Category: Directors

The Irishman (2019)

De Niro and Pacino under digital facelifts bring to life Scorsese’s meditative The Irishman

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro (Frank Sheeran), Al Pacino (Jimmy Hoffa), Joe Pesci (Russell Bufalino), Ray Romano (Bill Bufalino), Bobby Cannavale (Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio), Anna Paquin (Peggy Sheeran), Stephen Graham (Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano), Stephanie Kurtzuba (Irene Sheeran), Jesse Plemons (Chuckie O’Brien), Harvey Keitel (Angelo Bruno)

Scorsese had wanted to make this film for almost 20 years but it took the mega bucks of Netflix (to the tune of over $150 million) to finally bring it to life. With complete creative control, we get Scorsese’s epic as he saw it, an over three-and-a-half hour long sad meditation on the life of the gangster. For the first time in almost 25 years, Scorsese is reunited with his muse Robert De Niro – appearing here under various digital facelifts to tell the story of Frank Sheeran, an Irish member of the Mafia, and his relationship with infamous Teamster union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Was the film worth the effort to make it?

I first saw The Irishman in the cinema. I now feel that was a mistake. This is a film that needs to be soaked in like a warm bath. Like reading an involving novel, it needs to savoured and consumed at your own pace. In the cinema in one take – with no intermission – its runtime is punishing. It’s the worst form of criticism but in one take, the film can overstay its welcome. In fact it can become a little boring.

Re-watching the film a year later at home – where I could break it up into three chunks as (I feel) so many people have, it becomes a richer and more engrossing viewing experience. Because this is a totally different beast to Scorsese’s previous gangster movies, a quiet mood piece, contemplative, sad, a genuinely tragedy-tinged, doom-laden reflection on the emptiness and costly violence of the gangster life, and the empty shells it leaves of the people in it. And at its centre, a man so dehumanised by war, by obeying orders, so lacking of personality, so incapable of emotion it seems, that he ends the film as a blank, lonely, abandoned slate. It’s a real, and deliberate, counter-point to his electric gangster films of the past, from Mean Streets via Goodfellas to Casino and the cartoonish The Departed. Here the price of doing business is your soul – and when that final bullet comes (as it inevitably will) you have nothing to show for it.

It makes for a late Scorsese epic – nearly a TV mini-series – slow-paced, wintery and a perfect counterpoint to Goodfellas. There crime is ruthless but you can see it’s also fun. Here it’s hardwork, unrewarding and inevitably leads to a bloody demise. Time settles on the shoulders of its leads like deadweights and their is a weary sadness as they trudge from one feud to another, each of which can only be resolved by putting another body in the ground. And everyone knows that the next feud might well mean it’s their body that will end up six feet under.

Frank Sheeran is a drained automaton, a human being possibly in name only, who takes on violent acts without question, who can kill without remorse. This is the very picture of a second-tier career criminal, a man who takes orders and carries out missions. De Niro brilliantly creates an sociopathic monster, a man almost devoid of his own personality, with little to him but a taciturn killer. Sheeran is a tough character to relate to or understand – but that’s because he’s not really a character at all. Interestingly he doesn’t have the sort of flaws that undermine other Scorsese gangsters, like Henry Hill. His flaw is in fact his entire existence. His sociopathic acceptance of violence, his thoughtless carrying out of killing, his inability to relate to human beings. It’s what leaves him alone, unloved and isolated in a care-home. This is a man who can barely muster much emotion about killing his best friend, whose quiet, placid nature perhaps only hides his lack of capability of even experiencing emotion.

The Teamster union politics content of the film is often dense and hard-to-follow. At times it tips into being not that interesting. So it’s tough that it takes up almost two hours of the film’s run-time. It’s a sign of the films overindulgence. At the end of the day I’m not sure it adds much to your overall impression of the film. But reviewing the film perhaps that’s the point. The very shallowness and even pettiness of this feuding – not to mention the naked, unromantic greed – over how to distribute union pension money, explodes the myth of any romance to this crime. These are blue-collar conmen, using violence as a way to conclude a board meeting.

As Jimmy Hoffa, Al Pacino is the best he’s been in literally decades – the film uses his “hoo hah” shoutiness to great effect, but Pacino also makes Hoffa an unexpectedly vulnerable and lost figure amongst all the politics, a showman who overestimates his importance and invulnerability. The entire film is shaped (we discover) around a series of flashbacks from Sheeran on a road trip on what turns out to be the final days of Hoffa’s life (the film includes a solution to Hoffa’s famous disappearance). De Niro and Pacino spark beautifully off each other as a bond forms between them – the films lingering on their growing friendship (and at times strangely homoerotic intimacy) one of its strongest elements, as well as carefully demonstrating how disloyalty is a crucial survival skill in this world.

The film strongest elements are the doom-laden nihilism of the gangster life. Told by Scorsese deliberately without flash and excitement, with a score so sparse that long stretches of the film echo with silence, there seems to be no fun at all in the gangster world, instead a series of mundane men sitting in small restaurants, talking about admin and punching the clock. Many of the gangster characters are introduced with on-screen captions that detail the dates and natures of their violent deaths. It’s the exact opposite of what you might expect from a Scorsese film. It’s a director showing the dark flipside of his previous films, of the way the gangster life is a dwindle through a dull life marked with moments of danger, where death is a sudden violent explosion that ends a life too soon.

And it leaves families in a mess. Anna Paquin speaks very few words as Sheeran’s adult daughter, but only because her silent disapproval and disgust at her father’s life becomes the haunting of Sheeran’s whole life. His daughter’s silent disgust is a recurrent theme (even from childhood, she is repulsed by his capacity for violence and his heartlessness). Sheeran’s attempt to break through her silent disapproval, to get her to acknowledge him in some way becomes a large part of the sad coda of Sheeran’s life. It’s all part of Scorsese’s message: what is the point of a life like this that brings wealth and power, but also leaves you broken, lonely and despised by everyone around you?

And you can’t argue with the skill with which this quiet, meditative, grim and slow exploration of the gangster world is put together by Scorsese – or the artistry that every moment of the film has, or the control of the director. It’s beautifully shot and edited. It’s pace is at times glacial, but this is resolved by watching at your own pace on Netflix. It’s not a film to be binged (ironically Scorsese has made a television novel that he wants you to watch in one go) but instead one to be savoured and considered. That’s where it’s strengths are.

