Category: Directors

Peterloo (2018)

Mike Leigh’s passionate but dry, overlong film brings the Peterloo massacre to life

Director: Mike Leigh

Cast: Rory Kinnear (Henry Hunt), Maxine Peake (Nellie), Pearce Quigley (Joshua), David Moorst (Joseph), Rachel Finnegan (Mary), Tom Meredith (Robert), Simona Bitmate (Esther), Karl Johnson (Lord Sidmouth), Sam Troughton (Mr Hobhouse), Roger Sloman (Mr Grout), Alastair Mackenzie (General Byng), Neil Bell (Samuel Bamford), Lisa Millet (Jemima Bamford), Philip Jackson (John Knight), John-Paul Hurley (John Thacker Saxton), Tom Gill (Joseph Johnson), Lizzie Frain (Mrs Johnson), Ian Mercer (Dr Joseph Healey), Nico Mirallegro (John Bagguley), Danny Kirrane (Samuel Drummond), Johnny Byron (John Johnston), Tim McInnerny (Prince Regent), Vincent Franklin (Reverend Etlhelstone), Jeff Rawle (Hay), Philip Whitchurch (Colonel Fletcher), Martin Savage (Norris), Al Weaver (Hutton)

Perhaps one of the most pivotal moments in the struggle of the working classes to gain political and social rights was the Peterloo massacre of 16^th August 1819, at St Peter’s Field in Manchester. At a meeting of over 60,000 people, officials ordered first the mounted yeomanry and then soldiers to attack and break up the crowd. At least 15 people were killed and hundreds more wounded, either from the indiscriminate sabre blows from the yeomen (probably drunk) and soldiers (unable to control the panic), or crushed in the frantic attempt to escape from the confined square. The immediate reaction from the authorities was praise at breaking up this “Bonapartist” piece of revolutionary nonsense. The lasting effect was condemnation of the brutality shown towards a peaceful demonstration and the massacre becoming a major cause celebre. It was ultimately influential in the passing of the Great Reform Act, which greatly extended the franchise and rebalanced much of Parliament (at this point so unbalanced by age old tradition that while some tiny hamlets returned MPs, the whole of Manchester had no representation).

It’s still an emotive subject for many today, and with this reverent film, overflowing with anger at the hypocrisy and injustice of the ruling classes, you can’t doubt that Mike Leigh and the makers of Peterloo are among them. But however sincere their personal passion about the subject is, what they fail to bring to the film is any real dramatic impetus to make us care. Instead this is an inert, over-long, often (if I am being completely honest) tedious film that takes nearly an hour to get going and then only offers flashes of dramatic interest before culminating in the massacre itself (very well shot and staged, but still itself a rather distant viewing experience).

A large reason for this is the film is so reverential towards the campaigners for liberty, that the overwhelming majority of their scenes are given over to very good actors giving spirited renditions of actual speeches and pamphlets at a series of political meetings, shot with a reverent simplicity by Leigh. Much as it is can be interesting to hear quotes from things like this, by the time we are onto our twelfth political speech covering similar ground, delivered with another bout of fiery passion, you’ve started to glaze over. What we don’t get from many of these campaigners is any reason to really care about them – either as people or as part of a movement. Instead the film ends up like a cinematic Rushmore, carving their representations into celluloid for us to gaze up at in awe.

A similar fate befalls the working-class characters in the film, who are lacking any real character or story at all and whose main function seems to be to exist so we can experience both their misery and their awakening political awareness. Our main family is a group of mill workers, with Maxine Peake (does anyone do “hard-pressed working class stoicism hiding pain” better than Peake?) as the matriarch, welcoming her son home from Waterloo. These people talk at each other, quoting various current issues and bemoaning the hardness of living at a time of near universal poverty – but other than the fact that they are poor and suffering we are given very little reason to care for them. Like the rest of the working-class characters, they seem more like passengers in the film, meaning when the swords start flying, it’s actually very hard to get worked up as much as we should as members of this family are hacked down.

The one exception in the entire campaign-side of the narrative comes with the introduction of “Orator” Henry Hunt, a prosperous middle-class man who became a famed agitator for working men’s rights. Wonderfully played, with a an air of arrogant grandiosity mixed with genuine commitment to the cause, by Rory Kinnear, Hunt shakes up the pattern the film settles into over its first hour. Acutely aware of his position as the nominal head of a national movement, Hunt has little patience (and even a touch of class-based distance) from the mostly lower middle-class campaigners he mixes with in Manchester (while never being anything less than scrupulously polite), and his fish-out-of-water awkwardness around them raises several laughs (the only ones of the film). Scenes in which he imposes his own conditions on the internal politics of the Peterloo meeting (who will speak, who will be on the podium, will there be weapons in the ground) not only feel more real than anything else we’ve seen in the film, but they are also far more entertaining and engaging than anything else connected to the massacre’s build-up.

Leigh was perhaps so hidebound by wanting to honour the men who campaigned for liberty that, other than with the larger-than-life Hunt, he seems too restricted dramatically – as if adding too much of that essential for drama, conflict, would somehow undermine them. Ironically he has far greater freedom with the authorities – and the film’s more engaging sequences (outside of those with Hunt) are all based around the arguments, clashes, plots and fury of the various levels of authority in the country, from the corpulent Prince Regent through the Home Office to the local magistrates.

The film gets more juice from its righteous anger at the unfairness, arrogance and hypocrisy of these men than it does from almost everything else. It also gives the actors playing these roles far more to work with. Karl Johnson stands out as a stammering but adamantine Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth, paternalistic but totally unwilling to budge an inch. The real stars, however, are the magistrates we follow in Manchester, each introduced trying a trivial case (drinking an employer’s wine, an argument over a watch, stealing a coat) with ludicrous hard-line punishments (flogging and imprisonment, transportation and execution respectively). Played with a lustful relish by Philip Whitchurch, Jeff Rawle, Martin Savage and most expressively of all Vincent Franklin (who nearly goes too far with the lip smacking, until a scene later we see even the Home Office officials eagerly reading his latest dynamite dispatch with a barely suppressed chuckles at his OTT rhetoric), these characters argue the fine points of law and lustily denounce the working classes with such fire and energy that you conversely get more wrapped up in their scenes than almost anything else in the film. Maybe Leigh felt he had greater freedom to create characters and drama here, but it does feel unbalanced.

All that said, the massacre itself when we reach it is brilliantly staged, immediate, deadly, meticulously reconstructed and filmed with a documentary anger at its brutality. You can sense the creeping tension throughout the film and the explosion of violence afterwards, for all the problems of the film, is genuinely horrifying. In fact it wraps you up so much, I wish the film had dealt more with the aftermath of the clash (there is a very good scene as stunned journalists walk St Peter’s Field with horrified fury) and the impact it had, rather than the film wrapping up swiftly with funeral of one of its working-class characters (it’s not a surprise which one).

