Category: Political drama

It Was Just an Accident (2025)

Compelling, compassionate and deeply political drama, full of humanism and warmth

Director: Jafar Panahi

Cast: Vahid Mobasseri (Vahid), Mariam Afshari (Shiva), Ebrahim Azizi (‘Eghbal’), Hadis Pakbaten (Goli), Majid Panahi (Ali), Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr (Hamid), Delnaz Najafi (‘Eghbal’’s daughter), Afssaneh Najmabadi (‘Eghbal’s’ wife)

Late at night, a father (Ebrahim Azizi) driving his heavily pregnant wife and daughter home, hits a wild dog. His young daughter is deeply upset, but the father impassively responds it was ‘just an accident’. But the car is damaged, so the father pulls over for help. When he does so, the distinctive squeak of his artificial leg brings near-by Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) into a horrified cold sweat. Vahid has heard that squeak before: belonging to Eghbal (‘Peg Leg’) the man who brutally tortured him in prison.

The next day Vahid kidnaps Eghbal, intending to bury him alive until doubt sets in: has he got the right man? To get the confirmation he needs, he reaches out to others tortured by Eghbal, including wedding photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari), bride Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) (with groom Ali (Majid Panahi) in tow) and Shiva’s former partner Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr). Can this motley group confirm Eghbal’s identity? What will they do with him?

It Was Just an Accident takes inspiration from Death and the Maiden and it’s a story that could be happening right now. Jafar Pahani’s outstanding film is set in Iran, where anyone can be seized from the streets and face months of relentless, brutal questioning from furious interrogators. Pahani, himself imprisoned for seven months in 2022-23 (only gaining release after going on hunger strike) shot the film secretly (and illegally) in Iran, the sixth film he has shot in this way, after being banned from film-making. Smuggled out of the country, it won the Palme d’Or, and makes compelling political points about life in Iran while never losing track of the human stories at its heart.

Pahani asks searching questions about truth, reconciliation and what separates the oppressed from the oppressor. Each character, a rag-tag assemblage of the regime’s victims all bundled together in a beat-up van like an eccentric Scooby-gang, must ask themselves what they want from their former torturer. Is it vengeance pure and simple? Or something deeper? And would taking satisfying, violent revenge really fill the hole years of brutal treatment left inside them? Do they want to stoop to the same vile level as their torturer – if he can take the last vestige of their humanity from them in this state, is this not a victory of sorts for Iran?

There is no doubt about the lasting trauma years of imprisonment has left on its victims. Vahid, constantly stooped with back-pain, literally freezes in mute horror at hearing Eghbal’s squeaking leg, before rushing into a sudden, ill-thought-out kidnapping. Shiva can barely bring herself to look at her possible torturer, barely suppressing vomit when she recognises his smell. Goli has to be restrained from beating him, her pain roaring to the surface. Hamid’s instinct to immediately kill Eghbal needs all the group to restrain him: his fury so intense, the man’s identity is almost irrelevant to Hamid’s desire for revenge. Even the calmest people find themselves succumbing to the cathartic need to assault Eghbal, to work some of the pain out of their system.

But yet… aside from Hamid, the group find it hard to embrace the violence of their oppressors. Instead, all crowded into Vahid’s van with a drugged Eghbal locked in the boot, they meander, arguing over what to do. Bury him in the desert? Confront him? Let him go before he identifies them? These people fell foul of Iran’s government because they campaigned for worker’s rights – they are not revolutionary fighters, but ordinary people. This dilemma leaves them sitting in the desert, emotionally sharing stories of their imprisonment, seemingly waiting (as Hamid says watching Shiva sit under a dead tree, like Waiting for Godot) for a decision to come to them.

These heart-rending stories reveal the oppressive horror of Iran’s system. Tales of mock executions, people left hanging upside down for days, harangued under brutal conditions to confess and name names. The fear of returning there is a constant, all of them scared that a released Eghbal may come for them. The abusive infection at the top of the country, trickles down. Anyone with any authority abuses their power, from car park attendants who carry card machines to force bribes for turning blind eyes to suspicious activity to hospital staff who place rules above treating people (and nurses who expect ‘tips’ for service), the system feels corrupt from top-to-bottom.

But that doesn’t mean the country is. Pahani reminds us throughout that real people are kind: there is a strong, uplifting humanist streak throughout It Was Just an Accident. From an ordinary person’s instinctive offer to help when Eghbal’s car breaks down, to passers-by who rush to help push Vahid’s van when it breaks down (filmed in long shot, these passers-by didn’t even knew they were in a film) to a doctor who over-rules petty officialdom to help a woman in need. It Was Just an Accident is full of small moments of human warmth and decency. Each of our group displays these attributes at points, with Vahid and Shiva in particular revealed as people of deep generosity and kindness. The film also takes surprising turns, with the characters responding to circumstances with a decency and humanity that is immensely moving.

Pahani shoots with a series of measured, long-takes allowing performances and themes to naturally expand. He films a series of virtuoso extended scenes of intense emotion, where the camera simply sits or glides gently to follow the action. The long desert scene, where the characters share their stories is all the more powerful for the gentle, unobtrusive distance the camera gives them. Best of all, a hugely powerful sustained shot, lit by the brake lights of the van, explodes with grief, cathartic anger, menace and shame – as well as eliciting extraordinary performances from the actors.

It Was Just an Accident is wonderfully acted across the board. Vahid Mobasseri is heart-breakingly decent beneath his pain. Mairam Afshari’s Shiva is superb as a principled woman who won’t allow herself to be corrupted. Mohammed Ali Elyasmehr’s Hamid never lets the anguish beneath his rage get forgotten. Hadis Pakbaten gives Goli a desperation to speak out while Majid Panahi’s Ali allows his character’s reserve to slowly break. Ebrahim Azizi walks a fine-line with the possible Eghbal, switching from assurance to desperate confusion, pleading to rage – and closes with an impassioned tour-de-force that provokes complicated, enigmatic reactions from the audience.

Enigmatic is also part of Pahani’s ending, a quiet, open-to-interpretation final sequence that could be either a haunting reminder of how the past never lets us go, or a suggestion that there is a hope for truth and reconciliation. How you take it, is to you. But there is no doubting the extraordinary power of Pahani’s film, or how lightly it wears its political and social messages. This is not a film without humour, nor is it a film that forgets people are capable of decent, humane acts that can surprise even themselves. It’s a film that will leave you thinking deeply.

Kameradschaft (1931)

Pabst’s very earnest plea for brotherhood is also a gripping underground disaster epic

Director: GW Pabst

Cast: Alexander Granach (Kasper), Fritz Kampers (Wilderer), Daniel Mendaille (Jean Leclerc), Ernst Busch (Wittkopp), Elisabeth Wendt (Anna Wittkopp), Gustav Püttjer (Kaplan), Oskar Höcker (Mine foreman), Héléna Manson (Rose), Andrée Ducret (Françoise Leclerc), Alex Bernard (Grandfather Jacques), Pierre-Louis (Georges)

Pabst’s Kamerdschaft was his second sound film after Westfront 1918 and follows on from that film’s politics. Kamerdscaft is a heartfelt plea that, deep down, we are all comrades, who should be working together not tearing at each other. It’s based on a real 1906 mine disaster in Courrières where a coal dust explosion left thousands of French miners trapped underground, relying on teams of French and German (from Westphalia) miners to save them. Pabst shifts this to 1919 and the location to the French-German border (so new, it even runs through the mine itself with both sides literally walled off from each other). It’s straight after the war, and never have tensions been higher.

Pabst argues though that this lethal squabbling between nations distracts us from the ties that bind us. He opens with two children – one French, one German – arguing over a game of marbles both claim to have won, demanding the other hands over all the marbles. They even literally draw a border in the dirt to make their point. Pabst’s symbolism here is not exactly subtle, but it makes the point swiftly and clearly. Whenever we encounter the border officers, they are rules-bound and small-minded. A French border guard almost fires on a truck of German miners offering their help. Bosses from both sides put obstructions in the way of the effort to free the miners. The film closes with military forces from both sides solemnly re-building the underground border wall knocked down during the rescue.

