Category: Directors

Frankenstein (1931)

Iconic monster film, dark expressionist nightmare that totally reinvented the novel’s public image

Director: James Whale

Cast: Colin Clive (Henry Frankenstein), Mae Clarke (Elizabeth Lavenza), John Boles (Victor Moritz), Boris Karloff (The Monster), Edward van Sloan (Dr Waldman), Frederick Kerr (Baron Frankenstein), Dwight Frye (Fritz), Lionel Belmore (The Burgomaster), Marilyn Harris (Maria)

Has any film shaped the popular idea of a book more than Frankenstein? Ask anyone to describe the monster or the book itself, and you’ll not have to wait too long until you start to hear about bolts in the neck, thunder-struck gothic castles, hunchbacked assistants and labs stuffed with bizarre electrical equipment. Of course, none of that is actually in Mary Shelley’s The Post Modern Prometheus. But it is a key part of James Whale’s creative vision in this Hollywood hit. In fact, so much of a hit that it and its army of sequels led to whole generations convinced Frankenstein was the name of the monster, not his creator.

Frankenstein in fact bears almost no similarity to the original novel at all, checking off a few plot points and duplicating some character names. Other than that, it’s very much its own thing, a big expressionistic nightmare, with everything dialled up as high as those lightening-catching electrical machines can cope with. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) – you’ll note the film even changes his name to the more relatable Henry, with Victor given to his dull-as-dish-water pal Moritz (John Boles) – won’t settle down and marry fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke). Instead, he dreams of creating life, to become like God! And to follow that dream, he’ll dig up bodies, steal laboratory brain specimens from his mentor Dr Waldmann (Edward van Sloan) and stitch them together into a creature (Boris Karloff). But then misunderstandings and ill treatment leads to a series of terrible events.

James Whale’s film is a triumph of atmosphere; its images and visual creativity so haunting it’s not a surprise it effectively overwhelmed the novel. Inspired by German expressionist cinema – you can see the fingerprints of Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Fritz Lang all over it – Whale sets this monster tale in a world of towering, angular buildings, looming shadows and vast steampunk (long before it came into fashion) labs in damp-lined medieval castles. There is a strange timeless quality to Frankenstein: it opens with a shadow-laden graveyard dug up by Henry and his assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye), but the village feels like it is set in almost any time from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century (the costumes in particular are a real hodgepodge). Perhaps this was part of Whale’s intention, to create a timeless metaphor for man’s reach exceeding what’s sensible, to disastrous consequences?

It’s also interesting that, for all the warning of the terrors to come the film opens with from Edward van Sloan (who also portrays Waldmann), we actually end up siding with the creature. A lot of this is due to Boris Karloff’s excellent performance. Without a word of dialogue, Karloff makes this lumbering result of stitched together bits and pieces, into something vulnerable, frightened and child-like, whose violent acts only emerge from tragic misunderstandings or gross provocations. Karloff’s physicality is frequently gentle and timid, the few strangled sounds he makes sound almost scared, and his awkward stumbling resembles a deadly, confused toddler. He needs parenting, not chasing down by a mob.

The film’s key moment is Frankenstein introducing the creature to the daylight – the camera following those towering vertical lines of the set up to into a skylight, with the enchanted creature reaching his arms up to try and touch this magic ball of light. Then Frankenstein smugly slaps it shut and Fritz shoves a torch into the poor creature’s face. The monster may be introduced with all the elements of dread – Whale’s classic introduction a series of striking cuts that pull us closer and closer to the reveal of his restitched head – but it doesn’t take long before you feel really sorry for it. Even if it does have a ‘criminal mind’ stitched into it (a development so out of tone with the treatment of the monster, it feels like a fig leaf to reassure the producers it must be the baddie).

Not least because Frankenstein himself is hardly that sympathetic. Colin Clive – a long-term collaborator with Whale – grabs this larger-than-life part and runs with it, oscillating from scenery-chewing self-aggrandizement (his celebratory screaming has rightly passed into cinematic legend) to self-pitying excuses. It’s telling he never takes a jot of responsibility for either creating the monster, or for his inattention and poor treatment of it directly causing the tragedy it unleashes. Unlike his book counterpart, his arrogance requires witnesses – Elizabeth, Victor and Waldmann – to his experiments, entirely due to his arrogant fury at Waldmann’s questioning his sanity. His first solution, as soon as the creature becomes challenging, is to euthanise it and he never confesses to the lynch mob that take on the creature in the film’s final act that he is its creator.

The lynch mob is responding to the creature’s accidental drowning of a small girl. Again, this killing stems from a misunderstanding. Young Marie – the only person in the film who doesn’t react with horror when she sees the creature, suggesting she instead sees a kindred spirit – invites the delighted creature to join her in a game, tossing flowers into the river. Clapping his hands in delight, the creature joins in for a scene directed with bucolic beauty by Whale – right up until the flowers run out and the creature tosses Marie in instead, only to find she doesn’t float artistically.

As the creature flees in confused panic, Whale cuts to the raucous wedding celebrations in the Frankenstein village, which comes to a crashing close as Marie’s father walks with her body through the crowd, that turns from joy to shock around him. It’s one of several striking moments of fluidic camera work in Frankenstein, Whale employing a tracking shot that follows and partially rotates around the father, while keeping him tightly central in the frame as he walks through the crowds. There are similar moments of dynamic camerawork throughout the film, Whale using every opportunity to make this gothic nightmare world as immersive as possible.

The hyper reality of Frankenstein means it doesn’t really matter that much of the skylines are all too clearly cloth (I like to think Whale deliberately kept the multiple points where the cloth has bunched up in shot to stress the artificiality), since everything about this is dialled up to eleven, from performances, to setting to the grandly staged windmill-finale, hugely impressive in its flame-licked excitement. In fact, it’s all so overblown and gothic, in its set design, shooting and performance that the most grounded, human thing in it is Karloff’s beautifully played creature himself. That feels like no accident and makes Frankenstein a surprisingly subversive film. And also perhaps, even though it strips the creature of much that makes him a character in the novel, made him a modern icon.

Dial M for Murder (1954)

Second-tier Hitchcock thriller, with some interesting flourishes and entertaining moments

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Ray Milland (Tony Wendice), Grace Kelly (Margot Mary Wendice), Robert Cummings (Mark Halliday), John Williams (Chief Inspector Hubbard), Anthony Dawson (Charles Alexander Swann), Leo Britt (Party goer), Patrick Allen (Detective Pearson)

Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) is in a bind. A former tennis pro turned barely-successful sports goods seller, he loves the high life. Unfortunately, he’s running through cash like water – and, worst of all, most of it isn’t even really his but the property of his socialite wife Margot (Grace Kelly). And Margot is in the middle of an affair with trashy fiction writer, American Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings). An affair Tony knows all about, having stolen Margot’s love letters to anonymously blackmail her. But his new scheme is somewhat more permanent: blackmail disreputable Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson) into murdering Margot at a time when Tony has a perfect alibi. Sadly, things don’t go to plan – when do they ever? – and with Swann skewered in the back with a pair of scissors, Tony hurriedly improvises pining a pre-meditated murder charge on Margot all while avoiding the suspicions of Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams).

In his later extended interviews with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock gave less than a few minutes to talking about Broadway-adaptation Dial M, describing it as, at best, a one-for-the-money assignment or sort of warm-up for Rear Window. He was similarly dismissive about the film being shot for 3D, which he described as a ‘nine-day wonder’ which he joined on the ninth day. Hitchcock had a tendency to play up to ideas of his genius, laying sniffy dismissal on what were viewed by critics as his lesser works (although Truffaut said Dial M grew on him every time he saw it). Actually, while Dial M does have the air of an assignment to it, there are some neat little Hitchcock touches it that, while not making it a classic, does make it an entertaining way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

After all, not many other directors would have so relished Swann’s body sliding down onto a small pair of scissors. Or found so many fascinating angles for shooting a (mostly) single-set, from lofted over-head shots that give Tony’s detailing to Swann of his elaborate plan a God-like force to crashingly tight close-ups on the phone Tony will use to dial in his alibi. Hitchcock also adds more than a little sexual energy to the play. There Margot’s affair is very much in the past, as opposed to here being very much keenly anticipated by Grace Kelly’s sensual stare over a newspaper to a clock counting down her assignation with Halliday. Hitchcock also avoided the sort of tedious ‘duck now!’ shots that has made 3D a joke in cinema-going circles, framing shots with a great deal of depth, placing key objects in different depths of field in the shot.