But then that’s part of the whole film’s problem. It feels like a missed opportunity. It’s a stately civics lesson, a film that hammers home the importance of what it is presenting to you, but never really gives you a reason to invest in the real stories and passions behind the history. Instead it presents everything as important, because it is, rather than making it important to us. It feels at the same time a film that is preaching to the choir who already know this history back-to-front, and also a dry history lesson introducing it to a new audience. Either way it fails. Despite one or two good scenes, a dull, underwhelming, preachy disappointment.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

Charles Laughton looks on with longing as The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Director: William Dieterle

Cast: Charles Laughton (Quasimodo), Cedric Hardwicke (Jean Frollo), Thomas Mitchell (Clopin), Maureen O’Hara (Esmeralda), Edmond O’Brien (Pierre Gringoire), Alan Marshal (Captain Phoebus), Walter Hampden (Archbishop Claude Frollo), Harry Davenport (King Louis XI), Katherine Alexander (Madame de Lys), George Zucco (Procurator)

Victor Hugo’s gothic romance–slash-tragedy has been turned into a film so often, it’s a wonder anything that happens in it remains a surprise. But this 1939 version is perhaps the most influential, where Hollywood decided to throw money at the fable and try and make something as close as possible to the spirit of the book. But of course with a happyish ending on the end – because, you know, it’s still Hollywood!

In 1470s Paris, the city is caught between the pressures of religion and new developments such as the printing press. In the centre of the city is the Cathedral of Notre Dame – where the bells are operated by foundling Quasimodo (Charles Laughton), a deformed hunchback driven deaf by the constant ringing of the bells. His benefactor, Judge Jean Frollo (Cedric Hardwicke), is running a vicious campaign to cleanse the city of the gypsies and beggars that make up a large part of its underbelly – but he’s hit for six when he falls in love (or rather lust) with beautiful gypsy woman Esmeralda (Maureen O’Hara). But he’s not alone – equally smitten are naïve young poet Gringoire (Edmond O’Brien), arrogant Captain Phoebus (Alan Marshal), and Quasimodo himself. When Esmeralda rejects Frollo’s advances she soon finds herself in danger – and her only hope of safety comes from unexpected sources.

Dieterle’s background in German expressionism and silent cinema shines through in this visually striking and opulent studio production, with its superbly marshalled crowd scenes, brilliant use of near-impressionistic shadows and fabulous camera work that drifts over the impressive (and hugely expensive) set. Dieterle mixes this technical expertise with a real sense of emotion and character development, helped by some terrific performances from the cast. It’s a film that motors through the story of the novel, but skilfully repackages it as both a fascinating semi-romance and a sort of urban tragedy, as well as a subtle mediation on love and lust.

At the centre of it, you have Charles Laughton giving probably the definitive performance of the hunchback. Sweating under layers of make-up and an artificial hump, Laughton is nearly unrecognisable as the bell-ringer. His triumph is to make a gentle, tragic character emerge from make-up that suggests more Frankenstein’s monster than tragic hero. Nearly wordless for the first hour and a half of the film, Laughton does his magic with an expressiveness that speaks volumes of the loneliness in Quasimodo. Tenderly, he watches people knowing he can never be part of their lives – and look how excitedly he bursts out when he finally gets a chance to speak to Esmeralda one-on-one. Suffering punishment on the wheel, Laughton’s eyes convey the numb acceptance of pain as his natural state of affairs. But he also manages to bring out the gentle, childlike qualities of Quasimodo. It’s a wonderful, wordless, expressionistic performance – a triumph of physical acting and wonderfully judged emotional vulnerability.

The rest of the cast match Laughton stride-for-stride. Censor demands at the time required that Frollo be removed from his position (in the novel) as Archbishop, so the book-version of the character is split in two here. Archbishop Frollo is the sort of pious bore who can keep the Hayes committee happy. But Cedric Hardwicke gets to play the invented evil brother Judge Jean Frollo, the lecherous hypocrite from the novel. An authoritarian ascetic, Hardwicke’s Judge Frollo is lean, mean and utterly ruthless – and totally in denial about both his lustful feelings and hypocrisy. Hardwicke is virtually an archetype of the sinister authoritarian, but he manages to never chew the scenery. Incidentally, knowing the two characters are basically split from the original book, does allow moments of fun imaging the moral debates between the two as a sort of split personality discussion.

But there are plenty of other good performances as well – not least from Maureen O’Hara, who is charming and engaging enough to make you believe that the whole male cast is in love with her. Edmond O’Brian goes large at times with the passionate romance, but he does a very good job in the role. Thomas Mitchell is good value as the leader of the beggars, Clopin. There are strong performances across the whole film.

All these performances are framed within a fabulous design. The trouble and expense that has gone into the construction of the set is inspiring, the sweeping gothic arches and towers giving every shot something exquisite to look at. It also gives never-ending options for camera placement and impressionistic imagery for Dieterle. It works as well – the gloomy, imposing towers of Notre Dame are captured with real artistry, while the shadow it casts over the whole city of Paris serves as a constant reminder of the oppression the city lives in.

Dieterle also brilliantly films the crowd scenes, getting a superb sense of visceral emersion from these sequences. Whether the camera is in the mix, or flying above the crowds from the tops of Notre Dame, these scenes look equally fantastic. Dieterle handles the more action-related scenes with particular skill – Quasimodo’s rescue of Esmeralda from a death sentence is particularly well staged in its dynamism and graceful filming.

Not every beat works. The portrayal of Louis IX as a sort of kindly old uncle seems off-piste from the very start. The early sequences sometimes get bogged down too quickly in set-up rather than getting into the action. Alan Marshal is rather wooden as Captain Phoebus, although the film goes surprisingly far in suggesting the dark desires and predatory sense of danger that comes from the character. Some of the beggar court sequences get similarly stuck in kitsch.

But these are minor beats. It’s a film that really understands emotions and makes the dramatic thrust work. It also has a dark sexual power, not least in Hardwicke’s Frollo: a seething mess of frustrated desires. It never loses sight of the sadness at the heart of its central character’s story, of his loneliness and isolation, and manages to communicate this brilliantly in every scene where the character appears – he is trapped by his muteness, his ugliness or his sadness at every turn. It’s a development that never fails to be engrossing and finally moving. It’s a film that is brilliantly assembled with real technical skill, very well acted and wonderfully directed.

The Da Vinci Code (2006)

Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou stumble through the dire The Da Vinci Code, possibly one of the dullest films ever made

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Tom Hanks (Robert Langdon), Audrey Tautou (Sophie Neveu), Ian McKellen (Sir Leigh Teabing), Jean Reno (Captain Bezu Fache), Paul Bettany (Silas), Alfred Molina (Bisoph Aringarosa), Jürgen Prochnow (André Vernet), Étienne Chicot (Lieutenant Jérôme Collet), Jean-Yves Berteloot (Remy Jean), Jean-Pierre Marielle (Jacques Saunière)

In 2003 the world went a little crazy. Maybe it was all the buzz of conspiracy that seemed to be everywhere. Maybe people wanted a bit of escapism from the misery of our post-9/11 world. Or maybe there is just no accounting for taste. But inexplicably, a staggeringly poorly written thriller by a hack author, peddling a tired old conspiracy, became one of the most popular books of all time. Yup, ladies and gentlemen, it was a time of silliness, paranoia and poor taste. It was the time of The Da Vinci Code.

