Black Panther (2018)

Chadwick Boseman is the legendary Black Panther in Marvel’s solid comic book outing

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Chadwick Boseman (T’Challa/Black Panther), Michael B. Jordan (N’Jadaka/Erik Kilmonger Stevens), Lupita Nyong’o (Nakia), Danai Gurira (Okoye), Martin Freeman (Everett K Ross), Daniel Kaluuya (W’Kabi), Letitia Wright (Shuri), Winston Duke (M’Baku), Angela Bassett (Ramonda), Forest Whitaker (Zuri), Andy Serkis (Ulysses Klaue), John Kani (T’Chaka)

Marvel’s comic book world is now so stuffed with characters, worlds and dimensions that it is remarkable how many of its heroes are white and male. Black Panther does something completely different, giving us a set of African heroes and placing the common framework of a Marvel film within a very proud, and distinct, African heritage. So you can pretty much guarantee you ain’t seen a comic book film quite like this one.

After the death of his father (in Captain America: Civil War), T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) becomes king of the secretive nation of Wakanda. Camouflaging itself as a poor and unadvanced nation in order to avoid interaction with the rest of the world, Wakanda has in fact for centuries been mining a remarkable metal, vibranium, that has helped the nation become hugely technologically advanced. Its king also bears the responsibility of being the “Black Panther”, ingesting a vibranium-infused herb to gain superhuman speed and strength. However, others have their eye on the throne, not least Erik “Kilmonger” Stevens (Michael B Jordan), who wants to turn Wakanda into a force that could protect the black people of the world from their historical oppressors and avenge centuries of slavery.

Black Panther never fails to be entertaining. The film is shot with a genuinely vibrant excitement, and I love the way it proudly embraces a comic book twist on African tribal heritage. In fact the film’s depiction of an African nation which is secretly the most powerful and advanced nation in the world is really quite an impressive political statement.

Ryan Coogler directs the film with flashy brilliance and comes up with a few ways of presenting what are (essentially) action sequences we’ve seen many times before in unique new ways. The stand-out is an early action scene in a Korean bar, filmed to appear as an immersive single take around a large set, the camera dipping and zooming from character to character. Coogler also brings a fair amount of visual wit to the fights while not losing the emotional and character depth the story is aiming for.

The film also has some fine performances, with Boseman dripping dignity, nobility and decency as T’Challa. Regular Coogler collaborator Michael B. Jordan gives a great contrast as bitter LA slums kid turned misguided would-be dictator Kilmonger. Danai Gurira stands out as proud general Okoye, torn between duty and personal loyalties. Hell even Forest Whitaker – clearly loving every moment of this OTT Marvel world – gets some weight and dignity out of his typical grandstanding style.

It’s another mark for the film that the world of Wakanda is so effectively gender neutral. Kings of Wakanda have a Praetorian Guard of female warriors, most of the leading voices on its council are women, and its technical genius is T’Challa’s sister Shuri (played by Letitia Wright in a charming, star-making performance). Sure it doesn’t feel like the role of Black Panther himself is up for grabs for anyone lacking a penis, but this is a world where women are equal, if not leading, partners in the action.

The film also addresses issues of post-colonial struggle, not least attitudes towards slavery and oppression handed out to Africa over centuries. Kilmonger’s fiendish plot is, in many ways, actually quite sympathetic – he wants to use Wakanda’s resources to protect those of African descent across the world. Jordan gets some good moments from his speeches laced with anger at the historical treatment of Afro-Caribbeans and, to be honest, it’s hard not to see his point. So hard in fact that the film has to drop hints that Kilmonger is a potential tyrant to stop him from seeing too reasonable. 

This is where the film’s plot starts to get slightly hazy. The character arc of T’Challa himself is pretty unclear. Traditionally in these films, the character must embrace his destiny. Problem is, a lot of this arc was covered in Captain America: Civil War. The writers are unable to give him a truly compelling replacement arc here. T’Challa drops a few references early on to not feeling ready – but basically swiftly embraces it. He never outlines a real alternative agenda to Kilmonger – there are characters in the film who argue “Wakanda doesn’t get involved in the world”, but he isn’t one of them, so there is no journey towards engagement with the outside world (on far more humanitarian terms than Kilmonger advocates). 

Frankly, Okoye is given a better character arc than T’Challa, beginning by advocating “we must serve the throne and respect our traditions even if we doubt them”, and learning later to follow her own conscience. T’Challa, in contrast, is no discernibly different at the end of the film to how he was at the beginning. 

T’Challa’s journey is basically getting something, losing it and then getting it back. Strip away Boseman’s performance and the character is basically pretty dull. He partly suffers, as does the rest of the film, from an overstuffed cast spreading the focus of the film far too thinly and leading to character arcs and interconnections feeling rushed. Kilmonger’s connection with T’Challa is forced – they only know each other for at best two days! – and there is a superfluity of villains. There’s not only decoy antagonist Klaue (and his gang) hanging about for a good chunk of the film, but also Daniel Kaluuya’s ill-defined best friend turned opponent, W’Kabi. Combining Kilmonger and W’Kabi would have helped no end, allowing two different, divergent agendas to develop and cause a relationship rift between two friends (Kaluuya is instead totally wasted in a nothing part, whose allegiances change depending on the demands of the plot). 

The good guys fare no better: Lupita Nyong’o is completely wasted as a love interest who feels stuffed into the movie because, y’know, these films gotta have one. She does nothing in the film that could not be easily done by another character, and nearly all of T’Challa’s emotional scenes – and personal motivation – are tied into his sister rather than this are-they-aren’t-they-a-couple. 

It’s all part of the traditionalism that underlies the film. Its structure is familiar and, like many Marvel origin films, the villain is a dark reflection of the hero with similar skills. The final battle is traditional and a little dull (and feels very similar to Avengers: Infinity War). The film avoids showing T’Challa torn between isolation and intervention – he in fact advocates both in the first 15 minutes – and doesn’t really make much of the prospect of a hero changing his mind or developing his views to embrace a wider world.

But it stands out because it is different. And it deserves no end of praise for making such a film so full of love and respect for its heritage. It walks a very difficult line between enjoying the bright exotic colours while not making the film patronising or overly “other-worldly”. How many other Hollywood films have, at best, two white characters (well played in both cases by Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis)? How many others would dare have the villain make a defiant, sizzling and emotionally inspirational speech about racial oppression and the hypocrisy of the West (though the film goes easy on America, with the speech taking place at the hilarious “Museum of Great Britain”. Where is this place – please get my tickets!).