Dial M For Murder itself though, even with these little Hitchcock touches, tends to feel exactly like what it is: a well-heeled adaptation of a Broadway entertainment that is far more about plot, procedure and Christie-lite mystery than character or themes. (Actually, a mechanical operation like Dial M might well have appealed to Hollywood’s greatest ever proponent of the masterfully constructed tension piece more than her cared to admit). It’s a page-turner, Airport-novel transposed into glitzy, breezy entertainment where we get to flirt with someone completely naughty and wicked, but can be pretty sure the ‘howdunnit’ will become clear to everyone in the play, not just us (after all, the idea that Hitchcock – or anyone – will let Grace Kelly be executed for a crime she didn’t commit is of course preposterous).

Dial M plays very much into the Hitchcock playbook, where tension arises not from what we don’t know, but from the fact we know a little bit more than most of the characters. Just like Vertigo revealing its mystery surprisingly early, or watching a bomb tick down in Sabotage while its victims remain oblivious, we know from the start that this is all a scheme designed to entrap Margot. We know all the time exactly what Tony has done and the tension lies solely in working out whether Halliday or Inspector Hubbard will work it out and how they might manage to get Tony to pay for it. (There are also some echoes of Strangers in a Train, from Tony’s tennis-playing background to his sociopathic crime swop with Swann).

Tony is played with a suave, smugness by Ray Milland, which is just about likeable enough for a bit of you to want the selfish, shallow, self-obsessed Tony to get away with it. Milland won’t allow a slightly smug grin to disappear from his face – except in a burst of twitchy nerves when a stopped watch makes him concerned that he’s going to miss a vital phone call back home to establish his alibi during the attempted murder – and never once does he appear troubled by morality. In fact, he thinks rather sharply on his feet, pivoting in seconds from surprise at Margot’s survival to smoothly improvising a very convincing story, framed to (literally) hang Margot in. It’s an effective, enjoyable, pantomime-hissable performance which Milland has a lot of fun with.

He gets most of the film to himself, since Kelly is given a role that gives her little to do – although it does showcase her ability to communicate a great deal from looks alone, from her excitement at a future liaison, to growing fear as the police net draws around her. She’s certainly a far more magnetic performer than the bland Robert Cummings who has little about him to suggest he could set Grace Kelly all aflutter. The other key roles were filled out with actors from the original production: Anthony Dawson’s weasily opportunist Swann is perfectly convincing as the sort of cove who’d agree to murder to make his life easier while John Williams’ cements the image of the unflappable pipe-smoking detective who understands far more than it looks and lulls suspects into making fatal mistakes with an avuncular reassurance.

Dial M For Murder offers plenty of entertainment, even if it’s largely just a fairly routine plot-driven mechanical puzzle, spruced up by the odd inventive shot and engaging performance. But Hitchcock was probably right, that it sits very much in the second tier of his work.

Gladiator II (2024)

Gonzo sequel sits firmly in the shadow of the illustrious predecessor it tries to imitate time and time again

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Paul Mescal (Lucius Verus/Hanno), Pedro Pascal (Marcus Acacius), Connie Nielsen (Lucilla), Denzel Washington (Macrinus), Joseph Quinn (Emperor Geta), Fred Hechinger (Emperor Caracalla), Derek Jacobi (Gracchus), Tim McInnerny (Thraex), Alexander Karim (Ravi), Peter Mensah (Jubartha), Lior Raz (Viggo), Matt Lucas (Master of Ceremonies), Rory McGann (Tegula)

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Gladiator II. In many ways, it’s a big, silly, perfectly inoffensive swords-and-sandals flick, with the violence dialled up. But as a sequel to Gladiator – a film that married scale with a hugely relatable emotional story about one man’s quest to avenge his family and unite with them in the afterlife – it’s not even in the same league. Gladiator II’s biggest problem is that when it tries to do something different from Gladiator it usually fails and when it hues close to the original, it only reminds you what a good film that was and how you’d honestly much rather watch that again.

Gladiator II picks up 16 years after the first film. The nephew of the late Commodus, Lucius (Paul Mescal) lives with his wife in the last free city of Numidia. That ends when the city is taken by a Roman army, under the command of General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) and Lucius’ wife is killed. Lucius, taken as a slave, of course arrives in Rome and becomes a gladiator in the service of the ambitious, unscrupulous wheeler-dealer Macrinus (Denzel Washington). Macrinus has schemes to exploit the fragile Empire, ruled by brothers Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). General Acacius and his wife, Lucius’ mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), also plan to overthrow the Emperors. And Lucius also plans revenge against Acacius and all of Rome in that order.

Gladiator II is awash in echoes from the first film. It gives Lucius mostly the same motivation as Maximus. It opens with a big Roman battle. It rushes to get Lucius back into the Colosseum, via a few reluctant bouts in the provinces. He is accepted as a leader by the other gladiators, marshalling them like troops. Connie Nielsen gets the same plot and versions of the same “visiting the hero in prison” scenes. There is a lot of talk about the power of the mob. Hands are frequently rubbed in the dirt. The famous quotes (“Strength and honour!”) are paraded out. Lucius cos-plays as Maximus for the film’s big ending. The final scene shows a survivor searching in the dirt of the Colosseum. Just when you think the film has at least not shown us a shot of a hand stroking some wheat… Gladiator II even chucks that in. It’s a big bit of nostalgia IP dressed up as homage.

But Gladiator II only seems to understand the surface elements of what made the first film successful – not the heart. Gladiator was a very simple story: it was a film about a man who deeply loved his late wife and son, determined to carry on living until he avenged them. Sure there were plot mechanics about the future of the Empire and “The Dream of Rome” – but this was window dressing to a plot focused on very real emotions, about caring for your loved ones. Maximus was carefully crafted as an honourable, decent man, a reluctant warrior who fought because he must. This narrative simplicity is completely lost in Gladiator II, a film so awash with subplots, schemes and shady deals that it becomes hard to follow – and eventually to care – who is on whose side and why.

There are at least four competing schemes at play in Gladiator II, each fighting for screen time like rats in a trap. It’s at best a bloody stalemate. The character who emerges best from all this is Macrinus. Based on the first Moorish Emperor of Rome (a fascinating, if short-lived, figure) he’s played with a meme-courting bombast by a clearly having-fun Denzel Washington (his rolling pronunciation of the word “Pol-leetic-sah!” designed to launch a thousand GIFs). A flamboyant figure, he effectively mixes elements of both Proximo and Commodus from the first film with the larger-than-life amorality of Washington’s Alonzo Harris (if Harris was a slightly camp Roman aristocrat). Most of the film’s enjoyable moments revolve around his increasingly brazen manipulations, first of a corrupt senator (an enjoyably sleazy Tim McInnerny) then the two deranged and incompetent Emperors. Every other plotline eventually falls into the shadow of Washington’s scenery-chewing excess (by the time Macrinus is using a character’s severed head as a prop to intimidate the Senate, you realise you just have to go with it).

Gladiator II though needs to split its focus between these multitudinal plot lines, to the detriment of all of them. The emperors fiddle and feud while Rome burns. Various soldiers and senators line-up familiar plots to restore the republic. Lucius, the character we are supposed to relate to the most, is the one who starts to lose our interest. Paul Mescal does an effective job as this growling, surly figure, even if he doesn’t quite have the force to pull off his final late-act speeches. But the film rushes his elevation to leader among the gladiators so quickly it feels unearned – as well as stuffing the film with a multitude of sidekicks so anonymous they blur into one, so much so you won’t even notice (or care) when they start to bite the big one.

