Category: Directors

On the Rocks (2020)

Rashida Jones and Bill Murray deal with family problems in On the Rocks

Director: Sofia Coppola

Cast: Rashida Jones (Laura), Bill Murray (Felix), Marlon Wayans (Dean), Jessica Henwick (Fiona), Jenny Slate (Vanessa), Barbara Bain (Gran)

There is often a special bond between fathers and daughters. And it’s one that can be challenged if the father is “replaced” by a husband. After all, nobody wants to go from being the main man to second best. But how complex can this become when the father himself has a track record of selfishness and philandering? And is that the best person for the daughter to turn to when she starts to have doubts about her own husband? In Sofia Coppola’s gentle, light-weight film, Laura (Rashida Jones) reconnects with her roguish millionaire father Felix (Bill Murray), a successful retired art dealer, as she becomes increasingly worried that her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) is having an affair with his attractive younger colleague Fiona (Jessica Henwick).

Coppola’s new film is an entertaining, low-key family and relationship drama that’s as light as a puff of air. Recycling many familiar ideas from her previous films – in particular the idea of women who seemingly “have it all” but are feeling discontented and trapped in their lives – it spins off into a fairly gentle parable of how doubts and insecurities can take over our lives, which mainly serves as a lovely little showpiece for two very engaging actors to entertainingly do their thing.

Rashida Jones balances the trickier part as a woman who’s half endearingly fond of her fun-loving dad, half infuriated and damaged by the way he wrecked his marriage to her mother and ruined her childhood (it seems her sister and mother are no longer on speaking terms with him). At the same time, she’s keen to hold onto her successful writing career and family life – while also facing an existential crisis as she feels herself becoming more and more stuck in a rut. There are distant echoes of the lack of focus Scarlett Johansson’s character felt in Lost in Translation, the many lonely women running the house in The Beguiled, or the rich girls cut adrift in The Bling Ring or Marie Antoinette.

Into all this drops the bombshell of her husband’s possible infidelity. Coppola gently uses this as a subtle investigation of human nature. Is infidelity and betrayal something all people have as common possibilities? Or does a history of infidelity in our families make us more ready to see it everywhere? Gentle is the word, as the film doesn’t really labour any of these points – perhaps worried that to do so would take it into deeper waters than it has the nerves to handle – and prefers to keep the mood light and frothy. This does mean that when – eventually – emotional moments come, they come rather from nothing, and a braver film would have balanced better the lightness of father and daughter chasing after a (possibly) cheating husband, with tension between that same father and daughter over his appalling past behaviour.

But then, the film perhaps falls rather in love with Bill Murray – and genuinely it’s pretty hard not to. Sofia Coppola again provides Murray with a part designed to match all his strengths. A charming performer, it’s very hard (near impossible) not to like Murray and as he coasts through the film with relaxed cool, arching an eyebrow there, a touch of glib lightness here, investing certain lines with a saggy sadness, others with a playful childishness, you’ll enjoy every moment. Murray makes perfect sense as the ageing rouéand cad, who has lived his life entirely for his own pleasure, and now is conducted by chauffeur from hotel to hotel, flirting with any woman who crosses his path.

It’s a delightful performance, with several scene stealing moments – not least when Felix is pulled over by the cops and charms his way out of a ticket with confidence, a bottomless contact book and charm. The cops even push-start his showy old sports car. Of course it’s the ultimate display of white privilege: I’m interested if Dean would have had similar success if it was him. The film shies away from any commentary on race at all, which feels like a missed opportunity. Does Dean put so many hours into work because he needs to prove himself in the ways people like Felix never had to? A different film might have wondered if sub-consciously Felix was even more jealous and concerned about losing his daughter to a black man. But these are areas the film chooses not to go into.

Instead it largely settles for being a charming meander, centred around Murray’s character, that doesn’t want you to look to closely and realise what a selfish cad he really is. Of course the film is really about Felix’s regrets about not having the relationship he would like to have with his children (and Murray more than gets this across with his skilful suggestion of sadness behind the eyes), but even this is a beat the film very lightly taps. What you end up with is a very light, almost whimsical film that moves through a series of events that wind up feeling rather inconsequential. A puff of air you feel would blow the film apart.

The White Ribbon (2009)

The kids are not all right in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Director: Michael Haneke

Cast: Christian Friedel (Teacher), Ernst Jacobi (Narrator), Burghart Klaußner (Pastor), Steffi Kühnert (Pastor’s wife), Rainer Bock (Doctor), Susanne Lothar (Midwife), Roane Duran (Anna), Leonie Benesch (Eva), Ulrich Tukur (Baron), Ursina Lardi (Baroness), Maria-Victoria Dragus (Klara), Leonard Proxauf (Martin), Josef Bierbichler (Baron’s steward)

I think it’s fair to say Michael Haneke has a mixed view of humanity. His films look at the dark side of human nature, and the hypocrisies and cruelty underpinning much of our society. The White Ribbon explores these ideas further, a parable focusing on a small German village in the months before World War One, looking at how the life in one village perhaps helped lay the moral and societal groundwork for the younger generation to grow up and embrace Nazism.

In the fictional village of Eichwald, tradition is strong. The town, and its morals, are governed by traditional authority figures. However, each of these figures fails to live up to the values they – often brutally – enforce on the village and, most especially, its children. The Baron (Ulrich Tukur) is a distant autocrat, who talks of a duty of care but treats the villagers like property. The pastor (Burghart Klaußner) preaches morality and abstinence, but bullies his (many) children and condemns utterly even the slightest deviation from his own rules. The doctor (Rainer Bock) is a studious clinician, who humiliates and devalues his lover, the town’s midwife (Susanne Lothar), and sexually abuses his teenage daughter Anna (Roane Duran). In late 1913, a series of unexplained and increasingly violent events occur, from an attempt to cripple the doctor to arson, kidnap, theft and the beating of the midwife’s handicapped son. The perpetrators remain a mystery – one which the decent but ineffectual teacher (Christian Friedel) attempts to uncover – his older self (Ernst Jacobi) providing an, at times, naïve narration.

Haneke’s aim is to explore the conditions that led a generation to embrace a regime that promotes the unthinkable. While it’s clear that a future of Hitler and fascism – neither mentioned once in the film – hover over everything, this parable could serve for any totalitarian regime. Haneke is not interested in specifics. What fascinates the director is the creation of a mind-set that enables people to willingly align themselves with horrific actions. The brilliance of The White Ribbon is that could be as easily applied to Stalinism and the Khmer Rouge as it can to Nazism.

Shot in a beautiful black-and-white, the film presents a series of striking images, imbued with an immense psychological depth and haunting sense of dread. Haneke’s mastery of visual imagery is sublime, and he paces the film perfectly. While it is easy to claim the film is slow – and it does take its time – the deliberation of the pacing, and the precision of each shot, is all part of giving the film its thematic weight. It’s like a medieval passion play, with every moment giving depth to the whole.

The film’s focus is on the children – tellingly, only characters below the age of about 20 are named. It’s their faces the camera returns to time and again – and the film is set in a key moment of many of their lives, where disillusionment with adults begin. The age when they begin to realise their parents are far from perfect and even hypocritical. The film more than suggests that it is the children – working in some combination or alone – responsible for the crimes that take place in the village. Their motivations range from anger and resentment to despair and a longing for escape.

Many of these events centre around the pastor’s family. Played with a perfect emotional austerity by Burghart Klaußner, the pastor judges all around him as unworthy, with his children suffering the brunt of his discipline. It’s easy to see he is overly harsh, hypocritical (the sheer number of his children suggests he hasn’t worked hard to suppress his own sexual feelings) and unjust. His son is tied to his bed while he sleeps to prevent “impure touching” and his daughter is blamed, and publicly humiliated by him, for a school disturbance she is trying to stop. He’s a father who demands respect but cannot inspire love.

