Scenes From a Marriage (1974)

Bergman’s compelling, emotionally charged film is an intense, impressive and surprising tale

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Liv Ullman (Marianne), Erland Josephson (Johan), Bibi Andersson (Katarina), Jan Malmsjö (Peter), Gunnel Lindblom (Eva), Barbro Hiort af Ornäs (Mrs Jacobi), Anita Wall (Journalist)

A loving couple sit with an interviewer to discuss how happy their relationship is. Ten years later, years after their divorce, they meet in their old weekend cottage for an assignation away from their new partners. Along the way, they’ll lie, fight, cheat but also show time-and-again few people know them better than they do each other. Based on his own marriages and relationships (not least his relationship with Liv Ullman), Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage is a fascinatingly intimate and intense portrait of the contradictory impulses we feel towards the people we know best: how we can, in the same moment, love them, hate them, want to be a million miles away from them and also yearn to take them in our arms and tell them everything.

Skilfully cut down from a six-part TV series – the episode titles become ‘chapter headings’, each signifying a time shift – it becomes a series of intense, almost real-time, conversations between middle-brow professor Johan (Erland Josephson) and successful lawyer Marianne (Liv Ullman). From their ten-year anniversary, their happy-but-functional relationship is shattered when Johan leaves for the (unseen) Paula, heading into divorce, Marianne’s growth in sexual confidence, her little acts of revenge over Johan and their later affair. At all times they prove capable of ripping emotional wounds into each other, but also remaining strangely dependent on love and affection from each other.

It would be easy to say that Scenes of a Marriage is a theatrical piece – it came, originally, from a play Bergman was working on and well over two thirds of its running time features Josephson and Ullman alone on screen. But if the close-up is the language of cinema, Scenes from a Marriage may be the most cinematic film every made. Shot in a cooly observational style by Sven Nykvist, vast swathes of Scenes from a Marriage plays out in searing close-up, the camera studying every inch of the emotional angst its two characters are putting themselves through. Bergman knows exactly how to build the punishing tension in these scenes, frequently climaxing in visceral outbursts.

It is a film about what we say and what we chose not to say and what we decide to hear. The conversation between the couples is framed by their careful considerations: when to hold fire and when to let rip; when to listen and when to choose not to hear. And it’s clear that, when we are first introduced to them, they have mastered the art of not saying anything at all. Smilingly parroting cliches to their interviewer, they later smugly compare themselves to their feuding friends Karatina and Peter (excellent cameos from a searing Bibi Andersson and a provocative Jan Malmsjö). But their conversation never touches on deeper issues (Bergman’s called this chapter ‘The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Carpet’) and their sex life has dwindled to timetabled functionality.

It’s clear they are aware of this growing distance themselves. Johan shares his poetry with a colleague (an expertly reserved cameo from Gunnel Lindblom), complaining Marianne considers it little better than spiritual masturbation and yearns for an expressive freedom he feels is impossible in his marriage. Marianne meanwhile speaks to a client, Mrs Jacobi (a tragic Barbro Hiort af Ornäs), whose story of a lifetime trapped in a loveless marriage with children she never really wanted clearly strikes Marianne as a chilling vision of her own future.

That doesn’t stop Marianne responding with shocked subservience that tips into desperate pleading when Johan announces he wants to leave her. Bergman stages this scene beautifully, with the ridiculous logic people sink into in tragic break-ups. Johan eats a snack meal prepared by Marianne, guiltily confessing his affair, but there is something very real about Marianne’s stunned reaction which sees her planning his packing (because he’s useless at it) and continue their bedtime preparation before she starts pleading him to stay. Just there is something very real in Johan’s reaction: having steeled himself for a fight, her subservience enrages him until he is cruelly tearing verbal lumps out of her. This is the sort of searing emotional up-and-down that rings true, one allowing shock to humiliate them the other transforming shame into defensive, accusatory blame.

But Scenes from a Marriage is a film that utterly understands how much we change under circumstances. Separation is not good for Johan: his new lover doesn’t interest him, his career stalls and he tips into self-pity. Marianne, once the shock and fear of separation passes, discovers she likes her freedom. Her wardrobe shifts to more form-fitting and revealing clothes, she embraces the opportunities of singledom and repays Johan’s desertion with a seduction of him she deliberately doesn’t follow-through on. They now talk more honestly than ever before – and it’s a blistering, verbally and physically violent exchange rammed full of resentment and petty cruelty.

To do this stuff you need actors at the top of their game and who completely trust each other. Bergman certainly has this with his two stars. Josephson’s self-contented smugness moves through arrogant selfishness to desperate vulnerability, his expressive face sometimes puppy-doggish, sometimes drowning in bear-like fury. Ullman is, of course, exceptional. Her masterful ability to react, to let thoughts and emotions play fleetingly across her face was made for Bergman’s close-up film-making and she takes Marianne on a fascinating journey, from near-submissive home-maker to vibrantly confident women of the world while never letting the vulnerability and doubt be too far from her eyes. It’s an extraordinary performance, searing and tender, as raw as knife-edge.

