Anora (2024)

Superb mix of tragedy, farce and social commentary laugh-out-loud-funny then suddenly deeply moving

Director: Sean Baker

Cast: Mikey Madison (Anora “Ani” Mikheeva), Mark Eydelshteyn (Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov), Yura Borisov (Igor), Karren Karagulian (Toros), Vache Tovmasyan (Garnick), Aleksei Serebryakov (Nikolai Zakharov), Darya Ekamasova (Galina Zakharova), Lindsey Normington (Diamond), Ivy Wolk (Crystal)

Who doesn’t love a Cinderella story? A plucky young woman comes from nothing to find a life of love and riches she never dreamed of is at the heart of dozens of fairy tales. And films for that matter: it’s impossible to not think about Pretty Woman when watching Anora. In fact, you could argue the at-times surprisingly charming, laugh-out-loud funny but cold-eyed realism of Anora is a Pretty Woman corrective, as if Richard Gere woke up a few days later, introduced Julia Roberts to his friends and family and immediately wondered what the hell he had done.

Not just that but Mikey Madison’s beautifully performed force-of-life Ani (real name Anora, but she doesn’t like it) feels far more like a high-end-stripper-and-occasional-sex-worker than Julia Roberts. She’s 24-years-old, living in Brighton Beach and working in a glossy Manhattan strip club. One night the manager asks her to entertain Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the dissolute, immature son of an extraordinarily wealthy Russian oligarch, because she can speak Russian. Ivan is taken with Ani, paying her $15,000 for a week as his girlfriend that peaks (after a hedonistic stay in Las Vegas) in a marriage proposal. Eloping, Ani returns home believing her life has changed forever. That illusion is shattered when Ani’s godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian), and heavies Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan) and hired muscle Igor (Yura Borisov) turn up at their home (really, of course, Ivan’s parent’s home) under strict instructions that the marriage must come to end. Over a long 24 hours of exasperation, farce and slow realisations our Cinderella story collapses.

Anora is a brilliant film, superbly directed by Sean Baker. You’d expect a film of cold-eyed social realism – and there are elements of this in Anora – but it’s also a hugely loveable, charming, surprisingly hilarious and deeply felt film, perfectly paced as its story develops across a series of events that beautifully lead into each other. A lot of its success comes from Mikey Madison’s extraordinary performance, one of those star-making force-of-nature roles where you start off liking her and end up loving her. Madison is warm but prickly and spikey, vulnerable but determined, worldly but naïve, someone who fights her corner to the end but can’t see any change at forming her own future. Madison embodies all this perfectly, switching from wide-eyed naïve delight at her luck, to spitting, incandescent fury when defending her rights, to an increasingly desperate disillusionment mingled with self-disgust as her dreams collapse around her.

Similar to his previous films, Baker presents the world of sex work with understanding and compassion. There is nothing leering about the lens of Anora, even as it opens with a pan (sound tracked to a disco remix of Take That’s Greatest Day) along a row of dancer. Baker understands the professional drudgery of exotic dancing, the hard work and effort needed to give each client the best experience. Ani is a master of ‘put the client first’ patter, her sing-song Brooklyn accent filled with awe at their dull lives, helping her clients believe they are special. What’s striking about Anora is this a world Ani needs to be ‘saved’ from as such – she’s comfortable with her profession, is good at it and understands it’s limits – but it one where she has subconsciously learned her value as a person is directly related to her body and what she is willing to do with it, complex feelings that return at the film’s conclusion with shattering impact.

What she doesn’t truly understand perhaps is people in the long-term. So swept up and impressed with Ivan’s ostentatious wealth, she misses all the clues to his true character. Anyone who still moves around his apartment by letting his feet slide across the floor, who doesn’t know where the water in the house is kept, plays video games obsessively and hurls himself into sex with the rabbit-like intensity of a horny teenager is about a million miles away from the app developer she first imagines he is. Ivan – very well played by Mark Eydelshteyn – might be sweet, excitable and full of joie de vivre, but he’s also staggeringly immature, extremely selfish and barely thinks about anyone other than himself. Or maybe Ani does notice, but she’s so used to being part of a perverse service industry, she assumes this is normal. Ivan may profess to love Ani, but he is the grasping, self-obsession of a spoilt teenager who no-one has ever said no to.

Baker’s care and regard for his characters is beautifully done – in fact what’s striking about Anora is how characters who at first feel peripheral and marginal are organically grow, emerging over time as crucial figures. In fact, what’s striking about it is that it becomes very much a film about class: about the have and have-nots and how all of us – from put-upon fixer to stripper – have more in common with each other than with the super-rich, to whom everyone else are nothing but staff, there to meet their needs. There is only a small degree of difference between the cleaner Ivan teases while she cleans his floors and Ani who he teases while she allows him to get his end away in bed.

This become clear when the film enters it’s hilarious second act, as Ivan’s godfather Toros (a side-splitting performance by Karren Karagulian as man on the verge of a nervous breakdown) can barely hide his resentment at being Ivan’s dogsbody – while still terrified at how his super-powerful parents could ruin Toros’ life in seconds (and clearly wouldn’t think twice about it). Such is their power, Toros leaves his own child’s christening to clean up Ivan’s mess – and its clear he’s been doing this his whole life (his first appearance is easy to miss, ordering Ivan’s drunken friends to get off the sofa at the debauched New Year’s party he throws). Equally good is Vache Tovmasyan as the increasingly bemused Garvik, medicine addled and slowly losing his composure over one never-ending night.

What these characters have in common – along with Yuro Borisov’s Igor, hired muscle like Ani valued only for his physicality – is that to their employers they are less people and more items of furniture or household utensils. Ivan is no different from his tyrannical parents, who may deplore their son’s selfish wastefulness but have never done anything to stop it. Anora’s tragedy (among the comedy) is watching (and Mikey Madison does this beautiful in a series of micro reactions) Ani release only the thinnest slither of affection makes her any different from Ivan’s cleaner. To Ivan, she’s a status symbol – an attractive woman, great in bed who his hangers-on can be impressed by, a tool for rebellion, marrying her the ideal fuck an immature teenager can imagine for the parents he fears and resents.

Baker’s film unfolds all this with astonishing skill, but also an overwhelming energy and joy – and I have to stress again, that Anora’s middle section is hilariously funny, much more so than many conventional comedies – but also an empathy that eventually lands with a devastating and surprising force. Mikey Madison’s extraordinary performance deeply invests in Ani, understanding how her spiky exterior hides a vulnerable interior she rarely exposes. Every performance is outstanding – kudos also to Yuri Borisov who so subtly draws Igor’s quiet decency under his thuggish exterior, that his growing prominence in the film feels completely natural.

Anora is a film that deconstructs the reality of Cinderella stories. But it’s also a film that feels very much about the world today, where all of us have our lives directed and influenced by the super-wealthy in ways we have become so used to, we don’t even notice it anymore. It’s more obvious with strippers, cleaners, fixers and hired muscle. But if Ivan’s parents sank a business, how many families would be drowned in the waves? Under the heartfelt characters, the superbly paced drama, the farce and the emotional moments, Anora captures a universal truth about our modern age that all of us, like Ani, have tried to close our eyes against.

Escape from New York (1981)

B-movie thrills and an epic piece of world building in this very fun cult actioner

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell (Snake Plissken), Lee Van Cleef (Commissioner Bob Hauk), Ernest Borgnine (Cabbie), Donald Pleasance (The President), Isaac Hayes (The Duke), Harry Dean Stanton (Brain), Adrienne Barbeau (Maggie), Tom Atkins (Captain Rehme), Season Hubley (Girl in ChockFull o’ Nuts)

In the 1980s New York was pretty much America’s crime capital, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine an insanely dystopian America of 1997 where Manhattan is turned into a massive jail surrounded by a wall with its population entirely made up of murderous gangs and criminals (sadly without the severed head of the Lady Liberty lying in the middle of the streets). That’s what we get in Escape From New York (great title!). Problem is, it also makes it incredibly hard to get into New York – a real issue when a hijacked Air Force One crashlands there and the President (Donald Pleasence) needs rescuing.