When the curator of the Louvre (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is found dead in the museum, with his body covered with bizarre self-inflicted wounds and symbols, visiting Professor of Symbology from Harvard Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is called in to consult. Langdon quickly finds himself the main suspect and on the run, aided only by the victim’s granddaughter Sophie (Audrey Tautou in a truly thankless part of continual question asking, devoid of any agency). Following a trail of bizarre clues, Langdon ends up investigating a conspiracy that leads to the heart of the Catholic Church – could the Church be founded on a lie? Could Jesus Christ have in fact been married to Mary Magdalene? Could she have been his intended heir? Did she have a child? Has a secret society run (at various times) by the Knights Templar, Leonardo Da Vinci and Isaac Newton worked since the dawn of time to protect the secret? Of course they haven’t, but that’s not going to stop the film.

Okay let’s get the main event out of the way. This is a terrible film. But it’s not terrible for the reason you might think. I mean, sure, it’s poorly scripted bobbins, with poorly developed ciphers for characters, and it peddles a conspiracy theory which is total, illogical nonsense from top to bottom. But that’s not the main reason. The main reason this film is terrible is that it is so unbelievably fucking boring.

The film is an utterly faithful, practically scene-by-scene reproduction of Dan Brown’s book. And it immediately reveals how little Brown knows about how to write a good thriller. The film has two or three action “set pieces” or moments of tension – at least, they would be tense, if only there were any stakes to the situation, or the characters’ motivations or the peril they’re in made the slightest bit of sense. They don’t. You’ll barely remember the car chase, or any of the moments where the heroes are held at gunpoint. None of the characters have any definable personalities, other than what they are invested with by the actors playing them. But then that’s no surprise from a novel where the lead character is defined solely by being brainy, having a Mickey Mouse watch (such a character!) and (film rights pleading ahoy) looking like Harrison Ford.

Just like Dan Brown’s turgid original, this film quickly turns into a series of scenes where characters fling exposition at each other to whizz us through a series of sub-par brainteasers and anagrams, which are only solvable with information the characters have but the audience doesn’t (hardly making it a fun thing to play along with). You’ll find yourself wishing for those anagrams back though, once they move on to spunking the novel’s bizarre conspiracy theory into our ears. The low point of this is when Ian McKellen’s polio-suffering billionaire historian (a billionaire historian! Who has a private plane! Of course he does…) tees up a handy PowerPoint presentation he just happened to have sitting around ready, and regurgitates all the mystic mumbo-jumbo that the film tries to pass off as fact.

I’m sure I don’t need to recap the nonsense of this film, but seeing it boiled down from the book is a real reminder that Brown clearly read widely but with no depth. For starters, most of his understanding of everything from the church, to the Templars, to the history of Europe is bogged down in inaccuracy and misinterpretation. By the time the film is claiming that Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity angered the church you’ll have lost all ability to take anything the film says seriously (for the record, the Catholic church didn’t have a problem with gravity, and even if they did, as an Anglican living in a Protestant country, Newton wouldn’t have given a damn anyway).

None of the film’s (or book’s) ideas are even that original – it was all spewed forth in a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail (several characters here have names that are anagrams of the writers and editors of these books) in 1982. The idea of Jesus having a whole line of secret descendants is arrant bollocks. The idea of a secret society working to protect this secret is even more stupid (it was revealed after the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail to be a total hoax, swallowed whole by that book’s writers). There is not a shred of reality here – rather, it’s typical paranoia and anti-establishment bollocks repackaged as dark reveal.

This is before we even touch on the – heaven help us – “art analysis”. The dark hints of conspiracy in The Last Supper by Da Vinci boil down to: (a) there is no Grail in this painting, (b) the bloke to the left of Jesus looks a bit like a girl so must be Mary Magdelene (“a hint of bosom” McKellen tells us playfully), (c) there is an inverted triangle between Christ and this man/woman – so surely a sign of the female dominance! The fact that the painting shows only 12 disciples and Jesus – meaning that if Mary was there, it should show 14 people not 13 – isn’t considered worth mentioning. But then that’s par for the course for the film’s bullshit clues “discovered” in works of art to support the film’s bullshit, anti-Catholic agenda (the church being staffed in this film exclusively by shadowy, Bond-villain types, with a ruthless agenda for extremist Catholicism and murderous Albino hit-monks they dispatch at will). Give me a break.

But if the film had packaged this all up in a gleefully silly, high energy story, it could still have been an entertaining watch. Unfortunately, it’s completely and utterly boring. It goes on (and on) for almost two and a half hours, and in between unengaging lectures and tedious dialogue scenes it drags like you wouldn’t believe. It’s almost impossible to get engaged in anything at all, and it’s really not helped by the flat, dimly lit, for-the-money direction from Ron Howard. There is no zip or fun about the film whatsoever, as if the book’s massive popularity made the producers worried that if they treated the book like an action adventure yarn, or a fun bit of nonsense, then it might offend people. Instead they treat this nonsense with a deathly reverence usually reserved for Biblical epics that’s fatal for the viewing experience of the entire film.

It’s supremely dull, very self-important, and for all the hard work of an interesting cast of actors (who do their very best) it’s a complete, yawn-filled, pile of stinking crap. As the man said: “Holy Blood? Holy shit.”

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Three girls go up a rock and are never seen again in Peter Weir’s masterpiece Picnic at Hanging Rock

Director: Peter Weir

Cast: Rachel Roberts (Mrs Appleyard), Anne-Louise Lambert (Miranda St Clair), Dominic Guard (Michael Fitzhubert), Helen Morse (Mlle de Poitiers), Margaret Nelson (Sara Waybourne), John Jarratt (Albert Crundall), Wyn Roberts (Sgt Bumpher), Karen Robson (Irma Leopold), Christine Schuler (Edith Horton), Jane Vallis (Marion Quade), Vivean Gray (Miss McGraw), Martin Vaughan (Ben Hussey), Kirsty Child (Miss Lumley), Jacki Weaver (Minnie)

Is there any film as haunting and elliptical as Picnic at Hanging Rock? An impenetrable puzzle shrouded in mystery and wrapped in an enigma, it’s the ultimate “mood” film, where everything you understand in the film has be teased out from its sidelines and the unspoken motivations. It’s not going to be for everyone: Peter Weir tells a story on the feature-length Blu-ray documentary (longer than the film) of the response of one US distributor when he saw the film: “[He] threw his coffee cup at the screen at the end of it because he had wasted two hours of his life – a mystery without a goddamn solution!” That’s a fair comment – but accept that this mesmeric film is somewhere between mystery, hynoptic trick and ghost story and you’ll find treasure in it.

