Dunkirk (2017)

Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard and Fionn Whitehead are three ordinary soldiers trying to get home in Christopher Nolan’s epic Dunkirk

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Fionn Whitehead (Tommy), Tom Glynn-Carney (Peter Dawson), Jack Lowden (Collins), Harry Styles (Alex), Aneurin Barnard (Gibson), James D’Arcy (Colonel Winnant), Barry Keoghan (George Mills), Kenneth Branagh (Commander Bolton), Cillian Murphy (Shivering Soldier), Mark Rylance (Mr Dawson), Tom Hardy (Farrier)

“We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance, which should be noted.” – Winston Churchill

The evacuation of Dunkirk is a very British triumph. Beaten and encircled by the Germans, British forces were stranded in a small pocket around Dunkirk. The country looked certain to lose almost 400,000 men to death or imprisonment – the core of its professional army. The fact that almost 340,000 soldiers were evacuated was more than a triumph: it was almost a miracle. Christopher Nolan’s epic new film brings the triumph and adversity of this campaign to the big screen.

The action unfolds over a week around the evacuation of Dunkirk. On the beach Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), Gibson (Aneurin Barnard) and Alex (Harry Styles) are desperate to escape the chaos on the beach, where the evacuation is being managed from the one standing pier by Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh). On the sea, Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance) and his son Tom (Peter Dawson) head to Dunkirk in their small pleasure boat to help with the evacuation, picking up a traumatised soldier on the way (Cillian Murphy). In the air, Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden) fly a one-hour mission over Dunkirk to provide air support to the stranded soldiers.

As a director, Nolan’s calling cards are playing with narrative forms and timelines, while allowing personal stories play out on extremely grand canvases. Dunkirk feels like a summation of some kind of his career: its multi-layered timelines are gracefully and intelligently threaded together, and while the canvas is enormous, the human stories don’t get lost. The human interest running through the film is particularly impressive, as there is so little dialogue. It’s pretty close to “experience cinema” – it throws the audience into an immersive explosion of events, giving as much of an impression as it’s possible to give of the claustrophobia, tension and terror of being trapped on that beach.

The film-making is impeccable in creating this overbearing feeling. Hans Zimmer’s score thunders over the film, bearing down with a constant pressure and making excellent use of metronome ticking to keep hammering home the time pressure. Nolan brilliantly inverts scale in his filming to create a sense of claustrophobia – we constantly see sweeping shots of but the scale of our surroundings only forces home the seeming impossibility of what the British are trying to do. Individual soldiers seem tiny – how can one man possibly have a chance of escaping? It’s a brilliant mixture of sound and imagery to make the large seem small, the epic seem entrapping.

What Nolan does really well in this grand scale is to create a series of “ordinary soldier” characters. Despite the fact that we learn virtually nothing about them, these characters feel human and desperate. Again, they are such small, ordinary Everyman cogs in the giant machine of the army, that they become hugely relatable. It’s a hugely neat trick by Nolan, another brilliant inversion – just as he turns epic to claustrophobic, he turns ciphers into characters.

Recognising the need for balance between the overbearing impact of the Dunkirk beach sequences, the film allows a mix of story-telling and character types in its other two plotlines. So Mark Rylance’s boat captain voices much of the film’s humanitarianism, in a sequence that plays like a chamber piece – four people discussing duty and the impact of war in a confined space. Meanwhile Tom Hardy’s Spitfire pilot carries more of the traditional “war film” man-on-a-mission dynamics, engaging in a series of dog fights in the sky. Interweaving these stories offers not only relief to the audience, but also narrative contrast.

The interwoven storylines are also brilliantly done since they all take place in very different timespans. The plot at “the Mole” takes place over a week, “the sea” in one day, and “the sky” in one hour. Each of these timelines interlocks and unfolds in the film simultaneously, and characters move at points from one timeline to another.

Okay, writing it down, it sounds impossibly confusing and difficult to follow right? Who could keep track of all that? But the film is so brilliantly assembled that it always make perfect sense. Nolan uses several key markers – a boat, the fate of certain characters – to constantly allow us to see where we are in the story’s timeline. So we understand when we have moved from one timeline to another when we see a ship still on the beach that we’ve seen sinking elsewhere. This also increases the tension – we know at points what will happen before the characters do, because we’ve already seen the after-effects. Again, put it into words it sounds wanky and difficult to follow, but it really isn’t – and the film is put together with such confidence that it never feels the need to show off its narrative gymnastics. Nolan is confident enough to be clever without drawing our attention to it – a very difficult trick to pull off.

All this forceful story telling never prevents the story from also being at many points immensely moving and stirring. The arrival of the boats at Dunkirk is a genuine “lump in the throat” moment. The simple decency of Rylance’s boat captain gives a low-key impression of a very British sort of heroism, of quietly doing one’s duty while valuing every life and wearing your own grief lightly.

The film’s more action-based sequences are equally stirring and moving, because Nolan brilliantly establishes character with only a few brief notes. It’s made clear early on that Hardy’s pilot has only a limited fuel supply: every second he stays above Dunkirk protecting the men and ships below, he reduces his chances of getting home. It’s another sort of heroic self-sacrifice, and in a film that generally doesn’t shy away from showing the deadly consequences of war, Nolan is happy to give us some more traditional, fist-pumping heroics.

Nolan gets the maximum emotion from the more dialogue-heavy parts by hiring some terrific actors: Rylance, as mentioned is superb, and Cillian Murphy is very good as a shell shocked captain. Kenneth Branagh is perfect for conveying the weight of responsibility on the shoulders of the naval commander in charge of the evacuation. And elsewhere, Whitehead, Bernard and Styles all invest their ordinary Tommies with a great deal of emotion and empathy.

Dunkirk is a marvel of cinematic technique and accomplishment, which brings enough moral and emotional force to the drama to keep you engaged in the plights of its characters. You can marvel at the film making tour-de-force of its executions, but you never feel disengaged from it. It’s a marvellous film.

The Circle (2017)

Emma Watson struggles against the surveillance state in shockingly bad adaptation The Circle

Director: James Ponsoldt

Cast: Mae Holland (Emma Watson), Tom Hanks (Eamon Bailey), John Boyega (Ty Lafitte/Kalden), Karen Gillan (Annie Allerton), Ellar Coltrane (Mercer), Patton Oswalt (Tom Stenton), Bill Paxton (Vinnie Holland), Glenne Headly (Bonnie Holland)

Is there anything sadder than seeing a book you thought was fantastic get totally screwed up by film producers? Worst of all, Dave Eggers, the book’s author, even gets a screenwriting credit here. I hope to God his contribution was a rejected earlier draft, rather than the bland, aimless drivel on display here. It would be too depressing to think he gutted his own work and then mutilated its corpse.

Mae (Emma Watson) is thrilled to land a job at The Circle, an all-powerful, Google-style corporation with a virtual monopoly over the internet. However, she discovers while she works at the Circle that there are (of course!) dark secrets at the heart of the company, and that its charismatic CEO Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks) may not be all that he seems.

Imagine an adaptation of 1984 at the end of which Winston Smith defeats Big Brother but decides there are positive sides to living under a dictatorship, so carries on doing so. That’s exactly as ballsed-up as this total misreading of Egger’s gripping critique of our internet age. In this terrible adaptation, the novel is neutered beyond recognition into just another bland “Big Corporations Acting All Corporation-y” nonsense. The film is pretty much exactly as awful as the book is brilliant.

