Category: Relationship film

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins carry out a strange dance in the compelling The Silence of the Lambs

Director: Jonathan Demme

Cast: Jodie Foster (Clarice Starling), Anthony Hopkins (Dr Hannibal Lecter), Scott Glenn (Jack Crawford), Ted Levine (James “Buffalo Bill” Gumb), Anthony Heald (Dr Frederick Chilton), Brooke Smith (Catherine Martin), Diane Baker (Senator Ruth Martin), Kasi Lemmons (Ardelia Mapp), Frankie Faison (Barney Matthews)

Is there a more unlikely Oscar winner than The Silence of the Lambs? In fact, double down on that: is there a more unlikely film to have won all five of the Big Ones – Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay – only the third film in history to have achieved that (It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest being the others)? Re-watching the film, it’s actually a triumphant vindication for Hollywood to have chosen a thriller for the ages, a complex and intriguing puzzle wrapped in an unsettling outer layer of thrills and horror, as if the academy was (late in the day) finally tipping an award-lined hat to the film’s spiritual grandfather, Hitchcock himself.

Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is a trainee FBI agent, in the final weeks before her graduation. Out of the blue she is plucked from Quantico by the head of the Behavioural Science Unit, Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), to interview notorious psychiatrist-turned-cannibalistic-serial-killer Dr Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), now interned in a psychiatric prison-cum-dungeon in Baltimore. Crawford hopes the Lecter might be able to shed light on the motives of “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine), a serial killer kidnapping and skinning young women across a number of states. Lecter can shed some light – but the price is an opportunity to investigate further into the psyche of the determined and ambitious Starling. A three-way game of cat-and-mouse between Bill, Clarice and Lecter soon starts to emerge.

Demme’s film is a sublimely made entertainment that brilliantly pulls together the trappings of multiple genres (there are splashes of horror, thriller, police procedural, romance and black comedy to name but a few) into an unsettlingly tense and engrossing whole. It’s truly a film Hitchcock would have been proud of, a masterfully assembled thrill ride where every shot serves a purpose, and each scene is carefully constructed to establish a clear story and push the audience’s buttons. It has two of the best tense “prolonged misdirects” in film history (wittily signposted in advance by an early car chase that is revealed in a pull-away to be a training exercise in Quantico – don’t trust your eyes!) and it brilliantly immerses you in the world and emotions of Clarice Starling.

Demme’s aim was to get us to empathise above all with Clarice, as she descends into the dark underbelly of this terrifying world. Demme uses a carefully selected combination of POV shots and straight-to-camera addresses to deliberately put us into the position of actually “being” Clarice Starling. From following her perspective through rooms and corridors, to seeing the characters she is talking to address the camera directly as if talking to us, through to carefully placed close-up shots that allow us to study the thoughts and feelings travelling across Clarice’s face, it brilliantly allows us to invest overwhelmingly in her without us even really noticing we are doing it.

And of course that is put together with Jodie Foster’s extraordinarily brilliant performance in the role. One of the film’s many strengths is exploring the nature of being a determined, brave and ambitious – but still slight and feminine – woman in the alpha-male world of crime investigation. Clarice fends off in virtually every scene not just discrimination and instant judgement, but a parade of half-spoken advances and flirtations from male colleagues. Foster’s brilliance is to make a character who is determined but humane, slightly vulnerable while never weak. She’s the key driver of the story, but also both an insider and outsider in her world, partly motivated by a desire to prove herself, partly by an attempt to vanquish haunting childhood memories of weakness and loss.

It’s these feelings under the surface that attract the interest of Hannibal Lecter, and the strange dance between them is the heart of the film’s appeal and it’s magic. Why does Lecter want to know about the facts of Starling’s life (that quid pro quo he archly asks for)? Does he want to analyse her? Does he want to help? Does he want to amuse himself with her terrible memories? Or is he just bored? He hardly seems to be certain himself, but the intimacy shared revelations provide is neatly played with by Demme in sequences between the two (they barely share the frame by the way more than twice) that hum with a tension of danger, but also a thrill of illicit romance, mixed with incestuous interest (Starling the orphan, Lecter the father-like man of wisdom helping her catch the killer). And it works with us as well – we are so invested in Starling that, just like her, we end up liking Lecter (even though we know we shouldn’t).

Of course it helps that Hannibal Lecter is portrayed in a performance of magnetic, career-defining brilliance by Hopkins. Hopkins modestly claimed playing Lecter was easy once you mastered the voice and the physicality – but that’s to downplay the extraordinary skill mastering those aspects concern, and the bravura brilliance with which Hopkins plays to the camera but never tips into absurdism. It’s an arch, knowing, winking performance that also carries with it an intense, psychotic menace, a delirious capacity for violence (as we find out). Demme introduces the character sublimely – after the build-up, his ram-rod stillness, polite manner and refined behaviour are somehow even more unsettling. Sure Brian Cox in Manhunter may be more conventionally chilling, but Hopkins is like an elemental demon playing with our childhood bogeyman fears, a guy who seems even more dangerous as he playfully chats one minute, then beats you to death with a truncheon the next.

The scenes between these two characters dominate the film (even if they take up no more than ten minutes of its runtime), and their relationship (beautifully shot as a game of one cagey upmanship that turns into semi-flirting, that turns into something in between) defines the movie and its legacy. Lecter’s magnetism was such that in later movies he would increasingly become an anti-hero of sorts, a lord of misrule rather than a brutal and indiscriminate killer, but here he’s terrifying and satanic, just as Starling is courageous and noble as the lady on a quest.

And that quest targets Buffalo Bill – a deeply unsettling performance of psychological unease and self-loathing by Ted Levine. The film was controversial at the time for its killer being both a transsexual and gay (although the film makes clear it’s a desire to be anyone apart from who he is that drives all these feelings), especially as at the time these groups were barely represented positively in the movies. But it also makes for singularly unsettling character, living in a subterranean cave-like basement, surrounded by moths, his voice slurred childishly while carrying no sense of shame or regret for his actions.