It’s carried over into tensions between both communities. The French are generally encouraged to look down on the Germans. Life on the French side seems more secure and comfortable – with rows of workers houses, bars and plentiful jobs – with the Germans frequently crossing over to try and find work and relaxation in the French side. A trio of jolly Germans nearly get into a bar fight when a French girl declines to dance with one of them: a loud atmosphere in the bar disappearing, as Pabst’s camera pans past a row of faces suddenly turned confrontation and hostile.

This tension is increased by the language barrier. Kameradschaft was a French-German co-production and the actors used their native language. This allowed for a strong cast, with Alexander Granach particularly notable as the jolly Kasper. It’s fascinating to watch Kameradschaft with only one language translated, plunging you into trying to follow the stumbling French of the Germans and vice versa. Misunderstandings frequently arise. That bar near-fight is started when Fritz Kamper’s German miner assumes Héléna Manson’s Rose doesn’t want to dance with him because he’s German, when actually she says its only because she’s tired.

Misunderstandings continue throughout the film. The German’s underground struggle to make themselves understood, using a range of physical gestures and pigeon-French; the French stumble through basic German. While subtleties are missed, it’s striking how Pabst demonstrates in the big things, meaning is always clear: emotions and actions convey a universal meaning we all understand. In the aftermath, a French miner makes an impassioned speech about brotherhood: his German counterpoint responds with a heartfelt speech that he didn’t understand a word but he agrees they are all brothers.

“A miner is a miner” says Ernst Busch’s Wittkopp who insists on the rescue mission. (Busch was a veteran of Brecht and an impassioned Socialist). You can see why they feel this when you see the conditions below ground. Claustrophobic, dark, sooty and terrifyingly confined, the mines quickly become intimidating traps as support beams buckle and crumble. It’s even more impressive when you realise these extraordinarily convincing sets were indeed sets, build in a studio by Ernő Metzner and Karl Vollbrecht. It’s honestly hard to believe that the crew didn’t go underground when you watch, giving the film a strong steak of realism.

It’s a realism mixed with a moody expressionism in the lighting. When the explosion comes, the fire rolls through the smoke and steam filled rooms and then seems to continue, consuming everything in its path. Pabst uses a tracking camera to keep us just ahead of these advancing flames. He stages brilliantly the collapse of the mine, showing miners trapped or crushed as roofs cave in and rocks tumble down. Kameradschaft is just as strong in showing the panic above ground, as the families of those trapped race through the streets to gather at the mine’s locked gates, howling to be allowed in and help with the rescue of their nearest and dearest.

As in Westfront 1918, Pabst employs the same sound-proof casing to his camera to give it as much flexibility as possible while still capturing sound. Kameradshaft is full of the audio hustle and bustle of a town in torment, and he’s equally effective with sound below ground. Not only the collapse of the mine, but the sounds that come with being trapped: heavy breathing of rescuers in their breathing equipment, metallic tapping on pipes to attract attention, desperate scurrying of trapped miners to find a ringing phone in a ruined engine room. All of this is executed to perfection.

Pabst’s finest sound use comes when one trapped French worker succumbs to delusion under the pressure as a German rescuer approaches. As he sweats in panic, the tapping on pipes shifts to the rat-a-tat of machine guns. From his POV we see the approaching German in breathing transform from a miner into an infantryman. In a series of cuts, the French miner imagines himself in the trenches, launching himself in desperate self-defence against his would-be saviour. It’s a beautifully done moment that hammers home Pabst’s message that when nations turn natural friends into enemies, we are all left weaker.

Kameradschaft isn’t always subtle in saying this. You could frequently call it naïve. Pabst stresses the point with a zoom into the shaking hands of German and French rescuers meeting for the first time under-ground (holding the shot for longer than necessary). But it’s an earnest and decent message. But sadly, not one people were going to listen to. The film was, of course, banned in Nazi Germany almost immediately – and they would have approved of Pabst’s more cynical coda of the underground border being re-built (a scene cut from some prints, as being too glum). We may dream of brotherhood and peace, but sometimes it is just a dream. But Kameradschaft is a fine enough film to persuade us its worth dreaming.

Z (1969)

Costa-Gravas thrilling conspiracy thriller is possibly one of the finest political films ever made

Director: Costa-Gravas

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant (Examining Magistrate), Yves Montand (Deputy), Irene Papas (Helene, the Deputy’s wife), Pierre Dux (General), Jacques Perrin (Photojournalist), Charles Denner (Manuel), François Périer (Public Prosecutor), Georges Géret (Nick), Bernard Fresson (Matt), Marcel Bozzuffi (Vago), Julian Guiomar (The Colonel), Gérard Darrieu (Barone), Jean Bouise (Georges Pirou), Jean-Pierre Miquel (Pierre)

Costa-Gravas Z is an explosive political thriller, ripping a lightly fictionalised story from the Greek headlines (the opening credits playfully state ‘any resemblance to real people is ‘purely intentional!’) and turning it into a compellingly angry, cold-eyed look at political repression. It was based on the state-backed murder of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963 and the investigation by magistrate Christos Sartzetakis which briefly looked like it might expose repressive military forces but actually kick-started a 1967 military junta counter coup in Greece. Z takes this as inspiration for a truly universal story that continues to feel like ‘it could happen here’.

Lambrakis becomes The Deputy, played with great charm and determined charisma by Yves Montand. After death threats, he is murdered after a political rally by two thugs in a hit-and-run, in a public square, surrounded by police officers and a legion of witnesses. The police, represented by the virulent anti-communist General (Pierre Dux) declare it a tragic accident. They firmly expect our Sartzetakis-figure (Jean-Louis Trintignant, putting his enigmatic unreadability to extraordinarily good-use), son of a war hero, to back-up their bullshit. But he didn’t get the memo, conducting a genuine investigation which reveals the extensive links between the military and police and far-right organisations, how they planned the hit and did everything to ensure its success. But will this investigation lead to real change?

Costa-Gravas’ film is a hard-boiled conspiracy thriller with echoes of The Battle of Algiers’ primal urgency and immediacy. It’s committed to throwing you into the middle of the turmoil, with fast-cutting, hand-held camerawork, tracking shots through crowds and shots which zero in on the faces of victims and perpetrators alike. The film’s influence on directors like Oliver Stone is palpable. But, unlike Stone’s work, Z wears its moral outrage carefully: it presents events with a journalistic matter-of-factness, trusting us to recognise the corrupt horror of over-mighty governments. The resolute professionalism of Trintignant’s magistrate helps enormously here – heroism in this world is being honest and doing your job.

What Costa-Gravas film reveals is that these authorities believe they can act with utter impunity, convinced they will never be questioned by anyone, other than their liberal targets. Z opens with a darkly comic scene that outlines this thinking: during a lecture, the pompous General outlines (to a military audience shown impassively watching in a series of quick reaction cuts) his theory of ‘ideological mildew’ attacking the ‘tree of liberty’, using a tortured pesticide metaphor to suggest it is their duty to kill the mildew (liberals and socialists). This tyrannical view is parroted by people who are neither lip-smacking villains or fiendishly clever – they just have absolute, fixed certainty.

Z makes clear that such men, placed in position of authority, will attempt to shape events with a breath-taking arrogance. The assassination plot is shockingly clumsy and obvious and cover-up so full of transparent bare-faced lies, you’d need to be impossibly arrogant to even consider you could get away with it. Copious evidence shows meetings between senior officers and members of the right-wing CROC group. It’s claimed the Deputy’s fatal head-wound came from hitting the pavement, even though this is ruled impossible by both an autopsy and hundreds of witnesses. The General claims not to know the driver who ‘rushed’ the wounded Deputy to hospital (stopping at every opportunity), even though the man is his personal chauffeur. Everyone repeats the same tortured, unusual phrases – from the head of police to the thugs themselves.

It doesn’t stop there. Once it becomes clear Trintignant’s magistrate is genuinely investigating – that he has his own mind and opinions – the clumsy cover up turns aggressive. Blame is put on the Deputies own supporters (the word ‘false-flag operation’ didn’t exist then, but the idea is seized on); his lawyer is almost killed in a park hit-and-run in front of dozens of witnesses; a witness who can testify to the plans of the hitmen is pressured, told he has epilepsy, framed as a radical (he’s clearly not) and then nearly assassinated by one of the hit-men (put up in the same military hospital with a pretend broken leg), who flees the scene and in front of his doctors, while giggling at his cheek.