Almost worst of all, he requires his children to wear a white ribbon, to constantly remind them of moral standards they have failed to live up to. These acts of stigmatisation and bullying are not balanced with any outward affection – whatever he may actually feel, the pastor is far too restrained to show any warmth – and Haneke demonstrates his children are taking all the wrong lessons from him. The learn to be cold, distant and judgemental, and that strength is vital and weaknesses are not to be tolerated: they beat out individual thinking, and replace it with cold conformity. A basically good man – and the pastor clearly believes he is doing his best to protect his children – rears children who see others as inferior and different, and stigmatisation as an essential part of life.

The whole village lives in medieval thrall to the baron. You could be believe this village was hundreds of years in the past, not a single century. The villagers slave on the baron’s fields, meekly tugging their forelocks to him in church. The baron takes unilateral decisions affecting everyone’s lives. His own family life is cold – his wife doesn’t love him (and her sexual, not romantic, faithfulness is the only thing that matters to him), while his weak young son is the victim of at least two crimes. It’s a pattern of distant, selfish authorities who believe they work for the good of the community, while taking everything they can from it.

But then corruption is also endemic at the home. Rainer Bock gives a chilling performance as the local doctor, respected by the community for his dedication, who treats those closest to him with disdain at best, and abusive cruelty at worst. A controlling, cruel man, the doctor is the clearest example in the film of the hypocrisy of the older generation, demanding respect, decency and obedience from the younger, while treating them with selfish vileness.

Haneke’s film is a grim – and disturbing – study of this sort of everyday horror and it effect on the psyche. The dehumanisation of the young is clear, and the growing casual cruelty they begin to dish out to others becomes more and more striking. The film taps into a Wyndhamish fear of the young, the children moving in packs, their respectful words not matching their air of menace. This unsettling feeling only grows because, for many of the crimes, we are never given a firm answer to who carries them out (although we can guess). Saying that, at least three acts of violence and sabotage are explicitly shown, all of them carried out by the young – enough for the viewer to suspect the others can be tied to the same generation.

The film does pepper itself with touches of hope – enough to suggest not everyone is destined to succumb to malevolent forces. The schoolteacher – sweetly played by Christian Friedel – is well-meaning, if ineffectual, and his courtship of the baron’s dismissed nanny Eva (an endearing Leonie Benesch) has a charming bashfulness. (Although the fact the couple are brow-beaten into postponing their marriage by her domineering father reminds us of the dominance of the older generation). After the pastor’s pet bird is killed (by his daughter, who crucifies the creature on his desk), he is moved to tears when his youngest son offers him his own pet bird to make him feel better (although inevitably the offer only promotes a curt “thank you” from the Pastor while his son is in the room). The women of the older generation all show signs for reluctance or discontent with the behaviour of the patriarchs, although any protest is of course in vain.

It’s touches like this that prevent Haneke’s film from being a lecture. The village isn’t inherently bad, just terribly misguided. This all enforces the universality of the film. You’re kidding yourself if you think this could only happen in Germany. These generational clashes and the twisting of an entire generation could happen anywhere. The world is what we make it, and the white ribbons that help us remember our innocence can just as easily be used to categorise us as the worthy and the unworthy. Haneke’s film is a brilliant, profound and challenging piece of work that rewards thought, analysis and rewatching. Quite possibly his masterpiece. 

Being There (1979)

Peter Sellers is a void in the satirical Being There

Director: Hal Ashby

Cast: Peter Sellers (Chance, the gardener/Chauncey Gardiner), Shirley MacLaine (Eve Rand), Melvyn Douglas (Ben Rand), Richard Dysart (Dr Robert Allenby), Jack Warden (The President), Richard Basehart (Ambassador Vladimir Skrapinov), David Clennon (Thomas Franklin), Fran Brill (Sally Hayes), Ruth Attaway (Louise)

In movies honesty and simplicity often hide a deeper truth – a more pure view of the world, unaffected by cynicism. Being There takes these ideas and inverts them. What if we were so desperate to see a higher meaning in the words of the unaffected, that we kidded ourselves that even their blandest utterances carried deep meaning. It’s the central idea of Being There, proving again that a delusion only works when those affected are also those most invested in sustaining it.

Chance (Peter Sellers) is a child-like innocent. He works in the garden of “the old man” (implied to be his father). He has never in his life left the confines of his self-contained home. He can’t read, he can’t write. His meals are prepared for him by the old man’s staff. Apart from gardening his only other interest is television – and even that is a mute, hypnotic interest with Chance meekly watching anything screened in front of him. When the old man passes away, Chance (of whom there is no record at all) is asked to leave the house by the old man’s lawyers. He finds himself in a modern 1970s world, but still dressed (and with the manners) of a 1930s gentleman.

Accidentally hit by the chauffer driven car of Eve (Shirley MacLaine), the younger wife of wealthy businessman Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas), Chance (his name mistakenly overheard as Chancey Gardiner) finds himself in the home of Ben where his manners, dress and polite comments about gardening are interpreted as being deep, intellectual musings on society and the economy. In a few days Chance is advising the President (Jack Warden) and his opinion is being solicited by the media. Will anyone notice that Chance is a harmless but basically empty man?

Being There is not just a hilarious satire of the capacity of the rich and powerful to persuade themselves of things. It’s also a satire on the Capraesque notion of the innocent seeing a truth that the rest of us can’t see. It throws in more than enough social commentary on the edges as well – Chance is revered because he looks right: well-dressed, courtly manners, softly spoken, polite and above all white. The film gets a few pointed blows in on this that look more and more central to the film the older it gets. Seeing Chance’s earnest musings on gardening being interpreted as deeply meaningful economic commentary on the television, the woman who bought him up in the old man’s house – a black servant Louise – announces “It’s for sure a white man’s world in America. Look here: I raised that boy since he was the size of a piss-ant… Shortchanged by the Lord, and dumb as a jackass. Look at him now! Yes, sir, all you’ve gotta be is white in America, to get whatever you want.”

And she’s right. Interpreted by the rich, white, entitled men of America as one of their own, it never occurs to them that Chance might be something else. And his statements carry such bland emptiness – precisely because Chance is merely stating genuine gardening tips – that it becomes easy to invest them with whatever depth they like, because they have no depth themselves. While in Capra, Chance would stumble upon some of the corruption at the top or make these people rethink their lives, here he drifts through, barely understanding what is happening around him, allowing these powerful men to interpret him as something that reassures them about their own lives.

In the 1970s the film was seen as a satire on the television generation. But watching it today – despite Chance’s mute, unengaged smile while watching TV – this isn’t about a mindless cabbage potato being seen as a sage. He’s a completely empty vessel that can have meanings poured into him – and then can all stick because not for a single second is Chance trying to get anything out of it. He would be as happy returned to the street as he is in the palaces of the mighty.

The film works due to the success of Peter Seller’s performance. Seller’s had pitched long and hard for the role: he had always believed himself a void beneath the mad-hat comic personas he had inhabited, and believed himself uniquely placed to understand the neutrality of Chance. That’s what he brings here. It takes true skill to play a character as blank as this one. Chance never responds to the situation he is in – and seems to have no understanding at all of the situation. He’s completely genuine and honest – exactly what gives his comments weight to people, because he is not even remotely trying to add any weight to them – and meekly accepts all the things that happen to him. He is honest on every question he is asked – that his only interests are gardening and TV – and sits quietly, smiling, until finally saying or doing things he has frequently copied from TV.