Who ya gonna call? None other than grizzled, scowling, no-nonsense ex-Special Forces legend turned criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell). Plucked from a line of convicts by Commissioner Hauk (Lee Van Cleef), Snake is given a simple offer: fly a glider into Manhattan, find the President and bring him back in 22 hours so he can speak at vital peace conference and in exchange get a pardon. And just to make sure he doesn’t back out? Inject him with explosives that will go off in exactly 22 hours unless Hauk switches them off. Into New York Snake goes, a Mad Max hell under the thumb of kingpin The Duke (Isaac Hayes), with his only allies an eccentric ex-cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) and married couple Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau) and an old (untrustworthy) partner-in-crime Brain (Harry Dean Stanton).

From all this pulp, Carpenter serves up a very entertaining slice of B-movie fun and games, that frequently makes very little narrative sense (by the end relying on hilariously convenient plot developments and off-screen meetings), where the 22-hour countdown seems to alter with as little consistent logic as the shifts between night and day (judging by the sky, at one point it takes Snake well over an hour to take a lift up the World Trade Centre which even in a dystopian hell seems like a long time) and where characters switch allegiances as easily as you and I change socks.

But that hardly matters when Carpenter was so focused on making B-movie fun and use every penny of his tiny budget to maximum effect. Escape From New York is above all a triumph of creative world-building. In broad strokes – the sort of well-built skeleton that leaves the audience wanting to fill in the muscles and skin themselves – it presents a compelling view of an America that has so comprehensively gone-to-shit that a city is now a prison, a forever-war is taking place with both the USSR and China, the President is a corporate stooge (with British accent!) and the whole country is run by a proto-fascist police force. It’s full of neat little touches – not least the computer voice at the Manhattan prisoner processing centre that offers prisoners the chance of voluntarily immediate cremation rather than be chucked into the city – that suggest a panoply of dystopian mess behind it.

The world of Escape From New York is so intriguing, it carries the fairly bog-standard urban warfare against lunatic gangs plot that Carpenter had already mastered with Assault on Precinct 13. Once Snake lands his glider atop the World Trade Centre (for extra un-intentional retrospective impact, hijackers also fly Air Force One into a couple of Manhattan skyscrapers), truthfully there isn’t much in terms of the action that we haven’t seen before. Shoot-outs on streets lined with trashed cars and graffiti, fisticuffs in abandoned train stations and boxing ring match-ups between Snake and a giant bruiser armed with a baseball bat full of nails. Most of the film is basically a hide-and-seek cat-and-mouse chase. Eccentrically presented stuff, but all fairly run-on-the-mill.

What makes it work is that post-apocalyptic mystique and Carpenter’s determination to make every shot count. Not least because the budget only stretched to about a day’s filming in New York (probably why both sequences atop the World Trade Centre illogically take place at nighttime). The rest was shot in a burnt-out district of St Louis. There is a great deal of demented imagination that has gone into the design of the film, not least the cyber-punk barminess of the gang costumes, from the Duke’s Napoleonesque shoulder braids to the punk-rocker scuzziness of his number two Romero (an eye-catching performance of bizarre oddness from Frank Doubleday).

It helps when you have some committed performances, not least from Kurt Russell as ultimate man’s-man maverick Snake Plissken. Strange to think now that Russell, best known for Disney work, was seen as an odd choice for the bitter, shoulder-chipped, ruthless Snake. But it’s a role he embraces whole-heartedly, making Snake both a selfish guy who literally barely cares about anything other than himself and the sort of ideal tough-as-nails maverick who gets things done that we all kind of want to be. He’s also – from his eyepatch to his grizzled monosyllabic dialogue to his unveiled contempt for all the double-dealers and bullies he meets – effortlessly cool.

Russell sets a lot of the tone for the movie, his low-key scowl allowing a lot of the rest of the cast to cut loose in eccentric roles. Ernest Borgnine overflows with cheery New York patter, which doesn’t even slow down when he lights a Molotov cocktail to ward off marauding gang-members. Harry Dean Stanton weasels as a constantly side-shifting guy we are assured is a genius (despite all evidence to the contrary). Donald Pleasance has a whale of a time as an uncharismatic functionary who, it becomes clear, doesn’t care about anyone other than himself. Best of all, Lee Van Cleef (perhaps flattered that Russell seem to be homaging his Spaghetti Western roles) smirks, gloats and scowls as a relentlessly ends-rather-than-means boss.

Escape From New York barrels along to a blackly comic ending (in which our pissed off maverick hero potentially scuppers a major peace conference out of a fit of resentful pique). It’s intriguing world-building riffs wonderfully on Mad Max (in fact, you could argue that later Mad Max films basically riff of Escape From New York) and while its action is fairly routine, it’s acted and directed with huge verve and fun. The sort of thing you call a guilty pleasure.

Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

Thoughtful, sensitive, respectful and insightful war-movie – one of Eastwood’s best

Director: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Ken Watanabe (General Tadamichi Kuribayashi), Kazunari Ninomiya Private Saigo), Tsuyoshi Ihara (Lt Colonel Baron Takeichi Nishi), Ryō Kase (Private Shimizu), Shidō Nakamura (Lt Ito), Hiroshi Watanabe (Lt Fujita), Takumi Bando (Captain Tanida), Yuki Matsuzaki (Private Nozaki), Takashi Yamaguchi (Private Kashiwara), Eijiro Ozaki (Lt Okubo)

Eastwood’s original plan for his Iwo Jima epic was to tell the story from both perspectives, like a sort of Tora, Tora, Tora on the beaches. But, as the amount of story expanded and expanded, he decided to make two films (it helps being a Hollywood Legend when you change your mind like this). The American story would be covered in the melancholic-but-traditional Flags of Our Fathers, focusing on the soldiers who rose that famous flag on the peak of Mount Suribachi. For the Japanese story, Eastwood would do something more daring: tell the story in Japanese, entirely from their perspective presenting their military culture not as wicked or misguided but as a legitimate mantra as prone to extremes as the American one.

Letters From Iwo Jima is equally melancholic as its partner film, helped by its elegiac music score from Michael Stevens and Kyle Eastwood. It’s shot in a coldly austere, sepia-toned monochrome – there is barely any colour in it – and large chunks of it play out in gloomy subterranean quietness where the only sound of war is the artillery ground-pounding above the entrenched Japanese soldiers. This is the apogee of Eastwood’s moody, restrained style – perhaps he recognised and admired the reserve and formality in Japanese culture. Letters From Iwo Jima seems at first unfussy and objective so it’s a surprise how affecting and humane it becomes, all while seeing the virtues and deep flaws in a military system where the individual mattered a lot less than the whole.

Iwo Jima was a brutal fight to the death over an island less than 12 mi², a grey rock in the Pacific that’s only value was as an air strip for launching bombing raids on mainland Japan. Over 110,000 American soldiers took on 20,000 Japanese defenders in a campaign expected to last just a few days, but dragged out over a punishing 36. The relentless Japanese defence resulted in over 25,000 American casualties and c. 90% fatalities for the Japanese. Letters From Iwo Jima explores the mentality of an army that almost completely accepted (from commanding officers down to junior privates) their destiny, no their duty, was to not survive the island’s defence.