There are also excellent performances. Joe Pesci, lured from retirement, is outstanding. He’s a revelation as a sort of cool, calm, grandfatherly fixer a million miles from the lunatics he played in Casino or Goodfellas. Pesci quietly dominates several scenes, using stillness and quiet like a vicious badger who knows he only needs to swat once to remove his foes. This is a performance of beautifully judged grace and stability, a calm reflectiveness that carries a vicious coldness at its heart. Russell may prefer a peaceful solution – but he will order your death without thinking twice. Also excellent is Stephen Graham as the sort of dangerously impulsive bully Pesci played to such great effect in those earlier movies.

And those famous digital facelifts? Well they are fine technically. You ignore them after a while. But no matter of digital trickery can make De Niro move with the gait, physicality or certainty of a man more than 30 years younger than he is. As we watch De Niro (supposedly a killer in his prime) shamble forward, or gingerly give a rude grocer a kicking, you can’t forget that he’s really a much older man. To be honest the film would have been just as good – maybe better – with actors the correct age filling in for the younger roles. Watching it again, I’m never convinced that I am watching a De Niro the age he was in Mean Streets or even Goodfellas. To be honest, at times the facelifts don’t look a lot more convincing than hair dye and a little tape to stretch the skin back.

In fact the digital facelift at times is almost a metaphor for the film: it’s a film where age and time are a constant presence. Knowing the lead actors are old men, trying to look young kind of sits with that. These are not dynamic, triumphant young men. But then they never were. These are men who feel the burdens of the world on their shoulders every day. Who at the end of their lives will have nothing to show for it over than a satisfaction that they managed to live slightly longer than they expected. Whose friends and family will hate them and who find they sold their souls and gained nothing but dust in exchange. Long, slow, sometimes trying – but on a second rewatch, also compelling, thought-provoking, heartfelt, insightful and inspiring.

Being John Malkovich (1999)

A portal into the head of a famous actor? What better way to find out what it’s like Being John Malkovich

Director: Spike Jonze

Cast: John Cusack (Craig Schwartz), Cameron Diaz (Lotte Schwartz), Catherine Keener (Maxine Lund), John Malkovich (John Horatio Malkovich), Orson Bean (Dr Lester), Mary Kay Place (Floris), Charlie Sheen (Himself), W Earl Brown (JM Inc Customer)

Is there a more consciously eccentric film ever made than Being John Malkovich? Can you imagine the pitch to the Hollywood suits?

Our hero, Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) is a weedy, bitter puppeteer (as well as creep and potential stalker), whose wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) fills their house with rescue animals, from talkative parrots to a chimp with PTSD. Needing to make ends meet, Schwartz takes a filing job at a company based on floor 7½ of an office block (it’s a low ceilinged floor built between the other two floors – it’s cheaper on the rent obviously) where he becomes obsessed with his sexy co-worker Maxine Lund (Catherine Keener), who is resolutely not interested. But all this changes one day when Schwartz finds a fleshy, dark tunnel behind a filming cabinet that takes someone into the mind of actor John Malkovich (John Malkovich) – for 15 minutes, before expelling you onto the New Jersey turnpike. Sounds like a business interest for Schwartz and Maxine (spend 15 minutes in someone else’s body!), but the experience of being in someone’s body slowly begins to change Schwartz, Lotte and Maxine – and having his brain invaded has a terrible impact on Malkovich himself.

If that’s not the oddest plot you’ve ever heard, then I don’t know what films you’ve been watching. The film was the brainchild of Charlie Kaufman, who developed from this into one of the most distinctively gifted screenwriters in Hollywood, a master of the quirky and weird, the off-the-wall and the science fiction tinged everyday fantasy, blessed with the ability to mix in genuine human emotion amongst the oddness.

Being John Malkovich is an inspired idea and Kaufman’s script is ingenious in its structure and progression. Never once does the film settle for the expected narrative development or the conventional structure. It’s a livewire of a film that constantly leaves you guessing, switching tone and throwing logical but unexpected plot twists at every turn. There are plenty of moments where you could expect events to take a conventional turn, but the film never settles for the obvious.

Kaufman’s inspired script was lucky enough to find a quirky visual stylist who was willing to embrace it as much as Spike Jonze did. Jonze’s direction is a masterclass in small detail, slight twists and little touches of invention that never draw excessive attention to themselves but combine to make a thrillingly off-the-wall final picture.

Jonze knows that the jokes and surrealism of Kaufman’s script are so effective that they don’t need a firm directorial hand to lean the humour on – they work absolutely fine presented almost as written, and make for terrific entertainment. He shoots the low ceiling of floor 7½ with such straightforward confidence that each scene becomes hilarious for its stooped actors and crammed rooms. Jonze can therefore concentrate the flourishes on core moments, from the puppetry that Schwartz and later a Schwartz-controlled Malkovich make their life’s work, to assorted training and educational videos that pepper the film at key moments.

Like Kaufman as well, Jonze’s storytelling works because he inherently understands human emotion and isn’t afraid to throw it into the film alongside the humour. Plenty of directors would have been happy to have all the principals settle into being comic stereotypes, or overplayed pantomime figures. Jonze encouraged the actors to find the depth – and sometimes the darkness – in their characters, to ground the film effectively with touches of real life tragedy and human flaws that give weight to the surreal sci-fi elements – so much so that they start to feel as real as the rest.

John Cusack’s Schwartz is a bitter, increasingly twisted fantasist and dreamer – the sort of guy who believes that his lack of willingness to compromise his art in any way is a strength (his puppetry shows are highly complex, sexualised, high-blown, poetry-inspired hilarious puffs of pretension). Schwartz could have become a joke or a guy with a big dream – but the film increasingly shows him to be a dark, obsessive, cruel even dangerous outsider, who has no problem with harming other people to get what he wants, his moral compass is driven by his self-assessment of himself as a man treated badly by others, so doing what he wants is somehow deserved. It’s an increasingly dark portrait of a man who has more than hint of danger to him.

Keener, as the focus of his obsession, also does extraordinary work as a woman the film is not afraid to present as unpleasant in her selfishness, casual cruelty and greed – but a woman who slowly allows herself to open up and reveal an emotional openness and romanticism someone watching the start of the film would never expect. Similarly Diaz’s downtrodden, sad wife at home flourishes and grows as a person, as she finds in herself a new comfort and ease with who she is, from inhabiting the mind of another person. Both are excellent.