Based on Joan Livesey’s novel (which many believed to be true – a fate that also faced the film when it was released), on St Valentine’s Day 1900, a group of girls from a finishing school head to the Hanging Rock in Victoria for a picnic. Three of them (and one of their teachers) walk up to the rock and simply seem to disappear. The subsequent search by the authorities is baffling – and the impact on those left behind is brutal.

There is barely any real plot in Picnic at Hanging Rock but it’s not a film about that. It’s all about the mood, the creeping sense of menace, and the general uneasy dream nature of the story. Everything follows a woozy dream-like logic – and the atmosphere is built upon by the use of panpipe music and skilful use of classical music. Weir’s film is a masterpiece of ghostly, unsettling spookiness with the rock itself as some unknown mystical source at its centre – the first shot of the film shows it slowly appearing in the mist, as if it has somehow been transported there from some fantasia land outside of the normal.

Weir’s film became the most influential film of Australian cinema, and its tone set many of the key thematic points followed by later films of what became known as the “Australian New Wave”. It explores uneasy balances in Australia between the wildness of the country – and indigenous people’s beliefs and culture – and the social structures from the British residents who had claimed the land. Picnic also explores the beginnings of a split between long-standing Australian residents and those clinging to the upper class Brit lifestyle of the motherland. Weir’s film – with its brilliant photography – lingers on the nature surrounding the rock. Not only the rock itself, with its odd formations and strange structure, but also the animals and the environment about it. There is something unknowable, wild and untamed about these surroundings – something mankind can’t control or understand.

Weir shoots the film with a lush impressionism – everything has a hazy unreality about it – and the dreamy nature of the film is built on with the dark hints of sexual feeling bubbling under the surface. The girls are all on the cusp of discovering their own sexuality – and there are plenty of open suggestions of same-sex crushes, of growing awareness of their sexual natures among the girls. It doesn’t stop with them either – the adults are equally drawn towards unspoken desires (left very much open to interpretation). Weir gets some perfect visual representations of the stonking repression forced on top of all these feelings, not least a wonderful shot which shows several of the girls standing in a line tightly doing up each other’s corsets.

And that perhaps, it’s hinted, is what happens on the rock when the girls disappear. Trance-like, they walk towards a gap in the rock and seem to disappear. What drew them there? Lead girl Marian (a perfect performance of ethereal other-worldliness from Anne-Louise Lambert) even seems dimly aware in the opening scenes that she is bring drawn towards something. The only girl who isn’t drawn towards the mystic is more repressed, dumpy Edith – whatever the force is that calls the other girls, it leaves her panicking and screaming. What’s going on? Something dark, sinister – and you can’t help but think sexual.

And what does that mean for those left behind? A mess. Rachel Roberts (a late casting replacement for Vivien Merchant, and famously awkward around the girls on set) is very good as the distant, draconian headmistress of Appleyard Academy (basically a sort of finishing school for posh girls). The regime she runs at the school is a mixture of oppressive and discriminate, with punishments handed out according to Mrs Appleyard’s personal feelings about the students rather than any reflection of their own behaviour. Part of the film’s story is the fracturing of her own personality that happens as response to the disappearance – her collapse slowly into a sort of paranoid insanity, powered by drink. What dark secrets is she hiding? (The film hints that she has more knowledge than she should have of at least some of the darker events of the story, but never reveals how much or indeed why.)

But then the whole cast are dealing with problems they scarcely seem to understand. There is a curious – perhaps homosexual bond – between Dominic Guard’s repressed English teen and John Jarrott’s earthy, ultra-Aussie outbacker (a very good performance from Jarrott in a character that could easily have fallen into stereotype). Perhaps that’s why Guard’s character is drawn constantly back to the rock – and also why he too seems to have such an overwhelmed reaction to it.

The sole character in the film who feels most capable of expressing their emotions is the school’s French teacher Mlle de Poitiers. Played exquisitely by Helen Morse – she gives the warmest, most engaging performance in the film – she is the only character who seems able to get in touch with her emotions, unfiltered by too much repression. Perhaps it is no coincidence that as a “double foreigner” (French among the Brits in Australia) she is less affected by the rules around her. Either way, she becomes a perfect audience surrogate, as slowly horrified and confused by the actions she sees around her in the college as the viewer is. Morse is fabulous in these scenes, from a burst of emotion when reunited with a character she thought lost, to quietly watching Mrs Appleyard’s disintegration late in the film.

But the real star is Weir’s masterful direction of the mood of this film. Like that distributor said, there isn’t any plot as such – vital events happen off screen, and there is the distinct feeling that you are only being told half the story – but despite that, the film is compelling. So much is conveyed in the mood, the tensions, the style of the film that you are invited to bring your own interpretation to events. That makes it a continually rewarding piece of cinema – it invites you to make your own answers.

This juggling of atmosphere to make something so enigmatic is so crucial to the film’s success that the recent mini-series remake effectively continued the trick (with a few extra insights into Mrs Appleyard), and contained arguably even fewer answers over its 5 hours than this did in 2. But Weir’s brilliantly made, beautifully shot, eerily unforgettable film rightly takes its place as (perhaps) the greatest Australian film ever made: it’s a film that is about Australia, and about the tensions, confusions and mysteries of that country. Brilliant.

Network (1976)

Peter Finch rants and raves in media satire masterpiece Network

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: Faye Dunaway (Diana Christensen), William Holden (Max Schumacher), Peter Finch (Howard Beale), Robert Duvall (Frank Hackett), Wesley Addy (Nelson Chaney), Ned Beatty (Arthur Jensen), Beatrice Straight (Louise Schumacher), Jordan Charney (Howard Hunter), William Prince (Edward Ruddy), Lane Smith (Robert McDonough), Marlene Warfiedl (Laureen Hobbs)

Is there any movie ever made that has been more prescient than Network? So spot-on was its vision of television becoming pushed to extremes by its obsession with ratings that when it was screened a few years ago for a group of teenagers in America, they allegedly didn’t realise it was meant to be a satire. I’m also pretty sure you would have to go a long way to find a better written movie – it’s no surprise that this has been converted into a successful play, it’s basically one already.

In the 1970s, UBS is a struggling TV network trying to find a niche among the giants. Its news show is losing its timeslot in the ratings – which is bad news for its respected anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch). Informed he will be fired due to falling ratings, Beale goes on air and casually announces he will blow his brains out live on air next week. When this sends the ratings rocketing, the network sends him back on air, encouraging him to speak his mind more rather than just report the facts. When Beale suffers a full blown breakdown, his anti-establishment rants touch a public nerve and Beale becomes a ratings smash – with the news show taken over by ambitious Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), Head of Entertainment, who turns it into a bizarre light entertainment show, with the increasingly unhinged Beale the main entertainment. It’s perfect for everyone – so long as the ratings hold…

Network could so easily have become a shrill, OTT satire. Writing down the plot summary there, it even reads like that – a big, stupid, pleased-with-itself film that hits its points hard and where every character is a grotesque caricature. But that’s not the case here. This is a brilliantly written film – Paddy Chayevsky is surely one of the greatest writers in film history – a fiercely intelligent piece of satire, which most importantly crafts its characters with empathy and understanding. Some of them may be larger than life, and some of them may do things that are just this side of heightened reality, but at heart they all feel real. The film is shot through with heart and a sense of realism that underpins the razor sharp satire.