On top of which, Lucius zigs-zags through motivations with all the logic of a charging rhino. He goes from wishing he was dead, to fighting desperately for life, to vowing revenge on one man to suddenly changing his mind, to leading a proto-Spartacus inspired revolt to ditching the idea, to denouncing his mother and birth-right until suddenly he doesn’t, to half-heartedly resenting Macrinus to announcing he only lives to see him die, from rejecting Maximus to cos-playing him – how are we supposed to keep up with this? The fact he’s a man of very little words doesn’t help.

When he does speak it’s never particularly punchy. Scarpia’s workman-like dialogue gives him a clumsy rallying cry – “Where we are not where death is. Where death is, we are not” – which manages to be both leaden word-soup and spectacularly unrallying. The film recognises this by having Lucius ditch it late on for a rousing cry of – what else? – “Strength and honour”. Scarpia’s script, along with its muddy plotting, is full of deathly, forgettable pap; as well as riffing so determinedly on Gladiator that you’d think not a day went by in the bowels of the Colosseum without a wistful discussion about Maximus. Gladiator II also manages to pee across several ideas at the heart of Gladiator, from the potential implication that Maximus may have cheated on his wife to father Lucius (even Russell Crowe questioned that one) to the idea that at the end of the film they buried him in the Colosseum, which seems like the last thing they’d do.

In fact, I started to think that Ridley Scott’s main motivation for doing Gladiator II was to chuck in all the gonzo ideas he couldn’t make work (or find the budget for) in the first film. A fight with a mad rhino. A flooded arena full of ships (with added sharks – how these were caught and conveyed in-land to the arena just doesn’t even bear thinking about). Lucius and his fellow prisoners take on man-eating poorly-CGI’d baboons (Lucius’ position as leader largely stems from him biting one of these beasts before strangling it to death). Outside the arena, heads, hands and arms are hacked off and Scott effectively opens the film with a re-stage of the battle of Jerusalem from Kingdom of Heaven – only the siege towers this time are on ships charging the sea walls.

All of this is pretty well done, don’t get me wrong. Scott can do historical epic on screen like few others. But Gladiator II actually suggests that where he lucked out on Gladiator was keeping it simple with a strong story. Gladiator II feels something where attention has been lavished on the scale and the bombast, but that plot and character have been rushed. The film is about 15 minutes shorter than Gladiator while telling a story twice as complex, a mixture that doesn’t work well. In fact, the main feeling I had coming out from it was that I didn’t need to see it again and if I could re-watch Gladiator and pretend this didn’t exist at all, I might be a happier man. Gladiator II lives so absolutely in the shadow of its predecessor, that its flaws become more apparent through the constant invitation the viewer is made to compare and contrast them. This one won’t echo to 2030 let alone eternity.

Thor (2011)

Branagh lives his dream by making the most comic-book, bombastic Shakespeare-homage ever

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Cast: Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Natalie Portman (Dr Jane Foster), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Anthony Hopkins (Odin), Stellan Skarsgård (Dr Erik Selvig), Kat Dennings (Darcy Lewis), Clark Gregg (Phil Coulson), Rene Russo (Frigga), Colm Feore (Laufrey), Ray Stevenson (Volstagg), Idris Elba (Heimdall), Jaimie Alexander (Sif), Josh Dallas (Fandral), Tadanobu Asano (Hogun), Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye)

If you’d told people after Henry V that one day Kenneth Branagh would direct a high-octane comic book movie about a Norse God who bashes things with a hammer, you’d have been laughed outta town. But Branagh was who Marvel called to launch the Thor franchise – and doncha know it turned out to be a pretty shrewd choice.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is the arrogant son of Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and heir to the throne of Asgard, the planet that keeps peace in the Universe. After an attempt by Asgard’s old enemies, the Frost Giants, to re-capture a stolen super-weapon, Thor leads a reckless attack on their homeworld that threatens to shatter a hard-won peace. Disappointed and furious, Odin strips Thor of his powers and banishes him to Earth, where the fallen God of Thunder must learn humility to be worthy of regaining his powers. On Earth, he falls in love with gifted scientist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), while on Asgard the realm falls under the control of his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who manipulates events to make his own claim for both the throne and their father’s love.

You can sort of see the Shakespearean bits bubbling away there. Fathers and sons, ambition and power, tragic flaws. Destiny verses desire. Loki as a mix of Edmond, Iago and Cassius. Thor as a Prince Hal earning the maturity to lead. Odin as a kindly Lear. Hell, you could see Thor washing up on the shores of New Mexico, like Twelfth Night’s Viola, forced to pretend to be something he isn’t. He even has his own mini-Falstaff, in gluttonous warrior Volstagg. It’s a heightened story of Kings and Queens, Tempest-style magic and Hamlet-style family intrigue. Marvel, of course, partly hired Branagh to bring attention to this (effectively, paying Branagh for his Shakespeare-street-cred to make an otherwise snigger-worthy concept of Norse Gods in space get taken seriously), Thor does a great job of bringing this out without drowning the fun.

And of course, for those paying attention, Branagh had been dying to do bombastic nonsense for years. Shakespeare had disguised that Branagh adored loud crashes, big bangs, showy camera work (half of Thor is done in Dutch angles, apeing comic books) and pounding soundtracks. His Hamlet is crammed with half a dozen genres, from romance to action and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein showed he could fly over the top with the best of them. But he’s also an actor’s director, and he draws performances here from Hemsworth and Hiddleston in particular that would lay the groundwork for making these two of the most popular actors in the whole damn franchise.

Thor above all does a brilliant job of making us care for a lead character initially presented as a likeable but arrogant, immature and cocky hit-first-think-later warrior, cavalier about people’s lives. There is a very funny humiliation conga inflicted upon Thor on arriving on Earth (a classic rule-of-three gag) leaving him successively tasered, tranquilised by a syringe in the ass and knocked over by reversing car. It’s a brilliant way of breaking the haughty – the Mighty Thor, who trashed an army of Frost Giants, laid low by a middle-aged doctor yanking down his hospital pants. But it all sets us on a path for caring about him, helped by how chivalrous and polite he is with Portman’s winning Dr Foster. Sure, he’s still dripping with hubris – assuming once he gets his hands on his hammer Mjolnir again, everything will be as it was – but at wider traces of humanity emerge we start to care for him.

It’s cemented by a very effective scene where Branagh proves his worth as a director of actors. After failing to lift said hammer – being, at this point, unworthy due to having not really learned anything – Thor sits alone in an interrogation room, visited by a disguised Loki. Hemsworth is very good in his scene: he suddenly makes Thor humbled, fragile, accepting his failures, not lashing out but tearfully apologising for his past behaviour, meekly asking to just be allowed to come home then bravely accepts his permanent banishment. It’s actually an effectiveportrait of overcoming hubris: Thor’s true heroism isn’t trashing Loki’s rent-a-robot that is the film’s penultimate foe. It’s accepting, in his depowered state, his role in the battle is to stay out of the way and help get people out of the way before offering his own life as a sacrifice if he will end the robot’s rampage.

If Thor, in Hemsworth’s gently sweet and funny performance, overcomes hubris, Loki succumbs to it. Tom Hiddleston’s charisma here (cemented by his excellent turn in The Avengers) helped him become Marvel’s most popular anti-hero. Like Thor, he’s a complex character: a second brother who secretly resents his brother’s prominence, wants his father’s love, learns things about his past which make him lean into his worst instincts, all to try and be what he mistakenly thinks his family wants. Hiddleston carries all this angst and tragedy with real skill, while also filling the role with wit and playfulness: it’s a great, star-making turn.

It’s a sign of the film’s surprising complexity that it’s hero and villain switch perspectives over its course. Thor starts by dreaming of destroying the Frost Giants to impress Odin while Loki counsels restraint. He ends it by making enormous personal sacrifices to protect them from a genocidal plan unleashed by Loki who wants to prove he’s as tough as Thor. The film ends not with a hero triumphant, but alone and grieving losses. It’s stuff like this that makes Thor a truly interesting, engaging film in a way other MCU outings are not.

