is quite simply outstanding as a quiet, sheltered woman who grows, changes and decides to create her own destiny before our very eyes. (Helped by Hornby’s script again, which uses the Ireland-USA-Ireland structure to pinpoint many dramatic bookends and contrasts that Crowley subtly, and not forcefully, brings to the screen.) Ronan’s intelligence and her conflicting desires are clear in every scene, while her eyes seem able to communicate reserves of emotional depth. In two cultures where it isn’t easy for a woman to define her own destiny, Ronan brilliantly shows the difficulties many woman had in understanding or expressing what they want, in a world where they haven’t been set-up to think like that.

The film also doesn’t make it easier for her by making her two suitors – while radically different men – both such charming, lovely guys. Cohen’s Tony is a boyish enthusiast, full of hopes and dreams, who seems to represent everything that America has to offer Ellis. Domhnall Gleeson’s Jim is decent, honourable, kind, old-fashioned man who represents everything that she realises her Irish culture has for her – tradition, decency and a sense of self. It also speaks to how well drawn Ellis is by the film, and how deeply well-though out Ronan’s performance is, that it makes perfect sense that these two very different men would be drawn to her, and that both bring out different parts of her personality, which never feel contradictory.

It works as well because we’ve lived through everything Ellis has. She is present in nearly every scene in the film, and we see her change from a shy, scared, frightened woman on the boat from Ireland who needs to be cared for by an experienced emigrant fellow passenger (a very good cameo from Eva Birthistle) to a woman who flourishes in her new surroundings and the opportunities she is given. We need to feel that connection with her, since some of her behaviour (if it came from a man) would probably be seen as quite shabby indeed. But because we have such an understanding of her inner life – and because Ronan has such an empathetic and expressive face – we understand the reasons for her conundrum.

It’s that conundrum that lies at the centre of the film, and to be honest what dominates it. It works because it is done with such emotional truth (aided by Michael Brook’s excellent, heart-string tugging score that mixes American sounds with Irish folk to glorious affect), but the film is primarily a nostalgia romance. While it’s very setting makes you think about the immigrant life, it has very little to say really about either the cultural phenomenon or the impact it has on either the USA or Ireland (a charity Christmas meal for former Irish railway workers now all homeless is as close as it gets to talking about long-term integration). It doesn’t really matter, because the central story sweeps you up so much, but it does make the film more of a romance than the grander claims made for it by some as some sort of commentary on Irish immigration.

But there’s nothing wrong with such a handsome, romantic, emotional drama, or one that feels so reassuringly old-fashioned, even as it is made with touches of wit and confidence. Making some welcome comments on feminism, and led by Saoirse Ronan at her finest, it’s still a triumph of old-style, romantic, women’s pictures that you’d have to be pretty cold not to feel some sort of warming in your cockles by the end of it.

How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Donald Crisp and Sara Allgood raise Roddy McDowell in How Green Was My Valley

Director: John Ford

Cast: Walter Pidgeon (Mr Gruffydd), Maureen O’Hara (Angharad Morgan), Donald Crisp (Gwilym Morgan), Roddy McDowell (Huw Morgan), Sara Allgood (Beth Morgan), Anna Lee (Bronwyn), Patric Knowles (Ivor), John Loder (Ianto), Barry Fitzgerald (Cyfartha), Rhys Williams (Dai Bando), Morton Lowry (Mr Jonas), Arthur Shields (Mr Parry), Richard Fraser (Davy), Frederick Worlock (Dr Richards)

John Ford is by far-and-away best known for his Westerns, many of which are classics. So it’s a bit of a surprise that Ford always claimed the film closest to his heart was this occasionally sentimental drama about a young boy growing up in a Victorian Welsh mining town. Perhaps it was partly because, despite winning four Best Director Oscars, this was the only time Ford directed a Best Picture winner.

Following the remembrances of young Huw Morgan (Roddy McDowell), the youngest son (of several) of Gwilym Morgan (Donald Crisp), long-running foreman at the mine. The village is beautiful and life seems idyllic – until harsh economic conditions start to take their toll on the village. Wages are cut, moves towards unionisation are harshly resisted by the management, one-by-one the sons are laid off in favour of cheaper labour and the slag of the mine slowly turns the village into a dirty, stained mess. At the same time, the village is shown to be increasingly insular and judgemental, distrusting of outsiders, and suspicious of the preacher Mr Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon) and the attraction between him and Huw’s sister Angharad (Maureen O’Hara) – made worse after she marries. Huw’s youthful innocence and naivety are met with an increasing attack from reality.

Ford’s film is today a controversial choice for Best Picture – among the films it beat were The Maltese Falcon and, most strikingly of all, Citizen Kane. It’s tough for any film to hold onto the same level of public affection, when it’s widely seen to have robbed a film commonly held up as one of the best (if not the best) of all time. But How Green Was My Valley is no travesty of an Oscar-winner. On its own merits it’s a solid, impressive, sentimental piece of episodic film-making that won’t disappoint you, even if it doesn’t inspire as much as it should.