The defence’s success is due to the skilled command of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, a remarkable, restrained performance of relentless determination mixed with deep humanity from Ken Watanabe (unfairly snubbed at the Oscars). Kuribayashi over-rules his senior officers desire for a bayonet charge against the overwhelming American landing forces on the beaches. He knows this traditional attack would lead to suicidal instant defeat for the out-numbered, out-gunned Japanese. Instead Kuribayashi orders a tunnel network built across the island, to allow hit-and-run attacks designed to inflict maximum casualties. Rather than committing suicide at their posts on defeat, soldiers were ordered to withdraw from indefensible positions to continue the fight for as long as possible.

This strategic defence-in-depth strategy is denounced by several of his senior officers as either defeatism or American-sympathy. Kuribayashi knows victory is impossible – he arrives on the island writing a letter to his wife stating he will not live to see her again. But he also knows his tactic is the only way to slow down the American juggernaut. In his opinion, protecting Japan from air attack for a few more weeks is worth sacrificing his and all the lives of the 20,000 men under his command.

Kuribayashi respects Americans – flashbacks show his happiness in the 30s as a military liaison in California, his easy friendships with American officers and desire for co-operation with the USA. But in the same scene he unquestioningly (though with a warm smile) says he will serve his country no matter what. He’s a man of principle and honour, and even if he doesn’t agree with the war, he is for Japan right-or-wrong and will not think twice about giving his life in its service. This attitude soaks through the Japanese soldiers, and Letters From Iwo Jima presents it largely without moral judgement. There are shocking moments where defeated soldiers in Suribachi, weep as they looks at photos of their loved ones while clasping live grenades to their chest so that they may die at their post rather than live with the shame of failing their country. But, the film subtly asks, how different is this from the self-sacrifice countless American war films have (rightly) praised in their soldiers?

The difference is cultural. Very few American soldiers would choose suicide in a cave rather than the thought of confronting their families as defeated men. For Japanese soldiers, this is the ultimate strength, a view shared not just by incompetent, trigger-happy bullies like Captain Ito but right up to Kuribayashi himself who never considers for a moment surrender and living, choosing a suicidal night attack with his last soldiers and suicide on the last piece of earth on Iwo Jima that could still be just about considered Japanese. That’s an institutional expectation of total self-sacrifice, even when the sacrifice is completely symbolic, that has no real comparison in Western militaries.

The soldiers – as we hear in their letters, read to us in voiceover – love their families and they relate to a wounded GI from Oklahoma who talks about his mother (a slightly twee moment in another wise subtle film), but they also believe that the whole (Japan) is far more important than the individual (themselves). Trees should always be sacrificed to slow the fire and protect the forest. Letters From Iwo Jima may show the dangerous excesses this produces in the most fanatical, but doesn’t denounce this extreme penchant for sacrifice or give a clumsy moment of realisation that it is inherently ‘wrong’. Neither does it present Western, individual ideals as superior (indeed the few American soldiers seen are a mixed bag, as much prone to vengeful violence as their opponents).

Letters From Iwo Jima follows Private Saigo (very well played with a bewildered sense of fear and growing desire to live by Kazunari Ninomiya), the character closest to acting as a criticism of the Japanese mindset. A baker, who wants to see his wife and new-born child, he doesn’t really want to die on the island, but never questions it is his duty to do so. And his objections to suicidal orders or kamikaze attacks isn’t grounded in their senselessness but that they run contrary to Kuribayashi’s wider orders. Even our most relatable (to Western eyes) character, one who eventually accepts the idea of surrender when all is lost, is still part of the same culture where placing your own needs and desires before the whole is considered deeply shameful.

Perhaps this thoughtful, non-judgemental exploration of Japanese culture is why Letters From Iwo Jima (unusually for American war films) did very strong business in Japan. Unlike the eventual death cult of Nazism (see the exceptional Downfall), where suicide came from bitter pride and fear, here it’s the ultimate, terrible-but-logical outcome for a mentality that turned a small island into a respected world power. It’s not presented as a freakish aberration or some sort of national genetic character flaw: it’s in many ways a sort of perverse nobility which has, like all noble systems, advocates who are broad-minded and empathetic and those who are prejudiced and fanatical. Letters From Iwo Jima’s strength is it never presents it as inherently evil, rather a choice with good and bad outcomes.

Eastwood’s superbly directed film, perhaps one of his finest, is full of such thoughtful, unjudgmental reflections on duty and service and what loyalties to something larger than ourselves drive us to do. Shot with an austere, haunting chill and superbly played by a faultless cast, Letters From Iwo Jima is an earnest, mature piece of work and a quite extraordinarily unique war film.

Juggernaut (1974)

Disaster film masquerading as a sort of state-of-the-nation political satire of 70s Britain

Director: Richard Lester

Cast: Richard Harris (Lt Com Anthony Fallon), Omar Sharif (Captain Alex Brunel), David Hemmings (Charlie Braddock), Anthony Hopkins (Supt John McLeod), Shirley Knight (Barbara Bannister), Ian Holm (Nicholas Porter), Clifton James (Corrigan), Roy Kinnear (Social Director Curtain), Caroline Mortimer (Susan McLeod), Mark Burns (Hollingsworth), John Stride (Hughes), Freddie Jones (Sidney Buckland), Julian Glover (Commander Marder), Cyril Cusack (O’Neil), Michael Hordern (Baker)

Based on an event that almost happened – a bomb threat against the QE2 that led to a bomb disposal team parachuting onto the ship at sea, only to discover it was a haux – Juggernaut was a popular 70s thriller that today looks surprisingly dry. The ship here is the SS Britannic, caught in stormy seas. A calm man calls the firm’s director (Ian Holm) and to state he’s placed multiple high explosives onboard. Bomb disposal expert Anthony Fallon (Richard Harris) and his crew fly to the ship, captained by Alex Brunel (Omar Sharif), to try and disarm the bombs while Superintendent John McLeod (Anthony Hopkins) – whose family, naturally, is onboard – races against time to find the bomber.

Juggernaut can feel as sluggish as the cruise liner it’s set on, with large chunks feeling like they are being played for surprisingly low stakes. The passengers feel strangely impassive about their imminent deaths. When a member of the bomb disposal crew drowns on arrival no one seems to care. There is a strangely sombre mood everywhere, a general air of misery that seems in place long before the bombs are even announced. The police investigation is carried out by a team that thinks its hopeless and the captain retreats to his cabin to fiddle with executive desk toys.

Then you realise. This isn’t The Towering Inferno full of can-do action. This is a British disaster film, which is really about the depressing, dreary, dead-end feeling a lot of people in Britain had about their country (seemingly permanently in the grip of strikes, economic depression and political crisis) throughout the 70s. Juggernaut reflects this completely, the ship a weird state-of-the-nation place where even a bomb threat can’t shake the general feeling of grim acceptance that life doesn’t get any better than this, everyone and everything in charge is useless, so best get used to it.

Richard Lester appropriately then directs events in a very distanced way – perhaps he also wanted to put behind him his Hellzapoppin’ style that bought him fame and success with the Beatles. Most of the moments of action and tension are presented in a deliberately prosaic style (the culmination of the film happens in a distant long-shot with the final dialogue mumbled quietly) with a journalistic lens (there are obvious debts to Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal in its forensic laying out of procedure, but with that film’s pace or urgency carefully compromised, despite the clock ticking down). As part of this, the characters become devoid of exactly that – character.

Juggernaut actually is more about taking rebellious swings at British politics than solving a crisis. The British government – embodied by a smugly self-satisfied John Stride’s three-piece-suit apparatchik – makes it quite clear the 1,200 souls on the Britannic are expendable if the cost compromises the government. Juggernaut has more discussion of government subsidies than every other disaster film alive. The navy is run by fusty rules-bound types (interestingly, the private enterprise company is presented much more favourably – Holm, as its representative, is principled, decent and the only guy who really cares about the passengers). The bomber is a disillusioned former government worker, shafted on retirement by the cheapskate MOD (he even asks for an embarrassingly small amount of money). Fallon, in his cynical style, constantly bemoans how nothing in the country works and how useless his bosses are.