And a lot of it comes from Branagh’s skill with actors. Thor might not offer the greatest acting challenges to the rest, but Hopkins in particular was better here than he had been for years (he credited Branagh with helping him rediscover his passion for acting) and Portman and Skarsgård bring a lot of humanity to thinly written roles. Sure, in other ways Thor is less special: it’s action set-pieces are, by and large, fairly uninspired and run-of-the-mill, the small town trashed by a robot looks and feels like a backlot stunt show, some of the comedy lands flatly. But when it focuses on the character drama of two contrasting brothers and their love for their father it’s feels more real and engaging than a host of more technically adept comic book movies.

Thor gets over-looked in the MCU rankings. But it’s a surprisingly thoughtful, well drawn character study about worthiness not being about muscle and force, but on your wisdom, compassion and humility and putting other people before your own needs and desires. All captured in a magic hammer that is otherwise impossible to pick up. Branagh’s film gets that, with added bombastic comic book thrills. Thor has entertained me each time I’ve seen it and will go on doing so.

Anora (2024)

Superb mix of tragedy, farce and social commentary laugh-out-loud-funny then suddenly deeply moving

Director: Sean Baker

Cast: Mikey Madison (Anora “Ani” Mikheeva), Mark Eydelshteyn (Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov), Yura Borisov (Igor), Karren Karagulian (Toros), Vache Tovmasyan (Garnick), Aleksei Serebryakov (Nikolai Zakharov), Darya Ekamasova (Galina Zakharova), Lindsey Normington (Diamond), Ivy Wolk (Crystal)

Who doesn’t love a Cinderella story? A plucky young woman comes from nothing to find a life of love and riches she never dreamed of is at the heart of dozens of fairy tales. And films for that matter: it’s impossible to not think about Pretty Woman when watching Anora. In fact, you could argue the at-times surprisingly charming, laugh-out-loud funny but cold-eyed realism of Anora is a Pretty Woman corrective, as if Richard Gere woke up a few days later, introduced Julia Roberts to his friends and family and immediately wondered what the hell he had done.

Not just that but Mikey Madison’s beautifully performed force-of-life Ani (real name Anora, but she doesn’t like it) feels far more like a high-end-stripper-and-occasional-sex-worker than Julia Roberts. She’s 24-years-old, living in Brighton Beach and working in a glossy Manhattan strip club. One night the manager asks her to entertain Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the dissolute, immature son of an extraordinarily wealthy Russian oligarch, because she can speak Russian. Ivan is taken with Ani, paying her $15,000 for a week as his girlfriend that peaks (after a hedonistic stay in Las Vegas) in a marriage proposal. Eloping, Ani returns home believing her life has changed forever. That illusion is shattered when Ani’s godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian), and heavies Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan) and hired muscle Igor (Yura Borisov) turn up at their home (really, of course, Ivan’s parent’s home) under strict instructions that the marriage must come to end. Over a long 24 hours of exasperation, farce and slow realisations our Cinderella story collapses.

Anora is a brilliant film, superbly directed by Sean Baker. You’d expect a film of cold-eyed social realism – and there are elements of this in Anora – but it’s also a hugely loveable, charming, surprisingly hilarious and deeply felt film, perfectly paced as its story develops across a series of events that beautifully lead into each other. A lot of its success comes from Mikey Madison’s extraordinary performance, one of those star-making force-of-nature roles where you start off liking her and end up loving her. Madison is warm but prickly and spikey, vulnerable but determined, worldly but naïve, someone who fights her corner to the end but can’t see any change at forming her own future. Madison embodies all this perfectly, switching from wide-eyed naïve delight at her luck, to spitting, incandescent fury when defending her rights, to an increasingly desperate disillusionment mingled with self-disgust as her dreams collapse around her.

Similar to his previous films, Baker presents the world of sex work with understanding and compassion. There is nothing leering about the lens of Anora, even as it opens with a pan (sound tracked to a disco remix of Take That’s Greatest Day) along a row of dancer. Baker understands the professional drudgery of exotic dancing, the hard work and effort needed to give each client the best experience. Ani is a master of ‘put the client first’ patter, her sing-song Brooklyn accent filled with awe at their dull lives, helping her clients believe they are special. What’s striking about Anora is this a world Ani needs to be ‘saved’ from as such – she’s comfortable with her profession, is good at it and understands it’s limits – but it one where she has subconsciously learned her value as a person is directly related to her body and what she is willing to do with it, complex feelings that return at the film’s conclusion with shattering impact.

What she doesn’t truly understand perhaps is people in the long-term. So swept up and impressed with Ivan’s ostentatious wealth, she misses all the clues to his true character. Anyone who still moves around his apartment by letting his feet slide across the floor, who doesn’t know where the water in the house is kept, plays video games obsessively and hurls himself into sex with the rabbit-like intensity of a horny teenager is about a million miles away from the app developer she first imagines he is. Ivan – very well played by Mark Eydelshteyn – might be sweet, excitable and full of joie de vivre, but he’s also staggeringly immature, extremely selfish and barely thinks about anyone other than himself. Or maybe Ani does notice, but she’s so used to being part of a perverse service industry, she assumes this is normal. Ivan may profess to love Ani, but he is the grasping, self-obsession of a spoilt teenager who no-one has ever said no to.

Baker’s care and regard for his characters is beautifully done – in fact what’s striking about Anora is how characters who at first feel peripheral and marginal are organically grow, emerging over time as crucial figures. In fact, what’s striking about it is that it becomes very much a film about class: about the have and have-nots and how all of us – from put-upon fixer to stripper – have more in common with each other than with the super-rich, to whom everyone else are nothing but staff, there to meet their needs. There is only a small degree of difference between the cleaner Ivan teases while she cleans his floors and Ani who he teases while she allows him to get his end away in bed.

This become clear when the film enters it’s hilarious second act, as Ivan’s godfather Toros (a side-splitting performance by Karren Karagulian as man on the verge of a nervous breakdown) can barely hide his resentment at being Ivan’s dogsbody – while still terrified at how his super-powerful parents could ruin Toros’ life in seconds (and clearly wouldn’t think twice about it). Such is their power, Toros leaves his own child’s christening to clean up Ivan’s mess – and its clear he’s been doing this his whole life (his first appearance is easy to miss, ordering Ivan’s drunken friends to get off the sofa at the debauched New Year’s party he throws). Equally good is Vache Tovmasyan as the increasingly bemused Garvik, medicine addled and slowly losing his composure over one never-ending night.

What these characters have in common – along with Yuro Borisov’s Igor, hired muscle like Ani valued only for his physicality – is that to their employers they are less people and more items of furniture or household utensils. Ivan is no different from his tyrannical parents, who may deplore their son’s selfish wastefulness but have never done anything to stop it. Anora’s tragedy (among the comedy) is watching (and Mikey Madison does this beautiful in a series of micro reactions) Ani release only the thinnest slither of affection makes her any different from Ivan’s cleaner. To Ivan, she’s a status symbol – an attractive woman, great in bed who his hangers-on can be impressed by, a tool for rebellion, marrying her the ideal fuck an immature teenager can imagine for the parents he fears and resents.

Baker’s film unfolds all this with astonishing skill, but also an overwhelming energy and joy – and I have to stress again, that Anora’s middle section is hilariously funny, much more so than many conventional comedies – but also an empathy that eventually lands with a devastating and surprising force. Mikey Madison’s extraordinary performance deeply invests in Ani, understanding how her spiky exterior hides a vulnerable interior she rarely exposes. Every performance is outstanding – kudos also to Yuri Borisov who so subtly draws Igor’s quiet decency under his thuggish exterior, that his growing prominence in the film feels completely natural.

Anora is a film that deconstructs the reality of Cinderella stories. But it’s also a film that feels very much about the world today, where all of us have our lives directed and influenced by the super-wealthy in ways we have become so used to, we don’t even notice it anymore. It’s more obvious with strippers, cleaners, fixers and hired muscle. But if Ivan’s parents sank a business, how many families would be drowned in the waves? Under the heartfelt characters, the superbly paced drama, the farce and the emotional moments, Anora captures a universal truth about our modern age that all of us, like Ani, have tried to close our eyes against.

Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

Thoughtful, sensitive, respectful and insightful war-movie – one of Eastwood’s best

Director: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Ken Watanabe (General Tadamichi Kuribayashi), Kazunari Ninomiya Private Saigo), Tsuyoshi Ihara (Lt Colonel Baron Takeichi Nishi), Ryō Kase (Private Shimizu), Shidō Nakamura (Lt Ito), Hiroshi Watanabe (Lt Fujita), Takumi Bando (Captain Tanida), Yuki Matsuzaki (Private Nozaki), Takashi Yamaguchi (Private Kashiwara), Eijiro Ozaki (Lt Okubo)

Eastwood’s original plan for his Iwo Jima epic was to tell the story from both perspectives, like a sort of Tora, Tora, Tora on the beaches. But, as the amount of story expanded and expanded, he decided to make two films (it helps being a Hollywood Legend when you change your mind like this). The American story would be covered in the melancholic-but-traditional Flags of Our Fathers, focusing on the soldiers who rose that famous flag on the peak of Mount Suribachi. For the Japanese story, Eastwood would do something more daring: tell the story in Japanese, entirely from their perspective presenting their military culture not as wicked or misguided but as a legitimate mantra as prone to extremes as the American one.

Letters From Iwo Jima is equally melancholic as its partner film, helped by its elegiac music score from Michael Stevens and Kyle Eastwood. It’s shot in a coldly austere, sepia-toned monochrome – there is barely any colour in it – and large chunks of it play out in gloomy subterranean quietness where the only sound of war is the artillery ground-pounding above the entrenched Japanese soldiers. This is the apogee of Eastwood’s moody, restrained style – perhaps he recognised and admired the reserve and formality in Japanese culture. Letters From Iwo Jima seems at first unfussy and objective so it’s a surprise how affecting and humane it becomes, all while seeing the virtues and deep flaws in a military system where the individual mattered a lot less than the whole.

Iwo Jima was a brutal fight to the death over an island less than 12 mi², a grey rock in the Pacific that’s only value was as an air strip for launching bombing raids on mainland Japan. Over 110,000 American soldiers took on 20,000 Japanese defenders in a campaign expected to last just a few days, but dragged out over a punishing 36. The relentless Japanese defence resulted in over 25,000 American casualties and c. 90% fatalities for the Japanese. Letters From Iwo Jima explores the mentality of an army that almost completely accepted (from commanding officers down to junior privates) their destiny, no their duty, was to not survive the island’s defence.

The defence’s success is due to the skilled command of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, a remarkable, restrained performance of relentless determination mixed with deep humanity from Ken Watanabe (unfairly snubbed at the Oscars). Kuribayashi over-rules his senior officers desire for a bayonet charge against the overwhelming American landing forces on the beaches. He knows this traditional attack would lead to suicidal instant defeat for the out-numbered, out-gunned Japanese. Instead Kuribayashi orders a tunnel network built across the island, to allow hit-and-run attacks designed to inflict maximum casualties. Rather than committing suicide at their posts on defeat, soldiers were ordered to withdraw from indefensible positions to continue the fight for as long as possible.

This strategic defence-in-depth strategy is denounced by several of his senior officers as either defeatism or American-sympathy. Kuribayashi knows victory is impossible – he arrives on the island writing a letter to his wife stating he will not live to see her again. But he also knows his tactic is the only way to slow down the American juggernaut. In his opinion, protecting Japan from air attack for a few more weeks is worth sacrificing his and all the lives of the 20,000 men under his command.

Kuribayashi respects Americans – flashbacks show his happiness in the 30s as a military liaison in California, his easy friendships with American officers and desire for co-operation with the USA. But in the same scene he unquestioningly (though with a warm smile) says he will serve his country no matter what. He’s a man of principle and honour, and even if he doesn’t agree with the war, he is for Japan right-or-wrong and will not think twice about giving his life in its service. This attitude soaks through the Japanese soldiers, and Letters From Iwo Jima presents it largely without moral judgement. There are shocking moments where defeated soldiers in Suribachi, weep as they looks at photos of their loved ones while clasping live grenades to their chest so that they may die at their post rather than live with the shame of failing their country. But, the film subtly asks, how different is this from the self-sacrifice countless American war films have (rightly) praised in their soldiers?

The difference is cultural. Very few American soldiers would choose suicide in a cave rather than the thought of confronting their families as defeated men. For Japanese soldiers, this is the ultimate strength, a view shared not just by incompetent, trigger-happy bullies like Captain Ito but right up to Kuribayashi himself who never considers for a moment surrender and living, choosing a suicidal night attack with his last soldiers and suicide on the last piece of earth on Iwo Jima that could still be just about considered Japanese. That’s an institutional expectation of total self-sacrifice, even when the sacrifice is completely symbolic, that has no real comparison in Western militaries.

The soldiers – as we hear in their letters, read to us in voiceover – love their families and they relate to a wounded GI from Oklahoma who talks about his mother (a slightly twee moment in another wise subtle film), but they also believe that the whole (Japan) is far more important than the individual (themselves). Trees should always be sacrificed to slow the fire and protect the forest. Letters From Iwo Jima may show the dangerous excesses this produces in the most fanatical, but doesn’t denounce this extreme penchant for sacrifice or give a clumsy moment of realisation that it is inherently ‘wrong’. Neither does it present Western, individual ideals as superior (indeed the few American soldiers seen are a mixed bag, as much prone to vengeful violence as their opponents).

Letters From Iwo Jima follows Private Saigo (very well played with a bewildered sense of fear and growing desire to live by Kazunari Ninomiya), the character closest to acting as a criticism of the Japanese mindset. A baker, who wants to see his wife and new-born child, he doesn’t really want to die on the island, but never questions it is his duty to do so. And his objections to suicidal orders or kamikaze attacks isn’t grounded in their senselessness but that they run contrary to Kuribayashi’s wider orders. Even our most relatable (to Western eyes) character, one who eventually accepts the idea of surrender when all is lost, is still part of the same culture where placing your own needs and desires before the whole is considered deeply shameful.

Perhaps this thoughtful, non-judgemental exploration of Japanese culture is why Letters From Iwo Jima (unusually for American war films) did very strong business in Japan. Unlike the eventual death cult of Nazism (see the exceptional Downfall), where suicide came from bitter pride and fear, here it’s the ultimate, terrible-but-logical outcome for a mentality that turned a small island into a respected world power. It’s not presented as a freakish aberration or some sort of national genetic character flaw: it’s in many ways a sort of perverse nobility which has, like all noble systems, advocates who are broad-minded and empathetic and those who are prejudiced and fanatical. Letters From Iwo Jima’s strength is it never presents it as inherently evil, rather a choice with good and bad outcomes.

Eastwood’s superbly directed film, perhaps one of his finest, is full of such thoughtful, unjudgmental reflections on duty and service and what loyalties to something larger than ourselves drive us to do. Shot with an austere, haunting chill and superbly played by a faultless cast, Letters From Iwo Jima is an earnest, mature piece of work and a quite extraordinarily unique war film.

Benediction (2021)

Davies’ final film is a beautifully made, deeply sad, exploration of the long-term impact of trauma

Director: Terence Davies

Cast: Jack Lowden (Siegfried Sassoon), Peter Capaldi (Older Siegfried Sassoon), Simon Russell Beale (Robbie Ross), Jeremy Irvine (Ivor Novello), Kate Phillips (Hester Gatty), Gemma Jones (Older Hester Gatty), Ben Daniels (Dr Rivers), Calam Lynch (Stephen Tennant), Anton Lesser (Older Stephen Tennant), Tom Blyth (Glen Byam Shaw), Matthew Tennyson (Wilfred Owen), Geraldine James (Theresa Thornycroft), Richard Goulding (George Sassoon), Lia Williams (Edith Sitwell), Julian Sands (Chief Medical Officer)

Few generations carried scars as deep as that which saw millions of their fellows mown down in the endless bloody slaughter of World War One. For us, whatever understanding of the horrors of that conflict we have is often filtered through the war poets, who fought in unimaginable conditions. Terence Davies’ final film explores the life of Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden, ageing into Peter Capaldi) whose life never escaped the shadow of those terrible sights and awful losses.

