Category: Directors

Digger (2026)

Loud, self-important, pretentious, smug and crude satire that is also a satire on itself. Terrible.

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Cast: Tom Cruise (Digger Rockwell/Curtis Markson), Riz Ahmed (Dr Nirav Ganesh), John Goodman (President Compson), Sandra Hüller (Emma Rockwell), Michael Stuhlbarg (Vice President Eddie), Jesse Plemons (Kenny), Robert John Burke (General Fitzgerald), Emma D’Arcy (Lina), Burn Gorman (General Amos), Sophie Wilde (Hannah), Pip Torrens (AG Schumer), Corey Johnson (Admiral Jacobs), Stephen Wight (Rev Moore)

Somewhere along the line, Digger must have felt like an incredible idea. As the world almost literally boils over the summer, you can imagine Hollywood thinking: “people must be crying out for a satire on climate change!” Throw in the mega-wattage star power of Tom Cruise – with the added novelty of the svelte action-star in enough old-age make-up to make him look like a oligarch Oscar the Grouch – and lauded two-time Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu calling the shots, no wonder $150 million was thrown at this. Perhaps it would have been better for the environment if that cash had just been sent to a charity.

Digger at first seem to be about unscrupulous, ruthlessly ambitious oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), whose Drill-Baby-Drill attitude to the Arctic leads to a cataclysmic natural disaster and massive ice shelves drifting towards Europe and North America like naval cruise missiles. Amazingly, Digger is the most competent person in the US administration (led by John Goodman’s Trump-esque President) trying to deal with the fall-out. But wait! There’s more. Because the Digger story is actually an elaborate theatrical production (Fossil Fools) being staged in the post-apocalyptic future Digger caused, with Cruise also playing the perfectionist lead actor, complaining about the lack of subtlety in the satire he’s performing.

Yup that’s right. Iñárritu’s film is both a loud, brash, shouty satire and a satire of loud, brash, shouty satires. Is this a good combination? Not really. The actual satire itself is neither particularly funny, insightful or entertaining. (Digger is like Dr Strangelove if every role was played like George C Scott’s Buck Turgidson). The framing device is ponderous, boring, adds very little and makes smug, intellectual points about how art can be hijacked by the wealthy to push an agenda but can still be an important cathartic outlet for emotion, but is still an inadequate response to world-shattering events. In other words, Digger spends most of its time shouting at you, then takes the odd breather to tell you off for watching the film itself. It’s so smug and full of itself, and been such a financial disaster, it’s not a surprise that a counter-wave of fans is now trying to claim it as a misunderstood masterpiece, rather than a complete dog’s dinner.

Digger feels rather like it brings together all the worst, most tiresome elements of Iñárritu’s back catalogue to the screen. We get the self-satisfied theatrical ‘satire’ from Birdman, the portentous self-importance of Babel, the ponderous pontificating and oblique mysticism of Bardo and the whizzy, show-off spectacle of both. All washed down with the feeling that the film is judging you the whole time, while patting itself on the back for its own audacity.

I can’t even begin to tell you how annoyingly ‘cake-ist’ it is to be a shrill, noisy, crude satire stuffed with stereotypes and also try to pre-empt any criticism of this by commenting about it in-universe itself. That in-universe commentary also tries to make on-the-nose big business points, as the play transpires to be funded by Digger’s nephew (played by Jesse Plemens). Plemens character claims it’s an apology, but seeing as he also runs an all-powerful tech company it’s actually clear the entire enterprise is an arts-washing exercise for his reputation. If Digger wasn’t trying to do a million things badly, this would be a good point. Instead its as pretentious as everything else.

The spectacle of Digger is well-done I’d give it that. (So it should be, considering the millions of dollars spent on it – I dread to think what environmental cost). Much like Birdman felt like it had been made so Iñárritu could show he could do a whole film in what looked like one take, so Digger looks like it’s been made to showcase how he can merge a theatrical and a cinematic world into one, with sets and locations branching into each other, and the strings (literally so on the scale models) skilfully shown.

That’s impressive. It’s impressive in Birdman, even though the rest of the film spends chunks of its time being pleased with itself and telling you off (very similar to this). But everything in Digger is preaching to the choir, with nothing fresh or interesting to say to build the congregation. The American powers-that-be are trigger-happy, Bible-bashing morons who don’t give a damn about anything outside their own needs. They’re all dialled up to elevem preening macho male egotists, with thinly veiled racist, sexist and homophobic views. John Goodman’s bombastic President is a moronic narcissist dying of “ass cancer” who believes his fate and the world’s are the same.

Saying this, Cruise throws himself into this world with the sort of commitment you’d expect from an actor you suspect is not a million miles from the back-seat driving perfectionist actor he also plays. He’s big, loud and giving it everything. If the film has any moments of merit, they are his. In particular, its set-piece scene where an unapologetic Digger bombastically informs the European parliament that they may claim they want eco-politics, but they are addicted to his black gold. Although its easy to think Digger is basically a self-important reprise of Tropic Thunder’s Les Grossman it’s all acting with a capital A, and the make-up, accent and inverted modesty of a buff athlete disguising himself as a paunchy geriatric in crappy cardigans is all part of that. But it’s all caricature of bangs and flashes – and that fact that, in his other role, Cruise tell us this repeatedly doesn’t change the truth.

What really stands out here is that neither Cruise nor Iñárritu are particularly funny. At least the equally tiresome Don’t Look Up was made by people who knew how a joke works. Digger resorts more often than you might think, to vomit, food splatting and bowel movements for humour. In its ‘real world’ framing device, there is bugger-all lightness of touch either, the film constantly whacking us in the face with points about everything from environmentalism to politics to business to art. What also feels a bit bizarre about Digger is that it still needs to position Cruise as something of a hero: Digger, for all his monstrous greed, is competent and you almost admire his self-belief; Markson is a principled artiste, tortured with worry about his missing daughter.

I’m not even sure what the main point Digger wants us to take out of all this. Is it saying we are drifting, indifferently, towards destruction? That even in the future, the people watching this show are being distracted from what’s really going on around them by something bright and shiny? Or is it focused on how our shallow and selfish world today isn’t willing to do anything to stop a calamity? Or is gunning for the greed of the super-rich smashing everything? I guess it’s some combination of all of these, but the sledgehammer wit is so on the nose, you can’t be bothered to work it out.

Digger is a mighty, stinking mess, full of smug self-satisfied flash but in reality pulling the threads of the few ideas it’s made from as tightly as possible around itself to hide its nakedness. It also makes me believe, more strongly than ever, that Iñárritu might just be the most tiresome, flashy, faux intellectual of all the modern great directors.

The Long Voyage Home (1940)

Ford’s stylistic triumph is weak on narrative but strong on expressionist visual beauty

Director: John Ford

Cast: John Wayne (Olsen), Thomas Mitchell (Driscoll), Ian Hunter (Smitty), Barry Fitzgerald (Cocky Stuart), Wilfrid Lawson (Captain), John Qualen (Axel Swanson), Mildred Natwick (Freda), Ward Bond (Yank), Arthur Shields (Donkeyman), Joseph Sawyer (Davis), J.M. Kerrigan (Crimp)

John Ford is most associated with the grand vistas of the West. But ask him what film he really admired, and he was likely to answer FW Murnau’s Sunrise. The atmospheric beauty of the only ever winner of the Oscar for Unique and Artistic Picture inspired Ford to make this adaptation of four one-act Eugene O’Neill plays. The look and feel was so important to Ford, he even willingly shared his title card with photographic maestro Gregg Toland. The Long Voyage Home is not always a film of outstanding narrative, but it can claim to be possibly the most visually striking film Ford ever made.