Where did it all go so completely and utterly wrong? Did they not understand the book? The novel is not only a critique of the pervasive power of its shady Google-like organisation. It’s also a savage attack on our own tweeting, social media obsessed world – the sort of world where private actions are theft as they rob everyone else from experiencing them vicariously through tweets, photos and posts. It’s this part of the story the film completely (and almost wilfully) misses the point of.

They seem terrified at the thought that the social media Twitteratti might take against the film if it too openly attacks the actual users of systems like this, with their (at times) shallow, demanding and entitled pushing of their own opinions, and intrusions into others’ lives. Instead the film gives a complete pass to all the users of the systems, while attacking the corporation providing them. So we get the bizarre set up of a film that seems to say it’s totally fine for normal people to record everything and push it all onto the internet, turning their world into a judgemental surveillance state, but it’s evil for a corporation to create the devices they use to do it.

Even the film’s criticism of corporations isn’t very clear, largely because we never get a sense of the Circle’s power and its hunger for getting more and more control. The film throws away its involvement in politics and its control over everyday lives. Perhaps because it knows so many of the viewership love gadgets, there is no exploration of the creepy, controlling aspect of the many tracking and recording devices the Circlers wear throughout the film, as there is in the novel. Instead the target is the shady business people at the top (not that we learn anything about what they want) because everyone hates businessmen don’t they? Nice easy target. I can tweet my loathing of them very easily.

It’s a film devoid of any challenge. A character’s suicide from the book is changed to an accidental death. The more vulnerable and desperate of the characters from the book have been deleted. The obsessive self-definition the Circlers gain from what other people tweet about them is downplayed. The ending of the film completely inverts the novel, and leaves us with a bizarre final image of our hero kayaking on the lake, but warmly smiling at the drones watching her, even after she has destroyed the “villains” who run them. It makes no sense whatsoever. My jaw literally dropped when this happened by the way.

Mae is a character who now has no consistency. Her growing obsession with the power of social media – and the destructive effect it has on her actual human relationships – is completely ignored. It’s the key part of her character from the book, and its removed here to try her as traditionally ‘likeable’ as possible. An anti-hero becomes a flat out hero. The film shows the impact of actions she carries out in the book – particularly on Annie – but removes these actions from the film. Why do people slip into depression or depart from the film? Who knows. Left with nothing to work with from the original book, Emma Watson gives a bland and forgettable performance. No one else really makes an impact, playing dull, neutered versions of the characters from the source material, devoid of depth or interest.

The Circle might be one of the worst literary adaptations I’ve ever seen. It guts the original book and removes any of the most challenging and interesting content. It’s terrified of criticising in any way anyone who might be watching. It’s a satire on the social media age that has no satire in it, and is desperate not to talk about social media. Worst of all it will discourage people from reading the original novel. In the words of the modern age: #uttershit.

The World is Not Enough (1999)

Pierce Brosnan falls into Sophie Marceau’s clutches. Time for one last screw.

Director: Michael Apted

Cast: Pierce Brosnan (James Bond), Sophie Marceau (Elektra King), Robert Carlyle (Renard), Denise Richards (Dr Christmas Jones), Robbie Coltrane (Valentin Zukovsky), Judi Dench (M), Michael Kitchen (Bill Tanner), Colin Salmon (Charles Robinson), Desmond Llewelyn (Q), John Cleese (R), Samantha Bond (Miss Moneypenny), Ulrich Thomsen (Sasha Davidov)

I’ve long been of the belief that Pierce Brosnan’s Bonds were each a decline from the last, no matter how much money and action were thrown at the screen. TWINE in no way shakes that opinion. It’s a film I remember when I saw it in the cinema twenty years ago being a little, well, disappointed by.

After the assassination of an oil tycoon in MI6 headquarters, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is assigned to protect his daughter Elektra (Sophie Marceau) as she vows to complete the pipeline her father started. MI6 believes her life is endangered by her former kidnapper Renard (Robert Carlyle). Heading to Eastern Europe, Bond soon finds himself in the middle of a complex game, with a mysterious string puller, that seems to revolve around the stealing of a nuclear warhead and the kidnap of M (Judi Dench), with only nuclear scientist Dr. Christmas Jones (Denise Richards) to help.

TWINE is all about its electrifying opening sequence. It’s possibly the biggest, most exciting introduction to a Bond movie yet. Not only does it have a truly compelling action sequence in the boat chase down the Thames, but there’s plenty of plot, tension, mystery, revelation and humour – Bond straightens his tie under water – to match the entire content of some Bond capers. Brosnan is deadly in the Bilbao sequence – you believe he’s a killer – he’s working out of the money trap is Bond at his most ingenious and the beautifully filmed and edited boat chase is an absolute wonder. It’s edge of the seat stuff and when it finishes, you can just imagine a cinema full of people letting out a sigh of relief and kicking back to enjoy the rest of the film.

In fact that’s part of the problem. As Anthony Lane said in his review of the film “It’s the best 15 minutes in film this year. Let’s pack up and go home”. The problem is literally nothing in the film that follows can even hope to live up to this – and by the end, it’s practically given up trying. How does a film that started so vibrantly end with such a hackneyed fight on a submarine, with our heroes squabbling over something so fiddily it looks like an ink cartridge?

In between the phenomenal start and the damp squib ending, the film pings off to a lot locations – Azerbaijan! Turkey! Bilbao! – but everywhere still has the same bland, identikit feel to it, for all the shots of the odd famous landmark. That’s not to mention the rather laborious plot that ties the film together. It’s a film that feels like it’s trying to make a series of big statements about our hidden selves, revenge, manipulation – but falls short each time. It’s wrapped inside the most elliptical villain scheme I can remember. I only watched it a few days ago and even I’m not sure why Elektra wanted to blow up that damn submarine in Turkey.

Bond and Renard face off in the underwhelming sub sequence

Increasingly it becomes bogged down in machinations that feel recycled from previous films in the series. Shady Russians, corrupt security guards, chases down the snowy mountains, fiddily endings in old style nuclear subs. The film’s second biggest set piece – the attack on a cavier factory – has a rather formulaic inevitability about it.

It has its moments of cool and charm, but in many ways it’s a blunt and crude film. What sort of eclectic film casting selects people as wildly diverse as Goldie and Ulrich Thomson as sidekicks? Robbie Coltrane returns as Zukovsky, but his character has been broadened from his first outing in GoldenEye into some sort of comic relief, a cane carrying buffoon a million miles from the ruthless ex-hitman in his first appearance. We even get a return of the “MI6 accidentally stumbles in on Bond doing the nasty” closing gag so beloved of the Roger Moore era. By the end of the film it really feels we’ve come a million miles from the ruthless efficiency and dynamic action it opened with.

