Category: Directors

The Insider (1999)

Mann’s finest film is a chilling breakdown of the insidious strength of corporations

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Al Pacino (Lowell Bergman), Russell Crowe (Dr Jeffrey Wigand), Christopher Plummer (Mike Wallace), Diane Venora (Liane Wigand), Philip Baker Hall (Don Hewitt), Lindsay Crouse (Sharon Tiller), Debi Mazar (Debbie De Luca), Stephen Tobolowsky (Eric Kluster), Colm Feore (Richard Scruggs), Bruce McGill (Ron Motley), Gina Gershon (Helen Caperelli), Michael Gambon (Thomas Sandefur), Rip Torn (John Scanlon), Cliff Curtis (Sheikh Fadlallah)

For decades we persuaded ourselves smoking was problem-free. Then, when we finally decided sucking tar into your lungs several times a day probably didn’t go hand-in-hand with good health, Big Tobacco bent over backwards to argue they didn’t believe for one minute nicotine was actually addictive. This lie – they were improving the hit to increase the customer base – was blown upon by corporate whistle blower, and former B&W employee, Dr Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe).

But the battle over the reporting of the story also exposed the fault-lines in corporate-owned media companies, as Wigand’s 60 Minutes interview was canned by a CBS network terrified of legal action imperilling a corporate sale, much to the fury of crusading producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) who spent months bringing Wigand in only to see him brushed aside. The Insider charts these two stories merging into each other: the deadly campaign of intimidation and smears against Wigand, segueing into the caving of CBS in the face of legal threats with Bergman left furious, betrayed and turning his campaigning fire against his own employers.

This all comes grippingly to life in Michael Mann’s superb slice of All the President’s Men inspired-reportage, turning this 1996 TV-and-business scandal into a sleek, intelligent thriller that takes a chilling look at how corporate America rigs the game in its own favour with impunity. The Insider is as rightfully furious at the dirty-tricks and menace of the tobacco companies, as it is at the subtly insidious way corporate interests pollutes news reporting. It does this while also presenting its two heroes as flawed men with more in common than they might think: competitive alpha males, both prone to taking rash, destructive actions in fits of head-strong self-righteousness, caring about their own moral code over the needs of others.

The Insider splits into two clear acts: the agonising decision of Wigand to blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance, in the face of immense personal and professional pressure and Bergman’s subsequent struggle to deliver on his word and get Wigand’s confession on air. The first half offers the more traditional heroics – and the more overt hero-and-villain structure, but increasingly I find the second half, of news shows being dictated to by their paymasters more-and-more unsettlingly prescient, becoming increasingly relevant the older the film gets.

But that first half makes for a compellingly tense pressure-cooker view. It’s powered by an excellent performance by Russell Crowe (effortlessly convincing as someone twenty years older, and collecting his first Oscar nomination). Crowe makes Wigand principled but prickly, brave but confrontational and at times frustratingly self-righteous. His moral qualms are finally sharpened into action his fury at the blunt-intimidation from B&W’s sinisterly avuncular CEO (a masterful cameo from Michael Gambon – one of the great single-scene performances in movies) and its implication that he cannot trusted to stick to his NDA. Wigand barely involves his wife (a tightly-wound Diane Venora) in his decisions, only mentioning his dismissal in passing and deciding to appear on 60 minutes (a decision that will shatter their lives) unilaterally.

But Wigand also has higher motives. He wants to be able to look his daughters in the eye, having sold-out to burnish the dirty-deeds of B&W with his scientific skills. He’s rightly affronted by the lies Big Tobacco has sold the public and undergoes enormous sacrifices (financial, marital, professional, legal, death threats and a public smear campaign) to see things through. Mann’s cool mix of starkness and shadows, full of drained out colours and greys, is perfect for a world where Wigand is shadowed by strangers at a driving range, receives bullets in his mailbox and searches late at night for who has left footprints in his garden. Crowe superbly conveys a man acting out of an increasing sense of moral imperative, struggling desperately to hold himself together under immense pressure.

