Category: Films about racism

Mississippi Burning (1988)

Earnest drama about racism, whose narrative perhaps focuses on less important issues and people

Director: Alan Parker

Cast: Gene Hackman (Agent Rupert Anderson), Willem Dafoe (Special Agent Alan Ward), Frances McDormand (Mrs Pell), Brad Dourif (Deputy Sheriff Clinton Pell), R. Lee Ermey (Mayor Tilman), Gailard Sartain (Sheriff Ray Stuckey), Stephen Tobolowsky (Clayton Townley), Michael Rooker (Frank Bailey), Pruitt Taylor Vince (Lester Cowans), Kevin Dunn (Agent Bird), Badja Djola (Agent Monk)

In June 1964 three civil rights workers – two white New Yorkers Andrew Goorman and Michael Schwerner and a black Mississippian James Chaney – were arrested, released and then murdered by Neshoba County law officials working alongside KKK white supremacists. An FBI investigation (codenamed Mississippi Burning) revealed the crime, arrested the criminals and managed to convict several (but not all) of them on the federal charge of violating civil rights (convinced the state charge of murder would lead to acquittal from racist juries). Mississippi Burning fictionalises this true-life atrocity into a hard-hitting thriller, mixed with the conventions of crime drama.

It’s directed by Alan Parker in the style of Midnight Express, pulling no punches in chucking the vileness of the KKK up on screen. During the course of Mississippi Burning we see Black people chased, beaten, flung out of moving cars onto the street, lynched and a praying child kicked in the face by a KKK thug. Rightly, the murderers are a vile parade of bullies, cowards and knuckle-dragging monsters portrayed by a group of actors (Dourif, Rooker, Sartain and Vince among them) used to going all-in on portraits of the scum of humanity. It’s a tightly directed, intense film – with a repetitively pounding score by Terry Jones – with Oscar-winning photography by Peter Biziou capturing the flame-lit night-time atrocities these repulsive people execute on innocents.

Mississippi Burning is undoubtedly well-made, with a very earnest message behind it. It’s impossible to fault its rightful disgust at the appalling injustice and racism, but you can’t help but feel it’s focusing its heroic lens on the wrong part of the story. It drew fire at the time for its fictionalisation of almost every element – wisely so in its portrayal of the initial crime, where their names and exact nature of their murder are altered – and the way this pushed the FBI (an organisation that had in many cases actively worked against civil rights) into a traditional heroic role, while reducing the Black people to passive recipients of beatings or kind words from whites. It’s hard not to feel today that, for all the skill of the film, the impact of those decisions have magnified the film’s flaws over time.

At heart, Mississippi Burning uses the conventions of a mis-matched buddy-cop investigative drama to add narrative drive to a social issues film. The two FBI agents are played so well by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, you barely notice both are stock roles straight out of central casting. Hackman gives such energy and life (with a lovely touch of shame that his own past conduct, as a Southern sheriff was presumably only a degree better than the people he’s investigating) to his role as no-nonsense, veteran maverick who understands the streets, that he transforms this cliché into a real person. Similarly, Dafoe plays the by-the-book, stuffy superior who has too learn rules-bending sometimes break the case, with such commitment you forget how role familiar it is.

The personal narrative of the film revolves around whether these chalk-and-cheese investigators will overcome their initial iciness – they address each other formally throughout the film and butt-heads frequently on the conduct of the investigation – to become a team which feels odd for a film where the other stakes (violent institutional racism) are so large. In many ways an alternative cliché – two disconnected investigators investing more in a case based on the injustice they see and the witnesses they talk to – might well have served it better and also reflected contemporary complaints that the FBI was more interested in the letter than the spirit of the law. Mississippi Burning does, at times, address this by having characters explicitly ask if the FBI would even lift a finger if two of the victims weren’t white. But seeing as the film generally considers raising the question the same as engaging with it, it doesn’t go anywhere.

The film requires the agents to undertake mis-steps in order to educate the audience (would Dafoe’s character really be as ignorant about the nuances of segregation as he frequently is here?) and blunder about for much of the early acts, most notably Dafoe’s public conversation with a Black man in a diner, that inevitably leads to the poor man kidnapped and beaten by the KKK. But on the whole, the FBI are presented as noble straight-shooters, aghast at the state of affairs in the South, rather than a body run by the morally-ambiguous J Edgar Hoover.

It also means Mississippi Burning relegates its Black characters to passengers and passive victims, reliant on white people for protection and vindication. While it would be false to claim the system in the South didn’t leave Black people largely powerless, the film’s failure to introduce a single memorable character giving voice to the Black perspective of a series of crimes that happened to them feels more and more uncomfortable as the film ages (particularly as the film’s hopeful ending very much places racism as a problem in the past, not a dilemma America continues to face).

The film’s real conscience (and the victim given most development) is instead Frances McDormand as the wife of Dourif’s vile racist sheriff. Parker’s film subtly indicating her lack of racism early (she consoling touches the arm of a Black man), and McDormand (who is excellent) brings real force to her pained, frightened longing to do the right thing. She contrasts neatly with the committed vile cowardice of Dourif, Rooker’s swaggering bullying and Stephen Tobolowsky’s Hiterlian racism as a KKK Grand Wizard. Parker successfully makes these guys so repulsive, that when Hackman’s Anderson gets free reign to intimidate, rough-up and bully them back it carries real satisfaction. But the film making the most developed victim of the film’s KKK a white, gentile feels more like filmmaker concerns that otherwise the bulk of the likely audience may otherwise have trouble relating to the bulk of the victims.

Mississippi Burning tries to be hopeful. This extends to some slightly forced moralising – the suicide of one character is attributed to guilt at the crime, rather than the more likely guilt at having ‘betrayed’ his fellow KKK – and a general sense that Mississippi is on the road to peace, feels a bit of a stretch for a region that had decades of continued unrest ahead. Saying that, in its sometimes clumsy way, you can’t doubt its power and its righteous disgust at racism. It’s well directed and has some excellent performances – Hackman and McDormand were both Oscar nominated – but it feels like a film that only focuses on part of an overall picture and not always the right part.

American Fiction (2023)

Intelligent, challenging satire mixes with moving family drama in this excellent debut

Director: Cord Jefferson

Cast: Jeffrey Wright (Dr Thelonius “Monk” Ellison), Tracee Ellis Ross (Dr Lisa Ellison), Issa Rae (Sintara Golden), Sterling K. Brown (Dr Clifford Ellison), John Ortiz (Arthur), Erika Alexander (Coraline), Leslie Uggams (Agnes Ellison), Adam Brody (Wiley), Keith David (Willy the Wonker), Okrieriete Onaodowan (Van Go Jenkins), Myra Lucretia Taylor (Lorraine), Raymond Anthony Thomas (Maynard)

Dr Theolonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is fed up. His new book is getting no traction with publishers, who want a “Black book” not the classics-inspired literary novels Monk writes. His family life is at a point of crisis: his mother (Leslie Uggams) has rapidly onset dementia, his doctor sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) is divorced and tired of being the only child looking after her, his plastic surgeon brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) is embracing his coming-out and divorce with drugs and a parade of younger boyfriends. In need of money to pay for his mother’s care, Monk pours his frustrations into writing exactly the sort of book publishers want: My Pafology, a crime-drugs-and-deadbeat filled stereotypical low-brow “Black” novel that he submits as a joke. Needless to say, the liberal white publishers come back with bank-busting advances, wowed by this “authentic Black voice” – much to Monk’s disbelief and self-loathing indignation.

This satire is the flashy clothing American Fiction dresses itself up in. In this impressively confident debut from writer-director Cord Jefferson, it frequently pulls out some whipper-sharp comic lines as it skewers the guilt-ridden pretentions of the liberal white elite, so concerned with being seen to care about embracing Black culture, that they don’t even notice they have effectively ghettoised Black culture into exactly the sort of crime-and-drugs nonsense Monk satirises in his fake novel. It’s a good joke, and the fact that Cord Jefferson’s film wears it a bit thin (the parade of self-congratulatory white people falling over themselves to praise the novel are fundamentally reprising the same joke each time – nothing new is added once you’ve got it the first time) doesn’t change that.