Some of this is in fact blackly funny. It perhaps almost would be, if it wasn’t for Z’s moral indignation. Even without murder, this is a repressive, corrupt regime: the Deputy’s team have innumerable petty obstacles placed in their way for their rally, their supporters are openly attacked by bused in protestors mixed with baton-wielding under-cover officers. Costa-Gravas doesn’t show the Deputy as a saint – flashbacks reveal he is an adulterer – but it does make clear his bravery (confronting and cowing crowds of anti-liberal rioters, utterly unrestrained by the police), leadership and the fear he overcomes. It also shows, especially in Irene Papas’ emotionally underplayed but quietly devastating performance, the raw grief of those who love him. His closest colleagues weep at news of his death, the post-death slandering of him all-the-more disgusting.

Z presents its evidence with an increasingly overwhelming force. The magistrate corrects (for a long time) any use of the word murder for ‘accident’ – by the time he himself says ‘murder’ it’s almost easy for us to miss it, so natural has the conclusion become. Pressure is, of course, applied to him: senior officers bluster about metaphorical eggs and omelettes; his bosses suggest he charge only the hit-men and (for good measure) charge the Deputy’s people for disrupting the peace by holding the rally in the first place. Plenty of ordinary people know exactly what’s going on, but don’t want to take risks: a newspaper editor reports what he’s told to, the Deputy’s doctor regrets not joining his lonely ‘march for peace’ but, well, you know how it is…

Given the blatant criminality of the police and the army – and the sadistic arrogance of hit-man Vago (an uncomfortable beat in Z is the whiff of homophobia in the depiction of Vago as a predatory homosexual and pederast) – it’s truly triumphant to see them bought to book. Despite their bombast (each officer states he will have no choice but to take his life to avoid the shame, something of course none of them do), each flees the building railing at the press. (The General, an antisemite among everything else, even roars ‘Dreyfus was guilty!’ when a journalist compares the affair to that).

But it’s short-lived. Perhaps Irene Papas’ Helene knows it will be when she responds to news of the arrest with a quiet middle-distance stare. Z closes with a dark coda that could almost be funny if it wasn’t horrifying. A photojournalist (played by producer Jacques Perrin) who we have followed uncovering the plot, reports the aftermath: initial resignations followed by slap-on-the-wrist sentences for the hit-men, charges dropped for the officers and a coup d’etat (at this point a cut removes Perrin) which sees the arrest or ‘accidental’ death of all the Deputy’s supporters, a junta government and bans of everything from authors, mini-skirts, modern mathematics and, above all, the letter Z, as zi has been taken by protestors as the badge ‘He Lives’.

It would be funny. It almost is funny. If it wasn’t part of a system that crushes freedom with violence and murder. Costa-Gravas’ brilliant, engrossing and perfectly judged film shows how terrifyingly swiftly it can happen, how freedoms and justice can be strangled before our very eyes. Watching it today, you can’t imagine a time when it won’t be coldly, chillingly, terrifyingly relevant.

A House of Dynamite (2025)

Terrifying, compelling and gripping it-could-happen drama about the madness of nuclear war

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Cast: Rebecca Ferguson (Captain Olivia Walker), Idris Elba (President), Gabriel Basso (Deputy NSA Jake Baerington), Jared Harris (Secretary Baker), Tracy Letts (General Anthony Brady), Anthony Ramos (Major Daniel Gonzalez), Moses Ingram (Cathy Rogers), Jonah Hauer-King (Lt Commander Robert Reeves), Greta Lee (Ana Park), Jason Clarke (Admiral Mark Miller), Malachi Beasley (SCPO William Davis), Brian Tee (SAIC Ken Cho), Renée Elise Goldsberry (First Lady), Kaitlyn Dever (Caroline Baker)

“That’s what $50 billion buys us? A fucking coin toss?” the Secretary of Defence (Jared Harris) plaintively wails as he discovers yet another weakness in the USA’s defence infrastructure. It’s one of many grim realisations filling A House of Dynamite, a relentlessly horrifying look at what might actually happen if a nuclear missile was launched at the United States: and how, in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Friends, the US President (Idris Elba) can go from shooting hoops at a charity event to flicking through menu-style list of world-ending options, being told he has a three minute window to make a decision that could be final for all of us. House of Dynamite makes clear to us all: the fate of the whole world effectively rests on a series of coin tosses we have no influence over.

Bigelow’s intense, brilliantly shot and edited film, plays out the same eighteen-minute scenario from different perspectives. A glitch in the USA’s satellite network misses the launch of an ICBM, somewhere off the coast of Asia, heading for Chicago. Disbelief and panic swiftly sets in at every level of the US administration. Anti-missile defence systems miss (that’s the coin toss, as we’re told it only has a 61% success rate in tests). A decision needs to be taken whether to follow policy and launch a counter-attack before the nuke hits. It plays out from three primary perspectives: Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), senior officer on duty in the Situation Room; Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), deputy NSA covering for his under-anaesthetic boss, begging Russia to stand-down their forces as the US goes to DEFCON1; and finally the President (Elba), out-of-his-depth in a nightmare where he feels powerless and totally unprepared.

Powerless and unprepared become the guiding feelings in US defence, as people slowly release the best cast scenario is only losing 10 million people in Chicago and their worst (most likely) case is everyone dying in a nuclear conflagration. Bigelow’s film, shot with the hand-held intensity of a combat film, grabs you with a vice like grip as it plays out this nuclear nightmare. A House of Dynamite only ever gives us the same information as the fictional administration trying to make impossible choices. Like them we never find out who launched the missile, if it’s the first of a wave or even if it’s fully armed ICBM. All we know is the strike on Chicago quickly becomes inevitable and, with that fact, the world as we know it is over. Bigelow’s film (although it is not as clear in its clarification of US launch policy as it could be) places the system (which offers few choices and no alternatives) as the antagonist.

It also makes clear that nuclear war can happen at a time totally not of our choosing. Here it unfolds on a regular morning. The President is at an inconsequential publicity event, reduced to dialling into a world-shaking video call from a mobile: and he’s barely a month into his administration. The National Security advisor is in an operating studio and his unknown assistant is reduced into running through gridlocked traffic to get into the office. A designated FEMA expert (Moses Ingram) has just been appointed and at first believes the whole thing is a drill. The NSA North Korea expert (Greta Lee) is at a Gettysburg reconstruction with her young son. The Situation Room is undergoing maintenance and the Premiers of Russia and China can’t be raised on the phone.

A House of Dynamite doesn’t land cheap shots: it’s portrait of the members of the administration and the US defence infrastructure stresses their level-headedness and professionalism. Indeed, their competence makes the complete lack of control they have all the more alarming. Tracy Lett’s STRATCOM General keeps a professional level-headedness, even as he dutiful advises sticking to a nuclear policy which will effectively end the world. Rebecca Ferguson’s composed, calm and collected Naval captain finds herself increasingly aghast but only allows herself a few moments of tears after a goodbye phone call to her husband, clutching a toy dinosaur gift from her son. Anthony Ramos’ missile base commander reassures his staff this is what they have trained for: right up until the point where their interceptor missile misses and he slips into near catatonic shock as he realises that life’s training was for nothing.

Politicians are similarly portrayed as decent, but fundamentally unprepared for the situation. Idris Elba’s suave president looks every inch the confident leader, but it’s revealed he’s uncertain, hesitant, terrified of looking weak and his skills of schmoozing the public utterly useless for this situation. Jared Harris’ Defence secretary is only marginally more on-top of his brief (he reveals the nuclear war briefing is less than half an hour because it was seen as so unlikely to happen) and, for all his competence, becomes increasingly distracted at the thought of his estranged daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) facing death in Chicago. Gabriel Basso’s Deputy NSA seems at first absurd, but grows in statue as he desperately tries to salvage global survival.

Bigelow’s film makes clear this is a lose-lose situation. It’s a film about the constricting pressure of panic. Panic leaves assured professionals weeping or vomiting. Superpowers plan world-ending retaliation out of fear that they might be wiped out before they get a chance to fire their nukes. The President becomes overwhelmed, asking the junior aide carrying the nuclear football (Jonah Hauer-King) what he should do. (Hauer-King’s character, acknowledging the way the War Book looks like a nightmare menu, wryly confesses he calls the world-ending options rare, medium and well-done). The Deputy NSA tries everything, including begging, to get Russia to stand down, only for them to refusing to do so until US meet Russia’s own un-meetable conditions.