The story focuses on the crew of the British merchant ship Glencairn, making its way from the West Indies back to England during the Second World War. Captained by a distant skipper (Wilfrid Lawson), the moral leader of the mostly Irish crew is boisterous, good-natured Driscoll (Thomas Mitchell). His shipmates include genial young Swede Ole Olsen (John Wayne), brooding, suspicious Englishman Smitty (Ian Hunter), trouble-maker Cocky (Barry Fitzgerald), burly bruiser Yank (Ward Bond) and timid Swede Axel (John Qualen). During the voyage, tragedy will occur, suspicion of treachery will fall on Smitty and Olsen will struggle to return to his family after ten years away.

The Long Voyage Home mashes the plots of these four O’Neill play into one loose narrative (and it is very loose), where you can almost see the joins as we progress from one play to another. But O’Neill loved the end result – he claimed to have watched his print of the film so often it wore out. Essentially, every twenty-five minutes or so, a new crisis or plot point kicks off and runs its course towards a (usually) tragic ending, all of which serves as a neat reminder that serving at sea is a tough life with more than a few perils, made even worse when you do it during war time.

But The Long Voyage Home is really an impressionistic Murnau film populated by the sort of amiable, good-natured, hard-drinking, quick-to-fight-quick-to-laugh Irishmen Ford loved. It’s a sort of Quiet Man Goes to Sea (a double gag now, since Wayne is the quietest man in it), with Thomas Mitchell’s larger-than-life mix of sentimental affection and roaring, fist-throwing joi d-vivre driving the narrative. It’s Driscoll who smuggles on Caribbean lovelies and alcohol for the crew before departing the West Indies, leads the way in any fights, but also comforts the dying and casts a fatherly arm over those in need. He’s the heart in Ford’s experiment in pushing the stylistic envelope.

It’s a very successful pushing, because The Long Voyage Home looks fabulous. This is possibly some of the finest photographic work Gregg Toland ever did – on the basis of this, Welles decided Toland was the man for Citizen Kane. From its opening, Long Voyage Home is a sumptuous collection of moody, fog-filled shots, where streaks of light cast powerful shadows over multiple scenes. Toland opens with a deep focus shot of the ship at sea, with West Indian women foregrounded from the opening and moves from there to mist being sliced through by searchlight torches to reveal the ship.

It’s a stylistic benchmark the film maintains throughout. Only Ford and Toland may have been brave enough to use light and shadow so strikingly. Some scenes are even lit facing into a strong light, casting long shadows towards the camera from which characters emerge. The ship is shot from unique and imaginative angles, most strikingly a low angle lens that Ward Bond’s luckless Yank is washed towards like a mannequin. The sort of striking visual imagery from The Informer is pushed even further. A character dies in a row boat, suddenly peppered by a Luftwaffe machine gun, his leg hanging over the side. The English port sees light dance off the cobble-stones and dingy pubs turned into places of shadow-filled beauty. A final punch-up is partly shot through dropped torches and lit matches. It’s a visual masterpiece.

The fact it’s not more highly regarded in Ford’s cannon is possibly because the episodic story is not always the most compelling, largely because it lacks a true through-line as it moves from event-to-event. But, in many ways, the way it plays a bit fast and loose with O’Neill is to its credit. No slavish, stagey reprise here (unlike, say, Ford’s less successful Mister Roberts). But it does make it a film that’s easy to drop in and out of, and one hard to summarise other than “(mostly) Irish sailors shoot the breeze on a ship”. Many of these chapters are striking, but it’s a film lacking narrative force.

What it’s straining towards is the idea that these men – all of whom are almost like big kids on a day trip – are deeply in love with the freedom of the sea, while also feeling trapped in its embrace. And that, perhaps, with the tendency to drink and fight at the drop of a hat, makes them their own worst enemies. Nearly every crisis in the film comes out of one or other of these demons. I suspect the idea doesn’t crystalise because Ford can’t shake his affectionate regard for exactly those qualities. (It’s also an unremarked irony that for nearly all these guys, this is not a ‘voyage home’ at all).

It’s also perhaps overlooked because people can’t wrap their head around the on-paper bizarre casting of John Wayne. The Duke, surely, was literally no one’s idea of a Swede. It’s a reminder of what a star Wayne was that your eye is so constantly drawn to him, considering how little he does for most of the film. He makes a noble attempt at an accent, but it must have been even worse than what we end up with considering Ole barely speaks for almost an hour and twenty minutes. Ford, who wasn’t that convinced by Wayne’s acting at the best of times, clearly cut some losses here.

The Long Voyage Home is at its best when it focuses on the visuals, and when it falls back on the natural charisma and easy-bond between its character actor stars, in particular Mitchell and Fitzgerald (Mildred Natwick also gives a fine performance as a guilt-ridden good-time girl). The atmospheric, brooding intensity is outstanding and, perhaps more than any other Ford film, it has shots you could hang in a gallery. It’s a lovely reminder of what an artist, the hard-drinking tough-guy really was.

Gangs of New York (2002)

Scorsese’s epic missed-opportunity, a film full of merits but overall unsatisfying

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Amsterdam Vallon), Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Cameron Diaz (Jenny Everdeane), Liam Neeson (“Preist” Vallon), Jim Broadbent (William “Boss” Tweed), John C Reilly (“Happy” Jack Mulraney), Henry Thomas (Johnny Sirocco), Brendan Gleeson (Walter “Monk” McGinn), Gary Lewis (McGloin), Stephen Graham (Shang), Eddie Marsan (Killoran), Alec McCowen (Reverend Raleigh), David Hemmings (John F Schermerhorn), Lawrence Gilliard Jnr (Jimmy Spoils)

Gangs of New York: the film Scorsese always dreamed of making. I wonder if it’s now the film he dreams most about getting another go at? It needed serious money to make it, from the pockets of Harvey Weinstein (oh dear God). It’s well-known that Weinstein – then infamous as ‘Harvey Scissorhands’ before far more revolting revelations – and Scorsese fought throughout (so much so Scorsese considered quitting cinema). Scorsese has always claimed the unevenly paced final film is his ‘director’s cut’ – but considering his more recent films with even-more-bottomless-pocket backing (Netflix and Apple) were nearly four hours a piece, that’s increasingly hard to believe.

Set mostly during the horror of the American Civil War, Gangs of New York bites off an awful lot. A depiction of an entire era of American culture, exploration of migration and race in America, corruption in New York politics, gang warfare on the streets of Victorian New York, a son looking for revenge… Gangs of New York tries to cover it all and with very mixed success. Irish migrant Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo Di Caprio) grows up an orphan after his gang boss father ‘Priest’ (Liam Neeson) is killed by nativist gang leader Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis). He returns to New York, bent on revenge, working his way into Bill’s confidence, while Civil War tensions bubble and burn in New York.

There genuinely is a lot to enjoy in Gangs of New York. Not least the huge scale of it. Dante Ferretti went to town recreating the slums of nineteenth century New York, chucking in the sort of details which reflect what must have been hours scrutinising historical records. Unlike other Scorsese films, Gangs drips in colour, with the various street groups showing off their panache with colourful, distinctive clothing – just as the posh knobs of uptown New York flaunt their wealth in their threads. This all gives a huge amount of scope for Scorsese’s superb camerawork, very lusciously shot and with sequences cut to perfection by Thelma Schoonmaker (Howard Shore’s score is also good, although you can tell listening to it, he was still immersed in Middle Earth).

And of course, when the story is boiled down to it’s the principles it is most engaged in, it is a decent story of a son revenging a father by taking out a man he almost begins to see as a surrogate father. The casting of Liam Neeson as Amsterdam’s lost pop is a masterstroke. Neeson’s charismatic presence easily convinces an audience that of course characters would still be talking about him decades later and even his enemies would dream of becoming him. Gangs tries to wrap its fingers around a Homeric plot: new boss Bill is consumed with boredom at his mastery of the world and wants a challenge, so almost deliberately restarts the earlier cycle, casting DiCaprio’s Amsterdam as a younger version of himself (with himself as Neeson’s Priest). In turn, as is often the case with Scorsese, we’re left in tenterhooks to see if Amsterdam is savvy enough to get out of a life of crime or if he will double down.

