Mississippi Burning (1988)

Earnest drama about racism, whose narrative perhaps focuses on less important issues and people

Director: Alan Parker

Cast: Gene Hackman (Agent Rupert Anderson), Willem Dafoe (Special Agent Alan Ward), Frances McDormand (Mrs Pell), Brad Dourif (Deputy Sheriff Clinton Pell), R. Lee Ermey (Mayor Tilman), Gailard Sartain (Sheriff Ray Stuckey), Stephen Tobolowsky (Clayton Townley), Michael Rooker (Frank Bailey), Pruitt Taylor Vince (Lester Cowans), Kevin Dunn (Agent Bird), Badja Djola (Agent Monk)

In June 1964 three civil rights workers – two white New Yorkers Andrew Goorman and Michael Schwerner and a black Mississippian James Chaney – were arrested, released and then murdered by Neshoba County law officials working alongside KKK white supremacists. An FBI investigation (codenamed Mississippi Burning) revealed the crime, arrested the criminals and managed to convict several (but not all) of them on the federal charge of violating civil rights (convinced the state charge of murder would lead to acquittal from racist juries). Mississippi Burning fictionalises this true-life atrocity into a hard-hitting thriller, mixed with the conventions of crime drama.

It’s directed by Alan Parker in the style of Midnight Express, pulling no punches in chucking the vileness of the KKK up on screen. During the course of Mississippi Burning we see Black people chased, beaten, flung out of moving cars onto the street, lynched and a praying child kicked in the face by a KKK thug. Rightly, the murderers are a vile parade of bullies, cowards and knuckle-dragging monsters portrayed by a group of actors (Dourif, Rooker, Sartain and Vince among them) used to going all-in on portraits of the scum of humanity. It’s a tightly directed, intense film – with a repetitively pounding score by Terry Jones – with Oscar-winning photography by Peter Biziou capturing the flame-lit night-time atrocities these repulsive people execute on innocents.

Mississippi Burning is undoubtedly well-made, with a very earnest message behind it. It’s impossible to fault its rightful disgust at the appalling injustice and racism, but you can’t help but feel it’s focusing its heroic lens on the wrong part of the story. It drew fire at the time for its fictionalisation of almost every element – wisely so in its portrayal of the initial crime, where their names and exact nature of their murder are altered – and the way this pushed the FBI (an organisation that had in many cases actively worked against civil rights) into a traditional heroic role, while reducing the Black people to passive recipients of beatings or kind words from whites. It’s hard not to feel today that, for all the skill of the film, the impact of those decisions have magnified the film’s flaws over time.

At heart, Mississippi Burning uses the conventions of a mis-matched buddy-cop investigative drama to add narrative drive to a social issues film. The two FBI agents are played so well by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, you barely notice both are stock roles straight out of central casting. Hackman gives such energy and life (with a lovely touch of shame that his own past conduct, as a Southern sheriff was presumably only a degree better than the people he’s investigating) to his role as no-nonsense, veteran maverick who understands the streets, that he transforms this cliché into a real person. Similarly, Dafoe plays the by-the-book, stuffy superior who has too learn rules-bending sometimes break the case, with such commitment you forget how role familiar it is.

The personal narrative of the film revolves around whether these chalk-and-cheese investigators will overcome their initial iciness – they address each other formally throughout the film and butt-heads frequently on the conduct of the investigation – to become a team which feels odd for a film where the other stakes (violent institutional racism) are so large. In many ways an alternative cliché – two disconnected investigators investing more in a case based on the injustice they see and the witnesses they talk to – might well have served it better and also reflected contemporary complaints that the FBI was more interested in the letter than the spirit of the law. Mississippi Burning does, at times, address this by having characters explicitly ask if the FBI would even lift a finger if two of the victims weren’t white. But seeing as the film generally considers raising the question the same as engaging with it, it doesn’t go anywhere.

The film requires the agents to undertake mis-steps in order to educate the audience (would Dafoe’s character really be as ignorant about the nuances of segregation as he frequently is here?) and blunder about for much of the early acts, most notably Dafoe’s public conversation with a Black man in a diner, that inevitably leads to the poor man kidnapped and beaten by the KKK. But on the whole, the FBI are presented as noble straight-shooters, aghast at the state of affairs in the South, rather than a body run by the morally-ambiguous J Edgar Hoover.

It also means Mississippi Burning relegates its Black characters to passengers and passive victims, reliant on white people for protection and vindication. While it would be false to claim the system in the South didn’t leave Black people largely powerless, the film’s failure to introduce a single memorable character giving voice to the Black perspective of a series of crimes that happened to them feels more and more uncomfortable as the film ages (particularly as the film’s hopeful ending very much places racism as a problem in the past, not a dilemma America continues to face).

The film’s real conscience (and the victim given most development) is instead Frances McDormand as the wife of Dourif’s vile racist sheriff. Parker’s film subtly indicating her lack of racism early (she consoling touches the arm of a Black man), and McDormand (who is excellent) brings real force to her pained, frightened longing to do the right thing. She contrasts neatly with the committed vile cowardice of Dourif, Rooker’s swaggering bullying and Stephen Tobolowsky’s Hiterlian racism as a KKK Grand Wizard. Parker successfully makes these guys so repulsive, that when Hackman’s Anderson gets free reign to intimidate, rough-up and bully them back it carries real satisfaction. But the film making the most developed victim of the film’s KKK a white, gentile feels more like filmmaker concerns that otherwise the bulk of the likely audience may otherwise have trouble relating to the bulk of the victims.

Mississippi Burning tries to be hopeful. This extends to some slightly forced moralising – the suicide of one character is attributed to guilt at the crime, rather than the more likely guilt at having ‘betrayed’ his fellow KKK – and a general sense that Mississippi is on the road to peace, feels a bit of a stretch for a region that had decades of continued unrest ahead. Saying that, in its sometimes clumsy way, you can’t doubt its power and its righteous disgust at racism. It’s well directed and has some excellent performances – Hackman and McDormand were both Oscar nominated – but it feels like a film that only focuses on part of an overall picture and not always the right part.

The Terminator (1984)

Schwarzenegger becomes an icon in Cameron’s masterpiece, a darkly gripping sci-fi chase-thriller

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Terminator), Michael Biehn (Kyle Reese), Linda Hamilton (Sarah Connor), Paul Winfield (Ed Traxler), Lance Henriksen (Hal Vukovich), Bess Motta (Ginger), Rick Rossovich (Matt), Eal Boen (Dr Peter Silberman), Bill Paxton (Punk)

“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead!”

If that description doesn’t grab your attention, I don’t know what will. James Cameron cemented his place in cult-film history with The Terminator, such a pure shot-to-the-heart of filmic adrenalin, its hard to think it’s been bettered since. Cameron takes a fairly simple story – essentially a long, relentless chase – and fills it with energy, black humour and a genuine sense of unstoppable menace, in a film that barely draws breath until it’s over an hour in and then promptly throws you straight into a final action set-piece. It uses its low budget effectively to create a world of mystery and dark suggestion and leaves you gagging for more. So much so, they’ve tried to recapture the thrill ride six times since (and only Cameron did it right, with Terminator 2).

It’s 1984 and two naked people arrive in Los Angeles in a ball of light. They’re both from 2029, time-travellers looking for the same woman. One of them nicks a tramp’s piss-stained trousers and runs from the police. The other is a stoic, impassive mountain of muscle who offs a few violent punks after they refuse his blunt instruction to hand over their clothes. Which one do you wish you were eh? Unfortunately, the second one is a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a machine in the skin of a man sent to eliminate Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), mother of the future leader of the post-apocalyptic human resistance to the machines. The first is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), the man sent to save her. Tough gig, since the Terminator is relentless, almost invulnerable and holds all the cards.