The hunt for Bill is the film’s story, and Demme uses the devices of cinema to make this as tense and unsettling an experience as needed. The camera prowls terrifyingly around Bill’s domains. Howard Shore’s score makes a deeply unnerving use of mournful refrains. Frequently scenes – such as the post-mortem inspection of a victim’s body – are often silently scored, making the mechanical noises of the investigator’s trade (such as the loudly clicking and whirring camera) deeply jarring. The film is grim, but relies more on reaction rather than bathing us in horrors, and implication brings the greatest terror. Every sequence of the film is perfectly assembled to leave us struggling to breathe – not least as events place Starling in more and more peril.

With its playful sense of black comedy, mixed with genuine terror and thrills, The Silence of the Lambs genuinely feels like the film Hitchcock was born to make. Everything in the film is perfectly assembled to serve the film’s aims – there is not a foot wrong in its assembly, and it’s sad that Demme never hit these sort of heights again. But the film is like a twisted companion piece to Psycho (only better), and in Hopkins and Foster produced two landmark performances. While the film engrosses us in Starling’s struggles in a man’s world, it also overwhelms us with Hopkins’ devilish magnetism and dark mystery. And what to make of the relationship between Starling and Lecter? It’s a mystery so enigmatic that it continues to grip today and it’s the secret behind the success of this compelling masterpiece.

The Greatest Showman (2017)

Hugh Jackman excels in The Greatest Showman, like a Broadway show bought straight to film

Director: Michael Gracey

Cast: Hugh Jackman (PT Barnum), Michelle Williams (Charity Hallett-Barnum), Zac Efron (Philip Carlyle), Rebecca Ferguson (Jenny Lind), Zendaya (Anne Wheeler), Keala Settle (Lettie Lutz), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (WD Wheeler), Natasha Liu Bordizzo (Deng Yan), Paul Sparks (James Gordon Bennett), Sam Humphrey (Charles Stratton)

In early 2018, the whole world seemed to go crazy for The Greatest Showman. A big old-fashioned film musical that wouldn’t look out of place with Gene Kelly in the lead, people went to the cinema again and again to see this escapist song-and-dance epic. Based loosely on the life of PT Barnum (Hugh Jackman), covering his marriage to childhood love Charity (Michelle Williams) and the creation of his Museum of Curiosities (funded through some chicanery with banks), he staffs the museum with “freaks” whom he encourages to embrace their nature and entertain the crowds. The “circus” is a huge success, but will Barnum be seduced by his desire for greater fame and acceptance in the cultural high circles that have no time for his mass entertainment? And how will his fascination with opera singer Jennie Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) affect his marriage?

If you get the idea from that plot summary that this is rather safe and unchallenging plot-wise, you would be right. Structurally this doesn’t offer anything more than hundreds of musicals before it – a hero aims for the stars, loses his roots on the way, only to triumphantly rediscover them and remember why he got into this business in the first place. Yup that’s your classic Hollywood plot here. And it doesn’t matter a damn.

Because The Greatest Showman, like the shows Barnum offered the crowds, knows exactly what it is: an old-fashioned Hollywood musical, shot like a classic piece of Broadway spectacle, crammed to the gills with hugely exciting and dynamic musicals performers ripping through a series of impressive songs and some stunningly choreographed numbers. Who gives a damn if you’ve seen the story before, when it’s so well done, the actors so engaging and the highlights on the way to brilliant to watch. Come to this with your mind set for the West End, and you’ll love it. Expect to see La La Land and you are in for a disappointment (or a pleasant surprise!)

Gracey’s film is unashamedly old-fashioned, and shot with a confident stillness that puts the actors, dancers and singers front-and-centre rather than the flourishes of a director. In contrast to some over-directed musical numbers, Gracey is happy to place the camera so we can see all the numbers perfectly. And why wouldn’t he when all the actors can dance as well as this? I want to see every step of the intricate choreography (that would have thrilled Kelly) from Jackman and Efron in The Other Side. I want to see every step of the thrilling group dance number From Now On. I want to marvel at Efron and Zendaya soaring through the skies on trapeze ropes in Rewrite the Stars.

It’s a musical that chose its cast carefully, requiring that they should all be capable of the sort of feats of physical and musical perfection that we all enjoy watching on Strictly every week. In all this, the snubs of the critics seems neither here nor there – hilariously the film always commentates on its own terrible reviews in advance (!) in the character of James Gordon Bennett, a humourless snobby theatre reviewer – it’s a film that is shot in the arm of pure entertainment.

I mean you’d need to have a heart of pure cold not to feel some serious emotions during Jackman and Williams’ beautiful rooftop ballet during A Million Dreams. What I particularly liked about this was its unabashed, carefully designed artificiality – like a blast of 1950s Minnelli musicals, this uses painted backdrops and studio locations to beautiful effect to create a larger-than-life, theatrical world of hyper reality. It really helps you to get even more swept up by it all.

But then you also get swept up from having an actor as charismatic as Hugh Jackman in the lead. Oozing charm and grace from every pore, Jackman is riveting in the role, his grin a mile wide, his skills as a singer and (most especially) a dancer shown off to stunning effect. He turns moments that could have rogueish qualities into sweetness, he is impossible not to root for. Sure as an actor he’s not stretched with the conventional arc Barnum has, but does that matter when he is giving this all he has. It’s a hugely, overwhelmingly enjoyable performance of pure charisma that I can’t imagine any other actor in Hollywood having the chutzpah to pull off. It’s so skilled that he never overwhelms the film but you could move the whole performance into a 1,000-seater theatre and it would still work perfectly.

The rest of the cast all lift their considerable game to match the commitment and expertise of the lead. Williams showcases her own musical talents, while Efron and Zendaya have a truly affecting romance at the heart of the film (while also being considerably compelling musical performers). Rebecca Ferguson has the least rewarding role (and is also dubbed for the high soprano singing), but does a decent job as someone you could imagine turning Barnum’s head. The rest of the cast playing assorted circus performers create a truly family atmosphere, with Keala Settle and Sam Humphrey particularly fine.

