Category: Directors

Hard Truths (2024)

Leigh encourages us to take a deeper, more considered look at the people around us

Director: Mike Leigh

Cast: Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Pansy), Michele Austin (Chantelle), David Webber (Curtley), Tuwaine Barrett (Moses), Ani Nelson (Kayla), Sophia Brown (Aleisha), Jonathan Livingstone (Virgil)

Sometimes the world all gets too much for all of us. But it’s pretty much always too much for Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste). A stay-at-home wife to plumber Curtley (David Webber), mother to shy, unambitious Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), pretty much everything enrages Pansy, who responds to virtually everything around her with unbridled rage and accusatory rants. She’s completely different to her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), a motherly hairdresser with two ambitious daughters Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown) with whom she has a warm loving relationship. What made one sister easy-going and the other someone who could literally pick a fight in an empty room?

The sharpest part of Mike Leigh’s small-scale, but deeply engaging, family story is encouraging us to take a longer look at a person who, at first, is almost unbearable. To find in them vulnerabilities and fears that makes us understand and feel sorry for them. But, make no mistake, Pansy is a tough person to spend time with. Brought to life in an astonishing, visceral, deeply raw performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, most of the film’s opening half hour is spent establishing Pansy’s kneejerk aggression which she uses to deal with everything around her.

Jean-Baptiste launches into these furious rants with the sort of all-consuming energy that feels like you’ve been punched back in your seat, while her all-in commitment even raises a chuckle or two at the unadjusted fury of Pansy’s words. Every encounter ends in Pansy either letting rip or almost deliberately escalating everyday moments into confrontations. She tears a strip off a shop assistant in a furniture store, seemingly for no reason. She confronts a shopping till assistant and two other people in a supermarket queue. She begins a slanging match with another driver over a parking space. At dinner she barely gets a fork-full of food into her mouth, so intent is she on condemning the rest of the neighbourhood while her husband and son keep their heads down and silently eat the meal she prepared. Compared to Chantelle’s warm home life and bubbly, chatty interaction with her customers, our sympathies lie with those who have to deal with Pansy.

But the brilliant thing in here, and in Jean-Baptiste’s fragile desperation and terror just under the surface, is that Leigh’s film unpacks this to make clear it stems from an inability to deal with the world: a fear that has turned Pansy into someone who instinctively attacks first before when she feels threatened (which is all the time). Pansy clearly suffers from some sort of deep anxiety mixed with OCD. She’s terrified of germs, barely able to touch items she hasn’t personally cleaned. Her house is antiseptic, devoid of personal items. She seems totally at a loss with how to talk to people, interpreting every approach as an implicit threat and is deeply lonely under her aggression. This is the anger of someone who is scared literally all the time, who can’t deal with the pressures of the world and has retreated into a defensive cocoon to drive everyone away.

Jean-Baptiste’s performance grows, deepens and peels away layers of Pansy to become richer and richer as Leigh’s perfectly placed, deceptively slight film gently spreads itself out. Pansy is convinced the world is dangerous, certain that everyone hates her, only married her husband (who gives her no emotional support what-so-ever and silently expects meals when he gets home) because she was afraid of dying alone. She can’t sit in a room without cleaning it, can’t bring herself to put on dentist goggles someone else might have used and is nearly paralysed with fear at the thought of touching a bunch of shop wrapped flowers. To her the world is a continuing, never-ending, terrifying struggle and it has turned Pansy into a woman constantly desperate and scared. Worst of all, Pansy knows this isn’t ‘normal’, that things which incapacitate her with fear don’t even cause other people to bat an eye – and she doesn’t understand why she is like this. This emotion pours out of Jean-Baptiste in a riveting, hugely affecting second act, playing out like a deeply moving emotional breakdown.

The catalyst is the mother’s day commemoration she and Chantelle share for their mother, a woman Chantelle remembers with deep fondness and love: but whom Pansy remembers only as a woman who expected Pansy to sacrifice her own education and interests to look after Chantelle and bring money into the home. Pansy references a childhood love of mathematics that was never encouraged – the sort of natural skill you can imagine someone somewhere on a spectrum like Pansy is would have had a real passion for – which for her summarises how opportunities were never meant for.

Our sympathies slowly, but noticeably shift. Pansy can’t do what the rest of do, put aside or forget the things that upset us. Hard Truths suggests sometimes we do that too easily: Chantelle’s daughters experience tough, unpleasant days at work but come together for drinks to say how great their careers are. Others deal with painful encounters – like the bullying Moses endures – by retreating into silence. Pansy though is aware she cannot deal with situations, cannot understand herself or why she is the way that she is – and, it’s clear, doesn’t like herself either. More and more we agree with Chantelle, who can’t understand why she married the unsupportive, monosyllabic Curtley (who treats his eager apprentice with dismissive disinterest and barely acknowledges Chantelle’s family showing its not fear of Pansy that keeps him sullen and silent at home).

It’s a masterful part of this wonderful, small-scale but deeply heart felt film from Leigh. Jean-Baptiste’s performance is one of the ages, but Michele Austin gives a highly emotive performance with a charm that hides an inner steel. It’s a beautifully assembled, wonderfully acted, highly intelligent film from an accomplished director who encourages the viewers to look as closely at characters – their complexities and virtues as well as their flaws – with the same patience and regard as he has spent his career doing.

Nosferatu (2024)

Eggers’ wonderfully atmospheric remake is creepy, haunting and quite extraordinary

Director: Robert Eggers

Cast: Bill Skarsgård (Count Orlock), Lily-Rose Depp (Ellen Hutter), Nicholas Hoult (Thomas Hutter), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Friedrich Harding), Willem Dafoe (Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz), Emma Corrin (Anna Harding), Ralph Ineson (Dr Wilhelm Sievers), Simon McBurney (Herr Knock)

Robert Eggers dreamed so long of his own version of FW Murnau’s seminal vampire film (and Bram Stoker copyright infringement) Nosferatu, it was originally announced as his second film. We had to wait a bit longer, but it was well worth it. Eggers’ experience helped him create a film infinitely richer than I suspect he would have made ten years earlier. Nosferatu is an astonishing, darkly gothic, richly rewarding film, glorious to look at and a fiercely sharp exploration of the subtexts of both sources. It can never match the original’s seminal impact, but celebrates and elaborates it.

The story hasn’t changed dramatically from the one Murnau ripped off from Stoker. In Wisborg, junior solicitor Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) leaves his beloved wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) for Transylvania and a lucrative land deal with the mysterious Orlock (Bill Skarsgård) that could lead to a comfortable life for him and his new wife. Unfortunately, there are three things he doesn’t know: firstly, the Orlock is a ravenously cruel vampire, with extraordinary supernatural powers; second his employer Knock (Simon McBurney) is an occultist worshiper of Orlock; thirdly, Orlock has used his mental powers for years to terrorise and groom Ellen from afar and Hutter’s presence is the final step in his scheme to control her. It won’t be long until a deadly curse plagues Wisborg.

Egger’s dark (but extremely beautiful) gothic film drips with atmosphere, gloomy shadows rolling over its elaborate sets, the drained out night-time shots reminiscent of the tinted black-and-white beauty of the original. The entire film is soaked in love for silent-era horror, with homages to Murnau, Dreyer, Sjöström and so many others I couldn’t begin to spot them all – though I loved Orlock’s gigantic shadowy hand creeping Murnau’s Faustus-like over Wisborg. The film drowns in folk horror, from its snow-capped Transylvanian countryside dripping in unspeakable hidden evils to the unreadable motives of a mysterious Transylvanian village.

At its heart is an exploration of the sexual undertones of the vampire legend. Orlock’s assaults leave his victims are overwhelmingly sexual, with Orlock’s body thrusting forward while he drains the blood of his groaning victims. That’s not to mention Orlock’s revolting sexual manipulation of Ellen. Nosferatu leans heavily into Stoker’s dark sexual awakening subtext. Orlock’s psychological manipulation has left Ellen traumatised, torn between dark sexual desires and romance with Hutter. Nosferatu opens with a dark (dream?) sequence, as Ellen rises with sensual sighs from sleep, drawn towards Orlock’s seductive shadow in sheet curtains, before joining him outside for something that looks an awful lot like sex before Eggers cuts with a jump scare shot, our first glimpse of Orlock.