The Terminator is pulpy, dirty, punchy film-making – and its huge success became James Cameron’s calling card for a lifetime of success. Set in a neon-lit, dingy Los Angeles (it never seems to be daytime in The Terminator), it taps into the core of a million nightmares, the fear of being chased and nothing you do ever sees to get you further away. It’s a really elemental fear which The Terminator brilliantly exploits, as impassive and impossible to negotiate with as your deepest, darkest dreads. Throw into that Cameron’s gift for tension and you’ve got the almost perfect thrill-ride.

It’s also a film that gives us the perfect level of information we need. Unlike the cops (and Sarah Connor) who can’t believe this story Reese is peddling them that they are up against an unstoppable metal killing machine, we know from the start the whole story. It’s enough for us to feel a cheeky frustration as they bend over backwards to fit logical explanations to the things they’ve seen and for us to feel the sneaking dread that storing Sarah away in a police precinct crammed full of heavily armed cops isn’t going to make a jot of difference. He won’t let anything stop him.

Is it any wonder quite a few people came out of the film sympathising with Sarah and Kyle – but feeling a sort of guilty admiration for the Terminator? This is the foundation stone of the Schwarzenegger cult, his role as the monosyllabic machine sending him into the upper echelons of Hollywood stardom. Cameron’s original idea was the Terminator should be a perfect infiltration unit, the sort of guy who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd (the original choice was Lance Henriksen, relegated instead to the second-banana cop behind Paul Winfield’s folksily doomed decent guy, fundamentally out of his depth). That went out of the window when Schwarzenegger came on board: say what you like about the Austrian Oak, but he stands out in a crowd.

Why is the Terminator darkly cool? (After all literally no one ever pretended to be Kyle Reese, but everyone has put on a pair of shades and said “I’ll be BACH”.) Because he embodies all the qualities we’ve been taught by films to respect. He’s strong and silent, calm and confident, never complains, doesn’t need help and never gives up. He’s exactly the sort of guy Hollywood has cast admiring eyes at since film spooled through a camera. We can’t help ourselves.

The film becomes about Schwarzenegger (even if he’s not in the last set piece, replaced by a budget-busting CGI android). Cameron knew how to get the best out him, his tiny number of lines (17 in total) delivered in his emotionless, euro-accent make him seem mysterious, different and cool, frequently responding with either deadpan seriousness or sudden violence. His under-statement lines are funny because we anticipate already the bloodbath that will follow. And, unlike despicable villains, he’s not motivated by greed, jealousy or wickedness: he’s almost the quintessential American hero, taking care of business – it just so happens his business is killing people.

Reese should be someone we admire more: he’s a plucky, resourceful underdog. But, unlike the actions-rather-than-words Terminator, he’s got to speak all the time – while the Terminator is a killing machine, Reese is the exposition machine. Biehn does a terrific job with a difficult role, a decoy protagonist who spends much of the movie alternating between gunplay and spitting out reams and reams of exposition explaining to anyone and everyone the future and terminators. On top of that, while his opponent gets on with, Reese’s constant refrain of how scared he is and everyone else should be (who wants to hear a hero say how terrified he is eh?) and his frustrated whining at no-one listening to his fantastic story marks him as weak. Charismatic heroes persuade their audiences: no one believes Reese until they are literally watching Arnie shrug off a whole clip of ammo.

Reese is, in any case, a decoy protagonist of sorts. His romantic longing for Sarah (having fallen in love with her photo in the future) and nurturing personality actually mark him out as the more conventional ‘female lead’. In the first of several films where Cameron would show-case heroic female characters, the actual ideal rival for the machine is Sarah. One of the most interesting things about The Terminator is watching Linda Hamilton skilfully develop this character from ordinary young woman into the sort of archetypal Western hero the film ends with her as (she even gets the sort of badass kiss-off line “You’re terminated FUCKER” you can’t imagine the less imaginative Reese saying).

On top of this The Terminator is a triumph of atmosphere. With its synth-score, it has an unsettling quality from the off helping to build the sense of grim inevitability that is its stock-in-trade. Just like the Terminator’s never-ending pursuit, the whole film is a well-judged, inevitable, time-loop. Sending people back in time turns out to be the very thing that guarantees that future will happen. Throughout, Cameron’s little titbits about the future (partly constrained by budget) are perfect in giving us just enough information to understand the stakes but leave enough mystery for us to be so desperate to know more, we fill in the gaps from our imagination.

But the reason The Terminator works best is that it’s an undeniably tense thrill ride, an extended chase sequence that rarely eases off and never loses its sense of menace. You never feel relaxed or safe while watching The Terminator and never for a moment that its heroes are on a level playing field with their opponent. Atmospheric, tense and terrifying, it walks a brilliantly fine line (so much so, the Terminator methodically massacring a precinct full of cops is both unnerving and the most popular scene in the film) and never once let’s go of your gut. It’s not only possibly the best, most perfect, Terminator film made also still one of Cameron’s finest hours.

Twisters (2024)

It won’t blow away, but theres something reassuringly old-fashioned about Twisters

Director: Lee Isaac Chung

Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones (Kate Carter), Glen Powell (Tyler Owens), Anthony Ramos (Javi), Brandon Perea (Boone), Maura Tierney (Cathy Carter), Harry Hadden-Paton (Ben), Sasha Lane (Lily), Daryl McCormack (Jeb), Kiernan Shipka (Addy), Nik Dodani (Praveen), David Corenswet (Scott)

Twisters is perhaps one of the oddest pieces of IP rebooting (as we call it these days) in years: a sideways sequel to a 1996 box-office hit that virtually no one has thought about once since it was in the cinema thirty years ago. Twisters hardly brings in a new breath of air for 2024 compared to what worked at the box-office in 1996: in fact in many ways it’s as predictable as that film was. But yet it gets away with it, because there is an old-fashioned simplicity about it, a pure ‘just wanna entertain you’ vibe throughout, combined with the fact it creates a small group of likeable characters we care about, played by winning performers. Rather like Top Gun: Maverick it takes the ideas that people liked from the first film but delivers them far more effectively with much more charm.

Meteorologist and instinctive twister spotter Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is one of the few survivors of a failed scientific experiment to use a compound foam to reduce the power of tornados, with the deceased including her boyfriend Jeb (Daryl McCormack). Five years later she is called back into the field by her old colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos) who needs her help to test his new tornado radar-scanning technology company. In Oklahoma with Javi’s team, Kate faces her fears, finds that the impact of the storms is leaving a heavy burden on the community and falls into a flirtation with rock-and-roll meteorologist and YouTuber Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) whose cowboy exterior hides his heart of gold.

All this blows itself up into highly entertaining stuff, told with an old-fashioned sense of fun by Lee Isaac Chung. It’s actually a relief to find a modern blockbuster just focused on an entertaining, character-led piece of popcorn fun, rather than blowing pop-culture references, set-ups for future films and homages to hits from yesteryear, straight into your eyes. Twisters never reinvents any wheels at all, but it’s several degrees better than the forgotten film its riffing on and you’ll end up being surprisingly invested in it.

A big part of that is the charming and hugely likeable performances from its two leads. Edgar-Jones is very good at this sort of tough-edged exterior hiding inner-vulnerabilities (the team on Twisters must clearly have binged through Normal People during lockdown like the rest of us). Powell – who is having a moment and then-some – is also an absolute pro at cocksure types like this with unexpected layers. There is a sort of It Happened One Night opposites-attract screwball comedy between these two, who take each other at first for a naïve city-girl and a brainless cowboy only to find (would you believe it!) that first impressions are not always the right impressions.