Seller’s restrains himself utterly in the role and eventually his very tame, sweet blankness makes him endearing. The performance would fall apart if even for a split second there was a tip of hat or wink to the camera. There’s none of that. Compare Chance to say Forrest Gump. Gump is the quintessential example of the cliché man who really understands the world better than all of us. Chance is the reality, a simple man, harmless but incapable of really engaging with the world. In Hal Ashby’s skilled and restrained hands this becomes crucial to the awe he is treated with by the rich. He’s a mystery we get no answers to and someone we know as little about at the end as we did at the start. But yet Sellers is mesmeric.

Melvyn Douglas’ provides a superb (Oscar-winning) performance as Ben Rand. How much does Rand really believe in Chance? He’s charismatic, determined and driven – but also nearing the end of his life. Does he want to believe in his faith in Chance, because it makes him feel better? Is Chance almost a sort of advance satire of movements like scientology – faiths that make rich people feel better about themselves, because it affirms their views and place in the hierarchy? It’s possible – and why not when they can craft an idea of Chance that is far superior to their nervy (and literally impotent) President (Jack Warden in a smart little turn).

Ashby at time overplays his hand a little. The final image – a benign Chance literally walking on water on the Rand estate lake – is famous, but its meaning is unclear. Does it imply that Chance is some form of second coming? Or does the naïve and clueless Chance simply walk across water because he doesn’t understand that he can’t? I feel the latter myself – the idea of him being a Jesus figure is so out of keeping with the film, I see it as a final physical representation of his own lack of knowledge about the world. Some hated the final flourish (visually wonderfully done as it is) – although not as much as the bizarre outtake of Sellers cracking up that plays over the credit (Sellers in particular loathed this, believing it shattered the magic of his performance and cost him an Oscar).

Being There isn’t perfect – it’s too long and Shirley MacLaine gets rather a thankless part as the wife who becomes infatuated with Chance (more could perhaps have been got out of her seeing the truth of Chance, rather than being as arrogantly deluded as the rest). Moments have dated less well than others. But it’s got a sharp idea at its heart – and its satire of the rich, Hollywood sentimentality and society feels sharper every day. Rather fittingly as well the film has an autumnal quality about it in Ashby’s coldly reserved shooting: Sellers and Douglas both died shortly after its release, the book’s author Jerzy Kosinski would be plagued after its release with accusations of plagiarism and Ashby’s (after a drug fuelled but successful 1970s) career would collapse almost immediately after its release. But it’s a smart, mysterious, witty and profound film that gains greater meaning with age.

Alien 3 (1992)

Sigourney Weaver goes through the motions again in Alien 3

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Sigourney Weaver (Ellen Ripley), Charles S. Dutton (Leonard Dillon), Charles Dance (Dr Jonathan Clemens), Brian Glover (Warden Harold Andrews), Ralph Brown (Aaron), Paul McGann (Golic), Danny Webb (Morse), Lance Henriksen (Bishop), Pete Postlethwaite (David), Peter Guinness (Gregor), Christopher Fairbank (Murphy), Phil Davis (Kevin), Niall Buggy (Eric)

Few films feel more like a grim contractual obligation than Alien 3. If you want a real blood bath, you’d get more entertainment from reading about the tortured history of its production. Over nearly six years it saw off several scripts, at least two directors (including David Fincher resigning over continual studio interference) and Sigourney Weaver only agreeing to do the film if she was killed off at the end (well that and a big pay cheque).

All of this ended up as a depressing, grim and largely unenjoyable mess that goes over the same old ground as the first two films, but with diminishing returns. After the events of Aliens, our heroes ship crash-lands on a prison planet. Everyone on board is killed other than Ripley (we’ll come back to that…). The planet is populated by criminals who have embraced religion, led by Dillon (Charles S. Dutton) and a small staff of warders (Brian Glover and Ralph Brown) and Dr Clemens (Charles Dance). The company orders Ripley to sit tight and get picked up. But did an Alien on the ship lead to its crash? Is there now an alien on the planet? And is Ripley carrying an Alien inside of her?

It won’t surprise you to hear that the answers to all these questions are of course “yes”. And the film takes a painfully long time to get there. This is made all the more painful by the shockingly, uninvolving grimness of the story’s telling. Nowhere is this more clear than in the ruthless killing off of the surviving characters from Aliens. After the warmth and humanity of that story – and Cameron’s skilled creation of a family dynamic between Ripley, Hicks and most especially the mother-daughter bond between Ripley and Newt, it’s hard not to feel that their brutal off-screen deaths are a real slap-in-the-face. At a stroke all the character development of the previous film is negated. And so we get back on the treadmill of another monster hunt.

It’s not helped either by the fact there is hardly a character here you could give two hoots about. The prison is almost completely staffed by British character actors, peppered with the odd American. The script totally fails to give any of these people really distinctive personalities at all, before the Alien starts munching through them. On top of which the lazy script is littered with effing and jeffing, that serves to make the characters very angry all the time and even less engaging. The film’s most interesting new character, troubled Dr Clemens (a decent performance of world-weary sadness from Dance) is dead by Act Two, and the rest are basically an identikit pile of same-old-same-old. Dutton gets some good speeches as the prisoner’s morally complex leader, but he’s fighting an up-hill battle against turgid dialogue and tired old plotting.

Already by Alien 3 it feels like the franchise was out of ideas. Yet again “the company” is up to no good, only interested in making a buck off the creature. A post-industrial landscape again sees a number of people killed off in ever more familiar ways. The alien looks a bit like a dog this time (or an Ox if you watch the longer and even duller extended cut), but that’s about the most original thing here. And at the centre of the misery we have a grimly resigned and disinterested Weaver, who seemingly can’t wait for that Alien to burst out of her chest and end her association with the franchise for good.

It’s very hard to find anything enjoyable at all about this film. And it feels odd to say that about a film which is about people being brutally murdered one-by-one by an alien. But the others had touches of hope, humanity and demonic poetry to them. This is just a parade of slumming it British character actors, playing foul-mouthed rapists and murderers, getting torn apart. And then the film ends with a colossal downer even more downier than all the rest of the sludge you’ve had to sit through.

Basically Alien 3 reminds us that, with the monster as a motiveless killing machine, there weren’t many places to go with it. It’s not like it could suddenly reveal a motivation or something. So it seems the franchise was doomed – as it has been almost ever since this – to be a familiar parade of facehuggers, dark rooms, slow builds as people meander towards death down corridors, blood splatter and people who barely qualify as characters meeting grisily ends. Alien 3 is depressing and unrewarding in so many ways.

Scarface (1983)

“Shay hell-o to my leetle friend!” Al Pacino puts it all out there in Scarface

Director: Brian de Palma

Cast: Al Pacino (Tony Montana), Steven Bauer (Manny Ray), Michell Pfeiffer (Elvira), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (Gina), Robert Loggia (Frank Lopez), Miram Colon (Mama Montana), F. Murray Abraham (Omar), Paul Shenar (Alejandro Sosa), Harris Yulin (Detective Bernstein), Mark Margolis (Shadow)

Remember when Al Pacino played the softly spoken, chillingly self-contained Michael Corleone? Watching The Godfather, who could have imagined that performance would be the outlier in a career that gleefully embraced the insanely OTT in a way few other great actors have dared. And possibly no other performance in Pacino’s career was as large as in Scarface, a ball of nervous energy, foul-mouthed aggression and drug-fuelled instability, the burning heart at the centre of Brian de Palma’s wildfire of a film. Scarface dials every single thing up to about 11 and then some, becoming the director’s brashest and most enduring work – but it owes everything to Pacino’s furious, unreserved energy at its centre.