You could argue that the film – with its message of acceptance and lack of judgement – flies a little bit in the face of the real Barnum (“there’s a sucker born every minute”) who probably was partly exploiting his acts for cash. The treatment of Jennie Lind as an increasingly scheming would-be-seductress is a sad slur on a woman who gave most of her earnings to charity. In fact you wish allthe names had been changed to distance us from reality.

But the film gets away with it because it is basically a heartfelt and genuine piece of work that, most of all, like a huge Broadway musical just wants to entertain the audience. And on that score it works – you’ll get invested in the characters and their story and you’ll find yourself humming the songs afterwards and trying (failing) to dance those steps. Go into it in the right mindset, and you’ll find a delight.

Boyhood (2014)

Ellar Coltrane grows up before our eyes in Richard Linklater’s 12-years-in-the-making Boyhood

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Ellar Coltrane (Mason Evans Jr), Patricia Arquette (Olivia), Ethan Hawke (Mason Evans), Lorelei Linklater (Samantha Evans), Libby Villari (Catherine), Marco Perella (Bill Welbrock), Brad Hawkins (Jim), Zoe Graham (Sheena)

If there is one thing we can all relate to, it’s the trials and tribulations of growing up, that shift from being a child to an adult. It’s the subject of Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, which follows the growing up of Mason Evans (Ellar Coltrane) from the age of 6 to 18 and his relationship with his divorced parents Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and Mason (Ethan Hawke) and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater). What is however most striking about Linklater’s film is that it was shot over a staggering period of time, 12 years in fact, meaning that Ellar Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater literally grow up on screen before our eyes.

It makes for an almost unrepeatable power over any other film dealing with the same subject, by letting all the actors naturally grow older over the length of the film. Suddenly it becomes not just a film dealing with an idea, but instead a real life dramatisation of the process of ageing, becoming some sort of emotional scrap-book or album, a type of film version of the trick of making a drawing move by quickly flicking the pages of a notebook. It adds an air of depth and reality to the whole film that gives it a universal strength and appeal. It’s an actual slice of real life, it’s unrepeatable and profoundly well done and immersive.

Linklater was given near creative freedom to shoot the film – with the small yearly budget for shooting the film being squirrelled away into various studio accounts. Linklater creates a film with a lack of actual drama that makes it feel even more like a part of life. There are precious few “narrative points” or dramatic tools in the overall film, with the exception maybe of Olivia’s hard drinking second husband Marco (Bill Welbrock). Instead, the issues that Mason (and Samantha) deal with have a universal relevance. These are the sort of events – the sort of conversations – that any child could have growing up. Far from making the film dull, this serves to increase its power.

Linklater based each year’s filming script on the events and feelings that were going on in the life of Ellar Coltrane at the time (although he had a clear idea of the final scene and shot), which perhaps also helped to draw such a series of deeply felt and real performances from Coltrane. The intimacy of the story also brilliantly makes each scene feel engrossingly real, precisely because everything is grounded in reality and nothing in some sort of overarching film narrative.

It’s a film entirely about capturing the rhythms and beats of real life and Linklater’s style allows moments of spontaneity, of naturalness and reality. Nothing in the film ever feels forced. You could argue that it also leads to a film that is almost restrainingly unambitious – it’s about as grounded as you can get, and barely has a structure as such at all beyond time passing. But that would be to miss the point – and the very fact that the film ignores virtually all the clichés of filmmaking narrative and storytelling is something to be praised than to be criticised.

The film works so well due to the commitment of all involved, not least Arquette and Hawke as the parents. Arquette won nearly every award going (including the Oscar) as the mother, and her performance is a testament to the film’s strengths. It totally eschews the loud moments of acting, the look-at-me Oscar bait that the role could have had, to instead focus on a quiet, sad dignity – but also warmth and loving regard for her children. There is no studied pretence to the role at all, but instead Arquette seems to play instead the moments of joy, tinged with disappointment at moments and chances lost from early motherhood, that you can imagine everyone feeling. It’s a bravely real performance, stuffed with moments of searing, heartfelt emotional truth.

Hawke is just as good as the father, a man who slowly comes to terms with his own responsibilities and adulthood over the course of the film. Starting as still something of a would-be beatnik and playboy, we see him slowly – especially after a second marriage – grow up and accept the role of an adult and a parent, while still clinging to the idea of dispensing fatherly/brotherly wisdom to his son.

If Linklater’s film does have a flaw it’s on this focus of father-son. There really was nothing to stop this from being Childhood rather than Boyhood, but instead it’s the story of the son (and with a particular stress on his bond with his absent father) that is at the heart of the film. It’s perhaps reflecting the angle that Linklater himself bought to the story, but its shame the film doesn’t try and be more even handed by allowing us to get a greater sense of how time and childhood affected both Mason and Samantha, rather than filtering Samantha’s experience through Mason’s perspective. It also means that Mason’s relationship with his mother is downplayed in favour of the bond between father and son, a general preoccupation with male relationships that runs through the film.

It’s a minor flaw I suppose, more of a missed opportunity – and less tasteless than a clumsy sequence where Oliva inadvertently motivates a Mexican immigrant to change his life, something he is profoundly grateful for years later but which she seems uncomfortably unaware of – but then this is a film that gets so much else right. Linklater’s live-action time-lapse film is a work of art that is probably unrepeatable, and is so low-key and normal that it carries a force and relevance few other films can.

Loving (2016)

Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga in a love story that fails to capture fire

Director: Jeff Nichols

Cast: Joel Edgerton (Richard Loving), Ruth Negga (Mildred Loving), Marton Csokas (Sheriff Brooks), Nick Kroll (Bernie Cohen), Michael Shannon (Grey Villet), Terri Abney (Garnet Jeter), Alano Miller (Raymond Green), Bill Camp (Frank Beazley)

Imagine the idea of the state dictating whom you could and couldn’t marry. This was the predicament Richard and Mildred Loving found themselves in, when the appalling segregationist policies of America in the 1950s saw them arrested for the crime of a white man marrying a black woman. Over time, especially from the 60s onwards, their case was seized upon by Civil Rights movements as a possible cause celebre for repealing many of the worst excesses of laws against mixed-race marriages. But the Lovings themselves remained quiet, private and determined to lead as normal a life as possible, while others fought this battle for them in the court.