These two play absorbingly off each other, their conversations gripping minefields of repressed then hugely expressed emotions. Their collaboration, guided by Bergman’s close (but not intrusive) camerawork is extraordinary. Fashioned from Bergman’s experiences of relationships, Scenes from a Marriage is, however, strangely hopeful. One of its key themes is that, even when they hate each other, this couple know and trust each other more than anyone else. In times of crisis and pain they always turn to each for a consolatory word or comfort.

There is something strangely warm about their relationship, despite its turmoil, and the film is refreshing in saying friendship and love doesn’t have to end with divorce, but can transform itself into something else, perhaps even something better. Perhaps it’s that strange note of hope that makes Scenes of a Marriage so influential to a generation of filmmakers. It refuses the simple moral standpoints of judgement and suggests the decision to no longer be together (or even faithful to each other) need not be the end all, but instead a bump in a longer journey: that a relationship (and even a love) doesn’t end when a marriage does.

The King of Comedy (1983)

Scorsese’s dark satire on the obsessive love of fame was miles ahead of its time

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro (Rupert Pupkin), Jerry Lewis (Jerry Langford), Sandra Bernhard (Masha), Diahnne Abbott (Rita Keene), Shelley Hack (Cathy Long), Frederick De Cordova (Bert Thomas)

Like moths to a flame, celebrity attracts obsessives, weirdos and those desperate to grab their slice of fame’s limited cake. In our world of influencers and social media, the sharp, uncomfortable and acidic King of Comedy has become a classic after flopping on release. The world seems full of Rupert Pupkin’s today, people who feel their mission in life is to share their gifts for entertaining with the world and feel ownership over their famous idols.

Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) feels like this about TV chat-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). Pupkin sees himself as a polite, affable comedy-star-in-the-waiting and only the fact that he and Langford have never met is preventing them from forming a deep and lasting friendship. In actuality, Pupkin is a fantasist with an elaborate fantasy-world he struggles to differentiate from reality. Believing Jerry wants to give him his big break, his stalkerish attempts to become the star’s protégé lead to inevitable rejection. Desperate, he allies with Jerry’s even-more-openly obsessive stalker Masha (Sandra Bernhard) to take desperate measures to break into the spotlight.

The King of Comedy gets, in a way few other films have done before or since, the dark outer-reaches of the allure of fame. It’s a film about people desperate, in different ways, to have a part of the glamourous exciting world are pressed up against the screen watching. It’s about the darkly-comic – and, in their way, terrifying – lengths people will go to feel special and noticed. To land a quiet moment with a distant superstar or (even better) to become the celebrity themselves.

There’s a little bit of Rupert Pupkin in all of us. Perhaps that’s why we find De Niro’s exquisite performance both hilarious, mortifying to watch but also strangely endearing. Who hasn’t spun in their head elaborate fantasies full of warm conversations with those we admire, where they fall over themselves to tell us how amazing we are? Or imagined a critical teacher going on television to tell the world how wrong they were? Or dreamed of impressing the person we fancied at school with tales of our high-flying success among the hoi-polloi?

What we perhaps don’t do, is build a replica TV studio in our apartment, staffed with life-size cardboard cut-outs of our heroes. Or act out, long into the night, the conversations we wished we had. We probably don’t try to force up fantasies weekend retreats with superstars into reality by turning up at their houses unannounced with a date we want to impress in tow. We might enjoy flirting with a little fantasy life, we’ve probably not started to believe it or started to resent the celebrities for not performing in real life the affection they show us in our mind.

But Rupert does. Superbly played by De Niro – this might just be his finest performance, hilariously over-eager, pathetic but with just the possibility of Bickle-like danger under the surface – Pupkin lives half in this world, half in his own. He doesn’t even seem to realise how socially awkward or desperate he is, approaching every conversation with an air of polite, calm decency. The sort of guy who hands over his own autograph to the girl he’s trying to impress, telling her it will be worth a fortune one day. Who, when he finally gets the chance to talk to his idol after ’rescuing’ him from a deranged fan (something we quickly realise is a set-up – and an indicator of the ends Pupkin will go to), seems literally unable to let the conversation end, utterly unaware each additional word that passes his lips makes it less-and-less likely Jerry will ever speak to him again.

Pupkin only looks normal when he’s compared to his partner in Jerry-obsession Masha, a superbly grating performance of unhinged monomania from Sandra Bernhard. Masha and Rupert – the sparky, bickering interplay between De Niro and Bernhard is electric, the two sounding like children feuding over the last cookie in the jar – are two halves of the same personality: Rupert the more polite, more capable of affecting normality part who longs for a celebrity to recognise him as one of their own; Masha is the possessive id, who wants to grasp her object of affection tight and never let them go, focused on celebrities because they are easier to follow than regular people.