This is an Orlock radically different from Max Schreck’s original. While he shares his long nails and angular posture, here he is no-more-or-less than a decayed, rotting corpse. His body is covered in sores of decayed skin, with everything (including his penis) halfway to the compost heap, his bony legs and hips positively skeletal. There are homages to his Vlad the Impaler roots, from his fur-lined uniform coat (that like the rest of him has seen better days) to his surprisingly well-groomed moustache. But there isn’t a trace of the handsomeness of so many Draculas – this Orlock is possibly even more repulsive to look at than the rat-faced monstrosity of the original.

Skarsgård’s make Orlock a truly ruthless figure, delighting in his natural cruelty. With Hutter his looming, shadowy menace offers not a jot of home comforts, working to terrify a man who he sees as a perverse romantic rival. (His hallucinatory blood-sucking assault on Hutter is filmed in a manner reminiscent of rape). Throughout, he treats almost everyone he encounters with contempt and lofty disgust and takes a sadistic delight in torturing Ellen’s friend Emma Harding’s family, culminating in a truly shocking scene of grizzly horror. While the original Orlock was almost feral, like his rats, this one is a monstrous decayed sorcerer with a never-ending hunger and sadistic desire to play with his food.

He also has something the original never had: a voice. Skarsgård spent weeks in training to develop this (digitally unaltered) vocal range, a rolling bass-rumble which wraps itself around a raft of Dacian dialogue. Eggers’ gives him immense supernatural skills, in a film dripping with occult magic. Simon McBurney’s Knock (a remarkable performance) is a lunatic drowning in it: covered with dark markings, biting the heads of pigeons and communicating with Orlock by sitting naked in a Pentecostal star. His brain has been flushed out by Orlock’s mental power (who treats him like dirt) and the vampire’s hypnotic voice overwhelms the senses: just a few sentences drains Hutter of willpower (Nicholas Hoult’s fear is so palpable here you could almost touch it). Orlock’s malign influence can twist people or make them suddenly ‘wake’ with no idea of where they’ve been.

The power of his influence twists and distorts emotionally and physically. Lily-Rose Depp captures all this in a remarkable physical and vocal performance, as Ellen falls victim to Orlock’s mental manipulations. Depp throws herself into the most violent fits since Linda Blair: her body spasming, her voice distorted into an Orlock-mirroring gurgle, her eyes rolling back, her inhibitions falling away and blood weeping from deeply disgusting places, especially her eyes. Depp’s performance is extraordinarily committed, her fear and self-disgust at her manipulated sexuality (eekily from childhood) by the Count as tender as he hatred of him is sharp and all-consuming.

It’s never clear how far the vampire wants to screw Ellen, and how far he wants to consume her (Eggers even suggests, towards the end, that Orlock may even welcome his own destruction – perhaps the rapacious hunger is too much?). What is different from the original is Orlock and the plague he brings with him are different. While the original was a destructive force of dark nature, this Orlock is focused exclusively on punishing Ellen, with a literal plague striking down Wisborg.

In the face of this beast, the powers of science and reason are powerless (as Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s delicately performed Harding discovers, refusing to believe until its far too late). Like Murnau’s original, the powers of science and reason (such a key weapon against the vampire in Stoker) are useless. Even rationalist Dr Sievers (a fine performance by Ralph Ineson, channeling Peter Cushing and Michael Hordern) – a man so calm even the insanity of Knock can’t flap him – chucks in the towel and calls in Willem Dafoe’s barnstorming Professor von Franz (here considerably more effective than his counterpart), a scientist turned alchemist with deep occult knowledge.

But it can’t change the fact this is not a war between two sides, but a deeply personal struggle between Orlock and Ellen, with Hutter torn between them. Eggers’ focus on this personal story at the heart of a dark twisted legend adds a genuine freshness – and makes a superb counter-balance to the lashings of gothic horror the film soaks in. It makes for a superb remake that contrasts and comments on the original while telling its own story of dark, corrupted manipulation. Eggers’ direction is faultless in its atmospheric unease and there are superb performances from Skarsgård, Depp, Hoult and the rest. It’s a powerful work, overflowing with silent horror atmosphere while also feeling very modern that has the potential to haunt our nightmares as much as the original.

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

Ultimate arthouse film, designed to reward constant analysis and interpretation with no answers

Director: Alain Resnais

Cast: Giorgio Albertazzi (X), Delphine Seyrig (A), Sacha Pitoëff (M)

If there is one film that could practically stand as a dictionary definition of art-house cinema, it might be Last Year at Marienbad. A striking collaboration between director Alain Resnais and novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, is puts the vague in Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave to you and me). Last Year at Marienbad is a film almost unlike any other, a work of art that lays itself out in front of you and asks you to bring your own viewpoint to bear to decide what (if anything) it’s actually about. You could call it a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma (to borrow a phrase from Churchill – and lord knows what he would have made of it).

Last Year at Marienbad is set in a sprawling, Versailles-like palace (which might be a hotel), where grand, art-laden corridors go on forever, every room drips with fine details the grounds are mini-countries and opulent, geometric designs fill ever corner of the building. Within this, a parade of people dressed in evening finery move like impassive robots, uttering flat banalities and either moving slowly between rooms or standing impassively like statues. Among these strange, ghost-like figures a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) waylays a woman (Delphine Seyrig) and tells her a year earlier they met somewhere else (possibly Marienbad, but could have been Frederiksbad, Karlstadt or Baden), fell in love and planned to elope a year later. She doesn’t remember him at all. He spends the film trying to persuade her. Another man (Sacha Pitoëff), who might be her husband, engages the first in a mathematical card game (nim) which he defeats him at constantly.

If that sounds sparse, it’s because a plot description barely functions for a film so wilfully oblique it’s about whatever you decide it’s about. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s purpose perhaps can be seen when our two could-be lovers discuss a classical statue. (In a neat touch, the statue itself was specially carved for the film). Their conversation revolves around different interpretations of what these Roman (or Greek) figures are doing: is the man protecting the woman from walking into danger? Is the woman protecting the man? Are they in love? Are they arguing? Why is there a dog sitting at her feet, looking away? This conversation is framed through a series of lingering shots from multiple angles, that invite us to bore our eyes into the statue and decide for ourselves.

And that’s basically the film in microcosm. It’s a series of beautifully haunting images and scenes, shot by a gliding camera and accompanied by Francis Seyrig’s hypnotic score, that invites the views to stare at this film like they would a painting in a gallery and spot as many (or as few) tiny details as they like and see if it changes their view of the artist’s overall intention. Last Year at Marienbad, in effect, nearly defies any sort of logical criticism. What you take out of depends entirely on what you put in. Which is to say, it’s as perfectly legitimate to say it’s a pile of pretentious, piss-taking piffle as it is to call it a gorgeous, transcendent piece of art that leaves you thinking for days.

Everything is designed to leave things open to question, with the normal rules of logic and cinematic structure routinely discarded. Characters will be in frame at the start of the shot and then, as the camera drifts away from them, suddenly appear in another (impossible) location – for example one shot starts with X at a card table, then drifts across the room to the doorway to see him enter.

The people move like functional props, or bored actors trotting through their marks. There is barely a facial expression or jot of intonation in anyone. They stand mutely to attention, or shift through a senseless parade of conversations, waltzes and card games. There is a ghostly, dream-like, never-world quality to the entire hotel (it’s influence on The Shining – from Resnais’ controlled, Steadicam style shots, to the haunting sense that mankind has no agency or influence in the building – is really clear). It’s as cold as a block of marble, and the people often feel like statues that have walked off their pedestals into the world.