This section of the film – especially with its clear antagonist – plays as a superb personal and political thriller, Mann expertly conveying lurking menace. In 1999 the second half of the film, the struggle to actually broadcast Wigand’s interview, was often seen as slightly underwhelming. But actually it shows a different type of danger: less overt and heavy-handed corporate power with its legal injunctions and bullying FBI guys hoping for a cushy retirement job with the corporation, more how these corporate masters assert control in quiet, less direct ways to decide what we hear or see.

Our journalists have no fear when confronting criminals or terrorists – The Insider’s prologue establishes this with Bergman and host Mike Wallace not flinching in the face of gun-toting Hezbollah fighters guarding the Sheikh they have arranged to interview. But they face far greater threats to their integrity when confronted with lawyers and corporate directors (effectively embodied by Gina Gershon and Stephen Tobolowsky as uncaring suits) whose threats are indirect and insidious. Wigand’s interview could imperil the sale of CBS and the bonus of the corporate suits, and in that scenario journalist principles can go hang. Christopher Plummer is, by the way, superb as the charismatic Wallace, who caves to pressure then convinces himself he hasn’t, a super-star of the airwaves who loses part of his wider integrity trying to protect his position.

And doesn’t the idea that corporations can squeeze the life out of journalistic stories feel even more chilling today? After all, virtually every single news outlet out there is owned by a major business, all with their own agendas. Can we really believe they’ve not all made calls on gets reported, based on what their shareholders might think? Mann’s film skilfully – and rather chillingly – shows how quickly they can re-work the agenda. It leaves Lowell Bergman raging (as only Al Pacino can) against the betrayal of trust he’s being forced to make towards Wigand.

Crowe’s pressure-cooker performance stole many of the headlines on release but The Insider also benefits from an excellent Pacino performance. Utterly committed to his principles and – just like Wigand – utterly unwilling to compromise them even an inch, no matter the cost, Bergman will pick up the windmill-tilting banner, and charge with it at his own paymasters. No one can rip through speeches quite like Pacino, but he gives Bergman a real genuineness, grounded in a fundamental decency, whose righteous anger is underpinned with world-weary disbelief that it’s come to this.

It grounds an excellently studied breakdown of a journalistic turf war. The Insider plays like All the President’s Men, if Woodward and Bernstein had been spiked after they nailed the story. Mann demonstrates the influence in The Insider’s crisply immersive photography that employs depth of frame and gyroscopic deep-focus, as well as in the crisp editing and the film’s mesmerising emersion in the complex details of building a story. Combine that with a gripping conspiracy thriller on the machinations of ruthless corporations and The Insider makes for a compelling film.

Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

Some odd clashes of style but still a distinctive and unique musical, if not a triumph

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Ted Neeley (Jesus Christ), Carl Anderson (Judas Iscariot), Yvonne Elliman (Mary Magdalene), Barry Dennen (Pontius Pilate), Bob Bingham (Caiaphas), Larry Marshall (Simon Zealotes), Josh Mostel (King Herod), Kurt Yaghjian (Annas), Philip Toubus (Peter)

A bus rolls up in the West Bank and a bunch of excited, hippie actors and singers bundle out. What else are they going to do but replay the final days of Jesus Christ – with songs! Thus begins Norman Jewison’s adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice’s rock opera musical, a hodge-podge of interesting ideas, stylistic nonsense and touches of the bizarre. Some of it works, some of its doesn’t – but at least it’s having a stab at doing something different.

I’ll assume you are familiar with the final days of Jesus Christ (Ted Neeley) as Jesus Christ Superstar ticks off the arrival in Jerusalem, the money lenders in the temple, the last supper, Gethsemane, Pilate washing his hands and the crucifixion (but not, pointedly, the resurrection). Jesus is at the centre of this but, as is so often the case in films, is an enigmatic, unreadable figure. The real lead is Judas (Carl Anderson), worried that the Messiah is running the risk of provoking a brutal smack-down from the Romans and letting the worship of his follower’s rush to his head. Perhaps he should do something about it?