That it slightly dodges and fudges the implication of these themes in its plotting and the conception of its hero – who is basically a dull character played by a charismatic actor – doesn’t reduce its pleasure at doing something different. I’m not sure it will stand up to repeated viewings – look past the setting and it does little new – but it’s a worthy entrance in a crowded universe.

Collateral (2004)

Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx take a long taxi ride in Michael Mann’s thriller Collateral

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Tom Cruise (Vincent), Jamie Foxx (Max Durocher), Jada Pinkett Smith (Annie Farrell), Mark Ruffalo (Detective Ray Fanning), Peter Berg (Detective Richard Weidner), Bruce McGill (Frank Pedrosa), Irma P. Hall (Ida Durocher), Barry Shabaka Henley (Daniel Baker), Javier Bardem (Felix Reyes-Torrena)

Tom Cruise enjoys throwing us film-goers curveballs every now and again. In Collateral he pops up as a sociopathic hitman, grey of hair and suit (like a buzzcut, rampaging John Major) leaving bodies strewn about the place. It’s great to see him in Michael Mann’s lean, very enjoyable action thriller, looking as sleek and soulless as the rest of LA.

Cruise’s Vincent is a hitman in LA to knock off a list of targets. But how will he get from hit to hit? Why by hiring a taxi driver for a night: risk-averse dreamer Max (Jamie Foxx) who has been working “temporarily” as a taxi driver while he builds plans for his dream limo business for a mere 12 years. Max is thrilled to have a big spender in his car – until something goes wrong on hit #1 and a body lands on his cab. Max no has no choice but to assist Vincent – although Vincent ends up becoming more attached to Max than he might ever have imagined.

Mann shot his film on a high-definition video and it gives a very unique look at LA, really capturing the hazy yellows and cool blues of the city and giving everything in the picture a slightly grainier, starker look. But that would count for nothing if the story of the film wasn’t pretty good, and Collateral is a very effective action thriller, which doesn’t reimagine the genre but offers more than enough freshness to enliven the familiar elements it’s made up from. 

Its main assets (along with Mann’s cool, detached and pin-point sharp direction) are the performances of its two leads. Cruise is just about bang-on as a professional hitman, devoid of empathy, who finds surprising possibilities of friendship open in front of him. He’s a fascinating character, like someone who has spent so long studying people that he can just about replicate human reactions, without understanding the humanity behind them. Cruise’s obsessive preparation for his roles also help makes him flawlessly convincing as this lethal ubermensh.

Foxx however is just as good as a basically decent, friendly, low-key guy who is kidding himself that he is not drifting through life. It’s Max’s story we follow throughout the film – and it’s his sense of personal morality, his strict belief in right and wrong, that gives the film its dramatic force. Foxx also avoids undermining or laughing at Max, who is basically a man so buttoned up and cautious that (without a major push) he’ll clearly die of old age in that cab. 

These two characters thrown together have a curious chemistry – a sort of riff on the casual bonds that can develop between driver and passenger as they talk about their lives, views and interests. It’s not a friendship – certainly not in Max’s case – but it’s a strange sort of bond nevertheless. Vincent, you feel, hasn’t talked to many people like this – and while he’s still willing to threaten Max or put him at great risk, he still develops a strange protectiveness about him. It’s this quirky and different relationship that powers the film and finally makes it unique. This odd couple don’t overcome boundaries to become bosom friends, but they also don’t come together as fierce rivals. Instead they sort of work out a co-existence in that cab.

It’s the most interesting thing about a film that otherwise – to be honest – deals a pretty familiar deck with confidence. Sometimes the film plays its cards so well you overlook them – the first time I watched it, I was semi-surprised at the reveal of the final victim, but really it should be pretty obvious to anyone who has seen a movie before. The plot is full of moments like this that are played with a freshness – or with a cunning – that stops them from feeling familiar.

But that’s really what it is. The journey around LA from hit-to-hit is a familiar sounding idea. The encounters between Vincent and the targets are pretty familiar – the exception being a fascinating, and hard to read, encounter with Barry Shabaka Henley’s jazz player turned informant, which sizzles with tension – and the action scenes, while well staged, are the sort of shoot-outs we’ve seen before. Mann shoots them with a vibrant excitement, but it’s mostly B-movie stuff presented freshly.

What it comes down to is that relationship between those two characters, and the skill of director and actor in drawing out subtleties in performance. (Don’t listen by the way to the director’s commentary, which ruthlessly strips these subtleties away as Mann bangs on about heavy-handed, predictable backstories which thankfully don’t make it into the movie, but make it sound dumber than it is). Cruise and Foxx are both fantastic, Mann’s direction of this sort of icy-cold, impersonal, dangerous city is impeccable and the film itself doesn’t fail to entertain.

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

The French military move into Algiers in Pontecorvo’s neo-realist masterpiece The Battle of Algiers

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo

Cast: Jean Martin (Colonel Mathieu), Yacef Saadi (Djafar), Brahim Hadjadi (Ali La Pointe), Tommaso Neri (Captain). Ugo Palette (Captain), Fusia El Kader (Halima), Mohamed Ben Kassen (Petit Omar)

Sometimes, when watching The Battle of Algiers, you have to catch yourself and remember everything you are watching was staged rather than real footage. That right there is the greatest strength of this film, and its ongoing legacy. It feels more real than the news, it looks more authentic than reality. Match that with the fact that (and it says a lot for the world that this is the case) its themes remain painfully resonant today, and you can see why it has had such a lasting and profound impact on film-makers.

Pontecorvo’s film dramatises (although that almost feels like the wrong word) events in Algiers, capital city of French Algeria, from November 1954 to December 1957 when the Algerian War of Independence turned the city into a near warzone, with its hub being an increasingly brutal struggle for control of the Casbah between the French authorities (and then army) and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) cells. 

That description only gets a flavour of the film, which reconstructs the story with a truly awe-inspiring immediacy that feels like a slice of real life. The film has a fearless willingness to depict the dangerous struggle and violence in a combat between terrorists and soldiers. So we get violence on both sides, torture, murder, beatings, bombings of young civilians and other acts of brutality, all chronicled with a documentary realism that never feels exploitative or distasteful.

The film is often hailed as being scrupulously even-handed. I’d argue it isn’t quite – what it does do is recognise that both sides are human. The cause of Algerian independence is clearly one the film finds sympathetic, and while it shows acts of terror from the Algerians, the real acts of violence and prejudice come from the French authorities and citizens. The film doesn’t turn the Algerian terrorists into unspoilt martyrs, but it certainly regards their cause as right. So it can show them killing civilians and engaged in acts of violence, but still admire their cause (the film was made with the involvement of several former members of the NLF both in front of and behind the camera).