But we’ve all been desperate to take a chance to get close to something we want haven’t we? When presenting himself at Jerry’s office with his demo tape, Pupkin politely but firmly refuses to read any social cues from the staff that they want him to leave. De Niro’s permagrin is a superpower, rejection bouncing off him unscathed. De Niro manages, under the smile and unassuming manner, to always demonstrate Pupkin’s belief fame is his due. The King of Comedy really understands the belief many feel that all which separates them from success is luck. Pupkin rejects hard work and honing his act, genuinely not understanding why he can’t graduate straight to prime-time TV. He’s a millennial ahead of his time, someone who believes if he really, really wants something he should get it.

What’s fascinating about Scorsese’s film is it encourages us to share Pupkin’s delusional perspective. Jerry Langford – a superb performance of bitter, dark self-parody by Jerry Lewis – is all smiles on TV but, as far as we can see, a surly bully in reality, frequently abrupt and rude. But think about it: we only really see him from the perspective of the invasive Pupkin and the frankly terrifyingly Masha. Would you cut these guys any slack? In brief moments where King of Comedy puts us in Jerry’s shoes, it’s clear his world isn’t always pleasant: the woman who responds to his polite refusal to talk to her son on the phone screams “You should die of cancer” at him and he’s obvious genuinely scared of Masha. Is it a surprise he clutches a golf club throughout his confrontation when Pupkin arrives at his home? He chooses his words carefully because too much interaction can be as dangerous as none-at-all.

What’s also quietly clever about King of Comedy is that Pupkin isn’t talentless as such. His problem is all his material is as derivative and carefully studied as his attempt to act normal is. When we see his act, some of the jokes land – but they land like with the carefully planned poise of an obsessive who has copied the tics of those with genuine talent. Pupkin is witty, but it’s outweighed by his obsessive desire for immediate fame. Everything about him is carefully crafted, his entire persona constructed to cope with the world. That’s why he retreats so often in fantasy, where everything is easier.

And maybe King of Comedy heads into fantasy, much as Taxi Driver perhaps does. Don’t trust a Scorsese-De Niro film where someone who we’ve seen as maladjusted, unaware and self-deceiving as Pupkin gets what he wants at the end. King of Comedy shares huge amounts of DNA with Taxi Driver – history repeating itself as farce – even if Pupkin is too childish and incompetent to be as much of a danger as Bickle is.

King of Comedy captures all this with a brilliant understanding of the addictive qualities of fame and celebrity. Sure we sort of like Pupkin sometimes, but we also understand why Jerry finds him so unbearable and unsettling – and also clear just how short a distance he would need to travel to become Masha. King of Comedy delivers all this with an unflashy skill and hosts a truly superb performance from De Niro, a pitch-perfect study in weakness, longing, delusion, repressed desperation and strange vulnerability. It speaks to feelings we’ve all had, but it also reveals the horrific end results of those longings.

Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023)

Terminally dull prequel, full of backstory you won’t care about at all

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Tom Blyth (Coriolanus Snow), Rachel Zegler (Lucy Gray Baird), Josh Andrés Rivera (Sejanus Plinth), Viola Davis (Dr Volumnia Gaul), Peter Dinklage (Casca Highbottom), Jason Schwatzman (“Lucky” Flickerman), Hunter Schafer (Tigris Snow), Fionnula Flanagan (Grandma’am), Burn Gorman (Commander Hoff), Ashley Liao (Clemensia Dovecote)

Did you watch Hunger Games and wonder – ‘this is great and all but where did that guy Coriolanus Snow come from, eh’? Not sure I did. And I’m not sure I really needed to know, now that I’ve sat through all interminable 158 minutes of Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes or Hitler: The Early Days. Imagine, if you will, the original Hunger Games movie – but if it was much longer, had an utterly uninteresting lead character and took itself so seriously you’d think it was offering a solution to third world debt and climate change all at once. Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes worst crime isn’t that it goes on forever, that it retreads old ground with no new ideas or that it feels like a pointlessly over-extended footnote. It’s that it is overwhelmingly, crushingly, dull.

People didn’t care about the back story: they cared about Katniss Everdean, a perfectly crafted character, hugely engaging and relatable on every viewing. I cared about her struggle to protect the people she loved not the backdrop of Panem politics. Did anyone? If I was interested in anything in Panem politics it was the way the Games both terrified the huddle masses of the districts and gave them hope. Unfortunately, this film either didn’t understand that, didn’t care or assumed we’d happily invest in the original’s villain if he was buff and had a dreamy girlfriend.