Jeff Nichols’ film is full of affection, empathy and regard for these very everyday, normal people. What it is not – for all the skill of Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga’s performances in the leads – is a film that manages to raise any real interest at all. This is a frequently slow-moving story that manages to drain any drama out of what should be a really dramatic story.

Racial inequality is the sort of topic that desperately should be throwing up rage and anger. Imagine Spike Lee tackling this sort of content. Loving settles instead for being a polite, even rather patronising homage to the quiet lack of drive and energy in Richard Loving (in particular). The sort of film that honours his decision to, essentially, get involved as little as possible in the case, to avoid engaging as much as he can in the wider implications their legal battle has for the nation and to studiously resist any attempts to get either side involved in it.

This may be great for reality, but it’s strikingly poor drama. You feel that a drama that focused instead on those actively campaigning for the rights for equal marriage rights to be recognised, the ones who actually fought these battles in court and brought energy and fire to the debate might be a more interesting film. Instead this settles for being a film about regular, not special people, while around the edges of their lives far more interesting events and actions are constantly taking place.

There are some things to admire in the making of the film – Nichols’ brings his usual poetic skill to it – but this is a glacially paced, unabsorbing, overlong film that manages to make a scintillating and passionate subject as dull as dish water. Negga and Edgerton both do fine jobs – and clearly really admire the everyday nature of their characters – but these softly spoken, unengaged people to whom events happen, but who never take a stand of any sort of try and shape these events or set the direction of their own life, slowly switches the audience off.

Where is the fire here? Nichols’ film instead tries to become a tribute to the honesty of the working man, to Richard’s everyday values, simple, homespun viewpoints. It hails his lack of education (the film dances around where on the education spectrum Richard would be placed today), social awareness or even opinions as something which somehow makes him more “real” than anything else. This attitude, to be honest, becomes both trying and even a little patronising in its bluntness and sense of importance.

Just in case we are ever in danger of ever forgetting that he is a working man, the film can’t go longer than about five minutes without showing Richard laying some bricks. Mildred gets a little more engagement with the social issues of the 1960s – and the film does a good job of suggesting that she was a woman of considerably more hinterland than her husband, but who loyally followed his lead in the world. But neither of them come into focus as truly engaging characters. And because they are so hard to invest in, because the story and their film gives us so little personality for either of them to latch onto, in the end you don’t get as fired up by the injustice of their case as you should do.

Instead you are left thinking at the end that this sort of racism is bad because, well, we know it was at the start. Following the story of two basically boring people who were in the right place at the right time to become the face of overturning some terrible laws, doesn’t make them interesting and doesn’t make a story that focuses on their lives at the cost of any of the wider issues or actual battles that were being fought, suddenly interesting either.

Room at the Top (1959)

An ambitious man chooses between a damaging love affair and career in this fabulous kitchen-sink drama

Director: Jack Clayton

Cast: Laurence Harvey (Joe Lampton), Simone Signoret (Alice Aisgill), Heather Sears (Susan Brown), Donald Wolfit (Mr Brown), Donald Houston (Charlie Soames), Hermione Baddeley (Elspeth), Ambrosine Phillpotts (Mrs Brown), Allan Cuthbertson (George Aisgill), Raymond Huntley (Mr Hoylake), John Westbrook (Jack Wales), Richard Pasco (Teddy)

If there is one thing that preoccupied British cinema of the late 50s and early 60s it was class. How was a working class boy from the wrong end of the tracks supposed to pull himself up and make himself some room at the top? That’s certainly one of the many themes that you find in Jack Clayton’s sensational hit, nominated for a string of Oscars, but it’s also as much about how the search for that mystical nirvana that sees you invited for tea and crumpets at the conservative club, also means sacrificing huge shards of your own soul.

Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) arrives in the a Yorkshire town to take on a dreary, poorly-paid post in the Treasurer department of the local council – but has the bonus of being office work that gives him a chance at working his way up to the top. To that end he sets his ambitious cap at Susan Brown (Heather Sears), daughter of major local business magnate Mr Brown (Donald Wolfit). But Joe is also a man of his own passions, which fly in the face of his ambition, and he finds himself drawn towards married older French woman Alice Aisgill (Simone Signoret), who he meets at the local amateur drama club and who encourages him to surrender his ambitions and instead lead a life of contentment and happiness with her. Which possible life will Joe choose?

Perhaps the very first of what became the kitchen-sink genre, Room at the Top is beautifully filmed by Jack Clayton (as you would expect), but also brings the other major strength of this overlooked director to the fore, his ability with actors and to wring all-encompassing tragedy from the most everyday of circumstances. That’s what he does here, creating an almost epic scale of internal struggle for its hero, prickly as he is, drawn between two deeply conflicting goals, that asks what profits a man who gains the world at the cost of his soul?

Because, Room at the Top is that uniquely British film, that shows ambition and desire to better yourself often comes hand-in-hand with the sort of ruthless disregard of your roots, backgrounds and those around you in order to find your own path. Joe Lampton is a former POW, chippy, insecure, bitter, angry and determined to gain the sort of life he deserves. Of course it’s not hard to agree that he is more deserving than some of the tweedy, chinless fools around him and the sneers and condescension he receives from the officer class (his rival for Susan’s affections delights in calling him Sergeant, and reminding him constantly of his superior war record) is more than enough to motivate Joe.

What’s really striking about Joe therefore as how weak the character is. In undoubtedly the finest performance of his career, Laurence Harvey (a difficult and unreadable actor, with a style bridged between minimalism and woodenness) bravely shows both the bullish determination and the fundamental insecurity and weakness of Joe. A character who defines himself solely around what he feels he can achieve, he’s also a man completely unaware of what happiness is and how he to get it – and the thawing of her personality into something warmer and more loving with Alice, only serves to highlight how misguided and weakly he suppresses and kills such feelings in order to seize opportunities in life he feels entitled to.

