Goodfellas (1990)

Pesci, Liotta and De Niro embrace the life of crime in Scorsese’s masterpiece Goodfellas

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Ray Liotta (Henry Hill), Robert DeNiro (Jimmy Conway), Joe Pesci (Tommy DeVito), Lorraine Bracco (Karen Hill), Paul Sorvino (Paulie Cicero), Frank Sivero (Frankie Carbone), Frank Vincent (Billy Batts), Tony Darrow (Sonny Bunz), Mike Starr (Frenchy), Chuck Low (Morrie Kessler), Frank DiLeo (Tuddy Cicero), Samuel L. Jackson (“Stacks” Edwards), Catherine Scorsese (Tommy’s mother), Michael Imperioli (Spider), Debi Mazar (Sandy)

If there is one film loved more than any other in Martin Scorsese’s filmography, it’s probably Goodfellas. It’s a seismic high-point, not just in its genre – the greatest gangster film ever made since The Godfather Part II – but in film-making, it’s influence and legacy seeming to hung over everything ever since, not least the next-great gangster epic The Sopranos (with which it shares a whopping 27 actors, most notably Lorraine Bracco, Michael Imperoli, Frank Vincent and Tony Sirico). But, on top of all that, Goodfellas works so well because it is a masterpiece of both style and substance, a superbly inventive film that uses all the tricks of cinema to tell a fascinating and brilliantly paced morality tale.

“As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster”. So says Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), our Irish-Italian guide (and those heritage distinctions are very important in this world) who joins the wrong crowd as a teenager in the 1960s and winds up a strung-out, cocaine-addicted wreck in the 1980s caught by the cops and turned for states evidence, fleeing to an obscure life in witness protection with his long-suffering wife and sometime-accomplice Karen (Lorraine Bracco). Along the way though, Hill loves the glamour and greed of the gangster life, it’s excitements and boys-club rules, guided by his mentor the terrifyingly ruthless Irish-Italian Jimmy “the Gent” Conway (Robert DeNiro), psychopathic fellow gangster Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and menacingly quiet capo Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino – never better). 

Scorsese’s film is an electric celebration of movie making, partly why it’s so beloved of film buffs. Scorsese marshals all the weapons in his considerable arsenal as filmmaker. We get jump cuts. We get freeze frames (each marking a significant moment in Hill’s life). We get sharp editing. We get unreliable narration. We get dizzyingly brilliant long-shots and tracking shots (none more so famous than Henry and Karen’s arriving at a club – from travelling from the back door, through the kitchen and into the best table at the club all in one wonderful shot). We get Scorsese’s brilliant use of music, his perfectly placed camera, his brilliance in knowing when to hold his shots, his mastery of lighting (an early hit is so bathed in red it feels like digging a grave in hell). This film was the master at his ultimate height, inspired by everything from the New Wave to old-school 1930s gangster films.

He was also perfect for the material, as no one perhaps understood this world better than Scorsese: and that’s the seductive good and the terrifying bad. Back to that shot of Karen and Henry arriving at the club. The whole sequence – the deference with which Henry is treated, his cool comfort with power, the exclusiveness and special treatment of the whole thing – that smacks of the sort of ultimate party we can only dream of. For most of the first half of the film, Scorsese totally understands why this life is so appealing and exciting. Sure there is violence. There’s danger. But there’s also comradeship. There’s doing anything you want all the time (so long as you stick within the clubs rules). There’s being treated by a God by those around you. Who wouldn’t enjoy that? Is there any wonder Henry saw this as he was growing up and, more than anything, wanted a part of it? In voice-over Karen makes it clear, all this violence and power and being asked to hide guns by your boyfriend is sexy. Who cares about the implications, give me a slice of that pie.

Without understanding this glamour, the film could never show the dark depths of the underbelly of gangsterism. Strangely, perhaps because this is a blue-collar film (the highest gangster we see, Paulie, is still only a few steps away from the street), it’s easier for viewers to give these guys a pass for their behaviour (in a way no one did with Scorsese’s spiritual sequel, his white-collar crime movie The Wolf of Wall Street). Don’t be fooled. Scorsese hints at it with the opening prologue, with Henry, Jimmy and Tommy pulling over a car to brutally finish off (with a spade, knife and gun) a body of a yet-to-be-revealed victim in the back of a car. These ain’t good guys, and for all Henry is shocked by the capacity of violence from the other two he does nothing to stop it.

Because violence is what powers this film, it can happen anytime, it can happen to anyone and your killers always come to you smiling as friends. The gangster code preaches all the time about never betraying your friends, never ratting. But these guys stab each other in the back all the time. There is no honour among thieves. Every hit comes seconds after friendly enquiries and laughs. When Jimmy masterminds a brilliant heist, so paranoid and distrusting is he of those he did the crime with that he has them all killed (a masterful cut montage). Later in the film, strung out on cocaine and terrified of the law Henry treats every meeting like it’s the entrée to him being killed. Even Karen isn’t safe – witness the brilliantly oblique scene late in the film when Jimmy offers her some coats ‘they’re just round the corner’ – is it a hit? Are the coats real? Who knows…

Loyalty is only extended at best to one or two figures. Jimmy (Robert DeNiro in imperious form, terrifyingly cold and also generously ceding the best moments to his co-stars) seems to have a never-ending patience for the psychopathic, instinctive violence of his best friend Tommy. Played with a petrifying Oscar-winning flourish by Joe Pesci, Tommy is like a murderous Rumpelstiltskin, a brutal killer and wired murderer who can explode at any moment. Witness the famous “Funny how?” scene – it plays superbly off Tommy’s unpredictability, his hair-trigger possibility to either laugh with you or shoot you. Much of the film’s problems for our ‘heroes’ – not less that body in the boot of the car – stems from Tommy’s capacity for thoughtless violence. 

Scorsese directs these scenes with such unbearable tension, that any romance of the early sequences of the young Henry Hill disappears. How could you even begin to imagine spending time in a room with these violent, soulless men who kill each other at the drop of a hat? Despite all this, never for one moment until the very end does Henry even consider leaving this world behind. Like so many of the characters in The Sopranos the addiction of this world of power is just way, way too much and if that means a short life then, hell, so be it. Even at the end on witness protection, Henry’s punishment is that he is forced to live a normal life like a no-body (or rather like the rest of us) while balancing the guilt of betraying the people he left behind. Loyalty is a complex thing, but always one-sided in the Gangster world.

As Hill Ray Liotta gives the finest performance of his career. Henry is part wide-eyed naïve dreamer unaware that his dream is a nightmare, and loving every minute of it. Liotta’s Hill is an addict to everything he touches – danger, violence, infidelity and most damagingly of all the mountains of cocaine he is consuming by the 1980s. Compared to the other gangsters, he’s a decent guy – but only in the sense he hesitates (slightly) in the face of murder. He’s selfish, greedy, strangely likeable oddly sympathetic but you feel he gets everything he deserves. Just as good is Lorraine Bracco as his wife Karen, too aroused and infatuated with the bonuses the crime life brings her to listen to her conscience. 

Scorsese’s film is a masterpiece that completely understands that the gangster life is, at the end of the day, a series of boys who never grew up who espouse concepts like duty, honour and faith but live lives of greed, petty murder, vengeance and savagery. Sure walking on the dark side can be fun, can be exciting and can bring you some immediate bonuses. But it also leaves your soul as cold as Jimmy’s or as blackly non-existent as Tommy, the sort of guy who can pour affection on his mother while shrugging off her worries about what that terrible smell is in the boot of his car. These guys are having fun for half the film, until they aren’t, but don’t get seduced by the fun of it. Scorsese knows only too well that they’re going where the film started: a red light washed grave in the middle of nowhere.