Young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth, doing his best to sound like Donald Sutherland) is one of the leading students in Panem, selected to mentor a tribute through the 10^th Hunger Games. Young Snow’s loins heat-up when his tribute is manic pixie dream-girl Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler) from District Twelve. But what excites him more: a tumble with a girl from the sticks, or persuading outlandishly loopy games master Dr Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis, the only person having fun) he knows how to turn this gladiatorial deathmatch into ratings gold? You got one guess what he picks.

Though it takes him a very, very, very long time to pick it. We watch this Proto-Hitler embrace his inner sociopath, through a weary trudge in Hunger Games lore with the origins of virtually every prop in the original movies lovingly laid out for us. Ever wondered why Snow wears that buttonhole? This is the film for you and then some. Almost every single thing in Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is linked to something in the original movies. It’s the sort of unimaginative, world-shrinking yawn-fest where nearly every character shares a surname of a character from the original films – but of course Caesar Flickerman’s dad has exactly the same job, personae and style as he does!

You could let this go if Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes had an interesting story of its own. But it’s tedious, self-important plot makes Attack of the Clones look like Tolstoy. It chucks in a little bit of arena slaughter, but inexplicably makes it unclear how many of Coriolanus’ suggestions for improving the show are actually changing things. When the tributes perform for ‘favour’ is that something they always did (as most people behave like it is) or because Coriolanus scrawled memo suggested it (as the film implies)? The wider impact is also lost: are people bonding with Lucy Gray or having their child-killing-urges ticked in brand new ways by Coriolanus? Who knows.

It doesn’t help that Ballad seems shy about making Coriolanus himself a villain. It gives Tom Blyth a difficult act to pull off and he’s left playing his cards so close to his (inevitably) buff – his future sadism doesn’t stand in the way of a good topless scene in this film – chest that rather than wondering what will top him into sociopathy, he instead becomes a flat, boring character, with even his lust for Lucy fizzling rather than sizzling.

Rachel Zegler gets a bit more fun as this irritating mix of idealist and realist (she is pretty much whatever the plot needs from scene-to-scene – one minute angrily slapping away offerings of food, the next cowering in shocked fear when danger comes calling), with Ballad at least a good vehicle for Zegler’s vocal talents. But Lucy Gray remains too enigmatic – and, to be honest, just as dull in her unknowability – to ever become someone you care about. And never, for one minute, in her flower-crafted dress and perfect make-up do you believe she is a child of the ghetto in the way you did with Jennifer Lawrence.

Honestly the film misses a hero as complex and multi-layered as Katniss and splitting facets of her into two other characters just creates to incomplete characters. Throw in a plot that lacks any energy – it’s lackadaisical second half, with Coriolanus chucked into the wilderness as a Stormtrooper in District 12, goes on forever – and which gets bogged down in an utterly unengaging and confusing rebellion plotline with is resolved with a nonsensical narrative flourish – and it’s a recipe for disaster. It never, ever get the pulse racing as it stumbles, yawningly, to its end.

The stuff that actually is interesting gets shunted to the sidelines. A bored Peter Dinklage gets a late monologue on the creation of the Hunger Games that you desperately want to hear more about it, but don’t. Viola Davis, barrelling over-the-top under a mountain of demented hair, weird contact lenses and bizarre costumes, keeps talking about ‘the purpose of the Hunger Games’ in a portentous way that sounds like its leading somewhere but never does (so much so, I wondered if the filmmakers even understood the bread-and-circuses-as-control metaphor going on here).

Francis Lawrence directs as if this background-filling pamphlet from Suzanne Collins was a newly discovered Testament. The film is slow, stately and gives even the smallest, most inconsequential moments an unbearable level of self-important significance. It lacks pace and interest – so much so that even the slaughter of eleven scruffy, malnourished children and teenagers feels tired and ‘seen it all before’. There is no mystery, no sense of roads-not-taken, not even any peril . Just small elements of a more interesting later story being slotted dutifully in place, you realise you never wondered where Coriolanus Snow came from because it never mattered in the first place.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

The Python’s finest hour is a hit-a-minute medieval comedy that I never fail to laugh at

Director: Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

Cast: Graham Chapman (King Arthur), John Cleese (Sir Lancelot/The Black Knight/French Taunter/Tim the Enchanter), Terry Gilliam (Patsy/ Soothsaying Bridgekeeper/The Green Knight/Sir Bors), Eric Idle (Sir Robin the-not-quite-so-brave-as-Sir-Lancelot/Concorde, Dead collector/Roger the Shrubber/Brother Maynard), Terry Jones (Sir Bedevere the Wise/Prince Herbert/Dennis’ mother), Michael Palin (Sir Galahad the Pure/Leader of the Knights Who Say Ni/Lord of Swamp Castle/Dennis), Connie Booth (Miss Islington), Carol Cleveland (Zoot/Dingo)

I’ve sometimes found the surreal, satirical and sometimes plain silly humour of the Monty Python troupe hit-and-miss. But when it lands, it really lands and Monty Python and the Holy Grail may well just be their finest hour. Essentially a series of sketches loosely worked together into a sort-of-plot, but never taking itself too seriously, it’s an often-inspired collection of highly influential gags delivered by a troupe of performers at the top-of-their-game (it’s hard to believe that they have all said shooting the film was a tough, punishing and exhausting process).