The film explores fascinating ideas of identity – Lotte and Maxine find a freedom and an exciting otherness in being a passenger in another person’s body, and use it as voyages of self discovery for themselves. Schwartz on the other hand sees this body – just as he sees all human beings – as just another puppet for him to control, another way of adjusting the world to match his requirements, rather than change anything about himself. While some lose themselves in Malkovich’s body and find the experience rewarding, Schwartz can only find happiness when bending the body to his own will.

And what of Malkovich himself? Well has there ever been a braver performance in film? Malkovich is superb as an arch portrait of himself as a rather self-important actor, with an unknowable coolness about him, an intellectualism that makes him a man easy to respect but strangely hard to relate to, a face that is distinctive but a strangely unrelatable style that makes him hard to remember (it’s really an extraordinarily funny and brave performance). As Malkovich realises what is happening to him, the film plays with real beats of tragedy and even horror – what would it be like to be forced into being a passenger in your own head? This is nothing compared to the horror Malkovich encounters when he enters the tunnel himself – to find himself in a world where everyone looks like Malkovich and can only speak using the word “Malkovich”.

Being John Malkovich uses its surreal ideas to explore profound – and even chilling – ideas of control, destiny, personality and identity. With several superb performances, a brilliant script and controlled and intelligent direction, it’s a film unlike any other – and continues to delight and surprise twenty years on from its release.

The Fisher King (1991)

Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges go on a quest in Terry Gilliam’s decent but overlong The Fisher King

Director: Terry Gilliam

Cast: Robin Williams (Parry), Jeff Bridges (Jack Lucas), Mercedes Ruehl (Anne Napolitano), Amanda Plummer (Lydia Sinclair), Michael Jeter (Homeless Cabaret Singer), David Hyde Pierce (Lou Rosen), Lara Harris (Sondra), Harry Shearer (Sitcom actor), John de Lancie (TV Executive), Tom Waits (Veteran)

In 1991 Terry Gilliam was seriously worried he might be unemployable. After the famous feud with his producers over the editing of Brazil, his follow-up The Adventures of Baron Munchausen had flown over budget and bombed at the box-office. For Hollywood Gilliam was the worst kind of maverick – trouble with no record of financial success to give him the licence to do what he wanted. So he was thrilled to be offered the chance to direct The Fisher King, his first ever “for hire” job, a sentimental but surreal romantic buddy movie. It’s financial and critical success almost certainly saved his career.

Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is a New York radio shock jock, whose show accidentally provokes a lonely and confused man to massacre the customers at a late night bar. Three years later and Jack’s career is over and he is working as a co-owner of a video rental star (and live-in lover) with Anne Napolitano (Mercedes Ruehl). One day – drunken and suicidal – he is saved from a gang of young thugs by eccentric homeless man Parry (Robin Williams). Jack discovers three years ago that Parry was a respected professor of English literature, whose life fell apart after his wife was killed in the same bar massacre that ruined Jack’s career. The two men are drawn together – but can they save each other?

The film is based on the myth of the Fisher King, the king charged with finding the Holy Grail but could not find it for years – only for a fool to present it to the king full of water to drink, revealing it was there in the King’s possession the whole time. The fool helps because he is “purer” than those more worldly around him. The idea that Richard LaGravenese’s screenplay is leaning on is that these two characters – Jack and Parry – alternate between them the roles of Fisher King and Fool, both slowly doing things for each other that change their personalities and allow them to adjust back into the world and become comfortable with the people they are.

Reading that it should become clear that this is a sentimental film – and it certainly is. It’s also hellishly overlong for such a slight story of tragedy leading to overcoming personal crisis. We know watching the film from the start that Jack Lucas is a bad guy – and Gilliam shoots his opening scenes of Radio presenting with great skill, using high angles, extreme close-ups and shots that prevent us getting any real sight of Jack, making him as impersonal and contemptable as possible in his shallowness, pride and thoughtless cruelty. It’s not a mystery to expect that we are due to watch a triumph of the human spirit film, in which Jack becomes a better man. The film takes a very long time making this simplistic point.

The catalyst is Robin Williams, in a role tailor made for him as a hyper-active, manic personality mixed with tragedy and depression. To be honest Williams is frequently over indulged in the role – despite his Oscar nomination – heading over the top too often, and often over-egging the pudding both in Parry’s energetic enthusiasm and also in his moments of tragic depression. Parry is given a romantic sub plot with Amanda Plummer’s nervous office worker (a character who is little more than a collection of quirks than a personality, and it’s a shame it’s led to Plummer being typecast in such eccentric roles) that is almost insultingly slight and one-sided (he comes across a bit like a stalker) and lacks any of the charm needed for the story to work.

Parry is used to tie the film into further Arthurian flourishes with his obsessions with the legend. Parry visualises a sinister Red Knight – a mental expression of his grief and horror at his wife’s death, which takes the form of the appearance of his wife’s blood splattered face – which chases him through the city. Parry is also obsessed with the discovery of the Holy Grail, which he claims can be found in a millionaire’s faux medieval castle in the centre of Manhattan. This Arthurian stuff is often rather crow-barred in, but holds more interest than traditional plot-lines of people rediscovering their humanity and capability of bonding with others.

Jeff Bridges actually takes on the far harder role as Jack Lucas, a character who has to go on a firm development from start to finish. While Parry is a deliberately eccentric figure, Jack is the one who must journey from arrogance and pride to selflessness and humanity. Bridges does it very well, with a neat line in under playing and an ability to suggest the warmth, shame and self-disgust that Jack works hard to cover up. He’s also blessed to share scenes with Mercedes Ruehl who is outstanding (and Oscar winning) as his girlfriend, the most humane, engaging and real character in the film, a woman who seems at first blowsy and cheap (Jack clearly believes she is beneath him) but reveals more and more depths and capacity for honesty, love and generosity.

Gilliam has a sharp eye for the huge gap between wealth in poverty in 90’s New York, and how the two worlds are geographically only a width of a piece of paper, despite being worlds apart. His direction uses many of his flourishes with great effect. Fish eyed lens POV shots, low angles, stylistic dream sequences, a dream sequence where Grand Central station is full of dancing travellers like a mighty ballroom – many of the sort of things you see in his films are here. To be honest, I found some of the flourishes a bit overwhelming in a story that is so slight and so grounded in just four people’s interactions and quests for salvations. But it works, and Gilliam gets some moments of romantic and platonic love that really work. But it’s still a slight film that goes on far too long, and it eventually loses the viewer in its time-consuming journey towards expected heart-warming moments.