First the good stuff. Douglas Slocombe’s photography, on location in a sun-soaked Middle East (the cast must have been grateful their flowing, hippie robes translated into such light clothing) looks gorgeous (the final shot of the cross at dusk – with a shepherd and sheep just visible in the corona of the sun’s glare, a happy on-the-day accident – is sublime). The locations are bravely selected to stress the sweeping vastness of desert: Pilate’s home is a rocky mountain, the apostles dance among abandoned Roman pillars, Gethsemane is the only splash of green we see. A cave with a circular hole in its roof, casts a striking shard of light over Jesus with his disciples. There is gorgeous stuff here.

It’s mixed in with some successful modern touches. Turning the money lender’s stalls into a trashy marketplace, rife with everything from tourist tat to heavy weaponry works as a striking image of commercial corruption. Jesus’ final vision of Judas takes place in a Roman amphitheatre decked out like a concert carries a nice dream-like quality. The idea of having the priest’s temple being a piece of bare-bones scaffolding is a nice visual image of their ambition. At the centre of the film is a very striking, excellently sung performance by Carl Anderson as Judas. Pretty much dominating the film, he brings the part just the right amount of spark, frustration, anger and self-pity and best manages to invest the songs with character.

Unfortunately, Jesus Christ Superstar mixes this with plenty of modern touches that either land flatly or whose intention becomes almost hard to work out. When Judas is chased through the desert by tanks or buzzed by fighter planes, is this a sign of the conflict that would come, the sense of destiny forcing him into his assigned role, or just an excuse to see the budget put into effect on some military hardware? Moments like this feel they are trying too hard against the more subtle modern touches.

There’s also the rather mixed bag of inexperienced performers Jewison fills the film out with. Ted Neeley can certainly hold a note, but he’s no actor, turning Jesus into a blank void who frequently feels like he’s watching the action around him while waiting for his cue. Yvonne Elliman similarly is an excellent singer but doesn’t really manage to convey the complex feelings of love and worship in Mary Magdalene. The rest of the cast give it an enthusiastic go, ranging from the decent (Barry Dennon) to the over-emphatic (Philip Toubas – who later became a hugely successful porn star, not exactly the expected career path of St Peter).

The mix of hippie-ish costumes also only works in places. While Jesus is of course dressed pretty much as any Hollywood film had ever dressed him (white-flowing robes), others wear a mixture of that, flower-power garbs or the sort of in-between strangeness (I’m looking at you Roman soldiers) that makes it look like they have wandered in from an episode of Star Trek. The brightly coloured costumes do however stand out extremely well in the vast blankness of the desert.

Jesus Christ Superstar’s main problem is its lack of narrative drive. Co-scripting with Melvyn Bragg (surely the easiest paycheque ever for one of the UK’s leading public intellectuals), Jewison doesn’t really provide any dramatic meat or force between the songs. There isn’t really a sense of moral and narrative development, with the film instead feeling rather like the concert album it’s based on, a series of songs staged one after-the-other without really linking together in a full narrative arc.

Saying that, Jewison’s effectiveness with the camera comes across well. “Hosanna” is crammed with a full-blown, very well-shot Busby-Berkely style number where Jewison rather effectively uses freeze-frames to punctuate the beats. “The Temple” sees Jesus disappear under a swarm of lepers like a zombie victim. A shot of the Judas’ purse of thirty pieces of silver dominates the frame at one point like it’s drawing him in. Some of the frantic tracking shots of Judas through the desert have a real elemental force to them.

But there isn’t quite enough of that to bring Jesus Christ Superstar to make it a triumph. Its episodic song structure, it’s odd mix of styles and the wildly varying quality of its performances never quite gel together. However, it’s perfect for turning this into a sort of camp spectacular, a cult oddness that stands out as quite unlike any other musical or film Jewison made.