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence in an unusual love story Silver Linings Playbook

Director: David O. Russell

Cast: Bradley Cooper (Pat Solitano Jnr), Jennifer Lawrence (Tiffany Maxwell), Robert De Niro (Pat Solitano Snr), Jacki Weaver (Dolores Solitano), Anupam Kher (Dr Cliff Patel), Chris Tucker (Danny McDaniels), Julia Stiles (Veronica), Shea Whigham (Jake Solitano), John Ortiz (Ronnie)

David O. Russell is a director it’s easier to admire than fall in love with. I can see why actors come back to work with him time and again – he’s clearly an actors’ director who crafts stories that give them chances to shine. But his films often have an archness about them, while I find too many of them settle for a sort of middle-of-the-road quirky cool. I’ve never really, truly, loved any of them – even if I have enjoyed them while watching them. The closest I think I’ve got is Silver Linings Playbook.

Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) is released from psychiatric hospital, after being confined for assaulting his ex-wife’s lover, into the care of his parents Pat Snr (Robert De Niro), unemployed now making a living as an underground bookmaker, and Dolores (Jacki Weaver). Suffering from a host of compulsions connected to his bipolar disorder, Pat is fixated on winning back his wife. To do so, he enlists the help of Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), the widow of a policeman who died in a road traffic accident, who has her own borderline personality disorder and has been dealing with her grief through a parade of casual sexual encounters. Together they enter a dance competition – Tiffany because she always wanted to, Pat because Tiffany has offered to take Pat’s letters to his wife if he says yes and because Pat wants to prove to his wife that he has changed. But is there more than mutual convenience between the two?

Silver Linings Playbook is an unusual romance, that also explores themes of mental health and compulsions and how thin the lines can be between what we consider healthy and not healthy. When does obsession tip over into something that should be treated? Pat is the sort of guy who wakes his parents up to furiously denounce the Hemingway book he has just finished reading in one sitting (a scene played exuberantly for laughs – including Pat smashing a window by throwing the book out of it) but it quickly tips into danger when in a similar mania he awakens the entire neighbourhood at 3am tearing the house apart for his wedding video, accidentally hits his mother, and ends in a tear filled scuffle with his dad. Similarly, Tiffany’s tendencies towards aggression and self-destruction frequently put her in situations both funny and dreadfully damaging.

But just as close to this, we have Pat Snr’s addiction not only to gambling, but also to a raft of superstitions designed to better his chances of winning (and which dominate large parts of his life). Dolores seems obsessed with maintaining peace and order in the family. Pat’s brother has an almost savant tendency to speak his mind, causing more harm than good. Every character in this seems to have their own psychological hang-ups, with resulting problems.

But the film marries this up with an actually quite sweet romantic story between two damaged souls, both very well played by Cooper and Lawrence. This was the film where Cooper repositioned himself as a major actor of note. His performance here is a perfect mixture of charm, pain, confusion, frustration, insight and self-destructive monomania. He’s both funny and deeply moving, sweet and also slappable, gentle but with a capacity for unpredictability. He’s a terrific performance, deeply affecting. It also helps he has fabulous chemistry with an Oscar-winning Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence’s Tiffany is a vulnerable soul, desperate to appear as tough and impossible to harm as possible and not caring about any of the collateral damage. She’s as brittle as she seems rigid, and as desperate for affection as she pretends to be uncaring about it.

The film throws these two together with an obvious spark from the start, and brilliantly uses their preparation for a dancing contest to show them growing closer together physically and emotionally, as well as adding a purpose to their lives and giving them a common goal to work towards. There is a rather nice gentleness, amongst all the chaos of this film, that something as simple as taking up a new hobby can help to ground two people.

The film builds the romance gently, carefully showing it developing organically and leaving us to guess at what point the bond between these two enrichens and deepens from an instant connection to something more profound. It’s sure got a lot to overcome, with Pat’s obsessive focus on his wife and Tiffany’s compulsion for meaningless sex and her own desire to destroy promising relationships (she almost immediately alienates the surprisingly gentlemanly Pat with an offer of casual sex on their first meeting). With a gentle slow-burn, the film builds towards something that ends up being rather moving.

Russell’s adaptation of the original novel is well-structured and entertaining and his unfussy, stylish direction brilliantly creates an enjoyable mode. De Niro (in what many people called a joyous return to form) and Weaver are both very good as the parents (both were Oscar nominated – this is one of the few films to be nominated in each acting category) and there is hardly a weak beat in the cast. After several quirky, indie-cool, rather distant films, this is possibly the most fun and the most heart-warming Russell has ever been. It’s a career high. Heck even Chris Tucker is really good. And I’d never thought I’d say that.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Meryl Streep on demonic good form in The Devil Wears Prada

Director: David Frankel

Cast: Meryl Streep (Miranda Priestly), Anne Hathaway (Andrea Sachs), Emily Blunt (Emily Charlton), Stanley Tucci (Nigel Kipling), Simon Baker (Christian Thompson), Adrian Grenier (Nate Cooper)

Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is the lord of all she surveys. Ruling the fashion industry from the editorial office of her magazine Runaway, she can make or break careers with a pursed lip or a raised eyebrow. And, while barely raising her voice beyond a whisper, she expects total obedience and deference in the office, with her assistants little better than personal slaves. It’s a tough world for wannabe journalist Andrea (Anne Hathaway), hoping for a big break from her connection with Miranda. Andrea looks down on the world of fashion, and longs for a serious journalism career – but will her ideals survive the temptations on offer… 

The Devil Wears Prada is your pretty standard morality tale of the moth brought too close to the flame: the hero struggling to resist the temptation to jack in their principles and dreams in order to win the praise of a domineering bully and secure riches and fame. We’ve seen it all before, and to be honest TDWP doesn’t really do anything different from this formula, other than introduce it into the world of fashion and making both the tempter and tempted a woman.

And it works where it does because it has some pretty impressive women in these roles. None less than Meryl Streep, who seizes on the role with a quiet relish and has the confidence to underplay scenes that lesser actresses would tear into as if their only dinner that day was the scenery. What’s notable about Streep’s Miranda is that she is so calm, so quiet, so assured, so unflustered that she only needs the slightest gestures and hints to break people around her. It’s the ultimate confidence that comes from supreme power – she knows she never needs to raise her voice, that people will fall silent to listen to her. Streep also mines her considerable comic talent to lace her many moments of cruelty and selfishness with an arch, dry humour.

It’s no wonder poor Andrea has such a rough time in this film. Only in Hollywoodland could Anne Hathaway be considered a dumpy frump, but the styling of her as a someone with no sense of fashion whatsoever (at least initially) does at least make her stand out from the rest. Andrea’s plotline follows what so many other “moth to the flame” plots have followed, moving from snide indifference to her job to all consuming obsession as she begins to parrot the same values and opinions of her master. She even has a partner (usually the woman’s role, so very nice to see it reversed) who complains about her not being at home enough.

The film avoids cheap shots at fashion as well which is refreshing, stressing at every point that it is a world of legitimate art and expertise and has made an important contribution to the culture and society of the 20th century. No wonder so many fashion famous faces cameo. Andrea’s scornful disregard for fashion is punctured early on as being an inverted snobbery and part of her desire to project an image of herself. 