Locations are inconsistent and change all the time: Resnais shot the film in multiple palaces and stitched the locations together, hiding cuts with carefully placed objects (in one instance A walks down a corridor seemingly in one shot, but Seyrig is actually walking through about three totally different locations). The pattern, design and contents of rooms change (A’s bedroom shifts through myriad designs and layout, most noticeable in its constant swopping between either a mirror or a painting above the mantelpiece). An exterior balcony next to that statue subtly changes location as well (and even appears as a detailed landscape painting).

Everything shifts, twists and contorts all the time as if the film reforms depending on the angle you are looking at it from. The hotel could be a purgatory or a dream. It could be a half-formed memory. X could be an Orpheus striving to save his Eurydice. Or a self-aware film character. Or a trapped dead soul. A could be an amnesiac, a fantasy figure, a ghost, a part of X’s psyche. M could be her husband, X’s alter-ego, death or a complete stranger. Every single interpretation is legitimate and you could pull out different moments to support any one of them.

Myself, I saw it as like a dive into X’s memories. Everything about the shifting scenery, strange dis-jointed logic of the film moving seemingly at random between past and present, the repetitions and reframings of the same conversations, seemed like a man sifting his memories. X even stops and argues against certain scenes (‘It didn’t happen like that.’) There are hints of a dark trauma: repeated shots of A cowering in her room, brief moments of shock, tears and her pulling away from X. We see multiple hints of A’s death, including a possible shooting by M. I started to think this was X reframing his memories to absolve himself: that after rejection by A, he assaulted her in some way, she committed suicide (the opening play the characters are watching is Romers based on Ibsen’s play about a man haunted by the suicide of his wife). X is now forcing his memory to adjust this into a tragedy where he was the victim – and as part of that must persuade A she loved him.

But that’s just my view. You could just as well say X is so bored watching Romers, he makes up a whole fantasy based on it to keep himself entertained (inevitably, the set of the play changes completely whenever we see it). I do think it interesting most 60s criticism took X completely at his word as a victim, while more recent criticism has often cast X as an unreliable narrator (if that term has any meaning here). What matters more is whether you are intrigued enough to find dwelling on what this all means (the way we dwell over a Picasso) worth your time. For me it unquestionably is.

Emilia Perez (2024)

Controversial arthouse film which clumsily tries to do to many things, many of them not well

Director: Jacques Audiard

Cast: Zoe Saldaña (Rita Mora Castro), Karla Sofía Gascón (Emilia Pérez/Juan “Manitas” Del Monte), Selena Gomez (Jessi Del Monte), Adriana Paz (Epifanía Flores), Édgar Ramírez (Gustavo Brun), Mark Ivanir (Dr. Wasserman)

Sometimes a film comes along that manages to annoy everyone. Emilia Pérez seems to have achieved that unwanted goal. Jacques Audiard’s Cannes Jury Prize winner is a wild, audacious piece of film-making that misses as much as it hits. It’s also been bashed as a musical full of people who can’t really sing, denounced as transphobic, and savaged by Mexicans. Perhaps Emilia Pérez shows us the downside when an auteur French director works with Netflix who accidentally promote what would have otherwise been a little-seen arthouse film into the heart of a culture war. I don’t think Emilia Pérez intends to be racist or transphobic (but yeah most of the cast can’t sing), but it does deal with these issues at times very clumsily. It’s also a curious mish-mash that places a transitioning character in a traditional “hard-to-escape-your-past” plot.

That transitioning character is Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón), formerly a notorious drug-lord. With the (initially coerced) aid of crusading lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), Emilia succeeds in faking her death, moving her family to Switzerland to protect them, extricating a fortune from her criminal empire and flying to Israel for her operation. Four years later, Emilia finds she can’t live without her children and Rita is roped back into retrieve her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and kids and move them in with their “aunt” Emilia. Simultaneously Emilia, wanted to be cleansed of her criminal past, starts a foundation to “discover” the graves of those killed in Mexico’s drug wars. But returning to a world she left behind only makes it harder for Emilia to escape her criminal past.

Emilia Pérez: an Audiard crime story with songs! Audiard described it as an opera fantasia, and I feel it was his intention for nothing in it to be treated as traditionally “real”. The characters frequently burst into song or throw themselves into dream-like dance sequences to express complex feelings. Aside from the film’s explosive, guns-blaring conclusion, filmed on isolated, dusty, abandoned houses and roads, key scenes are tightly shot on sparse sets with very little back lighting, giving them a dreamy black-box effect. Emotions are as heightened as the (sometimes clumsy) lyrics and the film throws itself into every dialled-up event with a comic-book energy.

All of which means Emilia Pérez is an acquired taste and, like many ambitious films that zig when they should zag, fails as often as it hits the jackpot. Its finest scenes are the key song-and-dance numbers, all left in the hands of Zoe Saldaña (excellently torn between idealism, fear, cynicism and regret with complex feelings about her dubious employer). Saldaña is a dynamic and fearless dance performer, throwing herself into synchronised movements through a Mexican market in the film’s opening “El Alegato” and dominating the film’s central show-piece, an athletic, sensual dance around and over tables at a charity ball in “El Mal”.

But even Saldaña falls foul of the film’s largest musical failing: with the exception of Selena Gomez (who struggles with a Mexican accent so terrible, even non-Spanish speakers can tell it’s awful) no one in the cast can really sing. Criticism like that somehow feels shallow when you apply it to an arthouse film, but it’s legitimate. The cast largely go for fast-paced, Henry-Higgins-ish, rhythmic speaking, big on husky intensity but not exactly something you would sit and listen to. Gascón is a particularly poor singer, especially noticeable with the operatic high notes she is frequently given. Even the controversial AI-upgrade her voice was given in post-production can’t help her.

Throw into that the clumsiness of some of the lyrics. For a film dealing with as sensitive an issue as this, are lyrics like “Man to woman or woman to man? Man to woman. From penis to vagina” really a good idea? Is a song about Emilia’s son singing about how her smell reminds him of his Dad (body smell being a hot topic for this community) tasteful? Since this issue (the perception of bodily odours) is a key issue for the trans community, writing a whimsical song about it rather suggests Audiard and team didn’t really do enough to wrap their heads around controversial issues.

Perhaps that’s because Emilia Pérez is, at heart, a classic “just when I thought I was out…” movie that tries to spice up the formula by having its gangster character be a trans woman (the partial implication of a sex change being a type of disguise is another hot-topic issue the filmmakers should have got themselves familiar with). It does, I think, make for a fresh take to see even incredibly macho, hardened killers can have longings like Emilia – and Gascón’s performance is actually at its best showing the fear that lies below the aggression before Emilia’s transition, and when embracing her tearful joy at the success of her operation. But the point remains this is a film not looking to make a real statement on transgender issues, or even demonstrating any real interest in the experience of being trans. It is instead just using a trans identity as a new context for a familiar “starting a new life” storyline. With minimal changes, Emilia could have undergone extensive plastic surgery or gone into witness protection and it would have made few changes to plot or themes.

It is interesting to get a trans character who is not always completely sympathetic (although I get that the community find it a blow upon a bruise to finally get a film with a trans lead, and she’s as a morally questionable and unlikeable as this). Emilia’s desire to restart her life away from crime is fatally undermined by refusing to make the sacrifices needed. Slowly she drags her family back in (passing herself off, Mrs Doubtfire-like, as her own sister), reconnects with the criminal underworld (albeit for humanitarian reasons) and reverts to the threats and violence she used in her old life (when, let’s not forget, she had a plastic bag slammed over Rita’s head to motivate her).

Emilia Perez also never explores the outrageous moral stance of a murderer in a new life, using their knowledge to “help” their victims by “discovering” the graves of people she ordered put in the ground. In fact, the only person affected by Emilia’s past crimes whom the film shows her encountering is the widow of an abusive husband (who is actually grateful to the gangsters for saving her the trouble). It scrupulously avoids any contact with, say, a grieving relative of one of her past victims. Similarly, the film avoids engaging with Emilia’s appalling emotional manipulation of her family. Karla Sofía Gascón gives a committed performance, but she is not able to coalesce all these complicated feelings into a character that feels real and the film constantly veers awkwardly between giving her implied criticism and absolution.