And that satire is all around the world of television. So astonishingly prescient is the film about the rise of reality TV, ratings obsessed and lacking in real soul, that many of its jokes pass by almost unrecognised today. Respected news producer Max Schumacher’s throwaway line about an hour of network TV drama being made up of films of car chases (and crashes) from the police? Done to death already. The idea (again unthinkable in the 1970s) that a news anchor could litter the air with their own opinions on the news and current affairs – half the anchors in America now run their shows like editorial pieces. The concept that the public could be entertained by watching someone clearly not completely normal, throwing crazed statements at the camera – it could only be a fantasy right? A TV network completely in thrall to its corporate masters, following the line from the bosses? Yup surely that could never happen.

What Chayevsky does so well is turn these into masterpieces of rhetoric. Some of the greatest speeches ever written in film appear here, and they work because not only do they showcase some superb writing, but also every moment is crammed with ideas and real genuine feeling. Howard Beale may well be as mad as hell and not going to take it any more – but he articulates his reasons for feeling this with an acute emotional reality. Schumacher’s paens to the changing world of television, and his own lost place in it, are beautifully done. Diana’s ratings obsessed spewing of TV related facts and figures is sharply underpinned by our awareness all the time of the emotional reality of her near-inevitable emotional breakdown (surely only a few years at most down the line).

Given these lines, the acting is extraordinary (it won three of the acting Oscars in 1967). There isn’t a duff beat or performance in this film, and the delivery of the high-blown dialogue is simply outstanding, brilliantly directed by Lumet who was always a highly skilled director of actors. In fact, Lumet is often easy to overlook here, but his understanding of the material, and handling of its message and delivery, is a big reason for why it never becomes overbearing or trying. Away from the leads, he also gets superb performances from Duvall (chilling and on the verge of rage in every scene as the corporate suit who really calls the shots), Beatty (who had basically one speech, worked a day, and got an Oscar nomination) and Straight as Schumacher’s wife (who went one better than Beatty and won the Oscar for her one scene – the shortest Oscar-winning performance ever at just a few minutes).

Peter Finch won a posthumous Oscar for his role in this film – ill health restricted his “mad as hell” speech into only two takes (an extraordinary thought when you watch it). Beale is a gift of a part, an intelligent, compelling piece of showmanship – but Finch’s gift is to make the part feel real and human under the genius dialogue. The early scenes showcase Beale clearly struggling with depression, under the smiles, and already starting to crack. I love the way Lumet often frames Finch during these scenes – in group scenes he’s often to the edge of events, and he only slowly comes to the fore to gain a close up. Heck most of his first outburst on television is only seen by us on a viewing monitor in the control room (only the viewer seems to be listening by the way – the technicians are either gossiping or mechanically going through the motions of running the live broadcast, including countdowns to commercials).

Finch basically steals the movie, because you can’t shake from your mind his delivery of scenes like this one:

It’s even harder to believe that so many actors turned down the role – perhaps worried that it would seem like a pantomime role. One of those actors was William Holden – and thank goodness he did, because his grounded, bitter, crumpled, but still idealistic Max Schumacher is one of the film’s highlights. Holden gives one of his greatest performances – often overlooked under the flashy roles of Finch and Dunaway – making Schumacher the still centre of the film and, by its end, something approaching its powerless voice of conscience.

Faye Dunaway (also Oscar-winning) makes a great deal of the demonic role of Diana Christianson, the representative of the next generation of TV producers, concerned only with ratings over morals. It’s probably the least “real” of the characters, but Dunaway finds the vulnerability and fragility carefully hidden under Diana’s chilly self-confidence and ruthlessness.

It’s Diana who drives the film, overseeing the transformation of the news hour into a bizarre variety show (including a soothsayer, amongst a host of eccentric magazine feature slots) where Beale is bought on to rant about the emptiness of our world and the horrors of our soulless age like some sort of dancing bear, his inevitable fainting fits greeted by roars of applause. (“What are you?” asks the warm up man of the studio audience “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!” they delightedly cheer back).

The film runs a particularly dark streak alongside this with Diana’s plan to build a solid hour of entertainment every week from an embedded camera crew following the exploits of a gang of radical Marxist black-pantherist terrorists. The film gets a lot of slightly more obvious satirical material from this – the terrorists quickly lose their Marxist principles in hilarious fights around things like negotiating syndication rights – but its vision of television turning real-life horrors (repackaged) into entertainment for the masses is only a few degrees shy of where many channels have ended up today.

That’s the whole film – sharply intelligent about where the world is heading, but balancing this with a genuine sense of humanity and emotional intelligence around its characters. If Chayevsky’s screenplay – or Lumet’s direction – hit us over the head with the points the film was trying to make, we’d quickly switch it off. Instead it makes its points with wit and a sense of reality that makes it both horrifying and entertaining. But then it would always have its place in film history with that dialogue and the acting it inspires from the cast. Most of the actors give their best ever work here, and the script is one of the finest around. As for the view of television – well, if we haven’t reached where Network was by now, it’s surely only a few minutes in the future.

The Untouchables (1987)

Super stylish cops and robbers thriller, as Costner and Connery take on Capone

Director: Brian de Palma

Cast: Kevin Costner (Eliot Ness), Sean Connery (Jimmy Malone), Andy Garcia (George Stone), Robert De Niro (Al Capone), Charles Martin Smith (Oscar Wallace), Patricia Clarkson (Catherine Ness), Billy Drago (Frank Nitti), Richard Bradford (Chief Mike Dorsett), Jack Kehoe (Walter Payne)

“What are you prepared to do!”

It’s the motto of this electric law-enforcement film, one of those all-time classics that provides endlessly quotable lines and moments you can’t forget. It’s crammed with iconic moments, from its brilliantly quotable dialogue from David Mamet, via its wonderful music score, to its artful film literacy and iconic performances. If there is an untouchable film, this one is pretty close. I love it.

It’s 1930, prohibition is in full force and Chicago is ruled by gangland kingpin Al Capone (Robert De Niro). Young Federal Officer Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner) is thrown into Chicago to end Capone’s reign and stamp out the illegal liquor business. Not surprisingly, it’s hard to know who to trust in a town as stinking as this one, until a chance meeting with disillusioned beat cop Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery) helps him find a group of people he can trust – “Untouchables” who aren’t going to go on Capone’s payroll. But to bring Capone down he’s going to have to embrace the “Chicago way” and start to bend his strict moral code.