The film’s depiction of the French soldiers also gives more of an impression of even-handedness. These soldiers are not brutal or sadistic, but functionaries doing about a job (just following orders?) with a ruthless efficiency. The casting of Jean Martin (the only professional actor in the film) as French commando leader Colonel Mathieu also perhaps weights things, as Martin gives an engaging, morally conflicted performance, and the film lays great stress on Mathieu’s own experiences during the Second World War in the French Resistance and (it’s implied) in a concentration camp. 

The French soldiers go about their task of pacifying the terrorists with a campaign of capture, enhanced interrogation and systematic elimination of cell leaders, using their superior resources and training, in a way that the CIA (which screened the film for its agents in 2003 to help them understand terrorist cells) described as being a complete success militarily, but a total failure politically. It stamps out the Algerians in the Casbah, in a way that reduces casualties and restores order – but totally fails to win over the precious hearts and minds.

And Pontecorvo knows it’s hearts and minds that his film is all about. His camera immerses us in the heat and tension of the Casbah, picking out the faces of the non-professional extras (and actors) that populate his film, showing the bubbling tensions and resentment slowly building in a population that doesn’t start out as bitter and extremist, but becomes more and more so as the French stamp out the Algerian independence movement. People swirl around the action, increasingly objecting to the strict control procedures that segregate the Casbah from the rest of the city, and at several points crowding into potentially violent mobs, spurred on by some members of the NLF.

The NLF also has little compunction in the tactics it has to employ in order to stand any chance against the French. Pontecorvo frames the film around the experiences of Ali la Pointe (a striking performance from non-professional Brahim Hadjadi). It opens with la Pointe trapped by the French soldiers, flashing back to his initial recruitment, radicalisation and increasingly pivotal role as a cell leader under more the more urbane and political Djafar (Yacef Saadi, another non-professional playing a version of himself). 

La Pointe is our audience surrogate – and it’s surprising how we find ourselves drawn towards him. Especially since within the first 15 minutes he’s moved quickly from murdering gangsters in the Casbah to shooting cops and leading riots. Pontecorvo shoots and edits these moments of terrorist action and planning with a Hitchcockian skill. One particularly brilliant sequence follows three NLF women being selected, prepared for, traveling to and carrying out a series of bombings of cafes and bars in Algiers (the victims at one seem to be exclusively teenagers and young people).

The film is full of moments like this, all filmed with a gripping down-to-earth black-and-white realism, buzzing with tension. It’s brilliantly assembled and totally compelling, a documentary slice of Italian neo-realism that presents a fascinating look at the dangerous politics of resistance and occupation. The French military’s heavy-handed tactics are totally effective – even torture is shown to yield enough results to justify its use – but they are also completely wrong, morally repugnant but executed by soldiers going about their duty with no bitterness (Mathieu frequently tells the press that he hopes for a bright future for Algiers and even doubts the wisdom of occupation in the long run).

Pontecorvo’s film remains alarmingly prescient and relevant today – and it’s actually a little scary how little the world has changed. You can just as easily imagine the same events happening in Iraq or Afghanistan today. It’s told here with no sensationalism but a mostly objective even-handedness, that makes clear the side it favours but doesn’t demonise the other. As a slice of history turned into film it’s impeccable.

This Sporting Life (1963)

Rachel Roberts and Richard Harris excel in brutal kitchen-sink drama This Sporting Life

Director: Lindsay Anderson

Cast: Richard Harris (Frank Machin), Rachel Roberts (Margaret Hammond), Alan Badel (Weaver), William Hartnell (“Dad” Johnson), Colin Blakely (Maurice Braithwaite), Arthur Lowe (Slomer), Vanda Godsell (Mrs Weaver), Jack Watson (Lennox), Harry Markham (Wade), George Sewell (Jeff), Leonard Rossiter (Phillips), Anne Cunningham (Judith)

The British New Wave of the early 1960s embraced working-class stories. They centred on chippy, confident, crowd-pleasing working-class young men (it was always men) from regional towns, doing blue collar work, thumbing their nose at the establishment and fighting to find their own way. This Sporting Life takes a similar route – but its central character, Frank Machin, is a furious, resentful and selfish man, who seems hellbent on destroying everything he touches. Unlike Arthur Seaton or Billy Fisher, he’s hard to like – and the film hits as hard as scrum of rugby players. 

Frank Machin (Richard Harris) is a miner turned professional rugby player – not that he has any love for the game (“I only enjoy it if I get paid for it!” he contemptuously states). Machin is an articulate brute of a man, a pugilistic whirligig of resentments, barely expressed or understood desires, and a deep-rooted and chronic insecurity that cries out for love while pushing it away. He’s in love with his landlady, widowed mother of two young children Margaret Hammond (Rachael Roberts). They begin an affair of sorts – but it can barely survive her trauma and Machlin’s self-destructive rage.

Lindsay Anderson’s films are notable for their anger and bitter satire, so it’s no surprise he directed the least crowd-pleasing, angriest angry-young-man film of all – or that This Sporting Life killed the genre. The film is a series of hits, aimed far and wide, from the deference of the players to the owners who treat the clubs like playthings (the “amateur fair play” British attitudes to sport from the patronising owners gets a kicking), to the hypocritical judgemental attitudes of the working class. Even its romantic story features two characters so unable to engage with or understand their feelings that they only really seem able to communicate fully when raging at each other. 

Anderson’s new-wave, kitchen sink aesthetic creates a film that feels like a series of battles. From Machlin moving in local clubs to visiting the home of creepy closeted club owner Weaver (a smooth and unsettlingly cruel Alan Badel), whether rebuffing the advances of Weaver’s wife or at a Christmas party, he always seems ready for violence. The rugby matches are filmed like mud covered fights, with players piling into each other like sledgehammers. Even the “romantic” (and I use that word advisedly) scenes between Roberts and Harris feel like conflicts (they frequently tip into nerve-shreddingly raw emotional outbursts). 

Anderson’s film takes everything you expect from the Saturday Night and Sunday Morning expectations and amps up the danger, anger and tension. Machlin barrels through scenes, conversations and relationships in the same way he charges through the rugby pitch. The whole film is a sharp warning of the danger of unrestrained masculinity, pushing all softer emotions to one side. Machlin wants so desperately to be a man that everything must be a battle, at all times displaying his most manly qualities. The tragedy is that you can tell there is a far more sensitive and intriguing personality below the surface.