What Python got right here is how easy – and hilarious – it is to poke fun at something so very po-faced and serious as medievalism had a tendency to take itself back then. In fact, it’s perhaps a lasting tribute to the film that no-one has ever been able to take it quite as seriously since. Monty Python and the Holy Grail also lines up shots at the arthouse high-brow seriousness of films like Andrei Rublev and, most famously, The Seventh Seal (those hilarious, moose-obsessed, opening credits are a flawless take-down of Bergman’s portentous opening) but also a dismantling of the likes of Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (no-one can watch that film’s opening now without picturing the Black Knight protesting ‘It’s a only a flesh wound!’ as crimson spray flows freely).

I love Holy Grail. It’s practically designed for undergraduates to sit around and watch, while getting slowly pissed and then spend ages quoting at each other. Many of its jokes lean into bizarre surrealism and funny sounding words – “shrubbery!” just sounds funny, even more so when it’s squeaked out by a giant Michael Palin in a ridiculous helmet affecting a rhotacism. And the Pythons knew how to turn problems into genre-defining gags: thank God they couldn’t afford horses, so instead came up with the frankly genius idea to just mime the knights riding horses to the sound of two coconut halves being visibly tapped together by their squires.

And then to have the comic presence of mind to riff on enforced ideas like this so much (just how did coconuts turn up in medieval Britain?) that for generations, fans will ram their tongues earnestly into their cheeks debating the migratory habits and air speeds of laden and unladen swallows. It’s all part of a superbly written script, which get just the right balance between Thomas Mallory-esque medieval rhythms laced with nonsese ( “The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land”) and a mix of anachronistic casualism and simmering middle-class frustration. All the time in Monty Python and the Holy Grail there are traces of the sort of serious, played-dead-straight, medieval film this could be, making the constant punctuation of surreal, fourth-wall leaning, silliness all the more hilarious.

A lot of this also comes down the highly skilled comic playing of the troupe. Graham Chapman, in particular, has the seemingly dull job of playing the straight-man. But his ability to play, even the most ridiculous encounters, with complete earnestness is crucial to the film’s success. Arthur is, really, a ludicrous figure, but Chapman knows he can never acknowledge this for the joke to work. Hilariously, the legendary king here becomes a sort of put-upon middle-manager, constantly frustrated while going about his day job, dumb enough to be unaware of how absurd he is, but smart enough to get frustrated at the increasingly dim antics of his followers.

It also allows the rest of the troupe to let rip with broader comic performances, all of whom have a whale of a time. John Cleese’s pompous bossiness and control-freak mania is perfect for the psychotic Sir Lancelot while his latent comic cruelty, combined with a passion for silly accents and walking, is perfect for the famed French taunter (the funniest Frenchman on screen). Palin’s goodie-two-shoes decency is great for the tempted Sir Galahad while his brilliant capacity for deluded self-importance nails the Lord of Swamp Castle – and who else could have taken such an impish delight in the Trotskyist mantras of the socialist peasant Dennis? For the rest of the troupe, Eric Idle’s mix of cheek, dressed-up poshness and wimpy weakness is expertly used while Terry Jones mocks academia as Sir Bedevere and whines brilliantly as Herbert. And no-one does dirty better than Terry Gilliam.

Gilliam and Jones also directed, allegedly not always harmoniously neither quite agreeing if this was a film or whether it was a comic show. But the presence of Gilliam behind the camera probably accounts for why this is the most visually striking Monty Python film, with mists rolling over the hills and the Scottish locations given a mythic power which makes the silly jokes that happen all around them even funnier – while Jones’ medievalist background surely helped define the film’s surprisingly authentic (and therefore even funnier) feel. Holy Grail also very successfully disguises that it was effectively all shot in one or two locations (Doune Castle is shot from so many angles it becomes about a dozen different locations).

But what really makes Holy Grail work is the quality of the jokes. And it opens with a run of gags of such consistent quality they are perhaps unparalleled in Python’s work. The Swallow debate. Bring Out Your Dead. Peasants nailing the ‘self-perpetuating autocracy’. The flesh wounds of the Black Knight. The witch trial. The French Taunter (“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries!”). The Trojan Rabbit. Camelot being a silly place. The opening half of the film is one piece of solid comic gold and if the second half doesn’t have quite the same hit rate, it’s still more than funny enough.