Juggernaut flings together an American style disaster and action plot, with a kitchen-sink drama about British society. While its interesting, personally I feel mashing these two genres together creates a slow, dry action-adventure and a shallow, social commentary. The tone seems to have confused some of the actors: Omar Sharif seems literally all-at-sea. A potential romance with Shirley Knight’s character deliberately goes nowhere – the film so takes the unconventional route with plots likes this that you state to wonder why on earth Knight even agreed to do it). Anthony Hopkins permanently feels like his attention is elsewhere. The smaller roles tend to come out best: Stride’s uncaring official, Roshan Seth as waiter who pretends to speak less English than he does (a neat social commentary on cultural expectations in the 70s), Michael Hordern in a scuzzy cameo as a bomb expert – all of them make more impact.

Lester does treat himself to several amusing background events. A nameless passenger who doesn’t let the ship’s imminent explosion get in the way of his exercise regime (he runs into almost every single main character at some point). Throw-away gags (very much in the style of The Three Musketeers) are common, such as market stall owner turning to place something on his stall, not noticing it’s been sent flying by a speeding police car or a flustered Holm feeding Rice Krispies to his kid then his dog. You could make the surrealist argument the real hero is Roy Kinnear’s entertainment officer, relentlessly continuing the good cheer. From umpiring half-hearted badminton matches in a squall to jollying the passengers through a fancy dress party that could also be their last evening on earth, Officer Curtain is determined ‘civilisation must be preserved’. Is there a better vision of what it felt like living in 70s Britain, clinging to the fading memory of the Blitz spirit?

Richard Harris – in a neat and no-doubt-boozy pairing with David Hemmings – is the only one of the leads seemingly allowed to inject life in this, or able to marry up the counter-culture harrumphing and tense wire-cutting action in a performance of amusing cynicism and cocky pride. Juggernaut – for all it boils down to our maverick hero having to choose between the red and blue wire – is actually fairly detailed (and praised by experts) on the process and teamwork of bomb disposal, even if Harris’ less-than-steady hands are not what I would want standing between me and death.

Away from him though Juggernaut is a curiously unhurried, slow and sometimes-less-than-gripping thriller that really shines a light on the slightly run-down, depressed and bewildering place Britain was to many people in the 70s. A land it seems where everything felt a bit hopeless and pointless and nothing seemed to work – except the bombs used to blow the place up. Expect that and you’ll find stuff to enjoy: expect The Towering Inferno and you are in for a disappointment.

The Substance (2024)

Twisted body horror isn’t quite the feminist statement it thinks it is, but still a unique film

Director: Coralie Fargeat

Cast: Demi Moore (Elizabeth Sparkle), Margaret Qualley (Sue), Dennis Quaid (Harvey), Edward Hamilton (Fred), Gore Abrams (Oliver), Oscar Lesage (Troy), Christian Erickson (Man at diner)

Getting old in Hollywood is not kind. Particularly for women. Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a big star of the 90s, now eeks out a living as exercise queen for a daytime TV show. But TV exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid) decides people don’t want to watch a woman in her 50s and unceremoniously gives her the boot. Fearing a life of lonely irrelevance, miles from the limelight, Elizabeth accepts an invitation to try ‘The Substance’. This black-market drug creates a ‘younger, more beautiful, more perfect’ version of you – birthed from your spine. Taking the drug, Elizabeth spawns Sue (Margaret Qualley), a 20s version of herself who promptly lands her old job on the exercise show.

The two must swop places every week, one living their life (either in obscurity or vicariously enjoying much-lusted after career success) the other lying comatose on the bathroom floor. At first the balance works, but they soon grow to resent each other: Sue despises Elizabeth’s self-loathing bitterness while Elizabeth becomes consumed with envy at Sue’s hedonistic success. Quickly the balanced life between the two collapses, leading to inevitable disaster.

The Substance is one of those films you can pretty much guarantee people will remember about 2024. Pretty much everything in it is dialled up to eleven, a crazy mix of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Cronenberg-body horror (particularly The Fly) by way of David Lynch. Fargeat shoots it with a deliberate grindhouse intensity, revelling in the vast amounts of icky body horror, gallons of blood and guts, often filmed in a mix of dream-like drifting and trashy exploitation.

It’s a sharply directed, extremely intense film from Coralie Fargeat (who also scripts), punchy, vicious and darkly hilarious. It’s also been shot to be almost as uncomfortable to watch as possible. The camerawork is frequently disjointed, full of disconcerting jerky close-up. Nightmare Lynch-style dream horror images pop-up, along with haunting Mulholland Dr style floating heads and Kubrickian homages. Every moment of body horror is accompanied with revolting, squelching sound-effects. You’ve rarely seen anything as intensely, bizarrely OTT as this, the film carefully designed to get audiences either screaming “fucking hell!” or hiding their eyes behind their popcorn.

The film’s most successful moments are these moments of shocking body horror. Created from a host of ingenious practical effects (The Substance surely is destined for a make-up Oscar), the film superbly creates everything from green-fluid soaked birthing scenes to the grim disintegration of various body parts that slowly ages Demi Moore into a wizened babushka to the final hellish Elephant Man by way of the The Fly inspired ending. It’s superbly done, deeply unsettling, but blackly entertaining in its extremity. And The Substance is incredibly extreme, pulling absolutely no punches in this blood-soaked, Angela Carteresque fairy-tale horror.

Fargeat draws an extremely committed performances from Demi Moore, given the sort of acting challenge she never got when she was the biggest star in Hollywood, playing a woman so consumed with ingrained self-loathing and disgust (having so completely swallowed the ideology that your personal value is directly connected to your appearance) that she would rather live as a recluse in the shadow of another version of herself than build a new life. There is an extraordinary scene where a panic stricken Elizabeth prepares for a date with an old schoolfriend (possibly her last chance at a normal life) but is so consumed by self-loathing and doubt about her appearance (painfully ironic, since she of course looks great) that she goes through multiple attempts at make-up up in the movie, each time rubbing it off with such increasing fury that by the end she’s virtually sand-papering her face as if trying to erase herself from existence.

Just as fine is Margaret Qualley as the ‘perfect’ version of Elizabeth, but who has just the same self-loathing and insecurity as the original. It’s a similarly committed performance by Qualley, a carefully studied, surprisingly vulnerable performance while also being ruthlessly ambitious and self-indulgent, which embraces the hyper-sexualised expectations of young women in Hollywood. Dennis Quaid also throws in a fun cameo as a lasciviously camp, OTT executive full of ruthless, heartless bonhomie who sees women only as window-dressing for perverts. After all it’s an industry that forgets: from the opening montage of Elizabeth’s Hollywood star going from eagerly photographed to forgotten, through to the insultingly trivial gift stuffed in her hands as she is dismissed.

But The Substance’s satire is often rather forced and obvious (right down to Quaid’s exec being called Harvey). It feels like it misses a trick by having its only female character being a woman who has so swallowed the ageist views of Hollywood, she literally can’t imagine questioning it. So much so, her clone equally embraces life as a sex object. While The Substance invites us to understand the poison of this world independently, there is virtually no commentary on the unjust sexism within the film. In fact, The Substance so echoes the leering camera angles and pervy shots of the worst kinds of sexist cinema that sometimes it’s a bit hard to see it as satire and (as the camera stares at Qualley’s butt or down her top) more as just reality.

At no point do Elizabeth or Sue make any form of realisation about how they have been indoctrinated to only understand themselves as being worth something so long as they look like a pin-up. While The Picture of Dorian Gray understood the temptations of a selfish hedonism even when we know its wrong and The Fly was all about the damaging impact of ambition, for all its pointed smirking fun The Substance is at heart more of a pulpy gore-show revelling in extreme than a sort of social satire.