Audiard offering not exactly the most flattering image of Mexico was the final nail in the film’s coffin, even if to be honest it’s his nationality as the face of a film about Mexico (Paz is the only Mexican involved) that has probably raised most hackles. Emilia Pérez has moments where Audiard’s impressive film-making stands out, a dance number captures your imagination or there is a flash of compelling acting. But then it will segue into the sort of scenes we’ve seen in hundreds of crime movies, or songs so out-there they raise the wrong sort of gasps. Emilia Pérez might not be intentionally trying to be racist or transphobic, but it certainly handles both themes with real clumsiness. Fundamentally, it’s a traditional plot told in an outlandish style, over-exposed into a world of criticism that Audiard (who has basically apologised if people don’t like the movie) and his collaborators just weren’t ready for. The film itself? Good moments, bad moments, but not worth all the fuss.

All That Money Can Buy (1941)

The Devil sure knows how to tempt a man in this beautifully filmed morality tale

Director: William Dieterle

Cast: Walter Huston (Mr Scratch), Edward Arnold (Daniel Webster), James Craig (Jabez Stone), Anne Shirley (Mary Stone), Jane Darwell (Ma Stone), Simone Simon (Belle), Gene Lockhart (Squire Slossum), John Qualen (Miser Stevens), HB Warner (Judge Hawthorne)

Sometimes life can be a real struggle. With debts, failed crops and animals getting sick, what’s a guy to do? That’s the problem New Hampshire farmer Jabez Stone (James Craig) has in 1840. What he wouldn’t give to find a bundle of buried gold that could solve all his problems. Fortunately, charming old rogue Mr Scratch (Walter Huston) knows exactly where to find one – all he wants in return is for Jabez to sign away his soul seven years from now (signed in blood of course). Jabez gets fortune, prestige, the son he always wanted – but when ‘Mr Scratch’ comes to collect, can Jabez’s friend, famed orator, lawyer and congressmen Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold) save his soul?

All That Money Can Buy is a richly atmospheric piece of film-making from William Dieterle, adapted from Stephen Vincent Benet’s short story and full of gorgeously filmed light-and-shadow with a haunting score by Bernard Herrmann. (The story was originally titled The Devil and Daniel Webster, also the film’s original title before RKO changed it to avoid confusion with their more successful Jean Arthur comedy The Devil and Miss Jones.) It’s a neat morality tale, full of dark delight at the devilish ingenuity of Mr Scratch, with lots of dark enjoyment at seeing a weak-but-decent man corrupted into being exactly the type of greedy, cheating cad to whom he was deeply in debt to from the beginning.

It’s nominally about James Craig’s Jabez Stone, but Jabez is a shallow, easily manipulated passenger in his own life, pushed and pulled towards and away from sin depending on who he’s talking to. Stone’s fall is swift: moments after meeting Scratch, he’s digging hungrily into a meal while his wife and mother say grace, hugging his newfound bag of gold. As his wealth goes, he drifts from his pure wife (Anne Shirley, effective in a dull part) becoming easy prey for demonic (literally) temptress Belle (a wonderfully seductive Simone Simon). By the time the seven years are up, he’s skipping church for illicit card games and crushing the farms of his neighbours to fund his dreamhouse-on-a-hill.

Stone is really the Macguffin here. The real focus is the big-name rivals: The Devil and Daniel Webster. It’s implied these two have fought a long-running battle for years: our introduction to Webster sees him scribbling literally in the shadow of Mr Scratch, who whispers to him tempting offers of high office. Later Webster is unflustered when Scratch suddenly appears to place a coat on his shoulders, treating him as familiar rival. You could argue Scratch is only prowling the streets of New Hampshire because he’s looking for a way to nail the soul of his real target, Daniel Webster.

As Mr Scratch, the film has a delightful (Oscar-nominated) performance from Walter Huston. With his scruffy clothes and twirling his cane, Scratch pops up everywhere with Huston’s devilish smile. It’s a masterclass in insinuating, playful malevolence, with Huston playing this larger-than-life character in a surprisingly low-key way that nevertheless sees him overflowing with delight at his own wickedness. Huston has the trick of making Scratch sound like someone trying to sound sincere, while never leaving us in doubt that everything he says is a trap or lie, only showing his arrogance and cruelty when victory is in his grasp. It’s a fabulous performance, charismatic and wicked.

Edward Arnold makes Daniel Webster both a grand man of principle and a consummate politician, proud of his reputation and all the more open to temptation for it. He also has the absolute assurance of a man used to getting his own way, and the arrogance of seeing himself as an equal to the Devil rather than a target. These two form the ends of a push-me-pull-me rivalry.

The rivalry culminates in its famous ‘courtroom’ scene, as Webster – a little the worse for drink –argues for Jabez’s soul in front of a ghostly court of American sinners from the bowels of hell (lead among them Benedict Arnold). Its shot in atmospheric smoke, with the double exposure creating a ghostly effect for jury and judge. It’s another excellent touch in a film full of inventive use of effects and camerawork, Dieterle at the height of his German influences. The artificial New Hampshire scenery is shot with a sun-kissed beauty that bears Murnau’s mark. Striking lighting and smoke-play abounds in Joseph H August’s camerawork, not least Belle’s introduction backlit with an extraordinarily bright fire. Early scenes of Stone’s misfortune interrupted by a brief frames of a photo-negative Scratch laughing, quite the chillingly surrealist effect.

Politically, All That Money Can Buy backs away from any overt criticism of Webster’s support for the Missouri Compromise (this key piece of slavery protection legislation is so key to Webster’s view of American strength he’s even named a horse after it). But it’s quite brave for 1941 in allowing the Devil legitimate criticism of America’s ‘original sins’ saying he was there driving on the seizing of the land from the Native Americans and up on deck on the first slave ship from the Congo. (Especially as Webster can’t defend these actions). It’s also interesting that the film praises collectivism for the farmers over rugged individualism, a conclusion it’s hard to imagine being praised a few years later.

All That Money Can Buy is also filled with impressive practical effects, not least Scatch’s impossible catching of an axe thrown towards him, bursting it into frame. Both Scratch and Bell reduce papers to flaming ashes with a flick of the wrist. Horribly woozy soft-focus camera work accompanies Jabez’s nightmare visions of the damned. It’s tightly and skilfully edited, superbly paced, with montages used effectively for transitions (a field of corn growing is particularly striking) and wildly unnerving sequences, like Scratch’s fast-paced barn-dance with its whirligig of movement and repeated shots. It’s all brilliantly scored by Herrmann, from the pastoral beats of New Hampshire to the discordant sounds (some created from telephone wires) that accompany Scratch.

All That Money Can Buy concludes with a stand-out speech from Webster that perhaps settles matters a little too easily – and brushes away any of the film’s mild criticism of America’s past with a relentlessly upbeat patriotic message. But the journey there – and the performances from a superb Huston and excellent Arnold – is masterfully assembled by a crack production team working under a director at the height of his powers. A flop at the time, few films deserve rediscovery more.

A Complete Unknown (2024)

Engaging but traditional biopic, very well-made and full of knock out performances

Director: James Mangold

Cast: Timothée Chalamet (Bob Dylan), Edward Norton (Pete Seeger), Elle Fanning (Sylvie Russo), Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez), Boyd Holbrook (Johnny Cash), Scoot McNairy (Woody Guthrie), Dan Fogler (Albert Grossman), Norbert Leo Butz (Alan Lomax), PJ Byrne (Harold Leventhal), Will Harrison (Bob Neuwirth), Eriko Hatsune (Toshi Seeger), Charlie Tahan (Al Kooper)

In 1961 Bob Dylan seemed to emerge from nowhere – or, if you like, from being A Complete Unknown – to become the big star of American music and the centre of a battle for the soul of American folk music. On one side, were the traditionalists – they loved Dylan’s thoughtful, lyrical ballads and use of guitar, harpsichord and other instruments. They believed Dylan could lead a whole new generation to traditional American music. On the other side were the modernists, inspired by rock and roll, and the new (electric) sound. A Complete Unknown is about Dylan’s – inevitable – journey towards exploring new music sounds, culminating in his strum-heard-around-the-world as he played an electric set at the Newport Folk Festival (to a mixed reaction to say the least).