Interestingly, as I sat in an Oxford cinema-screening exclusively filled with white people laughing, I realised American Fiction is its own sort of meta-satire. How many people in the cinema I sat in realised they were proving the point of the film? American Fiction displays to white people a funny sketch about our own concerns to be seen to be saying and doing the right thing. We laugh at these idiots and reassure ourselves that we would never be so utterly unaware about our patronising gate-keeping, while also embodying many of the attitudes the film is skewering. We want to be seen to be right-on and laughing at the right things. It’s a neat way for Jefferson to both entertain and challenge us.

Jefferson’s film is partly about urging us to break beyond our shallow ideas of what “Black America” must be. Monk comes from an affluent middle-class family that, skin colour aside, wouldn’t like out of place in the Hamptons. His background is one of beach-house second-homes, art on the walls, lacrosse sticks in his bedroom and a family where everyone has a doctorate. He even has a devoted housekeeper, expertly played by Myra Lucretia Taylor, who’s both an honorary aunt and also a shrewd commentary on stereotypical Black servants, calling the children “Mr Monk” and “Mr Cliff”.

While Monk writes about the urban ghetto with satiric anger, it’s clear that world is almost totally alien to him. The film itself acknowledges it: in an intriguing exchange, Issa Rae’s author of a more stereotypical ‘Black’ novel (We’s All Lives in the Ghetto) even calls out Monk for us air of class-based judgement around other parts of the Black community, social commentary I would have liked the film to challenge more (The film encourages us to question Monk, a snob and arguably a slight bully, but frequently gives him a pass by contrasting him to the ridiculous and more selfish characters around him). It would have been interesting to see more of the reaction to the book from Black readers, not just white ones eager to show their credentials.

American Fiction though takes on the targets it goes for with a certain aplomb. Publishers, literary prize givers and the overtly-but-dutifully-PC are effectively skewered. It’s also one of the few books that really gives a sense of writing. Monk’s drafting of the novel sees the characters he is bringing life to appear in his study with him, parroting his dialogue and then turning to discuss character, motivation and make suggestions to the author. More of this, giving us more insight into the novel and the assumptions that underline Monk’s writing of it, would have given an interesting extra dimension to the film’s satire.

Jefferson’s clever and vibrant film suckers us in with satire, but really flourishes as a complex family drama. He offers an affecting and compassionate storyline of siblings who have grown apart due to their natural inclination to independence, distance and repressed emotion. (It’s suggested this is a trait inherited from their father, a famed surgeon with a rollcall of infidelities.) American Fiction beautifully sketches very natural portraits of siblings who know exactly how to push each other’s buttons, but also quickly fall back onto a shared language of memories and mutual experience. For all the satire, it’s as a heartfelt, small-scale family piece that the film really excels.

This is partly because it gives such wonderful opportunities to a fabulous array of actors. Jeffrey Wright, so often a supporting player quietly adding depth to a series of under-written franchise films, is excellent as Monk. Wright perfectly captures his hangdog resentments, his bitterness at not getting a fair deal and middle-age ennui. He also brings to life the pre-emptive walls Monk has built up to keep pain (and other people) out, the same intellectual distance that makes his books hard-sells. Combine that with Wright’s expert comic timing – not only his awkwardly uncomfortable shifts into his urban persona, but also his head-in-hands exasperation at the shallowness of the world – and this is a brilliant showcase for a consistently impressive actor.

Equally fine is Sterling K Brown as Monk’s frequently selfish brother Cliff, trying to enjoy life while he can – like Wright, Brown’s comic and emotional touch are spot-on. The film touches on themes of generational homophobia – their increasingly senile mother, sensitively played by Leslie Uggams, is clearly disapproving of his sexuality – but doesn’t hit this beat too hard. Tracee Ellis Ross is a breath of life-filled air as Monk’s sister while Erika Alexander gives emotional weight and depth to a slightly underwritten part as Monk’s new neighbour turned girlfriend Coraline.

American Fiction is frequently stronger when it focuses on crafting this low-key, realistic family drama, refreshingly clear of manufactured drama. What people will remember though is funny (if slightly one-note) satire – Monk even turns his story into exactly the sort of cross-racial appeal movie ready to collect awards, that you could argue American Fiction itself is. American Fiction ends with several alternative endings, each of which just made me feel Jefferson himself wasn’t sure how to end it. But, on the whole, this is a highly promising debut from Cord Jefferson, crammed with excellent dialogue and performances, which casts a fresh and urgent eye on important questions.

The Old Oak (2023)

Loach’s swansong is a passionate, if slightly out-of-time, call for peace and understanding

Director: Ken Loach

Cast: Dave Turner (TJ Ballantyne), Ebla Mari (Yara), Claire Rodgerson (Laura), Trevor Fox (Charlie), Chris McGlade (Vic), Col Tait (Eddy), Jordan Louis (Garry), Chrissie Robinson (Erica), Chris Gotts (Jaffa Cake)

The OId Oak is likely the swansong for 87-year-old Ken Loach, Britain’s leading independent film-maker and high-priest of left-wing political cinema. It’s an engaging valedictory effort, crammed with fine Loach touches. But it’s a film that feels slightly politically out-of-time, which works better not when making tub-thumbing points but as a simple plea for a love and understanding. There are worse things Loach (who I’ve sometimes found rather trying for all his brilliance) can sign off with.

In a small town near Durham, TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) is a former miner and passionate union man now struggling to keep his pub, The Old Oak, alive in the face of mounting costs. World-weary, he is roped into helping Syrian refugees settle in their new homes in the town. Many locals, bitterly feeling the town has been left behind by government, can barely hide their fury at these refugees. But TJ finds they re-ignite in him a desire to make the world a better place, particularly as he forms a fatherly friendship with Yara (Ebla Mari), a passionate young photographer, who doesn’t know if her own father is alive or dead and wants to build links between the refugees and the local community.

The bond between TJ and Yara is at the heart of this gentle film, with Loach drawing beautifully natural performances from Dave Turner (a former fireman union boss) and Ebla Mari. One of Loach’s greatest strengths has always been his ability to poetically draw out hugely endearing relationships. TJ and Yara are a perfect example, two people who recognise loss and isolation in each other. TJ’s purpose in life has gone, never finding anything to replace his union campaigns of the 80s, estranged from his family and going through the motions to keep his pub alive. Yara has lost her home and everything she has known, the only memento of her father being her treasured camera, facing hostility from all around her.

The Old Oak centres this relationship in a passionate cry for empathy between different communities. The refugees arrive lost, isolated, confused and scared, fleeing conditions far harsher than many of the people in the town could understand. Far from having an easy-ride (as many accuse them of, seeing them get free homes and furniture) they desire nothing else but to go home, but are forced to make the best of it here. It’s a perspective that never occurs to many of the townspeople, seeing them only as interlopers not victims with whom their community – that has never really recovered from pit closures – has more in common with than they suspect.

TJ and Yara both recognise this – and want to build bridges not burn them. Much of The Old Oak revolves around TJ’s efforts to convert his disused back room – a shrine to union action when the room was the heart of the mining community – into a food bank to support both refugees and local alike. Loach’s humanitarianism comes to the fore here in the brief stories we hear about the users of this food bank: the small boy who can’t believe the food is free, the sulky teenager who finds care she rarely encounters elsewhere, the proud boy promised his ‘secret’ thathe needs the food bank will be kept. These are real people, with real problems, which Loach excels at bringing to life.

Loach is equally skilled at subtly staging personal pain. The director of Kes hasn’t lost his touch with the staging of deaths of beloved pets. The emotional pull TJ’s dog Mara has over him – much of his life’s meaning coming from tending for this small dog – and the impact of her loss is beautifully played with a raw grief by Dave Turner and staged with maximum emotional impact by Loach without a stroke of sentimental manipulation. Just as the smashing of Yara’s camera in the film’s opening moments by an unpleasant yob, berating the arrival of these interlopers, carries real impact from the gentle desolation on her face. The building of relationships, instigated by mutual pain and a hope for a better future, is The Old Oak’s strongest material.