In fact the more you watch The Substance the more you think it’s real inspiration is Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and the ‘hag-horror’ of the 60s. A star name of yesteryear, takes on a role that riffs on their loss of youth and beauty, throwing them into an ever more twisted tale of obsession and revenge. You could argue The Substance trusts us to see for ourselves that all this rampant sexism is wrong: but you could also quite happily watch the film and assume it was Elizabeth’s vanity that caused all the problems, not the system that inoculated it in her.

There is another version of The Substance that could match its pulpy love of horror thrills with a bit more of an insightful commentary on gender politics. But the fact the film ends in an explosion of blood that makes The Shining look positively restrained (a sequence that goes on too long in an overlong film), you suspect its real heart is actually in creating shocking images rather than really exploring the issues it wants you to think it is addressing.

Small Things Like These (2024)

Profoundly sad film of the impact of small acts, with a soul-searching lead performance

Director: Tim Mielants

Cast: Cillian Murphy (Bill Furlong), Eileen Walsh (Eileen Furlong), Michelle Fairley (Mrs Wilson), Emily Watson (Sister Mary), Clare Dunne (Sister Carmel), Helen Behan (Mrs Kehoe), Zara Devlin (Sarah), Mark McKenna (Ned), Agnes O’Casey (Sarah Furlong)

Sometimes the only hope for change, is that the balance of small acts of kindness outweighs the mass of indifference and blind-eye-turning. Claire Keegan’s acclaimed novella is about exactly such a moment. In the small town of New Ross, Wexford, just before Christmas in 1985, coal merchant Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) works hard to provide for his family and look out for those around him. Bill is struggling with insomnia, haunted by memories of his mother’s (Agnes O’Casey) death when he was a boy. One day he witnesses something unsettling at the local convent: a young woman (Zara Devlin) begging not to be left there. A few days later he arrives at dawn to find her locked in the coal shed. The Mother Superior (Emily Watson) assures him it is nothing to worry about and sends him on his way with a giant tip. But Bill can feel in his bones something is not right.

Small Things Like These is a sombre investigation of how an appalling scandal like the Magdalene Laundries could continue for years. The convent’s influence touches every inch of the town. Social life revolves around the Church and even organise the town’s Christmas lights. They run the school – with the Mother Superior heavily implying Bill’s actions will have a profound impact on his children’s educational prospects – and they are treated with awed deference from everyone. You slowly realise many people know things are not right at the Convent – but no one wants to rock the boat (Bill’s wife even begs him not to and the pub landlady warns him to put his own family first).

In a world like this, bad things flourish because people don’t want to put themselves and their loved ones at risk. People must hear the wailing of babies from the convent and decide to keep walking. It’s not just the convent: New Ross is full of people looking the other way to poverty and misfortune. Bill quietly does his best to help people – a generous Christmas bonus for his workers, a handful of whatever change he has to a young boy walking home alone – but even he can only look on in slack-jawed sorrow when he sees a shoeless child in the middle of the night drinking from a cat’s bowl.

Mielant’s film brilliantly captures not only the drab, gloomy atmosphere of this poor Irish town – every shot is soaking in shades of grey, brown and coal dust black – but also the grim sense of things constantly being watched passively from a distance. The film is awash of shots that frame events through doorways or at a distance, be it from across the street or in mirrors or reflections. Small Things Like These is an oppressive, claustrophobic film, largely taking place in dusk or night-time darkness, where things go unspoken and unconfronted.

The burden of inaction has had a huge impact on Bill, in a mesmerising performance by Cillian Murphy. Quiet, awkward and shy, Murphy makes Bill weighed down by an impossible burden of sadness. Large chunks of the film simply allow us to study Murphy’s face, and few actors can convey inner turmoil as beautifully as Murphy can. You feel there is a poet’s soul buried in Bill, in Murphy’s eyes haunted with an impossible melancholia: Murphy brilliantly embodies a quiet, decent man who knows the world isn’t right but is deeply torn about what he can do about it, while haunted by his own lingering childhood pain at witnessing his mother’s death and never knowing his father.

It’s interesting that this past is one of the most brightly filmed parts of Small Things Like These. Bill’s natural empathy towards the young woman he encounters at the convent – and his desire to care and provide for his own family – is rooted in his own past. Growing up without a father, the child of the maid of a wealthy family, we realise it is only due to an act of decency that Bill’s life developed as it did. As a single, unmarried woman, his mother could easily have ended up in the Magdalene Laundries herself, with Bill taken at birth to be fostered by strangers. It’s only the kindness of her employer (a tender Michelle Fairley) that saved him – though Bill still grew up bullied and mocked for his illegitimacy.

Perhaps Bill realises more the lucky escape he had, when confronted by Emily Watson’s chillingly authoritarian (under a mask of genial indulgence) Mother Superior. What would his life have been like if his mother had been crushed by someone like this fierce woman, resolute in her self-righteousness? Bill’s shame and guilt is superbly conveyed by Murphy as he leaves with a previously disputed bill settled in full (and then some) and a promise of future favours to come. The message is clear: this is how the world works and Bill should get with the programme.

That’s how wicked deeds flourish among decent people. Small Things Like These may spin an old-fashioned Edmund-Burke-inspired line, but it’s hard not to argue with its honesty, conviction and the air of impossible sadness that drips from every frame of it. At points it’s decision to leave so much unspoken does create more ambiguity than I think it intends. In particular, the music choices for some flashbacks imply shocking revelations that never arrive. Which are in fact utterly counter to the film’s eventual, slightly open-ended, reveal of Bill’s past (contrary to the more explicit book) but this a refreshingly quiet, thoughtful and meditative film (with a brilliant, grief-stricken lead performance) – that in its gentle way carries real emotional force but leaves you feeling hopeful.

Benediction (2021)

Davies’ final film is a beautifully made, deeply sad, exploration of the long-term impact of trauma

Director: Terence Davies

Cast: Jack Lowden (Siegfried Sassoon), Peter Capaldi (Older Siegfried Sassoon), Simon Russell Beale (Robbie Ross), Jeremy Irvine (Ivor Novello), Kate Phillips (Hester Gatty), Gemma Jones (Older Hester Gatty), Ben Daniels (Dr Rivers), Calam Lynch (Stephen Tennant), Anton Lesser (Older Stephen Tennant), Tom Blyth (Glen Byam Shaw), Matthew Tennyson (Wilfred Owen), Geraldine James (Theresa Thornycroft), Richard Goulding (George Sassoon), Lia Williams (Edith Sitwell), Julian Sands (Chief Medical Officer)

Few generations carried scars as deep as that which saw millions of their fellows mown down in the endless bloody slaughter of World War One. For us, whatever understanding of the horrors of that conflict we have is often filtered through the war poets, who fought in unimaginable conditions. Terence Davies’ final film explores the life of Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden, ageing into Peter Capaldi) whose life never escaped the shadow of those terrible sights and awful losses.

Benediction is a sombre, mellow, deeply sad portrait of a man who spent a lifetime searching for something, anything to fill the void the war had left in him. Following Sassoon’s life in a series of tableaux-style scenes that mix poetry reading, period music, news footage with flash-forwards to the tetchy, weary older man he will become, it’s a sad, reflective work that presents memory as a sort of prison that consigns everyone to a life sentence. Davies catches this beautifully in his stately, melancholic film where survival guilt goes hand in hand with bitter regret at missed opportunities.