That’s the meat of James Mangold’s traditional, but very well-made and enjoyable musical biography, a spiritual sequel to Walk the Line (with a decent, but drink-addled Cash here played by Boyd Holbrook). Much like that film, this tweaks and amends some historical facts, but manages to get close to the spirit of its subject all within a familiar biography set-up of early success, mid-way struggles and triumphant (of a sort) resolution. There is nothing in A Complete Unknown to surprise you but it’s still a highly enjoyable, very professionally assembled journey.

Its main success is the depth and insight with which it penetrates Dylan’s character. A Complete Unknown embraces Dylan’s enigmatic quality, not to mention his stubborn, relentless and obsessive focus on his music and the austere distance he can treat the world. This all comes across beautifully in Timothée Chalamet’s superb performance – not only a pin-point physical and vocal and impersonation, but also a soulful rendering of a poet who constantly pushed against being classified and categorised, bristling against ideas he should play certain songs certain ways.

The roots of the culture clash that will dominate the film are clear from the start when Dylan and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) drive from visiting visited Dylan’s hospitalised idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and Dylan flicks through radio channels. Dylan finds interest in all the different music they encounter; Seeger smiles pleasantly and nods his head, but clearly can’t hide his patient disregard for the electric beats of rock and roll. It’s the platform for the surly discontent Chalamet so perfectly embodies as Dylan is expected to pigeon hole himself as a folk singer, who (as he puts it) stands with his acoustic guitar at a mic and sings Blowin’ In the Wind for the rest of his life. A Complete Unknown falls in love with Dylan’s passionate self-expression, his search for his own sound.

That search frequently makes Dylan a difficult person to spend time with. Awkward and hesitant with other people – Chalamet’s Dylan is constantly cautious about exposing too much of his inner thoughts and feelings – the poetic writer mumbles in monosyllables and responds to fame with a grudging disdain that seems him rarely remove his sunglass shield between him and the world. He has no interest in fame and is positively alarmed at adulation from strangers (there is a neat line when he is unrecognised by a street vendor and asked if he has kids to which he wearily replies ‘Yeah, thousands’). Match that with his ruthless determination to put his artistic calling above anything else, and you’ve got a man who verges on using other people.

It feeds into Dylan’s relationships. At his request, his girlfriend Suzie Rotolo is very-lightly disguised as Sylvie Russo, played with an emotional richness by Elle Fanning. The film skips the more difficult parts of their break-up – Dylan stated the only song he regrated was one he wrote about Rotolo’s abortion, calling himself a shmuck for doing so. But in doing so, the film steams off Rotolo’s contribution to Dylan’s writing and much of her own dynamic and interesting qualities. The original Rotolo, an artist, was an important sounding board: we don’t see a jot of that here, as she is repackaged into offering Dylan much-needed stability and security, dealing with movie-girlfriend insecurity about Dylan’s attraction to collaborator Joan Baez.

Dylan returns to Russo when he needs comfort at times of stress (from dropping in on her apartment – and waking her new boyfriend – late at night, to bringing her with him to the folk festival when he intends to turn electric) but Chalamet’s simmering self-focus makes clear Dylan at this stage can’t settle into a mutual relationship. It also comes between him and Joan Baez, played with dynamic charisma by Monica Barbaro, Despite their attraction and musical synchronicity, Dylan never sees her as a true artistic partner, even calling round one night for a booty call followed by private song writing using her guitar (she throws him out). On tour together, Dylan archly points out he writes the song and he leaves Baez hanging at a concert when he flat-out refuses to play the advertised favourites. The chemistry however is still there, within when it tips into aggression.

Dylan goes his own way, and if that means turning against surrogate fathers Peter Seeger and Woody Guthrie, then he will. A Complete Unknown features one of Edward Norton’s finest performances as a warm, tender and heartbreaking Pete Seeger (matched with a wonderful performance from Eriko Hatsune as Pete’s wife Toshi). Norton is brilliant at making Seeger – an environmentalist and gentle, accommodating advocate of folk music – a portrait of inevitable disappointment-in-waiting. There is a heart-rending moment where Norton beams as if all his dreams have come true as Dylan plays his first Newport festival: heart-breaking because we know Dylan’s next performance (where a guilty Dylan brusquely shrugs off Seeger’s gentle pleading to stay acoustic for just one more day) will see these dreams left in shattered pieces.

A Complete Unknown is a handsome, very well-mounted film from James Mangold, who has proved time-and-again that he can explore classic Americana with a freshness and energy few other directors can match. The film is perhaps overlong – probably due to the innumerable recreations of performances from Dylan, Seeger and Baez, all excellent but there are far too many – and it’s biopic approach is relentless traditional. But it’s filled with a parade of rich performances (with Chalamet outstanding), rolls along with energy, carries an emotional impact and will leave you engaged and entertained throughout.

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

Scott’s crusader epic is a much better, more thoughtful film than you’ve been led to believe

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Orlando Bloom (Balian of Ibelin), Eva Green (Sibylla of Jerusalem), Jeremy Irons (Lord Tiberias), David Thewlis (Hospitaller), Liam Neeson (Godfrey of Ibelin), Brendan Gleeson (Raynald of Chatillon), Marton Csokas (Guy de Lusignan), Edward Norton (King Baldwin IV), Ghassan Massoud (Saladin), Michael Sheen (Priest), Velibor Topić (Almaric), Alexander Siddig (Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani), Kevin McKidd (Sergeant), Jon Finch (Patriarch Heraclius), Ulrich Thomsen (Gerard de Ridefort), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Godfrey’s nephew), Iain Glen (Richard I)

Version control: This review cover the Director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven, a three-hour film that is much better than the original theatrical version.

For hundreds of years the Middle East has been the site of wars over land and religion: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven is a grand, melancholic epic about the crusades, a period of history that seems to become even more divisive and controversial with every passing year. During the First Crusade (1096-99), a European Christian army had bloodily seized control of Jerusalem (massacring its Muslim population). The Crusaders built a state that lived through fragile truces, in a constant state of cold war with the Muslim states that opposed their conquest. Scott’s film picks up the final years of that ‘kingdom of Heaven’.

He does so through fictionalised version of the events. Balian (Orlando Bloom), a former military engineer, is now a widowed blacksmith in Northern France – until Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), a crusader lord, returns to claim him as his illegitimate son. Fleeing his home after murdering his bullying priest brother (Michael Sheen), Balian arrives in the Holy Land as the new Lord of Ibelin. But he not a paradise, but a kingdom full of ambitious lords and zealots, surrounded by the armies of Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) with the whole thing only just held together by the wise leper king Baldwin IV (Edward Norton). There is already a power struggle for who will control Baldwin’s heir, the child of his sister Sibylla (Eva Green). Will it be the moderates led by Tiberias (Jeremy Irons) or the zealot Templars led by Sibylla’s husband Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csorkas)?

I’ve always been interested in this period of history, and I’m a sucker for a grand historical epics. So I’m pretty much the target for this ambitious, luscious, flawed but engaging film. It helps when it’s assembled by a director as full of visual flair as Ridley Scott. Kingdom of Heaven is an extraordinarily beautiful film – one of those where you really could snip out every frame and hang it up on your wall. Gorgeously lensed by John Mathieson, it moves from a chilly, blue-filtered North France (a land of artistic snow fall and permafreeze) to a David Leanesque desert land, of rolling sand dunes and skies tinged with deepest blue. It’s a film of breathtaking scale, as medieval armies converge, legions of siege weapons roll up to never-ending city walls and the desert stretches as far as the eye can see.