And funny is what it is all about. You can say ‘it doesn’t have as good a plot as Life of Brian’. You can say it just ends, as if the troupe ran out of ideas. You can say it loses a steam. But it doesn’t matter when you laugh and laugh time and time again at its best bits. And you really do. And people who encounter it at the right age, will go on laughing at it for the rest of their lives., for decades to come.

The Fall Guy (2024)

Very enjoyable action caper and also a rather sweet tribute to the unsung heroes of filmmaking

Director: David Leitch

Cast: Ryan Gosling (Colt Seavers), Emily Blunt (Judy Moreno), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Tom Ryder), Hannah Waddingham (Gail Meyer), Teresa Palmer (Iggy Starr), Stephanie Hsu (Alma Milan), Winston Duke (Dan Tucker), Ben Knight (Dressler)

I’ve seen every single Hollywood Superstar I’ve ever heard of perform miraculous acts of derring-do in front of my very eyes. That all happened right? The camera doesn’t lie! Alas what we saw wasn’t the Legendary Star but instead a well-trained guy, dressed in the same costume, putting life and limb on the line for the big shot. And they don’t even get Oscars for it! The Fall Guy is a witty, exciting and rather sweet tribute to the unsung hero of the movies, the stunt guy, all wrapped up in a pulsating, tongue-in-cheek action-adventure that showcases two likeable stars and, of course, their similarly costumed fall guys.

Our hero is Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), stuntman of choice for superstar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a spoilt man-child who brags he does his own stunts but can’t cross a road without a double. Colt is riding high, in a promising relationship with cinematographer Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), until a stunt goes wrong leaving him badly injured. Colt disappears, breaking-up with Jody and wallowing in depression for eighteen months. However, he comes storming back when summoned to Australia by producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) who claims Jody personally asked him to double for Tom on her directorial debut, Mad-Max-meets-Independence-Day sci-fi epic Metalstorm. Only turns out she didn’t ask: Colt is in fact tasked by Gail to find the missing Ryder or she’ll be forced to cancel the film and end Judy’s career. Colt soon gets bogged down in drug lords, dead bodies, hitmen who don’t quit and imaginary unicorns. Can he find Ryder and make amends with Judy?

The Fall Guy is fast-paced, loose and funny with a script of punchy Drew Pearce jokes, focused overwhelmingly on giving the viewer a cracking night out at the movies. It leaves very little in the locker room which is fitting for a film is all about celebrating the joy of doing things for real. The Fall Guy pushes the envelope for stunts, be it stupendously high falls, multiple barrel roll cars, furious fisticuffs that use everything going and car chases that leave burnt rubber skid marks on every surface. Basically, it’s a celebration of the art of stunt work, no more than you would expect from Leitch, a former stunt co-ordinator and champion of doing it for real.

It very successfully mixes giddy action thrills with a engaging romantic comedy that uses its two stars to great success. Gosling is relaxed, witty and above all extremely cool, his obvious enjoyment of the material very infectious. Blunt’s comic timing is immaculate. Together their chemistry not only creates plenty of laughs, but makes us invest in wanting them to be together. But The Fall Guy doesn’t just settle for rom-com conventions. A focus of the film is watching Colt get in touch with his feelings (how many other action films feature their stars quietly crying in a car, listening to Taylor Swift?) and accepting his stuntman bravado (it’s the profession where you stick your thumb up at the end of the stunt, regardless what happens) led him to drive Judy away out of twisted shame.

Of course, on the way to getting in touch with his findings, Colt doesn’t half stumble through more than his fair share of brawls. You couldn’t make a film about a stuntman without packing in more death-defying thrills than you can shake a stick at. The Fall Guy delivers two types of stunt thrills. One is the behind-the-scenes on-set stunts Colt executes – death-defying falls, flipping and rolling cars, people being thrown across a field into a rock – where we get to see a few tricks of the trade behind the magic. And then we also get genuine ‘real world’ stunts of epic, popcorn-munching excitement as Colt goes about his search. This is some of the most impressive stuff you’ll see (and its expertly deconstructed in the behind-the-scenes clips that festoon the end-credits), from Colt being hurled and smashed through every inch of Ryder’s apartment to a stunning car-chase that turns into a bare-knuckle dumper-truck fight that’s the film’s mid-act calling card.

The action is somehow even more enjoyable because of the world-weary comedy Ryan Gosling plays it with. After all, being thrown into situations like this is bread-and-butter for Colt, so whether its spending a fight protecting an elusive jet-lag-defeating espresso or working out exactly when he to jump into the road to collide with a car, everything is met with a semi-resigned shrug. He also gets some excellent partners-in-crime, trading stunt-movie facts with colleague Dan (a very funny Winston Duke, shouting the name of the Hollywood stars whose signature moves he’s replicating during fights) and, perhaps best-of-all, a French speaking stunt dog called Jean-Claude who Colt treats like a friend (a dog that bites people in the groin shouldn’t be as funny as this, but I must have been in the right mood). The final battle also sees Colt call on an army of fellow stunt-people.