The film’s most interesting beat, without a doubt, is Elektra King. It’s a stroke of inventiveness to turn the character established as the Bond girl, into the film’s villain. Elektra uses many of the tropes of traditional Bond girls – vulnerability, sensuality, playfulness, a certain gutsiness – and repackages them as villainous tools, weapons of manipulation and deceit. Sophie Marceau is very good as possibly the most intriguing villain of the whole series, and the film neatly leaves open the question of how far her experiences twisted her, or whether her sociopathy was a deep lying trait. Her chemistry with Brosnan seems at times a little forced, but she gets most of the meaty content of the story and handles it with gusto. It’s especially neat to see how Marceau adjusts and adapts her performance for each person she encounters – with Reynard she’s playful and infatuated, with Bond she’s more aloofly sensual.

Denise Richards gets all nuclear physicist

She certainly fares better than poor Denise Richards, playing a character who feels like she was written backwards from the film’s closing punchline (“I thought Christmas only comes once a year” indeed). As if the producers wanted to counterbalance the innovativeness of Elektra, Richards feels like she’s wandered in from a classic Moore film: nominally an expert in something grand sounding (nuclear physics – and you can have a £1 from me if you ever meet anyone who believes Denise Richards has a PhD in rocket science) but really a damsel in distress dressed in hot pants. I’d further add that Brosnan already looks far too old for her.

The film’s best asset though is Brosnan’s Bond. The more I rewatch Brosnan’s efforts, the more I feel sorry the guy didn’t get more of the sort of material Dalton and Craig received either side of him. He clearly has the acting chops to do something a bit more interesting with the character, but his Bond is always a bit tonally confused – one moment he will stare viciously at a fallen opponent, the next he’ll be wearing a shit-eating grin and perving over ladies’ underwear in a nightclub. Brosnan does both these things, I hasten to add, extremely well: this film is probably his peak action performance, and at several points (not least his first encounter with Reynard) his sense of physical danger is jaw dropping. TWINE is a kind of perfect embodiment of his era: 1/3^rd Connery to 2/3^rd Moore.

For all that the big picture of the film gets away from Apted, he does have a good eye for smaller moments that stick with you – the tie moment, Brosnan’s look into the camera after his first kill. Moments like this appear throughout the film: a cut back to Zukovsky’s grin when Bond’s car is destroyed, the pinpoint bullet shot that hits a plate of glass right in front of an unblinking Reynard. Moments like this get increasingly lost as the film pushes on and becomes more and more formulaic and traditional, but they are still there.

That’s what it all comes back to: the film is not the sum of its parts. Moments stand out, but the whole thing really doesn’t. Everything feels a little too pre-packaged. Even an actor as brilliant as Robert Carlyle (the sort of actor everyone said should play a Bond villain) is lost in the mix, his performance as forgettable as a million other “ruthless anarchist” types we’ve seen before. There are some neat homages – I like the painting of Bernard Lee in MI6 HQ – but too much of it feels like more of the same, told with a professionalism that crushes the life out of individualism. So while it has moments that excite and entertain, as well as elements (such as Elektra King) that feel unique and original, too much of it also feels like, well, any other Bond film. For all its energy, it feels like watching a world-class athlete run on the spot.

FINAL COMMENT:This film does get some credit however for how tastefully it handles the final scenes of Desmond Llewelyn as Q. Tragically Llewelyn died in a car crash shortly before the film was released, but his work here is possibly some of the best he contributed to the series. Never let them see you bleed and always have an escape route.

Lost Highway (1997)

Bill Pullman goes out of his mind in David Lynch’s deliberately weird Lost Highway

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Bill Pullman (Fred Madison), Patricia Arquette (Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield), Balthazar Getty (Pete Dayton), Robert Loggia (Mr Eddy/Dick Laurent), Robert Blake (The Mystery Man), Gary Busey (Bill Dayton), Lucy Butler (Candace Dayton), Michael Massee (Andy), Richard Pryor (Arnie)

It wouldn’t be a David Lynch film unless the plot was impossible to explain, but here goes. Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) marriage is on the rocks. The couple start receiving packages containing camcorder videos of their home. These videos become increasingly more and more personal and intimate. The final video shows Fred murdering Renee. Imprisoned, Fred suffers from headaches and then overnight he transforms into another person, Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). Released back into the world, Dayton encounters the glamorous Alice Wakefield (Arquette again). Then things get even weirder. Yup that’s right: weirder.

Lost Highway is probably Lynch at his most obscure and baffling. Like a lot of Lynch films, it’s a question of taste. What do you want to get out of a film? If it’s a puzzling mystery then this might be the film for you. Lost Highway is like an impossible jigsaw, or a landscape with no frame of reference: trying to judge what the overall actual picture is, is nearly impossible. Traditional film making elements, such as story and character, are subservient here.

So whether you like Lost Highway will probably come down to how much you are willing to accept everything you see is constantly being dismantled and repositioned by the film. It strikes a less successful balance between this “Lynchian” material and more traditional storytelling than Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive (both, I would argue, superior films). However, for those willing to run with a mystery, Lost Highway is a baffling but intriguing watch – unsettling, unnerving, but fascinating.

So what is it about? Now I confess I needed to read up a little bit, but the best way to understand the film is as some sort of elliptical, dreamlike fantasy created by its lead character. It seems pretty clear that the majority of the film is, at best, subjective recollection or out-and-out fantasy. A little too much attention is paid in the film to a line from Fred Madison that he dislikes video cameras as he prefers to “remember things my own way rather than how they happened”. A fairly on-the-nose statement, but a clear mission statement for a film if I ever I saw one.

In fact, Fred Madison is so keen to remember the world only as he sees it that, he literally becomes someone else to build some sort of internal fantasy world where he can win the girl. But Fred/Pete is such a screwed up, confused person he can’t even get his own fantasy world right –impressions from the real world keep draining in. At least, that’s a fair interpretation. The film of course deliberately keeps things open: is this some fantasy Fred has while trapped in his cell? Or is there some sort of metaphysical transformation that fades into the real world? Is there an element of this story being circular and self-perpetuating? Is there any reality to it at all? How much you engage with these questions is a pretty good indication of what you’ll make of this film.

Whatever your response to it, as a piece of film-making it’s a very impressive piece of work. All the usual Lynchian touches are here: the strident and discordant lighting at key moments, the intelligent and daring use of music, the intermingling of design from the modern world and Americana of the 1950s, not to mention the moments of extreme violence and graphic sex. Lynch uses unsettling camera angles and sudden tilts of angle and sound to constantly keep the audience on their toes and questioning what they are seeing. Disturbing and haunting imagery, a testament to Lynch’s painter’s eye, is perfectly judged. Confusing as this film is, it offers a parade of intriguing images.

It’s an important landmark in Lynch’s filmography: a flowering of ideas he had been dabbling with since Twin Peaks, of mysticism, perversion and human darkness, and a jumping off point for haunting, almost illogical films to come like Mulholland Drive. The Mystery Man (unsettlingly played by Robert Blake – not least as this is the last film Blake made before his conviction for murdering his own wife) is a haunting, perfect Lynchian character – unsettling in appearance and confusing in intention. Is he a real person, or a mystical force? Is he some sort of external expression of evil driving Fred on, or is he part of Fred’s fractured mind?

Patricia Arquette plays two very different femme fatales, but to what extent are they reimaginings or reversionings of each other? It’s a very good performance from Arquette, playing someone who is not quite a real person, nor quite a fantasy, who feels like a character from a film moving into a real world, which itself is probably a fantasy. Just writing this sentence shows what a crazy film this is.