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

Albert Finney interrogates an all-star cast in Murder on the Orient Express

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: Albert Finney (Hercule Poirot), Lauren Bacall (Linda Arden), Martin Balsam (Signor Bianchi), Ingrid Bergman (Greta Ohlsson), Jacqueline Bisset (Countess Helena Andrenyi), Jean-Pierre Cassel (Pierre Paul Michel), Sean Connery (Colonel John Arbuthnot), John Gielgud (Edward Beddoes), Wendy Hiller (Princess Natalia Dragomiroff), Anthony Perkins (Hector McQueen), Vanessa Redgrave (Mary Debenham), Rachel Roberts (Hildegarde Schmidt), Richard Widmark (Ratchett), Michael York (Count Rudolf Andrenyi), Colin Blakely (Cyrus Hardman), George Coulouris (Dr Constantine), Denis Quilley (Antonio Foscarelli)

If there was a film that set the template for our expectations for an Agatha Christie adaptation, it was probably this one. A big starry cast. Luscious period detail. An engrossing plot with clues and double meanings in every corner. A healthy mix of the OTT and the chilling. Marshalled by Sidney Lumet, almost certainly the best director to take on a Christie mystery ever, this film was a massive hit then and remains a hugely enjoyable, rewarding treat now, the sort of masterclass in quality film-making and bravura acting that is guaranteed to leave a smile on your face.

You surely must know the plot by now right? Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) returning from a successful case in the East hitches a ride on the Orient Express on the way home. During the journey he is asked by American businessman Ratchett (Richard Widmark) if he would take up the role of his bodyguard after threats against his life. Poirot turns him down – and sure enough the next morning Ratchett turns up dead in his compartment, with no less than a dozen knife wounds in his chest. With the train stranded in a snow drift, the killer must be one of the other twelve passengers in the carriage. And so the case begins…

Sidney Lumet’s superb, classy piece of murder mystery is a triumph of design and style. The train looks superb, the period detail is perfect, the costumes are luscious. But what Lumet brings to it all underneath all this Sunday afternoon splendour is a genuine sense of chilling menace. Helped a great deal by Richard Rodney Bennett’s haunting musical cues, this film never lets the viewer forget that the heartless destruction of an entire family is at the root of the crime itself, or that the desires for revenge we find in ourselves can take us to dark places.

Lumet’s film opens with a brilliantly constructed series of newspaper stills, establishing the horrors of the Daisy Armstrong case that underpins the mystery, the kidnapping and murder of a young child (based on the Lindbergh kidnapping) that led to tragic consequences for an entire family. This chillingly sad and tragic back story is echoed throughout the film, and immediately establishes the stakes for all involved.

So we spend the film then trying to work out how all the suspects might fit it into this story. Lumet’s concept of bringing together an all-star cast was a brilliant idea, not only giving each of the suspects a quickly established personality (partly inspired by the actor’s body of work), but also assembling a group of such talented actors that they can sketch out a character within a few moments. Lumet’s first recruit for the cast was his old collaborator Sean Connery – and the agreement of Connery to take on a supporting role brought a host of actors to follow. It all adds to the fun, an enjoyable star-spotting exercise, and also an amusing game of watching sometime wildly competing acting styles.

Connery plays Arbuthnot with a stiff-upper lip English reserve, but then you also have a wonderfully arch (and very funny) John Gielgud, a dementedly twitchy Anthony Perkins (McQueen seems to have been adapted into a junior brother of Norman Bates), a show-boatingly larger-than-life Lauren Bacall (great fun), a Germanic stern Rachel Roberts and an inscrutable Vanessa Redgrave. That’s just a few of a terrific collection of actors, and arguably only Wendy Hiller’s overly imperious Princess Dragamiroff is a bit of a miss.

Lumet’s strength in depth allowed him to push his actors into demanding places – complex set-ups and, most especially, a series of long takes in his often confined performance spaces. The highlight – in fact it won her an Oscar – is Ingrid Bergman’s five-minute (practically only) scene where the camera slowly rotates around her across five minutes as she tells her story. Bergman’s shy, nervy, gentle and timid missionary comes across as achingly vulnerable. Bergman had been offered the larger role taken by Wendy Hillier, but wisely turned it down for this show-stopping moment.

The advantage of having such accomplished actors was most clear in the burden placed on Finney as Poirot. Watching it now – familiar as we are with decades of David Suchet’s definitive performance – it’s easy to see Finney’s performance as a little too much. Covered with make-up and a fat-suit, his shoulders hunched around his neck, his hair plastered down with grease and his accent frequently heading way out over the top, Finney certainly leaves very little in the dressing room. His Poirot is an amiable showman, a man willing to adjust his personality and approach from suspect to suspect, but in the end a man with a well-being arrogance and a deep sense of personal morality as well as a profound sense of humanity.

Finney was a surprising Oscar nominee for Best Actor, but he almost certainly owed this to his final speech, an almost thirty-minute tour-de-force. Lumet, operating in small confines, determined that the best way of getting the most dramatic energy from the speech was to use long takes, elegant camera moves, and the minimum of cutting – to let Poirot cast his spell over the audience as much as he does over the suspect. As such Finney – in a tiny, crowded, set – performed the complete monologue several times (each time apparently flawlessly) so that the camera could be positioned in each point in the confined set at a time. The result is seen in the final sequence, which uses dizzying long takes and careful camera moves to draw us brilliantly into the reveals that come thick and fast.

Finney’s performance is magnetic in its theatricality and commitment, and Lumet’s directing decisions throughout the sequence really help to make this sequence as effective as it is. Lumet’s peppers this sequence with a series of brief flashbacks to earlier in the film, which skilfully present snippets of the characters testimonies represented at different camera angles, which is both eerie and also throws a new light on the scenes we have already seen. For all that Finney is a bit much at times, you can’t help but enjoy this piece of showmanship.

The final resolution remains justly famous, and it largely owes a lot to this film. Agatha Christie even was favourable to the film (one of only two films of her work she liked, the other being Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Witness for the Prosecution) although (in words I presume heard by Kenneth Branagh) she bemoaned the smallness of Finney’s moustache. There have been several film and TV adaptations that have followed, but only David Suchet’s version has challenged it for the title of the best. With its gorgeous settings, imaginative direction and wonderful cast I never tire of watching it.