The real issues here are workplace bullying – although the film never really delves into it that much and is eager to leave no real resolution. Emily Blunt – who is extremely good, with more than a hint of desperation and depression under her cool, arch, British exterior – as Andrea’s fellow assistant shows early on how environments like this chew people up and force them to become sharks or die. It’s a suggestion the film is not keen on exploring in real depth though, preferring a far lighter, more traditional story as we wonder whether Andrea will be seduced by the darkness or will return to her roots of integrity and journalism (one guess which way she goes).

Even at the end though, Andrea is still desperate in some way for Miranda’s approval and to be acknowledged in some way by her. It’s a feeling that the film shares. It wants Miranda to turn to it and praise it, it’s scared of really calling her out on her behaviour, instead wanting to cut her as much slack as possible. It wants to see her triumph and, even at the end, to take a wry pleasure from Andrea forging her own life. It’s as besotted with her as the characters are, and for all it shows that Andrea doesn’t do well from spending time with her, it still seems to want to show that under it all “she is human”. It dodges the bullet of actually dealing with bullies and monsters, and instead takes the line of saying “yeah sure she was bad, but she had great style so you can’t not like her.” Which means, in a way, it follows the same line that in real life allows charismatic geniuses in the workplace to continue behaving any way they like.

Which isn’t to say this isn’t a fun film with decent performances and lots of good jokes. Streep gives Miranda a huge degree of depth – we have moments of her loneliness and isolation from her family – but it’s a film that could have done more to show the negatives of how working lifestyles like these affect people. I guess that would have made it less fun though.

The Song of Bernadette (1943)

Jennifer Jones sees visions of the Virgin Mary in the moving The Song of Bernadette

Director: Henry King

Cast: Jennifer Jones (Bernadette Soubirous), Charles Bickford (Abbé Dominique Peyramale), Williem Eythe (Antoinie Nicoleau), Gladys Cooper (Marie Theresa Vauzou), Vincent Price (Vital Dutour), Lee J. Cobb (Dr Dozous), Anne Revere (Louise Casteror Soubirious), Roman Bohnen (François Soubirous), Mary Anderson (Jeanne Abadie), Aubrey Maher (Mayor Lacade), Linda Darnell (Virgin Mary)

“For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.”

With these words, this worthy religious epic from the Golden Age of Hollywood kicks off its retelling of how visions of the Virgin Mary from one poorly educated peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, turned Lourdes from a backwater near the French-Spanish border into one of the most important Catholic pilgrimage sites in the world. It’s material that you could fairly expect to be pretty dry and sanctimonious stuff. But, surprisingly, it’s rather affecting and engaging work – and, although made with a certain workmanlike competence, carries enough touches of grace to lift it up into the second tier of the Hollywood firmament.

Bernadette Soubirous is played by Jennifer Jones – in one of her first screen roles, for which she became at 25 one of the youngest Best Actress Oscar winners ever. Until her visions begin, she is just an average peasant child, struggling with asthma, her parents (Anne Revere and Roman Bohnen) struggling with poverty, failing at religious school under the strict tutelage of Sister Marie Theresa (Gladys Cooper), and generally looking ahead to a life very much like any other. But visions of the Virgin Mary (played by an unbilled Linda Darnell) bring belief and devotion into her life, and she reports the content of the visions (and her discussions with the Virgin Mary) with an honest simplicity and consistency that wins many backers, not least local priest Abbé Peyramale (Charles Bickford). But the local officials of Lourdes, led by local prosecutor Vital Dutour (Vincent Price), concerned that these visions will impact plans for the town’s development and anxious about the hysteria they could encourage in the simple-minded, try their best to restore what they see as reason over the intoxication of faith.

Faith really is the word of the day in Henry King’s at-times stately, but also shrewdly worldly drama that mixes divine intervention and belief with a fair-hearing for the doubters and the arguments of reason. The miracles, when they come, are followed with several characters – not least Lee J Cobb’s coolly rational doctor – outlining the alternative explanations for why these people may suddenly feel they have been cured. Later Dutour complains wryly that it only takes a handful of cures among the thousands that come for everyone to continue to want – or need – to believe. 

But the film sides squarely with the truth of Bernadette’s visions, not least by stressing at every turn her honesty, guilelessness and principle. Questioned by various church officials – many of them terrified of being duped by a con, having been stung in the past – she sticks with an honest openness to the same version of the story over and over again. Peyramale – initially just as sceptical – is won over to belief by Bernadette’s sudden knowledge of such matters as the immaculate conception, when she seemed barely aware of what the Holy Trinity was while studying at school. 

King – a largely middle-of-the-road director, but who marshals his resources well here – clearly takes inspiration from Carl Dreyer’s films on similar topics of faith and visions in his shooting of Bernadette. Bright light and intense close-ups that study every inch of her rapture help convey the spirituality of her visions. When Bernadette leads groups to her visions – none of whom can see what she sees – light radiates around her and over her, but seems to barely touch those she is with. The cinematography by Arthur C Miller is beautiful, a brilliant use of light and darkness to skilfully sketch both the poverty of Bernadette’s background and the radiance of her visions.

The mood of the film is also helped be Jennifer Jones’ impressive performance. Bernadette is, in many ways, potentially one of the least interesting and dynamic characters in the film, but Jones pulls off the immensely difficult task of making someone stuffed with decency, innocence and honesty into an actually compelling and endearing character. A protégé of David O Selznick (whom she later married), Jones earned her place in the film with her ability to invest Bernadette with humanity, avoiding any hint of cynicism in her performance while never becoming grating either.

It contributes to a beautiful telling of the story, backed by a series of excellent supporting performances. Charles Bickford landed an Oscar nomination as the kindly, decent priest whose initial scepticism and concern that the crowd is being manipulated is washed away by growing belief. Lee J Cobb is very good as a stoutly rationalist doctor. Anne Revere (also nominated) has a protective warmth as Bernadette’s mother.

The film’s finest supporting roles though come from Vincent Price and Gladys Cooper. Price is superb as the man of science and reason who worries over the implications of fanaticism and the damage hysteria can cause, but is never simply prejudiced or Dawkinsish in his religious doubts. King’s film treats his concerns with a genuineness that makes both the character more interesting and the film more balanced. Cooper is brilliant as a Salieri-like nun, enraged with envy and jealousy that after years of devotion and suffering it is not she but Bernadette who gets the visions.

And why did Bernadette get those visions? The film is not crude enough to suggest why – Bernadette herself apologises for the trouble she has caused and her unworthiness – but it’s clear that it’s her very innocence and sincerity that makes her worthy of them. The design – and impressive score by Alfred Newman – helps to make the film feel as profound as it does, but it’s the balance that the film handles its characters with that makes it engrossing. There are no simple heroes or villains, just as there are no simple solutions. Like the film says at the start, it’s a question of faith. Those who do not wish to believe can marshal as many arguments in their favour as those who want nothing more than to trust in faith. It makes for a fine, balanced, engaging and well-made classic.

Tootsie (1982)

Dustin Hoffman plays somewhat against type in the marvellous Tootsie

Director: Sydney Pollack

Cast: Dustin Hoffman (Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels), Jessica Lange (Julie Nichols), Teri Garr (Sandy Lester), Dabney Coleman (Ron Carlisle), Doris Belack (Rita Marshall), Charles Durning (Les Nichols), Bill Murray (Jeff Slater), Sydney Pollack (George Fields), George Gaynes (John van Horn), Geena Davis (April Page)

It sounds like a movie idea from hell: “We’ll get Dustin Hoffman to play a struggling actor who can only get a job when he dresses as a middle-aged woman and auditions for a daytime soap. Hilarious misunderstandings will follow…” But you’d be wrong: Tootsie is an absolute delight: not only a wonderful comedy, but a touching love story and an acute commentary on sexism and the compromises women are forced to make to get the same opportunities as men. It’s a wonderful, smart, thought-provoking film.