A Generation (1955)

Wajda’s striking debut is full of politically-enforced lies but is masterful film-making

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Cast: Tadeusz Łomnicki (Stach Mazur), Urszula Modrzyńska (Dorota), Tadeusz Janczar (Jasio Krone), Janusz Paluszkiewicz (Sekuła), Ryszard Kotys (Jacek), Roman Polanski (Mundek)

Few European countries felt the brunt of the Second World War more than Poland. Invaded by the Nazis and the USSR (it’s often forgot Britain and France went to war in 1939 to defend Polish, something even we seem to have forgotten by 1945 when we allowed the country to be smothered in the Soviet embrace), it faced atrocities from both dictatorships which left lasting scars on the nation. It’s events (and legacy) was the subject of the first three films by legendary Polish director Andrzej Wajda, the title A Generation capturing the impact it had on the entire country.

A Generation follows a group of young men drawn into the resistance movement against the German occupying forces. They include the increasingly political Stach (Tadeusz Łomnicki) and the hesitant, anxious Jasio (Tadeusz Janczar), both of whom are inducted into a resistance cell by the impassioned Dorota (Urszula Modrzyńska). As Warsaw burns during the Jewish Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the newly minted fighters take to the streets in solidarity – and at cost.

It’s a simple summary, but that only tells half the story. There are subtleties to A Generation that can be hard to pick-up on for those not born Polish. When Wajda made A Generation, Poland was in the grip of Stalinism. It’s a film not made under artistic freedom, but by an artist pushing against the boundaries of what censorship would allow him to say. Among a great deal of truth in A Generation there are also thumping great lies. Lies that surely must have hurt Wajda, whose father was murdered (along with thousands others) by the Soviets at Katyn (a war crime A Generation, by necessity, pins on the Germans).

Stalinist thinking dictated very clear lines. The resistance heroes in the film are The People’s Guard. This was a pro-Soviet force, that believed only the Soviet Union could save Poland from the Germans. The Home Army (the largest resistance group, loyal to the Polish government-in-exile in Britain) are portrayed as bourgeoisie, reactionary, scared to fight and only marginally better than collaborators. (In real life, Stalin allowed the Home Army to be massacred by the Germans in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 – Soviet tanks effectively sat outside the city and watched – then shipped thousands of survivors to death in the gulags).

Stalinist thinking also permeates the films characterisation and opinions. Many of the characters frequently feel functional and under-developed, quietly placing the movement ahead of themselves – classic Stalinist thinking, where the individual only serves as a cog in a greater machine. Stach’s work-place mentor waxes lyrical about a wise, kind old man with a beard – Karl Marx of course – while outlining how their Home Army supporting factory boss is ruthlessly exploiting the working classes for profit. Comments about the holocaust are kept to a minimum – Stalin hardly being known for his tolerance either – with Wajda going as far as he can by praising the Jews bravery as fighters. Arguably the most developed character in the film – Tadeusz Janczar’s twitchy Jasio – is only allowed to be a more complex hero because, all his doubts, fears, bravado and individual pride, eventually lead him to the ultimate sacrifice (in the film’s most iconic moment).

If A Generation is so politically compromised, why watch it today? Because it is also a superbly striking debut from a master film-maker – and it’s important to remember, that even with its lies and political obfuscations, the Polish authorities were hardly happy with it at the time anyway. Inspired by Italian neo-realism, Wajda gives the film a lived-in, on-the-streets quality that helped revolutionise Polish cinema. Quite simply, no Polish film had ever looked like this before – it was the first to break free from its hermetically sealed studio bubble. From its opening tracking shot through the poverty-stricken streets of Warsaw’s Wola district, to its extensive location shooting in run-down factories and cobble-lined streets, A Generation embraces realism, employing several non-actors.

Mud, rain and ill-lit locations fill out the frame in a grim, sharply realist view of war. Wajda frequently shows bodies hanging from lamp-posts, while gun battles between Germans and partisans have a frighteningly random intensity to them (perhaps helped by the fact that budgetary issues meant it was cheaper to fire real ammunition on set). The film pioneered the use of squibs for gunshots (condoms filled with fake blood, then burst). Warsaw burns in the background of shots that foreground everyday life, such as fun-fares and solidly proletarian workers working happily.