It opens with Sassoon’s protest against the war – denouncing its content from his first-hand experience. Saved from the possibility of a firing squad by influential friends (chief among them, Simon Russell Beale’s good-natured Robbie Ross) Sassoon is dispatched to an Edinburgh military hospital to “recuperate”. There he meets and falls in love with the sensitive, shy poet Wilfrid Owen (Matthew Tennyson), a love he is scared to confess. After Owen is killed, Sassoon commits himself to a series of romantic relationships with selfish, bitchy men including Ivor Novello (a marvellously supercilious Jeremy Irvine, whose eyes are stone cold) and the shallow, vain Stephen Tennent (Calam Lynch, full of Bright Young Thing smugness, turning into a lonely, tragic Anton Lesser). As an older man, he converts to Catholicism and struggles to understand his son George (Richard Goulding).

Davies’ film posits a Sassoon who never recovered from grief at the death of Wilfrid Owen and could never truly forgive himself for being too timid to express his feelings. Davies films Sassoon and Owen in scenes that sing of unspoken intimacy, from an overhead shot of a swimming pool dip that feels like a pirouette, to the matching body language they exhibit while sitting watching a variety show at the hospital. They laugh and dance together, but at parting Sassoon cannot move himself beyond a tightly clasped handshake and a whispered urge to stay a few minutes longer.

In discussions with his doctor and friend Rivers (a lovely tender cameo from Ben Daniels), Sassoon tearfully talks of his fear of expressing his own emotions. Perhaps this, coupled with his self-blame, is why Sassoon placed himself in so many relationships with such transparently flamboyant shits? Davies certainly seems to suggest so: Sassoon had less fear of “being himself” when he was with arrogantly confident men like Novello and Tennant. Did he also, the film suggests, feel so crippled with regret and survivor guilt, that he couldn’t believe himself worthy of the love of gentle, decent men, such as the Owen-like Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth).

Sassoon becomes a man who can never fully escape the never-ending hurt of memories. Even as an older man, Davies shows Capaldi’s Sassoon sitting in his garden, the background replaced by news footage of slaughter in the trenches. It’s mixed in with the shame Sassoon felt at his “stand” against the war being, in the end, a moment that changed nothing. Davies further paints his poetry as declining post-war, as if parts of his creative life never survived the shocks he experienced.

And always he hopes something might make him whole again. Sassoon races through these false dawns during the film: relationships with men, marriage to Hetty (Kate Phillips as the younger Hetty is nearly as oppressed with unspoken sadness as Sassoon), the birth of his son – all fail to deliver. So as an older man – in a neat CGI transition during a 360 camera move – Davies transforms Lowden to Capaldi as he tries Catholicism (there is another wonderful cut that takes us from young Sassoon’s silver military cross being dropped into a river, that transitions into the grey-suited older Sassoon lying in a crucifix position on the floor of a church).

But the tragedy of Benediction – and there is no denying it’s a deeply sad and even slightly depressing film – is none of these attempts fill his soul. The older Sassoon – sharp, prickly and with a stare that goes on and on from Capaldi – snaps at things he doesn’t understand, cruelly dismisses the older Tennant and bitterly complains at the lack of recognition his later work received. He’s a man desperate for companionship, but comfortable only on his own.

It’s particularly sad having seen the brighter, passionate and warm man he was. Much of Benediction succeeds due to an exceptional performance by Jack Lowden. Lowden brilliantly conveys Sassoon’s lingering depression and loss under the surface of every interaction. The cheery wit that covers the self-loathing that leads him into destructive relationships and painful situations is as well captured as the self-deceiving optimism he had that everything could be different. Lowden ends the film with an extraordinary emotional moment – filmed in tight one-shot by Davies – where we see, on the last day of the war, his impossible burdens lead him to a single, quiet, emotional outburst of the vast reams of pain that then continued to burn inside him for the rest of his life.

Benediction is about guilt, loss, regret and denying yourself opportunities at happiness and joy through an internal determination that it is not for you. There is something profoundly personal in this – Sassoon’s life in this film, mirroring many of the regrets Davies spoke of in his own life – a fact increased by the heartfelt, gentle construction of the film with its melancholic air and rich sense of empathy for its subject. As a final work, it’s a fitting tribute to both the poet and its director.

The Fallen Idol (1948)

Brilliant thriller about how hard the world is for a child to understand

Director: Carol Reed

Cast: Ralph Richardson (Baines), Michèle Morgan (Julie), Sonia Dresdel (Mrs Baines), Bobby Henrey (Philippe), Denis O’Dea (Chief Inspector Crowe), Jack Hawkins (Detective Amos), Walter Fitzgerald (Dr Fenton), Dandy Nichols (Mrs Patterson), Geoffrey Keen (Detective Inspector Davis), Bernard Lee (Inspector Hart), Dora Bryan (Rose), Karel Stepanek (First Secretary), Torin Thatcher (Constable)

We’ve all had heroes we worship haven’t we? Few hero worships burn as brightly as a child’s. Eight-year-old Philippe (Bobby Henrey), son of a foreign ambassador in London, is awe-struck by the embassies English butler Baines (Ralph Richardson), a kind, decent man with a twinkle in his eye who enjoys spinning stories for Phil about his exciting life in India. The highlight of Phil’s day is spending time in Baines’ parlour. For Baines though, his highlights are the snatched moments of release from his domineering, unloving wife (a masterfully tough-to-like Sonia Dresdel) that he spends with embassy secretary Julie (Michèle Morgan).

The affair is obvious to us in seconds. But Phil – from whose perspective we see large amounts (but, crucially, not all) of the film play-out – is of course oblivious, readily accepting Baines awkward assurance Julie is just his niece. The Fallen Idol – the middle film in Reed’s astonishingly high-quality run of films that includes Odd Man Out and The Third Man – is a brilliantly tense, very moving story of how adrift children feel in the adult world, how easily they misinterpret signals and misread social cues. Superbly filmed, with a wonderful script by Graham Greene (from his own novel) it’s a masterclass in how the simplest situation can lead to the most intense drama.

It revolves around a fatal trap for Baines. Believing his wife is away for the weekend (she has in fact concealed herself in the embassy mansion), Baines treats himself to a day and night with Julie. Discovered, the confrontation leads to Mrs Baines dead at the bottom of the stairs. The argument is partially witnessed by Phil – but crucially, only glimpses of it as he runs down the exterior fire escape, peering in through windows as he goes – but in full by the viewer. It’s clearly a terrible accident, taking place after Baines had left. But Phil is convinced he has witnessed a murder – and so passionate is his hero worship of Baines (and loathing of Mrs Baines), he decides to do everything he can to protect the butler.

The genius of Reed’s The Fallen Idol is that we are always know more than any of the characters. Just as we can tell immediately from witnessing Baines and Julie’s whispered, Brief Encounter-ish meeting in a London coffee shop that they are in the midst of a passionate affair, so we also know much faster than any character that Mrs Baines is still in the house and that her death is a clumsy accident. We can also see, in ways Phil cannot, that his desperate lies only undermine Baines honest version of events. We know all the details well ahead of the police, watching them misinterpret clues and behaviour in the worst possible light. The entire film shows how damning circumstances and coincidences can fold up into a vice-like trap from which there is almost no escape.

The Fallen Idol is a film awash with lies. In many ways it’s a heartbreaking reveal of how quickly the compromises and selfishness of the adult world corrupts the child’s. At the heart of these lies is Baines himself. The role is beautifully played by Ralph Richardson, utilising his eccentric cuddliness to exceptional effect, but also perfectly capturing the selfishness, weakness and cowardice of Baines. Because Baines is a liar – not only to his wife, but also to Julie (he spectacularly lacks the guts to ask his wife for a divorce, despite what he tells Julie) and, walking Phil back after he has crashed Baines’ tea-time meeting with Julie, urgently instructs him to lie if he is ever asked about what happened that afternoon. Baines doubles down on his duplicity by using the unwitting Phil as a shield to cover a zoo-trip date with Julie, and even his adventure stories to Phil are all slightly self-aggrandizing tall tales.