John Ford directs a handsomely mounted film, full of luscious monochrome shots. It’s a shame that the original plans for the film – to shoot on location in Wales in technicolour – were prevented by World War Two, as the sweep of the real locations would have added a real epic scope to the drama, not to mention make the decline of the village even more obvious visually. But the recreation of the Welsh mining village they planned to film in (in Malibu of all places!) is faultlessly impressive, and Ford creates a real Celtic charm in his shooting of the film.

Celtic is perhaps the key word here as, along with the location, the other thing that ended up jettisoned in the film was its Welshness. There is precious little – if anything – Welsh about this film. It contains one Welsh actor (Rhys Williams), and Ford’s cast use a parade of actors ranging from an attempt at Welsh from Crisp to an imperious mid-Atlantic drawl from Walter Pidgeon. Most actors however settle solidly for something close to Irish – and it’s pretty clear to me that Ford, proud of his own Irish heritage, basically saw this a story of the old country forcing its sons to head to the new country, in the same way his own parents emigrated. It also makes sense for casting the film – there seemed to be precious few Welsh actors in Hollywood at the time, but a parade of Irish actors. 

But look past the film’s complete lack of Welshness – not to mention its presentation of the Morgan’s family home as far more clear and spacious than it would have been in real life – and pretend this is an almost Irish story, and you can focus on the film’s strengths. Although presented with sentiment and nostalgia, How Green is actually a more coldly realistic film than that. While shot with a luscious regard for the past, the film’s themes work to undermine this as much as possible – dealing with disillusionment, depression, unemployment and societal collapse. While Huw may remember the past as being a glorious country, we can see from the tumoils of his family that it was far more complex than that.

Of his siblings, most lose their jobs at the mines and are forced to emigrate. One who remains loses his life due to the mine’s working practices. Their father buries his head in the sand, and refuses to support any moves towards unionisation or the worker’s attempt to improve their lot. The family relies totally on the mine, but by the end of the film have been more-or-less destroyed by it. Even Huw’s sister Angharad, who has a good marriage to the son of the mine owner, finds herself trapped in a loveless marriage with her affections for Gruffydd the source of cruel comment from the village. The valley may be green on the surface, but it’s far darker underneath. 

And poor Huw either doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. After struggling through bullying from a teacher at school, he finishes school and is awarded a scholarship – only to reject it in favour of remaining to work in the mine, having learned all the wrong lessons from his life (and to the horror of his father). Ford stresses Huw’s youthful naivety by not ageing up Roddy McDowell (very good) at all as Huw – Huw remains forever a 12-year-old-boy, even as events race on. It’s a neat capturing of both the older Huw (who narrates) imagination of what he was like, and also serves to stress how Huw’s nostalgia is framing the story we are seeing. It also makes Huw seem even weaker and vulnerable than he is – a shot of Huw labouring in the mine behind a seemingly giant cart hammers home his weakness – Ford shoots many scenes with low-angle lenses to make us visually emphasise with Huw and to see the world from his perspective.

How Green’s main weakness is its hesitation to commit to either the cold reality, or the hazy nostalgia that the film’s filming style uses. It lands between the two stools, wanting to tell us the truth while also wanting us to leave with a warm feeling towards the simpler times of the past. It’s perhaps not helped in this by the episodic nature of the script, which moves from event to event without much in the way of overarching narrative. It makes for a film that leans even more towards a slightly maudlin view of the past as a series of entertaining stories, which serves to cover even more the darker themes of the film.

Ford’s cast are a mixed bag. Donald Crisp is superb as the father, part imperious patriarch, part loving father – and won the Oscar. Equally good is Sara Allgood as his wife, the ideal loving mother that a son would remember, but with a spine of steel. Maureen O’Hara brings a passionate romanticism to Angharad, while Barry Fitzgerald and Rhys Williams are entertaining as a drunken trainer and his boxer protégé. Mnay of the rest of the cast though are weaker, with Walter Pidgeon rather stolid as Gruffydd and many of the actors playing Huw’s brothers reduced to balsawood under the burden of odd accents and earnest characterisation.

Ford’s film is a very good one that, if it catches you in the right mood, will certainly move you. I am not sure it caught me in the right mood on any of the occasions I saw it, but I appreciate its technical assurance and excellent direction. It fails to really find an effective balance between its darker tones and its nostalgic outlook, but it still works for all that. It’s not Welsh but it is a good film.

Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer are lovers drawn together in Call Me By Your Name

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Timothée Chalamet (Elio Perlman), Armie Hammer (Oliver), Michael Stuhlbarg (Professor Perlman), Amira Casar (Annella Perlman), Esther Garrell (Marzia), Victoire Du Bois (Chiara)

First love is a story everyone can relate to. Call Me By Your Name unfolds an engrossing early romance, where precocious 17-year old Elio (Timothée Chalamat) discovers his bisexuality through his deep attraction to his professor father’s (Michael Stuhlbarg) summer research assistant, 24-year old Oliver (Armie Hammer). An attraction which, over a long hot summer in Northern Italy in 1983, finally leads to a deep romantic and sexual bond forming between the two.

Refreshingly, Guadagnino’s film is relentlessly positive and devoid of tension or disapproval. You’d expect a romance such as this – especially a gay one – to lead to an eventual outburst of furious disapproval from someone or tear-filled remonstrations that what the couple have isn’t wrong. These are avoided completely, for something that feels intensely real and convincingly grounded, especially as it follows Elio’s stumbling attempts to identify his own sexuality and understand how his feelings affect him. 

This is also a showcase for acting, a film like this living or dying on the chemistry between the two lead actors, and Chalamet and Hammer have this in spades, suggesting from the very start a deep bond, that grows in emotional intensity. The relationship is a slow dance, with both of them blowing hot and cold at different times. Oliver’s first tentative approach is resoundingly rebuffed by Elio, only for Elio’s fascination with Oliver to grow into a deep unexpressed longing, which Oliver is nervous about responding to for a host of factors, from the age difference to his residence in Elio’s parents’ house. Even after the two come together, Elio’s confusion about his own feelings leads him to turn colder before the two finally find an equilibrium that works. 

It’s also a classic coming of age story, as Elio moves out of adolescence and into adulthood. Elio never feels like a traditional teenager in the first place, a musical prodigy and talented autodidact who seems to have read nearly everything (“Is there anything you don’t know?” Oliver jokingly says at one point after Elio explains the detailed history of a war memorial). But in other ways he is the same as any other teen: sex-obsessed and confused, spending a lot of time with two female friends who he seems to be unsure of his feelings are towards, indulging in explorative sexual fantasies and fumbled exploration of his own and others’ bodies, working out what he likes and what he doesn’t.

It leads to a superb performance from Chalamet (youngest ever nominee for Best Actor at the Oscars), who perfectly captures both the intelligence of Elio, and his confused lack of understanding of who or what he is. Chalamet’s body language – a mixture of awkward teen and assured adult, is a perfect physical expression of his part-adult, part-child psyche. Like any teenager, he’s at times selfish, greedy or plain annoying. But at many others he’s sensitive, delicate, vulnerable and desperate to express his love. Chalamet juggles all these competing emotions and hormonal drives brilliantly, and his face is a true instrument of expression, a sliding kaleidoscope of confused urges that compels your attention.

It’s a perfect match-up with Hammer, who is superb as just the sort of boisterous, confident, exciting and sexy presence you can imagine being drawn towards. But Hammer also laces Oliver with a tenderness, a concern and a gentleness beneath his joie de vive that really expands the character’s soul and makes him not just a force of vibrancy but also a genuinely lovely man. Hammer is very careful (as is the film) to avoid the possibility of Oliver being seen as a seducer, and it does this by giving him a touching restraint as well as manipulation-free openness, an honesty and an emotional freeness that helps make him more often the pursued rather than the pursuer.

Guadagnino lets this gentle love story unfold over a luscious, gorgeous Italian summer, with his camera drifting contentedly around the two lovers and their environment, as much a part of the dance of their initial attraction. The film is resolutely “in the moment” and has no flashbacks, flash forwards or any real reference to any narrative events outside of what we see on screen. It unfolds gracefully and naturally, with the camera work largely taking an unflashy but still warm view on everything we see.

Guadagnino deliberately treats much of the central romance element with reserve, avoiding too much nudity and panning discretely away from sexual encounters between the two. (I will say though, that he has no such reserve with Elio’s heterosexual encounters, where female nudity and sex are shown in full.) It does successfully preserve a sense of innocence and purity in the relationship – and keeps the focus on the fact that this love between the two is about them becoming better people, who understand themselves better, through the relationship. 

This positive message is reinforced by the acceptance of Elio and Oliver from all in the film, including Elio’s parents. Michael Stuhlbarg in particular has a scene near the end of the film of wonderful power – cementing his status from this film as a dream dad – with a speech to his son so full of acceptance, encouragement and love that you’ll feel your heart melt. Both Elio’s parents are very aware of the relationship and tacitly encourage it: according to this film at least, if you’re young and gay, growing up in a Bohemian, academic household does make your life easier! (Even Oliver comments that Elio has no idea how lucky he is.)

This film is also refreshing for its lack of casualties. Sure the two girls Elio and Oliver flirt with are disregarded swiftly, and the film gives only a little time to their rather shabby treatment, but generally it’s a film about learning who you are by spending time with someone else. And if that includes a few moments of teen awkward sexual exploration that are almost unbearable to watch (a scene with a curious Elio and a peach is a case in point, replete with queasy sound effects) then so be it.