It makes a fantastic backdrop for a film that’s tries really, really hard to take a measured, reasonable view on human nature and religion. It’s fair to say that this makes Kingdom of Heaven a very serious film (there is barely a few minutes of humour in its entire three hour runtime – a joke about Neeson once fighting three days with an arrow in his testicle is about all you’re gonna get), but it’s also nice to have a film celebrating compromise and moderation. Really, Kingdom of Heaven isn’t a true representation of the Crusader period at all – the real Balian and Baldwin would scarcely recognise the humanist liberals they become here – but as a sort of fantasia on balancing conflicting demands in a place that seems to make men mad, it’s hard not to be respect that it’s trying as hard as it is.

To achieve it’s aims, Kingdom of Heaven divides both sides of the argument into goodies and baddies. For the goodies, Baldwin and Saladin are reasonable, just men willing to strive for a world where all can worship freely. Edward Norton – unbilled under a silver mask and English accent – brings a great deal of strength and wisdom to Baldwin, matched by Ghassan Massoud’s superbly patient Saladin. On the other side, we have the “God wills it!” brigade. Admittedly on the Muslim side, they are embodied by one of Saladin’s advisors, whereas the crusaders are awash in angry, Holy War bloodlust types who believe any killing is justified if it’s in God’s name.

Kingdom of Heaven has a respect for faith, particularly when filtered through the words of characters who don’t believe painting a cross on their chest allows them to kill anyone who disagrees with them. Several times, Balian argues doing sensible, reasonable things technically against the word of the Biblewill be understood by God (if he’s worthy of the name). It playfully suggests David Thewlis’ (in an excellent performance) reasonable Hospitaler might actually be an angel, with his power to appear undetected and prodding of Balian towards doing the right thing (Thewlis even disappears into a burning bush at one point).

But, if I’m honest, much of the rest makes its points rather forcefully, showing a world where fine words are corrupted by ambition and anger. Many of those preaching faith are really motivated by a constant hunger for more –power, land, you name it. The closer a character is to the Church, the more likely they are to be either a pantomime, mustachio-twirling villain (like Marton Csorkas imperious Guy or Brendan Gleeson’s playfully-psychotic Raynald) or snivelling hypocrites like Jon Finch’s Patriach (who counsels converting to Islam and repenting later when the shit hits the fan).

Kingdom of Heaven lays out this earnest, well-meaning political viewpoint of how moderation should trump fanaticism, while filling its wonderful visuals with gorgeous costumes, stupendous sets, a brilliant score and some stunning battle sequences. But there is always a fascinating lack of hope in Kingdom of Heaven. When Balian troops up Gethsemane on his arrival in Jerusalem, he only hears the wind not the word of God. When offered the chance to save the kingdom from itself, it comes with such a morally compromised price-tag a straight-shooter like Balian is always going to say no. While his father (one of Neeson’s patented performances of weary, maverick nobility) clings to ideals, the film is perhaps best summed up by Jeremy Irons’ wonderfully world-weary performance as the cynical Tiberias: mournful, depressed and wondering what the hell it’s all been for.

It’s no wonder it’s such a savage world. Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t shirk on the medieval violence. Bodies are hacked to pieces with fountains of blood. It opens by introducing us to a regular Dirty Dozen of toughened Crusader veterans – only to slaughter nearly all of them in the first act. Death is only seconds away in this dangerous world: even sailing to the Holy Land is to risk near certain shipwreck. It’s fascinating that the film’s amazing reconstruction of the Siege of Jerusalem sees Balian fighting to make the siege so difficult that Saladin will be forced to offer terms rather than slaughter the city’s population as the First Crusaders did hundreds of years ago.

Sadly, the film’s main weakness is Orlando Bloom. Surfing the peak of his post LOTR popularity, Bloom’s limitations are ruthlessly exposed by carrying this historical epic. His delivery lacks shade and depth, he doesn’t have the charisma for the big speeches and he never convinces as either a man consumed with grief or a battle-hardened veteran (he doesn’t even remotely look like Michael Sheen’s older brother). It’s a part that needs a role of commanding presence, but Bloom doesn’t have it. It’s unlucky he also has to play off Eva Green giving a complex, well-judged performance as a Queen who learns humility the hard way (the director’s cut restores an entire plot-line for her, which adds hugely to the film’s quiet air of inevitable tragedy).

Kingdom of Heaven has a lot going for it: it looks amazing, it’s crammed with stunning scenes on a truly epic scale and gives excellent opportunities to a host of great actors. It’s an interesting, surprisingly glum exploration of the struggle to find peace. Sure, it’s view of the Crusades has very little link to do with the actual crusades and it’s a little one-sided in its views. But it’s also a thoughtful film that’s really trying to say something that’s worth hearing about moderation, all with some truly breath-taking epic film-making. It’s not a lost masterpiece, but it’s a much more impressive film than its reputation suggests.

Don’t Look Now (1973)

Atmospheric, heart-rendering and beautifully constructed supernatural film, an emotional look at grief

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Cast: Julie Christie (Laura Baxter), Donald Sutherland (John Baxter), Hilary Mason (Heather), Clelia Matania (Wendy), Massimo Serato (Bishop Barbarrigo), Renato Scarpa (Inspector Longhi), Leopoldo Trestini (Hotel manager), Giorgio Trestini (Woekman)

We tend to trust our senses, don’t we? We like to see the world as something solid and factual, that we can process and understand with rational thought. What we don’t have time for is the idea of a sixth sense about the world beyond us. We can’t measure that, so we prefer to ignore those feelings. Don’t Look Now is partially about the terrible consequences of ignoring gut-instincts about the unexplainable, as well as the terrible, all-consuming horror of grief. On top of that it’s a horrifying quasi-ghost story, a moving portrait of marriage and a terrifyingly beautiful image of Venice that’s quite unlike anything else on film.

John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter (Julie Christie) are in Venice, a few months after the death of their daughter in a tragic drowning accident. John is busying himself at work restoring a church, Laura is looking for distraction from grief. Chance leads to a meeting between Laura and two mysterious sisters (Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania), one of whom claims to have second sight and to be able to ‘hear’ messages from the Baxter’s late daughter. Laura is desperate to believe, but John is resolutely unconvinced. But it’s John who starts seeing visions of a child in a red coat – a red coat just like the one their daughter was wearing when she drowned – and becomes increasingly troubled by strange coincidences and feelings.

Roeg’s stunning film is a masterpiece of atmosphere. Shot in vivid colours in a coldly intimidating Venice – which Roeg manages to make feel both beautiful and deeply, disturbingly unknowable and dreadfully intimidating. Don’t Look Now constantly unsettles and disorientates you, a gorgeous city hosting an insidious gothic mystery. It’s a masterfully edited film, that uses our ‘knowledge’ of the language of cinema to disorientate us, forcing us to form associations between images by juxtaposing them together (for instance, Roeg cuts from John casting doubts on the motives of the sisters to them laughing joyfully something that context makes us see as sinister).

The clue in Don’t Look Now is in the title – once we are told to look at something, we’ve got an overwhelming desire to stare straight at it. John’s mind is mind sending a plethora of subconscious warnings: but the more his mind says ‘don’t look’, the longer he stares. He should be picking up on the visual signals from Roeg’s extraordinary design: Don’t Look Now is awash in red. In almost every scene, splashes of striking crimson abound – from coats, to bags, to signs, to everyday objects, to blood – as if the film itself is trying to warn him (at one crucial moment, he even turns away from a street of green fronted shops and cafes, to charge down a street lined with red ones). Don’t Look Now is the tragedy of a man with great powers of intuition who comprehensively ignores them because it’s the rational, sensible thing.