What we are left with is the realisation that there is no winner here. Many viewers, I feel are missing the point. Who fired the missile, who (or if) America hits back, if Chicago goes up in inferno or not, is not the point. Just firing the starting trigger in this race means you lose, because when the nuclear buttons is pressed by anyone there is no turning back, no way of unringing that bell. This is the chilling message of Bigelow’s compelling film – made all the more chilling as she finds so much humanity in the people forced to make these terrible calls.

What we end up with is a different type of coin toss: one man, in most cases with almost no preparation what-so-ever, making a decision that could go either way on virtually no conclusive information at all, in an impossibly small window, about whether to risk ending the world or not. What A House of Dynamite makes clear is that’s all nuclear deterrent really is: a coin toss for individuals who feel they have to always call heads. That’s possibly the most terrifying about it.

Born on the Fourth of July (1989)

Passionate polemic against Vietnam, with a committed central performance – tough, angry viewing

Director: Oliver Stone

Cast: Tom Cruise (Ron Kovic), Willem Dafoe (Charlie), Kyra Sedgwick (Donna), Raymond J Barry (Eli Kovic), Jerry Levine (Steve Boyer), Frank Whaley (Timmy), Caroline Kava (Patricia Kovic), Cordelia Gonzalez (Maria Elena), Ed Lauter (Commander), John Getz (Major), Michael Wincott (Veteran), Edith Diaz (Madame), Stephen Baldwin (Billy), Bob Gunton (Doctor)

Ron Kovic and Oliver Stone shared the feelings of many of their generation: a deep and abiding feeling of betrayal about the war they were sold in Vietnam. Kovic entered Vietnam a passionate true-believer in the cause; he left a traumatised veteran, paralysed from the waist-down, facing a difficult journey of guilt and discovery that would lead him into a career of anti-war activism. Stone too left Vietnam, wounded and affected with PTSD. The two had collaborated on a screenplay of Kovic’s autobiography in the 70s, before funding fell through: Stone vowed he would make the film when he had the power: the success of Platoon and Wall Street gave him that.

It’s not a surprise, considering the understandable passion that went into it, that Born on the Fourth of July is a polemic. You can argue it’s a heavy-handed and virulent one: but then it’s hard to argue with the catastrophic impact over a decade of American foreign policy decisions had on generations across several countries. Could it have been anything else? Born can be an uncomfortable and relentless watch, and subtlety (as is often the case even in Stone’s best work) can be hard to spot. But is that a surprise when the whole film feels like a ferocious, cathartic cry of pain?

It follows a mildly fictionalised version of Kovic’s life (Kovic’s willingness to adapt his life, drew some fire at the time – particularly as he was considering a run for Congress) starting with his childhood, through his teenage enlistment, the shocking horror of Vietnam, his limited recovery in under-funded veteran hospitals, his growing discomfort with the attempt by some (including his passionately conservative mother) to celebrate sacrifices he increasingly feels were misguided and wrong, culminating in his joining the ranks of the same long-haired protestors he spoke of disparagingly earlier.

Through it all, Kovic is played with a searing intensity by Tom Cruise. Cruise was a controversial choice – seen as little more than a cocky cocktail juggling, jet piloting, superstar (despite measured, subtle turns in The Color of Money and Rain Man). It feels a lot more logical today, now that Cruise’s Day-Lewis commitment to projects is well-known. It’s a raw, open and vulnerable performance with Cruise expertly inverting the cocksure confidence of his persona (and the earlier scenes), to portray a man deeply in denial at his injuries (internal and external), with resentment, anger and self-loathing increasingly taking hold of him.

Kovic is a man who never gives up: be that a misguided (and in the end almost fatal) attempt to defy medical advice that he will never walk again, to embracing the anti-war cause with the same never-say-die attitude he signed up to the military with. What Stone and Cruise bring out, is the huge cost to Kovic of working out the fights worth having: from his student days training days on hand for a wrestling bout he loses, to is military career, to activism, it’s a long, difficult journey.

It’s a performance that understands the crippling burden of guilt. Cruise commits to Kovic’s rage, but always keeps track of the vulnerable, damaged, scared soul underneath. He never allows us to forget this is a man eating himself up, not with resentment at his injury, but guilt at his actions in Vietnam – from being part of a mission that pointlessly machine-gunned women and children, to his own accidental shooting of a fellow marine. As you would expect from Stone, Born’s view of Vietnam is bleak: pointless, disorganised missions, led from the rear by incompetent or uncaring officers, where the only victims are innocent civilians or GIs.

That’s perhaps the key about Born. Kovic is not motivated primarily by his injuries. Those are the results of the risks he chose and, to a certain degree, he accepts them. What motivates him is guilt: throughout he is haunted by the crying of the Vietnamese baby he was ordered to leave in the arms of its deceased mother while also struggling to accept his guilt at his friendly fire killing. These feelings fuel his self-loathing, and his anger rightly develops against the lies he was told that led him to commit those acts.

Stone’s film is unrelentingly critical of the mythologising of armed American intervention, and the assumption (often parroted by those who stay at home) that it can never be anything other than completely righteous. It’s a society where (as happens in the film’s opening) children play at soldiers, watch parades of veterans (the young Kovic fails to clock the flinching of these veterans – one played by the real Kovic – at rifle fire, seeing only what he wants to see) and, as young men, are sold tales of duty, sacrifice and heroism. Kovic is too young and fired-up to notice the reluctant pain of his veteran dad (a superbly low-key Raymond J Barry), clearly struggling with his own trauma.

Much as the film paints one of Kovic’s friends in a negative light – like a young Gecko he heads to college, states all this talk of Communism conquering the world is propaganda bullshit and sets up a burger chain where he brags about fleecing the customers and groping the female staff – it also can’t but admit that when it came to Vietnam, he was right. Similarly, Stone is critical of Kovic’s ambitious, apple-pie Mom (Caroline Kava, in a performance of infuriatingly smug certainty) who won’t hear a word against the war and demands achievement from her son, constantly stressing it must have been worth it.

It’s not a surprise one of Born’s most cathartic moment is when Kovic – Cruise’s performance hitting new heights of unleashed resentment – rails late-at-night at his Mom, calling out her upbringing of unquestioning patriotism and saintly conformity as nothing but an ocean of bullshit. It’s an outpouring that has been welling up since his return, looking for the right direction: snapping at protestors, doctors, his younger brother who dares to oppose the War. Born is about a man coming to terms with why he is so angry and finding the appropriate target: and it becomes the system that sent him on this journey, starting with his mother and onto his own government.

This would be the government that provides shabby hospitals, full of broken-down equipment, whacked out attendants and overworked, underqualified doctors. Stone’s camera pans along wards piled with rubbish and rats. The conditions here are, in many ways, worse than the Mexican villa where Kovic finds himself struggling to re-adjust, surrounded by other paralysed veterans (among them Willem Dafoe, as a seemingly mentor-like figure with uncurdled rage just below the surface). Stone’s film never once loses its righteous fury at how a generation was let down by its leaders on every level.

So it’s not surprising Born is a fiercely polemic work. And, yes, that does sometimes reduce its interest and make it an unrelentingly grim watch (Stone isn’t interested in putting any other side of the argument in here). But it’s extremely well made (Robert Richardson’s excellent photography uses tints of red, white and blue at key points to brilliantly stress mood) and you can feel the heart Stone (who won a second directing Oscar for this) put into it. Its impact comes down to how much you engage with the passionate, furious argument its making: connect with it and it’s a very powerful film.

The House of Rothschild (1934)

Old-fashioned historical melodrama with a well-meaning, earnest political message

Director: Alfred L Werker

Cast: George Arliss (Nathan Rothschild/Mayer Rothschild), Boris Karloff (Count Ledrantz), Loretta Young (Julie Rothschild), Robert Young (Captain Fitztoy), C. Aubrey Smith (Duke of Wellington), Arthur Byron (Baring), Helen Westley (Gudula Rothschild), Reginald Owen (JC Herries), Florence Arliss (Hannah Rothschild), Alan Mowbray (Prince Metternich), Holmes Herbert (Roweth)

It’s 1814 and things are looking tight for the international banking house of Rothschild. With the Napoleonic Wars over, partly thanks to Rothshild financial support of Wellington’s armies, Nathan Rothschild (George Arliss) is pitching to underwrite the loans to help restore France. Problem is, now the merde is out of the European fan, many of the Powers-That-Be don’t want to continue working with a Jewish bank. Led by scowling antisemitic Prussian Count Ledrantz (Boris Karloff), the Rothschilds bid is unjustly rejected. Rothschild outmanoeuvres his enemies to win the contract back, but it leads to a series of revenge pogroms in Prussia. Things change though, when Napoleon escapes from Elba. As all roads lead to Waterloo, will Rothschild back the Allied powers or throw in his lot with Napoleon?