All this comes together in Richard Harris’ searing performance in the lead role. His career break – he won the Best Actor award at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar – Harris was possibly never better. He’s a brooding force of nature in this film, utterly convincing as a man who bottles up his feelings until it is way too late. He hits out at everything, but you feel he is really running scared from the vulnerability in his own personality. With children, Machlin is tender and gentle, but with adults he is unable to express his feelings. His emotions for Margaret are based around suggestions of a need for a mother figure, sexual desire – and a desire for an answer to the emptiness he feels in himself. Harris is like an Irish Brando here, a marvellous, emotional, dangerous, brutal figure.

Rachel Roberts (also Oscar-nominated) is just as good, giving another extraordinary performance (to match the similarish role she played in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) as Margaret. Grieving her husband, terrified of commitment, aware of her own position, as incapable in her own way of expressing her emotions and feelings as Machlin is, Margaret is as much a damaged and combative character. Roberts’ performance suggests years of disappointment and struggle behind the eyes, and she has a rawness and humane anguish in her scenes with Harris that sear the eyeballs. The scenes between these two are difficult to watch but engrossing.

The film is stuffed with excellent performances. William Hartnell is heartbreakingly tragic as the closeted talent scout who spots Machlin, only to be dropped by the new star. Colin Blakely is excellent as Machlin’s more grounded and engaging teammate. Vanda Godsell is the face of female corruption as Weaver’s sexually possessive wife. Arthur Lowe (who went on to work with Anderson several times) is very good as a stuffy but shrewd board member. All of this is beautifully filmed in black and white, with an urgency mixed with flashes of impressionistic grimness.

Anderson’s film, though, is primarily a working-class tragedy, about a man unable (until far too late) to really understand what he wants. Why is this? Because of failings in himself, but also failings in his upbringing, where qualities of self-understanding and expression are not encouraged, where pressure is placed on men to be men, where class and stuffy attitudes look to stamp out any real sense of self-knowledge. It’s an angry young man film that is truly, really angry. No wonder it flopped at the box office. But no wonder it lasts in many ways better than other films from this genre. It feels like a film that wants to say something, that has an urgent message. And it has at two extraordinary performances.

Farewell My Concubine (1993)

Leslie Cheung and Fengyi Zhang are the still centre for decades of Chinese history in Farewell My Concubine

Director: Chen Kaige

Cast: Leslie Cheung (Cheng Dieyi), Fengyi Zhang (Duan Xialou), Gong Li (Juxian), Ge You (Yuan Shquig), Lu Qi (Master Guan), Ying Da (Na Kun), Yidi (Eunuch Zhang), Zhi Yitong (Saburo Aoki), Lei Han (Xiaosi)

Chinese cinema isn’t well-known in the West. Maybe it comes from China so long being behind its own Red Curtain. Farewell My Concubine was pivotal to introducing Chinese cinematic culture to the West, winning a Palme d’Or and nominated for an Oscar. It’s surprising in a way, as Farewell My Concubine is a film that you almost need an intimate knowledge of Chinese history to truly appreciate (which I’m not sure I do!). But not surprising in another, as it is a glorious made, brilliantly acted and directed paean to the warmth of the human spirit.

Told over 52 years, from 1925 to 1977, the film follows two actors in the Peking Opera – Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) and Duan Xiaolou (Fengyi Zhang). Brought up in a brutally tough actor training school, the two become famous for their performances in the opera, Farewell My Concubine, about the suicide of a king’s concubine. Dieyi plays the concubine, while Xialou plays the king. The two actors are held together with a strong, almost unbreakable bond of brotherhood. But Dieyi also has a romantic longing for Xiaolou. Their relationship is made more complex after Xiaolou’s marriage to former courtesan Juxian (Gong Li) – but the three quickly find a relationship of tolerance, support and understanding that is tense but works. Around them China undergoes the Second World War, Japanese occupation, Mao’s seizure of power and the Cultural Revolution.

Kaige’s film is an epic that places an intimate and personal story at its centre and introduces global and national events which we largely understand from the perspective of our characters. This is a brilliant way of showing the seismic changes in China over this period – from the 1920s, which are so simple and Dickensian in their set-up that they might as well be the fifteenth century, to the increasingly brutal oppression of Mao’s regime. At the centre of all this is the relationship between the three core characters.

This relationship is almost impossible to define, so richly complex and human does it feel. It all rings immediately true – three people who are held very closely together by bonds of family, shared past and mutual dependency, but whose relationships are also rife with jealousies and regrets. Deiyi oscillates between vulnerability and guarded resentment against everyone around him. Xiaolou (brilliantly played by Fengyi Zhang, all warm-hearted charisma but easily led by others) is both annoyed and frustrated by Deiyi, but also goes to extraordinary lengths to protect him. Juxian (an enigmatic intelligent performance from Gong Li) at first seems to be a manipulative presence who wants to split the two of them apart, but comes to an unspoken accommodation with Deiyi that recognises they have a lot of shared interests and love.

All of this is simply beautifully done, subtle, un-obvious and brilliantly restrained, wonderfully acted by the three leads. Deiyi is a fascinating character, struggling with his sense of identity, trained from an early age to look and behave as much like a woman as possible. Is it any wonder that it has had an impact on his sexual identity? (The film’s openness about homosexuality – with Deiyi frequently being used for sex by his patrons – is one of many reasons it was nearly banned in China). Deiyi feels unable to express the feelings he clearly has, frequently falling back on imperiousness and pride. Leslie Cheung is just about perfect in this role: fragile, brittle but also harsh and unforgiving.

Kaige films all this beautifully in this visually striking film, using a host of brilliant images and wonderful lighting. The film’s opening hour covers the characters’ childhoods in the harsh training regime of the opera school, where beatings are common. Every character, by the way, accepts this as totally normal – in a striking later scene, the two adults meet their mentor again and immediately revert back to mutely accepting physical punishment for perceived wasting of their talent. One of the film’s striking commentaries on China in fact is the difference between their deference and the defiance of up-and-comer Xiaosi, who flat out refuses to take part in the harsh regime Deiyi tries to introduce and later becomes a leading light in the Cultural Revolution. It’s one of many ways the film uses the characters to demonstrate the changes in China.

The section covering the childhood of the characters is wonderfully done, a truly Dickensian series of events that will go on to define the lives and impressions of the two characters, skilfully built around the fate of a third friend – a more defiant joker who struggles far more to cope with the discipline of the camp compared to Deiyi’s stoic acceptance and Xiaolou’s matey deference. I truly loved this sequence and would happily have watched it for ever, every moment is so well observed, the child actors are marvellous and the claustrophobic world of the training school is immaculately observed (the outside world is so absent that the appearance of a car is actually a huge surprise as it makes you realise we are in the 20thcentury). 