However, this sort of rom-com, relationship-led stuff is exactly what makes Twisters entertaining and makes you care for it. After all, as Twister showed us, once you’ve seen wind related special effects pile on, you’ve kind of seen them all, it’s just a question of degree. Twisters front-and-centres not so much the gusty action, but the characters at the heart of it. Impressive as Chung’s staging of the blowing away of cars and the ripping up of buildings is, it works because we care about the people at cowering beneath the gale.

That’s because Twisters is told with an old-fashioned heart. There is nothing in it that really surprises you: Daryl McCormack’s prologue boyfriend has ‘doomed’ written all over him the moment he speaks and the only thing that you’ll really puzzle over is how long the post-prologue time-jump will be. Although it’s character and plot developments are well handled and endearingly delivered, there are all unsurprising. Would you believe Kate and Tyler find they have much in common? That Tyler’s blow-hard cowboy storm-chasers turn out to all have Hearts of Gold? That Javi’s loaded, Stetson-wearing tycoon sponsor is a ruthless modern-day Crassus, using the weather forecasts to snap up devastated land for tuppence? It’s just like we can be pretty certain that the twister-diluting experiment that Kate is working on in the film’s opening will come storming back in Act Five.

You could pretty much scribble down all possible plot developments over the course of the film after watching the first twenty minutes, but somehow it doesn’t really matter. Even though everything in this is completely and utterly safe and straight-forward, it’s told with such professionalism and such a sense of fun, it hardly matters. Everything in Twisters is focused on just entertaining you and not forcing you to worry or get stressed about things. Perhaps that’s why the film shies away from the questions asked around why the storms are getting worse (let’s not bring something really depressing like climate change into a breezy opposites-attract thrill ride). To balance that it does more-or-less avoid the storms making moral judgements on who gets killed off in its blustery assaults, unlike so many other disaster movies.

Twisters offers nothing really original or unique, but everything in it seems to come from the heart, like Chung wanted to make the sort of unfussy, well-meaning entertainment vehicles he watched in his youth, when it was all about sitting back, munching popcorn and leaving with a grin on your face that a film just entertained you. And at a time when the cinema seems to be full of easter-egg stuffed, self-satisfied, franchise-building bait there is an awful lot to be said for that.

A Night to Remember (1958)

Still one of the definitive Titanic movies, a compelling documentary-influenced look at the disaster

Director: Roy Ward Baker

Cast: Kenneth More (Charles Lightoller), Michael Goodliffe (Thomas Andrews), Laurence Naismith (Captain Edward Smith), Kenneth Griffith (Jack Phillips), David McCallum (Harold Bride), Tucker McGuire (Molly Brown), Frank Lawton (J Bruce Ismay), Richard Leech (William Murdoch), John Cairney (Murphy), John Merivale (Robbie Lucas), Honor Blackman (Liz Lucas), James Dyrenforth (Colonel Archibald Gracie IV), Anthony Bushell (Captain Arthur Rostron)

The sinking of the Titanic on 14 April 1912 is one of the most iconic events in twentieth century history. A Night to Remember brings the ship’s final hours to life in forensic detail, based on Walter Lord’s carefully researched book. Told with documentary-style distance, mixed with admiration for stiff-upper-lip British pluck, the film cemented many people’s perceptions of the night of the sinking and remains one of the best-known films about the disaster.

To tell the story, the production decided it needed a central figure and selected Second Officer Charles Lightoller, recruiting a British star to play the role. And no one did bluff, charismatic middle-class decency better than Kenneth More, born to play roles like this. Lightoller would be placed at the heart of the keep-calm-and-carry-on evacuation of the ship, More’s reassuring presence letting the audience know everyone involved was doing their best under impossible circumstances.

A Night to Remember remains very effective. It’s special effects and recreation of the ship are highly impressive. Even tilting sets were built to replicate the ships list, meaning drinks tilt in glasses and the careering skid of a dinner cart in the dining room was done for real. But where it really scores is its effective capturing of a very particular British mood: the determination to carry-on in terrible, appalling circumstances. While it’s easy to look at this unflappability in the face of disaster as almost comic, what’s so effective in A Night to Remember is that below the surface it’s clear almost every single character is screaming in terror.

You can see it in the shell-shocked disbelief of Captain Smith (a very effective Laurence Naismith, an excellent portrait of man in ultimate authority with no power at all to affect the situation) who stares with shame at the hundreds of people he can’t save. It’s in the guilt of Thomas Andrews (Michael Goodliffe, full of wry humour that slips away leaving him a shell) who blames himself and vainly tries to save others without creating panic. The grim-faced determination of radio operator Jack Phillips (a remarkably restrained Kenneth Griffith) who taps out the SOS until the bitter end. These feelings are carefully hidden and suppressed – for the good of morale – but the screaming panic and despair of the passengers in the final moments of the ship are simply giving voice to hidden feelings earlier.

What comes across very well in A Night to Remember is the utter powerlessness of the situation, matched with the bad luck and poor preparation that condemned more to death. It’s clear to everyone in authority, from the start, that there are insufficient lifeboats and quickly becomes apparent no help is not coming. While not raising enough urgency around the evacuation did contribute to deaths, it’s also clear to the officers it’s the only way they can hope to maintain any sense of order for as long as possible. If they fronted up on the real disaster heading their way, those guns they grab from the armoury would have all been exhausted keeping control.

A Night to Remember subtly suggests the fault is not personal, but somehow systemic: that Titanic is just the rash a whole host of societal problems have come out in. You can see the arrogance and unwillingness to question in the huffy pretension of the man on the train who pulls Lightoller up for mocking a soap advert that celebrates the ship. The behaviour of many of the passengers that safety precautions are at first an imposition, then that their class and position should automatically entitle them to particular treatment. The thudding refusal of many to accept the reality that the unsinkable ship can go down. The stunned look on people’s faces when the truth hits them and, as Lightoller says late in the film, it suddenly feels like they can never trust so blindly again.

Alongside this, it’s a tribute to bravery and self-sacrifice, often expressed with that classic British reserve and dry humour in the face of imminent disaster. From Lightoller and the sailors who fight, up the final moment, to assemble two collapsible boats even as the deck sinks under water around them to the engineering crew who willingly agree to stay below deck to keep the power on – a certain death sentence (“And it’s my birthday today and all” someone good naturedly moans, while the others gather a water-logged cup of tea). Perhaps uniquely for Titanic films, there isn’t even a villain: it’s one of the few adaptations that doesn’t show Ismay (a never-the-less pompous and weasily Frank Lawton) ordering the ship to go faster. In fact Ismay is shown energetically throwing himself into the evacuation (even told to stop trying to help by Lightoller) who steps into a boat (self-loathing covering his face) only when no one else tries to take one of the available seats.

Despite which, the film doesn’t avoid the fundamental errors. The treatment of the second and third-class passengers is shockingly abrupt and impatient, as if the saving of their lives is an inconvenience on a busy night – by the time they are allowed on deck, one plaintively moans that the lifeboats have already left. A group of bellboys are ordered to remain where they are (and instructed to not smoke!) condemning them. As the scale of the disaster grows, several passengers in under-filled boats complain that they are ‘already too full’ to go back for survivors. Even Lightoller’s decisions (interpreting ‘women and children first’ as ‘women and children only’, a decision that led to half-full boats sent away) are criticised.

A Night to Remember also sprinkles itself with several touching personal stories that carry real impact. The first-class passenger who asks Andrews for a no-bullshit appraisal, then quietly ensures his wife and sleeping children board a lifeboat. The Stausses who refused to separate and go down with the ship. A lost child saved from trampling by a steward, who promises him it will all be over soon as they sink. The young couple crushed by a falling funnel. The heartless card sharp who turns out to have a capacity for calm self-sacrifice.