The House of Rothschild is a very well-meaning, old-fashioned historical melodrama, that takes a strong stance against antisemitism. It clearly has more than half-an-eye on events in Germany in the 1930s. As the film’s Prussia of 1814 sinks into mobs hurling stones through windows, smashing up shops and chanting for the expulsion of Jewish people, while families flee across the body leaving their possessions behind (all while the self-satisfied, archly cold Ledrantz pushes his agents to provoke the people to yet more outbursts), surely many people would have seen parallels with Hitler’s Germany.

Throughout the film, the accusations of antisemites are pointedly broken down and strongly rebutted or placed into context. Why do the Rothschilds work in money? Because they are literally banned from any other profession. And money is the only tool they have to defend themselves against 2000 years of persecution; persecution that has made the Rothschilds feel a true affinity for their fellow Jewish people. Indeed, Nathan Rothschild feels a duty to stand firm and do anything he can to help his people: and if that means a bit of financial chicanery or applying heavy pressure to the European powers, then so be it. There is a greater good here when lives are at stake.

The scourge of racism is strongly displayed throughout the film. It opens with a prologue as Nathan’s father Mayer (George Arliss pulling double duty, under a pile of make-up and a wig) struggles to hide his justly-earned fortune from being stolen by corrupt tax collectors who call him ‘Jew’ and smugly tell him the amount he owes to the government is whatever they say it is. It’s a ferocious piece of open antisemitism, but it has genteel echoes when Nathan is later snubbed for an invite to a ball to celebrate Wellington’s victory (a victory he largely paid for) since Jewish people aren’t welcome at such events.

The House of Rothschild places its laudable anti-persecution aim into a very traditional, old-fashioned, costume drama that wouldn’t look out of place on the Victorian stage. It was a passion project of George Arliss’ (who cared deeply about its message), but also fit wonderfully well inside his wheelhouse. You can see its deep similarities to Arliss’ Oscar-winning vehicle Disraeli. Just as there, he plays a twinkly elder statesman, with a touch of the rogue but overflowing with decency and honour. Despite being seen as a suspicious outsider, he out-plays his rivals in an international conspiracy while casting an avuncular eye over a love affair in the family: in this case between his daughter (Loretta Young) and gentile British cavalry officer Captain Fitzroy (a fairly wooden Robert Young). Both films end with our hero celebrated by royalty at a grand ball, while cementing a loving marriage with his wife (played again by Arliss’ wife Florence).

Arliss is, of course, very good in a role tailor made for his mix of playful charm and speechifying. Much of the film is essentially dominated by Arliss, who delivers with his customary skill (even if his performance as Mayer is more than a little ripe) and if his performance feels more than a little like Disraeli #2, his comfort in front of the camera and the naturalness he brings to the role help enormously. Under the playful exterior, Arliss also finds a strength and determination, powered by a real moral fury at the injustices, slights and (eventual) violence perpetuated upon his people.

Few other actors get much to play with here. House of Rothschild is heavily fictionalised, from its invented nemesis in Count Ledrantz (Karloff is good value as the scowling racist) to the build-up to the Waterloo campaign. However, for history buffs like me, there is a fair bit of delight in seeing a parade of great European statesmen pop up in cameos. From Tallyrand to Metternich to Lord Liverpool, these powerhouses of politics fill out the margins, even if they barely come to life as characters. If there is an exception, it’s the customary gruff no-nonsense military bearing C. Aubrey Smith gives Wellington (here a man firmly on the side of decency and honour).

The romantic sub-plot is very disposable, despite the best efforts of all involved. It briefly overlaps with the film’s main themes – Rothschild is less than happy with his daughter marrying a gentile, while he suffers a parade of humiliations from Fitzroy’s compatriots – but otherwise provides little real drama. The various conspiracies are largely resolved through some ingenious Rothschild speeches. The film’s main success is always the creeping dread of antisemitic violence, a candle it keeps alive throughout its old-school, costume-drama melodrama, with just small drops of directorial and cinematic invention. It’s the main reason for remembering a film that’s entertaining enough, in a gentle, classic Hollywood biopic way. It never reinvents the wheel, but it’s passionate about the people who find themselves ground beneath it.

Note: Considering all that, it’s particularly sickening to note that footage from The House of Rothschild of Arliss in full Mayer Rothschild make-up was pinched and repurposed for Joseph Goebbels’ vile antisemitic epic, The Eternal Jew.

Norma Rae (1979)

Heartfelt political drama, with a powerful lead performance, which works surprisingly well

Director: Martin Ritt

Cast: Sally Field (Norma Rae Webster), Ron Leibman (Reuben Warshowsky), Beau Bridges (Sonny Webster), Pat Hingle (Vernon), Barbara Baxley (Leona), Gail Strickland (Bonnie Mae), Morgan Paull (Wayne Billings), Robert Broyles (Sam Bolen)

At their best, Trade Unions remind us we are never stronger than when we work together. That’s never needed more than ever when confronted with the crushing, soul-destroying working conditions of an unfettered industry. Norma Rae was based on the true story of Crystal Lee Sutton, a North Carolina textiles worker who fought tooth-and-nail to gain Trade Union representation for her factory. Fictionalised here as Norma Rae Webster (Sally Field), Norma Rae covers her political awakening and her channelling her inbuilt sense of justice and fairness and her quickness to anger, towards the constructive goal of changing the lives of her and her community.

Martin Ritt’s conventional but heartfelt biopic may not reinvent the wheel when it comes to telling life stories, but throws itself into all-consuming righteous indignation at the staggering unfairness of the American economic model. The factory at the heart of Norma Rae wouldn’t look out of place in a Victorian-set movie. Deafeningly loud, machines whir non-stop, the air full of cotton spores clogging up lungs, breaks sharply controlled (making an emergency personal call is a disciplinary offence), dismissal possible at the slightest whim, pay kept at rock bottom, workers with medical conditions forced to work through under threat of dismissal… the ghastly, oppressive, miserable textiles factory is like nothing more than a workhouse.

And it is a captive workforce because the workers there have no other choice. The entire community lives in the factory’s orbit, with no other opportunities in the vicinity. The town feels only a few steps up from a shanty town in the factory grounds, people living and dying in its shadow. Even the shift supervisors are only a rung or two up from those they manage. No wonder that anyone who takes a job monitoring the other workers is treated like a snitch. There are no prospects, no hope of change and nothing to look forward to: only day-after-day constantly grinding out clothing for minimal wages (that have not kept track with inflation) while the bosses get richer.

Despite this though, everything is set up to keep the status quo going. Many of these Southern workers have swallowed the management kool-aid that anyone arriving from the North talking about unions are commie, anti-American agitators. Particularly when they are New York Jews like Reuben Warshowsky (Ron Leibman). The factory owners do the absolute minimum to meet the requirements of Warshowsky’s legally-entitled inspection, or to ensure the workers rights to vote for representation. Local authorities, such as the Church, collaborate in maintaining the status quo. And Norma Rae doesn’t look-away from how the racism is used. The local preacher can’t decide if he is more at aghast at the idea of a union meeting in his church hall, or that the meeting will be non-segregated. The factory bosses shamelessly peddle the lie that a union is a tool for Black people to take control of the factory and drive white workers out.

But Ritt’s film clings to the hope that good people can change things, with reasoned argument and passion. That’s embodied in Sally Field’s Norma Rae. Previously best known for sitcom The Flying Nun (her character did exactly what the title says), Field seemed left-field casting as a trailer-trash single mother to three children from three different fathers, turned firebrand political agitator. But Field’s performance was an (Oscar-winning) revelation. She makes Norma Rae both a firecracker of perseverance and determination, but also acutely aware of her vulnerability, Field never losing track of the anxiety that makes her resolute stand-taking all the more impressive.