Call Me By Your Name is a terrific coming-of-age tale, emotionally honest, true and mature and directed with a graceful ease and unshowy skill that is a testament to the deep confidence and grace of its director. With two superb performances and some excellent support work, it’s a glorious summer movie of love that will speak to you regardless of sexuality.

Dead Poet's Society (1989)

Robin Williams is an inspirational teacher (is there any other type in films?) in Dead Poet’s Society

Director: Peter Weir

Cast: Robin Williams (John Keating), Robert Sean Leonard (Neil Perry), Ethan Hawke (Todd Anderson), Josh Charles (Knox Overstreet), Gale Hansen (Charlie Dalton), Norman Lloyd (Headmaster Gale Nolan), Kurtwood Smith (Mr Perry), Dylan Kussman (Richard Cameron), James Waterson (Gerard Pitts)

“Oh Captain, My Captain!” Your feelings for Dead Poet’s Society are probably directly linked to how you react to that desk-standing ending. A triumph of emotional film-making? Or garishly over-sentimentalised nonsense? I’ll go for the latter myself, as I found myself non-plussed and unengaged with this conventional “idealistic teacher changes lives of young boys” story. Seen it all before. 

In 1959 at elite, all-male prep school Welton Academy, four young students (Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles and Gale Hansen) are surprised by the unorthodox teaching methods of their new English teacher, Welton Academy old boy John Keating (Robin Williams). Rather than teach the stuffy, facts based curriculum, Keating encourages the boy to use their hearts and minds, to be creative and above all to carpe diem as much as they can. The boys start an illicit poetry club (?) and begin to explore their own artistic leanings – but their conservative parents and school won’t stand for this challenge of the orthodox and when tragedy strikes it’s Keating who gets the blame.

Dead Poet’s Society already feels a bit dated, and it’s story line treads all too familiar ground of fusty seniors struggling to understand the artistic stirrings of the youngsters inspired by the sort of maverick inspirational teacher that everyone at one time or another has dreamed of being. Naturally of course (as per the rules of films) all the other teachers are either cynical, disinterested or box tickers. For a genuine artist like Weir, I was struck by how plodding this film was in its story and construction and also its ideas and themes. It’s a struggle between generations played out at a point in history where the cultural revolution of the sixties was just about to happen. These ideas were already over twenty five years old when the film was made – and this adds nothing really too the mix.

Instead we get the standard tropes we might expect, as the students play out expected and predictable plots. Nervy Ethan Hawke, at first too shy to speak, finds the courage to express himself. Josh Charles sets out to woo the girl he loves (at times this is more than a little creepy). Proto-rebel (and no doubt soon to be sixties activist) Gale Hansen begins bucking authority and writing scurrilous articles for the School newspaper. And Robert Sean Leonard begins to defy his domineering father’s wishes to focus solely and exclusively on a medical career by landing the part of Puck in a local play and dreaming of a career in the theatre.

Despite the focus of much of the film’s promotion (and in people’s memories) on Robin Williams’ central performance, the story line is all about these boys. And I will say there are some fine performances from these four principles – three of whom went on to have notable careers. Particularly fine is Robert Sean Leonard, who gets a meaty pile to play with as a young adolescent who lacks the courage to tell his father what he really feels and carries all this with a confidence and assurance (even though his Puck performance is hardly the work of genius the film insists it is!).

It’s unfortunate that most of what they do is the totally expected collection of school yard clichés, which builds towards an inevitable and predictable, sad, sentimental, ending. Keating is the standard inspirational teacher, given to flights of fancy and eccentric touches (tearing pages from books, leading the boys in sports designed to build their poetry skills, encouraging the boys skilfully to recite their own poetry) that will either leave you wishing you had him as a teacher or leave you cold. 

Watching it now, and seeing Keating interact with his students, you can’t help but feel his increasing closeness with the boys, his encouraging them to call him “Captain” (in one skincrawling moment he doesn’t even turn around when walking until one of them addresses him as this!), his taking them to plays, his obvious favouring of a few key students would all contribute to him struggling to get CRB cleared. I actually found his character rather grating, although the film does use a good few moments to underline how Keating rebukes the boys for their more thoughtless and pointless acts of rebellion and how he urges Neil to gain the support of his father before acting.

Nothing particularly wrong with Robin Williams performance though, even though the thing you feel impressed people the most was this most energetic of funny men restraining himself in a relatively straight and low-key part. It’s a role several actors could have taken on just as well, but Williams does a sound job.

It’s a shame that the film itself is so deeply bland. Its later sentimental touches become increasingly heavy handed and overbearing, and it’s parable of betrayal and corruption in a 1950s school hits its points equally hard. There is nothing really fresh or unique here, and the film itself never brings its story to life in a way that feels fresh or unique. It’s a film widely loved, but to be honest for the uninitiated has more than enough moments of weakness for you to want to check out of this class.