It’s a rich contrast to Alice herself, a woman who is far braver and more certain about what she wants, and willing to fly against the conventions expected of her if it means she can gain happiness. The novel was adapted to turn Alice into a French ex-pat (married to a brutally cold RAF type played with an imperious selfishness by Allan Cuthbertson) solely so Signoret could be cast in the role – and it’s a match made in heaven. Simply wonderful, Signoret brings the part not only an imperious sexuality, but also a deep and lasting vulnerability under the surface of Euro-chill, a woman who we see opening herself up to the possibility of an affair becoming something truly lasting and deep, who has the courage to understand who and what she wants in a way Joe never can.

The tragedy is in that inability of Joe to understand his yearnings. Clayton’s brilliantly subtle film demonstrates time and time again, contrasting its romantic freedom laced with passion when Joe and Alice are together with the stilfed, contained suppression and chill that the more buttoned up, angered Joe meets elsewhere. If Joe had the will and strength he would top fighting for the things he should want in order to seize the opportunities he actually wants. His tragedy is that he can’t – and can’t begin to understand himself, or acknowledge his desires, until it is too late.

This was all a deep shock – and carried real power – at the time when Britain was shifting out of post-war hierarchies into the freer 60s, and Room at the Top was a massive hit at the box office. But it made such impact because its attitudes feel so deep and real, and the simple, everyday tragedy it details of two relationships doomed for different reasons, bound together by the self-defeating ambition of its lead character. Because wherever he goes, Joe will have people like Mr Brown (Donald Wolfit is very good by the way, in a role far outside his usual style) constantly reminding him of his oik status, so any victory in inbuilt with failure. Joe’s ambition and intelligence serve largely to blind and deflect him from the things he really wants. A lesson for us all.

The Beguiled (2017)

Nicole Kidman struggles to resist the charms of Colin Farrell in The Beguiled

Director: Sofia Coppola

Cast: Nicole Kidman (Miss Martha), Kirsten Dunst (Edwina), Elle Fanning (Alicia), Colin Farrell (Corporal McBurney), Oona Laurence (Amy), Angourie Rice (Jane), Addison Riecke (Marie), Emma Howard (Emily)

A remake of Don Siegel’s adaptation of the original novel, The Beguiled throws a feminist slant on a story of a confederate soldier, Corporal McBurney (Colin Farrell) who, in the later years of the Civil War, is found injured in the grounds of a girl’s school, where the women have continued to run the operation while the menfolk are consumed with (and by) the war. The school is run by the distant Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman), with the lead teacher Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) and five students of varying ages. All of the girls and women find themselves entranced (beguiled!) with the deceptively gentlemanly McBurney, whose true aims may be darker than assumed.

Sofia Coppola’s version of the story shifts the attention onto the women of the piece, and their plight and emotional journeys. This is a perfectly legitimate stance to take – and showing effectively a colony of girls and women in the 1860s living some sort of structured commune life is interesting and different – but Coppola’s film has a coolness and distance to it that ironically makes it far less than beguiling than it should be.

Beautifully filmed as the film is, it’s slow pace and meditative tone – as well as the rather obvious points it seems determined to make about male and female relations – actually serve to make the film less engaging than it should be. Wonderfully framed and painterly in its execution, with an effective mix of classical and 1970s style, it still never quite sparks into life.

The cast also struggle to bring a heartbeat to their characters. Nicole Kidman brings her customary reserve and elegance to a woman who has hints of a mysterious past that troubles her to this day, but the role remains distant and difficult to read – more than the film really requires. A clash or seduction between her and Colin Farrell’s corporal keeps promising dynamite but the explosions never really seem to come. Farrell laces his role with charm and a gruff masculinity, but the role misses a sense of his own darkness or manipulative nature until quite late, with the final act revelations making him appear more angry and bitter than the role really requires. It all kind of sums up the film that gets lost in its artifice and fails to uncover its heart.

The film, you could argue, does its best to beguile the audience with McBurney as the film’s character are. We are shown at every angle his vulnerability and tender politeness, and hidden from us for too long are his more manipulative elements. Coppola’s film becomes an intense study instead of sexual feelings and relations within a confined space. From sensual hand washes from Miss Martha, to intense declarations with lonely teacher Edwina, to not-so-innocent flirtations with the pupils, there is more than enough evidence that McBurney’s desire to stay may well be as much linked to seeing the school as having the potential to be his own private harem. The film’s failure in this intense sexual politics is that, while it captures moments of the simmer of attraction, it fails to really establish the danger that McBurney could suggest, as a violent man of action with complete control over a group of women.

Indeed the final moments of the film even suggest that the school itself may be a sort of siren’s bay – although lord knows McBurney is no Odysseys – which I found a rather confusing beat. Effective as the final images, or the film’s last supper betrayals, may be, they don’t carry quite enough wait because the film never quite nails the sexual tension it is aiming for, or the sensual danger it is trying to establish as a theme within the film.

Other changes make less sense as well. Coppola deliberately changes the race of Edwina, from a mixed-race young woman to someone white enough to be played by Kirsten Dunst. While Dunst’s performance is fine, many of the themes of Edwina’s lack of confidence, her self-loathing, her feeling of having no place outside of the school, of being somehow less than other women are left in place. These themes of course make perfect sense for a mixed race woman in the 1860s who has landed a job through the connections of her father, but they make less sense for an attractive young schoolteacher with a privileged background. Coppola made the change because she felt that she could not do the theme justice, but she misses the fact that the very appearance of the character is the context needed for her to make sense.

The Beguiled is beautiful to observe and has its moments, but it never really comes to light the way it should. Thoughtful and poetic a director as Coppola is, she has created a film here that feels all artifice and no depth, that wants to paint a picture of the life of women in the civil war but never really has the energy and fire to make this come to life in a way to make the audience as engaged as they should be.