And it could all have been avoided. More than any other film A Night to Remember focuses on the unquestioning crew of the Californian who watch the sinking from ten miles distance (including the never-ending launch of emergency rockets) but having no instructions or initiative don’t do a thing (they switch their radio off rather than try and find out more). The rigid mindset of the system right there: disasters just don’t happen to British ships (Britannia rules the waves after all) so no reason to rock the boat. They are contrasted with the professional urgency of the Carpethia (who did leave their radio on) who race against hope to help.

A Night to Remember captures this all extremely effectively, remaining a powerful and documentary look at the simple facts of the world’s second most iconic (after Pompeii) disaster. Full of some very fine performances and shot with a pacey assurance by Roy Ward Baker, it remains one of the definitive studies of the diaster.

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

Smug, tiresome gags underpin a shallow piece of fan-pandering that mocks fan-pandering

Director: Shawn Levy

Cast: Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool), Hugh Jackman (Wolverine), Emma Corrin (Cassandra Nova), Matthew Macfadyen (Mr Paradox), Morena Baccarin (Vanessa Carlysle), Rob Delaney (Peter Wisdom), Leslie Uggams (Blind Al), Aaron Stanford (Pyro), Dafne Keen (Laura), Jon Favreau (Happy Hogan)

Deadpool is Marvel Jesus. It’s a joke in the film, but it’s also kinda true. The MCU has struggled in the past few years and it’s hoping the raw-and-ready sociopathic, fourth-wall-breaking merc-with-the-mouth can give its fortunes a jolt. In terms of money take, Deadpool & Wolverine is, I guess, going to do that. In terms of creativity and imagination, we’re still circling the toilet bowl, but hey at least Feige and co are doing it while clutching a wadge of greenbacks.

You say Deadpool’s constant fourth-wall leaning jokes ain’t really funny and that all they do is point out (and neutralising criticism in advance) weaknesses in plot and writing: but that toilet bowl gag was a bit of a turd right?

Wade Wilson aka Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) has been rejected by the Avengers on Earth-616 “The Sacred Timeline” (otherwise known as the one the MCU happens in) and returns to his friends on Earth-10005 (otherwise known as the 20^th Century Fox X-Men Franchise timeline) to retire and work as a used-car salesman. Until he is grabbed by the Time Variance Authority and informed by Mr Paradox (Matthew MacFadyen) his universe is being erased, due to the death of its Anchor Being Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in Logan. Deadpool’s only chance to save his universe is to find a new Wolverine, eventually pulling in “the worst Wolverine” who failed to save his world. Both are banished to “The Void”, a resting place for “erased” heroes from earlier timelines (aka cancelled movie franchises) run by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), the insane sister of Charles Xavier.

You made that tough to follow on purpose, you absolute bell-end. Ain’t you funny!

Flipping heck. If you think that sounds like a lot going on, don’t worry: it hardly matters. For Deadpool & Wolverine the story is just a very loose framework for a series of slightly smug in-jokes about nineties and noughties nostalgia, and gags about corporate mergers. (In case you missed it, Disney bought 20^th Century Fox and swallowed its comic book franchises like a money-Moloch). This matters an awful lot to some. Many others won’t care less. Deadpool & Wolverine very much tailors to the first group. If telling gags about Disney’s caution about jokes on drugs and anal sex, or riffing on the X-Men movies being less-and-less good over many years, sounds like your idea of comedy gold then this is for you.

Moloch and anal sex in the same paragraph – well-read show-off who wants to look cool ain’t ya?

Deadpool & Wolverine prunes a lot of comic mileage (or tries to) from mocking the “special sock” longings of geeks and fanboys, those who wile away hours debating who’s costume looked best or who could beat who in a fight. But this is a film mocking shallow, fanservice wank while itself being a massively shallow, fanservice piece of wank. If the only thing you felt was missing from Hugh Jackman’s previous Wolverine career was that he never wore the yellow-and-blue uniform, then this is the movie for you.

You were so pleased with that fanservice comment I saw you use it several times in Whatsapp hot takes. Twat.

Deadpool & Wolverine mocks fans for their shallow love for the obvious easy hit of seeing Deadpool and Wolverine fight, or a cameo from a well-known actor from an old movie or a celebrity playing a different version of a familiar character, then fills the film with almost literally nothing but this. Am I really meant to get excited seeing an actor revive a comic book role from a noughties superhero film we’ve forgotten and everyone at the time thought was rubbish? For all Deadpool & Wolverine wants to feel like something cheeky and dirty, it’s the safest slab of product out there. Every single thing in it feels like it has been cribbed from a fan’s wishlist on a Reddit thread. It feigns cocking a snook at Disney, but Deadpool is just an in-house jester: tweaking his master’s nose while taking a pay cheque and avoiding anything really pointed in his barbs. After a while you just get tired of it and the film’s embrace of cliché and retreads isn’t justified by Deadpool turning to the camera and pointing it out.

Getting up a head of righteous steam there ain’t you? Still paid to see it didn’t you! Sucker!

Still at least it’s better than when the film tries to have a heart. I’d respect it more if it was willing to make Deadpool a flat-out psychopath with no real sense of morals. Instead, he’s really all (very tiresome) talk, because Deadpool & Wolverine is desperate to turn him into someone the masses can find sympathetic by mixing his mook slaughter with emotive mooning over a group polaroid of the friends he’s trying to save from erasure from existence. Much like Ryan Reynolds’ performance, it often feels like filmmakers enjoying the shock quality of shrieking “FUCK” in a park, before running home to an early bedtime with their families.

Chickened out of writing the C-word there? Guess you don’t want to get blocked.

Deadpool & Wolverine opens with assurance it won’t ‘desecrate’ the legacy of Logan (an actual, good film with a proper story and emotional arc) – before, in one of the film’s better jokes, it has Deadpool dig up the skeleton of the dead Wolverine and use the bones to bloodily slaughter an army of TVA mooks. But then it desecrates it in a different, deliberate, even worse, way by ripping Logan off with shameless abandon. It gives Wolverine pretty much exactly the same plotline, including restaging almost identical emotional conversations, in almost identical locations. In fact, my overwhelming emotion watching Hugh Jackman snooze through this film with a growl was sadness that he came back after his perfect sign-off. But then I guess he get over a dozen million reasons to come back and prostitute himself here for one last runaround.

Like Deadpool doesn’t make that joke himself in the film – if you’re going to knock it, don’t rip it off!

Maybe he thought it was funny. It does feel like a home movie put together by a series of actors in their forties or fifties desperate to show their kids they can do something cool. Is there anything good in Deadpool & Wolverine? There are some good fights, even if Shawn Levy isn’t the best at staging them, but it does spray claret marvellously all over the place to well-chosen Madonna tunes. Matthew MacFadyen, essaying a cartoonish version of Succession’s Tom Wambsgans, is good fun, Emma Corrin makes an effective if under-used villain. There are some good jokes.

Because you gotta give some sugar right?

But the overwhelming air is smugness. None of the fourth-wall, franchise-teasing, corporate digs are that funny and very few of the asides carry any bite (several are about how handsome or muscular its stars are – the only remotely sharp comment is on Hugh Jackman’s divorce). Aside from that it offers nothing new or familiar, its setting is reminiscent of several other films, and it rips off plot galore from Logan and TV’s Loki show. Perhaps worst of all, in a year where an actually original and daring film Mad Max: Fury Road has fatally tanked at the box office, this openly rips off its location and style for The Void and it’s going to make millions.