Lady Bird (2017)

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

Director: Greta Gerwig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Descendants (2011)

George Clooney is a family man dealing with difficulty from The Descendants

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: George Clooney (Matt King), Shailene Woodley (Alex King), Amara Miller (Scottie King), Nick Krause (Sid), Beau Bridges (Hugh), Judy Greer (Julie Speer), Matthew Lillard (Brian Speer), Robert Forster (Scott), Patricia Hastie (Elizabeth King)

Anyone expecting a straight comedy hasn’t been familiar enough with Alexander Payne’s career. Payne’s movies are triumphant, slightly quirky, explorations of crisis in the lives and emotions of middle-aged, middle-class men. Few directors do it as well, bringing both a lightness of touch and a profound understanding of the tragedy that can underpin ordinary lives. He has an astute understanding of the pain of opportunities lost. And The Descendants is full of these, just as it is full of the hope you can gain from seizing new opportunities in the future.

Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu attorney who is the last trustee representative in his vast family for a site of 25,000 pristine acres on Kauai. With the trust due to end, Matt is under pressure from his family to sell the land for hundreds of millions and gain them all their financial security. In the middle of this, his wife suffers a boat accident that leaves her in an unrecoverable coma. Matt has to rebuild the relationship with his two daughters Alex (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller) as well as deal with the reveal this his wife was planning to leave him for her lover, a married estate agent Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard).

Payne’s film is heartfelt, low-key and a marvellous showcase for George Clooney who has probably never been better as the grieving and shocked Matt, struggling to come to terms with revelations about his own life that come completely out of the blue. In particular, his own realisation that he has left far too much of his family life to his wife, and his wife has in any case a less than perfect relationship with their two troubled children. Alex (Shailene Woodley) has a history of substance abuse and hell-raising while her sister Scottie (Amara Miller) is using bullying as a way of acting out. King, its clear, has let his connection with his family drift away with his consumption in his work, a character flaw that leaves him with a serious of painful revelations about his own failures.

These revelations are expertly acted by Clooney, who gives the part a rawness and edge beneath his natural charm that becomes deeply involving. He makes Matt both desperate, bewildered and confused as well as kind, decent and forgiving. Payne’s films never present easy solutions to problems, and frequently hold up their leading characters as being the root of their own troubles. It’s the case here as well, as King must learn to realise that many of the problems he is discovering in his family life come out from his own mistakes and lack of focus. How should he respond to his discovery of his wife’s infidelity? How should he decide to react when he discovers his wife’s lover had his own family?

It’s never the easy choice, and it’s never a clean and easy solution that wraps everything up neatly. The problems we encounter will eventually require us to make intelligent, emotional decisions and accept there are no clean answers. When we meet Brian Speer, he’s not a bad guy just a bit weak. It’s the same throughout. Every character has depth and hinterland. Robert Forster as Matt’s father-in-law may seem foreboding and harsh – but then he is perhaps right to blame Matt for his daughter’s unhappiness, even while he never holds it too harshly against him. Alex’s spaced out boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) suddenly surprises Matt with his emotional insight into family dynamics.

And of course, his daughters who seem tearaways are in fact far more mature and supportive than might have been expected. Shailene Woodley is excellent as Alex, a young woman who doesn’t blame but demands to be part of solutions, and supports her father to make the tough calls. And the moral problems keep coming, mixed with surrealist comic touches. It’s the sort of film where Matt can make a shocking realisation about his wife, and then return to his table in his restaurant to be assailed by a garish traditional music band.

Despite all this Payne’s film captures a sense of affection and warmth without succumbing to sentimentality or easy solutions. The sort of satisfying outbursts of pain and cathartic anger are largely avoided for far more mature and realistic feelings of joint responsibility for problems and an acceptance that what our lives become are what we make of them as well as other people. It’s a sort of complex avoidance of black-and-white solutions that help to make the film feel truly real and grounded. While not many of us need to worry about the pressures of making decisions that will make us millionaires, all of us have had to deal with our own mistakes leading to others making mistakes and the emotional fallout that this can bring.

In the centre of Payne’s emotionally intelligent film are these excellent performances, with George Clooney hugely unlucky to miss out on an Oscar for his emotionally intelligent and rich performance here. Payne’s film takes the male mid-life and family crisis and subtly analyses from a host of positions and angles, not just the man itself. We can feel sorry for a bloke who has suffered blows but also see his own decisions have contributed to his position. It makes for a delightful and heartfelt film, which is beautifully made by Payne and superb showcase for intelligent, grown up film making.

The Collector (1965)

Samantha Eggar is held captive by Terence Stamp in the unsettling The Collector

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Terence Stamp (Freddie Clegg), Samantha Eggar (Miranda Grey), Mona Washbourne (Aunt Annie), Maurice Dallimore (Colonel Whitman)

A lonely butterfly collector wins the pools. He’s rich, he can have everything he wants – but he’s still an outsider who can’t get a girl. Surely if a woman would just get to know him he’d find love. So the easiest way of doing that is probably kidnapping the woman you had a crush on at school, locking her in a carefully furnished basement in your Tudor mansion house and just wait for her to fall in love with you. Sounds like a perfect plan right?

William Wyler’s adaptation of John Fowles’ best-selling literary first novel sees Terence Stamp as the maladjusted loner and Samantha Eggar as his victim. It’s fascinating reading about the film today and the attitudes and perceptions towards it. Today the film is chilling in the obsessive, dangerous, self-pitying self-justifications of Freddie Clegg. But in the mid-60s a number of reviewers commented on the pity they felt for the kidnapper, and even expressed that in many ways he was acting on fantasies every healthy man has had (they haven’t). Quite rightly the film comes across differently today, a far more unsettling and disturbing portrait than it did at the time.

Wyler’s direction is intimate and a fine mixture of the theatrical – with its often single locations and two-actor scenes – and cinematic, particularly in the way he subtly builds up a Hitchcockian level of tension around the possibility of discovery and escape for Miranda. Sure visually he is a little too much in love with the crash zoom on key items (chloroform for example in Freddie’s car), and devices that seem a little too obvious (like the use of black and white for the film’s only significant flashback) but he mounts the entire film with an unsettling claustrophobia that works very well.

Further he draws out two fantastic performances from the leads. Terence Stamp was not a natural choice for the shy, timid outsider turned abductor – he’s obviously way too handsome and physically assured for the role – but he marshals very well the blinded arrogance of a man who believes the whole world would march to his tune if it only stopped and listened. His Freddie Clegg is softly-spoken, polite and controlled – so much so you almost forget how insane he is. Stamp also does a remarkable physical performance, making himself seem shorter and less dynamic than he really is, his body language having more than the hint of the schoolboy about it. Domineering, controlling, bullying and totally incapable of internal analysis of his actions.