This plot is also the most engaging as it revolves around Daniel Day-Lewis’ larger-than-life Bill the Butcher. Plucked from a supposed retirement (in the years leading up to this, urban rumour had it Day-Lewis worked as cobbler somewhere in Italy), Day-Lewis rips into Gangs with the sort of towering commitment that saw him tapping a glass contact lens on his eye with a knife dozens of times a day so he could do it without flinching on camera. But Day-Lewis doesn’t just chew the scenery. He makes Bill as poetic and reflective as he is impulsively violent. His triumphs give him only passing pleasure and he feels like a relic clinging to a dying past. Day-Lewis has a knock-out, early-morning monologue (draped in an American flag) which he gives just the right spin of vulnerable regret and desire for an equal, even while talking about the unrelenting violence of his rise and the fear it’s based on. He’s the primary reason to continue watching the film.

Because aside from that, you are picking out only scenes and performances that survived the ruthless cutting down to the two-and-a-half hours we have. Day-Lewis gets more than his fair share, and there are fine performances from Brendan Gleeson as a principled club-for-hire, Jim Broadbent as a jovially corrupt politician and John C Reilly as a sleazily sadistic policeman. The film’s opening, a pitched street-battle, is shot and directed with real gusto, as are later scenes of New York Draft riots. Dynamic filming ideas abound, like a striking scene that tracks in one-shot Irish immigrants arriving, being pelted with stones, signing up for the army and boarding a ship out of New York to almost certain death on the front lines. But it’s only flashes of brilliance.

The overwhelming feeling otherwise is how fast everything is going and how half-formed plot ideas feel. Characters who were surely once more important in a longer cut, linger on the edges of scenes (or are billed prominently without even having names). The film relies so much on the vast background and research in its making that many of its scenes require DiCaprio to frequently limber up for an intermittent voiceover to force-feed us historical context on everything from the Five Points to pick-pocketing to the passing of the Draft Act. Several scenes – often involving Broadbent – feel like bullet points of longer, denser conversations rammed with historical details.

The vast amount of stuff the film tries to cover in its non-epic running time leaves so much feeling under explored or box-ticked. I can imagine a cut where more time given over to nativist fury at Lincoln’s slavery emancipation would have led to a more complex plot for Lawrence Gilliard Jnr’s Jimmy (the only Black character in the film), instead of him being treated as just one of a crowd until he’s unceremoniously lynched in a riot. Or the hypocritical church, which drives out the poor from their only refuge to build a church to tend to them, would have been seen as real antagonists. Or the wealthy, preening themselves during sight-seeing tours to the Five Points, may have been used to explore the class tensions in a country where the poor were being shipped to the Civil War front lines to die. All of these ideas, and more, get their five minutes in the sun but leave little real impact.

It also doesn’t help that both DiCaprio and Diaz feel out of the depth. Perhaps this role, and the chance to work with Scorsese, was something DiCaprio didn’t feel ready for. He finds little of interest or life in Amsterdam, who feels moody and sullen rather than a conflicted angel of revenge. He’s also struggling with the accent; but not as much as Diaz, fighting a losing battle with her Irish lilt. Diaz never really convinces as a working-class pickpocket (she feels far too modern and middle class). She also has the most cliched role as (essentially) a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, pushing her man to leave revenge behind. Both actors, you feel, were part of Weinsteins box-office plan (Weinstein also vetoed any physical consequences for the ferocious beating Amsterdam takes at the halfway point – within ten minutes of screentime he looks no worse than he would sleeping off a big night).

Gangs of New York feels like a sort of Spark Notes version of a much-longer, more-complex, multi-faceted film on race, class, gender and immigration in Civil War New York. All that stuff is in there but skirted over so fast with such little depth you can very easily watch the film a couple of times and not spot it at all. Which I suppose makes it a tragedy of sorts, a real could-have-been. Its noticeable that, twenty years later, no-one seems inclined to look back at Gangs of New York and re-evaluate it as some sort of misunderstood masterpiece. Instead, it feels like the film as forgotten now as it was at the Oscars with its eleven nominations and zero wins.

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

Lubitsch’s touch doesn’t fail him in this light and frothy but charming comedy

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Cast: Maurice Chevalier (Lt Niki von Preyn), Claudette Colbert (Franzi), Miriam Hopkins (Princess Anna), Charles Ruggles (Max), George Barbier (King Adolf XV), Hugh O’Connell (Niki’s Orderly)

Lt Niki von Preyn (Maurice Chevalier) has it made. An officer in the Royal Guard, he’s the toast of Vienna. When he joins married friend Max (Charles Ruggles) as a wingman for a café trip to check out glamourous violinist Franzi (Claudette Colbert), he snaffles her from under Max’s arms and falls head-over-heels in love. So much so, he can’t help but smile at her while he’s on duty. Problem is, he does it while the visiting King (George Barbier) and Princess Anna (Miriam Hopkins) of Flausenthurm are driving past, and they are convinced he was laughing at her. Niki defuses the potential diplomatic disaster – but Anna falls in love with him and Niki finds himself married to her, while still in love with Franzi. How will this be solved?

Ernst Lubitsch brings his touch once again to the grand courts of Europe – Austria and the fictional land of Flausenthurm – in a light, witty and quietly rather naughty La Belle Époque drama, that’s crammed full of fabulous lines and cheeky gags. It’s almost a retread of The Love Parade and the set-up remains as light and frothy as before, with Chevalier pretty much playing the same role: a suave, likeable playboy roped into a dutiful marriage which (spoilers) eventually works out. Lubitsch lets both comedy and drama glide by incredibly smoothly, with a Wildean wit – and you could argue the greatest Lubitsch touch of all is presenting a comic romance where the man ends up with the “wrong” girl.

He does so because our Niki is a regular horn-dog under his Chevalier-esque charm: all that’s needed for him to look at Princess Anna as something other than a checkers-partner is for her to ‘jazz up her lingerie’ (an actual song title – welcome to pre-code Hollywood), puff a cigarette, smarten up her blonde locks and burn her dull nightwear. What’s a neat reversal is that this make-over comes courtesy of Franzi, who may look like a nightclub charmer but has the heart-and-soul of a true believer in marriage. More than enough – with a warm farewell letter – for Niki to refocus on his loving wife. Would any other director have managed to have his cake and eat it like this? (People have also enjoyed, for decades, the lesbian subtext in the scenes between these two – hilarious as well since they allegedly didn’t get on).

The Smiling Lieutenant has prepared the ground with a parade of cheeky gags along the way, dripping with innuendo and suggestive flirtation. Niki only meets Franzi as he’s been asked to assess her as a possible new mistress for Charles Ruggles (who never looked more like a bank manager as he does here) and promptly steals her away. He’s got several advantages of course: he ‘plays the piano’ so they can do some ‘chamber music’, and these men in uniform are catnip to the girls. Lubitsch making the point with a wonderful sequence as Niki walks Franzi home past a parade of cannoodling officers who ‘jump to attention’ as he passes – culminating in an officer who suddenly emerges from behind the bushes to do the same. Niki and Franzi’s late night discussion culminates in a long discussion about having dinner together – or even better breakfast. Pretty clear what they have in mind. The Smiling Lieutenant manages to make this relationship heartfelt and sweet: so much so, we’re not surprised Niki is giddy on duty.

Possibly only Lubitsch could present the royal family of a small nation as practically rubes in the big city. For all King Adolf complains that the Habsburgs, with a mere 700 years of power, are new kids on the block, the guys from Flausenthurm don’t have the refinement of Viennese. The Austrian Emperor prioritises greeting a train of cows over them (adding insult to injury, said cow train even passes them on their way into the city), they can’t even import a decent Schnitzel. George Barbier’s King Adolf feels more like a bluff country squire than the fifteenth of his name. Poor Anna, played with a wide-eyed naivety by Miriam Hopkins, is a dowdy princess, whose only education comes from Encyclopaedias with ‘all the interesting things left out’.