The Falling (2014)

Florence Pugh and Maisie Williams deal with tedious coming-of-age antics in The Falling

Director: Carol Morley

Cast: Maisie Williams (Lydia Lamont), Maxine Peake (Eileen Lamb), Monica Dolan (Miss Alvaro), Greta Scacchi (Miss Mantel), Mathew Baynton (Mr Hopkins), Florence Pugh (Abigail Mortimer), Joe Cole (Kenneth Lamont), Lauren McCrostie (Gwen)

Any film set in an all-girls school that succumbs to hysteria, with ominous goings-on that might be supernatural or might all be allegories for coming of age and emerging sexuality, is inevitably going to get compared with Picnic at Hanging Rock. But few films seem to be so desperate to be that film as The Falling does. 

Set in an all-girls school in 1969, at the cusp of the sexual revolution that will soon engulf the whole country, Lydia Lamont (Maisie Williams) and her elder brother Kenneth (Joe Cole) are both obsessed with Lydia’s charismatic classmate Abigail Mortimer (Florence Pugh) – feelings of emotional and sexual dependency that Abigail knowingly encourages and flirts with. After Abigail’s sudden death connected to her pregnancy, Lydia becomes increasingly disruptive at the school and finally becomes “patient zero” in an epidemic of fainting that afflicts the school.

Based on a true story, you can tell that this film is keen to conjure up some sort of deep-rooted mystery at the heart of the girls’ actions, questioning whether they were truly in control of their own actions at this time or under the influence of something else. Is this linked directly to the tragic fate of Abigail – is she in some way possessing the girls, driving them towards this fainting? Or is the fainting just a sort of acting out, as Lydia tries to get over her grief at the loss of her friend?

Frankly, who really cares? It’s pretty hard to get invested in a film that is working so hard to be meaningful that it overshoots the mark and just becomes tiresome. Yeah I get it, teenage relationships can have this unhealthy intensity to them. They can spin out into self-destructive elements. And maybe, if the film had focused more on that rather than trying to suggest some unsettling mystery it might have got further. But with every shot of the British countryside around the school, or the lingering shots on the girls writhing on the floor, or the unsettled terror of the teachers, you feel the film’s attempt to invest these events with meaning.

What you actually end up feeling, throughout this overlong and puffed up film, is impatience at the indulgence of these children. Far from a mystery, the fainting appears to be a tiresome, attention-seeking effort from young girls unable to express and process emotionally the things that have happened to them. There isn’t a single element of the film that makes you seriously consider some ghostly or psychical explanation for the events – they seem, clearly and throughout, to be manufactured by the girls involved. It’s hard to watch it without unsympathetically suspecting that if the adults around them stopped indulging all this nonsense, they’d miraculously recover soon enough. It’s possible to speculate over whether the girls are doing it deliberately or if this is the work of their overwrought subconscious – but while that could form a good premise for a film interested in group psychology, this film seems more interested in pretentious shots of trees. 

As if realising halfway through that it’s not come up with anything compelling yet, the film hastily throws in a poorly developed incest plotline, which is unsettling, illogical, and springs from nowhere. Not content with that, it then shoe-horns a rape into the backstory of a character late on, in a way that is clearly meant to be a dark reveal, but is in fact a really clumsy “obviously this caused all the problems” solution to the questions of the film. The character’s mental health problems and inability to bond with her closest family could have made for a complex and challenging character (and she’s certainly played by an actor who could’ve handled that material). Instead, rape is casually chucked in as a glib explanation for “oh and this is why she’s troubled – ta-da”. It’s cheap and lazy. But then that is on a par with all the sexual awakening content of the film, which is clumsy, clunky and often misguided. It wants to suggest an unsettling fascination with sex, and tie that in with dangerous, subversive ideas. Instead, it just ends up looking like standard teenage experimentation, filmed with a certain amount of style.

This is not to say the film is badly made as such. It looks good and it’s put together well. It’s just trying way too hard. The acting is very good. Maisie Williams is never anything less than watchable as Lydia, and creates a well-drawn character as a girl who goes from easily-led hero worshipper to the troubled centre point of disruption at the school. Florence Pugh is also a revelation as Abigail – a charismatic presence that you instantly believe would be obsessed over by everyone who knows her. Joe Cole is also very good as the creepy, sexually exploitative brother. There are some good performances from the adults, not least Maxine Peake as Lydia’s nervous, agoraphobic mother. 

But none of this cancels out the laboured pretension of the rest of the film, which always wants to let you know how clever it is, and how much it wants you to question the impact of all that dark sexual awakening. Instead, for all the sturm und drang,it ends up looking rather like a collection of silly girls who are acting out. The idea that obsession with Abigail draws rebellious and transgressive feelings from Lydia seems painfully obvious and unoriginal, and the flirtation with incest, rather than invested with meaning, instead feels like a film straining to shock.