In a role that draws on more than a little self-parody, Dustin Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey, a dedicated, demanding, difficult actor who has alienated so many people across Broadway and Hollywood with his unwillingness to compromise that he can’t land a job. When his friend Sandy (Teri Garr) flunks an audition on a General Hospital-style daytime soap, Michael thinks “what the hell” and puts himself forward for the role under the disguise of the middle-aged “Dorothy Michaels”. Surprisingly he finds he lands the job: and realises that women’s lot on the masculine film-set is not a happy one, evading sexual approaches, treated like idiots and generally encouraged to not pipe up. Intelligent, clever fellow-cast member Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange) hides her light under a bushel. At first Michael enjoys the respect he wins, but as Dorothy increasingly becomes a feminist icon he’s plagued with guilt at the lies and deceptions he’s practising.

It’s the sort of idea that should be either patronising today (a man learns about feminism by walking in a woman’s shoes!) or inadvertently toe-curling. The fact that it isn’t (and I’ve watched this film with women who have enjoyed it a great deal, so I’m not completely guessing here!) is a tribute to the film’s lightness of touch, combined with a neat sense of the ridiculous, along with the emotional truth and genuineness that the film is handled with. It neither preaches nor mocks but simply focuses on telling the story and allowing us to draw our own conclusions. It also has a script packed through with some absolutely cracking jokes, all of which are delivered straight.

Central to its success is Dustin Hoffman, who plays the entire role completely straight. His Michael is a neat self-parody in his abrasive difficulty – but he’s also shown to be a concerned and genuine friend to Teri Garr’s delightfully ditzy Sandy, urging her to have more confidence (little realising how difficult it is for women to impress male casting directors if they behave with the confidence of men). Sure he’s not above clumsy passes to women at parties, but he’s no dinosaur or sexist. And becoming Dorothy Michaels is an opportunist moment of eagerness to show he has range and can get work if severed from his terrible reputation, rather than having any cruel or mocking motivations.

And what Hoffman does so well here is that Dorothy becomes her own personality. And that Michael immediately recognises that Dorothy, with her assurance, her kindness, her unwillingness to take nonsense, but her serene confidence, is a much better person than he is. She refuses to be trapped into either of the two roles the director intends for her (love interest or shrew) but insists her role in the hospital soap be treated like a dedicated professional, not defined by her sex – which makes her exactly the sort of role-model women around her (and eventually across America) have yearned for. Somehow as well, the film gets us to invest in what a great person Dorothy is, even as we know it’s really Michael in disguise – and Hoffman never, ever plays the part for laughs.

The casting allows the film to get a number of hilarious shots at the fast-paced, poorly-written, cheaply sexist nonsense that goes into daytime soaps. The director of the show is a roving lothario (played with all the smarm at his command by Dabney Coleman), who opposes Dorothy’s casting because she is not attractive enough, talks over the women in the cast and expects affairs as part of his salary. The show’s leading man is an aged actor (played with an oblivious sweetness by George Gaynes) who expects to kiss every woman in the show and is totally unable to learn lines. The plots of the soap are a joke, and the actresses are frequently placed into demeaning situations that real nurses and administrators (the only roles of course women can play in a hospital!) would never do.

Becoming horrified by this, Dorothy/Michael encourages the other women in the cast to break out from this – not least Julie Nichols, beautifully played by Jessica Lange as an intelligent, sensitive woman forced into pretending to be an airhead so as not to disturb the men around her. Lange is superb in this role, and so radiant that of course Dorothy/Michael finds himself falling in love with her – a complexity that constantly intrudes on the sisterly bond that Julie increasingly feels for Dorothy…

And that’s another source of guilt for Michael, who is (despite it all) a good guy, and slowly works out that there is no way of extracting himself from all this without hurting people’s feelings (not least when Julie’s sweetly charming widowed dad – played wonderfully by Charles Durning – starts to have feelings for Dorothy). Michael doesn’t want to hurt anyone – not even Sandy, with whom he finds himself stumbling into a one-night stand that he can’t work out how to reverse out of because he’s so desperate not to damage their friendship (something that he of course ends up damaging anyway). It’s a film that brilliantly balances these personal struggles with wider pictures.

Because, as Michael is aware, he’s himself guilty of using women by stealing the cause of feminism by pretending to be a woman. He’s perpetrating a con on the whole of America, and can’t work out a way to back out. The solution he does finally find is a comic tour-de-force – while finding time to still focus later on the real, emotional impact on those who have come closest to Dorothy – and gently indicates how lives can move on.

Sydney Pollack has probably never directed a film as smart, touching and wise as this one (he also puts in a hilarious cameo as Michael’s frustrated agent). It’s a film that could have been just a comedy about a man in drag, but in fact ends up raising profound issues about sexism, feminism and relationships that still feel relevant today. It’s almost certainly Hoffman’s greatest performance – honestly, he’s sublime here, it’s a once in a lifetime performance – and there is barely a wrong beat in it. The cast fall on the great script with relish – Garr was never better and Bill Murray has a superb unbilled supporting role as Michael’s acerbic, playwright housemate. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll think and you’ll want to watch it again. Can’t say better than that.

Gosford Park (2001)

Cruelty, snobbery and viciousness – just another night at Gosford Park

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: Eileen Atkins (Mrs Croft), Bob Balaban (Morris Weissman), Alan Bates (Mr Jennings), Charles Dance (Lord Stockbridge), Stephen Fry (Inspector Thompson), Michael Gambon (Sir William McCordle), Richard E. Grant (George), Derek Jacobi (Probert), Kelly Macdonald (Mary Maceachran), Helen Mirren (Mrs Wilson), Jeremy Northam (Ivor Novello), Clive Owen (Robert Parks), Ryan Phillippe (Henry Denton), Kristin Scott-Thomas (Lady Sylvia McCordle), Maggie Smith (Constance, Countess of Trentham), Emily Watson (Elsie), Claudie Blakely (Mabel Nesbitt), Tom Hollander (Lt Commander Anthony Meredith), Geraldine Somerville (Lady Stockbridge), Jeremy Swift (Arthur), Sophie Thompson (Dorothy), James Wilby (Freddie Nesbitt)

We’ve always fancied ourselves that when Brits make films in America – think John Schlesinger’s brilliant analysis of New York hustlers in Midnight Cowboy – they turn the sharp analytical eye of the outsider on American society. But do we like it when America turns the same critical eye on us? Gosford Park is a film surely no Brit could have made, so acutely vicious and condemning of the class system of this country, without the hectoring that left-wing British filmmakers so often bring to the same material, it’s just about perfect in exposing the hypocrisy and cruelty that undermines our class system. You’ll never look at an episode of Downton Abbey the same way again.

In November 1932, Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) hosts a shooting party at his country house. McCordle is almost universally despised by his relatives and peers – most especially his wife Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott-Thomas) – but tolerated as his vast fortune from his factories basically funds the lives of nearly everyone at the house party. While the upper classes gather upstairs, downstairs the servants of the house led by butler Jennings (Alan Bates) and housekeeper Mrs Wilson (Helen Mirren) order the house to meet the often selfish and thoughtless demands of the rich. The house is rocked midway through the weekend, when a murder occurs overnight. With motives aplenty, perhaps the new maid Mary (Kelly Macdonald) of the imperious Countess Trentham (Maggie Smith) has the best chance of finding the truth.