Benediction is a sombre, mellow, deeply sad portrait of a man who spent a lifetime searching for something, anything to fill the void the war had left in him. Following Sassoon’s life in a series of tableaux-style scenes that mix poetry reading, period music, news footage with flash-forwards to the tetchy, weary older man he will become, it’s a sad, reflective work that presents memory as a sort of prison that consigns everyone to a life sentence. Davies catches this beautifully in his stately, melancholic film where survival guilt goes hand in hand with bitter regret at missed opportunities.

It opens with Sassoon’s protest against the war – denouncing its content from his first-hand experience. Saved from the possibility of a firing squad by influential friends (chief among them, Simon Russell Beale’s good-natured Robbie Ross) Sassoon is dispatched to an Edinburgh military hospital to “recuperate”. There he meets and falls in love with the sensitive, shy poet Wilfrid Owen (Matthew Tennyson), a love he is scared to confess. After Owen is killed, Sassoon commits himself to a series of romantic relationships with selfish, bitchy men including Ivor Novello (a marvellously supercilious Jeremy Irvine, whose eyes are stone cold) and the shallow, vain Stephen Tennent (Calam Lynch, full of Bright Young Thing smugness, turning into a lonely, tragic Anton Lesser). As an older man, he converts to Catholicism and struggles to understand his son George (Richard Goulding).

Davies’ film posits a Sassoon who never recovered from grief at the death of Wilfrid Owen and could never truly forgive himself for being too timid to express his feelings. Davies films Sassoon and Owen in scenes that sing of unspoken intimacy, from an overhead shot of a swimming pool dip that feels like a pirouette, to the matching body language they exhibit while sitting watching a variety show at the hospital. They laugh and dance together, but at parting Sassoon cannot move himself beyond a tightly clasped handshake and a whispered urge to stay a few minutes longer.

In discussions with his doctor and friend Rivers (a lovely tender cameo from Ben Daniels), Sassoon tearfully talks of his fear of expressing his own emotions. Perhaps this, coupled with his self-blame, is why Sassoon placed himself in so many relationships with such transparently flamboyant shits? Davies certainly seems to suggest so: Sassoon had less fear of “being himself” when he was with arrogantly confident men like Novello and Tennant. Did he also, the film suggests, feel so crippled with regret and survivor guilt, that he couldn’t believe himself worthy of the love of gentle, decent men, such as the Owen-like Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth).

Sassoon becomes a man who can never fully escape the never-ending hurt of memories. Even as an older man, Davies shows Capaldi’s Sassoon sitting in his garden, the background replaced by news footage of slaughter in the trenches. It’s mixed in with the shame Sassoon felt at his “stand” against the war being, in the end, a moment that changed nothing. Davies further paints his poetry as declining post-war, as if parts of his creative life never survived the shocks he experienced.

And always he hopes something might make him whole again. Sassoon races through these false dawns during the film: relationships with men, marriage to Hetty (Kate Phillips as the younger Hetty is nearly as oppressed with unspoken sadness as Sassoon), the birth of his son – all fail to deliver. So as an older man – in a neat CGI transition during a 360 camera move – Davies transforms Lowden to Capaldi as he tries Catholicism (there is another wonderful cut that takes us from young Sassoon’s silver military cross being dropped into a river, that transitions into the grey-suited older Sassoon lying in a crucifix position on the floor of a church).

But the tragedy of Benediction – and there is no denying it’s a deeply sad and even slightly depressing film – is none of these attempts fill his soul. The older Sassoon – sharp, prickly and with a stare that goes on and on from Capaldi – snaps at things he doesn’t understand, cruelly dismisses the older Tennant and bitterly complains at the lack of recognition his later work received. He’s a man desperate for companionship, but comfortable only on his own.

It’s particularly sad having seen the brighter, passionate and warm man he was. Much of Benediction succeeds due to an exceptional performance by Jack Lowden. Lowden brilliantly conveys Sassoon’s lingering depression and loss under the surface of every interaction. The cheery wit that covers the self-loathing that leads him into destructive relationships and painful situations is as well captured as the self-deceiving optimism he had that everything could be different. Lowden ends the film with an extraordinary emotional moment – filmed in tight one-shot by Davies – where we see, one the last day of the war, his impossible burdens lead him to a single, quiet, emotional outburst of the vast reams of pain that then continued to burn inside him for the rest of his life.

Benediction is about guilt, loss, regret and denying yourself opportunities at happiness and joy through an internal determination that it is not for you. There is something profoundly personal in this – Sassoon’s life in this film, mirroring many of the regrets Davies spoke of in his own life – a fact increased by the heartfelt, gentle construction of the film with its melancholic air and rich sense of empathy for its subject. As a final work, it’s a fitting tribute to both the poet and its director.

The Fallen Idol (1948)

Brilliant thriller about how hard the world is for a child to understand

Director: Carol Reed

Cast: Ralph Richardson (Baines), Michèle Morgan (Julie), Sonia Dresdel (Mrs Baines), Bobby Henrey (Philippe), Denis O’Dea (Chief Inspector Crowe), Jack Hawkins (Detective Amos), Walter Fitzgerald (Dr Fenton), Dandy Nichols (Mrs Patterson), Geoffrey Keen (Detective Inspector Davis), Bernard Lee (Inspector Hart), Dora Bryan (Rose), Karel Stepanek (First Secretary), Torin Thatcher (Constable)

We’ve all had heroes we worship haven’t we? Few hero worships burn as brightly as a child’s. Eight-year-old Philippe (Bobby Henrey), son of a foreign ambassador in London, is awe-struck by the embassies English butler Baines (Ralph Richardson), a kind, decent man with a twinkle in his eye who enjoys spinning stories for Phil about his exciting life in India. The highlight of Phil’s day is spending time in Baines’ parlour. For Baines though, his highlights are the snatched moments of release from his domineering, unloving wife (a masterfully tough-to-like Sonia Dresdel) that he spends with embassy secretary Julie (Michèle Morgan).

The affair is obvious to us in seconds. But Phil – from whose perspective we see large amounts (but, crucially, not all) of the film play-out – is of course oblivious, readily accepting Baines awkward assurance Julie is just his niece. The Fallen Idol – the middle film in Reed’s astonishingly high-quality run of films that includes Odd Man Out and The Third Man – is a brilliantly tense, very moving story of how adrift children feel in the adult world, how easily they misinterpret signals and misread social cues. Superbly filmed, with a wonderful script by Graham Greene (from his own novel) it’s a masterclass in how the simplest situation can lead to the most intense drama.

It revolves around a fatal trap for Baines. Believing his wife is away for the weekend (she has in fact concealed herself in the embassy mansion), Baines treats himself to a day and night with Julie. Discovered, the confrontation leads to Mrs Baines dead at the bottom of the stairs. The argument is partially witnessed by Phil – but crucially, only glimpses of it as he runs down the exterior fire escape, peering in through windows as he goes – but in full by the viewer. It’s clearly a terrible accident, taking place after Baines had left. But Phil is convinced he has witnessed a murder – and so passionate is his hero worship of Baines (and loathing of Mrs Baines), he decides to do everything he can to protect the butler.

The genius of Reed’s The Fallen Idol is that we are always know more than any of the characters. Just as we can tell immediately from witnessing Baines and Julie’s whispered, Brief Encounter-ish meeting in a London coffee shop that they are in the midst of a passionate affair, so we also know much faster than any character that Mrs Baines is still in the house and that her death is a clumsy accident. We can also see, in ways Phil cannot, that his desperate lies only undermine Baines honest version of events. We know all the details well ahead of the police, watching them misinterpret clues and behaviour in the worst possible light. The entire film shows how damning circumstances and coincidences can fold up into a vice-like trap from which there is almost no escape.