But then this is a film that is set in a small interior world, which shifts and changes subtly as the wider Chinese world moves around it. The Japanese occupation seems to come from nowhere, a sudden interruption of a world where the two actors struggle to please patrons. The continued re-staging of the opera Farewell My Concubine is striking for how little it changes, a still centre of artistic conventionality (and it is conventional – every moment is handed down from previous generations, with Xiaolou constantly criticised for using five steps at one point where tradition demands seven). The imperious patrons rise and fall around the actors, victims to a China which is shifting quicker than they keep up. 

Kaige’s film also sharply criticises the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, that threaten this relationship and pressure the actors to denounce both themselves and each other. The Chinese government of Mao changes constantly in its views and demands, faster than many can keep up – and what is acceptable one year becomes a capital crime the next year. Deiyi is ordered to perform for the Japanese, and later nearly faces death for this. A patron pivotal in saving him is later a man condemned for having that kind of power. Welcome to China.

Farewell My Concubine works because it puts the sprawling history in the background of this personal story of the relationship between three characters who need each other in ways they can hardly understand, increasingly drawn together as fixed points in a changing world. When the rules of yesterday are the crimes of tomorrow, is it any wonder you cling closer to the few people around you who understand and remember what you were like and where you are from?

Deiyi, Xiaolou and Juxian are characters held together by bonds that seem unshakeable, which allow them to frequently anger and attack each other but constantly draw them back to each other to support and save each other. Kaige’s understanding of this – and his brilliant discipline in refusing to add moments of definition to the feelings between these characters, but allowing us to interpret and form our own opinions of how their relationship works – is brilliant, and Farewell My Concubine is a brilliantly made, fascinating and infinitely rewarding film.

About Schmidt (2002)

Jack Nicholson is superb as beaten down Warren Schmidt in About Schmidt

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: Jack Nicholson (Warren R Schmidt), Kathy Bates (Roberta Hertzel), Hope Davis (Jeannie Schmidt), Dermot Mulroney (Randall Hertzel), June Squibb (Helen Schmidt), Howard Hesseman (Larry Hertzel), Len Cariou (Ray Nichols)

When you think about About Schmidt, it’s almost impossible not to think about Jack Nicholson. For so long Nicholson has been JACK, a personality so large, so present in the public conscious as the ultimate raging lothario, that most of his performances have been unable to escape it. He has blasted through so many films as a force of nature that what’s almost most surprising about About Schmidt is that Nicholson is so feeble, worn-out, uncharismatic and beaten down in the lead role. Did I also mention he was brilliant?

Nicholson is Warren R Schmidt, a recently retired actuary with an Insurance company in Omaha. As a young man he dreamed of a golden future, but his life has been one of crushing mundanity and boredom (albeit, I will say, clearly very well paid!). Schmidt has become a cowed, average, hollow man – the sort of man who urinates sitting down because his wife insists he does so and whose idea of defiance is to pop out for a milkshake. After his wife (June Squibb) suddenly dies, he is forced to deal with the fact that he is actually largely estranged from his idealised daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) and that he despises her decent-but-no-hoper fiancée Randall (Dermot Mulroney). Can he make her abandon the wedding?

Alexander Payne has excelled in this style of film: a slightly off-centre social comedy with a mix of a lemony sharpness, satirical wit and genuine warmth for its characters. He perfectly captures the hopes and dreams of small-town America and the trap of mediocrity and disappointment that these sort of suburban, unremarkable lives can have. About Schmidt does this brilliantly, by counterpoising the Schmidt’s feelings of depression and being trapped with the clearly empty dreams of his daughter’s would-be husband. Not to mention taking shots at the overbearing try-too-hard irritability of Randall’s bohemian family (who seem to celebrate the very failures Warren believes his life has been made of).

Payne works in perfect synchronicity with Nicholson, keeping all the actor’s OTT gestures and mannerisms well in check and pushing him to create a quiet, timid, worn-out man who is beginning to reflect (with some bitterness) on what his life has been and been to suspect (with some dread) what it might be for his daughter. Nicholson’s comic timing and his sense of empathetic sadness are both absolutely perfect. The film uses a brilliant device to let us hear Schmidt’s inner monologue via his writing a series of letters to the African child Ndugo he is sponsoring (hilarious in that he unleashes on this no doubt uncomprehending young boy a series of bitter, reflective and sad cries from the heart).

The film is about the disappointments of life, but each point is told with a dark or wry humour. From Schmidt’s retirement party (an event that everyone seems to attend only out of duty) to the death of his wife (who collapses mid hoovering) there is a dark sense of humour throughout. Nicholson plays these moments with a world-weary sadness that keeps the character grounded. At other moments, he can let rip with a more overt comic touch as he struggles with the distaste and alarm he is far too polite to show as he stays with Randall’s bohemian family (Kathy Bates is very good as the matriarch of this clan, a woman whose laissez-faire attitude is a front for her tyranny).

The film’s plot is brilliantly simple, and is fundamentally about how far Schmidt can go in re-evaluating and re-claiming his life, giving his final years (with his actuary head on he believes he has between 10-12 years left) some sense of individuality. These attempts rotate from sad starry-night imagined conversations with his late wife to awkwardly comedic encounters with a nice couple at a camping site, whose signals he completely misreads. Schmidt is angry – and those moments when it bursts out to Ndugo are hilarious – but as much with himself as anyone else. After all, who do we have to blame more than ourselves? 

Schmidt isn’t even a bad guy. He’s spot on about Randall, a decent enough guy but a hopeless businessman and incompetent chancer. A large chunk of the film’s final act hinges on us knowing that Schmidt is right, knowing that is daughter is making a huge mistake, but also knowing that we’d be as powerless about it as Schmidt is. Because the film, in its darkly comic way, is saying that nearly all of us are on this treadmill – and that nearly all of us can see that others are as well – but we can’t do anything about it or help them get off. We can only watch the gears shifting on.

It’s a brilliant, thought-provoking film, very funny in places – and Jack Nicholson gets to remind us all that he a marvellous, clever and subtle actor, in one of his finest performances since the 1970s. Nicholson’s control and likeability are vital to making Schmidt someone whom we warm to and pity, even while he frustrates. And Payne’s wonderfully directed, empathetic story illustrates a life of tragedy without meaning and dreams, but never scoffs at those who lead them – instead it’s only wistfully sad for what might have been.