Pacino plays Tony Montana, a working-class crook from Cuba dispatched (along with boatloads of undesirables from Castro’s regime) to Miami in the early 80s. There, in refugee camps and the local community, it’s crime and violence that give these guys the best chance of grabbing a share of the American Dream. Montana is no different, graduating from hits to drug deals and swiftly moving up the chain with his determination, gruff no-nonsense attitude, fierce loyalty and ruthless focus. But once you hit the top and the world is yours, there is really only one way to go – back down again, made easier when you are hooked on snorting mountains of your own product, incestuously in love with your sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and your increasing arrogance and unreliability put you on the wrong side of your partners and kingpins in South America.

A remake of the 1932 original by Howard Hawks (the film is dedicated to Hawks and the scriptwriter Ben Hecht), Scarface is a brash, unsettling, nervy and incredibly violent cartoon-style gangster movie that owes almost its entire legacy to Pacino’s snarling wit at the centre. Is Pacino taking the piss here with this performance? Surely, he must have wondered if he could get away with it. This is a whirlwind tour-de-force, Pacino throwing himself into it with nothing left in the locker-room. He delightedly wraps his vocal chords around a thick Cuban accent (turning words like cockroach into a three syllable delight – “Cock-ah-roatch”) and embraces his small stature by turning Tony into a little pressure cooker. Seemingly incapable (bar one scene) of staying still, he’s supremely tense, his shoulders hunched up, his teeth on edge, voice growling.

It gives the film an unpredictable energy, because you don’t know what Pacino the performer will do any more than the characters do. He’ll suddenly throw you off with a moment of silence, just as often as he will blast your eardrums with a roar of anger. Emotionally Tony is a complete mess. His obsession with his sister is obvious, a devotion that Tony seems to only half (if that) understand is sexual in nature. But he also has a slight homoerotic bond with best friend Manny Ray (Steven Bauer – the only actor of Cuban heritage in the film), their closeness and macho-posturing carrying more than a whiff of Top Gun-ish “he protests too much”.

Pacino also invests Tony with strangely sympathetic qualities. Sure he’s a violent and ruthless killer and dedicated criminal, but he’s also got a firm sense of loyalty and certain moral lines he won’t cross. He’s got no time for bullshitters and respects only strength and honesty – watch the scene where he brutally talks over the weasely Omar (F. Murray Abraham – jetting back and forth between shooting this and Amadeus for goodness sake!) during a negotiation with drug lord Sosa – he has no respect or regard for his more politically minded boss, only for straight-talking that makes a deal.

It’s all this that ends up making Tony an anti-hero the viewer sort of ends up liking – even while he dopes himself to the brim with coke and funnels piles of it onto the street (not that we see any of that). Tony is a violent killer, but he’s a sort of honest man, a monster yes but a public one that we enjoy seeing. Tony himself recognises this, calling out a crowd of people in a posh restaurant for treating him as a monster so that they can feel better about themselves (slightly undermined by the fact he’s coked to the eyeballs, incoherent and has brutally ended his marriage a second earlier).

So much is Tony a force of nature that, hilariously, it feels like many of the fans of the film – bling gangsters and wannabe street punks – miss that this film is a brutal satire of the culture of excess and greed. Tony’s life falls apart the more money he gets, his addictions and problems growing as his wealth does. He’s an instinctive, but not wise, man who builds a household of fantastic excess and tasteless ostentation (surely, like Saddam, his taps are gold-plated) but also manages to destroy his business and life in a few months due to his greed, stupidity and self-destructive streak.

The things that made him a high-riser are lost the more Tony surrounds himself with garish status symbols. Inevitable destruction walks hand-in-hand with Tony’s “more is more” attitude. The more he attempts to add class and polish to his life, the more he demonstrates his own lack of both qualities. Also, as he gets more obsessed with pointless status symbols he loses the very skills – honesty, energy, shrewdness – that made him a kingpin in the first place. Instead he becomes a drug-fuelled narcissist, making impulsively stupid decisions and wrecking everything he spent the first half of the film building up. Tony Montana is the face of a certain type of Reagan/Thatcher economics, where private enterprise rolls in and ruthlessly takes and takes, with no regard for the impact on other people and no interest in sustainability.

De Palma captures this pretty well – although he probably ends up making this satire of excess more of a hubristic tragedy. Largely because the film falls so hard for Tony – or rather Pacino – that the fact that Tony is, despite his own moral code, a pretty reprehensible person can be easily lost. Not that de Palma probably cares that much, since his main aim here seems to be to create a hell of a ride. And there are some great set-pieces, and some wonderfully character beats – not least a sequence where Tony seizes control of the empire from weak boss Robert Loggia and sinister corrupt cop Harris Yulin.

The film certainly does that, flying from set-piece to set-piece so swiftly and with such a sense of pace and shark-like momentum, you almost don’t notice that it runs for as long as it does. Every few minutes gives us a scene with stand-out moments of either Pacino grandstanding, shocking violence or both. Scarfaceis a very violent film – everything from chain saws to bullets are used to pull gangster bodies apart – and while it has a sort of moral message (“Excess is bad”) it’s really just an excuse like Cecil B DeMille to make us feel good about ourselves by watching someone pretty bad (but with a few redeeming qualities) dance like a bear for two and a bit hours doing terrible things (entertainingly) before being carved down in a hail of bullets as the devil comes round to collect.

Alien (1979)

Sigourney Weaver is last woman standing in Alien

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Tom Skerritt (Dallas), Sigourney Weaver (Ripley), John Hurt (Kane), Ian Holm (Ash), Yaphet Kotto (Parker), Harry Dean Stanton (Brett), Veronica Cartwright (Lambert)

For decades, space was seen as a place of wonder. But Alien reminded us it was also a place where no one can hear you scream. We dream the vast void out there contains life: but what if the life we found was a relentless killing machine, a seemingly invulnerable monster literally having humanity for breakfast? Ridley Scott’s Alien took science fiction and ran it through the blender of horror, turning its space ship into a terrifying haunted house with an alien straight out of slasher films. It’s still a landmark today.

In deep space, the Nostromo’s crew is pulled out of hypersleep early – long before arriving back in our solar system. A strange distress call from an unidentified vessel needs to be investigated, on standing orders from “the company”. The seven-strong crew lands their ship and a party heads out – only to return with third officer Kane (John Hurt) with a strange alien creature attached to his face. The creature can’t be removed until it detaches itself of its own accord. All seems well until an unfortunate dinner party – at which point the crew finds itself being hunted one-by-one by a relentless alien monster.

Scott’s film is so famous today it’s very hard not to forget your foreknowledge of what’s going to happen and to experience it as its original viewers did. But it still works brilliantly – even if almost everyone watching knows only Ripley is getting out of this alive. The film is a masterpiece of slow-burn tension punctuated by moments of shocking horror. The final Alien itself doesn’t appear until almost an hour into the picture – but before then we’ve had our nerves more than jangled by the unsettling disquiet of the film’s mood. From the Nostromo, to the storm-laden planet they land on, and the vast alien ship – now a tomb of dismembered corpses with an unsettling organic look, like a giant carcass – everything in the film is designed to put us ill-at-ease. You can’t watch this film and expect anything to turn out for the best.