Listening to Brian de Palma talk about the making of the movie, you can’t help but suspect he felt he was doing one for the suits rather than one from the heart. Well perhaps he should do that more often, because The Untouchables is a lean, mean, hugely entertaining action-adventure, that plays with genuine ideas and but also nails every single moment. Every scene is shot with a confident, compelling swagger – the sort of thing that reminds you what a conneseur of high-class pulp de Palma can be. The Untouchables plays out like a super-brainy graphic novel adaptation, and every scene sings. There is barely a duff moment in there.

A lot of this comes straight from David Mamet’s brilliant script. Really, with lines like this, moments as well-crafted as this, characters as clearly, brilliantly defined as the ones on show here, you can’t go wrong. Quotable lines fall from the actors’ lips like the gifts they are: “He brings a knife, you bring a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago Way!” It’s dialogue like this that just has ageless appeal, the sort of stuff you find yourself trying to work into day-to-day conversation.

But Mamet’s script is also sharply clever. It swiftly lays out at the start Ness’ moral compass, his code – and then, as the film progresses, it cleverly shows the whys and wherefores for Ness compromising these. Needless to say, the man at the end of the film is totally different from the bright-eyed naïve agent we met at the start. Mamet also brilliantly works shades of grey into all our heroes, while scripting some compelling moments of grandstanding bastardy that an actor as marvellous as De Niro is just waiting to send to the back of the net.

De Niro was of course the inevitable choice as Capone. Bob Hoskins was contracted just in case De Niro said no (when told De Niro would be taking the job but he would get a $20k pay-out for his time, Hoskins told de Palma he’d be thrilled to hear about any other movies de Palma didn’t want him to be in), but it had to be Bobby. The film drops Capone in at key moments: the film opens with the swaggering bully delighted at holding court with English newspapers while being shaved (de Palma’s camera draws down from an overhead shot, like a spider descending from the ceiling, to reveal him in the barber’s chair) – a flash of danger emerges when the barber slips and cuts Capone’s face (de Niro’s flash of fury, followed by his decision to pardon – combined with the barber’s terror – is perfect). Later Capone rages at Ness, hosts a very messy dinner party with a baseball bat, and weeps at the theatre while a key character bleeds to death at his home (a brilliant example of de Palma’s mastery of B-movie cost cutting). He’s the perfect dark heart.

And opposite him you need a white knight – even if it a white knight who is set to be sullied. I’m not sure Kevin Costner ever topped his performance here, in the film that made him a superstar overnight. Looking like the perfect boy scout – his fresh faced earnestness is one of his finest qualities – Costner also has a WASPish hardness under the surface. The burning determination he has to destroy Capone, his disgust at the murder and chaos Capone deals in, is never in doubt – just as his initial naïveté about how to end Capone is all too clear. Costner masterfully shows how each event pushes Ness a step or two further in bending his rules, to fight Capone’s ruthlessness with ruthlessness of his own. “What are you prepared to do!” Malone asks him, and the film is about Ness working out how far his moral compass can stretch. I can’t think of many films that so completely and successfully have the lead character change as much as Costner does here without it feeling rushed or forced. It’s a wonderful performance.

But the film is stolen – and it’s no surprise, as he has the showiest part, most of the best lines, and of course the movie-star cool – by Connery. It’s easy to mock Connery’s blatantly Scottish Irish cop – he gives the accent a go for his first scene, but promptly drops it. What Connery’s performance is really all about is an old dog who never got a chance to do the right thing, finally being given the licence, the support and the inspiration from the younger man to clean up this filthy city. And Connery rages in the film, a force of nature, the perfect mentor, the cop who against all initial expectations is prepared to go through any and all risks to get Capone. He’s the samurai beat cop, and Connery (Oscar-winning) growls through Mamet’s dialogue with all the love of the seasoned pro letting rip. It’s an iconic performance – and led to a five year purple patch of great films and roles for Connery.

But the film works partly because of these great performances and the script, but also because of de Palma’s direction. The pacing is absolutely spot-on, the camera full of moments of flash and invention. Every action sequence has its own distinct tone, from the horse riding hi-jinks of a Canadian border interception of a booze truck, to the dark slaughter late at night of one of the film’s main characters (a masterful, Hitchcockian piece of genius by the way that uses the POV shot to exceptional effect). A late roof chase sizzles with a ruthless energy.

But the real highpoint of the action is of course that famous train-station shoot out. Allegedly the original plans on the day had to be ditched due to budgetary reasons – so cinephile de Palma pulled a sublime Battleship Potemkin homage out of his locker. Shot in near silence, save for gunshots, the bounce of a pram falling down the station stairs (baby on board) and a spare score from Morricone, the sequence is true bravura cinema, both hugely exciting and strangely endearing for all those who know anything about the history of cinema.

De Palma and Mamet keep the story focused, clear and every scene has a clear purpose and goal. There isn’t a single superfluous character or moment. Everything is perfectly assembled to serve the overall impact of the film. It’s gripping, entertaining and compelling: the sort of film where if you catch it at the right age it has you for life. Ennio Morricone’s operatic score is perfect for the film, underlining and emphasising every moment and effectively sweeping you up. Costner and Connery are superb, De Niro is perfect, the film is a gift that has something new to give every time you see it.

Ship of Fools (1965)

Simeone Signoret and Oskar Werner are just part of the kaleidoscope of humanity in Ship of Fools

Director: Stanley Kramer

Cast: Vivien Leigh (Mary Treadwell), Simeone Signoret (La Condesa), José Ferrer (Siegfried Rieber), Lee Marvin (Bill Tenny), Oskar Werner (Dr Wilhelm Schumann), Elizabeth Ashley (Jenny Brown), George Segal (David Scott), José Greco (Pepe), Michael Dunn (Carl Glocken), Charles Korvin (Captain Thiele), Heinz Rühmann (Julius Lowenthal), Lilia Skala (Frau Hutten), Barbara Luna (Amparo), Christiane Schmidtmer (Lizzi Spokenkieker), Alf Kjellin (Freytag), Werner Klemperer (Lt Huebner)

Stanley Kramer was the man who went his own way in Hollywood. Struggling to find work after returning from the Second World War, he set up his own production company which quickly specialised in critically acclaimed “message” films. It’s the sort of film making that hasn’t always aged well. Kramer’s style hasn’t often either – even at the time he was seen as achingly earnest and worthy. Ship of Fools was the sort of perfect project for him: a massive best-selling novel about a huge subject, humanity itself. It was about big themes and it felt really important. It was perfect Kramer material.

In 1933, a ship sails from Mexico back to a newly Nazified Germany. On board, the passengers and crew blithely continue their own personal dramas and obsessions – it really is literally a “ship of fools”, as we are informed in the film’s opening by wry observant German dwarf Carl Glocken (Michael Dunn) who serves as an occasional chorus. On board: a faded Southern Belle (Vivien Leigh) desperate to recapture her youth; a failed baseball player (Lee Marvin) bitter that his career never took off; a young artist (George Segal) intent on only drawing serious subjects to the frustration of his girlfriend (Elizabeth Ashley); a bigoted, bullying Nazi (JoséFerrer) trying to start an affair with an attractive younger blonde (Christiane Schmidtmer); a Jewish jeweller (Heinz Rühmann) who thinks the Nazi party can’t be that dangerous; and ship’s doctor Willi Schumann (Oskar Werner) who finds himself increasingly fascinated with La Condesa (Simeone Signoret), a drug addict and a social campaigner being transported to prison in Spain. Truly, the whole world is on board this boat! (Or so you can imagine the poster saying).