It makes quite a contrast with Claudette Colbert’s sensual but surprisingly sweet Franzi who is a knock-out on the violin (and other things). Colbert is, naturally, very good bouncing brilliantly off Chevalier who could play these likeable, honourable rogues standing on his head. Princess Anna can look quite dull and dowdy next to her, but Miriam Hopkins manages to suggest decades of repressed sexuality in her, desperate to burst out. She just can’t get it right. Meaning, even with royalty as part of the deal, Niki is like a horse who can be bought to water but can’t be made to drink. Niki’s desperation to get out of a marriage he doesn’t want his hilarious, not least a Catch 22 conversation with Adolf where it’s explained that whether his intentions were honourable or dishonourable both means he has to get married.

The Smiling Lieutenant has the sort of professional lightness and ‘winking’ cheeky comedy that Lubitsch made his own. With wonderfully light comedic performances from its leads – Chevalier was happier breaking the fourth wall with a cheeky grin than any other actor working – and a parade of excellent jokes and one-liners in every scene, combined with Lubitsch’s ability to find a suggestive risqué or hilarious sight gag at the right time, The Smiling Lieutenant is a light sophisticated comedy. Sure, you can argue that Niki’s swerve from loving Franzi to embracing Anna is driven by showing a bit of leg, but when the entire confection is as frothy as this you can’t mind.

Mean Streets (1973)

Scorsese’s calling card is an energetic, gripping, electric mix of themes that would shape his career

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Harvey Keitel (Charlie), Robert De Niro (Johnny Boy), David Proval (Tony), Amy Robinson (Teresa), Richard Romanus (Michael), Cesare Danova (Giovanni), Victor Argo (Mario), George Memmoli (Joey), Lenny Scaletta (Jimmy), Jeanne Bell (Dianne), David Carradine (Drunk), Robert Carradine (Gunman), Martin Scorsese (Jimmy Shorts)

Mean Streets wasn’t actually Scorsese’s film debut but that feels like a technicality. If young Martin had a calling card, it was Mean Streets. It’s a vibrant, electric punch to the solar plexus and a dazzling display of virtuoso skill mixed with grungy, improvisational energy. Mean Streets is an artist finding his voice and screaming his agenda from the rooftops, bringing together a host of ideas, styles and themes that would dominate the rest of his work. Mean Streets remains raw, dynamic and overpowering, a major artistic statement like a punchy companion piece to Terence Malick’s Badlands, another new-found distinctive voice in American from 1973.

Mean Streets was strongly inspired by the environment Scorsese saw around him growing up on the rough streets of New York, crammed with the sort of sin Travis Bickle would later swear to wash away. It’s a world of gangsters and masculinity where boys never grow up, but become immature sharp-suited guys whose conversations end in hasty punch-ups and saving face means everything. Charlie (Harvey Keitel), nephew to the leading neighbourhood Mafiosa, is plagued with Catholic guilt. His idea to deal with this? To ‘save the soul’ of old friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), an impulsive tearaway, in debt to every money lender. Charlie will struggle to curb Johnny Boy’s self-destruction, but with limited success.

Catholic guilt soaks through Charlie, introduced kneeling in Church while we hear the words of a priest (voiced by Scorsese) outlining Charlie’s moral quandaries. Charlie has a morbid fascination with punishment of his sins, never seeing a flame without feeling the urge to dip his hand into it. He claims his hero is St Francis of Assisi (though there is no sign he has read or understood anything St Francis ever said). Charlie continues a clumsy internal monologue with God (hilariously, late in the film he slips into continuing this out loud to the confusion of Johnny). He has not time for confession, with its Hail Mary’s: he’s arrogant enough to think, as a real sinner he needs more.

But, like so many of Scorsese’s gangsters, his guilt runs skin-deep. He’s a nice guy, scrupulously polite and well-spoken, only as far as it goes. Charlie may know his guilt springs from his life of crime being full of greed and sin, but never once does he even consider changing it. Just one flash of his uncle casually suggesting he could own his high-class restaurant soon is enough for him to shelve all idea of personal change or real sacrifice. His self-imposed mission to reform Johnny Boy is really a self-aggrandising deflection effort, designed to make him feel better about his horrendous life choices. As if it’s fine to be a low-level rent collector and friendly face of Mafia loan sharks, if he makes one wildcard play by the rules everyone else obeys.

Keitel captures Charlie’s walking contradictions very well, his surface decency hiding his obsessive pride. He may be more articulate about his flaws, but Keitel makes clear Charlie talks a good game, but is obsessed about what people think of him. He considers himself in love with Johnny Boy’s epileptic cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson, very good) – but he’s way too embarrassed to ever let their relationship become public, because of the scorn that will be heaped upon him for dating someone ‘diseased’. Just as the idea of dating Black dancer Dianne (Jeanne Bell) is instantly rejected.

All these low-level gangsters are obsessed with status. Nearly every conversation – most strikingly in a pool room payment haggle – seems about five seconds away from a punch-up over some semi-imagined slight. No one has anything to talk about, other than booze and girls. They are all basically children, giggling over immature jokes or watching films like enthralled toddlers. Only Tony, a surprisingly thoughtful eccentric, seems to have any hinterland (and even he keeps baby lions in his basement). Most of them are useless. Michael, an incompetent loan collector introduced bungling a camera shipment deal, is desperate to look lean and mean in his sharp suits but constantly fails to look like anything other than someone’s dumb younger brother.

The willingness to call out these bullshit self-images is part of what makes Johnny Boy such a dangerous figure. Introduced blowing up a post box for shits and giggles, this is a jaw-dropping firecracker of a performance by De Niro. He makes Johnny Boy a larger-than-life figure with a sociopathic streak, stirring up trouble and conflict simply for kicks. There can be charm to his unashamed insolence – De Niro captures all this has a stunning early monologue, a rambling shaggy dog story excuse that Keitel’s Charlie can’t help grinning indulgently at. But he’s also capable of sudden, thoughtless violence. Just as he can collapse into vulnerable tears when the pressure’s on – tears he can instantly forget when he starts chasing the next thrill, like a dog with a car.

De Niro’s stunning performance beautifully complements Scorsese’s superb direction. Both artists collaborate perfectly for De Niro’s arrival at Tony’s bar – a perfectly paced tracking shot towards Keitel, cut to perfection to The Stones ‘Jumping Jack Flash’. It brilliantly tops Keitel’s own entrance earlier, where the camera followed him in tight close-up from behind (to the tune of The Stones ‘Tell Me’). Mean Streets is full of wonderfully selected rock ‘n’ roll tracks, the action cut to these tunes to perfection. Scorsese understands every beat of this music and how it can maximise impact. From ‘Rubber Biscuit’ to the stunning use of ‘Be My Baby’ at the film’s start, few directors have used pop songs better.

It brings a rocky edge to a film that feels constantly propulsive and wired, despite the fact the plot is strikingly straight-forward. It feels ripped from the streets in places (so persuasive is its energy, you can forgive the multiple obvious continuity errors), full of punchy energy. Sequences like Keitel’s drunken revelry – the camera attached to Keitel makes us feel we are woozing around as much as Charlie. An extended pool-room fight is a masterpiece of energy.

The film is full of masterful edits, immediate tracking shots and whipper-crack roving camerawork. All to see a world of shallow desires, where the characters feel awkwardly out of place as soon as they leave their dark streets (never has anyone looked less comfortable at a beach, than Charlie does here). Every problem is addressed with fists and Charlie is lying to himself when he says he’s less wild and foolish than the others.

Mean Streets builds towards a crescendo, but it’s a masterclass before then of atmosphere. And it’s a major awakening of a great artist – and a major statement of a great actor, De Niro as sensational as Scorsese’s filmmaking as breathtaking. In any other career it would be the highlight: the fact it might only crack the top ten of both, shows the greatness of the careers that would follow.