Martin Ritt’s film skilfully and economically sketches out her character from the start, helped by Field’s skilled playing. We are introduced to her impulsively and furiously berating both her supervisor and the factory’s tame doctor after the never-ending noise of the machine leaving her mother deaf, with no thought of her tenuous position. Later she will berate her own shallowness in sleeping with a married men – then infuriate him with accusations of selfish, ill-treatment of his wife. In a few short scenes, Field establishes a character with principles, a sense of honour and a fierce sense of justice but also prone to rash and kneejerk decisions.

Field’s performance soaks in righteous indignation but also has an emotionality under the surface. When arrested, she struggles like a wild animal to avoid putting in the car before taking on a stoic defiance in jail – only to break down in tears after being bailed. Field creates a women fiercely resilient and unshakeably resolute once she has found a purpose, with a strong sense of justice.

These are qualities recognised by Leibman’s visiting union organiser. Norma Rae draws a fascinating and extremely restrained platonic romance between these two who, despite their surface differences, are soulmates in the relentless focus, all-consuming dedication to justice. But both are spoken for: Warshowsky to a fiancé in New York, Norma to the man she has only just married, the decent-but-utterly-ineffectual Sonny (Beau Bridges). Their unspoken, subtle dedication to each other over late-night union work (which never spills out, even during a playful lake swimming session) is a restrained, very effective beat in a movie that keeps its fireworks for politics.

The film highlights the slow grinding of changing minds and energising people to fight for their own freedoms. Ritt highlights, in a series of underplayed meeting scenes, a host of characters sharing their stories, their faces showing them come to the realisation almost in that moment of how shabbily they are treated. He balances this with real moments of showmanship, that carry even more impact due to the underplayed nature of the rest of the movie.

Most famous, of course, is Norma Rae’s impassioned (literal) stand on principle as the management find a dubious reason to dismiss her. (Ritt frequently uses Field’s shorter statue to powerful effect, surrounding her with larger, overbearing men.) Standing on a table, she refuses to budge, clutching a hastily hand-written sign that just states the word ‘union’. In many ways, it’s a bread-and-butter heart-soaring moment, but Field and Ritt expertly sell emotion, from Field’s quivering, emotional determination to the workers slowly one-by-one shutting down their machines in solidarity.

Solidarity is what it’s all about, in a film that is more sympathetic and admiring of organised labour than almost any other Hollywood effort (it would make a fascinating double bill with On the Waterfront). Directed with effective restraint by Ritt with a power-house performance from Field, it’s also interesting to watch at a time when many in America are calling for a return to American industrial life like this but without any call for guarantees for the rights of workers. Norma Rae could be even more relevant in the years to come.

One Battle After Another (2025)

Fabulously made film, a brilliant merging of half-a-dozen genres is one Andersons’s finest

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Pat Calhoun/Bob Ferguson), Sean Penn (Colonel Steven J Lockjaw), Benicio del Toro (Sergio St Carlos), Regina Hall (Deandra), Teyana Taylor (Perfidia Beverly Hills), Chase Infiniti (Willa Ferguson), Wood Harris (Laredo), Alan Haima (Mae West), Paul Grimstad (Howard Sommerville), Shayna McHayle (Junglepussy), Tony Goldwyn (Virgil Throckmorton), John Hoogenakker (Tim Smith)

What is revolution – changing the world or just the relentless grind of One Battle After Another? It’s as hard to define as it is to define Paul Thomas Anderson’s incredibly striking Thomas Pynchon adaptation. Look at it one angle, and it’s a sharp political commentary on America; from another it’s a satire on the insular, self-defeating rules of secret societies; from a third it’s a pulpy chase-thriller; from a fourth a touching coming-of-age story of a daughter growing closer to her dad. Anderson’s skill here is that it’s basically all these and more at the same time, an electric, frequently laugh-out loud funny, hugely eccentric film that defies all categorisation.

Pynchon’s novel Vineland saw the radicals of the 1960s pulled, clumsily, back to life in the 90s. Anderson keeps the time skip, but moves the start to the late 00s and the destination to today. Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a dishevelled, but true-believing, junior member of The French 75, a radical Atifa-style organisation on a wave of armed anti-government action. He’s in love with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), an adrenalin-fuelled militant whose radicalism is often secondary to the rush she gets from guns and bombs. She’s the source of perverted sexual obsession for bottled-up, socially-striving US army officer Stephen Lockjaw (Sean Penn). After Perfidia makes a terrible choice, 16-years later the disillusioned, frequently doped-out, Pat (now living under the alias of Bob Ferguson) is raising their teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) when Lockjaw explodes back into their life, desperate to clean up his past indiscretions in case they imperil his acceptance into a secretive Neo-Nazi organisation of wealthy American, ‘the Christmas Adventures Club’. Cue a wild and crazy chase.

Anderson’s film bowls along with a whipper-cracker pace, over-flowing with confidence that it doesn’t need to spoon-feed us timelines, details or locations but trusts us to go with narrative flow. Which I for one really did. It’s a film that throws you straight into the mix – a French 75 raid on an immigration detainment facility – and barely lets up from there. Within the first half an hour we’ve seen a wave of direct action events from blowing up campaign offices (after warning phone calls) to sabotaging a city’s electricity supply – alongside Pat and Perfidia overcome with giddy, sexual thrills at thumbing their nose at the system. It’s a great way of grasping what an addictive rush fighting the man can be, something that’s all too-clear in the excited whooping, cheering and bombastic speechifying of many of its members.

These good times can’t last, but Perfidia wants to enjoy them as long as she can. In a blistering, force-of-nature performance from Teyana Taylor, Perfidia acts completely on impulse, thrilled with her life of action, pulling the naïve Bob in her slipstream. Danger of all sorts is addictive, from bombs to risky liaisons. She’ll spontaneously attempt to sexually humiliate Lockjaw on their first encounter (essentially ordering him to ‘stand to attention’ for her), then throw herself into an off-the-books sexual relationship with him (after he obsessively tracks her down for more humiliation) seemingly for kicks. She embodies the risky, thrilling excitement of the revolutionary world.

She’s also what leads to its destruction (her fellow revolutionaries are reduced to frightened shadows of themselves when, during a bank raid. Perfidia actually uses the lethal force everyone else has just talked about). Anderson’s film, after its propulsive start (assembled like an extended montage across an entire act), jumps to a very different future, where the thrills and spills of the underworld are subtly undermined, firstly by the hilarious dark comedy of all communication being managed through obsessive codeword rules and then by comparison with a far more quiet, but far more effective, underground railroad for migrants run by Benecio del Toro’s (underplaying brilliantly, his natural charisma flowing off the screen) Latin community leader and Taekwondo-sensei.

It’s also clear how hard it is to keep the revolutionary fire-burning. One Battle After Another superbly exploits the vulnerability and anxiety that underpins many of DiCaprio’s best performances. For all his involvement with radical violence, Pat/Bob is a sensitive, true believer starry-eyed, but with an appreciation for every-day duties that his fellow revolutionaries lack. It’s him who believes family and their daughter should come first (Perfidia, in the midst of post-natal depression, even admits she’s jealous of her daughter for absorbing so much of Pat’s love and attention).

DiCaprio brilliantly finds in Bob a good heart, whose desire to do the right thing is undermined by his own incompetence. In disappointment, he’s become a paranoid grouch, grumbling about pronouns, like any other middle-aged man adrift in the modern world. DiCaprio burns through the desperate energy of the part, but mixes it with a rich vein of black comedy at Bob’s frequent inability to cope with his situation. It’s a perfectly judged performance of loyalty and love, mixed with exasperation, panic and frequent well-meaning poor judgement.

The second-act leans into the satirical comedy of these middle-aged revolutionaries, bought crashingly to life. In a neat comic touch, Bob spends most of the film on the run, desperately trying to find Willa, while dressed, Arthur Dent-style, in the same scuzzy dressing-gown he was wearing before Lockjaw’s raid. Time-and-time again, he’s reduced to swearing impotently down a phone-line like any other middle-aged consumer fed-up with unhelpful customer service, as he repeatedly fails to dredge vital codewords up from his stoned memory. During his escape, he’ll fall off a roof while evading the law, blanch at jumping from a moving car and spectacularly bungle a shoot-out. But what never waivers is his determination to help his daughter. One Battle After Another plays at times like a version of Taken where Neeson’s character had let himself get out of shape but still threw himself into the chase.