First and foremost, it’s probably a good idea to say that this is in no way a murder-mystery. Robert Altman, I think, could barely care less about whodunit. While the film has elements that gently spoof elements of its Agatha Christie-ish settings, Altman’s interest has always been the personal relationships between people and the societies they move in. So this is a film really about the atmosphere of the house and most importantly how these people treat each other. Altman despised snobbery, and in a world that is fuelled by that very vice, he goes to town in showing just how awful and stifling so many elements of the class system really were.

“He thinks he’s God Almighty. They all do.” So speaks Clive Owen’s Robert Parks, valet, of his employer the patrician Lord Stockbridge (Charles Dance, excellent). You’ve got the attitude right there: the rich see themselves as a different species to those pushing plates around and cleaning clothes below stairs. The idea of there being anything in common is laughable. Slight moments of casual conversation between servant and master in the film are governed by strict laws and carry a quiet tension. 

It’s so acute in its analysis of the selfishness, snobbery, cruelty and arrogance of the British class system that each time I watch it I’m less and less convinced that Downton Abbey (the cuddliest version of this world you could imagine) creator Julian Fellowes had much to do with it. This film is so far from the “we are all in this together” Edwardian paternalism of that series, you can’t believe the same man wrote both. All the heritage charm of Downton is drained from Gosford, leaving only the cold reality of what a world is like where a small number of people employ the rest.

Upstairs the hierarchy is absurdly multi-layered. Everyone is aware of their position, with those at the top of the tree barely able to look those at the bottom in the eye, let alone talk to them. The rudeness is striking. Maggie Smith (who is brilliant, her character totally devoid of the essential kindness of her role in Downton Abbey has) is so imperiously offensive, such an arch-snob, she can only put the thinnest veil over her contempt when she deigns to speak to her inferiors. Her niece, played with an ice-cold distance by Kristin Scott-Thomas, embodies aloofness, selfishness and casual cruelty.

Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam, superb) – the one real person in the film, and a film star – is treated like a jumped up minstrel player, with characters falling over themselves to make snide comments about his career. His guest Morris Weissman (an excellent Bob Balaban), a Hollywood film producer, is treated with similar contempt – when reluctant to divulge details of the film he is in England researching (a Charlie Chan film) for fears he will spoil his plot, the Countess bluntly informs him “oh, none of us will see it”. Later, as Novello plays the piano (essentially singing for his supper) only the servants are pleased – most of the upper classes endure it under sufferance (“Don’t encourage him” the Countess says when there is a smattering of applause). You can see why, after only a few hours in the house, Weissman whispers to Novello: “How do you put up with these people?”

The servants themselves are bits of furniture, or barely acknowledged at all. Altman doesn’t shoot a single scene without a servant present, but this often hammers home their irrelevance to the upper classes (it’s made even more effective by seeing actors like Bates, Jacobi, Grant, Macdonald, Owen and Watson essentially being treated as extras). There are no bonds between upstairs and downstairs at all. Any upset witnessed on either side is responded to with silence. When Emily Watson’s Elsie (a brilliant performance of arch awareness of her place) momentarily forgets herself and speaks out at the dinner table, it’s treated like she has crapped on the floor – needless to say her career is finished.

The servants however echo the pointless rituals and ingrained hierarchy of their masters below stairs. For ease (!) the house servants insist the visiting servants are only addressed by the names of their employers not their own names. At their dinner table, their seating reflects the hierarchy of their employers. Many of the servants are more grounded and “normal” than the upstairs types, but they are as complicit in this system continuing as anyone else. They simply can’t imagine a life without it, and accept without question their place at the bottom rung of the house. 

Ryan Phillippe, later revealed as an actor masquerading as a servant (for research), immediately shows how hard it is to move between the two social circles. The servants despise him as a traitor who may leak secrets about their views of the employers. The guests see him as a jumped up intruder, even more vulgar than Novello and Weissman. His later humiliation is one of the few moments that see both sides of the social divide united (it’s fitting that it is an act of cruelty that reinforces the social rules that brings people together). 

The focus is so overwhelmingly on the class system – with Altman’s brilliant camera work (the camera is never still) giving us the sense of being a fly-on-the-wall in this house – that you forget it’s a murder mystery. Here the film is also really clever, archly exposing the harsh realities of the attitudes held by your standard group of Christie characters. Dance’s Lord Stockbridge in a Christie story would be a “perfect brick” but here we’ve seen he’s a shrewd but judgemental old bastard. The film throws in a clumsy Christie-style incompetent police detective, played by Stephen Fry. This is possibly the film’s only real misstep as Fry’s performance touches on a farcical tone that seems completely out of step with the rest of the film. But the Christie parody is generally wonderful, exploding the cosy English world the public perception believes is behind Christie (even if the author herself was often darker than people remember!).

It’s a hilarious film – Maggie Smith in particular is memorable, from cutting down her fellow guests, to judgementally tutting at shop-bought (not homemade) marmalade – but it’s also a film that creeps up on you with real emotional impact. Kelly Macdonald is very good as the most “everyday” character, who takes on the role of detective and has superb chemistry with Clive Owen’s dashing valet. But the film builds towards a heart-rending conclusion – a conclusion that, with its reveal about the darker side of Gambon’s blustering Sir William, feels more relevant every day – that shows the secret tragedies and dark underbelly of these worlds, with a particularly affecting scene between Atkins and Mirren (Mirren in particular is such a peripheral figure for so much of the film, that her final act revelations and emotional response carries even more force).  It’s heart rending.

Gosford Park is a film continually misremembered as either a cosy costume drama or a murder mystery. It’s neither. It’s a brilliant analysis of the British class system and a superb indictment of the impact and damage it has had on people and the country. Hilarious, brilliantly directed by Altman with a superb cast – it’s a masterpiece, perhaps one of the finest films in Altman’s catalogue.

Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019)

Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio have fun in Tarantino’s appalling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Rick Dalton), Brad Pitt (Cliff Booth), Margot Robbie (Sharon Tate), Al Pacino (Marvin Schwarz), Emile Hirsch (Jay Sebring), Margaret Quailey (Pussycat), Timothy Olyphant (James Stacy), Julia Butters (Trudi Fraser), Austin Butler (“Tex” Watson), Dakota Fanning (Squeaky), Bruce Dern (George Spahn), Mike Moh (Bruce Lee), Luke Perry (Wayne Maunder), Damian Lewis (Steve McQueen), Brenda Vaccaro (Mary Alice Schwarz), Nicholas Hammond (Sam Wanamaker)

Spoilers: I’ll discuss the film’s final 40 minutes in detail. I mean when you watch it you can guess where it’s going. But those final moments are truly central to my visceral hatred of this film.

There seems to be three eras of Tarantino movies. The first (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown) saw him work with pulpy themes focused on strong stories and character development. The second (Kill Bill and Grindhouse) saw him indulge his fascination with the B-movie and low-rent TV of his childhood. His third (Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained) sees him making strange revenge fantasies on behalf of other groups. Once Upon a Time is a marriage between his second and third eras. And I hated it. I hated, hated, hated, hated it. I genuinely can’t remember seeing a film I hated more at the cinema (maybe Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). It’s a self-indulgent, tasteless, overlong, smug, unbearable pile of pleased with itself shit. It’s grotesque and it left me feeling dirty.