The More the Merrier (1943)

Very funny farce, excellently acted with some near pin-perfect farce.

Director: George Stevens

Cast: Jean Arthur (Constance Milligan), Joel McCrea (Joe Carter), Charles Coburn (Benjamin Dingle), Richard Gaines (Charles J Pendergast), Bruce Bennett (FBI Agent Evans), Frank Sully (FBI Agent Pike), Don Douglas (FBI Agent Hardy)

Wartime in Washington and housing space is at a premium, with the city full to bursting. Here to solve this housing problem is millionaire Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn), who is ironically unable to find a place himself to lay his head. Luckily, through charm and bull-headed perseverance, he persuades young statistician Constance Milligan (Jean Arthur) to sub-let her apartment to him. Taking a shine to the buttoned-up Constance, Dingle sub-lets half of his half to army engineer Sergeant Joe Carter (Joel McCrea), planning to play Cupid. Something he commits to even more after meeting Constance’s stuffy pen-pushing fiancée Pendergast (Richard Gaines). As the Farragut-loving Dingle says: Full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes!

This zany set-up is delivered to the screen with plenty of bounce and zing by George Stevens. Especially its first half, a near master-class in pin-perfect, near-miss, door-opening-and-closing farce that would have made Chaplin or Keaton proud. The More the Merrier is a funny, surprisingly sexy film boosted by not taking itself too seriously and powered by three lead actors having a whale of a time. If its final resolution feels a little too forced – and Dingle’s manipulations at points verges towards the sinister – that doesn’t change the fact there are so many laugh-out-loud moments along the way.

The More the Merrier starts with a dry, witty sense of tongue-in-cheek parody as a sonorous news-reel voiceover introduces us to Washington where “living is pleasant and leisurely”, singing the praises of the city’s hospitality, fine dining and gentility while a montage of shots shows us it’s a whirligig of frantic movement, food grabbed on the street and “no vacancy” signs turned towards us with a slap. It’s a sign of the film’s wry wit and the fun it will have at the nonsense just behind the way we talk about everyday life. It’s also a sign that Stevens understands gags land best with a straight bat and a sly wink – a subtlety that serves the film well.

It’s first act, as Dingle and then Carter move into the home of the reluctant Constance, sees all three actors playing wonderfully into the straight-faced farce. An obsessive control-freak, running her life to a tight timetable, Constance hands a detailed minute-by-minute itinerary of the day’s first half hour to Dingle, that’s hilarious in its minutiae. Jean Arthur deserved an Oscar nomination for this scene alone, a perfect minute of ludicrously detailed instructions on everything from newspaper collecting to bathroom door closing to coffee brewing – with Coburn’s earnest bafflement equally fine. The inevitable disintegration of this plan the next day (a parade of the two locking each other out of the apartment, knocking into furniture, getting sprayed by an errant shower and losing a pair of trousers) is such a masterclass in farcical underplaying – in particular from Coburn – that it’s guaranteed to bring the house down.

But perhaps even better is the next morning, the first after Carter has been smuggled into the house without Constance’s knowledge. With only Dingle aware of the situation – and wanting to keep it secret as long as possible – Stevens positions the camera in the hall and delights us with a five-0minute sequence of perfectly timed door comedy, as McCrea and Arthur continuously just miss each other, culminating in a perfectly timed corridor cross where both actors only narrowly miss walking smack into each other. This is choreographed comedy at its finest.

The More the Merrier seems ripe for fast-paced screwball from there, but Stevens shifts gears into a romance that’s both natural and surprisingly sensual. He’s helped by the huge chemistry between Arthur and hand-picked co-star McCrea, who with minimal fuss and no grand-standing manage to communicate beautifully two people surprised to be absolutely besotted with each other. Their playing of Carter’s gifting of a travel case to Constance simmers with sexual tension, as McCrea quietly but intensely leans in to extol the virtues of every feature while Arthur breathlessly agrees – never before has excitement about a suitcase been such a clear stand-in for something else.

Their spark only grows, lingering glances and an intense desire to be left without the interference of Pendergast (Richard Gaines doing exactly what’s required as a tedious bore and obstacle to happiness). They have a late-night walking scene culminating in them sitting on their apartment stairs that feels like one of the raciest scenes in screwball. Stevens leans into this with his shooting of their bedrooms. Shot from the exterior, their windows subtly blur the rooms together (at one shot, the dividing wall is just a blurry line making the two appear to be in bed together) culminating in a final sequence that gets the slow-build to a final wall punchline spot on.

All of this works as well as it does thanks to the excellence of the three stars. Jean Arthur is very funny as a control-freak growing increasingly flustered as her well-organised life spins out of control (even if her final act wailing becomes a little wearing). McCrea perfectly mixes dry, low-key wit with a quiet sexuality. Coburn won an Oscar for possibly his finest ‘cheeky old uncle’ performance, a gruff mischief maker with a twinkle in his eye. All three of the actors spark of each other in any combination, right down to Coburn and McCrea throwing themselves into reading cartoons out loud with childish glee.

But the final act doesn’t quite deliver. A forced resolution involving the FBI never quite feels like it matches with what’s come before. The manipulations of Coburn’s character at times become a little too forceful – and it’s hard not to feel more than a little uncomfortable when he takes Constance’s accidentally abandoned diary and reads it out loud, an invasion of privacy the film never holds him to account for. If there is one point where the chemistry between Arthur and McCrea doesn’t land, its ironically in many of the final scenes, not helped by those continual frantic wails from Arthur. You get the sense Stevens had a great set-up but not quite a clear idea on how to finish it. But what gets us there is witty, fast-paced and very funny – and that’s just more than enough.

Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)

Third chapter in the story and it covers some familiar ground to the first, while still being great to look at

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoe Saldaña (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Kiri), Stephen Lang (Colonel Miles Quaritch), Oona Chaplin (Varang), Cliff Curtis (Tonowari), Kate Winslet (Ronal), Joel David Moore (Dr Spellman), CCH Pounder (Mo’at), Edie Falco (General Ardmore), David Thewlis (Peylak), Jermaine Clement (Dr Garvin), Giovanni Ribisi (Parker Selfridge), Britain Dalton (Lo’ak), Jamie Flatters (Neteyam), Trinity Jo-Li Bliss (Tuktirey), Jack Champion (Spider), Brendan Cowell (Captain Scoresby)

Back to Pandora we go. You can’t deny the beauty and spectacle of James Cameron’s imaginary world. Does Avatar: Fire and Ash take us anywhere the previous two films didn’t? On paper, I suppose it does. Some new locations, an interesting new tribe, some new visual wonders. But narratively, no it really doesn’t. Avatar: Fire and Ash perhaps shows the limits of the Avatar universe, essentially presenting us remixed elements of the previous two films, set out over a huge running time. It’s hard not to think that, already, we’ve seen it all before.

Picking off where the previous film left off, Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) mourn the death of their son Neteyam. With Neytiri increasingly hostile to humans and adopted human honorary son Spider (Jack Champion) just one failed breathing device away from dropping dead on Pandora, the decision is made to take him back to the rebel human scientists. En route, the family are attacked by a savage, fire-worshipping Na’vi tribe, led by the aggressive Varang (Oona Chaplin).

In the chaos, daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) discovers her unique bond with spirit of the planet Eywa, giving her the power to give Spider the ability to breathe Pandora’s toxic-to-humans air. This makes Spider the centre of a deadly game of push-and-pull: if the humans can retro-engineer his ability, they could conquer Pandora; if Jake lets him live, he will always be a danger. Then there’s the influence of Spider’s natural father, Quaritch (Stephen Lang), still living on in his Na’vi body, but increasingly fighting his own battles – and joining a passionate alliance with the dangerously destructive Varang.