The partisans huddle in sewers, drink in shanty late-night bars and work in dirty, noisy factories. Wajda’s film fully embraces the style de Sica and others introduced (and fascinatingly was doing this in parallel with Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and Aparajito thousands of miles away). A Generation might keep many of its characters lightly sketched – Stach and Dorota are invested with youthful fire by Tadeusz Łomnicki and Urszula Modrzyńska which goes a long way to round-out their essentially blandly communist personalities, Donata in particular fervent and stoic in her socialism – but it makes the stakes for their struggle with Fascism grippingly real and dangerously immediate.

Wajda also, successfully, gambled that if he made the two leads reasonably acceptable symbols of Stalinist thinking he would be allowed greater scope with the third. Tadeusz Janczar’s performance as Jasio is fabulous – a fighter disgusted by killing, who kills a German with a panicked firing of an entire clip then brags how much he let him have it, whose escape from the Germans during the Uprising could be interpreted either as a noble distraction to allow others to escape or a blind panic that ends fatally. Either way, Jasio is a fascinatingly rich, contradictory character.

Wajda’s film is a powerful mission statement of his dynamism with the camera and his ability to walk a fine-line between political demands and genuine drama (though his later films would be made under a marginally more liberal government). While it must never be forgotten while watching it that it presents a slanted, false version of history, it still captures an essential truth of its haphazard chaos and savage violence. When Stach weeps when seeing teenagers not much younger than him preparing to join the People’s Guard, it hits a deeper truth about the horrors of the twentieth century on Poland that blasts through any political compromise Wajda was forced to make.

Napoleon (1927)

Gance’s monumental film takes the breath away, packed with innovation, invention and drama

Director: Abel Gance

Cast: Albert Dieudonné (Napoléon Bonaparte), Edmond Van Daële (Maximilien Robespierre), Alexandre Koubitzky (Georges Danton), Antonin Artaud (Jean-Paul Marat), Abel Gance (Louis de Saint-Just), Gina Manès (Joséphine de Beauharnais), Vladimir Roudenko (Young Napoléon), Marguerite Gance (Charlotte Corday), Yvette Dieudonné (Élisa Bonaparte), Philippe Hériat (Antoine Saliceti), Max Maxudian (Barras), Annabella (Violine Fleuri), Nicolas Koline (Tristan Fleuri)

There is a marvellous quote from Victor Hugo when he wrote about the young life of the most famous Frenchmen who ever lived: Déjà Napoléon perçait sous Bonaparte. Which roughly translates as ‘already Napoleon was bursting through Bonaparte’ – or to put it another way, the man was already being consumed by the legend. That idea dominates Abel Gance’s extraordinary, epic, retelling of the Young Napoleon’s life, an origins story that sees a young man become increasingly distant and legendary before our eyes. Gance’s film may be resolutely old-fashioned in its historiographical approach, but is revelatory in its cinematic flair and invention, with almost every scene demonstrating Gance pushing the medium in new directions.

Napoleon was planned as only the first of no-less-than six films that would cover the cradle-to-grave story of the man who defined his whole era. Such was Gance’s ambition through, that even across five hours he felt he had only scratched the surface of the first 27 years of Napoleon’s (Albert Dieudonné) life from his childhood education (snowball fights and all) at Brienne – where he is seen as a Brutish Corsican outsider – via the French revolution, his failed attempt at revolution in Corsica, his successful siege of Toulon and promotion to General at 24, nearly losing his life in The Terror, Thermidor and his crushing of the Vendemaire uprising, marriage to Josephine (Gina Manès) and the beginning of his campaign in Italy.

Gance unfolds this in a film brimming with cinematic verve and invention. Much like its lead character, it is a seismic and larger-than-life (literally so in its most famous innovation, the three frame wide-screen effect achieved for its final twenty minutes). Napoleon practically defines the notion of historical epic, reproducing many at historical events at a 1:1 ratio. At its centre is a magnetically hypnotic (almost literally) performance from Albert Dieudonné (so enamoured with the role, he was buried in his costume) juggling the impossible by suggesting some of the many shades of this fascinating figure, part revolutionary, part tyrant, part romantic, part war-monger.