The camera prowls around the dank, grimy and run-down ship – space travel has rarely looked this unglamorous – like the predator that will hunt the crew. It’s slow, stately lingering on the crew, their faces, the eerily unsettling sounds and score, all serve to act like an advance funeral. Every single beat of the film stresses claustrophobia and dirt. It looks like a horrible trap already, and the film embraces a sense of grim inevitability. The observational style of the editing and shooting as we follow the characters, overhearing their bickering and functional work-based conversations, also helps add to this mounting sense of unease. It’s a surprisingly quiet film for much of its opening act, ambient noise and unsettingly lingering music dominating.

There is a poetical eeriness about the whole film. This is also partly from the sense of the ship being a society in microcosm. Much of the bickering is around bonus pay shares, the working-class engineers of the ship (one of whom is also black) bemoaning their smaller shares. The officers sit at the top, a mixture of entitled, distant, officious and daring. They have their own feuds over status, professional boundaries and personal rivalries. The captain is a laissez-faire professional, who offers only a general guidance and could really be just another member of the crew. The ship is like a giant oil-rig in space, with the crew basically a group of “truckers”. The film is as much about interpersonal tensions as it is about an alien monster who hunts people down.

But it is mainly about an alien monster that tears people apart. After almost an hour of deeply unsettling and unnerving build-up, when the monster (literally) rears its head, it’s a terrifying sight. We usually only see it briefly for small shots, but what we see is pure nightmare fuel. The creature is terrifying in its violence and power. It is partly human but also completely revolting. Covered in slime, it looks like a bizarre mix of a man, a giant penis and a vagina (its designer, HR Giger, reasoned nothing would be more unsettling and disturbing to us than seeing a beast that’s partly inspired by our own sexual organs). It creeps in corners, embraces the many shadows of Scott’s set and its capacity for violence seems unstoppable. Sharp editing and suggestion elaborates the visceral horror of its extending jaws punching through bone and flesh. It moves like an interpretative dancer and leaves a trail of blood. It’s unstoppable and infinitely cunning. It looks like your worst nightmare.

It’s all washed down with body horror. An alien that smothers its victims and shoves an egg down their throat which hatches through their chest becoming a slaughtering beast. There is an uneasy sexuality about this, right down to the “birth” of the creature being a grotesque parody of childbirth. The “birthing scene” is a masterpiece, the first moment in the film when the tension between the crew has eased – and the film itself seems to have relaxed for a moment from the knot of tension – that turns into one of the most memorable moments of body horror ever. The actors were allegedly told what would happen – but not how graphic it would be – and their horror-struck disgust (Veronica Cartwright was nearly knocked over by a powerful jetstream of mock blood and guts) and and shock gives the film a priceless realism.

Watching the film, it’s striking to me how much John Hurt’s Kane is shot as the hero early in the film. It’s he who wakes first from hypersleep. It’s Kane we follow the most for the early part of the film – he’s the one piloting the ship, volunteering to answer the distress call, urging his crew mates on as they investigate the alien vessel – it’s Kane who seems to be the hero. Making his brutal demise even more of a subconscious shock. On the other hand, Ripley is introduced as an officious, unpopular, by-the-book officer who it seems few other members of the crew like (Sigourney Weaver’s praetorian attitude helps a lot with this) – if you had to bet on someone to bite it early on, you’d pick her. The film continues to defy expectations. Characters who seem like they might be invulnerable are slaughtered early. Those who looked vulnerable survive until late on.

It’s a very strong cast. Weaver magnificently grows in authority as the film progresses, turning her abrasiveness into strength of character and moral determination. Hurt is very good as the unknowing victim-in-waiting. Kotto, chippy and defiant, is another stand-out. The finest performance through might well come from Ian Holm as science-officer Ash. Precise, cold, distant – but always hiding his own secret agenda – it’s an unsettlingly controlled performance that leads to a pay-off reveal that still works brilliantly today (and the character would have one of the most memorable death scenes in film, if he wasn’t in the same film as the most memorable death scene).

Scott’s filmmaking is brilliantly controlled, and the film is a horrifying masterpiece of tension and terror. The monster is skilfully shown at its worst (you’d never even guess in actuality it’s little more than a Doctor Who man-in-a-rubber-suit) and its design is faultless perfection. It’s not completely perfect – its build up might be ten minutes too long, and a late sequence that sees Weaver wearing little more than her undies looks hideously dated today – but it’s pretty close. Science fiction has never been scarier than it is here – hell the movies have rarely been scarer. In space no-one really can hear you scream.

A History of Violence (2005)

Viggo Mortensen: Hero or Villain? A History of Violence

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: Viggo Mortensen (Tom Stall), Maria Bello (Edie Stall), Ed Harris (Carl Fogarty), William Hurt (Richie Cusack), Ashton Holmes (Jack Stall), Peter MacNeill (Sheriff Sam Carney), Stephen McHattie (Leland Jones), Greg Bryk (Billy Orser), Heidi Hayes (Sarah Stall)

Cronenberg’s films redefined ideas around body horror. And one of his most accessible – and perhaps one of his richest and finest – films takes these ideas to another level by looking at the lasting – and damaging – impact of violence. That’s not just the immediate, visceral impact either – and lord knows Cronenberg doesn’t shirk on that here – but also the intense, long-term psychological impact and how it shapes entire lives. A History of Violence is a brilliantly told and superb piece of film-making that mixes thought-provoking content with a gripping, Western-tinged plot. It’s got a claim to being one of the best American films of the Noughties.

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is a regular Joe in a very small town in rural America. Running a small café, he lives a blissfully happy life of Americana with his wife Edie (Maria Bello), a lawyer, and their two children Jack (Ashton Holmes) and Sarah (Heidi Hayes). Their world changes forever though when Tom’s diner is held up late at night by two ruthless killers (Stephen McHattie and Billy Orser) and – with an instinctive ruthlessness – Tom ruthlessly dispatches the killers and saves the lives of his co-workers and patrons. His heroism makes him a local hero and brings plenty of excited press attention – but why does Tom seem so uncomfortable with this? Could it be linked to the swift arrival in the town of big-city criminal Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) who claims Tom is none-other than Joey Cusack, psychopathic hoodlum from Philadelphia who gouged out Fogarty’s eye? Are Tom and Joey one and the same? And how will the doubts affect Tom’s family?

Cronenberg’s film brings brilliant tension to this question of identity, setting it in a very modern-feeling Frontier town, which has more than a sense of a classic John Ford western town, complete with disturbance from murderous figures from outside, shattering the peace. But the film adds that distinct Cronenberg touch by suggesting that, behind the quiet diners and picket fences, the real danger may already be at the heart of the town. Is Tom who he claims to be? Or is he a malignant dark force at the centre of the town (and his family) bringing destruction to everything? What other dark truths, you can’t help but think, might be hiding behind those shutters?

But then that’s what you get with violence. It taints and ruins everything it touches. Innocent lives are shattered. Families and loved ones are left mourning. But it also twists and shapes the personalities of its perpetrators. It marks them and changes them, washing out positive qualities and leaving those who use it the most drained, empty and uncaring. The film opens with a chilling long shot as McHattie and Orser check out of a motel. Cronenberg keeps the camera still and holds the camera still to study the casual body language and chilling lack of engagement of its killers (“Why the delay?” “I had a little trouble with the maid”). The scene continues for an agonising length, making us dread the reveal of what these clearly dangerous, amoral men have done in this motel – the reveal eventually shown with a clinical precision, which serves as an entrée to even greater horrors.