Last Christmas (2019)

Emilia Clarke and Henry Golding in a Christmassy romance with a twist

Director: Paul Feig

Cast: Emilia Clarke (Kate), Henry Golding (Tom Webster), Michelle Yeoh (“Santa”), Emma Thompson (Petra), Lydia Leonard (Marta), Peter Mygind (“Boy”), Rebecca Root (Dr Addis), Patti LuPone (Joyce), Ingrid Oliver (PO Crowley), Laura Evelyn (PO Churchill), Rob Delaney (Director), Peter Serafinowicz (Producer)

Last Christmas has been savaged by critics and held up by many like it was some sort of embodiment of everything that’s wrong with cinema. Jeez louise guys, take a chill pill why don’t you? Feig’s London based comedy, working with an Emma Thompson script, does exactly what it says on the tin – an It’s a Wonderful Life-inspired Christmassy story, that ticks all the Christmas boxes. It has no pretentions for doing anything else. And there is nothing wrong with that!

Kate (Emilia Clarke) is recovering from a heart transplant last year, and she’s heading off the rails. She takes no responsibility for anything, she’s selfish, lazy, demanding and making a car-crash of her life and health. Working as a full-time Elf in a Covent Garden Christmas store (run by Michelle Yeoh as “Santa”), Kate’s life is heading down the toilet until one day she meets Tom Webster (Henry Golding), an almost supernaturally decent guy, kind, considerate, friendly and caring. With his guidance can Kate start to turn her life around?

Well there is a twist in Last Christmas and, to be honest, it’s pretty easy to see coming. Anyone with half an eye on costumes or numbers of interactions will see it coming and anticipate what they are going to get. But you know, that’s fine. This is a film that knows what it is, a fairly unchallenging rom-com that’s spiced with a little touch of Capra-esque whimsy and a conventional morality tale of a selfish person turning round their life.

There are some good jokes, there are some reasonably charming performances, there is a good sense of fun driving through the whole film and it manages to capture at least a little touch of that Christmas-movie alchemy (a la Love Actually) where you can imagine people happily sitting down to watch it, in a light, fun, unchallenging way, for years to come. Its Feig’s offering for the Christmas movie cannon and it’s a perfectly acceptable entry. In fact its cosy predictability and familiar structure is pretty much a key part of its appeal. Because at Christmastime we don’t really want anything that’s going to stretch us or demand things from us. We kind of want to sit around and watch something a little predictable, a little fluffy but basically well-meaning and fun.

Emilia Clarke does a terrific job as light comedienne in the lead role, a role perhaps far more suited to her quirky, klutzy, off-the-wall charm than years of playing Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones ever was. She throws herself into it here, happy to be silly, and shows both a good skill for pratfalls and also for drawing out a vulnerability from her character as well as being extremely charming. Henry Goulding makes a very good match as a character who could very easily tip over into smugly perfect, but again remains just the right side of charming.

Thompson writes herself a decent role as Kate’s Yugoslavian mother, a typical sort of nightmare domineering mother from films of this time, but laced with a sadness and isolation in the modern world and her adopted country. Moments that show the reaction of the characters to Brexit and the growing hostility to immigrants sometimes lean a little too heavily on the liberal conscience of the audience, but it fits in with the generally gentle, liberal attitudes of the film.

It’s a film that knows it’s a guilty pleasure, but it seems to have been designed to give you a sort of pre-Christmas glow. Catch it in the wrong mood and you will consider it one of the worst things you have seen. Take it in the right mood and you might even be charmed by it.

The Good Liar (2019)

McKellen and Mirren excel in this enjoyable confidence trick caper The Good Liar

Director: Bill Condon

Cast: Ian McKellen (Roy Courtnay), Helen Mirren (Betty McLeish), Russell Tovey (Steven), Jim Carter (Vincent), Lucian Msamati (Beni), Mark Lewis Jones (Bryn), Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson (Vlad)

The truth can be a difficult thing to grasp. Particularly when so many people are skilled at twisting and turning it for their own purposes. Roy Courtnay (Ian McKellen) is one of the best in the business, a selfish and greedy con man who preys on the vulnerable and the arrogant unlike, ruthless in is business dealings and with anyone who tries to muscle in on his business. His latest mark is Betty McLeish (Helen Mirren), a lonely widow who has inherited a huge fortune from her late husband. Meeting Betty through a “lonely hearts” online dating agency, Roy skilfully inveigles his way into her life and her home. But is all as it seems to Roy?

The Good Liar is an entertaining and enjoyable con trick of a film, that sets up its stall very much like a number of other films in this genre. We are presented with a picture of the conman at work, and shown many of the tricks and hoodwinks that the film will practice on us, being worked out in practice by the conman early in the film. It’s possible to see how the joins work – and do find your expectations being carefully prepped – but the film is entertaining enough that you are happy for it to let you try and lead you down the deceptive garden path even as it points out a few trips along the way.

A large part of the success is down to the brilliance of the two leading performances. Ian McKellen is at possibly his very best as the genial, amusing, waspish Roy who we only slowly begin to realise is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, with a line in casual cruelty and violence. It takes a great actor like McKellen, to play so successfully a consummate actor (and liar) as Roy, and never seem either too forced or overplaying the hand. His Roy has several excellent lines, and also a brilliant ability to look and sound genuine and heartfelt at one moment and shift gears to ruthless coldness the next. It’s a superb performance, wonderfully entertaining in its delight in its own villainy. You almost want to forgive Roy his essential vileness, such is his surface charm and McKellen’s waspish delight in playing such an unrepentantly horrible man. McKellen has done his best film work working with Condon and this film might be his best yet.

Mirren matches him well as the mark, a considerate, intelligent and decent woman. Mirren has a difficult job here, for reasons that would perhaps be spoilers, although I think it is safe to say that most viewers going into a film like this would expect that it would have a few cards up its sleeves. Needless to say Mirren is perhaps not all she seems, but she handles the difficult balancing act of seeming one thing and suggesting enough of another, that the final reveals never come as a surprise or seem inconsistent with her characterisation throughout the film.