The plot (such as it is) follows three days in the lives of fictional Hollywood-turned-TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Dalton’s best friend, chauffeur and personal assistant who can’t get a job in Hollywood due to his terrible reputation. Dalton lives next door to Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). On Feb 8th 1969, Dalton is offered a role in spaghetti westerns and preps for his next episodic TV show. On Feb 9thDalton shoots the pilot of Lancer a new TV western (and a real TV show) as the baddie, suffering a crisis of confidence about his career and talent. Meanwhile Booth does some odd jobs and has an odd encounter with the Manson family. Intercut with this are scenes of Sharon Tate going about her everyday life, including joyfully watching one of her films in the cinema. Finally we join the action after a time jump on August 8thas, after returning from filming in Italy, Dalton and Booth get drunk and high and accidentally waylay the Manson gang on their way to Sharon Tate’s house and – this being now Tarantino’s thing – brutally and bloodily murder the three Manson family killers.

Sigh. I think a question now has to be asked about what Tarantino’s problem is. As I realised where this film was going, my heart sank. This sort of revenge porn is, I’ll be honest, revolting, demeaning, tasteless and, leaving all else aside, not Tarantino’s place. It also demeans and cheapens the actual tragedies that happened to real people. Just as shots of Hitler’s head being machine-gunned to pieces in Inglorious Basterds while Jewish-American paratroopers machine-gunned a room of Nazi’s seemed to be grossly inappropriate, lowered the victims to the level of the killers and cheapened the actual deaths of real people in the Holocaust, making them seem like weak victims (as well as hardly being Tarantino’s place being neither Jewish or having any connection to the Holocaust) so it’s equally tasteless here. He just about gets away with it in Django Unchained, a black revenge thriller from a director who is not black and has littered his scripts with the “n-word” as all these guys were at least fictional people. But here it’s just grotesque.

We pride ourselves now that we have left the Gladiatorial ring behind, or that we no longer gather round on a Bank Holiday weekend to watch a convicted criminal being hung, drawn and quartered. But as I watched the Manson killers being bludgeoned to death, mutilated by a dog, their Glasgow kissed skulls crushed against a mantelpiece and immolated by flame thrower, I thought we’re not that far off. It’s basically a pornographic level of violence, that the film excuses because the Manson killers were bad guys (don’t get me wrong they were) but asking us to take pleasure in killing, is basically what Manson himself asked his followers to do. I find watching this sort of stuff not only feels like it cheapens the actual brutal, tragic murders of an eight-month pregnant Tate and her three friends, but also lowers me the level of the killers themselves. Tarantino’s films increasingly feel like the director himself would be fully on board with that episode of Black Mirror (“White Bear”) – where a killer is tortured everyday by tourists, and then has her mind wiped so she can go through it every single day – being turned into a reality.

In fact Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a worrying voyage into the man’s soul, and what I saw there was partly this muddled vanity and obsession with revenge (I mean who gives him the right to take revenge on behalf of others? Someone please tell me? There is an arrogance to that I find deeply unattractive), partly the tragically boring geeky tedium of the video-store nerd, mixed with a loving regard for white men and a worrying lack of interest (bordering on contempt) for anyone different.

I loathed and despised the final forty minutes of this film, but to be honest the opening two hours are not a lot better. This film is almost three hours long and contains about thirty minutes of plot if that. What it mostly is, is a chance for Tarantino to indulge to a ludicrous degree his obsession with low-rent culture of the 1950s and 1960s. To show off his knowledge of obscure films of the age (he’s heard of The Night They Raided Minsky’s you know…) and recreate in painstaking detail pastiches of the type of TV shows he grew up watching. These sequences seem to go on forever and ever, with the odd good line and decent gag not suddenly making it anything other than increasingly tedious.

What he really, really, really needs is a collaborator to tell him when less is more and certainly when too much is too much. The first two thirds of the film seem to stretch on for an indulgent eternity, and their content reveals more and more of the director’s obsession. White men are idealised and the old-school values of Hollywood, the world of the studio and simpler non-PC times are looked back on with a fussy nostalgia. The film takes every opportunity for Booth and Dalton to lambast hippie culture and the growing anti-establishment of the era, and has every character we meant to like yearning for the good old days.

Bruce Lee appears in the film, here interpreted as a braggart arsehole, showing off to the stunt men, who is humiliated by Cliff in a brawl. It’s a scene that amuses for a second and then makes you uncomfortably realise you are watching the most prominent non-white person in the film being put into his place by a middle-aged white man. It’s got more than a hint of racism to it. And Tarantino claims to be a fan of Bruce Lee! By contrast, while the film brutally murders the Manson killers, James Stacy (played by Timothy Olyphant here) the chiselled white-male star of Lancer, a man later jailed for repeated child molestation, is treated with a laudatory romance. Guess there are different rules for white guys who starred in Tarantino’s favourite shows. Whither the revenge saga where his victims mutilate him eh?

Women don’t get a better deal in this film. Sharon Tate is essentially an elevated extra, although Tarantino gets one lovely sequence out of her watching her latest film – a playful swinging 60s spy caper with Dean Martin – in a cinema and gleefully enjoying both the film and the audience reaction with a childish, delighted grin. But then a lot of the success of this is due to Robbie’s marvellous performance. Tarantino himself does his best to ruin it with his foot fetish, throwing Margot Robbie’s naked feet into virtually every shot. Aside from this, the film shoots and treats Tate like a teenager observing someone they have a crush on, romantically idealising her without ever getting anyway near understanding her or scratching the surface of her personality, instead following her with doe-eyed devotion.

But at least she gets lines. Every other woman in this is either a slut or murderer (or both) from the Manson cult, a shrew (like Booth’s dead wife and Kurt Russell’s stunt manager’s wife) or a bimbo (like Dalton’s eventual Euro-wife). There is no in between. It’s a film for men, written by a man, where the men take centre-stage, and a smugly held up as never doing anything wrong, with the film uncritically indulging their vices as symptoms of their tragedy of being left behind by a more progressive and changing country.

Both Pitt and DiCaprio enjoy swaggering twists on their images. DiCaprio overacts wildly, in an overly mannered performance full of actorly quirks (he has a stammer so we know he’s a sensitive soul deep down!), that riffs on other performances of his and largely involves shouting and swearing. Even scenes of emotional vulnerability carry a method fakeness about them – but then Once Upon a Time is a film with no heart, so it’s not surprising that when one of its characters tries to show one, the film stumbles spectacularly into artificiality. Pitt fares better, with a performance of McQueen like-cool, even if the film seems to believe that even if Cliff did kill his wife (as many believe) it’s fine because she was clearly a bitch.

All of this is shot with a flatness and lack of visual interest that is surprising for Tarantino, usually a much more vibrant director. Maybe he was just echoing the TV styles at the time. Maybe he was saving the fireworks for his orgy of (what he would call) cathartic violence at the end. Maybe it’s just a pretty mundane film. Maybe if Tarantino wasn’t the film-buffs darling, more people would call out his flatness and lack of imagination behind the camera and the soulless flatness of much of the films shooting and pacing. Its mediocrity and smug wallowing in the culture of yesteryear is appalling.

Because Once Upon a Time is a teenager’s film, and worst of all, a teenage bore. It’s got a major crush on Sharon Tate, but barely any interest in her personality. It drones on endlessly about geeky knowledge and old film and television that no one else knows anything about so that it sounds interesting and cool. It takes a childish, immature, sickening delight in fantasising about killing bad people in the most horrific ways it can possible imagine. It thinks it’s really clever and profound, but it’s actually a horrible, horrible film that’s also really tedious and which leaves a deeply unpleasant taste in the mouth, while demeaning the real-life victims of a crime by spinning some ludicrous revenge fantasy around them. It morally offended me after two hours of boring me. I hated it. I hated it. I really, really, really, really hated it. I hated it so very much.