For the rest of the performances, there is a good mix of the genuine and the artificial. Bill Pullman, at his most understated, is perfect to ground the film, while Balthazar Getty gives a fine, detailed performance as a character who is similar and slightly different to Fred. Robert Loggia mixes ferocity and a bizarre tenderness as a character who may or not be a foul-mouthed gangster. These performances add a level of heart to the film, allowing a bit for freedom for the strangeness.

Lynch’s Lost Highway isn’t a masterpiece – it’s perhaps too self-consciously oddball and unusual, too reliant on mood and atmosphere to make up for its lack of story and characterisation. It is however intriguing, a brilliant puzzle, even though it doesn’t really allow you to invest emotionally in it at all. You can admire it as a mystery, but you can never really open your heart to it. It’s a film that is daring and dangerous, but it’s also one that, for all its erotic sex and tortured psyches, never really feels like it’s about real people with real feelings. It’s a mixture that, as I’ve said, works better in Mulholland Drive. But this is a very good staging post to that film.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

Kenneth Branagh struggles to bring Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to life

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Cast: Robert De Niro (The Creature), Kenneth Branagh (Victor Frankenstein), Tom Hulce (Henry Clerval), Helena Bonham Carter (Elizabeth), Ian Holm (Baron Frankenstein), John Cleese (Professor Waldman), Aidan Quinn (Captain Robert Walton), Richard Briers (Grandfather), Robert Hardy (Professor Krempe), Trevyn McDowell (Justine Moritz), Celia Imrie (Mrs Mortiz), Cherie Lunghi (Caroline Frankenstein)

In 1994 Kenneth Branagh was the heir of Laurence Olivier: a man who could act, direct and produce, who never had a false step, whose every film was a success. In other words he was ripe for a kicking, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was the stick used to beat him. It was practically the founding text of “Branagh-bashing”, for a time one of the favourite sports of the British press.

Victor Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh) grows up obsessed with defeating death, traumatised by the death of his mother. Training as a doctor in Vienna, after the murder of his mentor Professor Waldmann (an effectively serious John Cleese), he uses the body of the murderer to create the Creature (Robert De Niro) – but, horrified by what he has created, he flees home to Geneva. While the Creature comes to terms with being an outcast, Victor marries his sweetheart Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) – only for her to become a target when the Creature vows revenge.

Okay the good stuff about this film: the production design is terrific, the Frankenstein house in particular a marvellous set. It’s also a very faithful adaptation, pretty much following the book (apart from a late, horribly melodramatic “Bride of Frankenstein” sequence). Branagh gets some affecting moments out of the film, particularly in the calmer moments – De Niro gives an interesting performance and the retention of the Walton framing device in the Arctic is well done. There is a good film in here. But it’s buried completely under the overblown shouting, swooping cameras and booming music that covers the rest of the film.

Contrary to his reputation as a purveyor of intricate Shakespeare adaptations, Branagh has always been a lover of big movies, who brings an operatic intensity to cinema. The problem is he goes too far here. This is at times so ridiculously overblown and frenetic in its tempo, you start to think Branagh is trying too hard, desperate to make a big budget smash. Wanting to make a big, gory, gothic horror film, he dials everything up to eleven, and the sturm und drang eventually becomes a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Interestingly, this intensity is particularly overbearing in the Frankenstein scenes, rather than those focusing on the Creature. Several scenes are filmed with the camera swooping round in circles over long intense takes, while the score thunders away. This principally happens in scenes of high emotion – the deaths of Frankenstein’s mother and his mentor Waldmann are both operatically overblown (in the latter Branagh literally cranes up and screams “No!”). Eventually it all becomes too much. You are crying out for everyone to take a breath and just deliver a line calmly.

Now I can see what Branagh is doing here. He’s looking to emulate the high-Gothic semi-camp of 1930s horror films. That’s the charitable explanation for why he spends the entire Creature-birthing scene running round topless (he must have spent ages on that chest), with Patrick Doyle’s score booming away, while the camera swoops and sweeps around him. Branagh is partly channelling Colin Clive’s mad scientist from James Whale (he even bellows “Live!” in pure Clive style twice in the film), but by going for overwhelming bombast in his performance, he misses out on making the character relatable. Now Victor is a selfish asshole of course, but we should at least relate to him a little bit: I’m not sure many people can in this film.

It’s a real shame because there is in fact, under the frantic editing and dizzying camerawork, a quieter, more intelligent film trying to get out. Branagh’s Frankenstein is a man deep in trauma about death, unable to cope with losing people, whose fear becomes a dangerous obsession. The romance between Victor and Helena Bonham Carter’s sweetly innocent Elizabeth has a lot of warmth (the chemistry is also excellent: no surprise to hear that the actors started a long term relationship on the set of this film). There are moments here meditating on life and death, but they constantly get lost in the next ridiculous bloody action scene, or explosion of overblown acting.

Similarly, De Niro mines a lot of confused sympathy from the Creature – probably because he seems the quieter and more “normal” person, for all his scars and acts of murder. The sequence with the Creature looking after the family of a blind man (a decent Richard Briers) sees De Niro mine a great deal of vulnerability and innocence from his situation. The contained camera work and restrained acting make these the finest scenes in the film, more memorable than any of the blood and guts that fill the final half hour.

De Niro and Briers: Your only chance to see Travis Bickle and Tom Good share a scene

And those blood and guts are a problem, because this is not a scary film. Not even one little bit. Instead it’s either ridiculous or juvenile – in a sequence where a character literally has their heart ripped out by the Creature, Branagh can’t resist not only having the Creature holding it up to the camera, but for the camera to jump to a close up of the heart literally beating in its hand. Not scary, not gross, just stupid and childish. At any points of tension we get the pounding music and running around and shouting like a Gothic Doctor Who. If only Branagh had taken a breath and treated the material more calmly and sensibly we could have ended up with something creepy and spooky, rather than garish.

It’s a real, real shame because honestly there are some good things in this movie. I’ve mentioned De Niro, but Tom Hulce is also terrific as Clerval and Bonham Carter very good as Elizabeth. There are moments of real class in the design and production – I’ve lambasted Patrick Doyle’s score a bit, but there are some very good tracks in here. The problem, much as it massively pains me to say it because I love him, is Branagh. His performance and direction is just too much: too giddy, too overblown, too frantic, too overwhelming. The film comes across less as a tribute to old style melodramatic horror movies, more a very intelligent gifted man talking down at fans of the genre, giving them what it appears the genre is about on the surface, rather than the depths that actually appeal to people. Despite its merits, the film is not alive, but dead inside.

Stardust (2007)

Claire Danes plays a star and Charlie Cox a village boy in charming adventure fairy-tale Stardust

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Cast: Claire Danes (Yvaine), Charlie Cox (Tristan), Michelle Pfeiffer (Lamia), Mark Strong (Prince Septimus), Robert De Niro (Captain Shakespeare), Sienna Miller (Victoria Forester), Jason Flemyng (Prince Primus), Rupert Everett (Prince Secundus), Kate Magowan (Una), Ricky Gervais (Ferdy), Peter O’Toole (King of Stormhold), Joanna Scanlan (Mormo), Sarah Alexander (Empusa), Nathaniel Parker (Dunstan Thorn), Henry Cavill (Humphrey), Dexter Fletcher (Skinny Pirate), Ian McKellen (Narrator)

Stardust is loosely adapted from Neil Gaiman’s novel of the same name, an adult fairy tale refashioned into a crowd pleasing family film: a warm and genuine adventure story, stuffed with romance, excitement and drama.