It makes sense in a film that celebrates this brotherhood. When Colt and the team are working on set, The Fall Guy centralises their creativity and commitment. The shooting of a Metalstorm battle scene is hugely improved by Colt and the team pushing the envelope with suggestions and improvements to the rudimentary script and the whole crew is scrupulously dedicated, professional and committed.

The real threats in The Fall Guy are the things that work against this. Special effects and deep fakes (whch plays into the film’s neat double-meaning title) are the tools of the villains and, in a wider sense, kill the flesh-and-blood of film-making. Hollywood stars and bottom-line Hollywood suits with no respect for the craft are the baddies. Aaron Taylor-Johnson has a lot of fun in a role that parodies almost every star you can think of (Tom Cruise is twice specifically named in the film, as if to stress for the laywers Tom Ryder is not him) while Hannah Waddingham is a smilingly heartless producer, never seen without clutching an oversized diet coke.

The Fall Guy is, above all, a film designed to cheer you up no-end. Crammed with sharp one-liners, expert sight gags and thrilling stunts with a cast having an absolute ball in their roles, it’s the sort of treat that will be remembered long after its slightly disappointing box-office haul has been forgotten.

The Wooden Horse (1950)

One of the first POW films, setting a template for stiff-upper-lip derring-do

Director: Jack Lee

Cast: Leo Genn (Peter Howard), David Tomlinson (Philip Rowe), Anthony Steel (John Clinton), David Greene (Bennett), Peter Burton (Nigel), Patrick Waddington (Senior British Officer), Michael Goodliffe (Robbie), Anthony Dawson (Pomfret), Bryan Forbes (Paul), Dan Cunningham (David)

One of the most popular of WW2 movies sub-genres is the POW escape movie. The Wooden Horse was one of the first of these, showcasing the sort of barmy, off-the-wall scheme that British POWs spent their tedious years dreaming up. Based on an autobiographical novel by former POW Eric Williams – here fictionalised as Peter Howard (Leo Genn) – inmates of Stalag Luft III built a pommel horse to aid their escape. The scheme? Hide a man underneath the horse to dig a tunnel, while the guards are distracted by a never-ending stream of men jumping over it for hours and hours on end.

The Wooden Horse dramatizes this with a stiff-upper-lip ‘well done Old Chap’ Britishness, shot with a low-key documentary realism (the film blew a huge portion of its budget on location shooting). It’s almost defiantly low-key, about a world away from Steve McQueen jumping over a fence on a motorbike or the sort of emotive struggles with war pressure in The Cruel Sea. Even the escape itself is a grinding, repetitive task taking place over months moving an infinitesimal distance every day as the parade ground tunnel edges closer and closer to the fence. This low-key attitude extends to the cast, led by Leo Genn, who eschew dynamics for calm, quiet unflappability. (Ironically, despite its documentary realism, Peter Butterworth – one of the original members of the escape attempt – was told on auditioning he wasn’t believable as a POW.)

The film is split neatly into two halves. The first covers the escape plan itself and lays out a structure that became familiar from countless POW films that followed: the plan is carefully detailed, senior officers humph and finally flick the thumbs up, a parade of fellow inmates chip in expertise (from forgery to ingenious distractions), a staged accident of flipping the horse over tricks the Germans into thinking nothing is going on, the tunnel caves in, a man is left stranded in the tunnel longer than is safe… It’s all in here, while our heroes bluffly and bravely work out the logistics of smuggling soil away and mastering various French identities to make their escape.

The second half follows two of our heroes – Leo Genn’s stoic Howard and Anthony Steele’s matinee idol Clinton – as they shred their nerves moving through Europe aiming for the port of Lübeck and a ship to Norway. This is the marginally less interesting part of the film, although it conversely does feature the film’s most interesting moment as a visibly sickened Clinton is forced to kill an ordinary German guard, very different from the usual boys-own adventure attitudes you expect.

However, most of the rest of the second half is just a little too dry and documentary, despite the best efforts to play up the paranoia and tension of a life on the run in occupied territory. Lee directs with a methodical, unflashy style, while ongoing clashes with producers on the budget, which eventually saw the film completed months later by the producer and a hurriedly put-together rather abrupt (and incongruous) ending in a Swedish restaurant, which seems to lean into the beginnings of an anti-Soviet Cold-War era consensus. Some of the dramatic tension drains out of a film which actually might have benefited from a little more melodrama, among the muttered, patient conversations in alleyways and the almost-agitated debates about which resistance groups to trust.