It’s the political content that never quite pulls itself into focus. Loach’s sympathy for the working-class community is clear. He demonstrates forcefully these communities have been left with almost nothing, lacking hope or purpose and facing lives of underfunded lack of opportunity. No wonder kids bristle when they see refugee children given old bikes and toys for free. Or that locals bristle at seeing houses assigned for free after they have had to scrimp and save to buy theirs. But I wonder if Loach finds himself slightly confused with some of the prejudices and lack of socialistic international brotherly love in some of the working class today.

Loach has always clinged to the idea of the workers of the world uniting. But throughout The Old Oak he tacks away from really facing the racially-based anger and prejudice in some working class circles and avoids tackling where some of this racism and xenophobia comes from. Or facing the fact that it’s more widely shared, on some level, by more people than he might care to think. (He seems more relaxed linking it to old battles – inevitably one of the most hostile is the son of a scab from the mining days.)

The film shows the angry grousing of the many of the regulars, but avoids getting under the skin of why they are angry about this invasion of their space, eventually writing them off as simply lacking true working-class solidarity. While sympathising with the struggles faced by many of the working class, as a consequence of decades of under investment and alienation from the status quo, Loach feels uncomfortable with acknowledging how some of this has fed into prejudice – or how the working-class dreams of Scargill have been corrupted into “us and them” ill-informed ranting.

Instead, Loach wants to fast-track to a picture he’s more comfortable with, showing many of the local community perform sudden 360 turns towards acceptance and brotherly love, with remaining racists written off as bad apples. The creation of an atmosphere where the younger generation are encouraged to feel xenophobic racial hatred – kids beat Yara’s brother outside of the school, filming it to post on YouTube, where it is watched with glee by some of the regulars – is unaddressed. It’s telling Loach seems certain getting everyone together for an old-fashioned socialist sing-along will help solve problems. It feels like a naïve, if touching, idea that doesn’t really ring true.

The Old Oak sometimes feels like a film from a man slightly out-of-step with the times (the many clumsy shots of phones playing YouTube videos adds to this). It’s a film made up of effective scenes – including a heartfelt sequence in Durham cathedral – but not quite drawn together into a satisfying whole, with so many plot developments kept off screen that it starts to feel it hinges on contrivance. It works best as a simple, human plea for love and understanding – but a more accurate understanding, or a willingness by Loach to really turn a harsh eye on the negative side of the working-class communities he has dedicated his life to, seems to have evaded it.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Film adaptation successfully aims for drama and emotion over showbiz bells and whistles

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Topol (Tevye), Norma Crane (Golde), Rosalind Harris (Tzeitel), Michele Marsh (Hodel), Neva Small (Chava), Molly Picon (Yente), Paul Mann (Lazar Wolf), Leonard Frey (Motel Kamzoil), Paul Michael Glaser (Perchik), Ray Lovelock (Fyedka), Zvee Scooler (Rabbi), Louis Zorich (Constable), Alfie Scopp (Avram), Howard Goorney (Nachum), Barry Dennen (Mendel), Ruth Madoc (Fruma-Sarah)

Sometimes it’s a surprise to remember Fiddler on the Roof is one of the most successful musicals of all time. A sensation when it opened on Broadway in 1964, it became the first musical to pass 3,000 performances and was soon playing all over the world. Based on a series of stories by Sholem Aleichem about life in a Jewish village in turn-of-the-century Imperial Russia, it feels like odd material for a hit. But it’s universal themes of the struggles between generations, persecution of a community and finding a balance between tradition and change struck a universal chord. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Jewison’s film version became the biggest hit of 1971.

It’s 1905 and milkman Tevye (Topol) lives his life by the traditions of his faith and Jewish community, balancing a series of competing demands like a fiddler perched on a roof playing his fiddle (it’s a tortured metaphor but it’s the title…). He has three daughters – sensible Tzeitel (Rosalind Harris), romantic Hodel (Michele Marsh) and kind Chava (Neva Small) – all of whom need marrying off, ideally to suitable husbands. But can life continue for ever when you live in a country rife with antisemitism, with pogroms as regular as clockwork?

Fiddler on the Roof was perfect material for a director as passionate about social issues as Norman Jewison. It balances comedy and theatricality very effectively with gritty realism and a sense of generational trauma at the suffering inflicted on innocent people for no reason other than their heritage. Although the film is undoubtedly too long (at nearly three hours), this does make the mood transition from gentle comedy to loss and bleakness something slow but relentless, helping it carry even more impact.

Jewison effectively translates stage musical to screen reality. Fiddler on the Roof is neatly edited, it’s opening number Tradition showing a montage of everyday-activities in the village (meat chopped, clothes sewn, pray books opened) with every action cut to mirror the song’s beat. It avoids glossy choreography in favour of something either more cinematically literate like this or more intimate, with many songs delivered in medium-shot, the camera zeroing in on the thought process and allowing the actors to give intense, emotional renditions.

Not that Jewison isn’t averse to a big theatrical number. Matchmaker, Matchmaker is the first number that could be on the Broadway stage but gets away with its moments of classical beats of choreographed movement because of the playfully-natural delivery of Harris, Marsh and Small. Jewison saves his real fire for Tevye’s Dream, liberated from the film’s realistic approach by happening in a dream. This number is pure theatre, with a chorus of dancing ghosts and a diva-ish spectre (played by Hi-de-Hi’s Ruth Madoc of all people) giving it everything they’ve got.

But Fiddler on the Roof’s main beat is realism. Oswald Morris’ Oscar-winning cinematography – its slightly sepia tone captured by stretching a pair of tights over the lens, its gauze clearly visible at points – displays a world that is, for all the vibrancy of the people living in it, frequently cold, unhospitable and difficult. That matches the attitudes of their Russian rulers, prejudiced bullies whose local representative stutters the sort of excuses about “just following orders” that are even more chilling with our knowledge of the horrors to come forty years later.

What makes the village flourish is its community. Run by tradition and faith, where (for better or worse) everyone understands their roles, duties and expectations. Fiddler on the Roof is about how far these can be pushed in changing times, structured around a man’s choice of his daughter’s husbands. Can Tevye accept a daughter choosing for herself? How about a daughter marrying a firebrand radical who wants to leave the village? How about another wanting to marry a gentile?

They are ideas initially beyond the ken of Tevye, a firm traditionalist with passing dreams of riches but who wants a world where nothing changes. To make this dyed-in-the-wool conservative a warm and entertaining figure, requires the right casting. In America, the role was associated with its originator Zero Mostel (desperate to play it on film). But Jewison felt Mostel’s personality was too large for cinema, that Mostel’s theatricality would work against the realist film he wanted. Instead, he cast the Israeli actor playing the role in London’s West End, Chaim Topol.

It was a masterstroke (much as it crushed Mostel and outraged fans). Topol, like Yul Brynner in The King and I, would define his career with the role, playing it over 3000 times on stage in a series of productions over almost forty years (eventually Harris would graduate from playing his daughter to his wife!). Astonishingly he was only 35 in 1971 – a brilliant combination of make-up and Topol’s gift for physical acting makes him feel 25 years older – and Fiddler, for a large part, relies on his charisma and charm. Topol is as comfortable with the conversational address to the camera – which dominates much of the film’s opening – as he is with the world-weary sadness and frustrated anger Tevye responds to the changing world around him with.

Topol’s performance works in perfect tandem with Jewison’s aim to ground and avoid flights of whimsy or vaudeville comedy. The harsh conditions don’t dampen the warmth in the community – wonderfully captured in the marvel that greets the arrival of tailor Mostel’s (an endearing, Oscar-nominated, Leonard Frey) sewing machine – and means the Tsarist repression and gangs of Cossacks who ride in, torches in hand, to burn and pillage carry real impact.

Jewison’s film carries foreknowledge of the Holocaust throughout, not dodging the knowledge that communities like this would be destroyed under Nazism. The film’s closing exodus may bring hope for Tevye and family (bound for New York) but also brings death to those who speak of heading to Krakow. It’s part of understands why tradition is so important to Tevye: as the imaginary fiddler follows Tevye’s family on the road, we understand the link to a shared cultural past is what gives identity and hope to a people facing persecution at every turn for thousands of years.