I watched Avatar: Fire and Ash in about three chunks on Disney+. Which I actually think does the film a lot of favours. For starters, it avoids the crushing weight of watching the whole four hours in one sitting. Secondly, giving it an episodic breakdown like that works rather well with Cameron’s narrative structure which breaks the film down into three natural acts (conflicted opening – separated family – unity in the final battle). But what it can’t disguise is the fact that so much of this film feels like reheated elements of the previous films. Right down to the film’s final battle, which combines narrative and visual elements of the final battles of both the previous films, in both the sky and the air.

Throw that in with not only a repeat of Sully’s ‘chosen’ status and many elements of his original story gifted to daughter Kiri (though Sully clings on to more than enough of it). Sigourney Weaver has a lot of fun with the way motion capture gives her the chance to play a teenager, but her passionate, slightly scared exploration of what might be her profound powers does feel rather similar to Jake’s own journey in the original film. Even Neytiri’s increased hostility towards the humans sees her just taking on elements of her original families storylines and emotions, with her children shifted to her role in the first film.

The most original element of the film is the introduction of Varang’s tribe of Viking like savages, burning settlements down and disfiguring fellow Na’vi simply (it seems) for the hell of it. This brutal, destructive force in the series feels fascinatingly new – not least since Cameron’s depiction of the Na’vi has so often seen them portrayed as peaceful, Kumbia types at one with nature. Their savagery is visceral and embodied extremely well by Oona Chaplin, who contorts her body into sensual and violent shapes. Chaplin gives Varang a terrifying sadistic glee, quivering with excitement when she discovers the power of machine guns and viciously lashing at anyone who challenges her with a monomaniacal energy. She’s the shot in the arm the film really needs.

Bits in Fire and Dust are similarly slightly fresher. Cameron sprinkles in little bits of originality. The families grief at the loss of one of their own in the previous film – and the unspoken blame felt and given – is told tenderly. Sully’s moral dilemma about whether, for the greater good, he will dispatch Abraham-like his adopted son Spider is well drawn. There are interesting suggestions that Quaritch is starting to embrace parts of his new-found Na’vi skin more than he expected (considering his knee-jerk racism), and his confused parental feelings towards Spider are well played by Lang. But the characters relentless, Terminator-like indestructibility is starting to get a bit weary now.

Similarly, too much else feels familiar. The portrait of the Sully kids is better drawn – and Weaver gets some good material as Kiri goes on a spiritual journey in some visually impressive (what else!) visions. But much of their dialogue still has a clunky “Hey Bro!” feeling to it. The themes about the struggles between pacifism and rising up to fight when needed feel very well explored now from the previous films.

Cameron does land a few anti-guns points, with only Varang’s tribe of lunatics embracing them. He piles on the praise at the power of nature and bonds that unite us. There is a genuine pleasure in seeing the human hunters of the intelligent whale-like creatures on Pandora meet their comeuppance. One thing Cameron does well in these things is making the villains so repulsive and unsympathetic that we cheer happily at seeing them meet well-deserved ends. But the set-pieces, stunning and exciting as they frequently are, rarely offer anything new either dramatically or narratively. Like the rest of the film, they fit into a familiar template that suggests the world of Pandora offers few further opportunities.

It’s interesting to consider if the two sequels Cameron plans will manage to find somewhere new to take us in this marvellous technicolour world of awe-inspiring visuals. But I worry that those films too will benefit from being broken down into three digestible, almost more enjoyable chapters of a familiar story on a streaming service, rather than an overwhelming three and a half hour trawl through ground, stunning that it is, we have all walked over before.

Heaven Can Wait (1943)

Lubitsch brings his touch to death and infidelity all flown under the wire of the Hays Code

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Cast: Gene Tierney (Martha), Don Ameche (Henry Van Cleve), Charles Coburn (Hugo Van Cleve), Marjorie Main (Mrs Strable), Laird Cregar (His Excellency), Spring Byrington (Bertha Van Cleve), Allyn Joslyn (Albert Van Cleve), Eugene Pallette (EF Strable), Signe Hasso (Mademoiselle), Louis Calhern (Randolph Van Cleve), Helen Reynolds (Peggy Nash), Clarence Muse (Jasper), Tod Andrews (Jack Van Cleve)

If you are going to start a film in Hell, it helps if you have the Lubitsch touch. Heaven Can Wait tells the life story of the late Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche), a charming old roué being interviewed by ‘His Excellency’ (Laird Cregar) at the entrance of a place ‘where innumerable people had so often told him to go’. Van Cleve’s life is one of general well-meaning romance, from his boyhood discovery that kissing a girl doesn’t mean you have to marry her, through to his elopement with Martha (Gene Tierney), the intended of his stuffy cousin, his winning her back after his (implied) good-natured faithlessness, and their happy decades of marriage and his roguishly flirtatious final years.

Perhaps only Lubitsch had the wit – and cheek – to sneak the story of a shameless Casanova under the Hays Code wire as a sort of heart-warmingly decent fable. Because, in many ways, Henry Van Cleve is exactly the sort of person the Code had doubts about – and of course Lubitsch loved: a debonair, classy man of means, who appreciates fine art and beautiful woman, would die of shock at the idea of a hard day’s work and never repents his choices for a second. Played with a bashful smile and wide-eyed honesty (even innocence) by Ameche, this is the sort of seducer the Hays Code could get behind (especially as Lubitsch subtly blurs the reality of his many conquests).

But than you also can’t imagine any other director presenting Satan like this. He’s embodied by Laird Cregar as a sort of genial bank manager – in a Hell that looks like a hotel lobby – whose hilarious dropping (Bond-villain like) of a loud-mouthed society Grande Dame down a trap door mid-conversation only makes us like him more. Our framing device runs us through a series of Henry’s crucial birthdays (the original play was even titled ‘Birthday’ – Heaven Can Wait is a much better title), many of them making a hilarious mini-film themselves, with sharp-edged dialogue perfectly captured by Lubitsch’s smooth and witty camera, that knows just how long to hold a shot.

Heaven Can Wait is full of just-under-the-wire sexual energy, disguised but very apparent today. What else are we to make of new Van Cleve maid ‘Mademoiselle’ (a very funny Signo Hasso) announcing her two years working for a duke were what he called “the happiest of his life”? Not to mention the life advice – kissing don’t mean marriage – she gives the Van Cleve (who learned, as a boy, when wooing an impressed girl with his insect pets that it pays to have ‘lots of beetles’). Or the clear implication Henry and Mademoiselle spend a wild night sharing far more than just a bottle of champagne.

Lubitsch hints at this with mutual hiccups. Throughout Heaven Can Wait coughs, sneezes and hiccups serve as a code for very different bodily outbursts (that of course couldn’t be shown). Wooing Martha in his tedious cousin’s (a very funny role of pedantic tedium for Allyn Joslyn) library during a terrible private concert, Martha’s sneezing fit is a clear substitute for her real feelings. Perhaps only Lubitsch could have disguised this mutual wild sexual elopement as something reassuringly pure. There is something very sweet about Ameche passing himself off as a book-store clerk to spark conversation with Tierney as she searches for How to please your husband (a title ripe for inevitable innuendo).

As with Ameche, Lubitsch gets a light, underplayed performance by Tierney that makes these two feel like a perfect pair. Heaven Can Wait’s fourth movement sees Martha flying the marriage home after suspecting Henry of an affair. Henry reassures her it is a misunderstanding – but with such ease, and such heavy breathing fluster on Martha’s part – it feels pretty clear Lubitsch is inviting us to understand perhaps Martha thinks fidelity is an optional extra with someone she has such hots for. It’s all conveyed with such lightness – and Ameche plays Henry with such innocent earnestness, never once tipping the wink – it’s extremely funny.