Already he has been warned of the dangers of ignoring his instincts. Roeg opens the film with the drowning of the Baxter’s daughter, while her parents rest indoors after a large Sunday meal. It’s a sequence of ominous, intense anxiety and terrifying, gut-wrenching impact as we cut back and forth between the daughter playing outside (with broken glass and lost balls floating on ponds), to John and Laura continuing casually talking while a slide frame of the Venetian church John is working on soaks in spilled water and the red of a girl’s coat in the image bleeds across the it (as much a prescient warning of John’s danger, as it is of his daughter’s). A distracted John is finally unable to resist the of danger he is feeling – racing instinctively to the pond, but too late to prevent tragedy.

The heart-rendering, raw pain as John fishes his daughter from the pond – the elemental roar from Donald Sutherland being almost unwatchable – caps a deeply affecting sequence in Don’t Look Now’s profound and tender study of grief and the strain it places on a loving relationship. Sutherland and Christie give beautifully judged, profoundly humane and sympathetic performances as shell-shocked people, barely able to process tragedy and looking for anything to distract them from the crushing grief that is hollowing them out. Grief in this wintery city is practically a third wheel in the relationship, an unspoken mix of regrets (and recriminations, Laura at one point blaming John’s lax rules for their daughter’s death) and barely expressed pain.

This doesn’t detract from the deep love they still feel from each other. Don’t Look Now’s (in)famous sex scene carries the erotic charge it does, because it genuinely feels like a long-married couple reconnecting physically, intimately familiar with each other’s bodies. Brilliantly, this sense is actually increased by Roeg intercutting from their love-making to their post-coital dressing, somehow the act of them half-watching each other put their clothes on being as loving as what they did before. Both have a deep desire to protect the other: John is distracting himself from his grief by ‘looking after’ Laura, while she re-focuses on an intense desire to protect her remaining family.

Laura at first feels the more vulnerable of the two: her emotions rawer (she collapses in distress after her first encounter with the sisters), her need for spiritual connection – either lighting candles in the Church, or desperately trying to believe she can communicate with their late daughter – much greater. It’s only when they are separated (after she rushes home to see their son after an injury at school) that the depths of John’s vulnerability and fragility become clear. Without her to distract him, he quickly seems to fall apart: becoming paranoid, increasingly fixated on possible disasters, ever-more obsessed with his glancing images of that girl in the red coat.

Roeg presents much of the world exactly as John sees it, and his masterful framing and editing of key moments and sequences both leave us in as much doubt about what is real as John is, suckering us into making the same mistakes he does. Again, our trust of how visual images are presented works against us, just as John misinterprets and misunderstands premonitions as events literally happening at that moment. It’s what lies behind his obsessive hunt for his ‘kidnapped’ wife, after seeing her on a boat on the canal hours after she flew back to England. Later events will demonstrate how disastrously he has misinterpreted these warnings.

John is drawn into an ever-more Kafkaesque nightmare (there is a lovely touch that, the more distressed John becomes, the more his Italian evaporates – in his element at the church, rebuilding frescoes, he’s fluent – at other times he can barely string a sentence together). A sinister police inspector – Roeg deliberately not correcting Renato Scarpa’s phonetic delivery of his English dialogue, making it unsettingly ‘wrong’ – seems sympathetic, but has John watched. The off-season city empties out (even the Baxter’s hotel closes), becoming a ghost town of echoey, identical streets which John hurtles down. The dark mystery of a serial killer haunting Venice becomes more prominent, concluding in the film’s horrifying reveal of what lies under that red coat, John realising all too late the skills of intuitive understanding that make him a skilled restorer of fragmented mosaics, was the same ignored intuition warning him of the dangers first to his daughter then himself.

Don’t Look Now is not only a masterpiece of atmosphere and superb editing and structure, it’s also Roeg’s most humane and tender work. It’s a deeply affecting portrait of a loving marriage struggling with grief – with extraordinary performances from Christie and Sutherland – and the way our longings combat with our rational mind to confound us. Set in a Venice that is eerily, ghostly and unsettling, it’s a haunting, powerful and superb piece of film-making.

Cry Freedom (1987)

Highly earnest, well-meaning, but tragically mis-focused biopic that doesn’t have the impact it wants

Director: Richard Attenborough

Cast: Kevin Kline (Donald Woods), Denzel Washington (Steve Biko), Penelope Wilton (Wendy Woods), Alec McCowen (High Commissioner David Aubrey Scott), Kevin McNally (Ken Robertson), Ian Richardson (State Prosecutor), John Thaw (Jimmy Kruger), Timothy West (Captain De Wet), Josette Simon (Dr Mamphela Ramphele), John Hargreaves (Bruce Haigh), Zakes Mokae (Father Kani), John Matsikiza (Mapetla), Julian Glover (Don Card)

Steve Biko (Denzel Washington) was a leading anti-Apartheid campaigner, driving the Black Consciousness Movement in the repressive racist state of South Africa. Biko called for Black people to organise themselves and rejected the paternalistic concern of hand-wringing white liberals. Biko was ‘banned’ in 1970s by South Africa’s (in)justice department (meaning he could not be in physical proximity with more than one other person at a time) but didn’t let this stop him campaigning – until he was eventually arrested and murdered in custody in August 1977. His story came to international attention with the reporting Donald Woods (Kevin Kline), the white liberal newspaper editor who befriended Biko, later also banned and eventually fled in disguise from South Africa.

All of this makes very ripe ground for Richard Attenborough to make another socially conscious, unreservedly liberal film, very much in the style of Gandhi. Unfortunately, while Gandhi combined epic sweep and drama with its schoolboy history, Cry Freedom is a deathly serious film, straight-jacketed by recreating events as reverentially as possible and focuses itself in all the wrong places. Cry Freedom is the Biko biography in which Biko becomes a supporting character to exactly the sort of white liberal he rejected having African stories filtered through. Admirable as Donald Woods’ efforts to find justice for Biko was, does it feel like he deserved the focus of over half the film? It’s as if Attenborough had decided to frame Gandhi solely from the perspective of Martin Sheen’s journalist rather than the Father of India himself.

Following the trend of many films of the 80s and 90s, Cry Freedom believes that the only way the regular cinemagoer can relate to a minority group is through the filter of a complacent white person having their eyes opened to how unjust everything is. In carefully following this cliché, Cry Freedom does do a decent job. Woods is patronisingly certain of his liberal views, even while he sometimes fails to even acknowledge his live-in Black maid who unquestioningly calls him ‘master’.

Back-slapping himself on writing the odd sympathetic editorial and convinced one of the big problems of South Africa is the danger of anti-white racism, he’s exactly the sort of hero you get in this genre: the guy who assumes, because the system has always worked for him, it will work for everyone. When he resolves to support Biko, he immediately assumes a friendly pow-wow with Justice Minister Jimmy Kruger (a terrifyingly amorally, avuncular John Thaw) will sweep away all the problems (it, of course, makes things immeasurably worse for everyone).

Cry Freedom largely re-creates the oppressive policies of South Africa, through seeing a white character become a victim of the very persecution, bullying and terrorising the Black community has spent its whole life suffering. (With the big exception that Donald Woods never seems to be in danger of being dragged off the streets and beaten to death in a police cell). It feels like a tone-deaf way of exploring these issues. Particularly as Donald Woods’ eventual escape from South Africa is staged and filmed with a singular lack of energy over nearly an hour of screen time, with interest slowly drained out as Attenborough uninventively turns it into an identikit version of any number of bog-standard behind-the-lines Great Escape shenanigans you’ve seen done a million times better before.

Attenborough, to be fair, saves his energy for the re-staging of the brutal repression inflicted on the Black community. Cry Freedom’s opening and closing sequences – a brutal slum clearance in East London and a restaging of the shockingly violent crushing of the 16 June 1976 Soweto uprising (where indiscriminate police automatic weapons fire killed and injured hundreds of children) – are shot with exactly the sort of humanitarian outrage and cold-eyed recognition of the horrors of conflict that Attenborough bought to Gandhi and A Bridge too Far.