It’s not as if you were even wild about Furiosa, but like the sanctimonious prick you are, you’ll give a pass to a film from an auteur but then knock a Marvel film. What makes you such a smug, humourless prick eh? Go with the fun!

Look for the last time, it’s not big, clever or funny to just milk some cheap gags out of anticipating the criticism. That’s enough. Fuck off now.

Touchy!

No seriously. Fuck off.

Elmer Gantry (1960)

Burt Lancaster gives a magnetic, Oscar-winning, performance in this entertaining plot-boiler

irector: Richard Brooks

Cast: Burt Lancaster (Elmer Gantry), Jean Simmons (Sister Sharon Falconer), Arthur Kennedy (Jim Lefferts), Dean Jagger (William L. Morgan), Shirley Jones (Lulu Bains), Patti Page (Sister Rachel), Edward Andrews (George F Babbitt), John McIntire (Rev John Pengilly), Hugh Marlowe (Rev Philip Garrison), Joe Maross (Pete)

Elmer Gantry (Burt Lancaster) has the patter down perfectly. He can charm, wheedle and turn a phrase to set the whole room alight with laughter. He wants success but the big break never comes, perhaps because he’s selling two-bit vacuum cleaners rather than something people really want. Elmer is smart and works out, when everyone is afraid of dying, it’s a captive market for salvation. With his seminary background, he’s a natural preacher and inveigles himself into the revivalist roadshow of Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons) which his force of personality shifts into a fire-and-brimstone exhibition of frenzied religious passion – just the sort of thing that gets the punters back into the church. But when the roadshow moves to the big city, will Gantry’s young affair with priest’s-daughter-turned-prostitute Lulu Baines (Shirley Jones) come back to bite him?

Elmer Gantry was seen as controversial and even outlandish at the time of its release – so much so a lengthy pre-credits opening crawl distances it from all those decent servants of the Lord who were worried it was tarring them with the same brush. But with TV evangelists raking in the cash and travelling preachers whipping crowds up into wild-eyed ecstasy, Elmer Gantry doesn’t seem so outlandish these days. Richard Brooks film adapts the middle-act only of Sinclair Lewis’ sharply satirical novel, and while it does smooth down the rough edges and offer touches of redemption for its charismatically selfish hero, it’s still a very entertaining plot-boiler with a well-delivered message and subtle character development.

Above all though it’s a defining star-vehicle for a perfectly cast, Oscar-winning, Burt Lancaster. Elmer Gantry plays to all his strengths: charismatic, larger-than-life and charming, overflowing with boundless energy and nimble, physical grace. Lancaster’s intense eyes and excitable grin burns through the screen and he’s totally believable as the sort of rogue everyone knows is a rogue but give him a pass because he’s so likeable. And he nails the magnetic charisma of fire-and-brimstone preaching, full of self-aggrandising comments about his own holy conversion from salesman to man of God. It helps that Lancaster’s physical prowess (at one point he does a body slide down the full length of the aisle mid-sermon) really helps build Gantry’s magnetic presence.

Elmer Gantry superpower isn’t that he’s shameless – he looks suitably guilty when calling his mother on Christmas day to explain, once again, he isn’t coming home – but that he can compartmentalise and forget shame so quickly. He manipulates and uses people with such charm they either don’t notice or don’t care – from charming clients on Christmas Eve with dirty stories to plugging Sister Sharon’s naïve assistant Sister Ruth (Patti Page) for details on Sharon’s life that he will then use to get his foot in the door of her roadshow. Even cynical journalist Jim Lefferts (Arthur Kennedy, warming up for effectively the same role in Lawrence of Arabia), who knows he’s a complete bastard, still finds him a great guy to hang out with.

But the truth is Gantry corrupts everything he touches. It happens by degrees, pushed along with winning arguments and eager ‘I’m just trying to help’ excitability, but its inevitable. Before he arrives, Sister Sharon’s roadshow is a dry but heartfelt and earnest mission focused on winning converts. Under Gantry’s influence it becomes religious entertainment. Because Gantry knows people need to have their passions stirred to really invest in something, and mesmerising patter is a huge part of that. Lancaster’s delivery of these showpiece sermons drip with eye-catching, inspiring passion – even when we know he’s a hypocritical bullshit artist who probably doesn’t truly believe word he’s saying, but sure does believe it in the moment. When even we feel stirred by it, is it a surprise his audiences start to get whipped into a frenzy, barking at devils and clawing across the floor to be saved by Gantry’s touch?

Sister Sharon’s manager and sponsor William Morgan (Dean Jagger skilfully playing a character who is far more susceptible to manipulation than he thinks) might have his doubts, but it works. Elmer Gantry takes a satirical swing at the Church as the reverends of the town of Zenith swiftly put aside any doubts (other than straight-shooter Garrison, inevitably played by Hugh Marlowe) and bring Sister Sharon’s Gantry-inspired roadshow into the big city to help drag more punters (and it’s quite clear that they see congregations as customers for religion) into their church. Elmer Gantry gets some subtle blows in on the commercialisation of the Church, even if it is careful to largely distance it as a whole from the tactics of Gantry.

Gantry’s corruption also touches Sister Sharon herself. Well-played by Jean Simmons, Sharon is earnest but surprisingly steely but as she lets a little of Gantry’s shallowness into her roadshow, so she starts to compromise on the very qualities that made her stand-out. From entering into a ‘good-cop-bad-cop’ performance for sinners to opening her heart to Gantry’s persistent seduction, Sharon becomes a portrait of corruption by degrees. Brooks’ film also implies in its dark finale that she has allowed herself to absorb Gantry’s spin that she could be a vessel of holy power, which puts her life at deadly risk.

Elmer Gantry is overlong and perhaps relies a little too much on Lancaster’s charisma – it fair to say when he is off-screen it’s energy lags. Its satiric edge is sometimes blunted by focusing on Gantry as the disease rather than a symptom of a church struggling to survive in a secular age. The introduction of Lulu Baines – an Oscar-winning Shirley Jones, playing against type as a bitter floozy – is a little late in-the-day and while her performance is solid enough, the character is more of a cipher in a plot-required final act conundrum than a fully-formed character.

But when the film focuses on Gantry, it’s a fascinating character study. How much does he believe in the things he says? Does he feel shame? How ambitious is he? When he says he loves Sharon, does he? Or does he feel everything he says in the moment, but it never sticks? Either way, it’s at the heart of Burt Lancaster’s compelling, charismatic performance which juggles a mountain of contradictions but never loses the sense of the shallow selfishness that lies behind the charm.

Hit Man (2024)

Inventive, playful, funny, sexy and dark this fabulous dark comedy changes gears with confident ease

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Glen Powell (Gary Johnson), Adria Arjona (Madison Figueroa Masters), Austin Amelio (Jasper), Retta (Claudette), Sanjay Rao (Phil), Molly Bernard (Alicia), Evan Holtzman (Ray Masters)

You might not want to hear it, but despite what the movies say there is no such thing as a hit man. In New Orleans, if you are talking to a mysteriously charismatic man who offers to take care of your ‘personal problems’ for a wedge of cash, you are probably confessing your desire to conspire to murder to a police agent. That agent would be mild-mannered psychology professor Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), a bland forgettable person who discovers a hidden talent for charismatic role-play, using his psychological skills to create a persona specific to his target. On a job, Gary becomes attracted to Madison (Adria Arjona), first dissuading her from ‘hiring him’ to kill her husband and then starting a relationship with her ‘in character’ as ‘Ron’. But relationships prove to be as risky for fake hit men as they would be for real ones.