Toy Story 4 (2019)

Woody is tempted by a new life in Toy Story 4

Director: Josh Cooley

Cast: Tom Hanks (Woody), Tim Allen (Buzz Lightyear), Annie Potts (Bo Peep), Tony Hale (Forky), Keegan-Michael Key (Ducky), Jordan Peele (Bunny), Christina Hendricks (Gabby Gabby), Keanu Reeves (Duke Caboom), Ally Maki (Giggle McDimples), Joan Cusack (Jessie)

Probably the hardest thing about making the fourth film in an acclaimed, perfectly-formed trilogy (yup) is justifying its existence in the first place. That’s basically the main task that faces Toy Story 4 – does it manage to exist without ruining the other three? And was there any need to go back to a story that had already been pretty much finished perfectly.

After the third film, Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen) and friends are now settled with their new child, Bonnie (an imaginative 6 year old). But Woody is being played with less and less, and is struggling with the adjustment from being Andy’s most important toy to becoming a little-used toy in the box. Taking it upon himself to accompany Bonnie to her first day at kindergarten, he sees her use an art-class to turn a spork into a toy – a toy that quickly comes to life as Forky (Tony Hale). As Bonnie’s parents try to ease her anxiety about starting kindergarten by taking her on a road-trip, Woody obsessively tries to train the reluctant Forky – who doesn’t want to be a toy – in how to be a favourite toy.

When Toy Story 4 rapped up, I basically said I didn’t really need to see it again. That’s quite a sad statement to make considering the original trilogy of films are so damn good. But this never really feels like it does justify its existence. Toy Story 3 finalises the whole saga so well with Woody and the other toys coming full circle, having helped Andy grow up and now being passed to Bonnie to help her deal with her childhood. It’s a beautiful, heart-warming story – and there isn’t a need to see what happens next. 

Toy Story 3 ended with Woody accepting that Andy has grown up, choosing to stay with his friends as a toy rather than going to college with Andy. But here we need to hit the reset button so that Woody is now missing Andy and his previous status – but is also in denial about this. I think there is something in this that is working towards Woody working out whether he wants to continue with a life of dedicated service or whether he wants to move on and change his life completely. Of course the scales are weighted a bit by the fact Woody is no longer a favourite toy and – worse! – is gathering dust in a cupboard. But it’s all a bit unclear and gets a bit lost.

Part of this is the amount of time given over to Forky, a rather trying and faintly irritating “comic” character, whom I could certainly have done without. He exists primarily as a motivation for Woody to remain at the funfair the road-trip gets stuck at, but the long stretch of time they spend apart means the mentor-mentee relationship the film starts with trails off and disappears for a large chunk of the film. As a mirror on Woody, the part is a failure.

In fact most of the plot gets stuck at the funfair along with the road trip, as the film introduces Gabby Gabby (voiced by Christina Hendricks) a voice-box doll from the 1950s with a misfunctioning voice box who has lived her life in an antiques store and dreams of being a real toy. Gabby’s obsessive belief that gaining a working voice-box (from Woody!) will get her the love of a child drives most of the rest of the film, a slightly rambling action-adventure that features Woody, Buzz and a gang of newly-met toys breaking in, then out, then back in to the antiques store. It’s a sprawling series of adventure scenes, that seems a million miles away from the film’s original opening of Bonnie dealing with going to school for the first time.

In fact, poor Bonnie gets almost completely shelved after the first act of the film, along with the rest of the original cast who barely appear. Jessie, Rex, Slinky Dog, Hamm and co are left “guarding the base”, hardly having any impact on the film and kept separate from Woody and Buzz for ages. Since the first three films revolved so heavily around the “family” mechanism of the group of toys, to shelve most of them into background characters seems a real shame. 

Instead the film starts to focus on Woody’s fear of being “a lost toy” – something put sharply into perspective by him re-encountering Bo Peep (Annie Potts) his sometime love-interest from films 1 and 2 (not present at all in 3). With a “nine years earlier” flashback opening the film, showing Bo Peep being gifted on to a new child, the film catches up with her having escaped from Gabby’s antiques store and now leading a free life, without a child, doing what she wants, when she wants. There is some decent chemistry between the two, but more could have been made of showing Woody slowly seeing that there are positives in not having a child as well as the negatives he has always associated it with. But like so many things in the film, with so much going on and so many new characters being introduced, the thematic issues get lost.

There is just too much plot. Essentially Forky exists to give Woody a reason to remain at the funfair. Gabby exists as an obstacle to stop them leaving. The funfair is a sort of existential trap for the heroes. But everything just bogs down the film, making the storyline increasingly top heavy. Buzz seems to have taken a step or two down in intelligence. Most of the new characters don’t engage as well as the old ones, even though Keanu Reeves has great fun as a nervous stunt toy. But the film has no economy, it gets crowded over with events.

Which is a shame as there is a simple thematic story here of Woody accepting that one stage of his life has finished and he needs to move on to the next. There was, I am sure, a way of telling this story that didn’t feature all these new characters, the confusing setting and the overlong adventure sequences. There was a way of doing this in parallel with Bonnie needing to grow up a little and start going to school. Of making it harder for Woody to think about leaving, because he has the whole family of toys with him (rather than on the sidelines). But the film doesn’t do it. It’s all too often flat footed, slow and missing the emotional target. It’s Toy Story so there are good moments. But they should have stopped at three.

The Dam Busters (1955)

Richard Todd leads the most famous bombing raid ever in The Dam Busters

Director: Michael Anderson

Cast: Richard Todd (Wing Commander Guy Gibson), Michael Redgrave (Barnes Wallis), Ursula Jeans (Mrs Molly Wallis), Basil Sydney (Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris), Patrick Barr (Captain Joseph “Mutt” Summers), Ernest Clark (Air Vice-Marshal Ralph Cochrane), Derek Farr (Group Captain John Whitworth)

It’s famous for its stirring theme. Those bouncing bombs. The fact that George Lucas, while still completing the special effects, spliced in the final bombing runs into his first cut of Star Wars. But where does The Dam Busters sit today as a film? 

In 1942, aeronautical engineer Barnes Wallis (Michael Redgrave) is working on a plan to take out the German dams on the Ruhr, a strike that could cripple German heavy industry. Conventional bombs can never cause enough damage, and the dams are protected from torpedo attack. So Wallis has a crazy idea – to build a bouncing bomb that will skim the top of the water, hitting the dam, with its top spin taking it down to the base of the dam for detonation. It’s a crazy idea – but it finally wins favour, with Wing Commander Guy Gibson (played by real-life World War II paratroop veteran Richard Todd) given command over an operation that promises to be risky and dangerous beyond belief.

The Dam Busters doesn’t really have much in the way of plot, being instead a rather straight-forward, even dry in places, run through of the mechanics involved in planning the operation and overcoming the engineering difficulties that stood in the way of the operation. Throw into that our heroes overcoming the various barriers and administrative hiccups put in the way by the authorities and you have a pretty standard story of British pluck and ingenuity coming up with a left-field solution that saves the day. (Though Barnes Wallis denied he faced any bureaucratic opposition like the type his fictional counterpart struggled with for most of the first forty minutes).

Of course, the film is also yet another advert for the “special nature” of the British under fire, a national sense of inherent destiny and ingenuity that has frequently done as much harm as good. Made in co-operation with the RAF, it’s also a striking tribute to the stiff-upper-lipped bravery of the RAF during the war, and the sense of sacrifice involved in flying these deadly missions.  