The success of the individual moments in Ship of Fools rise and fall depending on the level of engagement you feel in each of these stories. It’s a curious mixture of tales, some of them dancing around deeper meanings, some playing like dark farce, some plain self-important rubbish. What’s abundantly clear is Kramer feels this is all leading towards meaning something, though whether he gets anywhere near expressing what this something is really isn’t clear. In fact the only real categorical message I could take about this is that humanity has a tendency to fiddle whole Rome burns – and that of course the Nazis are bad.

There is an attempt to suggest a world in microcosm – and some have argued that the smorgasbord of characters are basically like facets of one person’s personality – but really what many of these stories are deep down are soapy pot-boilers, brought to life by good writing and fine acting. Kramer marshals all these events with a professional smoothness: there is something quite admirable about the fact he clearly sees the director’s role as more like a producer’s, someone there to service the story and actors more than to cover the film with flash. It might not make for something compellingly visual, but it is refreshing.

What Kramer is less successful with is the heavy-handed importance the film gives its serious moments. Most infamous is a moment when Glocken and Jewish trader Julius Lowenthal are sitting on the veranda, listening to the band while chatting about current affairs in Germany. “There are nearly a million Jews in Germany. What are they going to do? Kill all of us?” Julius jovially states – the band music obviously ends the second he stops speaking, filling the screen with a chilling silence. It’s the sort of moment that is supposed to make us feel the chill of the oncoming storm – but instead feels manipulative and portentous. Every moment like that lands in the same way – the film is delighted with its exploration of these shallow people, very pleased with knowing the Nazi destruction is on the way.

This self-important bombast dates the picture more than anything else in it. Nothing dates as badly as pretension. It’s a film that feels like it’s been made very consciously to make you think, and which wears its attempt to capture every level of society – from poor Spanish workers to rich Nazis – very heavily. It also makes obvious points: naturally the only true act of self-sacrifice comes from a poor Spanish worker, while the rich passengers can scarcely look past their own concerns.

When it isn’t being self-important, the film too often finds itself mired in soapy rubbish. The plotline featuring George Segal as a failing artist and Elizabeth Ashley as a frustrated girlfriend is tedious beyond belief, a slog through the worst kind of coupley drama that adds very little to the film. A further plotline around the companion of a wheelchair-bound intellectual, obsessed with an exotic dancer on the ship, could sit just as easily in Coronation Street as it could in a highbrow drama like this.

Despite all this, I have to say much of the acting is very strong – even if many of the actors are cast very much to type. Vivien Leigh, in her last performance, struggled with immense psychological difficulties during shooting, but brings a heartfelt realism to divorced Southern belle Mary Treadwell (an even more heartfelt version of her Blanche DuBois than in Streetcar). Kramer also allows her one of the film’s few moments of imaginative spontaneity when she suddenly bursts into a Charleston before stumbling back to her hotel room.

Carrying a lot of the film’s emotional weight are Oskar Werner and Simeone Signoret (both Oscar nominated) as an unlikely romantic coupling. Werner brings great depth and sadness to the world-weary doctor who finds himself irresistibly drawn to Simeone Signoret’s Countess. Signoret channels her distant, fragile imperiousness from Les Diabloques and Room at the Top to marvellous effect as a woman struggling with an indolent drug addiction but who feels a genuine responsibility to the world. The quiet scenes between these two are the closest the film gets to touching some distant meaning, even if it never quite gets there – and again the points deep down are fairly straight forward.

For the rest of the cast, there is hardly a weak link. Heinz Rühmann, in his only English-speaking role, campaigned heavily for the role of Jewish trader Julius and he is magnificent. José Ferrer swaggers convincingly as bullying Nazi Siegfried, even if he is saddled with the most obvious, poorly written, character. Michael Dunn (also Oscar nominated) makes a lot of his role as charming chorus and commentator. Lee Marvin is terrific as the frustrated and bitter baseball player. Charles Korvin gives a lot of depth to the thoughtful and compassionate captain.

Ship of Fools has plenty of moments of enjoyment. But as a whole it’s always a little self-consciously important, too determined to push you to be aware of the messages it wants you to take home. As the final shot sees a camera crane inexorably down onto a swastika you feel smacked around the face with the film wanting you to know that the darkness was just around the corner. The dread of Nazism should hang over the film like a shroud but instead it feels so repeatedly stressed to us that it loses all impact. The film wants us to know that we know more than the characters, and goes out of its way to remind us so that we can pat ourselves on the back when we spot the irony. Despite much of the quality of acting and dialogue, it gets wearing after a while.

Creed (2015)

Sylvester Stallone and Michael B Jordan keep the flag flying in Rocky relaunch Creed

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Michael B Jordan (Adonis Creed), Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa), Tessa Thompson (Bianca), Phylicia Rashad (Mary Anne Creed), Graham McTavish (Tommy Holiday), Wood Harris (Tony “Little Duke” Evans), Ritchie Coster (Pete Sporino), Anthony Bellow (“Pretty” Ricky Conlan)

Remember Rocky IV? It’s a bizarre film that opens with the plot twist of Apollo Creed, Rocky’s rival-turned-friend, slain in the ring by a Russian fighting monstrosity. Well that film, for all its rubbishness, partly redeems itself by being the jumping-off point for this spirited and well-made re-launch of the series. (Strange as it is for a film as grounded as this one to bounce off from such a bizarre piece of 1980s nonsense as Rocky IV.)

Adonis Creed (Michael B Jordan) is the son of Apollo Creed from an extramarital affair. Adopted as a young boy by Creed’s widow Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad), Creed grows up to be a man who yearns to fight as a boxer – although whether this is motivated by a desire to get closer to his father or to try and outdo him the film subtly plays around with as a major theme. He approaches Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) to train him, who eventually reluctantly agrees, inspired by seeing something of himself in the young man. When Creed unexpectantly lands a title shot – while Rocky deals with increasing ill health – both men have to come together to fight for their pride and future.

Creed is a film that captures what works about this franchise, and repackages basically a very familiar story (this is almost point-for-point a Rocky remake) with a great deal of dynamism. Coogler, a talented and original director, brings imagination and intelligence to essentially pulpy material and makes something old seem new again. It does this while still homaging the previous films (even the rubbish ones!) at several points, from small stills on the walls of Rocky’s restaurant, to bit-part characters, to the marvellously beguiling score that gently riffs on the familiar motifs from the series.