Anderson has fun with the bombastic self-importance of revolutionaries and the intricate insularity of their world. But he also has respect for their underlying desire to change the world for the better, even if the film suggests that the carefully, unflashy work being carried out by del Toro’s railroad is a better approach. Among the revolutionaries, there is a genuine warmth and feeling, embodied by Regina Hall’s loyal and humane Deandra (another superb performance in a film packed with them). There is a loyalty and protectiveness among the revolutionaries that bonds them together. And Sergio – del Toro outstanding as a never-fazed Sensei, a performance bubbling with dry wit – has built a community founded on mutual respect and looking out for each other.

And One Battle After Another has no respect at all for the alternative. The Christmas Adventures Club, the bizarre neo-Nazi group Lockjaw dreams of joining, shares the ridiculous language of secret knocks, handshakes and codewords. But it’s repellent in its instinctive racism and treats its members not as allies to be protected, but assets to be exploited and disposed of as needed. And their insidious extremism of its powerful white guys, with their hands on the gears of power, poses a far more dangerous threat.

Lockjaw is superbly played by Sean Penn as a ball of righteous, inadequate anger – from his ludicrous hair (which he frequently combs into an aggressive thrust), his tight t-shirts to accentuate his muscles to the lifts in his shoes to make him taller. Lockjaw is desperate to be a somebody, after a lifetime of social insecurity. Lacking any sense of imagination, with the emotional maturity of a disgruntled teen, Penn makes Lockjaw the embodiment of angry male entitlement trying to grab what power they can.

Anderson fuses all these elements into a film that takes us through several propulsive acts, from it’s French 75 prologue, to Bob’s desperate attempt to evade Lockjaw’s troops to a dusty road-chase that superbly carries an air of Mad Max. But Anderson does this, while never letting the film’s focus slip from the twisted family relationships at its centre: from Bob’s genuine, protective fatherly love, to Lockjaw’s incel jealousy and their twisted struggle for Willa (beautifully played by Chase Infiniti, in a star-making turn, as young woman finding a strength and idealism within herself that surprises her). It finds space for a genuinely moving series of personal relationships, just as it also skilfully shows Willa’s self-belief and social imagination flourishing under insane circumstances.

It’s part of a compelling, exciting, blackly comic and compelling film, which is not afraid to go to extreme, satirical lengths one moment and then pull you up with a scene that is gentle, earnest and heartfelt the next. It also avoids the trap of too directly preaching about America today, while asking several searching (and uncomfortable questions) about where we are now. Superbly acted across the board, it again shows Anderson is one of the finest directors working.

Lost Horizon (1937)

Capra’s well-made Utopian dream lacks any of self-awareness of the flaws in its vision

Director: Frank Capra

Cast: Ronald Colman (Robert Conway), Jane Wyatt (Sondra), Edward Everett Horton (Alexander Lovett), John Howard (George Conway), Thomas Mitchell (Henry Barnard), Margo (Maria), Isabel Jewell (Gloria Stone), HB Warner (Chang), Sam Jaffe (High Lama)

Life can be such a never-ending rat race, the idea of chucking in that relentless pursuit of fortune and glory can be really tempting. Fortunately, it turns out there is a place you can do that: Shangri-La, a halcyon Utopian community buried deep in the Himalayas. There the mountains give it a gloriously perfect climate and preserves its residents youth for potentially hundreds of years. It’s a paradise for legendary diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman), one of a group of Westerners whose plane crashes near-by, all of them invited to make their lives there.

It’s easy to see why this appealed to Frank Capra – even if his real idea of Shangri-La was Small Town America – and he poured years (and millions of dollars) into this dream project (it also took years to make back the investment). Conway is part of a group of mostly British Westerners escaping revolution in China. In Shangri-La, he’s deeply drawn to the peaceful ideology outlined by their host Chang (HB Warner) and Shangri-La’s spiritual leader, the Great Lama (Sam Jaffe). Not to mention the charms of resident Sondra (Jane Wyatt). Problem is, his brother George (John Howard) is desperate to return home. What will Robert choose?

Lost Horizon has a lot to admire about it, in among the incredibly earnest force of its telling, devoid of any drop of cynicism or irony. This is like a 101 of what to expect from Capra? It’s a celebration of the glories of living a simple, pure life without ruthless ambition and realpolitik. It’s filmed on a highly impressive scale by Capra – the gargantuan sets certainly show where the money went. Striking sequences, like a seemingly never-ending torch-lit parade of the people of Shangri-La marching towards Chang’s opulent estate, are breathtaking.

It hosts a fine parade of actors: Colman is perfect as the debonair, world-weary Conway, Horton and Mitchell make their supporting comic double-act genuinely funny (Horton, in particular, litters the film with wonderful bits of comic business using everything from mirrors to jewellery boxes), HB Warner makes a series of infodump ideological sermons more engaging than they deserve and Isabel Jewell creates a great deal of charm in the blousy Gloria. Interestingly, perhaps the most compelling sequence of Lost Horizon occurs before they even arrive, as these characters feud and panic on a hijacked plane taking them in totally the wrong direction.

But there is often something a little too pure about Lost Horizon. Even as the film-making beautifully unspools, it’s hard not to notice that for a huge chunk of this long film very little really happens beyond slightly sanctimonious speechifying comparing ‘our’ civilisation with the peaceful life of Shangri-La. In fact, it’s easy (particularly in our more cynical age) to start feeling a bit twitchy. So earnestly perfect is everything there, with a simplistic and unchallenging view of kindness and brotherly love, it starts to feel like being continually slapped by a SparkNotes copy of Thomas More. Capra uses John Howard’s blowhard George, to put a counter-view – but fills him with such ambition and desire that we are of course never in danger of taking him seriously.

Graham Greene wrote of the film “nothing reveals men’s characters more than their Utopias” before observing the design of Shangri-La resembled nothing more or less than a luxurious Beverly Hills Estate. Rarely has a truer word been spoken: this mountainous paradise, with its carefully designed gardens, well-stocked libraries, grand ballrooms and lush woodland perfect for riding feels like a slice of affluent middle-class Western civilisation in the middle Tibet. It makes for an interesting window into the film today.

Because it’s hard not to see Shangri-La as less of a land of beautiful contentment, and more as a sort of colonialist wet dream. Scratch the surface and it’s a very hierarchical community. Literally at the top of the hill, living in upper-class harmony surrounded by art, books, comfy armchairs and fine dining are the elite (all bar one of them Westerners). At the bottom, in their huts, live the Tibetan natives happily continuing their traditional way of life, happy to live and work (unlike the Chinese revolutionaries who Conway and co flee in the film’s opening) in the shadow of their betters. A smarter film than Lost Horizon might have pointed out the irony that Shangi-La is just a colony where the natives haven’t yet embraced political self-determination – but I’m not sure if such an idea occurred to Capra.

As soon as this crossed my mind, I couldn’t help picking holes in the calamitous internal logic of the film. Shangri-La’s only contact with the outside world is via a group of Tibetan sherpas who trek up and down the mountain once a month bringing supplies from the outside world – presumably its them who have trooped up thousands of books (including the complete works of Robert Conway!), hundreds of mediocre paintings and roomfuls of rococo furniture. The kindly inhabitants of Shangi-La’s palace never considered overseeing the construction of basic plumbing and power generation for the natives living in the valley below them (though they somehow recruited contractors to supply those things to their house on the hill).

In fact, the whole of Shangri-La’s world is set up on maintaining a strict two-tier system that keeps people content by making sure they never think for themselves. (What passes for education, is a series of patronising missionary-style sing-alongs). Even more chilling, the Grand Lama (a softly spoken Sam Jaffe, under mountains of make-up) has dreams of Shangri-La rebuilding global civilisation after its inevitable destruction, the whole world adopting his simplistic ideology. He means well, but I couldn’t help be reminded of Dr Strangelove orgasmically rising from his chair at the thought of creating a fascist Utopia of sexual bliss under an Earth poisoned by nuclear radiation.

None of these ideas enter into Lost Horizon’s simplistic world-view. It sticks with saying what the world needs is to be crafted into a sort of country estate, a sort of Tibetan Downton Abbey, with everyone happy with their assigned place in the chain. Lost Horizon gets as close as it can to any form of social criticism when Conway bemoans 90 ‘whites’ were saved from that opening Chinese revolution while thousands of natives were left to die. But aside from that, is exactly what it says on the tin: there are no flaws in Shangi-La.