There is something truly striking and original in every frame of Napoleon. Gance presents a picture of the famous general more than touched with an old-fashioned Great Man theory of history, but still suggests he is almost two men in one. He is Bonaparte, the slightly-chippy, awkward young man who clumsily woos Josephine (barely sure where to do with hands, tugging shyly at his sash), struggles to get noticed in a map-making office and finds it challenging to make friends, either at school (where he is a painfully serious outsider) or as an adult. But he is also Napoleon, the totem of history who Gance frequently frames as almost communing with a historical version of himself.

This Napoleon bursts from the awkward Corsican shell of Bonaparte. Gance frequently frames him almost confronting the camera, light shimmering around him to form halos, with a piercing stare that freezes people into place. He comes to identify himself with the flag and the revolution. So much so that, in his escape from Corsica, he will be borne across the seas by a tricolour jerry-rigged into a sail and visualise himself being hailed by the executed ghosts of the revolution as its natural heir. Indeed, the film ends with Napoleon atop a mountain starring into a montage of his future achievements, as if he was bending history around him.

Which isn’t to say Gance sees him as a constantly sympathetic figure. While there is no question he is a force of nature – he controls the frame, frequently centred and when the camera moves (such as the careering gallop that takes him to Italy) he is always at the eye of its propulsive tracking shots – he is also an imposing, even scary figure, distant and cold. In dyed red frames, he looks positively demonic, such as when he looms forward out of the rain in Toulon, his face filling the frame to demand relentless attack. His self-identification with the revolution becomes monomaniacal.

Gance re-enforces his distance from normal human reaction by returning constantly to the Fleuri’s, a working-class family who shadow the Great Man (Violine loves him hopelessly and her father and brother worship him) but whom he never notices. It’s part of him being crafted into marble before us – with all the terrifying lack of human understanding that suggests. Throughout he’s shadowed by an eagle, a visual representation of his mystical, greater-than-human nature, a bird of destiny that drives him relentlessly on. He’s contrasted constantly with other would-be leaders: the itchy Marat, the empty windbag Danton and (most noticeably) the curiously ineffectual Robespierre, an uncharismatic man who can’t control a crowd, is lost behind darkened glasses, follows the orders of others and is comically dwarfed by an eagle statue not elevated by it.

Gance’s history has a slight school-book Victorianism to it. He’s very proud of “historical” facts – quotes and events are frequently branded with the on-screen phrase “(Historical)” so we can see his behind-the-scenes research – and has more than a little love for irony. Of course, the final island covered in school-boy Napoleon’s geography class is “St Helena”! Of course, the English sailor who spots him escaping from Corsica (and is refused a request to sink his ship) is Nelson! The film is littered with cameo appearances from later Napoleon rivals and allies. There is also a darker irony playing here: we know that when Napoleon is praised by the ghosts of the revolution that, far from protecting it, he will in fact become its final destroyer.

But what really singles out Napoleon is it’s intense, cinematic inventiveness. It’s an explosion of unique, fascinating images packaged into a single film. Gance reinvented the wheel multiple times on this one, not least on his of ghostly images and cross-fades. To achieve this – such as the ghostly appearance of the Great Revolutionaries in an otherwise empty Assembly Hall, he re-exposed the same film multiple times (sometimes as many as twenty) to achieve the effect. The same for Napoleon’s schoolyard fights, a single sequence with the screen split into nine squares each showing a different moment in time achieved by covering different parts of the frame for each exposure.

Gance’s camera is strikingly mobile, his editing frequently thrilling and thought-provoking. The famous sequence of Napoleon’s escape from Corsica is superbly intercut with the clash in the Assembly that will lead to the execution of the Gironists. The swaying of the ship is increasingly echoed by the swaying and eventually full-blown swinging of the camera in the Assembly room. Both events merge together through cross-fades. The camera whips through some scenes with real pace and aggression – witness the fast-paced tracking shots that follow Napoleon to Italy.