The final killing in the motel is the last time the film will shy away from the immediate horrors of violence. Even Tom’s heroic slaughter of the killers to save lives doesn’t shirk from showing us the impact on the bodies of the killers as Tom dispatches them – bodies torn apart by bullets, with McHattie’s killer left with most of his lower jaw destroyed beyond recognition. Later we’ll see the impact not only of bullets, but also the jerking death spasms of those who have had their noses smashed into their faces, necks snapped or bullets pass through their heads. Never is this glorified – and never are we allowed to simply categorise some killings as good or bad. No matter who it is, the human body will still suffer staggering trauma.

But violence’s impact isn’t only physical. As Tom’s increasing comfort with using his natural propensity for brutal killing (“Have you never asked, why is he so good at killing people?” Fogarty asks an Edie still in denial) grows, so violence takes over his family and starts to shape the actions and decisions of those around him. Arguments become more regular and more visceral. Tom’s gentle son brutally beats his bully at school. The loving father Tom suddenly slaps him across the face. Edie and Tom’s blissful life – we see them playfully making love on a date night – degenerates into conflict, distrust, flashes of violence and finally an angry, intense and passionate sex scene on the stairs that is an exact mirror image of their earlier love scene.

Edie is, for all her horror at Tom, partly excited by finding her husband has such a capacity for danger and brutality. That’s the dark attraction of violence in this film: it reveals secrets about ourselves. Tom seems to subtly shift within conversations from the gentle Tom into the chillingly distant Joey. Worst of all, the more that muscle is stretched the more Tom seems to take comfort and enjoyment in it. Taking what we want, with no regards for the consequences, is liberating and makes us feel strong. No wonder it’s so attractive. And no wonder violence has so shaped and defined humanity’s history. It tends to get people what they want and it can feel good. And it looks cool. Because despite the horrors of the impact of the violence, Cronenberg is also honest enough to admit that it’s exciting.

At the film’s centre is a superb performance of cryptic unknowability from Viggo Mortensen, in possibly his finest role. Mortensen uses micro expressions, small beats and body language that moves between casual and chillingly precise to show two personalities in one body. And Mortensen also demonstrates the struggle between these – between the man he wants to be and the man he might well be. He’s equally matched by Bello, wonderful as a woman who finds her whole life destroyed but can’t shake an unnerving attraction to this man of danger who has suddenly emerged.

The entire cast are pretty much faultless. Ed Harris gets a decent role of gruff menace, but the film is almost lifted in a final act cameo by William Hurt. Oscar nominated for (what amounts to) less than five minutes of screen time, Hurt is simply a force of nature as a Philadelphia crime boss kingpin, purring out his lines with all the fury of a caged lion, mixing a readiness for violence with a darkly comic menace. It relaunched Hurt’s career as a leading character actor – and arguably he should have nabbed the Oscar for it.

Cronenberg’s film engages with ideas of identity throughout. What defines us? The things we’ve done? The choices we’ve made? How many years need to pass before we can say that we’ve changed? What makes us better? And can we decide the sort of people we want to be? It’s impossible to say for sure. If your whole family life is founded on a lie, how do you know what about yourself is true or not? These are fascinating questions and the film offers no easy answers at all. Can Tom return to the life before a violent history shook everything up – perhaps he can, perhaps he can’t. But one thing’s for sure (and Cronenberg makes clear) it won’t be a simple overnight fix and a Hollywood ending. For all the hoodlums Tom dispatches, the real damage is on the workings of his family and the real casualty is the life his family thought they had. And those wounds don’t heal.

Tenet (2020)

John David Washington has to save the world in the tricksy Tenet

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: John David Washington (The Protagonist), Robert Pattinson (Neil), Elizabeth Debicki (Katherine Barton), Kenneth Branagh (Andrei Sator), Dimple Kapadia (Priya), Himesh Patel (Mahir), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Ives), Michael Caine (Sir Michael Crosby), Clémence Poésy (Barbara), Martin Donovan (Fay), Fiona Dourif (Wheeler), Yuri Kolokolnikov (Volkov)

SPOILERS: I’ll be discussing Nolan’s film, which was kept so secretive, that even revealing what it is about might be considered a spoiler. So if you want to experience the film as intended, watch it first!

Tenet, at this rate the only blockbuster that is going to be released in 2020, was given the mission to save cinema from coronovirus. Match that with the near religious regard Christopher Nolan is held in by fans of cinema, and you had a major cinematic event on your hand. Is Tenet the second coming of cinema? Well of course not. But it is an enjoyable, if frustratingly tricksy, film shot on a jaw-dropping scale. If you ever had any doubt about whether Nolan grew up watching Kubrick intermixed with James Bond, this film dispels it.

Our entry point in the story is an unnamed character – he calls himself The Protagonist of the operation – played by John David Washington. A CIA agent, left critically injured after an operation at the Kiev Opera, is recruited to work for a mysterious organisation, Tenet. He discovers that Tenet is dedicated to preserving mankind in a war that is taking place across time. The tools of this war are “inverted” bullets and other materials. These bullets both backwards through time – explosions reform and bullets return to the guns that fired them. The Protagonist discovers that the inversion bullets are being funnelled through arms dealer Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). Sator is working with a faction from the future, planning to invert time in order to save their world from destruction. Sator also has access to machines that can invert people, allowing them to move physically backwards through time giving him huge advantages in forging his empire and in collecting the components of a time-inverting super weapon that will destroy all life in our present and past.

Confused? Well as characters frequently say throughout the film – don’t think about it too much. I’ve seen Nolan’s epic twice. It’s a film that revolves around Temporal Pincer Movements – military tactics that use normal and inverted people moving backwards through time. The “forward” team lives through the events. The “Inverted” team move backwards, seeing events from the end backwards, supplying real-time information to the forward team. Those carrying out a Temporal Pincer Movement know the exact timeline of what is to happen and are therefore almost unbeatable.

Watching the film twice, I realise it places the viewer in the same position. First time I was lost in the maze of the film’s rushed explanations, hand-waved time mechanics and confused by working out who was inverted and who wasn’t at any one time. Watching the film a second time, knowing the plot, I did a Temporal Pincer Movement on it myself – my “past self” who knew basically how the film ended, helped my second viewing self to understand what was happening.

So you’ve kinda got to watch it twice to understand it properly. Or at least to begin to. Second time around you also know which details are important and which to ignore, which explanations are crucial to its understanding and which are not. Second time around I noticed a lot more how characters, such as Clémence Poésy’s scientist, who introduces inversion, stress “don’t think about it too much”. The science of it all is basically a red-herring. There is talk of various predestination and grandfather paradoxes (as you might expect in a world where the future is plotting to destroy the past). Again, second time around I realised: don’t worry about it too much. 

So the question is, will people rush to see the film a second time around to understand it better? I’m not entirely sure they will. And I think that’s because, unlike Nolan’s other films, Tenet lacks heart. Here’s a man who has been praised for the ingenuity of his films going a little too far. Look back at Nolan’s other films and underneath the trickery and “timey-wimey” there is a core of a beating human heart. Inception and Interstellar, at heart, are about a man trying to reunite with his children. Memento, a man mourning the loss of his wife. Dunkirk, frightened young men trying to get home. In Tenet, there is none of this. It’s literally a film about time-scheneanigans with a huge Macguffin at the middle that will wipe out the world. The Protagonist is just what who he seems, a character who (engagingly played as he is by John David Washington, very good) we feel so little connection with that you could easily not notice we don’t learn his name.