Tristan (Charlie Cox) is a dreamy young man in the village of Wall, which neighbours the mystical and forbidden world of Stormhold. In love with the selfish Victoria (Sienna Miller), Tristan vows to travel to Stormhold and bring her back a fallen star. However, the star has landed in the form of a beautiful young woman, Yvaine (Claire Danes), and the two of them find themselves on a difficult journey to return to Wall. Along the way they must dodge the witch Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer) who wishes to sacrifice Yvaine to regain her beauty, and the surviving sons of the late king of Stormhold, particularly the ruthless Septimus (Mark Strong), who need Yvaine’s necklace to claim the throne.

What works about Stardust is that it has an air of whimsy about it, without ever feeling whimsical or corny. It’s a grown-up fairy tale, in the sense that it has some black humour and acknowledgement of sex, but really it’s more of a charming adventure story in a fantasy setting, which manages to keep its tongue in its cheek and not take itself too seriously. Matthew Vaughn’s direction has a very light touch and never allows this soufflé of a film to either puff itself up too much, or to deflate. Instead it rolls along with a giddy charm, with a delightful odd-couple love story at the centre. It’s a film that totally gets its tone spot-on, helped by confident direction and a wonderful score.

Charlie Cox plays romantic lead Tristan with a great deal of charm and really captures the romance at his centre. He also manages that extremely difficult task of being likeable – you can’t help but warm to him despite the fact that his self-awareness is completely off for a large chunk of the film. Claire Danes is equally good as the prickly Yvaine, hiding a great capacity for emotion and longing under a defensive exterior. Their romance is of course highly traditional – they bicker because they love each other! – but both actors carry it off with a great deal of style. You can’t help but want them to get over their problems and get together.

The romantic plotline is also never overwhelmed by the faintly Pythonesque comedy that surrounds it, particularly from the ghostly chorus of deceased Princes of Stormhold. Vaughn produces a great cast of comic actors for this group, while entrusting Mark Strong with the lion’s share of the screentime as the dashing decoy antagonist. In fact, the construction of the film’s narrative is rather neatly done, as this plotline of the inheritance of Stormhold is largely kept separate narratively from the romantic Tristan/Yvaine storyline, with the intersections only occurring at key points.

The real antagonist of the film however is Michelle Pfeiffer’s witch Lamia, Pfeiffer offering a neat portrait of vanity intermixed with cruelty. It’s a very decent inversion of a “movie star” glamour performance, and Pfeiffer’s heartless ruthlessness is a very nice contrast with Tristan’s altruistic openness. In fact Pfeiffer is very good in this film: she gets the balance so right that Lamia constantly keeps you on your toes as to how villainous or not she may be. I’m not quite sure that the film quite manages to completely bring the two characters plot lines together to provide a really effective narrative drive to the film, but she certainly works as an effective antagonist.

The film’s structure is a combination shaggy dog story and classic quest structure, which allows each sequence to take on its tone and structure, from thriller to comedy, depending on the characters involved. What threads this together is the growing (and very sweetly structured) love story between Tristan and Yvain which keeps the momentum up as the film moves from location to location, with cameo roles sprinkled throughout, without the film losing momentum (though it is probably 15 minutes too long). The film’s comfort with letting it sequences expand is clear with Robert De Niro’s Captain Shakespeare, a feared cloud pirate whose secret desires are not so secret as he might think. The film delights in essentially extended jokes like this – but it gets away with it because these jokes manage to be quite funny (De Niro in particular turns in a very good comic performance).

It’s a film that manages to remain distinctive and original, while appealing to a wide audience, which is quite some trick to pull off. It also manages to do this without losing its distinctive rhythm, which is both endearing and enjoyable. The “rules” of its world are clearly established, and while many of the actors are slightly tongue in cheek, they never laugh at their characters but only gently tip the wink at the audience. This freedom largely comes from the conviction and honesty Danes and Cox endow the central characters with, to ground the film. It alsohas a great sense of emotional intelligence to it, and brings a lot of depth to the characters. It also helps that it’s brilliantly designed, looks ravishing and is full of several delightful performances.

There’s lots of terrific stuff in this film, with a very sweet story at its centre. In fact this sweetness is probably the secret of its success: it never takes itself very seriously, it dances lightly from scene to scene and never allows itself to become too overblown. It’s got a terrific cast and is well directed, with a snappy bounce. At moments it does feel a little long, and some sequences overstay their welcome a bit too much – but the central characters are so winningly played that you don’t really mind. Sure this is not a masterpiece, but it has a sort of magic about it, the charm, excitement, adventure and romance, all mixed together with such confidence that it’s a pleasure to watch.

Pride and Prejudice (1940)

Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson in a just-plain-not-right version of Pride and Prejudice

Director: Robert Z Leonard

Cast: Greer Garson (Elizabeth Bennet), Laurence Olivier (Fitzwilliam Darcy), Mary Boland (Mrs Bennet), Edna May Oliver (Lady Catherine de Burgh), Maureen O’Sullivan (Jane Bennet), Ann Rutherford (Lydia Bennet), Frieda Inescot (Caroline Bingley), Edmund Gwenn (Mr Bennett), Karen Morley (Charlotte Lucas), Melville Cooper (Mr Collins), Edward Ashley Cooper (George Wickham), Bruce Lester (Mr Bingley)

There is an expectation that old-school adaptations of literary classics from the Golden Age of Hollywood somehow set the standards of adaptation, that all others will be judged against. That may well be the case with the 1939 Wuthering Heights, among others, but it really isn’t the case with Pride and Prejudice, which is essentially a bastardisation of Austen’s original, as if the book has been humped by Gone with the Wind and we are now watching its offspring.

Do I need to tell you the plot? Well I probably should tell you this movie’s version of it. The Bennet sisters are sassy young things always on the prowl for husbands. Lizzy Bennet (Greer Garson) flirts with the proud Mr Darcy (Laurence Olivier), while her sister Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan) wins the attentions of Mr Bingley (Bruce Lester). But how will pride and prejudice affect the course of true love? Find out in this Aldous Huxley (!) scripted version of Austen’s classic, adapted via a second-rate stage version.

What’s bizarre about this film is how wrong so much of it feels. Now I’m no Austen expert, but even I could see that all the costumes for this production are completely incorrect for the period. Turns out of course that the producers just had a lot of mid-19th century clothing and thought it looked better. Other things feel like low-brow farce: the Bennet sisters and their mother race Caroline Lucas and her mother in carriages in order to be the first to greet Mr Bingley. That’s right, it’s Pride and Prejudice with a horse-drawn drag-race. Who thought that was a good idea? But what can you expect of a film with the tag-line “When Pretty Girls T-E-A-S-E-D Men into Marriage!”? It even takes good lines from the novel and inexplicably rewrites them to make them worse – Darcy’s snobbish and personally hurtful dismissal of Lizzy at the Merryton assembly “I am in no humour to give consequence to young ladies slighted by other men” here becomes “I am in no humour to give consequence to the middle classes”. Why?