Instead the film takes us on a delightful dance where we know that something is going on that we don’t know about or can’t see – and playfully the film effectively shows us the mechanisms of the con very early on as Roy and his business partner Vincent (an excellent Jim Carter) carry out another confidence game on some other victims. But Condon’s playful film lets us know enough that something is happening that Roy can’t even begin to guess at, while also allowing us to enjoy his confidence, arrogance and fast-thinking willingness to dance from lie to lie depending on the mood.

The one problem the film might have is that the final reveal of what is going on is based on information that is not delivered early in the film, but instead dropped on us at the end in an info-dump. While it makes sense that the film wishes to play its cards close to its chest, it perhaps would have been more satisfying to have little bit more of the information sprinkled throughout the film, enough for us to have a bit of a chance of piecing together they why before we are told. On reflection the film gives us moments that point towards the big picture, even if never enough information is given.

But the film still works because it has a devilish charm and waspish wit, and a delightful performance of gleeful devilry from McKellen, in one of his best roles yet. Making a superb pairing with Mirren, Condon’s enjoyable film hinges on the success of its actors and its enjoyment of the tricky narrative sleight-of-hand that con films can do so well.

The Theory of Everything (2014)

Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne bring to the screen the life of Stephen Hawking

Director: James Marsh

Cast: Eddie Redmayne (Stephen Hawking), Felicity Jones (Jane Hawking), Charlie Cox (Jonathan Jones), David Thewlis (Dennis Sciama), Simon McBurney (Frank Hawking), Emily Watson (Beryl Wilde), Maxine Peake (Elaine Mason), Harry Lloyd (Brian), Guy Oliver-Watts (George Wilde), Abigail Cruttenden (Isobel Hawking), Christian McKay (Roger Penrose), Enzo Cilenti (Kip Thorne)

If you want a story of a triumph over adversity, there are few where adversity was faced off so successfully and publicly than the life of Stephen Hawking. Diagnosed with motor-neurone disease while still a postgraduate, Hawing defied the diagnosis that gave him little more than a few years to live, to shape a life and career that would have a profound impact on the world and make him probably the most famous scientist alive. Not bad for a man who spent a large part of his life confined to a wheelchair, only able to communicate through a synthesised computer voice.

But his life was not just a story where he was the only character. Many of his accomplishments came about because of the unflagging support of his wife Jane. This film takes as its source the book Jane wrote about their life together. And while it arguably sugar-coats or plays down some of the more uncomfortable or divisive elements of their marriage (a marriage that was eventually to end in divorce and several years where they did not speak), it also serves as a warm tribute to the many years they spent together where their support for each other was total and offered with no agenda or demands.

Here in James Marsh’s inventive and well-made film, which manages to more-or-less transcend its “movie of the week” roots, Hawking and Jane are played by Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones in performances that scooped an Oscar and a nomination respectively. Both are deserved, as these are rich, dedicated and empathetic performances, crammed with admiration for their subjects. It all fits perfectly well in Marsh’s moving if (at times) rather conventional film, which he directs with a lack of flash and plenty of heart.

It’s a film that sometimes avoids delving too deeply into the emotional heartlands of its lead characters, and the frequently messy situations that life throws you into (the end of this relationship comes with a remarkably calm sadness, which contrasts heavily with the furious argument Jane describes in her book). It’s also a film that has a very clear agenda of framing Jane as a near saint in her devotion and patience, and Stephen as a brave soul with a superhuman perseverance and regard for his wife. So the introduction of choir leader Jonathan Jones (played with a sweet charm by Charlie Cox) into their domestic life as a surrogate father to the Hawking children and friend to Jane (very definitely not a lover, the film is eager to make clear) is very much something accepted by both without a hint of doubt or recrimination. Similarly, Hawking’s later divorce of Jane is set in a context of “setting her free” rather than the more (allegedly) definitive break it was in real life.

Real life, you suspect, was messier than this. The film does mine some excellent emotional honesty from Jane’s decision to marry Stephen being, at least partly, based on her belief that this man she loves only has a few years to live. From the start she doesn’t anticipate signing up for a lifetime of providing care and abandoning her own aspirations to support Stephen’s (the film makes no real mention of her own dreams of becoming a translator) – but Jane does so with a decided willingness and sense of duty. Similarly, Stephen does not anticipate a life essentially trapped in a wheelchair – finally speechless – and the film allows beats of frustration from him, alongside the determination to not let these problems prevent him from achieving his potential.

The film revolves around Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Hawking. Needless to say it’s a technical marvel, a stunning accomplishment not only in its physical mastery (especially as it was all shot out of sequence, so in each scene Redmayne needed to carefully map how far the symptoms had progressed) and commitment, but also in its searing emotionality. Hawking’s brightness, his bashful playfulness, his intelligence and sense of cheeky charm are all there – and they’re later married with a pained, just-controlled bitterness mixed with stern mouthed resentment and gutsy determination to deal with the hand he has been given. Redmayne’s performance is a superb capturing of the all-consuming feelings of being betrayed by your own body, of no longer being the master of your own frame and being forced to adjust your plans and expectations to meet the limits nature has put on you.

Felicity Jones is equally good in a superbly heartfelt performance as Jane, a woman who gifts Stephen the determination and will to see past the limits the disease places on him. But it’s also a performance that acknowledges the draining burden of having to support someone this ill, of having to constantly be the strong member of the marriage, the one who must always be as ready to save her husband from choking at dinner as she must be to drop everything and fly across Europe to take life-saving medical decisions about him. Jones’ performance never slips into self-pity, but mines a rich vein of willing sacrifice powered by love.

Marsh’s film is largely unflinching around the everyday miseries and sorrow of the terminally ill and restrictingly disabled. We are confronted in every scene with the limits that Hawking’s body places upon him, from deteriorating handwriting and clumsiness to the loss of all speech and movement. This progression is presented with a detail uncoloured by maudlin sentimentality. Doctors are sympathetic but bluntly clear about the dangers and risks of treatment, each adversity is met with a quiet determination to carry on.

The Theory of Everything is a heart-warming watch – and features two superb performances. The portrait of a marriage that works, for the most part of their lives together, despite all obstacles is inspiring. While the film glosses over well-publicised issues over the end of the relationship – and perhaps downplays the emotional strains on both towards its end – it still succeeds in making a largely unsentimental picture of a genius who overcame all, and the brave woman who gave him the dedication he needed to do it.