As you’d expect with Lubitsch, the film is full of marvellous comic touches. Charles Coburn is excellent as Henry’s worldly-wise grandfather, who might love his family but only really likes Henry. Coburn’s wry amusement at Henry’s antics is consistently hilarious, Lubitsch gifting him two perfectly timed wonderful sight gags (one with a glass of water, the other seeing him emerge suddenly from a crowd). Even better though is the wonderful set-piece of Martha’s feuding parents (played with perfect passive aggressive bluster by Eugene Pallette and Marjorie Main), sitting at opposite ends of a long table, communicating only through long-suffering servant Jasper (a very refreshing role for Clarence Muse, where the Black man is smartest in the room). Lubitsch films this in a single take, gliding from table end to end which only magnifies the humour.

The first 70 minutes of Heaven Can Wait are so good – sharp, cheeky, funny – that when the Van Cleves effectively elope again, it perhaps would be better the film ends. Sadly, the final half hour dials up the sentiment (as Henry tries to steer his son away from a life of debauchery, an older Martha nobly resigns herself to cancer and Henry meets his end) and the energy drains out. Even Satan gets a moralistic, happy-ever-after closing speech! This closing act is duller, considerably less snappy and very easy to drift off in. You feel Lubitsch exhausted his interest and filmed the final act by contractual obligation.

But until then, this is a sharp, witty, delightful comedy, crammed with great performances. It balances naughty charm with surprisingly dark undertones (with each movement forward, more and more characters die off, a dark reminder this film opened in the afterlife) and has more than enough laughs in its first 70 minutes for you to sit through the closing 25. Perhaps second-tier Lubitsch, but his second tier his others first.

The Sundowners (1960)

Gentle episodic family drama, powered by some strong performances and lovely scenery

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Cast: Deborah Kerr (Ida Carmody), Robert Mitchum (Paddy Carmody), Peter Ustinov (Rupert Venneker), Glynis Johns (Mrs Firth), Dina Merrill (Jean Halstead), Chips Rafferty (Quinlan), Michael Anderson Jnr (Sean Carmody), Lola Brooks (Liz Brown), Wylie Watson (Herb Johnson), John Mellion (Bluey Brown), Ronald Fraser (Clint Ocker)

Who wants to settle down when the open road, and all the adventure it promises, lies ahead? Sure not Paddy Carmody (Robert Mitchum), an Irish-Australian sheep drover in the 1920s Australian outback, who loves the freedom of your home being wherever the sun goes down. Problem is, his loving wife Ida (Deborah Kerr) and teenage son Sean (Michael Anderson Jnr) are tired of this itinerant lifestyle. They want to put down some roots, ideally on an available farm they’ve got their eye on. But can they persuade the easy-going Paddy to settle down in the same old four walls?

This makes for some gentle, family friendly drama in this easy-going, episodic film which relies on some lovely location footage and a clutch of very charming performances to carry the day. While you can see links with some of the other film’s on Zinnemann’s CV – in the loose sense that Paddy has to choose whether to take a gentle stand by staying in one place for more than a few weeks – really it’s a leisurely ramble through a clutch of crowd-pleasing vignettes. The Sundowners probably stretches on a little too long, but it’s just about charming enough not to outstay its welcome.

Largely shot in Australia, it also follows Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach in introducing the country to American audiences. The difference being, while On the Beach was largely shot in Melbourne, all of the external footage here is in the dustbowl outback. These panoramas give The Sundowners the feel of a family western, with the Carmodys as decent, honest homesteaders. It’s a very familiar language for the film, spiced up by the film not shirking on chucking plenty of exciting wildlife. The parade of kangaroos, koalas and wombats that we get to see bouncing and crawling around – often looking impossibly sweet and cuddly – must have been catnip to audiences.

The Sundowners also presents an endearing, if terminally cliched, view of Australian life. With the dialogue littered with “g’days” and “fair dinkum” and the like, The Sundowners presents an affectionate portrait of Australian farmhands as honest, boisterous, hard-drinkers, quick to blows and equally quick to laughs straight after. The menfolk, after a hard day’s work driving sheep, like nothing better than to gather in the bar for a few cold ones or the barn for a few cheeky gambles. They’re decent, easy-going, never hold grudges and are a loyal, supportive community – naturally the bonds of friendship are formed in a mass punch-up which quickly turns into a boozy bonding session.

The Carmody’s fit right into this, with the family presented as a warm and supportive unit that, despite occasional disagreements, sticks together through thick and thin. At its heart is the relationship between Ida and Paddy, which is warm, affectionate and has a surprisingly strong sexuality in it (it’s hard not to notice their obvious continued attraction for each other, not least in a bedtime scene with a topless Mitchum). That also comes out of the natural, easy chemistry between Mitchum and Kerr (working together here for the fourth time) who genuinely feel like they’ve been together for years.

While you could take a pop at both actors less than faultless Australian accents, I prefer to think it’s smarter than that: Mitchum’s accent is half-way between Dublin and Brisbane, which feels right as does Kerr’s British-tinged Aussie. What’s more important is both actors give endearingly fine performances. Mitchum brings out a gentle, childlike quality, to Paddy. He’s softly-spoken, prone to moan rather than rage when things don’t go his way (his teenage sulk when roped into a sheep shearing contest is rather funny) and throws himself into things with all his heart – be that thrilled at a betting winning streak or mortified when a later streak goes wrong.

Perhaps even better though is Kerr, who mixes a motherly streak (she’s essentially looking after two kids’ here) with a determined outback assertiveness that sees her mucking in as much with the sheep driving as she does the cooking. But there’s also a soulful longing in Kerr’s performance for something more grounded in her life – a moment where, covered in dust and dirt, she stares at a woman adjusting her make-up on a train, radiates a longing for something more permanent in her life. But, while she may lose her temper with Paddy, she’ll never hold a grudge or leave us in doubt about her love for him. It’s a lovely, sensitive but strong performance.

Perhaps best in show here though is Ustinov, having a whale-of-a-time as grizzled old (pseudo?) posh drifter Rupert who the family effectively adopts and is as in love with the drifting life as Paddy. The role allows Ustinov to be tougher and more manly than ever before, while also using his natural gifts for whimsy and shameless yarn-spinning. Rupert, wearing a sailers cap allegedly from his service in the Chinese navy, claims expertise in everything, to have grown up doing any task you name and loves the refined things in life as much as he has a soft spot for the flirtatious arms of Glynis John’s blousy inn-keeper. It’s a very funny, but also surprisingly layered performance – if Ustinov hadn’t won the Oscar that year for Spartacus he would have stood a good chance of winning for this.

The Sundowners marshals these fine actors into a series of set-piece episodes. From driving sheep across the outback, to settling down at a farm, to the delivery of farmhand’s baby, Sean’s first beer, a sheep-shearing contest (where Paddy is royally hustled by an old timer), an epic coin toss contest, the closing adventures with the family’s newly won race-house Sundowner (with some well shot racing footage), the film constantly throws us into another small drama-within-a-drama, each unspooling with the same warmth and charm.

The Sundowners is, at heart, a slight tale and probably is overextended over its two hour plus. Much of its Australian setting, so eye-opening at the time, looks a bit twee and cliched today. But it’s got strong performances across the board, a good heart and a firm hand holding it together. It’s not a classic for the ages, but is a charming afternoon’s entertainment.

The Odyssey (2026)

Nolan’s epic takes deep, thoughtful bites out of Homer, looks amazing but maybe tries to do too much

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Matt Damon (Odysseus), Tom Holland (Telemachus), Anne Hathaway (Penelope), Robert Pattinson (Antinous), Lupita Nyong’o (Helen of Troy/Clytemnestra), Samantha Morton (Circe), John Leguizamo (Eumaeus), Zendaya (Athena), Charlize Theron (Calypso), John Bernthal (Menelaus), Himesh Patel (Eurylochus), Bill Irwin (Polyphemus), Elliot Page (Sinon), Benny Safdie (Agamemnon), Mia Goth (Melantho), Corey Hawkins (Polybus), Logan Marshall-Green (Melanthius)

I think pretty much everyone knows the story: Odysseus (Matt Damon), after ten years fighting the Trojan War, has the longest, most hellish commute ever. Will he see his Kingdom of Ithaca again, or wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and now-grown son Telemachus (Tom Holland) again? And, even if he does, what will he do about the fact his home is awash with hostile suitors, led by the bullying Antinous (Robert Pattinson) who want to take his throne and wife for themselves?