Interview with the Vampire (1994)

Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt bite and flirt in high-minded, but rather camp, Interview with the Vampire

Director: Neil Jordan

Cast: Tom Cruise (Lestat de Lioncourt), Brad Pitt (Louis de Pointe du Lac), Christian Slater (Daniel Molloy), Kirsten Dunst (Claudia), Antonio Banderas (Armand), Stephen Rea (Santiago), Domiziana Giordano (Madeleine), Thandie Newton (Yvette)

Why do vampires constantly keep rearing their ugly heads in films? What is it about them that we seem to find so addictive? Interview with the Vampire is a vampire film that takes a slightly different tone and tries to explore what it might actually be like to live the life of a vampire, the actual psychological impact it might have. It’s just a shame the film also can’t escape the temptation to fall back on the high camp the genre often gets trapped in.

Anyway, the film opens in modern day San Francisco, with young reporter Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater) interviewing a man named Louis (Brad Pitt) who claims to be an ageless vampire from the late 18th century. Louis tells his life story: turned to a vampire by the hedonistic Lestat (Tom Cruise) when he was consumed with grief at the loss of his wife and child. Louis struggles with the morality of taking life, unlike Lestat’s joy in killing. Later they turn a dying girl Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), who over the next 30 years matures psychologically but remains in the body of a 12-year-old. Louis and Claudia slowly begin to fear Lestat’s control and struggle to escape from his shadow.

Interview with the Vampire wants, desperately, to be an intellectual vampire film. A sort of Freudian exploration of the impact of suddenly becoming a creature that can never see daylight, sleeps in a coffin and has an insatiable hunger for human blood. Does it work? Well sort of, I guess. But the problem is most of the depression is carried by Brad Pitt’s Louis and, to put it frankly (as Lestat observes) he’s a whiner. His very human struggle with taking life and his sadness at the loss of his humanity should be engaging, but Louis is not an interesting character. He just mopes around. Rather than being sparked by his predicament, he’s just a boring and frustrating character.

Maybe this is partly Pitt’s performance as well – too withdrawn, too morose. Apparently Pitt hated making the movie (from the long hours of make-up, to the endless night shoots, to the boring character) and it shows in the movie. Pitt just can’t get engaged in the role, his matinee idol looks and rather dull speaking voice combining to make him look like a worse actor than he is. And then Louis keeps banging on and on about how depressed he is. In fact he bangs on so much you start to wonder why everyone – from Tom Cruise’s crazed Lestat, to Antonio Banderas’ ageless vampire – is so obsessed with him.

But then maybe it’s Louis’ looks eh? The film does wallow in the sensuality of sucking on people’s necks, and half the vampires in this seem to be campily metro-sexual. Cruise gives a surprisingly out-there performance of high camp hedonism and preening selfishness, so far out of his expected range that (while not brilliant) it reminds you he is a better actor than he gets credit for. Lestat clearly has a huge crush for Louis, and the orgasmic converting of Louis into a vampire leaves little to the imagination. Later Antonio Banderas as an effeminate, ethereal older vampire also seems to have a huge crush on Louis. The many vampire victims seem to succumb to erotic joy when they are bitten (at least until they die). Sex flows over the whole film, without the film itself ever actually being sexy, and the vampires are all pretty indiscriminate in their tastes.

Unfortunately this all too often tips into pure high camp. Stephen Rea, as a sort of vampire acrobat actor, gives a performance of superb silliness. Banderas lisps and wafts through the picture like a bizarre puff of perfume. Neil Jordan frequently explores the frame with ridiculous overblown action – no less than four times in the picture we watch scenes of operatic fire starting (often with vampires writhing in flamey pain) that suggest Jordan spent too long watching the fire sequence in Gone with the Wind before he made the picture. All the actors (aside from Pitt who barely shows up) dial it up to eleven with their performances, and the long-haired, long finger-nailed vampire representations here are like some sort of odd Halloween dressing up box.

Jordan’s film often trades dark, campy humour in favour of horror or thrills. There are no real jumps or scares in the picture, and the buckets of blood thrown around are more ridiculous than they are disgusting. In fact watching the film, I feel Jordan may have been torn between wanting to do something a little different (a sad vampire film about depression) and having to deliver the blood, guts and gore the genre fans wanted. Certainly, he fails to mine any real poetry from Anne Rice’s source material (although she loved the film, so what do I know) and for all the musings on the tragedies of living a life in the shadow you never really feel that moved by it.

There are however good things. Technically the film is very good. Cruise is surprisingly fun as the colourful Lestat. The film gets stolen by Kirsten Dunst as the physically young, mentally older Claudia, who struggles to find the balance between her teenage blood lust and her later disgust and fury at being trapped forever in the body of a child. But there isn’t enough good stuff among the tosh. Interview with the Vampire is an odd, actually rather bad film that is struggling to be a good one. It has a cast of 1990s heartthrobs who mostly enjoy dressing up and playing at their campy side. But it fails to really be engaging or make someone care about the story it is trying to tell.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

Guy Pearce and Jim Caviezel as friends turned foes in The Count of Monte Cristo

Director: Kevin Reynolds

Cast: Jim Caviezel (Edmond Dantès), Guy Pearce (Fernand Mondego), Dagmara Dominczyk (Mercedès Mondego), Luis Guzmán (Jacopo), Richard Harris (Abbè Faria), James Frain (JF Villefort), Michael Wincott (Armand Dorleac), Henry Cavill (Albert Mondego), Albie Woodington (Danglers), JB Blanc (Luigi Vampa), Alex Norton (Napoleon Bonaparte), Patrick Godfrey (Morrell), Freddie Jones (Colonel Villefort), Helen McCrory (Valentina Villefort)

Alexander Dumas’ novels are beasts. The Count of Monte Cristo is a real mountain of a book, a sprawling story of adventure and revenge. Kevin Reynolds’ film had a near impossible task to turn this into a film – most have gone down the route of adapting the book into a TV series – but triumphantly succeeds by locating in it a very clear, very filmic narrative.

In 1815, Edmond Dantès (Jim Caviezel) and Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce) are young men serving on a merchant ship, who wash up on Elba where Napoleon (Alex Norton) is in exile. Tricked into taking a letter for Napoleon back to France, Dantès is betrayed by Mondego, who desires Dantès’ fiancée Mercedès (Dagmara Dominczyk) and resents his own envy for the far poorer Dantès. The corrupt magistrate Villefort (James Frain) colludes to protect his own family’s secrets, and Dantès is locked up in the dreaded Chateau d’If for 15 years, during which time he meets fellow prisoner Abbè Faria (Richard Harris) who teaches him politics, mathematics, philosophy and sword-fighting. Faria shares with Dantès the secret of the vast treasure he hid on the island of Monte Cristo – treasure Dantès dreams of using for his revenge.