Fiddler on the Roof mines it’s material for emotion and character over showbiz bells and whistles. While it undoubtedly takes too long to explore in depth its slight plot, its length does conversely add even more impact to its closing look to the future. A fine musical adaptation.

Othello (1952)

Welles distinctive Shakespeare epic is a masterpiece of turning the Bard into film

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Orson Welles (Othello), Michéal Mac Liammóir (Iago), Robert Coote (Roderigo), Suzanne Cloultier (Desdemona), Hilton Edwards (Brabantio), Nicholas Bruce (Ludovico), Michael Laurence (Cassio), Fay Compton (Emilia)

In the early 1950s Orson Welles was in the wilderness. After the implosion of his career in Hollywood, he was grifting a living in Europe, juggling multiple ventures and paying for things (or not) with cheques from quick film cameos. But the fire was still there. Welles wanted a project which he would have complete control over. Shakespeare was the ideal collaborator: both free and dead, here was a man who offered an ocean of ideas and not a word of criticism, who would make no demands he re-cut the picture. A marriage of convenience but it led to cinematic triumph.

Othello would be an Welles production from top-to-bottom. Largely self-funded, a few investors chucked in liras for a share of profits (you can imagine Welles as Shakespeare in Love’s Fennyman grinning that was fine because “there never are any”) it became a labour of love over years. Welles begged, borrowed and flat-out stole film stock and camera equipment from assorted productions, kept costumes from for-the-money roles he did to keep the operation flowing (famously his Othello coat was a costume which he’d requested a fur-lining added to, that went unseen in the film it was made for but came rolling out in Othello). Actors were summoned, sometimes months apart, to shoot. Scenes would start filming in one location and finish filming months later somewhere completely different. Welles sat in the middle holding the entire film in his head.

It’s extraordinary that Othello is even coherent. The fact that it’s also a masterpiece of film Shakespeare is a miracle. But, cut loose from the bonds of Hollywood studio execs and not giving a damn about the bills (he had the cheek of genius so never picked up a tab) allowed Welles the scope to experiment and do things “his way”. Othello is the most purely “Welles film” since Citizen Kane, and a tour-de-force of cinematic inventiveness with poverty and lack of resources drawing the best out of a director who marshalled all his gifts of editing and lighting to make resourceful use of limited resources. It’s guerrilla film-making that looks like an epic.

What you could argue Othello is not is a truly original look at Shakespeare’s play – or really an actor’s piece. Welles’ passions for Shakespeare always felt as much about having a grand canvas of poetic language to impose his own vision on, cutting and changing as needed. Thematically, Othello is pretty much what you would expect. Welles’ Othello is the noble Moor pushed into a spiral of jealousy. Michéal Mac Liammóir’s (the finest performance) Iago is a dastardly liar, with faint hints of sexually motived envy. Desdemona is as pure as the driven snow, Emilia a faithful servant, Rodrigo a simpering idiot, Cassio a pretty boy. Our sympathies lie firmly where Shakespeare would expect.

Everything that is unique about the film lies in its telling. Othello is a breath-takingly beautiful film, which uses its locations to astonishing effect. Column lined castle rooms and towering walls create caverns of light and shadow. Welles uses the fixed points of columns to add a dizzying level of speed to camera movements that see these columns whip past the frame. The shadows of grills are frequently cast across faces and light creates looming shadows across the floor. Welles plays into this with the creation of light pools, concentrating it on single fixed points, often faces, with the surroundings bathed in black. The film presents real locations in defiantly expressionistic ways, giving each of them an elemental power that heightens the tragedy.

It’s a film made up of stunning set-pieces. It’s opening funeral cortege – like Citizen Kane, Othello starts at the end with Othello and Desdemona dead and Iago in chains – follows a march over city walls, playing out in striking shadow against the brightness of the sun, with booming, Gothic music giving the sequence an imposing sense of inevitability. Iago is paraded by a mob and placed in a cage, lifted above the city wall (this same cage frequently appears throughout the movie – including, once, having Iago walk nonchalantly under it – as a grim reminder of where this is heading). It’s a perfect marriage of sound and music, disguising the small scale with cinematic force.

Taking advantage of limitations time-and-again makes Othello great. Another striking sequence was born from necessity. With most of the costumes impounded for non-payment of shipping bills, the attempted murder of Cassio is re-staged in a Turkish bath (who needs costumes when we have towels!) a decision that turns the sequence into a masterpiece of light through steam, increased by the frenetic energy Welles shoots the sequence with culminating in its Lang-inspired super-imposing as Iago thrusts his sword down into the floorboards to dispatch Rodrigo.

Othello is frequently filled with imaginative camera angles. Often characters observe others from great heights – twice through sky lights, starring down at conflicts, murders and suicides. Iago and Rodrigo spy on Othello’s gondola romance with Desdemona from a distant bridge. The ramparts of Cyprus provide towering angles, over soldiers or wave-crashed rocks below. The camera also takes a number of low-angle positions, making characters (often Othello) tower over us. Clever angles and perspective work create whole ships out of sheets of fabric and basic models.

It’s also a triumph of editing. Welles assembled the film from a never-ending supply of fragments. Frequently actors appear with their backs to the camera while we hear them speak – as Welles said, a sure sign the actual actor wasn’t there. Like few other films, Othello feels like a film excavated from its shooting. It’s a film almost constantly in motion, rarely stopping to focus on an actor delivering a line (Othello’s first speech, parts of Iago’s speeches and Emilia’s speech to Desdemona being the main moments the film focuses on actor’s delivery – no doubt connected to those three actors being the ones Welles trusted).

Away from that, the camera often fast cuts and delivers scenes in motion, with actors speaking off camera as we focus on the events around them. This means the dialogue is repeatedly chopped, changed and trimmed to meet the needs of the scene. It helps make the film even more pacey and frighteningly interior – conversations become snatched and fast, words flung from angles we cannot see, ramping up the paranoia. Large chunks of it is redubbed by Welles himself – a light version of his distinctive tones clearly emerges from Robert Coote’s mouth and Michael Laurence’s Cassio has a familiar cadence. In some cuts, Welles also replaced Suzanne Cloultier’s voice with Gudron Ure (with whom he played the role on stage).

If there is a major flaw in Othello it’s probably the acting, frequently looking under rehearsed, with Welles himself a leading culprit. His Othello is underpowered and feels under-defined. There is little sense of an interior to his mind and Welles’ surprisingly somnolent delivery tends to crush much of the emotion. It’s hard not to think Welles was so focused on juggling every other factor, that he compromised on his acting. Only Mac Liammóir, Compton and Edwards look truly comfortable with their roles – and even they offer traditional readings.

But Othello is about turning Shakespeare to cinema and if Shakespeare himself is slightly sacrificed in the push, it doesn’t detract from the stunning theatrical beauty we get instead. Othello becomes a lean, pacey thriller, crammed with stunning imagery and imaginative flourishes (Rodrigo’s faithful dog, following sadly after his master, is a gorgeously little playful touch). It’s a film where light and shadow are major plays, where footsteps in subterranean water pools create ripples of motion and echoes of noise, that shows the greatness that can be born from necessity. It’s one of the greatest Shakespeare films.

Caché (2005)

Haneke’s fascinating puzzle is a profound and challenging modern masterpiece

Director: Michael Haneke

Cast: Daniel Auteuil (Georges Laurent), Juliette Binoche (Anne Laurent), Maurice Bénichou (Majid), Lester Makedonsky (Pierrot Laurent), Walid Afkir (Majid’s son), Annie Girardot (Georges’s mother), Daniel Duval (Pierre), Bernard Le Coq (Georges’s boss), Nathalie Richard (Mathilde)

Is any film more aptly named than Caché? Haneke’s film keeps its cards so close to its chest, it’s entirely possible revelations remain hidden within it in plain sight. Caché famously ends with a final shot where a possibly crucial meeting between two people we’ve no reason to suspect know each other plays out in the frame so subtly many viewers miss it. It shows how Haneke’s work rewards careful, patient viewing (and Caché is partially about the power of watching and being watched), but also how unknowable the past can be. It’s a chilling and engrossing film that fascinates but never fully reveals itself.

Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) lives a life of success. A wealthy background, host of a successful TV literary debate show and living in an affluent suburb of Paris, he’s married to publisher Anne (Juliette Binoche) and father to young champion swimmer Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). But there’s a serpent in his Garden of Eden. Georges and Anne are plagued by a stream of videos arriving at their house. These show long, static shots of their home and are accompanied by crude, graphic drawings. Someone is watching their house and the dread that this could escalate at any time is consuming them. But does Georges know more – do the messages chime with guilty memories in his past?

Haneke’s film is a multi-layered masterpiece, a haunting exploration (free of clear answers) into the things we prefer to forget, the hidden horrors we supress. It’s a film all about the shame and guilt buried amongst the everyday. Haneke even shoots the film on hi-definition video so that the surveillance footage of Georges and his home visually merges with the ‘real’ images of the couple. Within that, Caché starts to unpack the hinterland we hold as individuals (and, quite possibly as entire nations) of the guilts of our past that keep bubbling to the surface to bite us.

Caché is shot through with Haneke’s genius for menace and veiled threat. Can you imagine anything creepier than a camera set up outside your home, filming everything you do – but never knowing where it is? It’s an invasion of privacy that is insidious and covered in the additional menace that, at any time, it could escalate to something worse. The creeping, invasive tyranny of surveillance is in every inch of Caché, its omnipresence giving every interaction the feeling of being watched (something Haneke plays up – watch a man watching Anne when she sits in a café with a friend).

So gradually the book-lined world of the Laurents becomes a base under siege, a feeling amplified by Haneke’s mix of smooth camera movements adrift from establishing shots: constantly the camera glides through a space where we feel we neither truly understand the geography or are confident about the time. It’s accentuated by the window-free room the Laurents largely inhabit. In fact, their whole home feels window free, with curtains frequently drawn and rooms plunged into darkness, the family throwing up a shield to protect them from the outside world.

Or is it to cut them off from the unpleasant facts of life? It becomes clear Georges has built a world around himself, where he is the hero and all traces of the unpleasant or disreputable in his past have been dismissed to the dark recesses of memory, never to be accessed. Played with a bull-headed arrogance by Daniel Auteuil, under his assurance Georges is prickly and accusatory, liable to lash out verbally (and perhaps physically, considering the threat he carries in two key scenes). Auteuil masters in the little moments of startled panic and stress that cross Georges’ face, a man so used to a world that matches his needs, that anything questioning that is met with rejection.

It’s why he lies to Anne about his growing suspicions about the source of the tapes. The cartoons hint at a series of (deeply shameful) interactions, when he was a child in the 60s, with a young Algerian boy, Majid, who his parents considered adopting after the death of Majid’s parents. It was Georges lies that forced this boy out of his perfect farm-house into the cold-arms of the unfeeling French orphanage system. This is the original sin of Georges’ life, arguably the foundation of his success – a guilty secret that so haunts and disgusts him, even the slightest mention of it brings out the muscular aggression he otherwise keeps below the surface.

Of course, it’s hard not to see an echo of France’s colonial past. One of the things that works so well with Caché, is that this subtext is there without Haneke ever stressing it. Just as Georges’ lies forced Majid into a life of depression and misery, so France’s treatment of Algeria is the terrible shame the nation would rather forget. Majid’s parents died in a famously brutal stamping out of an Algerian protest in Paris in October 1961 (the deaths of over 200 people at the hands of French government forces only came to light decades later). The anger many show when presented with inconvenient, horrible past deeds (both personal and national), only feels more relevant today with our culture battles over history.

Georges sees himself as a victim of a vicious campaign. But, when Georges meets Majid, played with startling vulnerability by Maurice Bénichou, he seems light years away from the sort of man who could possibly be capable of such a campaign. Indeed, when a video of Georges encounter with Majid is widely shared, it is Georges (as even he admits) who appears the bully and aggressor. Majid has been demonised in Georges’ memory – in his nightmare he becomes an axe-wielding monster-child – but he’s an innocent, who had everything taken from him in a micro-colonialist coup carried out by a 6-year-old Georges. A coup the adult Georges has let himself forget, making him little different from France itself. (We are reminded the cycle continues, with constant background news footage of Iraq, ignored by the Laurents.)

The mistakes repeat themselves, but they don’t trouble the complacent middle-classes who benefit from them. Georges will even use his influence to have Majid and his son bundled into a police van. Of course it leads to an outburst that will shake this world up. Haneke’s films have always been realistic when it comes to the visceral horror of violence, and Caché contains an act of such shocking violence that it will leave the viewer as speechless and distressed as the witnesses.

And still the question hangs: who? It could be anyone. At one-point Georges storms out of his front door to confront the mystery video-sender, only to return to find a video wedged in the door. It’s literally impossible for this video to be placed without him seeing it done. Haneke is so uninterested in the whodunnit part that, perhaps, he’s implying the perpetrator is the director himself, using the mechanics of film-making to entrap the guilty parties. It fits with the coldly intellectual steel-trap part of Haneke’s mind, the part that uses films (like Funny Games) to tell off and preach. What other director would be more likely to set himself up as unseen antagonist in the film?

And does Georges learn anything? He will continue to confront characters who challenge his world view and dispatch (like nations) his guilt to the recesses of memory. His begrudging peace with his wife – a superbly restrained Juliette Binoche, increasingly resentful at her husband’s secrets – seems built on the shaky ground of their continuing mutual comfort. And suspicions linger over his son, an increasingly hostile figure who (just perhaps) is learning more about the flaws of his parents than they would be comfortable with.

Of course, this might all be open to interpretation from multiple angles. After all the film is called Caché. Haneke has hidden enough subtle implications in it that it can reward analysis from multiple angles. Shot with his characteristic discipline that suggests a dark, creeping fear behind every corner, it’s a masterclass in suggestion and paranoia. Brilliantly unsettling and constantly reworking itself before your eyes, it’s a masterpiece.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Scorsese tries to tell an Indigenous story – but from the persecutor’s perspective

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Ernest Burkhart), Robert De Niro (William King Hale), Lily Gladstone (Mollie Kyle), Jesse Plemons (Thomas Bruce White), Tantoo Cardinal (Lizzie Q), John Lithgow (Peter Leaward), Brendan Fraser (WS Hamilton), Cara Jade Myers (Anna Brown), JaNae Collins (Reta), Jillian Dion (Minnie), Jason Isbell (Bill Smith), Louis Cancelmi (Kelsie Morrison), William Belleau (Henry Roan)

In the 19^th century, the American government forcibly shifted Indigenous nations from their rich, fertile lands to unwanted backwater reservations. The Osage nation was moved from Missouri to Oklahoma, land no-one wanted… Until oil was discovered there in the early 20th century. Suddenly hugely rich, the Osage nation’s land once again became the focus of white Americans, as keen to dispossess these Indigenous people as they were in the last century. This ruthless grab of oil rights – and the brutal exploitation and murder of dozens of Osage people – is the theme of Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon.

Ernest Buckhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns from war service (as a cook) to live with his uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro) in Oklahoma. Hale lives on a ranch in the heart of reservation country and has built himself a powerful local presence by acting as benefactor of the Osage people. But Hale is, in fact, a ruthless sociopath who smiles cheerily at his neighbours, while plotting ceaselessly to steal their oil rights. Hale persuades Buckhart to marry Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), whose family own headrights. While the gullible and easily-led Buckhart truly loves Mollie, he also willingly takes an active part for years in Hale’s schemes to murder the rest of Mollie’s family, so that their oil rights will collect with Mollie – and, in effect, with Hale.