That’s matched as well with imaginative scenes of quiet beauty. The young Napoleon quietly communing with his pet eagle. The marvellous “shadow marriage” Violine conducts with a cardboard doll of Napoleon, positioned to cast a full-length shadow on the wall. There are moments of black humour – the coffin Robespierre and Saint-Just keep the death sentences they’ve passed in – and moments of soaring, lyrical inspiration such as the first singing of the Marseilles which takes on a mystical quality. To achieve this, Gance pushed the camera places it had never been before, patenting new techniques and devices to achieve frames, angles and cross-fades never seen before.

The most stand-out being the astonishing three-frame wide-screen effect. Perfectly mapped, with the small distortion in the joins almost adding to the power, this creates Panavision decades before Hollywood had even coined it. It creates awe-inspiring vistas of Napoleon’s Italian army – although the battle scenes Gance shoots are often cruel and dirty, with bodies twisted and crushed by the violence of war – but it also allows Gance to present three different images side-by-side, something he exploits to maximum effect in the closing moments that presents a giddyingly cut (it’s Eistensein-influence is clear) montage of past moments in the film that have led up to the Napoleon we see standing on a mountain before us starring into the future.

For Gance through, it is a future that wouldn’t come. Napoleon was not a success – perhaps people couldn’t quite process the scale of it, perhaps the money-men were terrified that Gance had spent the budget of six films on one and still hadn’t got round to Austerlitz, Borodino and Waterloo. The film was butchered and tinkered with for decades before it was reborn. And what a relief, because this is a stunning epic, which (for all its narrative simplicity) has something to wonder at in every frame. An extraordinary film, which everyone should see at least once.

Sexy Beast (2001)

Superb acting motors a gangster film that’s also a nightmare house-guest comedy

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Cast: Ray Winstone (Gal Dove), Ben Kingsley (Don Logan), Ian McShane (Teddy Bass), Amanda Redman (DeeDee Gove), James Fox (Harry), Cavan Kendall (Aitch), Julianne White (Jackie), Álvaro Monje (Enrique)

Gal Dove (Ray Winstone) has got it made. He’s baked bronze by the pool in his home on the Costa del Sol, earned after a life as a top safe cracker in London, alongside wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman), best friend (and fellow ex-crook) Aitch (Cavan Kendall) and glamourous Jackie (Julianne White). All that changes when an unexpected visitor turns up: Don Logan (Ben Kingsley). A tightly-wound, terrifyingly unpredictable sociopath, Logan has a job offer to which the only acceptable answer is yes: joining a team to break into a top London bank for crime king-pin Teddy Bass (Ian McShane). How’s Gal going to get himself out of this one?

Sexy Beast seems at points it might settle for being a standard British gangster drama. But Glazer’s becomes a hugely enjoyable mix of that and bizarre black comedy. A houseguest from hell comedy, like a psychotically foul-mouthed The Man Who Came to Dinner, with the added sprinkle of playful psychological theory and touches of darkly sexual content (James Fox brings back memories of The Servant and Performance). There is even an element of Greek drama: Gal really should be paying attention to the parade of ill-events preceding Don’s arrival, not least the boulder that tumbles down a mountain into his swimming pool nearly squashing Gal en route.

That boulder is, it turns out, far less of a danger than Don. If there is one thing that dominates perceptions of Sexy Beast, it’s the intimidating, witty danger of Ben Kingsley. For an actor best known at the time as Gandhi, to say this was a change of pace was an understatement. Kingsley arguably changed his whole career here with this stunningly intense, hilarious, performance. Shirt tucked in, head shaved, Logan might look physically unassuming but the pulsing vein in his head is a sign of him being a tightly wound ball of unprocessed anger and fury. Kingsley makes him superbly unpredictable – snapping on a sixpence from quiet to rabid fury with a terrifying capacity for sudden violence.

Glazer throws him into Gal’s Spanish heaven like a ticking timebomb. There is a great deal of wit in how Glazer shoots Logan, often sitting or standing in a domineering position in rooms while the other characters awkwardly shuffle, uncertain of where to look, hugging the margins. This comedy carries across into Logan’s utter disregard for social rules or niceties – all captured in his blackly hilarious calm refusal to extinguish his cigarette on a plane, followed by his ranting ejection (“I hope this crashes!”) – which sparks shocked laughs. It’s not funny for those around him as Logan sprays matter-of-fact slurs about his hosts, deliberately urinates on their bathroom floor and calmly discusses the time he had sex with Jackie in front of her husband.