The Falling wants to be a great cult classic. Neither of those words can be applied. It’s a well-made but empty spectacle, living in the shadow of other much better films. For all the skill of Maisie Williams and Florence Pugh, it misses the greater depth it is aiming for and settles for being a rather shrill would-be ghost story and a plodding attempt at social commentary.

School of Rock (2003)

Jack Black triumphs in high-school comedy School of Rock

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Jack Black (Dewey Finn), Joan Cusack (Principle Roz Mullins), Mike White (Ned Schneebly), Sarah Silverman (Patty DiMarco), Miranda Cosgrove (Summer Hathaway), Joey Gados Jnr (Zack Mooneyham), Kevin Clark (Freddy Jones), Rebecca Brown (Katie), Robert Tsai (Lawrence), Maryam Hassan (Tomika), Caitlin Hale (Marta), Brian Falduto (Billy)

The early 2000s saw the rise of a new force in American comedy films: rotund, rock ‘n’ roll, John Belushi-light Jack Black. Following his breakout role as a music-obsessive with purist tastes in High Fidelity, School of Rock saw the legend of Jack Black hit its peak. And it deserves to, as School of Rock is the sort of perfectly-formed treat that achieves everything it sets out to do.

Dewey Finn (Jack Black) is the sort of slacker man-child beloved of indie filmmakers, who has never grown up from his dreams of being a rock star. The only thing really holding him back? Fate and his own selfishness. Dewey’s expelled from his own band, due to his penchant for extended guitar solos and distracting stage antics, and his old bandmate-turned-respectable-supply-teacher, Ned Schneebly (Mike White, also the film’s writer) is pressured into finally asking Dewey for his share of the rent by Ned’s domineering girlfriend Patty (Sarah Silverman). Desperate for money, Dewey impersonates Ned and takes a role as a supply teacher for a group of 12-year-olds at a prep school. At first Dewey just wants to leave the kids to their own devices and pick up his cheque – but when he hears his new students in their music classes, he suddenly has a brainwave: they could be his new band, and help him win The Battle of the Bands competition. 

School of Rock is an immensely heart-warming film that manages to never sell out to become sentimental or depend on its characters learning “lessons” that improve them. Sure lessons are learned, and the film is very sweet, but it manages to wear this all with a cool lightness. In fact the whole film becomes a rather touching paen to the transformative power of music, and the way it gives people confidence and a voice. 

Linklater directs with a breezy cool, drawing some fantastic performances from the whole cast (I can’t give enough praise to a director who gets such relaxed, natural and funny performances from children as Linklater does here) and totally embracing the clichés of the “inspirational teacher” genre, with a comedic bent. The kids are the expected combination – the precocious ambitious one, the shy ones who hide skill, the brash wannabe bully who finds the joy of being part of the group – but they are all portrayed with such freshness and energy that the clichés hum with joy.

Linklater’s real stroke of genius is letting Jack Black rip in the lead role. The part is so perfectly tailored to Black that it feels like almost an extension of his own personality. Black is a force of nature in the role, a perfect combination of showboating and carefully thought out character work – and he works brilliantly with the kids. He’s hilarious as well, first as a wannabe rock star layabout, later as a band leader for the kids who discovers in himself a work ethic and ability to inspire. 

The character works because, deep down, under the selfishness and laziness, Dewey is basically a pretty decent guy. He cares about people’s happiness and he has a romantic view of rock and roll as a source of self-expression and celebration of life. (Although fortunately for the film, he’s no fan of the whole drugs side of many of the musicians he worships – having no time for the “poseurs” who attempt to impress the kids with the smoking and gambling at one Battle of the Bands audition.) And he’s so passionate about this that he can actually turn himself, if not into a teacher, at least into the sort of inspiring mentor who can bring his students out of their shells.

And he does this without really changing fundamentally who he is. Sure he’s touched by the kids, just as he’s touched them (to slightly misquote the film’s cheeky paedophile misunderstanding gag, when Dewey is busted by his charges’ parents!), but the warmth under the bluster is there all the time. And Dewey doesn’t suddenly turn into a high achiever or perfect guy – he just learns to channel his enthusiasm into encouraging musical skills in others (and there is something really sweet in his genuine, warm enthusiasm for talent from the very start). The film even allows the headmistress of the school (very well played by Joan Cusack as an under-pressure uptight woman yearning to cut lose a little) to be a spiritual ally and well-meaning obstacle rather than an opponent.

It’s this good natured warmth that runs through the whole film, and which at the end finds every character contented and united. (Well nearly every character – the film can’t shake its love of wistful man-childishness sufficiently to resist turning Ned’s girlfriend into a humourless, nagging shrew, in the film’s only real misstep). Plus the film rocks really well, and seeing the band together and perform is both fun and really sweet. No one puts a foot wrong here, and a lot of its success is due to Linklater’s ease and Black’s dynamic, verging just the right side of cartooney, comic tour-de-force at the centre.