To say where Hit Man, Linklater’s darkly twisted rom-com, heads would be to spoil it (let’s just say I didn’t see where it’s going) and the journey is a fabulous ride. Linklater and Powell collaborated on a (heavily) fictionalised version of this true story and pull together a smart, sexy, witty and at times surprisingly dark film, which make some shrewd points about the extent to which we choose and shape our own identities. Hit Man sees Linklater so confidently shift tone and mood within scenes, that you almost don’t notice how smoothly the film travels from farce to psychological insight to Postman Always Ring Twice sexiness to screwball wit to morally shady action. It’s a terrific ride.

It’s also a superb showcase for Glen Powell, who co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater. This should be a star-making role for Powell, in which he deftly plays mild-mannered and timid and darkly charismatic, often in the same scene. What’s so superb about Powell’s performance is how fluid it is, his two personalities (mild Gary and confident Ron) overlapping and merging into each other from moment-to-moment, or switching in response to sudden changes of situation. Powell and Linklater carry this out with real subtlety from moment to moment but watch the first scene and the last and you immediately notice the difference in our lead from the man we met at first.

Powell is both extremely funny – sequences showing the dizzying array of characters (from red necks to prissy Snape-ish goths) he becomes to lure in his targets are hilariously done – but also wonderfully engaging. Beneath the surface, it’s clear Gary is thrilled by how differently he is perceived when he becomes ‘Ron’, grinning as he overhears his police colleagues confess how exciting and sexy ‘Ron’ is compared to boring bird-watcher Gary. He finds he takes on a whole new confidence – and accompanying sexual prowess – as he throws himself into a dizzyingly sexual fling with Madison, who is also far more excited about the prospect of illicit sex with a killer than she probably would be with sweet rumpy-pumpy with a tenured psychology professor. Powell captures this all wonderfully, throwing himself into a tangled web of deceit with gleeful gusto.

Adria Arjona is similarly excellent as Madison, a woman who becomes harder and harder to read as the film continues. Its early stages really feels like a traditional rom-com – except the ‘meet cute’ features one person trying to hire another for murder, before they charm each other with cat puns – but the relationship shifts as much as the film itself does. Madison seems to come to life, filled with sexually excited recklessness, as she spends time with Ron. But Arjona is able to imply half a dozen things under the surface: is Madison a downtrodden girl enjoying a brush with danger, or is she some sort of manipulative femme fatale?

Linklater uses this to maintain a real high-wire tension in the film, which increasingly becomes impossible to predict. Both Gary and Madison are playing with fire here. If Gary’s dalliance with a former ‘client’ is discovered by his superiors – or if a chance encounter unmasks him to Madison – hell knows what might happen next. And can he keep the pretence that he is capable of ruthless, skilled violence, something much harder to do when your date takes you to a firing range and asks you to teach her? And what is Madison’s game, as it emerges that her break with her boyfriend isn’t as clean as she suggests it is – does she have something in mind that Gary isn’t prepared for?

Hit Man balances this brilliantly with the comedy, in one of Linklater’s most delightfully off-beat films, expertly played by Powell and Arjona. It’s underpinned with a deftly layered thematic message. Throughout we are reminded, by Gary’s psychology lectures to his increasingly engaged students, that people balance their own ids and egos and eventually ‘choose’ where they land. In doing so they create their own personality. It’s what we realise we are watching in this film. Both Gary and Madison decide they like more than a few of the elements of the people they are pretending to be – so why not mix them into their own personality? Suddenly they find themselves effortlessly capable of things they never thought possible – yet still embracing passions their playful alter-egos would find dull beyond belief.

It leads to a surprisingly ending that comes from left-field, but we realise we have been prepared for by Linklater and Powell almost from the film’s opening moments. It makes for a supremely entertaining and rewarding film, brilliantly played by its two leads (and it bears repeating that Powell is sensational here), with excellent support from Austin Amelio as a sleazy cop and Retta and Sanjay Rao as Gary’s more playful police colleagues. Hit Man is a dynamic, funny, sexy and surprising treat.

The Producers (1968)

A funny gag sits at the heart of a film that’s more cheeky than really funny or clever

Director: Mel Brooks

Cast: Zero Mostel (Max Bialystock), Gene Wilder (Leo Bloom), Dick Shawn (Lorenzo St. DuBois (L.S.D.), Estelle Winwood (“Hold Me! Touch Me!”), Christopher Hewett (Roger De Bris), Kenneth Mars (Franz Liebkind), Lee Meredith (Ulla), Renée Taylor (Eva Braun), Andreas Voutsinas (Carmen Ghia)

“Don’t be silly, be a smartie/Come and join the Nazi Party!” The cheek of a knockabout musical Hitler musical is the sort of stroke of genius only Mel Brooks might have come up with (and got away with). It’s the saving grace of The Producers, an otherwise rather pleased with itself, slight film whose cheeky gags look like they are taking a pop at sacred shibboleths but actually conform rather neatly with common (at the time) perceptions of women, homosexuals and randy old people. So much so, the film looks more braver and cheekier today when its relatively innocent sexism and homophobia comes across as cheeky tasteless fun rather than pretty much being par-for-the-course.

Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) is the least successful producer on Broadway. But perhaps he can turn that to his advantage when neurotic accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) points out that overselling shares of a guaranteed flop can make way more money than a hit. They just need a play that will definitely bomb: what better choice than Springtime For Hitler, a ludicrous musical tribute to Hitler written by dim Nazi Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars). Just to make sure they get the bomb they need, the duo hire talentless camp director Roger de Bris (Christopher Hewett) and stoned hippie lead (Dick Shawn). What could possibly go wrong? Or, rather, right?

There is a wild comic zaniness to The Producers epitomised by Zero Mostel’s manic energy as Max, a sleazy, sweaty mass of greed and self-obsessed vanity, totally devoid of any sense of shame. The Producers gets away with a lot because, like Max, its utterly shameless and frankly doesn’t give a damn what you think. Whether you find it hilarious or not depends on how much you are taken by provocative humour and scattergun cheekiness. There is an end-of-the-pier quality at the heart of The Producers (in the UK it would have been Carry On Up Broadway). Brooks doesn’t miss an opportunity for smutty postcard humour. It’s all so naughty he gets away with the ridiculousness of a Hitler musical.

A Hitler musical that wisely satirises the Nazi’s Riefenstahl showmanship via ludicrous Broadway choreography (including tap dancing stormtroopers forming themselves into dancing swastikas). Of course, Brooks is clever enough to keep the actual content of the musical purely on a surface level (no talk about what the Nazis actually did beyond aggressive militarism) – combined with Hitler portrayed as a bumbling Hippie full of the streetwise slang of pony-tailed sixties counter-culture. At heart, Springtime For Hitler doesn’t really do anything really more shocking or provocative than put blackshirts into 42^nd Street. It also carefully distances itself from the antisemitic elephant-in-the-room by having Bialystock and Bloom rip off the swastika armbands they agreed to wear while wooing Liebkind, throwing them in a bin and spitting on them. It’s a neat balance that allows the film to get away with as much as it does, while never touching the nightmareish darkness of the regime.

Of course, it helps that Brooks is one of Hollywood’s most famous Jews – and that Mostel and Wilder delight in leaning into a very Jewish comedy about a couple of shmucks enjoying being rogues. Wilder in particular is fantastic. While Mostel is at times be a bit much, Wilder’s hilarious snivelling childish timidity (he’s obsessed with a comfort blanket, the loss of which turns him into a mass of bleating despair) ‘blooms’ into the delight of an eternal good-boy finally allowed to be naughty. Wilder gets the balance just right between something larger-than-life and something real and when he talks about Bialystock being his first and only friend, it’s strangely moving.