There is a strange immaturity about Don, like a maladjusted child who has never grown up, superbly contrasted with Gal’s calm, contented mellowness. Don lacks any emotional maturity and sounds like a sulky teenager. He’s the sort of playschool bully who psyches himself up in the mirror and parrots word-for-word the instructions he’s received about the planned heist from the ‘bigger boys’. He seems to have no friends and a teenage romantic obsession with Jackie (who I would bet money was his only ever sexual experience). This is all captured superbly by Kingsley’s surprisingly complex performance full of terrifying childish unpredictability alongside its dark humour.

The dominance of Kingsley makes it easy to overlook Winstone’s equally fine performance. Any doubts about the power of Kingsley to intimidate is squashed by Winstone’s subtle terror at the former Gandhi. Winstone plays up his more loveable aspects, as an honest man (despite his profession), keen to make the lives of those around him better. He’s completely unsuited now for the life of violence and crime he has left behind. Mumbling, downward looking, Winstone gives Gal some nice hints of the submissive surrender of a life-long victim to his bully.

Glazer skilfully presents these characters as two sides of the same psychological coin. While Don is certainly real, viewers can have fun tying themselves into knots on theories where he is Gal’s terrifying id, an embodiment of the hardened, dangerous criminal he possibly used to be. This makes Don’s intimidating take-over of Gal’s home a visual representation of the repressed violence in Gal. It’s a feeling added to by Gal’s dreams of a satanic satyr figure (who sort of resembles Don). Sexy Beast uses this vibe to subtly suggest the real danger might be Gal’s deeply suppressed criminal psychology. It makes for a neat suggestive undertone, which Glazer carefully never overplays.

Sexy Beast makes an impressive calling card for Glazer’s skill. It’s smartly edited – a Logan monologue explaining the heist’s background is skilfully intercut both with Logan being told of the scheme and Teddy formulating the plan. Glazer mixes interesting camera angles – there are some neat shots where cameras appear to be attached to doors in particular a revolving bank door – and impressive simplicity, not least a quietly staged scene that uses a single shot to track Logan going from calm to berserk in Gal’s kitchen. It’s a sign of the flair and imagination of a consummate visual stylist.

He also stages the heist – masterminded by a dead-eyed and chillingly calm Ian McShane – with an impressive confidence. While Kingsley’s character so dominates the film that it’s hard to get as interested in the crime itself, it offers visual panache and – in the blundering of several of the criminals in a flooded bank vault and their clumsy celebrations afterwards – further sly commentary of the immature dumbness of criminals. The sexually fluid upper class orgy where the crime is born is also staged with a refreshing lack of salaciousness and the bursts of violence, when they come, carry a matter-of-fact brutality that’s much worse than all-out gore.

If Sexy Beast has a major fault, it is that the power and fascination of Kingsley’s character unbalances the film in his favour. Its final act feels like an anti-climax – probably the only time gun-laden, underwater antics have been less exciting than a classically-trained actor spraying f-bombs and the c-word like there’s no tomorrow – but that’s also a tribute to its early power. The first two acts speak to us because, beneath all the gangster shenanigans, we’ve all had to deal with the nightmare of an uninvited house guest from your past and we can all sort of relate to the dark humour of egg-shell tip-toeing the rest of the characters do around the simmering Kingsley-volcano.

It’s why Sexy Beast works best as a black-comedy confined play (a theatrical adaptation, not a TV prequel series, is what it really needs). When it focuses on the superb interplay of Winstone and Kingsley, the film flies. It’s also proof that Glazer, even at the start of his career, could turn familiar tropes into something strikingly different, original and unique in tone. A gangster film like few others.

Skyfall (2012)

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

Director: Sam Mendes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936)

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

Director: William Dieterle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dune: Part 2 (2024)

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

Director: Denis Villeneuve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)

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

Director: Sydney Pollack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cries and Whispers (1972)

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

Director: Ingmar Bergman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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