Never Look Away (2019)

Tom Schilling excels in this shadowy Gerhard Richter biography Never Look Away

Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Cast: Tom Schilling (Kurt Barnet), Sebastian Koch (Professor Carl Seeband), Paula Beer (Ellie Seeband), Saskia Rosendahl (Elisabeth May), Oliver Masucci (Professor Antonius van Verten), Ina Weisse (Martha Seeband), Rainer Bock (Dr Burghart Kroll), Hanno Koffler (Gunther Presueer)

In 2006 The Lives of Others propelled Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck to the fore-front of the European Arts Film circle. His follow-up, the Depp/Jolie starrer The Tourist was a disaster that sent him spiralling back. Now von Donnersmarck returns to German cinema – and the travails and divides of a country split for a large chunk of the 20^thcentury into East and West – with Never Look Away a film heavily inspired by the life and work of famed German artist Gerhard Richter, with splashes of German history and it’s difficult relationship with both fascism and socialism.

Kurt Barnett is an artist growing up in Nazi Germany, living outside Dresden after his father lost his teaching job due to his reluctance to join the party. Barnett’s family is hit hard during the way – his two young uncles are killed, Dresden (and everyone he knows) is destroyed. Worst of all his inspirational artistic sister Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl) is diagnosed with schizophrenia and is quietly killed during the Nazi programme of removing “unsuitable elements” from German society. That decision is taken by Professor Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), a natural survivor and amoral egotist who later makes the adjustment smoothly to living in the Socialist East. Barnett (played by Tom Schilling as a young man) meanwhile goes to East German art school, falling in love with a fashion student Ellie (Paula Beer), but struggling to find his own voice in an East Germany where all art must serve a social purpose. Will escape to the West bring freedom of thought?

Never Look Away is a mantra in the film, in an epic quasi-biography that explores the dark underbelly of German history, filtering the countries struggles to find some sort of freedom through the world of Art. It also has an unflinching eye for the losses and horrors of Nazi Germany, with the film never turning away from the brutal impact of the bombings of Dresden, the death of Kurt’s uncles on the Eastern front and (toughest of all) the shuffling of his tragic aunt into a gas chamber.

But the film also works so well as a commentary on the silent repression Germany has suffered throughout the twentieth century, from the fear of stepping out of line with a contrary opinion in Nazi Germany, to the repression of individualist thought under Communist East Germany. “Never Look Away” are the last words Elisabeth speaks to Kurt – and it’s what fuels his eventual move towards Art that comments on reality with its blurred reproductions of personal snapshots and images (see Gerard Richter’s art).

Von Donnersmarck uses art as a neat commentary for these ideas by showing how, in each era of Germany, the comments and views of art reflect each other. The film opens with the young Kurt and Elisabeth taking a tour around a Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Dresden, which suggests the likes of Picasso and Dali are either insane, moral degenerates, perverts or all three for their failure to create art that properly reflects nature. Later at the East German art school, the same artists are denounced again for failing to carry a proper and correct social message in their work. The tables are turned in the free Germany of the 1960s, where Modern exhibitionist art is all the rage, and paint and canvas is so passeas to be almost vulgar. Three different political spectrums, three very different dictates from society about what constitutes art.

How’s a man to find himself, and his personal expression as an artist, in the middle of this? Kurt is a gifted painter and drawer, but in every era his work is moved towards what is expected of him. As a boy in Germany he hides his impressionist sketches. In East Germany he becomes a famous painter of socialist images and murals. In the art college he tries to shift his style into the experimental alleyways of his peers – work that his professor (played with a neat mixture of pretension and earnestness by Oliver Masucci) recognises his not his true voice. It takes putting his own spin on images and memories of the past – of careful reproductions than subtly blurred to reflect our own imperfect memories (a visual trick von Donnersmarck prepares us for throughout the film with Barnett watching things move in and out of focus as they happen before him) works perfectly.

The film throws together this mix of art and German history with a thick streak of melodrama, which should be ridiculous but basically seems to work. Contrivance and coincidence bring together the fates of Barnett and Professor Seeband, the man responsible for the death of his aunt, and bounds their lives together forever. It’s a narrative development that could make you groan, but somehow the film gets away with it. It probably mostly works because Sebastian Koch is excellent as Seebold, even if the man is so base, selfish, lacking in shame and principle and coldly, uncaringly ruthless that he feels at time almost like a cartoon. No deed of greed and bastardy is beneath him, and the score frequently underlines his villiany with a series of unsubtle cues.

But it works because Koch’s Seebold is also a marvellous commentary on the flexibility of so many in Germany. Seamlessly he turns himself from proud SS sterilisation and termination doctor, into proud East German Socialist leader and finally into centre-piece of West German society as a leading surgeon. Just as art is bent and shifted, so Seebold represents how people will allow their lives and principles to adapt and shift with all the rest. It’s worth a bit of melodrama and some plot twists that lean on the unbelievable (and are based far less on reality than most of Richter’s life).

But the sections that focus on Barnet/Richter are just as fine, and von Donnersmarck brings energy, excitement and joy to the act of art creation in the way few other film makers have done. Tom Schilling continues his excellent run of roles, as a passionate free-thinker, yearning to have the chance to find his own voice and Paula Beer is just as good as his wife, whose artistic soul is just as strong, even if she does get a (albeit moving) can-I-have-babies plotline. The relationship between these two is striking for its loving affection and genuine warmth. And it gives the film a real heart.

Never Look Away isn’t perfect, but in its marvellous expression of the joys of artistic creation and the way that art is bent and used for the needs of government and society, it has a lot to say. With excellent performances across the board – Schilling, Koch and Beer are fabulous – it is also a fascinating commentary on the schizophrenic nature of Germany itself throughout much of the twentieth century. Melodramatic and obvious at times – and even I will say overlong at nearly three hours – a thudding mix at times of points made with too much force, it’s also a marvellous exploration of art and artists. Von Donnersmarck is back.