It’s this lack of heart that really weighs the film down. How much can we really care in the end about a world-ending Macguffin so briefly explained, we just take it on trust that it’s bad? Tenet is burdened by Nolan’s slightly-too-pleased-with-itself cleverness, as events are played and replayed from multiple angles throughout the film, in a way that demands repeat viewings rather than giving the first-time viewer more knowledge in each scene. If you fall for this sort of thing, then you will fall hard. But, Nolan’s other mega-hits charmed viewers because they cared about the characters at its heart, not the elaborate tricks about time and memory. We wanted to see DiCaprio find his kids, we wanted those boys on the beach to get home – and people were happy to let other things wash over them slightly, because the emotion was how they interpreted the story. Without that heart, the film is a massive, showy trick – and a bit empty as a result.

Which isn’t to say that Nolan doesn’t shoot the hell out of it, or that the scope of it isn’t incredible. It’s where his Bond influence comes in. Because while half the time, he’s paying homage to Kubrick’s mastery and precision – or wonderfully, with its early scene of objects moving backwards and thick rubber gloves, Cocteau’s Orphée – the other half is straight out of Roger Moore. Massive bases. Huge car chases. Big shoot-outs. A Russian villain who could have walked out of Spectre and straight into the film. Flemingesque touches with the hero infiltrating the villain’s world, taking part in a sport with him. A woman at the middle who has a foot in the camps of both hero and villain. This is all Moore-era Bond, repackaged with a sprinkling of PhD Physics.

If there is a heart in the film, its Elizabeth Debicki’s abused wife of Kenneth Branagh’s lip-smacking villain. The film’s most effective character scenes revolve around this pair, and the destructive, possessive ‘love’ of Branagh’s Sator, a man must possess or destroy a person. The film captures neatly the perverted “love” Sator claims to have for a woman he abuses, beats and terrifies – and Debicki beautifully captures the mix of shame, hate and fear people in such situations often feel. Nolan must have enjoyed BBC’s The Night Manager, as Debicki repackages her role from that film almost exactly, but given the most emotional and heartfelt plotline in the film, she becomes the one character you really care about and invest in. A better film might have put her even more front and centre.

Instead though, the action around time dominates, with Nolan’s brilliantly mounted action scenes that mix forward and backward motion with staggering (and seamless) effect. It’s yet another reason to see the movie twice. The film is big, loud and demanding – often too loud, with dialogue frequently drowned out (a problem you notice less second time around when you have a much better idea about when to concentrate and when to look away). The cast do terrific work. Washington is very assured as the lead, playing with wit and grace. Debicki is a stand-out. Robert Pattinson brings a quirk and originality to a role that has very little to it on paper. Branagh has been more controversial for his Bond-tinged Russian baddie, but I found a chilling horror in his domestic abuse and selfishness that works extremely well (again particularly second time around). Pattinson brings a playfulness to an underwritten role.

Tenet may not rework cinema – and I doubt it would make a top five list of Nolan’s best films – it’s bold and challenging, if a little cold and heartless. While demanding a double viewing, it’s not quite clear if it will make you long to see it again too quickly. But if you take the effort to do so, you will find a film that grows on you more with repeated viewing – and reveals its deliberately impenetrable mysteries much better.

The Shining (1980)

Jack Nicholson loses his mind in The Shining

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Jack Nicholson (Jack Torrance), Shelley Duvall (Wendy Torrance), Danny Lloyd (Danny Torrance), Scatman Crothers (Dick Hallorann), Barry Nelson (Stuart Ullman), Philip Stone (Delbert Grady), Joe Turkel (Lloyd), Anne Jackson (Doctor), Tony Burton (Larry Durkin)

I’ve often had mixed feelings towards Kubrick’s films. He’s impossible not to admire and there is no doubt many of his films are landmarks in cinema. But I’ve also often found him a brilliant technician, a striking intellectual but an emotionally cold and distant director, who seizes the brain and sense but doesn’t always engage the heart. It’s perhaps unsurprising that a director who has such control over the tools of cinema should be able to use it to create one of the greatest horror films of all time. Because what else is horror but the expert use of technique to unsettle and scare the audience? It’s like the genre Kubrick was destined to try – and succeed at.

The Shining was itself partly born out of Kubrick’s disappointment at the reception given to Barry Lyndon, his cinematically rich, but emotionally unengaging (to many) Thackeray adaptation. It garlanded awards, but praise that was more respectful than fulsome – while audiences had largely stayed away. Kubrick may be an artist – but he still wanted people to see his work. He decided to direct a film based on a poplar horror novel – after all people have been seeing slasher and fright pics for decades, so why not get a piece of that action? Stephen King’s novel was one of the few that engaged him (allegedly the famously highbrow Kubrick spent months reading part way into various horror novels before flinging them across his office in contempt). Sure Kubrick – much to King’s annoyance – junked many of the author’s themes in favour of his own. But in doing so he created a terrifying and deeply unsettling experience that stands as his most effective late work.

In the abandoned, and snow isolated, Overlook Hotel during off-season, writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is hired as caretaker to keep the building running. Accompanied by his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and young son Danny (Danny Lloyd), Torrance hopes to use the isolation time to come up with a draft of his new novel. However, dark forces are at work at the hotel. Ten years ago the caretaker butchered his whole family there, and the deaths have left a psychic legacy on the building. This is picked up on by the ESP-powered Danny, but also begins to play on the psyche of Jack who slowly begins to become ever more short-tempered, twitchy and unhinged as time goes on.

The Shining is one of the most frightening and unsettling films I’ve ever seen. And I attribute that completely to Kubrick’s mastery of the language of cinema. Every single frame, every single note on the soundtrack, has been perfectly shaped to inspire dread in the heart of the viewer. There are no cheap tricks, no jump scares, no obvious cinematic parlour games. Instead this is Kubrick using his technical artistry. What else can you say when one of the most disturbing things in the film is the changing sound of Danny’s tricycle as he cycles round the hotel (in a single, low angle, tracking shot), going from near silence as he cycles over carpet to bursts of sound as he cycles over wooden floor? When the score overwhelms with discordant sound and high notes as Danny simply stares at a door? 

But Kubrick’s genius is everywhere. He understands how the human brain is unsettled by symmetry. Watch the film again and see how so much of it is perfectly framed, how still the camera often is, how images – such as shots of corridors or rooms – are set in such a way to make the image look symmetrical. Something is off in our minds about seeing a building that looks so precise. It transfers as well when the actors are caught in the middle of the frame, with the set either side of them looking identical. Our mind keeps telling us it’s wrong. It feeds into our own doubts and fears. It disturbs us completely. Stillness and quiet mix with bursts of colour. For every elevator door opening to deposit a tidal wave of blood, there is the quiet intimacy of Philip Stone (absolutely chilling) as a ghostly representation of a past janitor, urging Jack to “correct” his wife and child.

That fear of symmetry extends as well to Kubrick’s use of two girl twins as ghosts of the former caretaker’s murdered children (and their stillness and softness of voice is equally terrifying). The ghosts throughout this film that urge Jack on in his murderous rampage are almost uniformly softly spoken, calm and polite – qualities that carry more and more menace. Even when the horrors begin to erupt, Kubrick keeps the camera movement and editing slow, gentle and frequently employs tracking shots (naturally leading to the invention of a new type of Steadicam). Where jump cuts are used they are to give us flashes of Danny’s ESP visions of the hotel (sudden cuts to the murdered girls or other horrors), enough to jolt us and working all the more in the rest of the film’s measured pace and gothic chills.

Kubrick also brilliantly makes use of the psychological impact of isolation. Out in the middle of nowhere, it’s clear time quickly loses meaning. The film is punctured throughout with title cards that seem increasingly random, either naming days (with no indication of how much time has passed between them) or time jumps that seem unconnected with the previous scene. It’s quick to see how much the Torrance’s perception of time has been lost in never-changing surroundings. The impact of constant isolation on a fragile psyche is perhaps something we are even more acutely aware of in 2020, and it’s clear that it has a catastrophic effect on Jack, who becomes ever more susceptible to his bad angels.