This is actually a fairly nifty adaptation of a huge novel into something cinematic. Almost every change made to the original book ends up working extremely well – and adds an immediately understandable dramatic tension to it. I’d actually go so far as to say this might be a masterpiece of cinematic adaptation. The decision to make Dantès and Mondego childhood friends and rivals instantly adds a real frisson of betrayal to Mondego’s actions, as well as adding a very personal element to the revenge portion of the narrative. The simplification of the other “betrayers” also works extremely well, while the careful links throughout back to Dantès’ upbringing never let us forget the roots he has come from.

The script is also packed full of fun interjections. The idea of the chess piece, which Dantès and Mondego pass from one to the other, becomes laced with symbolism, while the changing of Jacopo into a sort of Brooklyn pirate works extremely well (Guizmán gets some of the best lines, but also gets to show a touching loyalty and concern for Dantès). On top of which, the pushing to the fore of the swashbuckling sword-fighting excitement sets us up for a cracking final sword fight between our two friends-turned-enemies. 

Reynolds also shoots the film extremely well with a host of interesting angles and framing devices showing how Dantès position and confidence change throughout the story. The film’s climactic sword fight is brilliantly staged and the film charges forward with a real momentum (there are of course no sword fights in the book!). 

Particularly well handled through is the sequence that is (in many ways) most faithful to the original book – Dantès’ time in the Chateau d’If. What I love in this sequence is that it’s a perfect combination of stuff from the book, Karate Kid style training, and some good old-fashioned warm character building. It’s also got two terrific performances from Michael Wincott as an almost comically dry sadistic guard and Richard Harris as the imprisoned Abbè Faria, the quintessential wise-old-mentor (the relationship between Faria and Dantès is beautifully judged).

The film perfectly balances its sense of fun and adventure with a very real-feeling story of a man who has to learn there is more to life than revenge. The plot that Dantès puts together probably isn’t the most complex piece of chicanery you are ever going to see, but it doesn’t really matter because the focus is the fun of the journey, and the thrill of someone being a few steps ahead of everyone else. 

Jim Caviezel is very good as Dantès, just the right blend of forthright moral strength and simmering resentment (few actors do stoic suffering better than Cavizel). There is a really nice questioning throughout the film of Dantès’ motives and whether revenge is really worth the candle, which adds a lovely depth to Cavizel’s performance.

But the film probably gets waltzed off by Guy Peace (who turned down the role of Dantès because he thought Mondego was more fun) who gets to campily simmer, sulk and fume at the edge of every scene. Mondego is brilliantly reinvented as a fearsomely proud, selfish, hedonistic aristocrat with a major inferiority complex, who takes everything from Dantès and still isn’t happy at the end of it. But Pearce has a whale of a time with his cruelty and resentment, and it’s a great reminder of how much he is (as an actor) in love with make-up, Mondego being scruffy, slightly pock-marked and increasingly bad of tooth.

He’s a villain you can scowl at and he’s a perfect counter-point for a hero whose emotional distance is designed to make him at times a difficult man to invest in. The film’s expansion of their personal relationship in its early section works really well, setting up the innate inequalities between them (wealth on one side, bravery and decency on the other) during the film’s cheeky and amusing opening sequence on Elba with Napoleon.

The Count of Monte Cristo is an extremely well structured, hugely entertaining adventure film. It’s very much like a 1930s swashbuckler, and every scene has some delightful moment that you’ll love. There are some very good performances in here as well, working with a very good conversion of this doorstop of a book into a film. Skilfully directed, interestingly shot, well acted – it’s a gem that’s far too overlooked.

Loving Vincent (2017)

Douglas Booth becomes a painting in the unique Loving Vincent

Director: Doreta Kobiela, Hugh Welchman

Cast: Douglas Booth (Armand Roulin), Jerome Flynn (Paul Gachet), Saoirse Ronan (Marguerite Gachet), Helen McCrory (Louise Chevalier), Chris O’Dowd (Joseph Roulin), John Sessions (Père Tanguy), Eleanor Tomlinson (Adeline Ravoux), Aidan Turner (Boatman), Robert Gulaczyk (Vincent van Gogh)

Now this is something very different. It’s a common turn of phrase to praise a well-photographed film by saying every frame looks like a painting. Well Loving Vincent is a film where every single frame is literally a painting. A beautifully painted pastiche collection of van Goghs, painted over a combination of motion capture and photographs of real locations. And, as you would expect, it is beautiful. 

The film covers events year after the suicide of Vincent van Gogh (Robert Gulaczyk). Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth) tries to deliver van Gogh’s last letter to his brother Theo. Roulin’s father Joseph (Chris O’Dowd) is also concerned that there is more to the death than meets the eye, as van Gogh had written to him that all was well in his life. Roulin travels first to Paris and then to Auvers-sur-Oise, where van Gogh spent his final days, talking to those who knew him, including his landlady Adeline Ravoux (Eleanor Tomlinson), his art supplier Père Tanguy (John Sessions), the daughter of his doctor Marguerite (Saoirse Ronan) and finally Dr Gachet (Jerome Flynn) himself. 

Loving Vincent looks simply beautiful. Its quality is astonishing. The film was shot on green screen with actors. Van Gogh’s paintings were then overlaid as backgrounds for the action. The film was carefully edited, then every frame in the final film was turned into a single hand painting – with real paint. 65,000 hand-painted frames. It’s astonishing – you’ve never seen anything like this before. The style, the homages to van Gogh, the respect and craft behind reproducing his distinctive look – it’s marvellous. Every single image in the film demands you linger upon it and soak it in.

I simply haven’t ever seen a film like this before. I can’t imagine any film like this being made again (for starters it took years to make). It demands to be seen if you have any interest in art or any interest in cinema as a visual artform. It’s so impressively done, you start falling in love with its artistry. It’s also got a poetic visual beauty to it. The flashbacks showing van Gogh’s last few days are put together with a black-and-white pencil-drawn style, which contrasts beautifully with the primary colours of the present day. The film walks a brilliant tightrope line between “real” and dreamlike wonder – final shots of van Gogh or sequences of Roulin dreaming feel like real visual expressions of inner thoughts in their greater expressionist vibrancy.

If there is a weakness to the film, it is that (whisper it) there isn’t much actually to it once you look past the visuals. It’s truly unique in look and feel but the story it delivers is fairly traditional and even (at times) a little flat. Despite being soaked in van Gogh I’m not sure you learn too much about him or his art from the film, and the film shies away from its more interesting topics. The dialogue or plotting rarely ventures above the average.