You realise watching the films events unfold – and Freddie’s inability to analyse the emotional truth behind them – that he is alone because he fundamentally doesn’t understand human relationships. While many of the (male) film reviewers at the time found this strangely tragic, today it’s hard to feel anything but contempt for his cruel self-pity.

The more difficult role falls to Samantha Eggar as Miranda. Wyler’s attempt to get the best performance from here seems pretty kin to the abduction the character goes through in the film – she was kept in isolation on the film set, Stamp was instructed to not talk to her outside of shooting while Wyler constantly held the threat of dismissal over her. More than a few echoes of Hitchcock in that – and Wyler’s praise on the film’s completion for Eggar’s (Oscar nominated and Cannes Award winning) performance as more than a whiff of self-praise to it. But Eggar herself is superb as a woman who oscillates between panic, desperation, ingratiating kindness, anger, contempt and fear. Miranda is a woman who tries everything she can to get out of this situation, only to constantly butt heads against the twin devils of her countryside isolation and Freddie’s own lack of emotional and intellectual intelligence.

Because the film interestingly makes clear what a tedious and not-very-bright monomaniacal man Freddie is, compared with the educated and quick-witted Miranda. When she tries to engage him on a discussion about modern art, he is utterly incapable of beginning to appreciate artists such as Picasso (‘It doesn’t look real’), completely fails to grasp any of the ideas in The Catcher in the Rye (the book she suggests he reads) or their relation to him, and is drawn only towards the blandest, most traditional drawings that she creates while whiling away the time in captivity. He fanatically collects butterflies, rooms lined with framed specimens that he can discuss in detail but with no concept of their beauty. Every time Miranda tries to scratch the surface of Freddie to connect with him she constantly discovers he has no depths at all, he’s a little boy lost in the world who can’t understand why he can’t collect people with the ease he catches and kills butterflies.

Whether the film has some sympathy for Freddie is less clear. Maurice Jarre’s luscious score certainly seems to suggest we should feel something for this misguided guy, but today it’s almost impossible to do so. The film works just as well without those feelings of implied sympathy though, which is a tribute to Wyler’s even-handed and controlled direction. Certainly Miranda’s fear and oppression are easy to connect with.

Is this a Stockholm syndrome film? Miranda – an intelligent and cunning woman – quickly realises that while she is the victim, Freddie’s desire to be seen as sort of chivalric gentleman does give her some power over his treatment of her – he wants her to fall in love for real with him. How much does she start to feel sympathy for this misguided loner? Is there any hint of real feeling at any point in her eventual attempt to seduce him (I doubt it heavily watching the film, but I may be adding a modern perspective, as I suspect Wyler wants to leave a hint there – again the score supports this feeling a bit)? I’m not sure – but the film’s eventual ending does leave little doubt that Freddie is a dangerous man, and the world is a less save place with him in it.

The Collector isn’t perfect – and perhaps its attitudes have dated – but it still has a real skill to it, some wonderful scenes – and two terrific performances from its lead actors, who I think have never been better than they are here. Wyler’s last success – and you can see his debt to the later work of Michael Powell and Alfred Hitchcock in each frame, even while he fails to match either of them – it still makes for an unsettling, troubling and fascinating watch.

Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)

Cagney lets rip in this classic gangster film which is all about its barn-storming ending

Director: Michael Curtiz

Cast: James Cagney (Rocky Sullivan), Pat O’Brien (Father Jerry Connolly), Humphrey Bogart (Jim Frazier), Ann Sheridan (Laury Martin), George Bancroft (Mac Keefer), The Dead End Kids

It has perhaps the most famous ending of all gangster films. Faced with his final few minutes on Death Row, charismatic gangster Rocky Sullivan meets with his oldest friend, Father Jerry O’Connell. Rocky is a hero to the kids on the block, and Father Jerry pleads with him: go the chair yellow and just maybe you can help turn these kids away from a life of crime. No way Rocky is going to lose his pride – until the final few moments, when suddenly he collapses into a morass of whimpering fear and terror. Did he decide to listen to Jerry’s pleading? Or did he really go yellow after all?

It’s the question that you are meant to take from Angels with Dirty Faces, a superb example of the gangster genre, brilliantly directed by Michael Curtiz. And it works so well because quite simply no other actor in the history of film could have pulled it off as well as Cagney does. If you have any doubts about whether Cagney deserves to stand as one of the truly greatest film actors of all time, this film erases them.

Cagney is simply superb as Rocky. Has there ever been a gangster who was so charismatic, so magnetic, so strangely decent in his way, who plays in the corrupt world of crime but has his own absolutely rigid moral code? Few other actors could have you so ready to believe he would ruthlessly pull the trigger at the drop of the hat, and yet would still be someone you’d consider inviting round for dinner. Every single scene hinges on his brilliance as a performer, and his interaction with each character is superbly judged. He is an unapologetic bad guy, a man who openly says that he isn’t sure he is capable of empathy in the same way as normal people, yet he also has a fierce sense of loyalty and doesn’t hesitate to take the rap for others or to put himself in harm’s way to protect those he feels loyalty towards.

It’s all part of the intriguing moral puzzle of the film, that rather bravely inverts the idea of good and evil that the Hays Code mandated. On the surface this is a Board approved plot of two kids from the wrong end of the block, one who ends up good one who ends up bad, with the bad one getting his comeuppance and the good saving souls all around. But scratch the surface and actually this is a film that is making far more subtle points about a world that is in shades of grey. For starters, the most faithful and loyal character in the film is the hoodlum Rocky.

But more than that, the film stresses that the margin between priest and criminal is very thin indeed. Repeatedly it’s stressed that Jerry is only a priest – rather than a fellow criminal graduate of the reform system like Rocky – because he was able to run away faster from the police during their days of mayhem as tearaway boys. It only takes chance and a few lucky turns, and the priest owes his ability to find God and the good life solely because the criminal happily took the whole rap as a Kid. The priest and the criminal work almost hand-in-hand trying to encourage the local kids to engage more in their community (even if they are teaching subtly different lessons) and their friendship is unaffected by the events of the film.

Much as the film is building a traditional narrative of crime being attractive but not in the end paying, it is also subtly suggesting that good and evil perhaps coexist in harmony more than we might think (or might be comfortable to acknowledge). Which brings us back to the title I guess: Jerry is an angel with a dirty face from his flawed childhood, but in a way Rocky himself is an angel whose face is covered with the muck of crime. Both characters have lives that have crime and misdemeanours behind them, even if they have eventually chosen different routes.