Wilder, alongside the scenes taken from Springtime For Hitler, provides most of the humour. I’ll be brutally honest – I’ve never found much of the rest of The Producers funny. Nearly every other joke in the film relies on smut and cheek. Bialystock makes what money he does from pimping himself to randy octogenarians (never men obviously, that would be too risqué), and The Producers buys heavily into the idea that the sex lives of anyone over the age 60 is hilarious. It’s a cheap and rather repetitive joke, made over-and-over that Zero Mostel just about manages to sell because he embraces Bialystock’s utter lack of restraint. But it’s a one-note joke that outstays its welcome.

The Producers similarly makes rather obvious, one-note, jokes about all its female and gay characters. (Again, at the time much of this would not have been out-of-the-ordinary, so it actually looks more bizarrely more boundary pushing today). Ulla, Bialystock’s Swedish secretary, is a blonde sex-bomb whose recurring joke is her oblivious sexiness and willingness to burst into erotic dancing at the drop of a hat. She’s explicitly hired by Bialystock as a glamourous piece of eye candy ‘toy’ as a reward for his self-pimping and it’s not particularly funny. Also not particularly funny is the play’s director, a cross-dressing, mincing figure of camp satire played by Christopher Hewett, the main joke being he is a ridiculously overblown queer who wears a dress. Kenneth Mars’ Franz Liebkind – a ridiculous relic of the Reich, incompetent at pretty much everything he attempts – is slightly more amusing, if only because he’s utterly oblivious to his complete uselessness.

Brooks’ film is, you suddenly realise, rather slight. At around 80 minutes, it’s heavily reliant on its show-stopping glimpses of the Nazi musical (and even in that Dick Shawn’s Hipster swagger isn’t as funny as the Broadway parody) and aside from that relies on predictable farce, cheek and smut. Only Gene Wilder really transcends the material with a perfectly timed, strangely touching performance. Other than that, it feels like a film trying very, very hard to be a little bit-naughty, like an over-extended student revue sketch. But “Don’t be silly be a smartie/Come and join the Nazi party”? That is funny.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Superb fantasy film, full of heart, visual imagination and beautiful story-telling, truly one from the heart

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Ivana Baquero (Ofelia), Sergi López (Captain Vidal), Maribel Verdú (Mercedes), Doug Jones (The Faun/The Pale Man), Ariadna Gil (Carmen), Álex Angulo (Doctor Ferreiro), Manolo Solo (Garcés), César Vea (Serrano), Roger Casamajor (Pedro), Pablo Adán (Narrator/Voice of the Faun)

What do you do when your world is terrible? Sometimes the only way to survive is to embrace your own world, even if that world has its own darkness and terrors. Guillermo del Toro’s masterful Gothic fairy tale mixes the terrors of Francoist Spain with one of untrustworthy magic and monstrous spirits and compellingly balances bleak horrors with the chance of hope. Visually stunning, thematically rich and heartbreakingly emotional, Pan’s Labyrinth is a Grimm’s fairy tale bought shockingly up-to-date, a uniquely heartfelt film from a distinctive director.

It’s 1944 in the woods of Spain and the Reds are still fighting their lonely crusade against Franco’s fascists. Captain Vidal (Sergi López) is here to stamp out these rebels and has summoned his heavily pregnant wife Carmen (Ariadna Gil) and twelve-year old step-daughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) to his distant command post so that he can be present at the imminent birth of his son. Ofelia hates the punctilious and coldly obsessive Vidal (rightly so – he’s capable of coldy indifferent but shocking acts of violence) and escapes more-and-more into her fairytale books. One night, she wanders into an old maze and encounters a Faun (Doug Jones), who tells her she is the long-lost princess of the fairy kingdom and must perform three tasks to return home. Ofelia now exists in two worlds: an increasingly Gothic fairy one of and a real one of violence, ruled by her monstrous father-in-law.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a beautifully balanced film of multiple interpretations. It’s never clearly stated whether Ofelia’s fairytale world is ‘real’ of a product of her imagination. It’s clearly a way a scared girl could process real world traumas – the death of her father, the appalling Vidal, the horrors of war around her – with many elements of the fairy world reflecting things happening around her. But on the other hand, the mandrake root the Faun gives her to help heal her sick mother by placing it under her bed has an immediate impact and Ofelia’s magic chalk and the labyrinth itself offer secret doorways that allow her to escape Vidal in the film’s final act (or perhaps a by then disoriented and drugged Vidal is just mistaken). Essentially, you are left to embrace the idea you prefer – much as it is implied Ofelia herself chooses the version of her life she wishes to embrace.

Choosing for yourself and not blindly following orders is one of the key lessons of Pan’s Labyrinth. The ‘real’ world of Franco’s Spain is full of regimented orders to be blindly obeyed without question. In this it has the collaboration of the Church – at Vidal’s dinner-party, a subservient priest self-satisfyingly fills his plate with food while shrugging off concerns of the starving poor – and Fascism echoes Church mantras (one of Vidal’s lieutenants repeats the same propaganda ‘prayer’ to Franco over-and-over again while he hands out the bread ration to the cowed villagers). Franco’s Spain is one of order and regimen, where individuality and choice is stamped out.

And there are echoes of this in Ofelia’s fantasy world. Played with a gentleness, vulnerability and strikingly earnest decency by Ivana Baquero, Ofelia refuses to accept the world must be the way it is (unlike her mother who has sadly accepted it must). But her fairy world, the Faun – expertly portrayed by Doug Jones’ lithe physicality – is a far from gentle guide. Creaking from the wood he is formed from, he’s sinister, mixes vague statements with subtly presented orders and constantly holds information back while presenting Ofelia with tight rules for her tasks. Just as Fascism takes choice away real world, the Faun presents Ofelia with a book that reveals the future (but only one page at a time) and her tasks increasingly demand complete obedience, under the threat of punishment.

This is not a comforting world. Ofelia – who at one-point wears costumes reminiscent of those other famous children in dark, surreal and dangerous fantasy-worlds Alice and Dorothy – confronts a vile toad and, most chillingly, an albino child-eater with eyes in his stigmata hands who lives in a room decorated with nightmare reflections of the real horrors of the 40s (most strikingly a Holocaust-reminiscent pile of children’s shoes). For all its fantastical, it’s also very much a nightmare version of a real-world that could have been dreamed up by a child processing horrors.

Pan’s Labyrinth celebrates individuality and choosing for yourself. Ofelia’s story is one of increasingly taking her own choices: from refusing to accept her mother’s new husband, to escaping into her fantasy world (twisted as it is), to finally outright refusing the increasingly dark instructions of the Faun. It’s in doing this that she can eventually prove herself a true hero, someone who does not accept the established order but can make her own decisions.

This makes her a contrast to Vidal. Truly he is one of cinema’s most loathsome monsters. In a superbly controlled performance by Sergi López, Vidal isn’t repulsive because he is a larger-than-life, sadistic monster but because he is a small, inadequate bully who has controls his small world in order to make himself feel important. Vidal is obsessed with order and detail – introduced tutting at the 15-minute-late arrival of his wife, his office is filled with the gears of the mill and he fetishistically cleans his pristine uniform, shaves himself and repairs his father’s watch. This watch – the only memoir he has of his hero father, who died when he was a baby – is the root of his obsessions, Vidal desperate to become his father and pass on his own toxic legacy of ancestor worship to his son. It’s striking that, as Vidal’s world collapses around him, his clothing and body becomes more and more scarred, bloody and disordered – his external appearance resembling the monster within.