Scorsese’s film is certainly a rich tapestry, but also a curiously mixed viewing experience. It feels at times like what it is – a film that dramatically changed its focus several times during its development, eventually reaching towards bringing the Indigenous experience to the screen, only to find that reach exceeding its grasp. The original book by David Grann focused on the FBI investigation into the crimes with DiCaprio originally set to play FBI investigator White (now played by Jesse Plemons). DiCaprio instead was drawn to the role of Buckhart, with the film repositioned to focus on the killers rather than the investigators or victims. During Scorsese’s extensive work with the Osage nation, the filmmaker became increasingly compelled by the exploitation of the Indigenous people.

Watching the film, it feels like a late swerve in focus Scorsese isn’t quite able to deliver on. However, some of the film’s most compelling content is its commentary on the Indigenous experience and the brutal exploitation and murders by a white community that sees the Osage people as second-class human beings. As a sort of twisted natural progression from encroaching on land a hundred years ago, people like Hale talk of marrying into Indigenous families, breeding out the blood and turning these communities into extensions of their own white families so they can control their wealth.

Over the course of the film, Scorsese carefully shows community gatherings becoming more and more dominated by white faces. Even tribal functions and ceremonies become awash with white faces, staring on with paternalistic, unfeeling smiles. From an early montage of Indigenous people enjoying their unexpected wealth (in a mix of historical and recreations photos and film stock), we progress ever more sharply into seeing whites take over. These fall into two firm categories: Masonic pinstripe types who stick together to cover-up crimes, and trailer trash and inept lesser-family members who are farmed out like cattle to soak up Osage wealth.

Scorsese’s film doesn’t shirk from depicting the casual racism of this community. A KKK march heads through the town. When Hale attends the cinema, he first sees newsreel footage of the Tulsa massacre then The Birth of the Nation. A montage of suspicious Osage deaths is marked by a Mollie voiceover stressing the lack of investigation. Osage oil owners are dispatched with increasing blatantness, as pretence of staged suicides and accidents degenerates into shootings, executions and finally bombs. Hale rants about the need to “take back control” and coldly states that they can escape any retribution because, fundamentally, no one cares or will remember.

But yet… this is still a film where we see a traumatic event happen to a group, but which focuses overwhelmingly on the perpetrators rather than the victims. I find myself agreeing with one reviewer that it feels at times like Get Out, told from the perspective of the white people. Scorsese’s film’s main beat feels like regret and guilt and perhaps what it needed was anger. For all its noble efforts, it’s hard to escape the fact that Mollie is the only Osage character in its epic runtime who is made to feel like a character, and she remains a person things happen to. The other Osage characters are, by and large, victims – Mollie’s sisters or William Belleau as Hale’s drunken, depressed neighbour – people who pop up in order to be dispatched.

I was reminded somewhat of The Searchers. In 1956, a film that criticised a John Wayne hero as an unpleasant racist was a big statement – but in a film where the Indigenous characters were still faceless nobodies, villains or comic relief. It’s similar here: Killers of the Flower Moon shows us the vileness of its white villains, but doesn’t really give us a full Indigenous perspective. And it feels, in 2023, we should do better. Even the impact and workings of reservations, land displacements and white-guardians isn’t explained in the film. Gladstone is marvellous – her eyes are full of suppressed pain, suspicion, fury and glimmers of the possibilities of forgiveness – but her character remains somewhat of a cipher, never quite receiving the exploration the killers of her family receive.

It feels like a realisation made during the filming, but without the time to deliver (after all the stars are playing the killers). Scorsese gives two beautiful Osage-themed bookends (and his carefulness around avoiding cultural appropriation is to be applauded), but the Osage themselves become passengers in their own story, allowed only a few brief moments to protest or express their anger. In a film that stretches over 200 leisurely minutes, more really should have been done.

Saying that, the film is blessed with two wonderful performances by Di Caprio and De Niro. DiCaprio, his mouth stuffed with rotten teeth, his body stumbling from scene-to-scene, expertly walks a tightrope between weakling and coward. Does he realise the moral morass he has climbed into? Or does he not care? How does he manage the mental gymnastics of plotting the deaths of his wife and her family and yet also convince himself that he is protecting her? It’s a fascinating performance. De Niro gives his greatest performance in 25 years as a polite, gentle man who warmly means every word of his friendliness but is also capable of acts of shocking murder and violence towards ‘his friends’ without even batting an eyelid. De Niro’s avuncular presence chills noticeably over the course of the film, brilliantly letting the egotistical dark heart leak out into the surface.

There is a lot to respect about Scorsese’s film, not least the way the late Robbie Robertson’s heartbeat-inspired score constantly creates an air of menace. It’s beautifully filmed – even if it is incredibly stately in its huge runtime – and it’s trying, very hard, to address an under-addressed issue in American culture. But it fumbles the ball because, for all its good intent, it still tells the story of an Indigenous group through the eyes of white people. Worse – their white persecutors. A braver, better (and shorter) film would have centred Gladstone’s Mollie rather than making her, at times, a passenger on a very long ride. Killers of the Flower Moon strains to make amends to Indigenous Americans – but instead it feels like a long guilt-trip for its white film-makers.

Babel (2006)

Iñárritu’s grandiose film aims for a big statement about humanity, but settles for something simpler

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Cast: Brad Pitt (Richard Jones), Cate Blanchett (Susan Jones), Gael Garcia Bernal (Santiago), Rinko Kikuchi (Chieko Wataya), Adriana Barraza (Amelia Hernandez), Kōji Yakusho (Yasujio Wataya), Boubker Ait El Caid (Yussef), Said Tarchani (Ahmed), Mustapha Rachidi (Abdullah), Elle Fanning (Debbie Jones), Nathan Gamble (Mike Jones), Clifton Collins Jnr (Border police officer), Peter Wight (Tom), Harriet Walter (Lily), Michael Maloney (James), Satoshi Nikaido (Detective Kenji Mamiya)

“Only connect” was the epigraph of Forster’s Howards End. It’s an idea Alejandro González Iñárritu attempts to bring to the screen in Babel. Across three countries, he shows how small events in one plotline have drastic impacts in others. It makes for an undeniably beautiful film-making experience – but also a film straining for import, that hectors and belabours obvious points and relies far more on random events occurring due to foolishness and stupidity than the vagaries of fate or humanity.

In Morocco, Abdullah (Mustapha Rachidi) buys a rifle from a neighbour to protect his goats. His young sons practice with it by taking pot-shots at a tourist bus. They hit Susan (Cate Blanchett), whose husband Richard (Brad Pitt) is left desperately trying to get her medical help in a remote Moroccan village. The incident means their nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza) with whom they have left with their children in the US, has to take them with her to Mexico for her son’s wedding, where events at the border spiral out of control. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, the original owner of the rifle Yasujio Wataya (Kōji Yakusho) struggles as a single father with his deaf teenage daughter Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), who is dealing with grief and her burgeoning, frustrated sexuality.

I often find Iñárritu’s films a mixed bag. Babel is no different. There is a lot to admire here. There’s also just as much to be frustrated about. First the good. Iñárritu does an excellent job intercutting a film which moves from location to location and (it becomes clear) timeline to timeline, without ever confusing the audience or revealing plot details in one timeline until it becomes vital in another. We discover one entire storyline of the film takes place not in tandem but after the events of another plotline (which concludes where the other begins). The film is beautifully shot by Rodrigo Prieto, with Morocco unexpectantly filmed with a perfectly fitting dusty blue hue, Mexico in warmer tints that become oppressive and Tokyo with a sort of neon-noir.

The film’s first half does an excellent job of world and relationship building. Abdullah’s two young sons are head-strong, rash children entrusted with a weapon they lack the maturity to handle. The family’s desperation to hide their responsibility for the tragedy they have inflicted on Richard and Susan becomes terrifyingly engrossing – not least when we see the slap-and-trigger happy casual-brutality of the investigating forces. Similarly, Brad Pitt does a sterling job as a husband driven to ever-increasing desperation, impotent rage and grief as a husband powerless to help his dying wife in a remote village with poor communication and innumerable cultural barriers.

Iñárritu turns an intriguing eye on Mexico as a land met with looks of both wonder and terror by the Amelia two young charges. Young Mike is enthralled by the sights and sounds then sickened into tears when a game of ‘catch the chicken’ ends in a brutal decapitation. Amelia’s family is warm, friendly but also prone to thoughtless impulsiveness, made worse by a justifiable feeling of persecution from their wealthy neighbours across the border. The wedding though, for all the flashes of cultural confusion, is a vibrant and joyful event shot with a lyrical beauty.