The Book Thief (2013)

Sophie Nelisse is The Book Thief in this worthy, dull adaptation

Director: Brian Percival

Cast: Geoffrey Rush (Hans Hubermann), Sophie Nélisse (Liesel Meminger), Emily Watson (Rosa Hubermann), Nico Liersch (Rudy Steiner), Ben Schnetzer (Max Vanderberg), Heike Makatsch (Liesel’s mother), Barbara Auer (Ilsa Hermann), Roger Allam (Death)

Every year you get prestigious film versions of novels that have soared up the bestseller lists. Some of these are good or even great films. Other are so lifeless, listless and lacking in spirit they leave you wondering what on earth people got so fussed about the original for. That’s the case here with The Book Thief.

In late 1930s Munich, young Liesel (Sophie Nélisse) is fostered with a local decorator Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and his wife Rosa (Emily Watson). Liesel has a fascination with books – despite not being able to read and write – and soon Hans is teaching her literacy. Liesel has a compulsion to “borrow” books – first from a burning pile of Nazi forbidden tomes, then from the library of the wife of the local mayor. But it’s dangerous to draw too much attention to the family, particularly when they are hiding a young Jewish man, Max (Ben Schnetzer). 

I’ve not read The Book Thief. I can’t say that I feel the need to dash out and do so after this bland, middle of the road picture that makes Fascist Germany seem very picturesque. The film largely fails, like so many films before it, to translate the joy of reading into a visual language so the whole “book thief” concept of the title quickly gets pushed to the margins in favour of a series of episodic events based around Nazi Germany and Second World War tropes that already feel a bit tired. 

Percival’s award-baiting film doesn’t seem like it wants to bring (or is capable of bringing) something unique or interesting to the setting, instead going through the motions as prettily as possible. And the film does look great, I will give it that. It also sounds pretty damn good, not least through a playful and rich score from John Williams (his first original score for a non-Spielberg film for decades). But it never really gets anything special from the content. In fact, that very chocolate-box beauty of the film seems to run contrary to the setting of Nazi Germany. The awards-friendly beauty envelops the film like treacle.

The book was written from the prospective of Death, but, the film seems to drop this unique aspect as soon as it possibly can. Again, it’s a sign that the film cannot reproduce what worked in the book – by stripping out its most unique and interesting point, it makes the film feel as generic as it possibly can. Roger Allam is a wonderful choice as the richly voiced narrator – but he’s so rarely used in the film that when Death talks about how fascinating he found Liesel you are simply left wondering why. 

In fact that why is a real problem with the film – it’s what you’ll be asking all the way through. Why? Why is anything really happening? Why is Death telling us how different and striking this story is when everything we see in the film feels pretty familiar? What is the point of this film or the message it is trying to give us? For a film that tackles war, fascism, persecution of the Jews, and childhood innocence, it seems empty all the time.

And that’s the problem with the film. It’s all about the pretty presentation. The characters speak with forced German accents that make it feel even more like a pretty Hollywood Golden Age film. (By the way the bad Germans, like the Nazis, they speak only in German. Make of that what you will.) The acting is pretty good, Sophie Nélisse is a great find as the heroine. But there is nothing special about it at all. It’s seemingly made entirely as a prestige product for potentially winning Oscars. Any of the depths of uniqueness of the book seems to have been shaved off in service of that, and we’ve been left with a chocolate box that feels like it’s lacking the sweet richness you’d expect to find in it.

À Bout de Souffle (1960)

Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo get obsessed with their own images in À Bout de Souffle

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo (Michael Poiccard), Jean Seberg (Patricia Franchini), Daniel Boulanger (Police Inspector Vital), Henri-Jacques Huet (Antonio Berruti), Roger Hanin (Carl Zumbach), Jean-Pierre Melville (Parvulesco), Liliane David (Lilane)

The French New Wave emerged from a group of film critics from influential magazine Cahiers du cinema in the 1960s, led by Francois Truffaut (who contributed a four page story outline to this film, although Godard later minimised his contribution as much as possible). The movement believed the director was the “author” of the film, stamping their personality on it. Packed with references to classic Hollywood movies, the films were shot with an improvisational lack of formality (that often hid brilliant cinematic technique) inspired by Italian neo-realism.

Breathless, Jean-luc Godard’s revolutionary masterpiece, was one of the central films in this school of filmmaking. It followed the last few days of Michael Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo). A young man drifting through a life of petty crime, who idealises Humphrey Bogart’s style, he one day steals a car; it happens to have a gun in it, and in a moment of casual indifference he shoots a policeman trying to arrest him and flees. In Paris, while being hunted by the police, he reunites with his girlfriend, American student Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), and their self-absorbed relationship plays out under the shadow of the police net getting tighter and tighter.