And maybe I’m being impossibly cynical. Lost Horizon is a lovely film to bathe in for a while – after all Capra, at his peak, couldn’t make a clanger if he tried. But there is a more complex story on the edges here. If Lost Horizon had showed us more of Conway’s Gulliver-Like return to civilisation, lost in a series of spinning newspaper headlines, it could have given us more of that. But Capra is no Thomas More or Jonathan Swift. The satirical and suppressive elements under a hierarchical Utopia are alien to his mindset. Lost Horizon is a reassuring promise founded on shaky ground indeed.

Viridiana (1961)

Luis Buñuel’s brilliant, multi-layered satire is a superb, darkly hilarious, masterful film

Director: Luis Buñuel

Cast: Silvia Pinal (Viridiana), Francisco Rabal (Jorge), Fernando Rey (Don Jaime), Margarita Lozano (Ramona), Victoria Zinny (Lucia), Teresita Rabal (Rita), José Calvo (Don Amalio), José Manuel Martín (“El Cojo”), Luis Heredia (“El Poca”), Joaquín Roa (Don Zequiel), Lola Gaos (Enedina), Juan García Tiendra (“El Leproso”)

In the 1960s, Luis Buñuel was invited back Spain after years of creative exile to spearhead a new wave of Spanish filmmaking. He produced a film that not only bit the right-wing hand that fed it, it snapped it clean off and chewed it up. Viridiana must have been the last thing the authorities had in mind. Gloriously exposing the guilt and vanity of the upper classes and charity, it was lambasted by the Catholic church for blasphemy and showed an organised world teetering on the brink of chaos, with the powerful either perverts or playboys, the poor singularly ungrateful for the paternalistic patronage they receive and our lead character a hopelessly naïve former nun. Not surprisingly it was instantly banned and Buñuel never made a film in Spain again.

Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) is our naïve nun, called to her uncle Don Jaime’s (Fernando Rey) home for one last visit before her confirmation. Don Jaime though has plans: Viridiana has an extraordinary resemblance to his late wife and Don Jaime intends to first get her to cos-play his wife and then marry him. Or failing that, to drug her and rape her. Guilt stops him from the rape – but doesn’t stop him from claiming he did it, a lie he instantly (fatally) regrets but which leads her to abandon her dreams of becoming a nun. In the aftermath, Viridiana and her cousin (Jaime’s bastard son) Jorge (Francisco Rabal) divide the estate, with Viridiana aiming to continue her religious ideals through excessively generous charity with quietly resentful local paupers, who she has a vision of turning into a religious commune. It does not turn out well.

Viridiana benches much of the surrealism of Buñuel’s most famous work, but it loses none of his acute social satire and ability to inject the absurd with sharp dark humour. It makes Viridiana a startingly complex work, brilliantly assembled by an artist where every frame has a different idea, all of which comes together into a darkly entertaining whole. Its not hard to see why the strictly Catholic Fascist Spain found the film so outrageous, with its mocking of religious imagery (from the crucifix that becomes a flick knife to the famous scene of the paupers forming a drunken, pose-perfect, tableau of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper), it’s acknowledgement of a host of fetishes and perversions among the upper-classes (orgies, feet, hinted necrophilia, incest) and the utter ineffectiveness of any system, no matter how charitable, to control the human spirit, with the poor frequently resentful under their veneer of deferential gratitude.

Viridiana splits neatly into two acts, both revolving around a complex relationship with guilt and how it guides our actions. Don Jaime (a superb performance of corrupted grandeur from Fernando Rey) is a lonely man, plagued with guilt and regret over his wife’s death, locking himself away in a time-locked country pile like a perverted Miss Havisham. In private he fetishistically admires her clothes (which he blasphemously keeps like holy relics) and admires his feet in her shoes. He’s fascinated by Viridiana’s resemblance to his late wife and fantasises that she might be persuaded to renounce the cloth to live as his wife.

With the convenience of his servant Ramana – an equally lonely, repressed soul tenderly played with a burgeoning sexual desire by Margarita Lozano – he guilt-trips Viridiana into dressing for one night in his wife’s bridal clothes, drugs her drink and takes her to bed. He even arranges the sleeping Viridiana into the exact pose his wife had when she was before him, adding hints of necrophilia to an already disgusting assault. Shame stops him from committing the deed and guilt then corrupts both of them. Don Jaime at his selfish lie, Viridiana at her indirect role in her uncle’s death and the forced abandonment of her vocation.

Inheriting her uncle’s home, alongside playboy cousin Jorge (Jaime’s bastard son, who he has barely met), Viridiana redirects this guilt into a commune for the poor and needy, where charity, work and faith sit side-by-side. Her efforts to essentially introduce a benign feudal church-system contrasts with Jorge’s modernising efforts, introducing electricity and other mod-cons. Buñuel demonstrates the discomfort of these two worlds with a beautifully assembled scene where Viridiana’s leads a group pray intercut with a series of shots of acts of manual labour (hammers smashing walls, cement splatted on bricks etc.), making he prayer meeting (which we know the attendees think is a pile of bunkum) seem even more outdated and ineffective.

Viridiana isn’t cruel about these characters though – it looks at them as real people, with faults and virtues, some good some bad. It’s also remarkably clear-eyed about charity. There is something performative about Viridiana’s efforts, as well as a clear sense it is as much for her (subconsciously – she’s too naïve for cynicism) as it is the welfare of the beneficiaries. Those beneficiaries are a brilliant series of pen portraits of people who take offered charity, but resent the paternalistic attitudes that come with it. The working classes are not passively grateful for religious charity – but they are smart enough to take a meal ticket. No wonder the church was furious: Viridiana ruthlessly exposes the lip-service the downtrodden give religious charity, while refusing to reshape their lives and views according to instruction.

The peasants remain earthy, irreverent and full of their own pleasures and prejudices. Despite Viridiana’s best efforts they abuse a (possibly leperous) beggar, tying a cowbell to him so they can hear him coming. When left alone in the grand house, they do what many of us might well do in their place: like teenagers resentful at their parents, they throw a drunken party and trash the place. Viridiana’s ‘dinner-party’ scene is Buñuel’s masterclass in riotous joy that slowly turns darker and more dangerous. Mockery leads to over-indulgence, anger and eventually violence. Viridiana will discover to her cost her attempts at kindness has done nothing to change their basic characters and it is as likely for someone to be downtrodden and deeply unpleasant as it is for them to be decent.

Charity in Viridiana doesn’t really change the world. It can improve lives, but not the system. And using it to shape people into what you want them to be is doomed to failure. The peasants are (mostly) not bad people, they just don’t feel want to reshape themselves into pious substitute nuns for Viridiana as a pay-off for room and board. Jorge is distressed to see a working dog tied to a cart and forced to run alongside it. He impulsively buys the dog – which to its original owner is not a pet but a working animal that must own its keep. Jorge clearly feels good about saving this dog: but seconds after he walks away with it, Buñuel pans across to another identical dog running behind a cart. Who was this charity for? The dog or for Jorge? The peasants of Viridiana? And did this one act change anything? And for some charity is entirely self serving: Viridiana visits Don Jaime solely out of thanks for his charity in paying for her time in the convent – surely an act only carried out for Jamie’s own perverted reasons.

None of this is what the Church or Spanish state wanted to hear. A downtrodden class that isn’t grateful to its leaders for lifting them up, but resents them for their patronising strictures. Lords of the manor, one of whom is a lonely pervert, the second a libidinous playboy who sleeps with multiple women. A deeply religious woman, who is completely naïve and fails utterly. And an ending – an ending Buñuel was ordered to change from the script and in doing so made even more suggestive and blasphemous – that implies the household will settle into a sexual menage.

It’s brilliantly, pointedly not what he was asked for – and stunning condemnation of the flaws in an entire system, caught in a brilliant parable. It’s superbly directed by Buñuel, by now a master of camerawork and editing with a beautifully judged performance by Silvia Pinal who makes Viridiana someone we deeply admire even as every decision she makes seems doomed for disaster. It’s a fiercely challenging, involving and complex work and infinitely rewarding for reviewing and patient consideration – no wonder Spanish critics later named it the greatest Spanish film ever made.