Nolan’s adaptation of Homer is epic as few other films are. Shot it seems with the whole Mediterranean (and Iceland for good measure) as a soundstage, its visual imagery is almost impossible to beat, shot with immense skill for IMAX without letting the scale flood the story. It’s a surprisingly faithful retelling of the legend, with Homer’s non-linear style catnip for an architect storyteller like Nolan, who promptly opens the film in the final year of the timeline and spools backwards and forwards from there.

The film is set in “a time of apparent magic”, an oblique idea in a world of Cyclopes and trips to Hades (a stunningly, bleakly unsettling vast black landmass, with bodies crawling forward to sip goats blood and share terrible prophecies), but where the presence of the Gods is open to interpretation. Zeus cracks thunder and Poseidon rolls waves, but maybe it’s just superstition. Is Odysseus right to be a sceptic? The only God present is Athena, played with warm distance by Zendaya, who may or may not be a figment of Odysseus guilty conscience.

Despite its length, it frequently zips along, with a marvellously staged sequence from Homer cropping up every few minutes. Sequences like the Fitzcarraldo-like laborious dragging of a wooden horse (half buried in the sand) that looks like a grim bronze statue of a bucking horse, over many miles by the luckless Trojans are brilliantly done. It’s hard to fault almost anything about its production. But it’s not perfect.

Perhaps the major thing missing from Nolan’s film is a sense of personal hubris (as opposed to the imperial hubris of Agamemnon). Nolan has a very interesting interpretative idea of the fall of Troy being effectively the fall of man, the deception and brutality being a Bronze age Hiroshima. But a more interesting film would have seen Odysseus initially proud of his role in this orgy of war-ending killing, only to realise during the disastrous journey home he is in fact the villain. That he broke his own sacred code, of twanging the bow to warn the prey. Instead, Odysseus is plainly aware of his crimes from the start, and his shame perversely gives the character little room to develop, beyond Nolan’s implication his journey is self-inflicted.

Strangely then, it’s hard to get a sense of the journey changing Odysseus. Nolan is far more successful as seeing the whole film as a self-inflicted punishment. Odysseus doesn’t believe he deserves to go home. Instead, as the destroyer of peace and order, part of him embraces his journey (he even leaves Troy on a self-imposed longer route, over his crew’s protests). While his long exile with Calypso is largely pushed into montage, the film implies Odysseus willingly eats the lotus to forget his guilt.

Nolan attempts to fill the gap by having Odysseus strain to save his crew’s lives. But, while Odysseus is weighed down with guilt, his crew emphatically isn’t; this borderline mutinous bunch merrily ransacking and burning a farming village. When Circe denounces this bunch as rapists in waiting, neither the film (or Odysseus) can really argue otherwise. The Odyssey can never quite decide what it feels about these characters, and their resentment at Odysseus for their numbers being whittled down tends to get outweighed by the film’s empathy for Odysseus’ guilt and shame.

There are similarly confused emotional lines in Odysseus relationship with young warrior Sinon. The Odyssey wants to establish Odysseus’ double betrayal of this man – first allowing Antonius to bully him into taking his place in the army, then using him as a pawn to get the Trojans to drag the horse into the city – as a foundational crime. But there isn’t time to establish a surrogate father-son bond between them, meaning Odysseus betrayal of Sinon feels muddily motivated. Again, the film wants to keep Odysseus sympathetic so avoids stating the conclusion he must have made: Sinon’s life is an acceptable sacrifice to end the war. The Odyssey leans heavily on Elliot Page’s sensitive, traumatised performance to make us fill in this blank.

This is a sign of Nolan’s film covering a lot of complex meat, without always finding room to digest it fully. Alongside this, he wants a more conventional, crowd-pleasing tale of a hero coming home to a loving wife. As part of this, many of the female characters of The Odyssey are stripped of some of their richness. Most egregiously, Charlize Theron’s Calypso and Zendaya’s Athena are little more than sounding boards for Odysseus. But even Penelope, despite an emotionally intense performance from Anne Hathaway, is more of a traditional faithful wife. Nolan is trying to show the vulnerability of her position in a masculine world – but you long for more sign of the shrewd resentful figure of either The Return or Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad.

Perhaps because this is because Nolan is grimly realistic in suggesting women are often trapped in victim roles in this male world. Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen of Troy may be critical of the Greeks but is also an abused wife (her face disfigured by Jon Bernthal’s brutish Menelaus), plagued with shame about how her name was used to justify so much death. Even Circe, the most complex and engaging female role, dreads becoming a victim. That doesn’t take away from the barn-storming cameo of resentment and paranoia by Samantha Morton. The creepy Cronenbergesque body-horror of Circe using her hands to craft the sailor’s faces into pigs – including shoving her hand down one man’s throat – is perhaps the film’s most unsettling moment.

What a lot of this comes back to is Nolan’s admittedly fascinating idea that Odysseus has opened a Pandora’s Box that unleashed destruction on the world. His burning of Troy, broke Zeus’s Law of treating guests as you yourself would wish to be treated. In echoes of Oppenheimer, Odysseus believes he has laid the groundwork for the end of the world, by creating one where hospitality can be betrayed and people’s word is no longer their bond (exactly the world the suitors are exploiting in Ithica).

This keys into Nolan’s most interesting concept. Throughout this subtly fracturing world – where the Gods may be falling silent and the world is shorn of rules – there are reports of ‘men of the sea’ roaming the coasts taking anything they want. Is this another cause for the Greeks to fight? Perhaps not: like nuclear weapons, violence become self-perpetuating. The actions of Odysseus crew should clue us in that these men are in fact the Greeks themselves, their humanity gone, continuing a cycle of destruction and death started by Odysseus who has “become death, destroyer of worlds”.

There are many, many good ideas in The Odyssey, which I’ve mulled over for several weeks after seeing the film. Fundamentally, I feel some of it doesn’t always land from the casting of Odysseus. Would Matt Damon have been my choice? Probably not: there is a boyish decency about Damon, not a tortured cunning. He’s probably not helped by recent memories of Ralph Fiennes (almost born to play the role), but Damon can’t bring out the depths of conflict, guilt, regret and misplaced pride in the way (say) Cillian Murphy did in Oppenheimer. Damon is a little too similar to the optimistic, earnest energy Tom Holland very successfully gives Telemachus. The Odyssey tries to follow The Return in making Odysseus keen to ensure Telemachus does follow him into a life of violence – but can’t resist giving Holland one last sword fight to flex his muscles.

I feel conflicted about The Odyssey and I need to see it again. It is so close to everything I wanted. Its practical effects and epic scenes with Polyphemus, the sirens and Sicilia and Charybdis have a wonderful Jason and the Argonauts feel to them that I loved. But it also feels quite damning that the sack of Troy is less shocking here than it was in Troy (especially as the brutality is at the heart of what the film is trying to do) and its final third covers similar ground to The Return, but (for me) with less clear-eyed honesty, awkwardly balancing action set-pieces and its thematically ‘happy’ ending.

But there are so many delights to appreciate, not least Ludwig Göransson’s imposing score, the stunning imagery and costume design (Ellen Mironijck’s imaginative use of a range of inspirations reaches an apotheosis in Agamemnon reimagined as a mix of Darth Vader and Batman). There are wonderful performances in smaller roles, not least Morton, Bernthal, Himesh Patel and most of all John Leguizamo as the loyal Eumaeus and Robert Pattinson as the despicable. But while it tackles an array of brilliant idea, it can’t always balance these all successfully. It’s almost the first Nolan film where his reach overextends his grasp – but when you have a reach like this, does it matter?