Perhaps one of the most interesting themes of the film is the struggle of the characters to understand and appreciate the difficulties of depression: that suffers can be optimistic one minute, and consumed with world-ending self-loathing the next. It would have been more interesting if the film had engaged more with this theme, rather than trying to build a rather flat murder mystery around van Gogh’s death. It also would have felt more true to the actual struggles of the artist – crikey, this material was spun out into an excellent Doctor Who episode, which feels like it managed to get more understanding of van Gogh than this film manages.

The acting however is pretty good – Douglas Booth anchors the film every well as the nominal detective figure, struggling with his own guilt over abandoning van Gogh. Saoirse Ronan is very good as a sad love opportunity lost for van Gogh, Eleanor Tomlinson radiant as his friendly hostess, Jerome Flynn tragically guilt-ridden and envious as Dr Gachet. It may not be a film that really gives actors the opportunity to let rip, but it’s still good.

The main question over Loving Vincent is whether there is enough to it to make it more than an art experiment, or a curiosity. Plot and storyline wise it’s a very traditional, rather straightforward film, but it carries a germ of depth in there. And then the film looks so uniquely marvellous that you can’t deny it a certain place in film history. Because you won’t see anything like this again, and if you have any love for the artist or art in general, you have to check it out. Every frame is literally a painting.

The Long Good Friday (1980)

Bob Hoskins rules London – but for how long? – in classic Brit gangster masterpiece The Long Good Friday

Director: John Mackenzie

Cast: Bob Hoskins (Harold Shand), Helen Mirren (Victoria), Derek Thompson (Jeff), Bryan Marshall (Harris), PH Moriarty (Razors), Dave King (Parky), Eddie Constantine (Charlie), Paul Freeman (Colin), Stephen Davies (Tony), Paul Barber (Errol), Pierce Brosnan (Irishman)

The Long Good Friday nearly turned into a one-hour TV special starring a dubbed Bob Hoskins. The fact that it didn’t – and that today it can stand as one of the greatest British films ever made – is thanks to George Harrison’s Handmade Films, which bought the rights and saved the film. Thank God they did, as this is brilliant: thrilling, dangerous, intense but witty, strangely tender, satirical and smart. Fantastically made and wonderfully acted, it’s not just a great gangster film, it’s a great film.

Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) is the undisputed gangland boss of London, desperate to turn legitimate. He has a plan for development of London’s dockside into a paradise of office blocks and apartments. All he needs is a big investor to support his “corporation” to make the final push. On an Easter weekend he prepares to greet an American investor from a similar “company” to his own. But as Shand prepares for this life-changing weekend, his business is hit by a wave of killings and bombings that seem targeted at shattering his organisation. What’s behind this? Who is “having a go”? And how does this link with a mysterious money shipment we witnessed at the start of the film? Shand’s going to find out – and has to do so without his investors getting cold feet.

The Long Good Friday is a well-written, brilliantly structured mystery mixed with some brutal gangland violence. Mackenzie’s film is lean and mean but laced with dry, biting humour. Everything in the film works perfectly, and it really understands the veneer of culture, class and decency that gangsters like Shand like to put over their crime dealings.

Not that Shand isn’t a decent bloke of course. Bob Hoskins is simply superb as Shand, a likeable, strangely decent guy at first, who seems to somehow shrink and twist as the film progresses and he is less and less able to control the anger he keeps bottled up. Shand clearly cares deeply for those around him, but he’s also clearly stubborn and convinced of his own superiority. Hoskins brings the part a humane gravitas, a force of nature fury that burns through the film. And when confronted with opponents he can’t understand, he still tries to use the rules of gangland to take them on.

Of course these rules are completely unsuited for his IRA opponents. Despite the advice of his pet policeman Parky, Shand is confident that he can deal with these bomb-toting fanatics. Even worse, he thinks that they are basically playing by the same rules that powered his own rise to the top of the gangster tree. Part of the tragedy of the part is seeing someone who essentially appears relatively likeable at the start of the film fall back on the violence and rage that powered his assent to the very top. Needless to say the IRA aren’t intimidated by cockney thugs, and have no intention of letting Shand get away with his attempts to strike back. 

Here is a film brave enough to not only show the IRA at its centre, but to make them as effective and ruthless as this. Not even our geezer gangsters can take them on, and the poor plods seem petrified as soon as they rear their head. Could there be a more cutting criticism of Britain’s policy in Ireland? Terrorism has hardly gone away since – you imagine Shand being equally outmatched by Al-Qaida.

As well as a gripping gangster film, The Long Good Friday is a prescient and intelligent criticism of Thatcherism. Shand is actually pretty much spot-on with his vision of London being redeveloped into a political and economic power-house, one of the major cities of Europe. Many of the locations the film uses would be unrecognisible today, as they are all sites of offices and apartments. Shand has a 1980s swagger to him, a barrow-boy made good who likes to think of himself as a visionary businessman. He’s desperate to grab for himself a bit of the new money he senses could be washing around Thatcher’s Britain. So the film makes a nice satire of the “loadsamoney” generation, as well as of the gangster world of the East End. Shand’s yacht and flat are the quintessential yuppie pads, and Shand’s motivation is raking the cash in.

British hubris actually seems to lie at the heart of the whole film. Shand’s swagger and super-confident, “Britain reborn” attitudes are all based in his firm belief that Britain has its own special destiny. Of course, as events begin to hit home, this sense of British pride (represented by Shand’s determination to reshape London into a city of glass and office complexes) begins to shrivel under the weight of events. Shand is reduced to angrily denouncing everyone from the Irish to his potential American partners to the other nations of Europe.

(In fact it’s interesting watching the film in the light of Brexit – Shand would on the surface seem to be the poster boy for a certain type of UKIPer, but he’s actually passionately excited about the opportunities the Union presents, and the centrality of London to that world. He’d almost certainly loath Farage.)

All this thematic content – and this is a hugely British film, instantly recognisable to anyone who has grown up here – gets swept up in this brilliant gangster flick. The acting is sublime. Helen Mirren is a stand-out as a woman who is a very equal partner in Shand’s business empire, just as smart and just as ruthless. Derek Thompson (him off Casualty!) is good as a slightly sleazy major-domo, as is PH Moriarty as a gangland heavy (he certainly looks the part!). Future stars like Kevin McNally, Paul Freeman, Dexter Fletcher (as a kid) and most notably Pierce Brosnan (in his first acting job as a handsome IRA hitman) fill out the cast.

Brilliantly acted, tightly directed and full of great cultural and political depth, with terrific pace, scintillating action, engrossing tension, a deceptively simple story and a great script: The Long Good Friday surely stands as a landmark British film. And it has one of the finest final sequences you’ll see, which considering it revolves solely around Hoskins sitting in a car is saying something.