The Fallen Idol is a film awash with lies. In many ways it’s a heartbreaking reveal of how quickly the compromises and selfishness of the adult world corrupts the child’s. At the heart of these lies is Baines himself. The role is beautifully played by Ralph Richardson, utilising his eccentric cuddliness to exceptional effect, but also perfectly capturing the selfishness, weakness and cowardice of Baines. Because Baines is a liar – not only to his wife, but also to Julie (he spectacularly lacks the guts to ask his wife for a divorce, despite what he tells Julie) and, walking Phil back after he has crashed Baines’ tea-time meeting with Julie, urgently instructs him to lie if he is ever asked about what happened that afternoon. Baines doubles down on his duplicity by using the unwitting Phil as a shield to cover a zoo-trip date with Julie, and even his adventure stories to Phil are all slightly self-aggrandizing tall tales.

One of the toughest things about The Fallen Idol is that hero-worship is a confused one-way street, especially when children are involved. Baines is fond of Phil but often treats him with distracted affection out-of-kilter with the earnest, devoted adoration Phil pours on him. This devotion from Phil is so great, even his belief that his hero is a murderer makes no impact on him. Having taken his idol’s lessons to heart, about what to do when questioned about anything to do with Julie, Phil lies and lies to the investigating officers, corrupting himself (he believes, after all, he is helping a killer) while also making the innocent Baines seem guiltier-and-guiltier with every word.

Carol Reed draws a superbly natural performance from Bobby Henrey, in a performance utterly lacking in childish, mannered acting tricks. It’s a hugely natural performance, over-flowing with innocence making Phil a character we end up deeply caring for. The early half of the film throws us perfectly into the excited world of a child with a whole mansion to run around in, cuddling his pet snake close to his chest. Reed also brilliantly captures how a moment of trauma confuses and terrifies an innocent into not knowing what action to take. Fleeing the house barefoot – clearly terrified and heartbroken – immediately after the death, Phil is petrified when he encounters a policeman not because he is intimidated, but because he fears inadvertently betraying his idol.

Reed superbly captures the desperate vulnerability of children, the nightmare of not having your voice listened to as adults talk over and around you. The Fallen Idol (with its careful use of disjointed angles and God-like, wide-angle shots from above) has a superb sense of the horror of being caught in a situation you neither fully understand or can influence. It’s echoed perfectly by Baines’ increasingly defensive panic as each denial falls on all-too-obviously deaf ears. Phil also misinterprets almost everything he is told in the film, right up to when the sympathetic Julie (a lovely, warm performance from Michèle Morgan) begs him that only the truth can help Baines.

The Fallen Idol spices this up with superb moments of comedy. Dora Bryan has a delicious cameo as a ‘lady of the night’, called upon to by the flummoxed policemen at the station Phil has fled to, to try and draw some words out of the stubbornly silent child – and who can only fall back on the cliches of her profession (‘Can I take you home dearie?’). An Inspector (a lovely cameo from Bernard Lee) called in to translate in the embassy is begged by the first secretary to drop his inept schoolboy French. A tense interrogation of Baines is interrupted when a pedantic embassy staffer insists he must be allowed to check the clocks in the room (Reed wittily shows the characters revolving, clockwork like, impatiently on the spot in the background while this interminable check goes on).

But the great strength of The Fallen Idol is how it captures the joyful innocence of childhood and the Kafkaesque confusion the adult world can have on a child. Poor Phil never really understands anything that goes on (although the film ends with a sweet irony of Phil being the only person who perhaps understands a vital ‘clue’ only to be completely ignored) while we are always in complete understanding. Reed’s direction is faultless, both from his work with actors to his masterful use of camerawork and editing to really capture the confusing, unreadable adult-world from a child’s perspective. It’s a masterful, gripping, heart-rending film – a small scale classic that perfectly mixes tension and wit.

Basic Instinct (1992)

A sensationalist hit, this Trashy Hitchcock-pastiches looks very pleased with its own naughtiness today

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Michael Douglas (Detective Nick Curran), Sharon Stone (Catherine Tramell), George Dzundza (Detective Gus Moran), Jeanne Tripplehorn (Dr Beth Garner), Dorothy Malone (Hazel Dobkins), Denis Arndt (Lt Philip Walker), Leilani Sarelle (Roxy Hardy), Bruce A Young (Detective Sam Andrews), Chelcie Ross (Captain Talcott), Wayne Knight (Assistant DA John Correli), Stephen Tobolowsky (Dr Lamott)

If there is one thing Basic Instinct proves for sure, it’s that Paul Verhoeven is a very naughty boy. A sensational smash hit in 1992, largely because of the instant iconic status of that scene (you know which one), Basic Instinct remixes Hitchcock (especially Vertigo and Psycho) with lashings of explicit sex and violence, a touch of The Silence of the Lambs and a dollop of Fatal Attraction. It’s a deeply silly, dirty film that was a sort of Fifty Shades of its day: vanilla porn for those who feel too self-conscious to actually go and watch a real one.

Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone) is number one suspect for the murder of her boyfriend (or rather as she describes him “the guy I was fucking”) for two reasons: one she published a novel a few weeks earlier where she explicitly described the crime in detail and two she’s an obvious Hannibal Lector-ish genius psychopath. Doesn’t stop weak-willed detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) from becoming obsessed with her, sucked into a wild sexual affair. But is Catherine a misunderstood unlucky victim, or the genius manipulator her old college rival Dr Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn) – also Nick’s on-and-off girlfriend and psychiatrist – says she is?

Basic Instinct was the most expensive script ever sold, earning Joe Eszterhas $3million for what he claimed was fourteen days’ work. And you can see why – it’s got everything audiences could need for an addictive, trashy bit of fun. A femme fatale who is also a genius psychopath! A handsome macho cop! Brutal murders! A puzzle interesting enough to keep ticking over but obvious enough that you don’t need to think about it too much! And of course, lots and lots and lots of sex! And then even more sex! No wonder people saw dollar bills – at the very worst they had a chance at a so-bad-its-good box office smash.

But the good stuff. Basic Instinct’s comic-book Hitchcock pastiche actually works rather well, helped enormously by a marvellous Oscar-nominated score by Jerry Goldsmith, which brilliantly channels Bernard Herrmann’s luscious Vertigo strings. It’s no exaggeration to say Goldsmith’s score dramatically improves the film, from adding tension to a drawn-out elevator trip to adding a film noir lyricism to Catherine and Nick’s rather forced sexualised banter. Verhoeven also really knows his business: the film’s famous interrogation scene works as well as it does through his skilful editing between wide angles, close-ups and POV shots, aided by the striking uplighting from cinematographer Jan de Bont.

That scene – and the film – also works because of Sharon Stone. Taking on a role turned down by almost every single woman in Hollywood, Stone seizes hold of a part she knew was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Nick may be the lead – and Douglas, in the middle of his run of weak modern American men bewitched by strong women, may have been the high-paid star ($14 million to Stone’s $550k) – but both knew this was Catherine’s movie. Stone plays the role with a playful, sensual confidence and arrogant defiance, knowing full well she can seduce anyone. Despite the clunky dialogue, she makes Catherine sexy, smart and just about vulnerable enough to make some viewers doubt whether she’s the killer or not. (I mean she blatantly is, the film doesn’t really try and pretend otherwise. Most of the fun is seeing how shamelessly she can parade it and still get away with it.)

Away from that though, Basic Instinct is a terribly silly film, a well-made pandering to our lowest desires. Opening with an extremely graphic post-coitus stabbing frenzy (with blood spray everywhere and a nose skewered by an ice pick) – it then teases us three times that it will repeat this again after nearly every explosive session of rumpy-pumpy. Ah yes, the rumpy-pumpy. Basic Instinct slows at the half-way mark for an almost five-minute extended multi-angled, orgasm packed bit of horizontal jogging that Nick then rather pathetically spends most of the rest film bragging about being “the fuck of the century”.