The same poetic beauty extends to the Tokyo plotline, which is a sort of pilgrim’s progress for Chieko (excellently played in a superb mix of vulnerable and resentful by an Oscar-nominated Rinko Kikuchi) through a long few days in Tokyo. From feuding, aggressively, with referees at a volleyball, to clumsy attempts to seduce boys (alienated by her deafness) and, in one staggeringly awkward scene, a very much-older (and horrified) dentist, Iñárritu follow’s Chieko stumbling attempt to discover herself, leaving the revelation of the causes of her ennui for a final, near wordless sequence. Iñárritu experiments with sound, putting us into Chieko’s deaf isolation by draining sound in and out (noticeably in a late-night disco).

Communication and language are barriers for all the characters – hence the film’s grandiose title. Grandiose feels the word, as Babel makes a big swing making a relatively simplistic statement: the world would be a better place if we all listened to each other. Unfortunately, the script repeatedly falls back on tropes and narrative contrivances to make this message work. Two of the storylines – Mexico and the Moroccan family – hinge on aggressive, macho cops as disrupters. In a series of character developments I just don’t buy, Richard’s bleeding-out wife is treated as a tedious inconvenience by a busload of Brit tourists who essentially demand Richard leaves his wife to die so they can back to their hotel for dinner (I literally cannot imagine an entire busload of people behaving like this – god knows how the world responds to them when Susan’s bleeding out in a Moroccan village inexplicably becomes a major world news story).

There is also a half-hearted attempt to suggest guns are destructive forces. While it’s true a rifle purchase is the instigating factor – and Iñárritu makes a lot of one of the kids smashing up the rifle in a scene of heavy-handed import – it doesn’t really fly. Honestly, the main message I started to take out was that immature or stressed people make stupid, impulsive decisions in stressful situations. The kids shooting live ammunition at a tourist bus is an appalling act of immaturity. Santiago – a character set up as a time bomb from the start in an edgy performance by Gael Garcia Bernal – has a disastrous, impulsive meltdown bred out of booze and bravado at the Mexican border, that ruins the lives of everyone around him. Stranded in the desert, Amelia will make an equally disastrously poor decision with terrible consequences she can never turn back.

Eventually, Babel starts to feel like a film full of contrivances that mistakes ambitious range and variety of locations for actual depth. Essentially it has very little to say about the human condition other than looking for a little love or understanding. The four plot lines are fairly tenuously linked together, and impact each other only in the sense of each instigates the events of another. The film fails to create a tapestry of cause and effect and fails to weave its events back together for a conclusion. For all there are moments of effective tension and drama, and great deal of visual and visceral beauty, everything feels a little too forced, a little too on-the-nose.

That’s not to say there aren’t great performances or moments of great flair from Iñárritu. Adriana Barraza is fabulous as a proud mother and caring nanny, driven to her absolute limits. But it’s not as complex, revelatory or revealing as it thinks it is. It makes for a film that looks and feels like epic but carries only a simple and reassuring message.

Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee’s masterpiece is still frighteningly relevant today – and stunning film-making

Director: Spike Lee

Cast: Spike Lee (Mookie), Danny Aiello (Sal), Ossie Davis (Da Mayor), Ruby Dee (Mother Sister), Giancarlo Esposito (Buggin’ Out), Bill Nunn (Radio Raheem), John Turturro (Pino), Richard Edson (Vito), Roger Guenveur Smith (Smiley), Rosie Perez (Tina), Joie Lee (Jade), Steve White (Ahmad), Martin Lawrence (Cee), Leonard L. Thomas (Punchy), Christa Rivers (Ella), Robin Harris (Sweet Dick Willie), Paul Benjamin (ML), Frankie Faison (Coconut Sid), Samuel L. Jackson (Mr Señor Love Daddy)

When it was released in 1989 it was like a punch in the solar plexus. Spike Lee’s third joint was a powerful, dynamic and deeply thought-provoking and challenging piece of cinema. This demanded you sat up, took notice and understood that underneath the happy lies America tells itself, the country was deeply divided and a tinderbox waiting for a spark. Perhaps the most painful – and shocking – thing about Do the Right Thing is how little has changed. You could make the same points today and the film’s tragic ending in police brutality, violence and uneasy truce could be repeated in the headlines as readily tomorrow as it was in 1989.

Set on one swelteringly hot day in New York City, Lee’s film is a kaleidoscope of diverse lives in the predominately Black neighbourhood of Bedford–Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Just about the only people here not Black are Pizzeria owner Sal (Danny Aiello) and his sons Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edson). Working for Sal is Mookie (Spike Lee), drifting through life but determined to get paid, who has a son with Tina (Rosie Perez). In this neighbourhood anything could be a spark. Perhaps it will be Buggin’ Out’s (Giancarlo Esposito) objection to Sal’s pizza parlour ‘wall of fame’ being exclusively Italian? Perhaps the bored kids schlepping around the street? Maybe imposing Radio Raheem’s (Bill Nunn) ghetto blaster constantly pumping out ‘Fight the Power’? Or will it because of the Korean convenience store owners, or the police officers who ride into the neighbourhood like it’s a war zone?

What’s really striking about Spike Lee’s film is it is neither polemic nor hand-wringing exercise. Perhaps what really outraged people in 1989 when it was released – let’s not forget it’s the year the vaguely similarly themed but deeply reassuring Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture – was that it offered no answers. Instead, it holds a mirror up to America for a long, uncomfortable, look. While other films presented racism as a journey towards peace, Do the Right Thing shows it as a systemic problem with no easy solutions. Any reconcilement is tentative or grudging at best, few lessons are learned and there is very little sign that this won’t all happen again.

Lee’s film is an electrically confident piece of film-making. It’s also amazing what a glorious mish-mash of styles Do the Right Thing is. You get everything from music video to action set-piece, kitchen-sink drama to comic book dutch angles, soft porn to comedy, odd-couple romance… Almost every scene as it moves around its smorgasbord of characters takes an influence from a different genre, held loosely together by Samuel L Jackson’s 24/7 DJ Mr Señor Love Daddy. But never once does one scene jar up against another or does the general impact of the film feel blunted.

Perhaps it works because the entire film is awash in the messy unpredictability of life and the simmering resentments hidden below the surface. Sal and his sons are awkward fits in the neighbourhood, legacies of a bygone age – a whole other generation of usurped immigrants – keeping an uneasy truce with their customers. Not that there are obvious lines drawn here: John Turturro (in an excellent performance of great depth) plays a racially aggressive man, fascinated with Black culture. Sal, superbly played by Danny Aiello, balances genuine affection for some customers with baseball-grabbing antagonism for others.

It’s sometimes hard to tell what they might face, as the Black community is widely disparate in its feelings. (Spike Lee has written critically of the tendency by some to lump “Black people” together into a homogenous lump). There are stark generational. Da Mayor – a superb Ossie Davis, stumbling, well-spoken and ineffective – and Mother Sister (a sensational Ruby Dee), the neighbourhood matriarch, belong to an older era of Civil Rights, Malcolm X and MLK. The younger generations – those kids bombing loudly around the neighbourhood, including a young Martin Lawrence – don’t give a toss about their legacies and are barely interested in the world around them. Others, like Buggin’ Out (a firecracker Esposito), speak a semi-coherent collection of political phrases, mixed in with righteous but largely pointless anger about trivial events, that most people ignore.

In the middle of all of this, Lee himself plays Mookie, an everyman character for Black America, young, drifting, uncertain about where he is going. Mookie shirks fatherly duties – Tina literally has to order a pizza from Sal to get him to visit – and often does little more than punch-clock. But he also offers a fine, level-headed understanding of the various personal and community clashes around him. He’s an effective sounding board for every character, listening carefully and constantly torn about what doing the right thing might mean.