I ask you – do these costumes look right?

That’s before you get into the casting. While some of it is pretty good (Edmund Gwenn is very good as an ineffective Mr Bennet, while Mary Boland has a neat line in shrieking as Mrs Bennet) others are downright bad – Bruce Lester is stiff as Mr Bingley, Edward Ashley Cooper is forgettably dull as Wickham, and Melville Cooper hideously overplays as a Collins who seems to have stepped in from a Marx brothers film.

Other parts just feel a bit wrong. Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier as the leads are marvellous actors, but neither of them produces a version of these iconic characters that feels remotely true – or even recognisable. Garson not only looks too old, but she doesn’t have the sense of playful intelligence and spark that Lizzy Bennet needs: she’s more of a slightly aloof tease. Laurence Olivier is reasonably good as Darcy, but the character is re-invented as much softer and more playful from the start, and his willingness to be teased by Lizzy early in the film makes her rejection of him make very little sense.

Their relationship has a flirtatious element throughout, fitting the film’s reimagining of the novel as a sort of romantic comedy in period costume, with elements of Hollywood screwball – but bearing no resemblance at all to the actual relationship Lizzy and Darcy ought to have. At Bingley’s garden party they engage in a playful archery competition (he assumes she’s a novice, she of course is an expert marksman). In itself the scene is good fun, but Darcy’s polite apology and willingness to look a little foolish, means it doesn’t hold together when she condemns him for arrogance. In fact, you’d be pretty hard pressed to identify much pride or prejudice going on at all. The main obstacle to their relationship is shown as Wickham’s denunciation of Darcy – but since Lizzy hasn’t actually seen Darcy do anything particularly bad, it seems particularly forced.

Furthermore, the film makes Lizzy seem like a ditzy schoolgirl, since literally one scene later she has spun on a sixpence and is devoted to Darcy. This is also a flaw of the film’s telescoping of events – within five minutes it feels Wickham elopes with Lydia, then Wickham comes into money, then Darcy reveals his true character, then Wickham and Lydia return. The film rushes through these events, in order to fly towards its artificial happy ending (all the Bennet sisters are given appropriate suitors in a clumsy final shot) without any real sense of Austen, or any real eye for the sort of subtle social satire she had carefully worked into her novels.

The film’s individualist take on Pride and Prejudice does at least distinguish it from other productions I suppose, but it’s terrified of the depths to the story or its characters, and seems to do everything it can to neuter its “bad” characters – Caroline Bingley barely appears, and it’s hard to believe that any reader of the book could picture Lady Catherine as she’s reimagined here: a sort of playful wingman to Darcy’s courtship of Lizzy.

But then this never feels like Austen – it’s got more of an early Gone with the Wind vibe to it, but played as romantic comedy. Lizzy here is an aloof, determined, slightly foolish, but strong-minded Scarlett-O’Hara-lite, while Darcy is a neutered Rhett Butler charmer. The production does everything it can to look like Gone with the Wind in its setting and design. Austen’s social commentary is phased out and replaced with low comedy and bantering lover style dialogue. I suppose as a film in itself, it’s perfectly fine, but as an adaptation of one of the greatest novels of all time, it’s sadly lacking.

Ronin (1998)

Robert De Niro takes aim in super cool car-chase classic Ronin

Director: John Frankenheimer

Cast: Robert De Niro (Sam), Jean Reno (Vincent), Natascha McElhone (Dierdre), Stellan Skarsgård (Gregor), Sean Bean (Spence), Skipp Sudduth (Larry), Michael Lonsdale (Jean-Pierre), Jonathan Pryce (Seamus O’Rourke), Jan Triska (Dapper Gent), Féodor Atkine (Mikhi)

Sam (Robert De Niro), Vincent (Jean Reno), Gregor (Stellan Skarsgård), Spence (Sean Bean) and Larry (Skipp Sudduth) are ex-intelligence operatives from the Cold War (or “the late unpleasantness”). Now working as mercenaries, they are hired by IRA operative Dierdre (Natascha McElhone) to steal a mysterious case. The operation becomes increasingly complex as trust is betrayed, new competitors emerge, and a stream of gun battles and car chases soon bursts out.

I don’t think there are enough words to say how much I love this film. I have seen it I honestly don’t know how many times. Some films just connect with you, or something about them so completely works for you that you can’t help but enjoy them. Ronin is quite simply one of my favourite ever films – others may poke at it, but to me I think this is a perfectly structured piece of film-making, a 1970s-style thriller produced in the 1990s, the last flourish of old-school, Cold War spy film-making. In fact, I genuinely think the further we move away from the bombastic 90s, the richer this film looks. It’s becoming less and less of a guilty pleasure and more and more of a pleasure.

First and foremost you have to talk about what Ronin is most famous for: its jaw dropping car chases. What’s particularly exciting about these is that everything you are seeing was done for real. There is barely a spot of trickery in this – they simply hired the best stunt men in the world, got hold of some cool looking cars, and let them go to town all over France.

Of course, watching cars going round and round in itself isn’t massively interesting: what makes it compelling in Ronin is the skilled story-telling. Not only do we always know what’s going on, but the characters are kept in the forefront (most of the actors’ terrified faces were real, as they tore round the streets of Paris for real at 90+ miles an hour). In addition to that, the editing and shooting of these scenes is simply superb. The film gets a perfect balance of sound effects and musical cues: the soundtrack of the final car chase is split 50/50 between revving engines and music. A combination of low angles (putting us practically on the front of the car) and medium and long shots keep the visuals of each chase fresh. You’d actually have to be without a pulse to not be gripped by these sequences. These are without a doubt the best car chases ever committed to screen.

But it’s not just about car chases. This is a brilliant mood piece, filmed in a drained out colour palate that makes the whole thing feel like the characters have been transplanted intact from the 1970s. Frankenheimer’s direction is crisp and cool, and he has an eye for an excellent shot. He also allows plenty of subtle character and mood building to counterpoint the action, as in the excellent, almost wordless, opening sequence following De Niro’s arrival at a café. Carefully he cases the joint while the others arrive, putting in place a possible escape route (we later discover) before heading in. Later, the film builds a moment of exquisite tension and excitement about a drawing on a board and the colour of a boat house. We even get a scene where De Niro guides some of the characters through performing surgery on him to remove a rogue bullet.

The whole film is packed full of excellent vignettes like this: I love the moment when De Niro pretends to have lost his nerve and carelessly knocks a coffee cup off a table to see how Skarsgard’s slightly sinister Gregor may respond (he catches it before it hits the ground and then immediately looks sheepish as if he has given something away). The film also sprinkles dark hints throughout of a wider world (“Where do I know you from?” “Vienna” “Of course…” an example of exposition-free dialogue that establishes a back story), while the characters’ backgrounds and their recruitment by “the man in the wheelchair” remain deliberately obscure.

It’s also one of the best Macguffin films you are going to see ever. What’s in the case? Who knows? Who cares? The film’s structure totally understands that it doesn’t matter to us what’s in the thing at all. It’s only important in that it matters to the characters: and that most of them are willing to go to any lengths to secure it (preferably for free).