But then Nick is a pathetic figure. Somehow keeping hold of his badge, despite gunning down two tourists while high on cocaine, he’s got such an addictive personality he makes Lloyd Bridges’ (“I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue!”) air traffic controller in Airplane look like a model of restraint. After internal affairs-mandated therapy (how’s that for a slap on the wrist) – hilariously compromised by Jeanne Tripplehorn’s Dr Garner crossing all ethical lines by repeatedly shagging him – Nick has proudly quit drugs, drink, smoking, and shooting before asking questions. Needless to say, under Catherine’s influence, he embraces all of these again, all while still managing to be the sort of middle-aged loser who wears a pullover to nightclub.

Eszterhas’ script mixes awful “tough” dialogue (“Looks like he got off before he got offed” Nick’s partner jokes over a victim) with clumsy psychological insight (my favourite is Tobolowsky’s consultant who confidently states two options: Trammel either did or didn’t do it – inevitably this childishly empty insight is met with the manly ‘tecs muttering “In English Doc!”) and blunt statements of the obvious (“She’s brilliant! And Evil!” screams poor Tripplehorn). The flirty banter is largely sold by Sharon Stone’s confidence, since the lines (“I’m not wearing underwear”) are hardly Double Indemnity. The film’s mystery is so irrelevant to its appeal (and, in many ways, plot), it merrily gets bogged down in several off-screen murders of characters we’ve never met.

Today Basic Instinct feels like a bizarre museum piece. George Dzundza’s sidekick cop is intended as comic-relief but comes across like a little ball of toxic masculinity. An early sex scene between Nick and Beth is pretty much impossible to watch today without thinking “yeah that’s rape”. The film uses bisexuality (though we only, of course, get girl-on-girl – Douglas made it clear he ain’t gonna kiss no man) as raw titillation, an entre for the soft porn of Douglas and Stone noisily going at it for about 10% of the film’s run time. Even the famous scene is uncomfortable to watch, since Stone has since made it clear she didn’t consent to that shot.

Basic Instinct is a deeply silly piece of trash. But then that was its appeal back then – no one felt they were actually watching Hitchcock when they sat down to this rip-off of the master (in fact Basic Instinct makes you feel it’s probably a relief the production code meant Hitchcock couldn’t give into his Verhoevenish instincts). Today most like to think of it as a sort of well played card trick. However, it’s hard not to feel a bit for Sharon Stone to whom it became a millstone (which she eventually exploited for a terrible belated sequel for which she pocketed $13.5million), despite being the person possibly most responsible for its success. So maybe Nick won in the end after all.

Evil Does Not Exist (2024)

Haunting, enigmatic parable on nature and modern society that leaves a lingering impression

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Cast: Hitoshi Omika (Takumi Yasumura), Ryo Nishikawa (Hana Yasumura), Ryuji Kosaka (Takahashi Keisuke), Ayaka Shibutani (Mayuzumi Yuuko), Hazuki Kikuchi (Sachi Minemura), Hiroyuki Miura (Kazuo Minemura), Yûto Torii (Tatsuki Sakamoto), Takako Yamamura (Yoshiko Kizaki), Takuma Nagao (Tomonori Hasegawa), Yoshinori Miyata (Akira Horiguchi, Takahashi), Taijirô Tamura (Ippei Suruga)

Imagine a beautiful Japanese mountain village, where the water is so clean, jugs of are taken straight from the stream to the local restaurant where its unique taste adds to the food’s beauty. Everything here is in careful harmony. Until a corporation reckons it’s the perfect site – keen to exploit, while it can, lingering Covid subsidies – to build a glamping site with a 95% effective septic tank (because that’s fine with government regulations). The corporation hosts a charade of a consultation where the plans are rejected by the community, unconvinced by the ‘trickle down’ wealth promised and more concerned with that 5% sewage being tipped into their gloriously pure water supply.

Perhaps the point of Evil Does Not Exist is that there is no real malevolence here. The corporation that wants to effectively shatter the harmony of this community isn’t doing it because they are cruel, they’re just doing what they do to create profits. And they genuinely don’t really see the problem because with a classic lack of empathy they’re convinced what is good for them is good for everyone. And that deep-down everyone shares their outlook. The villagers are just angling for a bigger pay-outa and they don’t really need to fix the septic tank because it falls within the rules and the water will still be okay with a little bit of sewage in it.

Evil Does Not Exist it seems, because most of the bad stuff happening in the world is because of empathy-free systems, people not really caring about impact of their actions and a general lack of interest in long-term impacts over short-term gain. Hamaguchi’s beautifully filmed, Godard-inspired (from title fonts, to shooting-style to Hamaguchi’s use of non-professional actors) environmental parable carefully and subtly deconstructs a world where the beauty of nature can be rinsed away simply out of a sense of inevitability and quick-buck expediency.

Originally envisioned as a short film that would showpiece the beautiful orchestrations of its composer Eiko Ishibashi, Hamaguchi expanded it as he shot more and more material, eventually developing it into a fascinating and open-ended parable about our relationship with nature. Nature here is an elemental and unknowable force: the first five minutes of the film is a sustained tracking shot through the trees, the only sounds we hear being Ishibashi’s music. It’s almost ten minutes before we hear any dialogue. The village’s ‘odd-job man’ Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) is very much one with the natural world around him, taking only what he needs and living in gentle, stoic harmony with the environment.

Hamaguchi’s film – utilising his careful, Ozu-inspired camerawork and Godardian love of realist observation – creates a natural world which is both beautiful and hauntingly mysterious. In the film’s calm shots of nature, the forest becomes a haven but one strangely inhuman. There is a feeling of unknowable, unrelatable forces in this world, an organic Gaia understanding that the villagers are unconsciously plugged into, which governs the ‘rules’ of existence. It’s an understanding utterly inaccessible to those who arrive from the city and want to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

Evil Does Not Exist pivots around its consultation meeting, which takes place in a town hall, chaired by initially bored consultants going through the motions with a slide deck they don’t understand and a ring-binder of notes they are unfamiliar with. As the villagers quickly discover (their adroit questioning taking the under-prepared consultants off guard), this consultation is a sham – anyone with any control over the fate of the project isn’t there and the glamping site is happening regardless of anyone’s feelings. All this meeting is about (as the head of the company later says, dialling in to chat to his consultants on a video call) is demonstrating the company has ‘listened’ and to tweak a few token issues (it’s telling that the head of the company describes the disastrous meeting as a complete success). None of this is evil of course: it’s just the bureaucratic acquisitiveness of the modern world, which values procedures and rules over impacts and end results.

Both consultants however find themselves taken with the village. But Hamaguchi demonstrates this is always rooted in a patronising sentimentality that’s as much about themselves as it is the actual village. Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) in particular, a disaffected company drone, spontaneously decides he can just jack it all in and become a skilled man of the wilderness like Takumi. Takahashi comes across as an embarrassing romantic, identical in many ways to the likely glamping customers (who want a sense of the nature without actually living there). He’s hideously clueless about the fauna of the forest and his practical skills (captured in a hilariously awkward attempt to chop wood) are woefully inadequate. None of this stops him from assuming he can fit right in on a whim with no preparation or training. Takumi’s just an odd-job man, how hard can that be to pick-up?

It doesn’t kid Takumi, who stares at him with an impassive face that hints at a range of emotions from contempt to humorous indulgence. Perhaps he’s aware that Takashi (again patronisingly) sees him less as an individual and more as his personal Yoda, placed on earth to mentor Takashi’s personal growth: to the outsiders the village and its inhabitants are always filtered through what they can do for them. Takashi’s patronising expectation that Takumi will welcome a ‘student’ isn’t wildly different from the company’s view that Takumi can be won over to supporting the project because they’ve offered him a job and a semi-decent salary.

This all culminates in a mysterious, open-ended conclusion which sees Hamaguchi lean into hints of folk-horror. Does the conclusion of Evil Does Not Exist show the dangerous consequences of mankind’s interference of nature on the most innocent? Does Takami represent a resentful natural world biting back? Questions hang over the film’s cryptic ending, which has been neatly foreshadowed throughout.

Evil Does Not Exist has a quietly hypnotic quality to it, but also a haunting chill behind its beautiful imagery. But it also asks subtle but intriguing questions about our link to nature and how a myopic focus on our own interests and needs inadvertently damages the world far more than actively ‘evil’ acts ever could.