One of the toughest things about The Fallen Idol is that hero-worship is a confused one-way street, especially when children are involved. Baines is fond of Phil but often treats him with distracted affection out-of-kilter with the earnest, devoted adoration Phil pours on him. This devotion from Phil is so great, even his belief that his hero is a murderer makes no impact on him. Having taken his idol’s lessons to heart, about what to do when questioned about anything to do with Julie, Phil lies and lies to the investigating officers, corrupting himself (he believes, after all, he is helping a killer) while also making the innocent Baines seem guiltier-and-guiltier with every word.

Carol Reed draws a superbly natural performance from Bobby Henrey, in a performance utterly lacking in childish, mannered acting tricks. It’s a hugely natural performance, over-flowing with innocence making Phil a character we end up deeply caring for. The early half of the film throws us perfectly into the excited world of a child with a whole mansion to run around in, cuddling his pet snake close to his chest. Reed also brilliantly captures how a moment of trauma confuses and terrifies an innocent into not knowing what action to take. Fleeing the house barefoot – clearly terrified and heartbroken – immediately after the death, Phil is petrified when he encounters a policeman not because he is intimidated, but because he fears inadvertently betraying his idol.

Reed superbly captures the desperate vulnerability of children, the nightmare of not having your voice listened to as adults talk over and around you. The Fallen Idol (with its careful use of disjointed angles and God-like, wide-angle shots from above) has a superb sense of the horror of being caught in a situation you neither fully understand or can influence. It’s echoed perfectly by Baines’ increasingly defensive panic as each denial falls on all-too-obviously deaf ears. Phil also misinterprets almost everything he is told in the film, right up to when the sympathetic Julie (a lovely, warm performance from Michèle Morgan) begs him that only the truth can help Baines.

The Fallen Idol spices this up with superb moments of comedy. Dora Bryan has a delicious cameo as a ‘lady of the night’, called upon to by the flummoxed policemen at the station Phil has fled to, to try and draw some words out of the stubbornly silent child – and who can only fall back on the cliches of her profession (‘Can I take you home dearie?’). An Inspector (a lovely cameo from Bernard Lee) called in to translate in the embassy is begged by the first secretary to drop his inept schoolboy French. A tense interrogation of Baines is interrupted when a pedantic embassy staffer insists he must be allowed to check the clocks in the room (Reed wittily shows the characters revolving, clockwork like, impatiently on the spot in the background while this interminable check goes on).

But the great strength of The Fallen Idol is how it captures the joyful innocence of childhood and the Kafkaesque confusion the adult world can have on a child. Poor Phil never really understands anything that goes on (although the film ends with a sweet irony of Phil being the only person who perhaps understands a vital ‘clue’ only to be completely ignored) while we are always in complete understanding. Reed’s direction is faultless, both from his work with actors to his masterful use of camerawork and editing to really capture the confusing, unreadable adult-world from a child’s perspective. It’s a masterful, gripping, heart-rending film – a small scale classic that perfectly mixes tension and wit.

Basic Instinct (1992)

A sensationalist hit, this Trashy Hitchcock-pastiches looks very pleased with its own naughtiness today

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Michael Douglas (Detective Nick Curran), Sharon Stone (Catherine Tramell), George Dzundza (Detective Gus Moran), Jeanne Tripplehorn (Dr Beth Garner), Dorothy Malone (Hazel Dobkins), Denis Arndt (Lt Philip Walker), Leilani Sarelle (Roxy Hardy), Bruce A Young (Detective Sam Andrews), Chelcie Ross (Captain Talcott), Wayne Knight (Assistant DA John Correli), Stephen Tobolowsky (Dr Lamott)

If there is one thing Basic Instinct proves for sure, it’s that Paul Verhoeven is a very naughty boy. A sensational smash hit in 1992, largely because of the instant iconic status of that scene (you know which one), Basic Instinct remixes Hitchcock (especially Vertigo and Psycho) with lashings of explicit sex and violence, a touch of The Silence of the Lambs and a dollop of Fatal Attraction. It’s a deeply silly, dirty film that was a sort of Fifty Shades of its day: vanilla porn for those who feel too self-conscious to actually go and watch a real one.

Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone) is number one suspect for the murder of her boyfriend (or rather as she describes him “the guy I was fucking”) for two reasons: one she published a novel a few weeks earlier where she explicitly described the crime in detail and two she’s an obvious Hannibal Lector-ish genius psychopath. Doesn’t stop weak-willed detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) from becoming obsessed with her, sucked into a wild sexual affair. But is Catherine a misunderstood unlucky victim, or the genius manipulator her old college rival Dr Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn) – also Nick’s on-and-off girlfriend and psychiatrist – says she is?

Basic Instinct was the most expensive script ever sold, earning Joe Eszterhas $3million for what he claimed was fourteen days’ work. And you can see why – it’s got everything audiences could need for an addictive, trashy bit of fun. A femme fatale who is also a genius psychopath! A handsome macho cop! Brutal murders! A puzzle interesting enough to keep ticking over but obvious enough that you don’t need to think about it too much! And of course, lots and lots and lots of sex! And then even more sex! No wonder people saw dollar bills – at the very worst they had a chance at a so-bad-its-good box office smash.

But the good stuff. Basic Instinct’s comic-book Hitchcock pastiche actually works rather well, helped enormously by a marvellous Oscar-nominated score by Jerry Goldsmith, which brilliantly channels Bernard Herrmann’s luscious Vertigo strings. It’s no exaggeration to say Goldsmith’s score dramatically improves the film, from adding tension to a drawn-out elevator trip to adding a film noir lyricism to Catherine and Nick’s rather forced sexualised banter. Verhoeven also really knows his business: the film’s famous interrogation scene works as well as it does through his skilful editing between wide angles, close-ups and POV shots, aided by the striking uplighting from cinematographer Jan de Bont.

That scene – and the film – also works because of Sharon Stone. Taking on a role turned down by almost every single woman in Hollywood, Stone seizes hold of a part she knew was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Nick may be the lead – and Douglas, in the middle of his run of weak modern American men bewitched by strong women, may have been the high-paid star ($14 million to Stone’s $550k) – but both knew this was Catherine’s movie. Stone plays the role with a playful, sensual confidence and arrogant defiance, knowing full well she can seduce anyone. Despite the clunky dialogue, she makes Catherine sexy, smart and just about vulnerable enough to make some viewers doubt whether she’s the killer or not. (I mean she blatantly is, the film doesn’t really try and pretend otherwise. Most of the fun is seeing how shamelessly she can parade it and still get away with it.)

Away from that though, Basic Instinct is a terribly silly film, a well-made pandering to our lowest desires. Opening with an extremely graphic post-coitus stabbing frenzy (with blood spray everywhere and a nose skewered by an ice pick) – it then teases us three times that it will repeat this again after nearly every explosive session of rumpy-pumpy. Ah yes, the rumpy-pumpy. Basic Instinct slows at the half-way mark for an almost five-minute extended multi-angled, orgasm packed bit of horizontal jogging that Nick then rather pathetically spends most of the rest film bragging about being “the fuck of the century”.

But then Nick is a pathetic figure. Somehow keeping hold of his badge, despite gunning down two tourists while high on cocaine, he’s got such an addictive personality he makes Lloyd Bridges’ (“I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue!”) air traffic controller in Airplane look like a model of restraint. After internal affairs-mandated therapy (how’s that for a slap on the wrist) – hilariously compromised by Jeanne Tripplehorn’s Dr Garner crossing all ethical lines by repeatedly shagging him – Nick has proudly quit drugs, drink, smoking, and shooting before asking questions. Needless to say, under Catherine’s influence, he embraces all of these again, all while still managing to be the sort of middle-aged loser who wears a pullover to nightclub.