In Vidal’s world everything fits neatly into place, governed by his Fascist ideology. Carmen – a fragile Ariadna Gil, struggling to accommodate to a world of harsh choices – is of interest to him only because of the baby she carries. He operates the mill as a tightly organised regime, in which the rebels are unwanted ghosts in the machine. He uses violence ruthlessly but as a tool, not with sadistic relish. He brutally beats a suspected rebel to death with a bottle with robotic indifference and tortures suspects with a practised patter. To him, everything is justified if it is obeying an order. So much so, that he literally cannot understand the refusal of Dr Ferreiro (in one of the film’s most moving moments) to blindly follow orders, no matter the consequences.

Dr Ferreiro (a beautifully judged performance by Álex Angulo) is one of two figures whose independent thought Vidal is unable to recognise, even when they are under his nose. His maid Mercedes (Maribel Verdú, one of the passionate hearts of the film) is fiercely independent, the sister of the rebel leader and working subtly against Vidal. She forms a bond with the gentle Ofelia while showing that refusing to be part of a blind system is a crucial part of humanity. She also provides possibly one of the most satisfying moments in cinema during a confrontation with Vidal.

Del Toro’s film beautifully balances these fascinating ideas of choice and independence within its brilliantly evocative design. It’s a beautifully shot film, in a gorgeous array of Velazquez-inspired tones, its moody darks and blues gorgeously captured by Guillermo Navarro while its design work is extraordinary in its texture and detail. But it’s a classic because del Toro’s superb creativity and quietly emotional direction. Pan’s Labyrinth makes us really care for this child just as it makes us despise the cruelty of her step-father. Combined with gorgeous design, del Toro’s film truly comes from the heart, a loving, very personal tribute to the power of stories and individual choices. The film is so powerful, you even forget that it opens as it ends, and that we know in our heart-of-hearts how this journey will finish. Nevertheless, Pan’s Labyrinth ends on a note of joy and acceptance so pure, it could only be from the fantasy world not the real one.

Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

Exciting and witty war-time spy thriller, an overlooked work from a master director

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Franchot Tone (Corporal John Bramble), Anne Baxter (Mouche), Akim Tamiroff (Farid), Erich von Stroheim (Field Marshall Erwin Rommel), Peter van Eyck (Lieutenant Schwegler), Fortunio Bonanova (General Sebastiano), Miles Mander (Colonel Fitzhume)

It’s 1942 and the war is not going well for the British. The Germans are on the move in Africa under their ace commander Field Marshal Rommel. A tank drifts through the desert, bumping up and down sand dunes. Inside its crew slump, one dangling from his gun turret, another thrown on-and-off the gearsticks with each dune. It’s hauntingly Wilderish – a ghost tank charging through a never-ending desert – that Corporal John Bramble (Franchot Tone) wakes into, escaping across into the bombed-out Empress of Britain hotel run by panicked Farid (Akim Tamiroff), assisted by British-loathing Frenchwoman Mouche (Anne Baxter). Bramble’s hopes that he might lay low for a few days are thrown into danger when the hotel is requisitioned moments after his arrival by the German army with Rommel (Erich von Stroheim) himself setting up command there. Bramble passes himself off as recently deceased club-footed waiter Davos – only to discover Davos was a German spy and Rommel expects him to help delivery on his masterplan to crush the British.

Five Graves to Cairo is a magisterial juggling game of move and counter-move in which everyone holds tightly their own very specific parts of a greater mystery while trying to learn everyone else’s. Wilder does all this with wit and more than a little tension. Can Bramble keep up his pretence about being Davos while hiding his complete ignorance of Rommel’s masterplan? Will Rommel’s constantly alert, note-taking aide Lt Schwegler (Peter van Eyck) rumble him? The whole film is captured in one of its earliest sequences, as Farid carefully shepherds and blocks the view of Schwegler’s inspection of the foyer of his hotel, to prevent him seeing Bramble hiding behind the desk.

The whole film builds from there as Bramble constantly thinks on his feet, crafting obscure but convincing answers as he improvises wildly. All while limping around in a club-foot shoe and providing the sort of night-and-day waiting service the Germans expect. His improvisation is endless, from distracting a blowhard Italian general to steal his gun, to identifying himself quietly to a captured British officer being wined and dined by the smug Rommel by switching a whisky name chain on a bottle with his dog-tag (then smoothly passing off ‘Bramble’ as a rare spirit to the Italian general). His plans switch fast too, from a vague assassination attempt to being instructed by Miles Mander’s Montgomery-ish officer to uncover the Field Marshal’s schemes.

The Field Marshal himself is the epitome of Prussian arrogance. Played with a preening, puffed-up, Teutonic self-importance by an excellent Erich von Stroheim, Rommel never moves without his feathered swagger stick, pompously cavorting around the hotel, prissily demanding the finest sheets and best room. Far from the later ‘Good German’ image of the General, this Rommel is as snobbishly self-satisfied as a Bond villain, overwhelmingly pleased with his elaborate scheme (which he shrewdly set-up years earlier) and teasingly playing twenty questions with his British prisoners to see if they can work-out his intentions, while manipulating the game so his opponents can’t win. He’s an arrogant, hissable villain we are desperate to see taken down a peg or two.

Equally dislikeable is his whipper-smart aide, played with a thin-politeness by Peter van Eyck that hides his comfort with deception. With these villains as the face of the relentless German military machine, Wilder builds real tension around the importance of Bramble foiling Rommel’s scheme – and makes very clear to us that these ruthless sticklers for rules, certain of their own genius and superiority, will definitely not treat this accidental spy kindly if they catch him.

As Bramble, Franchot Tone does a decent job – although his Transatlantic vowels sound particularly odd when the similarly American Anne Baxter immerses herself in a French accent – even if Bramble himself is less interesting than his situation. A more charismatic actor might perhaps have helped lift Five Graves to Cairo to a higher level – after all it shares more than a few stands of DNA with Casablanca but Tone and Baxter aren’t quite Bogie and Bergman. What Tone does do well is morph swiftly from persona-to-persona, switching from heat-stroke confused soldier to would-be-assassin, to fast-thinking spy with a surprisingly natural ease.

He also builds a rapport with Mouche – Edith Head’s costumes for these two, with their contrasting blacks and stripes, quickly visually link them together – who discovers she hates the German more than she resents the British for abandoning her brother at Dunkirk. Baxter is very good as the real emotional heart of this film, a harsh woman hardened by loss, desperate to do what she can to save her POW brother but who finds a new cause to believe in. Baxter carefully lets her character build in statue from obstacle to reluctant aide to true believer, with real naturalness.

Her development reflects a whole film that uses its single claustrophobic location – nearly the whole film takes place over little more than a day or two in the hotel – to excellent effect, with potentially dangerous reveals lurking around every corner. Not least that the real Davos lies buried under rubble in the basement – not quite fully buried, Wilder’s focus early on Bramble’s orthopaedic show hinting at the vital ‘tell’ later on. Everyone – except perhaps the supremely self-satisfied Rommel – suspects there is more going on than they realise, and Wilder expertly ratchets up the tension through Hitchcockian time-bombs and carefully structured dialogue sequences to keep the audience firmly on the edge of their seats.

It’s makes for a fine caper, a careful riff on then current history that suggests Bramble might just have provided the vital clues to prevent the nefarious Rommel from claiming victory at El Alamein. While Five Graves to Cairo has a high entertainment factor, it’s not quite in the first league of war spy stories. But with entertaining performances – Tamiroff’s sweaty, stammering Farid and Fortunio Bonanova’s hyper-Italian Opera-singing general are also treats – and a real wit balanced with a well-developed tension, it’s a strong early film from a director who would go from strength-to-strength.