Jean-Luc Godard’s film was hugely influential, as it seemed to re-write the rules of how films were to be made. Godard’s film is down and dirty, it’s almost guerrilla, but filmed with a wonderful, improvisational beauty. Shots are hand-held and dynamic, the action is all filmed on location, the framing is rough and ready, the camera gets up close and personal with the actors, throwing us in with them with an overwhelming sense of realism. The whole film feels irreverent, casual and cool, and gets a wonderful sense of urban Paris. It magnifies and reflects the very qualities the lead characters believe they have themselves.

Godard’s most influential touch was the use of jump cuts within scenes, with action jumping from moment to moment within a scene seemingly spontaneously, giving an impression of constant movement and ripping out the sense of time between actions. It also gives a sense of the film always driving forward, bouncing from beat to beat. According to rumour, this influential use of editing was a happy accident. The original cut of the film was well over two hours, and the distributors wanted something less than 90 minutes. Rather than cut whole scenes, Godard cut the small moments of movement or peace in scenes, giving the film a jagged freshness.

The whole film is full of these moments, the jumps over silences and conversational gaps, jumps in time lags between walking from point A to point B. It really works as well. The exterior scenes buzz with an exciting freshness. The long second act, basically nothing more than a conversation in a bedroom between the two leads, is edited almost like an action scene in a modern film – perfect for the self-dramatising energy the two characters are leading their lives with.

It’s those two leads who really help to make the film. Seberg picked up a quarter of the film’s budget to be the “name” lead, and she brings the film a soulful but distant sense of coolness. Belmondo was the real find, turning himself overnight into a mega star. In the sixties these were the people that your cool student wanted to be. Belmondo nailed his sense of iconoclastic cool in the opening moments – particularly when turning casually to the camera while driving his stolen car, to involve us personally in the story of his own life that he is constructing.

You can see how the performances (and characters) of the two leads had such impact on filmmaking. Energetic but also listless, contemptuous of authority and certain that whatever the world has in store for them it is definitely something more, self-absorbed and selfish, immature and convinced that their lives are more important that the average people around them – they are the predecessors of Bonnie and Clyde, of the young killers in Badlands. And nothing seemed to capture the counter-culture cool than Belmondo with a cigarette dangling from this mouth, apeing Bogart. 

But both lovers are equally selfish and obsessed with their own stories. Or rather, self-consciously living their lives like they are in a narrative – in fact you could say that the film predicts the self-obsession of the social media age. Michael lives a life that is all an entirely constructed front. He’s a would-be gangster, with a carefully studied front of gritty cool. He spends endless time making sure that his look, his clothes, his postures, his manners are always spot-on. He constantly keeps up a stream of consciousness narrative about his own life and situation, positioning himself as the sort of representative of modern American hip.

And Patricia is the same. Although at first she seems the more natural and grounded of the two, it’s clear her self-obsession is just as profound (if not more so) than Michael’s. Patricia constantly reviews and rebuilds the narrative of her own life, discussing her romantic life like it was a carefully constructed fiction, or some sort of hyper-cool Mills and Boon. “Do I love you? Should I love you? Can I make myself not love you?” Patricia’s construction of her own narrative – and her desire to shape and control it completely – makes her as completely artificial as Michael is. 

She’s so determined to construct her own narrative, that she shrugs off a string of revelations about Michael as if they didn’t exist. He’s a killer? Okay. He’s got at least two names? Hardly matters. He’s married? Nobody’s perfect. When deciding to betray Michael to the authorities, the action seems almost motiveless, but it quickly becomes clear that it is led by her latest review of the life situation and deciding it’s not what she wanted. Surrendering Michael to the law is her chance to say “No, I shape the story here – and I get to control who I feel love for, no one else”. By betraying Michael she is cutting a part of a life narrative out like she was removing a tattoo, something that she is not sure she wants any more but finds hard to remove.

One area where I do struggle with the film now is the attitude it has to its heroes. I think it wants us to kind of admire Michael – for all his faults – as some sort of unconventional hero looking to lead his life. I struggle to feel the engagement with a guy who is literally a murderer as much as the film wants me to – but I think this is the result of a major change from the more rebellious 1960s, to our changed times today. But then I’m also not sure that the film has as much heart as it wants to have – its characters are so consciously artificial that you never really get a sense of them as human beings. They are always characters, never people – and the film is always focused on their constructed images rather than anything real for you to invest in. There is much to admire, and not much to love.

And that doesn’t change the influential nature of the film. While it’s easier to admire the film than to love it – for all the strength of the performances, the characters are selfish fantasists – and its technical achievements sometimes distance as much as they throw us into the action, it’s still brilliantly put together. It’s masterfully made, and while I’m not sure it really has any heart, it’s got enough energy, force and urgency to make dozens of films.