It’s also helped by a fine performance from Michael B Jordan with a pretty much spot-on re-interpretation of the Rocky character in a new form. Jordan’s Creed is impulsive and quick-tempered, but also kind and charming. In fact it’s refreshing to have such a clean-living and well-brought up hero centring a film! Jordan gets some intelligent and subtle character work over Creed’s mixed feelings for his father: both resentful of never knowing him and also desperate to gain a sort of posthumous approval. It’s a basic daddy-problems story line but it’s done with a lot of subtlety.

Stallone’s performance as the ageing, slightly world-weary, lonely Rocky is another stand-out. This film’s Rocky is punched out, weighted down by life and unable to get over the sadness of his wife’s death; he sees young Creed as both a chance to find a new family and a reminder of his guilt over Apollo’s death. It’s a fine performance he gives here, detailed, moving and pretty much perfectly judged, with real moments of humour among the pathos. There is also an extraordinarily subtle make-up job on Stallone to make him appear far weaker and vulnerable than he actually is. It’s probably his best performance since the original film.

Coogler’s direction is spot-on, the pacing of the film is pretty much perfect. He shoots the fight scenes with particular freshness, the camera darting in and around the fighters as they beat each other in the ring. This immediacy adds a lot to these sequences – although the heavily choreographed fights, while great cinema, barely resemble a real boxing match! The film also balances really well both the training montages (many of which affectionately homage similar sequences from the early films) with a sensitive and well-constructed romance plotline between Creed and singer Bianca (well played by Tessa Thompson, who makes a lot of what is on paper quite an underwritten part).

It’s not perfect, don’t get me wrong. The decision to cast actual boxers in pivotal roles doesn’t always pan out, not least Anthony Bellow as Creed’s title rival (surely it’s easier to train up an actor than try to teach a boxer to act). For the English viewers it’s hard not to feel a few sniggers at the slightly strange sight of a title fight taking place at Goodison Park of all places (surely this film is the closest any Everton fan has got to seeing major silverware).

But its affectionate reworking of the tropes of the series works really well, it’s extremely well-acted, it has intelligent character work for both Creed and Balboa who become fully rounded and intriguing characters, and it’s very well directed. It becomes a film about the importance of family as much as it is about legacy, about the two lead characters having to come to terms with the loss of their loved ones and build a new family. For all that the events in the film are pretty close to a straight re-tread of Rocky, this is such a lovely, heartfelt film it’s hard not to like it a lot.

À Bout de Souffle (1960)

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

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Danish Girl (2015)

Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander struggle with questions of identity in the overly sentimental The Danish Girl

Director: Tom Hooper

Cast: Eddie Redmayne (Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe), Alicia Vikander (Gerda Wegener), Matthias Schoenaerts (Hans Axgil), Ben Whishaw (Henrik Sandahl), Amber Heard (Ulla Paulson), Sebastian Koch (Dr Kurt Warnekros), Pip Torrens (Dr Jens Hexler), Nicholas Woodeson (Dr Buson), Emerald Fennell (Elsa), Adrian Schiller (Rasmussen)

Working out who you are can be a lifetime’s struggle for some people. Finding out that who you are is someone outside the bounds of what society considers normal or acceptable often calls for a special kind of bravery. That’s the kind of bravery that Einar Wegener had when he realised that he felt he was a woman, not a man. Einar became one of the first ever recipients of sex reassignment surgery, becoming Lili Elbe. It’s an inspiring true-life story, fudged in Tom Hooper’s syrupy, sentimental film.

Eddie Redmayne plays Einar/Lili, slowly realising his fascination with women’s clothing is actually part of a far larger realisation, that she identifies as woman rather than a man. Her wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), helps Lili explore her identity, herself journeying through pain at losing her husband to final acceptance and support as Lili begins surgery to complete her transition.

Tom Hooper’s film is shot and framed with the magnificence you expect from his previous films. Hooper’s mastery of framing not only presents people in striking contexts (he has a particular eye for positioning people artfully in a frame with fascinating walls behind them), but also uses the camera to drill into its protagonists (throwing backgrounds into soft focus) to help you begin to empathise with them. It’s a great way to build a connection with the lead characters. But the film never quite adds enough depth and real understanding to its beautiful visuals. I’m not sure it really gets inside the mind of Lili and gets a real understanding of her.

For starters, the structure of the film is confused. The main problem is that the dramatic thrust of the film is Lili realising she is a woman. The character’s emotional and psychological conflict is all bound up in struggling to accept this: the journey of the film is Lili’s internal journey to know and accept herself. Once this realisation is made the drama drains out of the film. Try as it might, it can’t make a series of operations to make complete Lili’s transition dramatically interesting. It also fails to really get inside the psychology of Lili at this point, making her feel more like an exotic, occasionally selfish, passenger through a series of treatments, rather than someone who feels like she has real dramatic thrust.

This is partly because the film splits the perspective more or less equally between Lili and Gerda. While the film follows the passage of Lili realising who she is, if anything more of its empathy and understanding (and interest) is invested in how Gerda reacts to this change. You can see the logic of some complaints that the story of this leading LGBT figure is filtered through the perceptions of their heterosexual wife. Gerda’s emotional journey – pain, anger, rejection, sorrow, despair, acceptance and support – is what really drives the film, far more really than Lili’s realisations.

But this slightly skewed perception is all part of a film that never quite feels true. I appreciate that Lili moved in some bohemian circles, but surely more people would have been more outraged in the 1920s and 30s by this change. The only people in the film we see reacting in any way negatively are two doctors and a pair of thugs in Paris. Other than that, far from a struggle for acceptance, people seem to fall over themselves to tell Lili how wonderful her new identity is.

The most supportive figure of all is Lili’s childhood friend, Hans Axgil (played very well by Mattias Schoenaerts) – who’s the centrepiece of another major issue with the film. This wonderfully warm and kind man befriends and supports both Lili and Gerda. I left the film wanting to find out what happened in real life to this man who seemed too good to be true. Guess what: he was literally too good to be true. He didn’t exist. In fact no one in the film existed other than Lili and Gerda. Furthermore the timeline (and many of the events) of the film have been changed, as have some of the facts around their relationship. For a film pushing itself as an inspiring “true story” this feels more than a little bit like a cop out.

This is part of the film simply trying too hard. From lingering shots of Einar longingly fingering women’s clothing early in the film, to the syrupy music sore that hammers home as many of the emotional beats of the film as possible, it’s a film that wants to do things as obviously as possible for the audience. It wears its “importance” very heavily: you can tell all involved believed that the project they were working on was going to have an impact on viewers across the world.

Not that we should detract at all from two lead performances. Redmayne immerses himself utterly in the role and performs with sensitivity, giving Lili an early sense of fear that develops into an increasingly relaxed and confident determination. Vikander is equally good, running the full gamut of emotions: she probably is the movie’s heart (making her supporting actress Oscar feel even more like character fraud). Two fabulous performances – and plenty of striking visuals, well directed – but it’s a film that really never quite feels like it gets into the heart of its lead, and always feels like it’s pushing you into feeling an emotional reaction, straining for you to shed tears, rather than letting them come naturally.