The other major strength of the film is its cracking dialogue, the work of an uncredited David Mamet (allegedly pissed off that the Writer’s Guild of America declared he had to share billing). The dialogue is endlessly quotable, and deftly sketches out character: for instance, we understand immediately De Niro’s cool confidence and Bean’s blustering faux machismo from exchanges like this:

Spence: You worried about saving your own skin?
Sam: Yeah I am. It covers my body.

That only scratches the surface of the film’s dialogue, which crackles – this exchange between Vincent and Sam sums up its wit, and lived-in quality:

In fact the film is full of cool lines like this that seem to carry a flavour of working in intelligence, and stick in the imagination (“The map is not the territory” or “Either you’re part of the problem or you’re part of the solution or you’re just part of the landscape”). The best moments sizzle with an effortless cool, with dialogue that you find yourself (or I do anyway) regularly dropping into everyday conversation. It also helps to slowly build relationships within the film, with Sam and Vincent’s dialogue quickly finding itself in sync, a clever little indicator of their building friendship.

The relationship between Sam and Vincent is in many ways the heart of the film – while other characters fall by the wayside, events ruthlessly exposing their weaknesses, it’s these two who form a close bond. Vincent may believe “Everyone’s your brother until the rent comes” but their friendship develops a real warmth and trust – they are the real romantic link in the film (despite a flirtation with Natasha McElhone’s steely IRA gun runner Dierdre).

All this content comes together brilliantly into a tightly contained and carefully paced thriller. It’s also strikingly well-acted in a tight, stripped down manner. This is probably the last engaged, “serious” role De Niro did before his career drifted into decades of self-parody. He gives Sam a brilliant lived-in quality, with a wry sense of humour. Jean Reno is equally well cast as the laconically cool Vincent, while Natasha McElhone is engaging and intriguing as Dierdre. Stellan Skarsgård is a stand-out as the ice-cool Gregor. Of the no-less than three Bond-baddy actors, Michael Lonsdale probably has the best part as a model-building fixer, though Sean Bean does decent work as twitchy poseur. Jonathan Pryce is, I have to say, not completely convincing as an IRA heavy, but does a decent job.

Okay I’ll concede the final reveal and resolution of the film’s plot is not the best moment (a particularly heavy-handed, plumbily voiced BBC radio voiceover explains much of the ending), but that’s a bump in the road of gripping, smart and old-school thriller. It’s accomplished in its filming, and its mood sizzles from the screen. The car chases are edge-of-your-seat gripping, and there is barely a false beat in acting or dialogue. The direction is full of character and has a brilliant eye for little details. Above all else, I really love this film – probably more than is healthy – and I have seen it a crazy number of times. I can’t imagine not enjoying watching it – and I don’t think I ever haven’t, even though I must know it frame-by-frame. Brilliant stuff!

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

The original and the best: Disney’s animated classic Beauty and the Beast

Directors: Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise

Cast: Paige O’Hara (Belle), Robby Benson (The Beast), Richard White (Gaston), Jerry Orbach (Lumière), David Ogden Stiers (Cogsworth), Angela Lansbury (Mrs Potts), Bradley Pierce (Chip), Rex Everhart (Maurice), Jesse Conti (Le Fou)

After decades of average or forgettable films, in the early 90s Disney had a sudden renaissance. From 1989 to 1998, the studio was a veritable hit factory, with films from The Little Mermaid to Mulan, via classics like The Lion King and new ideas like Hercules all being lapped up by audiences. Perhaps the most widely loved (and maybe even the best!) of this era was Beauty and the Beast.

Like all the best Disney films, the story is traditional with a modern twist. Belle (wonderfully voiced by Paige O’Hara) is a young woman in a small provincial town who wants so much more than spending her time dodging the unwanted attentions of handsome local hero Gaston. When her eccentric father Maurice is imprisoned in a mystical castle by a terrifying Beast (Robby Benson, who combines sensitivity and ferocity), she agrees to take his place, while the Beast (and his enchanted servants) all hope she might break the spell placed on them by falling in love with him.

This was the first animated film to ever be nominated for Best Picture, back in the days of only five nominees and it was hard to sneak onto the list if you weren’t a heavy-going “important” piece of film-making. If that’s not a testament to its greatness, I’m not sure what is. It’s one of the best mixes of Disney magic: charming, delightful, sweet, funny and exciting. It has a heroine who feels real, independent and relatable and a hero you empathise with, even while he behaves badly. It’s got a villain who first seems an arrogant blow-hard before his real brutishness is revealed. All this in a very romantic, engrossing storyline, with a host of supporting characters it’s impossible not to like.

So why does this work so well? It’s sweepingly, lusciously drawn and it drips romance and humanity. Everything stems from those central characters, and the amount of empathy we feel for them. Like all great films, this knows without characters we invest in, nothing else works – no matter how many great numbers and funny lines there are (and there are plenty of both!).

Belle could have easily been either a flighty romantic or an aloof autodidact, but the film crafts her into a grounded romantic, dreaming of more but knuckling down and dealing with the hand life has dealt her. Facing a life of captivity she resolves to do what she can to make her life bearable. She’s determined and independent and exhibits genuine intellectual curiosity alongside her empathy. She feels real, and you invest in her reactions to things because those reactions feel normal.

An even bigger challenge is the Beast, but it’s triumphant in the handling of this tricky character. He is ferocious, but the film quickly and efficiently makes clear his anger is based in pain and vulnerability, and intense isolation. Careful shots establish his self-loathing – his slashing of a painting of his pre-transformation face couldn’t be much clearer. Even at his most furious, we gets quiet moments of vulnerability. The animation of the Beast is perfect – his face is fierce, but his eyes are wonderfully expressive. His facial features at key moments relax and fold in to show someone far more gentle. He’s like everyone on a first date, scared to express his deeper feelings. The animators marvellously capture both his power and surprising delicacy. His boyish enthusiasm is infectious – his excitement in gifting Belle the library is heartwarming. In fact he’s so endearing and engaging a character, I think everyone feels a twinge of disappointment when he is replaced by a human being in the final scenes!

Revolving around these two is a wonderful cast of engaging characters. The primary servants in the plot – Lumière, Cogsworth and Mrs Potts – are all strong, unique and three-dimensional characters with more than enough depth to eschew their basic character traits (Cogsworth’s name even rhymes with jobsworth, Lumière is a charming rogue and Mrs Potts a motherly matron) to become characters we end up caring deeply for, that feel real.

The film also borrows from Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete to create the character of Gaston, possibly one of the most interesting villains in Disney. Drawn with a certain conventional handsomeness (although he looks smug enough for you know he’s a wrong ‘un from the start), Gaston is a character who questions many of the assumptions made linking popularity and handsomeness with goodness. He’s also a character who grows measurably darker through the film due to his own choices, rather than being inherently villainous from the start.

It’s all part of the richness of the world the film creates – everything feels natural and all the characters real and understandable. Maybe that’s partly why it works so well – it’s a film that is animated, rather than a cartoon. With a tight plot, good pacing and a clear focus, it’s focus is on emotion and characterisation, and it avoids cheap laughs, with comedy growing organically. Because the characters themselves are so compelling, the events carry huge dramatic force – when Belle is threatened by wolves, we genuinely fear for her; when the heartbroken Beast can barely rouse himself to fight Gaston we are overwhelmed with pity and concern.