In fact it’s striking that the film’s final few notes are not of triumph after the completion of the operation, and the destruction of the two dams, but instead the grim burden of surviving. After 56 men have been killed on the mission, Barnes Wallis regrets even coming up with the idea. The final action we see Gibson performing is walking quietly back to his office to write letters to the families. Anderson’s camera pans over the empty breakfast table, set for pilots who have not returned, and then over the abandoned belongings of the dead still left exactly where they last placed them. It’s sombre, sad and reflective – and probably the most adult moment of the film.

Because other than that, it’s a jolly charge around solving problems with a combination of Blue Peter invention, mixed with a sort of Top Gear can-do spirit. Michael Redgrave is very good as the calm, professorial, dedicated Barnes Wallis, constantly returning to the drawing board with a reserved, eccentric resignation to fix yet another prototype. The sequences showing the engineering problems being met and overcome are interesting and told with a quirky charm that makes them perhaps one of the best examples of such things made in film. 

The material covering the building of the flight team is far duller by comparison, despite a vast array of soon-to-be-more-famous actors (George Baker, Nigel Stock, Robert Shaw etc.) doing their very best “the few” performances. Basically, generally watching a series of pilots working out the altitude they need to fly at in training situations is just not as interesting as watching the boffins figure out how to make the impossible possible.

The flight parts of the film really come into their own in the final act that covers the operation itself. An impressive display of special effects at the time (even if they look a bit dated now), the attack is dramatic, stirring and also costly (the film allows beats of tragedy as assorted crews are killed over the course of the mission). The attack is brilliantly constructed and shot by Michael Anderson, and very accurate to the process of the actual operation, in a way that fits in with the air of tribute that hangs around the whole film.

All this reverence to those carrying means that we overlook completely the lasting impact of the mission. “Bomber” Harris (here played with a solid gruffness by Basil Sydney) later considered the entire operation a waste of time, money and resources. Barnes Wallis begged for a follow-up to hammer home the advantage, but it never happened. The Germans soon restored their economic capability in the Ruhr. Similarly, today it’s more acknowledged the attack killed over 600 civilians and over 1000 Russian POWs working as slave labour in the Ruhr. Such things are of course ignored – the film even throws in a moment of watching German workers flee to safety from a flooding factory floor, to avoid showing any deaths on the ground.

And of course, the film is also (unluckily) infamous for the name of Gibson’s dog. I won’t mention the name, but when I say the dog is black and ask you to think of the worst possible word to use as its name and you’ve got it. It does mean the word gets bandied about a fair bit, not least when it is used as a code-word for a successful strike against the dam. Try and tune it out.

The Dam Busters is a solid and impressive piece of film-making, even if it is low on plot and more high on documentary ticking-off of facts. But it’s also reverential, a little dry and dated and avoids looking at anything involved in the mission with anything approaching a critical eye. With its unquestioning praise for “the British way”, it’s also a film that reassures those watching it that there is no need for real analysis and insight into the state of our nation, but instead that we should buckle down and trust in the divine guiding hand that always pulls Britain’s irons out of the fire.

Saving Mr Banks (2013)

Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson clash on the making of Mary Poppins in Saving Mr Banks

Director: John Lee Hancock

Cast: Emma Thompson (Pamela Travers), Tom Hanks (Walt Disney), Colin Farrell (Travers Robert Goff), Ruth Wilson (Margaret Goff), Paul Giamatti (Ralph), Bradley Whitford (Don DaGradi), Jason Schwartzman (Richard M Sherman), BJ Novak (Robert B Sherman), Kathy Baker (Tommie), Melanie Paxson (Dolly), Rachel Griffiths (Ellie), Ronan Vibert (Diarmuid Russell)

Walt Disney was a man used to getting what he wanted. And what he wanted more than anything was the rights to PL Travers’ Mary Poppins series. It was his kids favourite books, and he had promised them he would make the movie. It took decades – and Disney had to wait until Travers needed the money – but finally a deal was struck, with Travers having full script approval. So the hyper-English Travers is flown across the Atlantic to Los Angeles where she reacts with a brittle horror to every single suggestion from the Mary Poppins creative team, and distaste at the commercialisation of Disney’s enterprise. Based on the actual recordings (which Travers insisted on) from the script meetings, Emma Thompson is the imperious PL Travers and Tom Hanks the avuncular Walt Disney.

John Lee Hancock’s film is a solid crowd pleaser that, if it feels like it hardly delivers a completely true picture of the making of Mary Poppins, does put together an entertaining and interesting idea of the difficult process of creation and the tensions when writers (who don’t want to change a thing!) clash with film production companies. These problems being made worse by the clashing worlds of the loose, casualness and breezy friendliness of Los Angeles, and the intensely cold, buttoned-up Edwardianism of Travers, hostile to all shows of affection and any touches of sentimentality.

The film gets more than a lot of comic mileage out of these mixed worlds, with Travers’ every look of aghast, repressed, British reserve (“Poor AA Milne” she mutters while manhandingly a stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh toy out of her way, followed by “You can stay there until you learn the art of subtlety” as she dumps a massive Mickey Mouse cuddily toy against the wall of her bedroom) bound to raise sniggers at both her blunt hostility and cut-glass wit. Against this the American characters – all of them forced to dance to her tune – meet wave after wave of hostility with a practised American friendliness and warmth. It works a treat.

The film walks a fine line with its portrayal of Disney who is both a charming uncle figure and also a savvy and even ruthless businessman. Tom Hanks is spot-on with showing both sides of this man, making it clear how he managed to make so much damn money but also from how he managed to inspire such loyalty from many of his staff. Yes the film soft-peddles on many of Disney’s negatives – from refusing to show a single second of Disney smoking, to no mention of his active union-busting activities – but this is a film focused on Disney the impresario and negotiator. 

And what a person to negotiate with! That the film works is almost exclusively down to Emma Thompson’s imperious performance in the lead role. Thompson has a very difficult job here of turning someone so consistently rude, aggressive, arrogant and unpleasant as Travers (and over half of the film goes by before she says something nice to anyone) into a character we genuinely invest in, care about and laugh with as much as gasp at her rudeness. It’s a real trick from Thompson, adding a great deal if inner pain and vulnerability just below the surface, but only allowing a few beats of letting these feelings out for all the world to see. It makes for a performance that is superbly funny, hugely rude but also someone we end up caring about.

A lot of that spins from the careful recreation of Travers’ past in flashback, particularly her relationship with her father, Travers Goff (played with charm by Colin Farrell), an alcoholic bank manager in Australia when Travers was a child, who lived a life of irresponsibility mixed with bursts of playful, imaginative games with his daughter. It’s the realisation, by the elderly Travers, that her father was feckless and irresponsible that motivates her writing of Mary Poppins, the super-Nanny who flies in and saves not just the whole family, but specifically the father. Equally good in these sequences is Ruth Wilson as the despairing Mrs Goff.

It adds a sadness to the backstory of Travers – and an understanding of why she behaves the way she does – and the film also brings it round to a neat mutual meeting ground between her and Disney, who himself had problems with a father who drove him hard to achieve. It also explains Travers’ growing warmth to her chauffer, played by Paul Giamatti as a loving dad, the one person she demonstrates some affection to within the film.

It’s a film that wants to have its cake and eat it though, and it can’t resist adding a “happy ending” to the story of Travers finally accepting (even if she denies it) that she enjoys the Mary Poppins film and is moved by the saving of Mr Banks that it contains. In reality of course, Travers hated the film (though claimed some of it was passable) and refused Disney all permission to ever make any sequel. But that hardly matters here, to this fairy tale of saved souls which wants to see Travers saved – even if the truth was far more complex.