Curtiz’s film allows this commentary to bubble subtly and cleverly under a host of wonderful scenes and carefully composed sequences. The highlight of which might well be an extraordinarily well made extended shoot out scene, as Rocky faces his final show down with the cops after one crime too many. But it’s a peak of a series of superb sequences that make excellent use of framing and intent. Curtiz even makes the Dead End Kids – a group of, I’ll be honest, rather irritating child actors, whose fates I find it hard to get worked up about – reasonably engaging. There are several other fabulous performances, not least a wonderfully snivelling turn from Humphrey Bogart as a cowardly and corrupt lawyer with more than a few criminal connections.

It all comes back to that final sequence as events catch up with Rocky and the electric chair awaits. Cagney is simply brilliant in this scene, a perfect steel front of composure and pride that we are invited to question whether it cracks or he does so deliberately. Curtiz shoots the sequence in shadow play (apart from one shot of Rocky’s hands clinging desperately to a radiator) – to meet the Hays Code rules about what you could and couldn’t show on screen, the chair being a no – but it works superbly and Cagney’s powerhouse but also restrained performance nails it perfectly. While you like to think Rocky has done the “right thing” you can’t be sure – and it’s that question that hangs over it that helps cement this as a brilliant inversion of the black-and-white morals of the era: we like to think decency has prevailed, but maybe it’s all just being yellow after all…

King Kong (2005)

Naomi Watts and a mo-cap Andy Serkis bring to life Peter Jackson’s dream in King Kong

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Naomi Watts (Ann Darrow), Jack Black (Carl Denham), Adrien Brody (Jack Driscoll), Thomas Kretschmann (Captain Englehorn), Colin Hanks (Preston), Jamie Bell (Jimmy), Andy Serkis (Kong/Lumpy), Evan Parke (Ben Hayes), Kyle Chandler (Bruce Baxter), John Sumner (Herb), Lobo Chan (Choy), Craig Hall (Mike)

In the late 90s Peter Jackson was working hard on putting together the plans for his dream project. It was a complex project, with unprecedented special effects demands, a huge cast, a demanding shoot and a big budget. However, plans fell through, so Jackson decided to move his attention to that Lord of the Rings trilogy idea he had been banging around instead. Hot of the success of that little escapade, he delivered at last his dream: a huge remake of King Kong.

Carl Denham (Jack Black) is a ruthless film director, desperate to make the big epic that will dwarf all others. Pulling together a team including playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) and vaudeville dancer Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), he heads out on a ship for location shooting on the mysterious Skull Island. Arriving on the Island, they find that the savage natives aren’t the only dangers on an Island that has bypassed evolution. The crew find themselves hunted by dinosaurs, huge creepy-crawlies and other horrors all while they try to find and rescue Ann from the Island’s Alpha – a huge gorilla, King Kong (famously motion-captured by Andy Serkis). Led by Jack, who has fallen in love with Ann, dangers surround the crew – but is mankind, and the ambitious Carl, the real danger?

Time and public perception has not always been kind to Jackson’s labour of love. Perhaps coloured by the generally negative reception to his Hobbit films (which are a mess), perhaps also by the film being more of a gentle, sentimental film mixed with cartoon-splatter horror rather than the monster-mash B movie later Kong films have been, it’s generally remembered as a bit of a disaster. This is far from fair. Yes it’s overlong (hugely so at well over three hours – nearly twice as long as the original) and over-indulgent but it’s also quite a sweet, if rather tonally mixed, film that more or less manages to keep an audience entertained.

Unlike later films which have enjoyed Kong (or Godzilla) most when he smashes things – even if he is often the film’s hero or at least anti-hero – this Kong film is perhaps at its most contented when it is finding the humanity in the ape. As a 9-year old, Jackson talks about crying when Kong fell dead from the Empire State Building – and it is this engaging giant that he wants to bring to life here. Using Serkis – cementing his reputation here as the whizz of motion capture – to have a human literally inside the Gorilla, giving real expressions and genuine character to a giant ape was deliberate. The film’s most heart-felt – and quietest – moments both involve moments of gentle play or innocence from the Gorilla, either starring at a beautiful sunset (which he does both on the island and on the Empire State) or playfully slipping and sliding on a Central Park frozen lake, this is a monster that Jackson sees as a misunderstand soul, that bond he felt at 9 brought to the screen.

That’s the key between the bond that Ann feels with this beast who starts as potential killer, becomes protector, friend and finally a sort of romantic interest of a kind. Well played by Naomi Watts, Ann Darrow herself is a damaged soul, a bright-eyed, naïve dreamer with a dose of realism slowly entering her soul, who wants to entertain people but also to make her immediate world a better, warmer place. It’s natural that such a person would start to feel a deep bond with Kong, to learn to appreciate his gentleness and protectiveness, to put herself at risk to try and save his life. It’s a huge development of the character from scream-queen, and positions Ann (or tries to) as a more pro-active force in her own story.

And the ape responds to this, slowly revealing his own true nature as a potentially gentle giant, albeit one who is prepared to rip a few T-Rex’s apart to protect his love. He certainly ends up feeling more of an ideal partner for Ann than the other men in the film. Adrien Brody’s Jack Driscoll is a determined, principled and brave man but there is a touch of inadequacy to him, a surrendering of responsibility and a lack of proactivity in his make-up. While the early love story between the two characters is sensitively drawn, it tellingly can’t survive the events of Skull Island – at least not in the same way.

Mind you Driscoll is better than Denham, who is transformed in this film to a soulless monster interested only in his own greed for fame and power. Jack Black delivers what the script demands – even if the film is pushing on the edge of his range. As Black’s stock has fallen, so perhaps as some of the film’s – and the perception of his performance here. It doesn’t help that the idea of the ruthless film director seems to be a common trope for film director’s to explore (and interesting psychological question there!) so the character’s shallow lack of regard for anyone else, coupled with his fierce ambition to be the greatest showman around start to grate after a while. It’s a character lacking any depth.

But then that’s the case for most of the rest of the cast as well, who struggle to make room in a film that is overloaded with events and action to the detriment of its overall impact. Jackson’s heart may really lie in the quiet moments between beauty and beast – but he also loves an action scene. And King Kong has too many of these. Much of the middle hour of the film is given over to a never-ending parade of events on Skull Island, that after a while seize to have any real impact. As nameless crew members are crushed by boulders, or stampeding dinosaurs, or savaged by giant insects, or have their heads caved in by savage islanders (not surprisingly these H Rider Haggard style savages, with their lust for human sacrifice, drew more than a little criticism – and it hasn’t aged well) you start to feel your interest sagging. Kong’s brawl with three savage T-Rex’s is perfectly made in every respect, except for the fact it goes on forever.