Warmth and humanity in the drawing of the characters, makes their stories so affecting

Of course it is also a cartoon, and much of the triumph of it is based in the animators’ successes. The imagery is gorgeous, the detail in each frame is wonderful, the design of the castle is fantastic (we’ve already talked about the influences of Cocteau’s film, but it’s clear again here). The famous ballroom scene is wonderful – the “camera work” marvellous, the creation of the ballroom awe inspiring (genuinely we all thought it was real at the time!). Time and again the filmmakers use inspired framing and composition that conveys the emotion. The performances they draw from their characters is exceptional – the expressiveness given to all of the characters, from Belle and the Beast to the faceless tankards in the castle, is brilliant. You can freeze-frame any single scene from the movie and be able to instantly identify how every character feels.

The famous ballroom, a sweeping series of camera shots and a landmark in computer illustration

This is the true Disney magic: this world is real, because everyone in it feels so alive. It captures your heart, from its marvellous stained-glass opening telling the backstory, to the triumphant swelling score that meets the ending. I’ve barely mentioned the songs, but each one is brilliant, an instantly recognisable, pleasurable earworm – in fact, this film may have the best songs of any Disney film in the canon. Beauty and the Beast is so good that, never mind being nominated for best picture, it arguably would have won in many years (it lost to The Silence of the Lambs: it’s hard to imagine a film more tonally different!). Endlessly enchanting, charming, warm, funny, moving and exciting, this is a masterpiece and a landmark in Disney animation.

Anne of the Thousand Days (1969)

Henry won’t be happy with that girl: stagy adaptation of the Anne Boleyn story Anne of the Thousand Days

Director: Charles Jarrott

Cast: Richard Burton (King Henry VIII), Geneviève Bujold (Anne Boleyn), Irene Papas (Queen Catherine of Aragon), Anthony Quayle (Cardinal Wolsey), John Colicos (Thomas Cromwell), Michael Hordern (Thomas Boleyn), Katharine Blake (Elizabeth Boleyn), Valerie Gearon (Mary Boleyn), Peter Jeffrey (Duke of Norfolk), Joseph O’Conor (Bishop Fisher), William Squire (Sir Thomas More)

Anne of the Thousand Days fits neatly into Hollywood’s obsession of the 1960s: the grand British historical epic, crammed with costumes, old locations and leading Brit actors in beards mouthing “olde English” style dialogue. Some of these films are of course marvellous – A Man For All Seasons being clearly the best – some are merely competent. AotTD falls very much in the latter category. It’s a solid but dry and rather self-important piece of entertainment, more interested in wowing you with its pageantry than moving you with its emotion.

As the film opens, Henry VIII (Richard Burton) considers whether or not to sign Anne Boleyn’s (Genevieve Bujold) death warrant. The film then flashes back to tell us the story of Anne’s rise and fall. Along the way, the usual figures from Tudor history are wheeled out: Wolsey, Catherine, More, Cromwell and assorted Boleyns. And of course, the whole thing ends with Anne proudly proclaiming her daughter will one day be the greatest queen of England, with quite exceptional clairvoyance given how unlikely that would’ve actually looked at the time.

The main problem is it isn’t sure what it wants to say about its central character. It wants to simultaneously position her as a strong, “modern” woman with her own ambitions but as a woman succumbing to passion. Essentially, it wants to have its cake and eat it: for Anne to understand Henry is far from love’s ideal vision, while not wanting to lose their “Great Romance”. So we have scenes where Anne questions why anyone would want to marry Henry or talks of her desire for peace, and later scenes where she demands the judicial murder of all who refuse to accept the marriage.

And it may want to show Anne as a modern woman, but – frustratingly – it’s only actually interested in her as a romance object. Her modernity is solely expressed in defying her family to try and marry someone other than Henry, and having spirited “I hate you/I love you” sparring matches so beloved of Hollywood. But the film has no interest in her intelligence, her involvement in the Reformation, or how this led into dangerous conflict with the increasingly powerful Thomas Cromwell (here her downfall is solely down to her inability to produce a son, and being jealous of love rival Jane Seymour, here playing the sort of minxy temptress Anne is often accused of being).

And even this simplified, Mills-and-Boon Anne is inconsistent– one minute she’s a sweet young girl bravely resisting her unwanted royal suitor. Then, she’s delighted with the power that comes with allowing the King to court her. Equally suddenly, she falls in love with him (though that scene is so confusingly written it’s initially unclear whether this is genuine or simply a ploy to win back the attention of Henry). Even away from the central “romantic” relationship, her character oscillates – she schemes revenge against Wolsey, but then is too nice to take Hampton Court from him.

Despite this, Genevieve Bujold delivers an excellent performance. The film successfully plays up her youth early on, and she brings the role a lot of passion, fire and intelligence. Her French-Canadian accent also makes perfect sense considering Anne was largely brought up at the French court. Bujold does her best to hold together an inconsistent character and delivers a real sense of Anne’s independence and intellectual strength. Not even she can completely sell the competing visions of Anne the film has, but she does a very good job with what she is given.

Richard Burton was allegedly fairly scornful of his performance, but he is terrific. One area where the film does succeed is repositioning Henry as a proto-tyrant, who literally cannot conceive he is wrong. In a memorable scene, Henry explains that, ruling as he does through God, any thoughts in his head must have been placed there by God, ergo he can never be wrong. If that isn’t a tyrant, I’m not sure what is. Burton’s charisma is perfect for a man who can flip on a sixpence from bonhomie to fury. While Anne’s intellectualism is overlooked, the film does a great job of demonstrating Henry’s intellectual fakery, via his bland and overbearing musical compositions (met with a rapturous response from the court). Lords literally breathe sighs of relief after they leave his presence. Burton may not be an ideal physical match, but embodies Henry’s ruthless selfishness and towering ego.

It’s a shame that, despite having strong performances, the film is not only so confused, but also so flat and dry. Charles Jarrott frames the film with a dull conventionality, carefully letting costumes and production design fill the screen like a dutiful workman. Has he got any really interesting ideas for shooting this stuff, or presenting a routine plot with any freshness? Not really. Instead we get spectacle, and inevitable rundown of events, but no real sense of novelty. It turns the whole thing into a rather slow, reverent slice of British history, dry and stodgy, ticking off events as it goes.

Those events come and go with a confused focus. The foundation of the Church of England is under explained. The fates of several characters are left unresolved – in particular Cardinal Wolsey (an otherwise excellent Anthony Quayle) simply disappears. The final condemnation of Anne is rushed and confused (you would be forgiven for not really understanding who she has been accused of sleeping with, and the alleged incest between her and brother is almost thrown away). Other characters are simplified (despite good performances from their actors): so William Squire’s More is upstanding and honest, while John Colicos’ Cromwell is dastardly and scheming.

Anne of the Thousand Days is rather old fashioned and probably best watched now as a Sunday afternoon film. It tells a very, very familiar story (how many times have we seen Henry/Anne’s romance on screen before and since) without too much originality, and largely fudges putting together a clear sympathetic portrait of its central character. Having said that, it is well acted and looks wonderful. It’s just also rather dry and far too aware of having an “important” story to tell.