There is a sort of brilliantly brave ambiguity around Do the Right Thing. There are no heroes, only people, warts and all. Casual fights are picked but not seen through – like Buggin’ Out confronting John Savage’s well-to-do commuter for scuffing his trainers. The kids demean Da Mayor as a drunk wash-out who never made anything of his life (perhaps, subconsciously, worried his present is their future). Racial prejudice works every way – in one of Lee’s many flourishes, several characters (Mookie, Pino, a Hispanic man, a police officer and Sonny the Korean shop-owner) break the foruth wall to speak a flurry of racial insults to Italians, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and white Americans, giving vent to private feelings, but also showing how close these are to the surface.

Do the Right Thing is made up of a series of brilliantly sketched vignettes as its many characters mix and mingle over the long day, some sharing insights, some butting heads. The film zigs as much as it zags – Mookie confronts Pino’s racism not with anger but calm, reasoned discussion. Our three breeze-shooting old timers are as irritated at the loud and brash kids as they resent the cops. Heavy-set Radio Raheem (a stoic Bill Nunn) puts aside his ghetto-blaster to talk about love beating hate. That ghetto blaster will exact a heavy toll.

It’s at the heart of the explosion of violence that caps the film. It’s tragic that the police violence which ends the film – and the resulting riot – is still no stranger today. A troublemaker meets a death far exceeding their crime by being effectively lynched by the police in a choke hold (Lee cuts to his feet twitching in the air, as he is lifted by a truncheon around the neck). This police murder (and the police flee the scene, taking the body – and the evidence – with them) slams the political message home. People are flawed, tensions are high – but no one does anything even vaguely approaching deserving death, and the fact the authorities ‘resolve’ problems through brutal force is everything that’s wrong with America.

But Lee is not one to excuse all violence. The mob – and it becomes a mob, with Lee not afraid to show cash tills being looted as well as furious, righteous anger – nearly turns on the Korean shop next, seemingly for no other offence than being foreign. People we would never expect, scream passionately for the world to burn. But then, Lee also makes the key point: when the world is as unjust and dangerous as this, isn’t the right thing sometimes to let out a primal scream. After all, what is a building when weighed against a man’s life?

What is the right thing to do? It’s a complex message the film grapples with. Mookie arguably starts the riot – or at least directs its anger – with a window smash. But by doing so, he also side with his community. In many ways it is the right thing to do. After all, Sal started the spiral by responding to intense, loud baiting with a flurry of racism. Mookie is, in some ways, a fixed labourer – Sal, for all his affection for Mookie, can’t imagine a world where Mookie won’t be working in his pizza parlour – and siding with the crowd is a defiant assertion of his independence and identity.

It’s just a flavour of the complex and challenging ideas in a film that avoids easy answers. As Sal and Mookie, the next day, stand in the ashes neither of them willing to forgive and forget, but also neither of them wanting to return to violence, they stand like representatives of America, struggling to process its race-related history. It’s a million miles away from the easy messages and gentle fixes of liberal Hollywood. Tension here settles for coexistence – but acknowledges that explosions of rage and anger are an inevitable part of that. That’s not a message America wanted to hear in 1989 – hell its barely one it wants to hear today – but it’s a powerful part of this landmark masterpiece.

Empire of Light (2022)

Mendes passion project is strangely free of passion in a film that misses the targets it aims for

Director: Sam Mendes

Cast: Olivia Colman (Hilary Small), Micheal Ward (Stephen Murray), Tom Brooke (Neil), Toby Jones (Norman), Colin Firth (Donald Ellis), Tanya Moodie (Delia), Hannah Onslow (Janine), Crystal Clarke (Ruby), Monica Dolan (Rosemary Bates), Sara Stewart (Brenda Ellis)

In 1981, Hilary Small (Oliva Colman) is the duty manager of grand, old-fashioned, Margate sea-front cinema The Empire. A quiet, lonely spinster who’s never seen any of the cinema’s movies, she carefully performs her duties at work which include servicing the sexual needs of owner Mr Ellis (Colin Firth). However, her life changes when young Black man Stephen Murray (Micheal Ward) starts as an usher. The two strike up a friendship that becomes a relationship – but runs into conflict as Stephen struggles with growing racism and Hilary suffers a relapse into schizophrenia.

Empire of Light has been described as personal passion project by Sam Mendes. Bizarrely it feels like a film which all passion has been strained out of. It’s a functional and safe film, scripted with little inspiration and given life largely by the charisma of its two leads.

Empire of Light partially frames itself as a love-letter to cinema-going and film. Strangely it hardly engages with either of these. In fact, it could (with minor script changes) be set just as easily in a department store, petrol station or bingo hall. This is a film where no-one talks about cinema, watches a film or even seems interested. Toby Jones’ projectionist explains the mechanics of his trade in what feels like a carefully scripted explanation of the workings of a machine the writer knows nothing about. For all the beauty of Roger Deakins’ photography, there is no moment of magic that you might expect from a director who claims to be enamoured with the medium.

Hilary finally decides to watch a film for the first time: “pick any one you like” she tells Jones. He tees up Being There – a film I’m wondering if Mendes has seen. For starters, would I show a film about mental health featuring a racist cartoon in the middle to a woman struggling with her own mental health who has just watched a close friend being beaten up by the National Front? You’re left feeling Norman simply teed up whatever film was in the machine. But then, as he says, he doesn’t really watch the films anyway. Afterwards Hilary and Stephen chat about Peter Sellers – but never once mention he has only just died.

Empire of Light fails at most other things it attempts to do. Its heart is in the coming-of-age, second-chance-at-life romance at its centre. There is fine chemistry between Colman and Ward, and their bashful coming together works as a meeting of two spiritually similar people who feel life is passing them by. Their unspoken courtship early on – rescuing a wounded pigeon together in the abandoned upper-storey of the Empire or watching the New Years fireworks on the roof – has a pleasant innocence. But fundamentally, these characters feel ill-defined and go through personal crises that feel pat and under-developed.

Colman gives her all as Hilary – although this sort of dumpy, frumpy, tragic, timid woman is becoming a little too much of a calling card – but this is a thin character. We slowly realise Hilary is a woman struggling with mental health – making her sexual exploitation by Firth’s smug, sleazy, manager even more unpleasant. She carefully goes about her work, stares down at the ground and wouldn’t even dream of intruding on the cinema-goer by actually watching the film. Colman masters the little touches of glee she gets at the presence of Stephen, Hilary’s simultaneous enjoyment and bashfulness about what she assumes is a hopeless crush.

Where the film fails though is in finding any depth in Hilary’s struggles with schizophrenia. Colman’s character is inspired, in many ways, by Mendes’ own mother. The film aims for a sympathetic presentation of mental health, which it manages but without providing any insight. While many aspects of mental health were not discussed at the time, a film made today really should have more to say than Empire of Light musters. Instead, Hilary’s condition feels like a dramatic shorthand. For a passion project that’s not good enough – the film even falls back on the age-old “stops taking her meds” plotline. For all the gusto and commitment Colman brings to Hilary’s mental collapse – a furious destruction of a sandcastle, or ranting, drunk, in an apartment where the walls are strewn with self-penned graffiti – it never feels insightful enough.

It’s sadly the same with Micheal Ward’s Stephen. For all Ward is hugely charming as this saintly young man – and for all he expertly suggests Stephen’s anger at the growing tide of racism in Britain – the issues he deals with feel like window-dressing. The most interesting moment is his confrontation with an angry, racist customer who is appeased by Hilary rather than challenged – much to Stephen’s justified fury. But name-checking Brixton and New Cross and saying “it’s getting worse” doesn’t really feel like getting to grips with the dilemmas he, and young men like him, were facing. Particularly when Stephen responds to a deadly beating with something approaching a shrug of the shoulders. You can’t argue with Mendes’ genuine feelings, but there is never enough depth.

Instead, these major social issues are benched by the film’s end, making them feel like discussion points to make Hilary feel better about her life and for Stephen to resolve to move on with his. It has less to say about these issues than an episode of Call the Midwife. Just as it has nothing to say about the magic of cinema going, turning it into a retro back-drop of posters and old sweeties. Far from making a case for cinema, it makes the building as irrelevant as some worry it is becoming today.