Those bad angels are partly where Kubrick begins to deviate from King. Not surprisingly, with Kubrick’s often nihilistic view of humanity, he introduces the idea that Jack has a history of violent temper and even striking Danny. This is very different from King’s idea of a good man and father being bent out of all recognition by the hotel’s evil into a would-be murderer. It’s possibly the main objection King had against the film’s changing of the novel. That and Kubrick’s clear disinterest in “shining” – the name given to the ESP qualities some of the characters display. For Kubrick, what was more important was the unsettling impact environments can have on people’s psyches – amplified in this case by terrifyingly bloodthirsty ghosts. For King the corruption of the good from evil among us was crucial. Both are fascinating ideas – but you can see why the book’s author would not be pleased to see his concepts sidelined.

Part of this may also have stemmed from the casting of Nicholson. Probably the greatest American actor of the 1970s (his hits during that decade are astonishing), this was the first chapter in a new era. Now Nicholson became JACK, part actor but part personality, so larger-than-life that you only had to say his first name for everyone to know who he was. Sure, Nicholson is (like in A Few Good Men) a ticking time bomb, but the performance works. It’s the film where Nicholson embraced for the first time the demonic grin and leer of cruelty he would use so well. But seeing him attack the film’s gothic qualities, while still having a touch of humanity for its quiet moments, works a treat. Could any other actor in the world have pulled off “Here’s Johnny!” and still have us absorbed in the character and the film? It’s pantomime, but brilliance.

More controversial is Shelley Duvall’s weepy, slightly pathetic wife. Much of Duvall’s wetness in the role is surely connected to the reportedly miserable time she had on set. To draw the “right” reactions from her, Kubrick essentially bullied her on set, putting her through hell. Sometimes hundreds of takes were done of even the most trivial scenes to get them right (this film perhaps cemented Kubrick’s reputation for ludicrous perfectionism), a regime that reduced Duvall to a state of near psychological collapse. While this was perfect for her performance, it was hardly conducive to her well-being. And was in itself perhaps another sign of the lack of heart in Kubrick, a director concerned only in the end with effect not emotional truth.

So it’s a black mark against the film. But The Shining is still a masterpiece, perhaps one of Kubrick’s greatest films. The film was so dependent on its technical wizardry, detailed perfection and preciseness that its impact becomes almost unbearable. It focuses on all Kubrick’s strengths and almost none of his weaknesses – indeed his basic dislike of people becomes crucial to its effect rather than running counter to an audience’s need to invest. Tense, unsettling, troubling and in the end deeply scary, while never feeling cheap or exploitative. It’s a landmark in both its genre and its director’s career.

Moulin Rouge (1952)

Dancers a go-go in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (not that one!)

Director: John Huston

Cast: José Ferrer (Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec/Comte Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec), Zsa Zsa Gabor (Jane Avril), Suzanne Flon (Myriamme Hyam), Claude Nollier (Comtess de Toulouse-Lautrec), Katherine Kath (La Goule), Muriel Smith (Aicha), Colette Marchand (Marie Charlot), Georges Lannes (Sgt Patou), Theodore Bikel (King Milan IV), Peter Cushing (Marcel de la Voisier), Christopher Lee (Georges Seurat)

John Huston’s biography of Toulouse-Lautrec is less well known than its exclamation marked name-sake. It would be easy to say there is little in common, beyond the name and setting, between Huston’s film and Luhrmann’s operatic jukebox musical. But that’s to overlook the sprightly and confident shooting that Huston gives many of the scenes in the Moulin Rouge, and the mood of depression and corruption that underlies all the glamour of the club. These are two films very much drinking from the same well – even if the aesthetic and style of both are drastically different.

This artist biography focuses mostly on the last decade of Toulouse-Lautrec’s life. Played by José Ferrer (who also does double duty as the artist’s patrician father), it’s an exploration of the self-loathing and depression that drives the artist and funnels itself into his art. Art which is bold, animated with strikingly unique use of colours and movement. It’s all very different from the more timid, self-conscious crippled artist, the growth of whose legs was arrested after an accident in his childhood. Huston’s film front-and-centres Toulouse-Lautrec’s quest for love, but it has enough to say about the rest of its subject’s life.

Similar to his later work on Moby Dick, Huston aimed for a very particular look for his film, inspired by the colours used in the artwork of its subject. Shooting in Technicolour – and much to the objection of that company, who believed all films should showpiece it’s particularly striking bold colours rather than the muted colours Lautrec at times used – he manages to assemble a picture that feels like it completely captures not only the style of the artist, but also captures something of the more grimy and seedy side of the Parisian streets he walked. There is a neat little scene in the middle of the film where Lautrec argues with a printer over mixing his own specialised colours, rather than the more traditional colours he works with. Hard not to see that as a commentary on Huston’s own struggles with Technicolour.

It gives the film though its own very distinctive look, in which Huston uses a number of cinematic approaches that really capture the vibrancy of the Moulin Rouge. The opening scenes, that showcase a flashy can-can dance at the club is shot with immediacy, the camera roving in amongst the dancers, throwing us into the atmosphere and excitement of this ground-breaking night club. Alongside which – within the confines of the Hay’s Code – we get a sense of the sexuality of the nightclub, captured in the tempestuous clashes between the dancers and the pettiness and suddenness of feuds that spring up over every subject matter.

The film doesn’t quite continue all this vibrancy in the rest of its length as it focuses more on Lautrec’s own personal life. José Ferrer, always a distantly patrician actor, is perhaps a little too stilted to really invest us in the emotional pain of a man who didn’t believe he was worth loving. However his commitment to playing the part physically can’t be faulted. To play the diminutive Lautrec, Ferrer wore a contraption that folded his lower legs up behind him (he could only wear it for about 15 minutes before he had to restore the circulation to his legs), wearing this even in scenes he could not be seen full length, so as to get the posture of Lautrec correct. It’s a shame that Ferrer’s slightly reserved manner and precision leaves you feeling like the character is being studied at arms length rather than up-close and personally.

This affects slightly the focus on romance that the film takes – art gets its place, but the style very much looks at these in context of romantic struggles. Lautrec is presented as man convinced of his own ugliness and the barrier of his disability, who could never find a woman who would love him. This drew him, it seems, either towards destructive relationships (in particular with a ‘prostitute’ – not that you would know thanks to the Hays Code – played with an Oscar-nominated richness by Colette Marchand) or to relationships he convinced himself could only be hopeless, platonic obsessions (Suzanne Flon as an art-lover who only the most self-loathing of men couldn’t tell is devoted to Lautrec).

The film interestingly rather misses a sense of fun that you might expect from a nightclub scene. Lautrec is of course miserable for most of his life, self-medicating his physical pain and depression with drink. His parents are either guilty at the accident that crippled him, or frustrated at his choice to spend his life painting the dancers of the Parisian night-life. Huston does get a great sense of the compulsion of the artist – Lautrec is rarely seen not sketching something – and his film is very successful at capturing the loneliness that can accompany art.

If the film does sometimes become a slightly old-fashioned a-to-b story of an artist and his inspiration, it counter-balances this with the flashes of creativity and vibrancy Huston brings to the film. Huston was himself critical of the film in the future, thinking it a missed opportunity – I would suppose due to the general lack of sex in a story set in an environment soaked in it – but working within the limitations he had, it’s a fine piece of work. While you could wish for a slightly more engaging lead performance, it certainly works very effectively to bring its setting and story to life.