Eszterhas’ script mixes awful “tough” dialogue (“Looks like he got off before he got offed” Nick’s partner jokes over a victim) with clumsy psychological insight (my favourite is Tobolowsky’s consultant who confidently states two options: Trammel either did or didn’t do it – inevitably this childishly empty insight is met with the manly ‘tecs muttering “In English Doc!”) and blunt statements of the obvious (“She’s brilliant! And Evil!” screams poor Tripplehorn). The flirty banter is largely sold by Sharon Stone’s confidence, since the lines (“I’m not wearing underwear”) are hardly Double Indemnity. The film’s mystery is so irrelevant to its appeal (and, in many ways, plot), it merrily gets bogged down in several off-screen murders of characters we’ve never met.

Today Basic Instinct feels like a bizarre museum piece. George Dzundza’s sidekick cop is intended as comic-relief but comes across like a little ball of toxic masculinity. An early sex scene between Nick and Beth is pretty much impossible to watch today without thinking “yeah that’s rape”. The film uses bisexuality (though we only, of course, get girl-on-girl – Douglas made it clear he ain’t gonna kiss no man) as raw titillation, an entre for the soft porn of Douglas and Stone noisily going at it for about 10% of the film’s run time. Even the famous scene is uncomfortable to watch, since Stone has since made it clear she didn’t consent to that shot.

Basic Instinct is a deeply silly piece of trash. But then that was its appeal back then – no one felt they were actually watching Hitchcock when they sat down to this rip-off of the master (in fact Basic Instinct makes you feel it’s probably a relief the production code meant Hitchcock couldn’t give into his Verhoevenish instincts). Today most like to think of it as a sort of well played card trick. However, it’s hard not to feel a bit for Sharon Stone to whom it became a millstone (which she eventually exploited for a terrible belated sequel for which she pocketed $13.5million), despite being the person possibly most responsible for its success. So maybe Nick won in the end after all.

Evil Does Not Exist (2024)

Haunting, enigmatic parable on nature and modern society that leaves a lingering impression

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Cast: Hitoshi Omika (Takumi Yasumura), Ryo Nishikawa (Hana Yasumura), Ryuji Kosaka (Takahashi Keisuke), Ayaka Shibutani (Mayuzumi Yuuko), Hazuki Kikuchi (Sachi Minemura), Hiroyuki Miura (Kazuo Minemura), Yûto Torii (Tatsuki Sakamoto), Takako Yamamura (Yoshiko Kizaki), Takuma Nagao (Tomonori Hasegawa), Yoshinori Miyata (Akira Horiguchi, Takahashi), Taijirô Tamura (Ippei Suruga)

Imagine a beautiful Japanese mountain village, where the water is so clean, jugs of are taken straight from the stream to the local restaurant where its unique taste adds to the food’s beauty. Everything here is in careful harmony. Until a corporation reckons it’s the perfect site – keen to exploit, while it can, lingering Covid subsidies – to build a glamping site with a 95% effective septic tank (because that’s fine with government regulations). The corporation hosts a charade of a consultation where the plans are rejected by the community, unconvinced by the ‘trickle down’ wealth promised and more concerned with that 5% sewage being tipped into their gloriously pure water supply.

Perhaps the point of Evil Does Not Exist is that there is no real malevolence here. The corporation that wants to effectively shatter the harmony of this community isn’t doing it because they are cruel, they’re just doing what they do to create profits. And they genuinely don’t really see the problem because with a classic lack of empathy they’re convinced what is good for them is good for everyone. And that deep-down everyone shares their outlook. The villagers are just angling for a bigger pay-outa and they don’t really need to fix the septic tank because it falls within the rules and the water will still be okay with a little bit of sewage in it.

Evil Does Not Exist it seems, because most of the bad stuff happening in the world is because of empathy-free systems, people not really caring about impact of their actions and a general lack of interest in long-term impacts over short-term gain. Hamaguchi’s beautifully filmed, Godard-inspired (from title fonts, to shooting-style to Hamaguchi’s use of non-professional actors) environmental parable carefully and subtly deconstructs a world where the beauty of nature can be rinsed away simply out of a sense of inevitability and quick-buck expediency.

Originally envisioned as a short film that would showpiece the beautiful orchestrations of its composer Eiko Ishibashi, Hamaguchi expanded it as he shot more and more material, eventually developing it into a fascinating and open-ended parable about our relationship with nature. Nature here is an elemental and unknowable force: the first five minutes of the film is a sustained tracking shot through the trees, the only sounds we hear being Ishibashi’s music. It’s almost ten minutes before we hear any dialogue. The village’s ‘odd-job man’ Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) is very much one with the natural world around him, taking only what he needs and living in gentle, stoic harmony with the environment.

Hamaguchi’s film – utilising his careful, Ozu-inspired camerawork and Godardian love of realist observation – creates a natural world which is both beautiful and hauntingly mysterious. In the film’s calm shots of nature, the forest becomes a haven but one strangely inhuman. There is a feeling of unknowable, unrelatable forces in this world, an organic Gaia understanding that the villagers are unconsciously plugged into, which governs the ‘rules’ of existence. It’s an understanding utterly inaccessible to those who arrive from the city and want to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

Evil Does Not Exist pivots around its consultation meeting, which takes place in a town hall, chaired by initially bored consultants going through the motions with a slide deck they don’t understand and a ring-binder of notes they are unfamiliar with. As the villagers quickly discover (their adroit questioning taking the under-prepared consultants off guard), this consultation is a sham – anyone with any control over the fate of the project isn’t there and the glamping site is happening regardless of anyone’s feelings. All this meeting is about (as the head of the company later says, dialling in to chat to his consultants on a video call) is demonstrating the company has ‘listened’ and to tweak a few token issues (it’s telling that the head of the company describes the disastrous meeting as a complete success). None of this is evil of course: it’s just the bureaucratic acquisitiveness of the modern world, which values procedures and rules over impacts and end results.

Both consultants however find themselves taken with the village. But Hamaguchi demonstrates this is always rooted in a patronising sentimentality that’s as much about themselves as it is the actual village. Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) in particular, a disaffected company drone, spontaneously decides he can just jack it all in and become a skilled man of the wilderness like Takumi. Takahashi comes across as an embarrassing romantic, identical in many ways to the likely glamping customers (who want a sense of the nature without actually living there). He’s hideously clueless about the fauna of the forest and his practical skills (captured in a hilariously awkward attempt to chop wood) are woefully inadequate. None of this stops him from assuming he can fit right in on a whim with no preparation or training. Takumi’s just an odd-job man, how hard can that be to pick-up?

It doesn’t kid Takumi, who stares at him with an impassive face that hints at a range of emotions from contempt to humorous indulgence. Perhaps he’s aware that Takashi (again patronisingly) sees him less as an individual and more as his personal Yoda, placed on earth to mentor Takashi’s personal growth: to the outsiders the village and its inhabitants are always filtered through what they can do for them. Takashi’s patronising expectation that Takumi will welcome a ‘student’ isn’t wildly different from the company’s view that Takumi can be won over to supporting the project because they’ve offered him a job and a semi-decent salary.

This all culminates in a mysterious, open-ended conclusion which sees Hamaguchi lean into hints of folk-horror. Does the conclusion of Evil Does Not Exist show the dangerous consequences of mankind’s interference of nature on the most innocent? Does Takami represent a resentful natural world biting back? Questions hang over the film’s cryptic ending, which has been neatly foreshadowed throughout.

Evil Does Not Exist has a quietly hypnotic quality to it, but also a haunting chill behind its beautiful imagery. But it also asks subtle but intriguing questions about our link to nature and how a myopic focus on our own interests and needs inadvertently damages the world far more than actively ‘evil’ acts ever could.