It’s not hard to wonder if this is more the sort of film Attenborough wanted to make, but that funding demanded a white lead so as not to panic mainstream cinema audiences. It makes large parts of the film feel like a missed opportunity. A real immersion in the actual day-to-day lives of Black South Africans – not just the beatings, but the unending, casual racism and oppression – would have created a film of even more power. (The fact the film suddenly ends with a flashback to Soweto – an event not central to the plot at all – makes you wonder if Attenborough suddenly realised that, without it, Cry Freedom would have barely shown a Black face for its last twenty minutes).

But too much of the rest of Cry Freedom feels too dry, reserved and lifeless. Even Biko himself falls into this trap. Denzel Washington delivers a very fine performance, full of the sort of effortless charisma and magnetic leadership that makes you believe that so many would follow him and using wit and moral certainty to stand up to the various bullying policeman he encounters. But too much of Biko’s dialogue with Woods is full of the sort of dialogue designed to inform and educate the audience, rather than create good story-telling. Too many scenes in Cry Freedom’s opening hour feel like a South African politics seminar, no matter how much energy Washington gives the dialogue.

It’s part of the feeling the whole film carries: a very serious political ethics class, mixed with an all-too familiar story of a white man learning first hand just how tough his Black friends have had it for years. Attenborough so clearly means well, it feels almost cruel to knock him and his film: but Cry Freedom feels like a film with a lot of blood, sweat and tears invested in it, which then fails to have the emotional heft it really needs and spends a lot of time telling the wrong person’s story.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Whale’s sequel is a masterclass in how more can sometimes be more, a delightful black-comedy

Director: James Whale

Cast: Boris Karloff (Frankenstein’s monster), Colin Clive (Baron Henry Frankenstein), Valerie Hobson (Elizabeth Frankenstein), Ernest Thesiger (Dr Pretorius), Elsa Lanchester (Mary Shelley/The Bride), OP Heggie (Hermit), Gavin Gordon (Lord Bryon), Douglas Walton (Percy Shelley), Una O’Connor (Minnie), EE Clive (The Burgomaster), Dwight Frye (Karl), Ted Billings (Ludwig), Reginald Barlow (Hans)

What does every studio want after a mega hit? A sequel of course! Directors are never more powerful then when studios will let them do pretty much whatever they want so long as they get another shot at capturing body-sparking lightening in a bottle one more time. James Whale and gang came back for Bride of Frankenstein and produced a classic, more entertaining than the first film, a barmy, balls-to-the-wall piece of nonsense where logic is thrown out, sly jokes abound and the meter is dialled well up to camp. Bride of Frankenstein is exactly the “memorable hoot” Whale wanted to make, and proof that perhaps he had not “drained the well” after all.

Bride of Frankenstein kicks off pretty much where Frankenstein left off – requiring some fast thinking since the creature (Boris Karloff) ended that film incinerated in a burning windmill. Turns out he actually hid in the water-logged basement, emerging to stumble into violence from villagers terrified at this bolt-necked giant’s existence. Meanwhile, a chastened Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) swears he’s out of the reanimation game… only to be dragged back in by his old mentor (presumably a different one to the first film’s Waldmann) the creepy Dr Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger). Pretorius has been experimenting with creating life, and he wants a whole race of these people – so he’ll need a bride for the creature, to get that ball rolling. While the creature fights and flies, Pretorius and Frankenstein fire up the generator and get ready to stitch.

There is more than a little bit of black humour to Bride of Frankenstein, a film Whale clearly never intended to be taken seriously. It’s combined with more than a touch of camp and sprinklings of the absurd with general utter indifference to any rules of time, setting or location. Whale’s gothic world is whatever and whenever he needs it to be at any point. If that means the creature is chucked in a medieval cell one minute and Dr Pretorius is using a telephone to call his underlings the next, that’s fine. Logic is already all over the place, since it opens with Mary Shelley, her husband Percy and Bryon in full period costume recapping the first movie, despite that film being littered with no-end of what would be to them unimaginable technical possibilities.

Whale buttresses his fantasia on Frankenstein by pruning out, probably, the last couple of elements of the book he liked but hadn’t used: the creature’s ability to speak, it’s time out at the secluded hut of a blind man and (of course) the concept of a bride being resurrected. But then Whale also pours all his love into Ernest Thesiger’s sinister and delightfully eccentric Dr Pretorius, the sort of larger-than-life character who leaves all reality behind. Thesiger has a whale of the time, sucking on the sarcastic dialogue like a lemon and delighting in playing the sort of amoral mad man (he even makes Frankenstein look sane) who brings a picnic to a grave-robbing and uses a tomb as a table.

Pretorius’ swiftly brow-beats Frankenstein into saddling back up. Colin Clive – who broke his leg shortly before filming, requiring him to do nearly all his scenes sitting down – is surprisingly restrained, with the old madness only coming to the fore in the Bride’s birthing scene. That birthing scene is a brilliant expansion of the first film, Whale using the increased budget to expert effect to take us up onto the roof of the laboratory, expanding the detail shown of the mechanics of the experiment (Whale uses Dutch angles to dial up the general air of creepy weirdness and clearly was inspired by Metropolis) and launching a creation even odder than the original. As before the design work is exquisite: the Bride – wonderfully played with a ear-piercing screech (based on the swans near her London home) by Elsa Lanchester, her white high-lit hair a masterpiece of memorable, blackly-comic imagery. The Bride makes such a lasting impression, it’s a shock to realise she’s in it for less than five minutes.

Did Whale intend anything to be taken seriously? He tips the wink with Una O’Connor’s opinion-dividing performance of shrieking, Oirish panic as the villager who discovers the surviving creature. Pretorius is introduced showcasing his collection of miniature living people in jars (a bishop, a devil, a mermaid, a queen and a randy Charles Laughton-channelling Henry VIII) the sort of head-turningly bizarre scene that leaves you both delighted and shaking your head in amazement. There is something hilariously odd about the creature being introduced to those human vices, smoking and drinking. Whale was surely chortling to himself at the thought of the creature contentedly blowing smoke circles with the blind hermit or eagerly knocking back a glass with Pretorius.

It’s remarkable that despite this strong leaning into comedy, Bride of Frankenstein still manages to find the humanity in the persecution of the monster. Chased down (once again) by a wild crowd, the creature is tied down to a pole and lifted up, his body unmistakenly in a crucifixion pose. The film’s emotional centrepiece is his sojourn with the blind hermit. It’s impossible not to see more than a touch of Whale’s experience of persecution for his homosexuality in the tender staging of these scenes, two men living contentedly together only to have their partnership condemned the moment the real world intrudes. The gentleness of these scenes becomes very affecting, not least since this is the first (and last) time the creature is treated like a person rather than a monster.

Karloff is, as before, excellent in the lead role – despite his worries about the creature’s mystery being sacrificed on the altar of his fumbling, toddler-like speech. He makes the creature, even more than before, someone reaching out for warmth and connection, disgusted at his own monstrous nature and whose delight at the idea of a bride is strangely touching. (Bride of Frankenstein – a title even name checked at one point by Pretorius – cemented the popular confusion about whether the creature or his creator is ‘Frankenstein’). It’s the monster who also emerges at the film’s conclusion as the closest thing we have to a moral force.

Really Bride of Frankenstein shouldn’t work as half as well as it does. It’s part horror, part black comedy, part farce with scenes that shift from tragedy to knock-about satire. But it’s superbly assembled by Whale – at the top of his game here – and barrels along at such speed (sustained by superb performances, in particular from Karloff, Lanchester and Thesiger creating a portrait of monstrously soft-spoken camp for the ages) and with such full-blooded commitment at every moment that the film never once sinks. It is such a gloriously entertaining, wildly committed piece of pulpy film-making that it’s hard to imagine it could have been done better. And it certainly was the last word in what to do with the monster on-screen, that saw him embrace fear, love, comedy and tragedy all in one go. He probably should have stayed with the dead.