Ambition lies behind every frame (all of them beautiful by the way) of this huge three hour epic monster picture – but it gets all so much that it buries the story. Like Kong himself, it touches the heavens only to fall tragically to Earth, trying to protect the thing it loves. Jackson wants to protect Kong from being just seen as a massive ape that hits things – but loses his way at times when Kong does little more than exactly that. It is still an intelligent and heartfelt film – but it struggles as well with being an uncontrolled play in the sandbox.

Sunshine (2007)

Astronauts head out to restart the sun in Danny Boyle’s Sunshine

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Cillian Murphy (Robert Capa), Chris Evans (James Mace), Rose Byrne (Cassie), Michelle Yeoh (Corazon), Cliff Curtis (Searle), Troy Garity (Harvey), Hiroyuki Sanada (Kaneda), Benedict Wong (Trey), Chipo Chung (Icarus), Mark Strong (Pinbacker)

Spoilers: Last act surprises are discussed here. Although they did put them in the trailer at the time as well

What would we do if the sun decided to pack it in? To be fair, probably not build a bomb the size of Manhattan out of all the world’s fissile material and then fly it up to the Sun in a huge spaceship to jump start the sun’s core. Because that idea is pretty much like trying to restart a volcano with a match. To be fair, Professor Brian Cox (for it was he) did come up with an actual concept that did work – something involving a Q-Ball in the sun, whatever the hell that is – that the film never mentions. But then who really cares about the science, we only care about the simple idea of restarting the sun’s engine with a massive nuke. That’s an idea I don’t need a staff pass at the Large Hardron Collider to understand.

Mankind’s final fate is in the hand of a team pulled from across the world’s space agencies, with Professor Robert Capa (played by Cillian Murphy as a figure inspired heavily by Brian Cox himself in looks and style) as the boffin whose job is to blow the bomb when the time comes. The mission, Icarus II, is under the command of Captain Taneka (Hiroyuki Sanada), with engineer Mace (Chris Evans), pilot Cassie (Rose Byrne), biologist Corazon (Michelle Yeoh) whose job is to maintain the oxygen garden, psychiatrist Searle (Cliff Curtis), navigator Trey (Benedict Wong) and second-in-command and comms officer Harvey (Troy Garity). Entering the final days of the mission, near Mercury, the crew discover traces of the first missing mission that carried the first payload to restart the sun, Icarus I. Deciding two payloads are better than one, the crew divert to intercept – and of course from there everything slowly falls apart into increasing chaos, destruction and horror.

Boyle’s film was marketed as a sort of slasher-in-space – which to be fair it only really becomes in its final act, as the crew accidentally take on board captain of Icarus I, Pinbacker (Mark Strong), a man driven mad by proximity to the sun, deluded in the belief that it is God’s will that mankind perish with the sun. In fact for the bulk of its runtime – and its primary themes – are really about the psychological impact of prolonged isolation in space with only a small group of people for company (a heightened submarine claustrophobia), the dangers and damage that obsession can cause and the moral complexities that emerge when the fate of mankind is literally in the hands of eight people.

With an intelligent script by Alex Garland, Boyle’s film is smart, superior sci-fi which asks searching questions of how we might respond in the situations this crew are thrown into. How quickly would you make decisions about who is expendable and who is not when you are mankind’s last chance? How quickly would you be willing to sacrifice yourself? What moral qualms would you feel if the fate of the one was balanced against the many? And how are all these feelings heightened by the intense claustrophobia and isolation of prolonged space travel, interacting with the same few people day-in and day-out in a ship of which every inch you would be intimately familiar within the first few months of a mission lasting years?

It’s a wonder more people don’t go crazy in the film. Boyle’s film makes excellent use of the terrifyingly awesome, good-like power of the sun. Its rays are so intense at the range of the ship, that any exposure over about 2% of its full strength is lethal. But there is something about its mighty power, its all-consuming presence, that draws characters too it like moths to a flame. Psychiatrist Searle (impressively played by Cliff Curtis) already seems to be becoming slowly a slave to an obsession with our star, his skin peeling from too many hours in the ship’s solar observation lounge. Pinbacker (a curiously accented performance of intense insanity from Mark Strong) lost his mind in sun worship, his mind seemingly snapped by coming face-to-face with the powers of the heaven compared to the mini-presence of man.

But it’s that presence of mankind that drives the mission, and lies behind all decisions. Hard-ass engineer Mace (Chris Evans, very good) seems like a jerk, but he simply applies Spock’s maxim of the needs of the many to a logical extreme (correctly) objecting to every course of action that invites unknowns into the equation that endanger the mission. And Mace doesn’t hesitate at any time in the film when asked to balance his own safety against the success of the mission. Each crew member – with the exception of Harvey – places their own survival a distant second behind the completion of the mission, and the film is littered with moments of self-sacrifice and self-imperilment.

It’s this humanistic core to the film, of accepting the world is it and that mankind must be preserved within that, which leads to some of the film’s more weighted points around faith and religion. The film has little time for anything away from pure science, and an interest in higher powers and staring too closely at the bright light, is mixed in heavily with a dangerous fundamentalism that eventually leads to the film’s only spiritual figure Pinbacker becoming a psychopath determined to follow what he sees as God’s plan at the cost of all human life. It’s not a subtle picture of religion – and the film could have balanced it with at least one of these characters expressing some faith in some sort of religion on the ship or gently questioning how humbling being this close to the face of God might feel. The film has no time for that.

But then I suppose this is really a psychologically intense mission film, a sort of big-themes action sci-fi that is the sort of ideas based film you wish was made more often. Boyle’s direction is pinsharp as always, and the moments of dreamy awe and shattering power of the sun (as bodies are vapourised, parts of the ship crumble) or the freezing vastness of space (as one character discovers to their cost) provide a series of haunting scenes. Shooting Pinbacker with a juddering out-of-focus intensity – intended to ape the feeling of starring directly at the sun – is effective in making the character chillingly unknowable. This moments work very well, as does the superb cast which has not a weak link among them (Cillian Murphy in particular anchors the entire thing extremely well). Sunshine is a thought-provoking and blistering science-fiction film that manages to balance big themes and ideas with horror house jumps and haunting moments of tension.