The camp-escape half works best, probably because the ingenuity of seeing the prisoners work out the logistics of converting their pommel horse into the perfect escape weapon and overcoming the minutia of camp life remains very entertaining. There is even a certain amount of wit in the bonhomie and cheek of the escape, which the film doesn’t shy away from, from the plan depending on the willingness of hungry POWs hurling themselves over a wooden horse for hours at a time to the boarding school air of bored over-familiarity that permeates the sleeping quarters. Lee also mines some tension out of a late-night inspection of the sleeping quarters, which only just misses discovering the mountains of soil that has been hidden precariously in the ceiling.

The Germans themselves are presented fairly sportingly – The Wooden Horse doesn’t give us an obvious villain and, as noted, presents its only slain German as a tragic figure. The Germans are even fairly sporting, solemnly carrying away the offending horse with a hurt dignity after the escape – presumably the poor War Horse is to be confined to solitary – while the POWs give this hero a rousing cheer. The Wooden Horse avoids the set-up of many similar films, which often presents both a token ‘Worthy Opponent’ and a token ‘Unrepentant Nazi’ among the Germans. Instead, they are exclusively presented as straight-forward professionals – again perhaps with an eye on the emerging 1950s anti-Soviet consensus that was starting to form in Europe.

The mood of sporting endeavour around the whole film – as well as the stiff-upper-lip pluck of the imprisoned Brits – helped guide the POW film towards its natural development as a Boy’s-Own adventure story with a sense escape as the ultimate sporting adventure (though even The Great Escape throws in more than enough tragedy). The Wooden Horse sometimes lacks in drama, so swept up is it in a sort of documentary realism (it’s hard not to argue with the producers that the put-upon forbearance of John Mills might have been a better choice for the lead than the rather too smooth Leo Genn), but as an early example of a much-loved genre it offers more than enough entertainment.

The Running Man (1988)

Gloriously stupid Arnie vehicle, sort of satire but really a chance for violence and wise-cracks

Director: Paul Michael Glaser

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger (Ben Richards), María Conchita Alonso (Amber Mendez), Richard Dawson (Damon Killian), Yaphet Kotto (William Laughlin), Jesse Ventura (Captain Freedom), Jim Brown (Fireball), Erland Van Lidth (Dynamo), Marvin J. McIntyre (Harold Weiss), Gus Rethwisch (Buzzsaw), Professor Toru Tanaka (Professor Subzero), Mick Fleetwood (Mick)

It’s 2017 and the USA has fallen apart (they were more right than they thought…) with a dictatorial government keeping the population in their place and distracting them from their lost freedoms with the violent TV show The Running Man, where criminals fight to the death in gladiatorial contests. The latest contestant? Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a former cop who everyone believes massacred civilians from his helicopter gunship but who we know is actually the hero who tried to stop it. Running Man host Dawson (Damon Killian) thinks Richards is the guy for a ratings slamdunk. But guess what? Arnie is as tough as he looks and might just bring down the system in prime time.

The Running Man makes an interesting contrast with Rollerball. In fact, it’s really just a souped-up 80s version of the same idea, of corporations using violent entertainment to keep the masses in line. The main difference being Rollerball is a sort-of lingering existentialist character study which mixes ambiguity with high-octane sports action, played out with Kubrick-inspired classical music and lingering slow-mo. The Running Man is a loud, brash, hyper-violent film that allows Arnie to flex both his muscles and his wise-cracking wit. Leaving its roots as a Stephen King adaptation far behind, it’s both a lot more stupid and a whole lot more fun than Rollerball.

The Running Man is a bizarre mix of Cronenbergish media satire and ludicrous camp comedy. It’s in-universe TV show has a parade of killers on it, laughable in their cartoonish violent silliness, with methods of killing so elaborate that they would put Bond villains to shame. Subzero is an ice-skating wrestler with a razor-sharp hockey stick! Buzzsaw dispatches opponents using (you guessed it) a chainsaw that can cut through anything! Dynamo dresses up in an electric suit, sings opera and electrocutes people! Fireball burns everything with his gas-filled flame-thrower!

You think that sounds silly? Well don’t worry because Arnie will (surprise, surprise) send them all to their maker with a karmic death (you have one guess as to how they all die) and an apt pun (“He had to split!” he grins slicing Buzzsaw in half with his own chainsaw). This is Arnie at his eighties height, expanding his brand and transforming The Running Man into his very own star vehicle. (He even squeezes in his “I’ll be back!” catchphrase). Ben is the perfect Arnie character: he’s noble but cool, muscular but witty, makes bad-ass threats and delivers on them, smokes stogies like they’re going out of fashion and waltzes off with the girl at the end after saving the world.

Arnie is sort of working alongside a resistance movement, but they don’t get in the way of his manly independence. The principle function of his resistance movement buddies Laughlin (Yaphet Kotto) and Weiss (Michael J McIntyre) is to symbolically lay down their lives to give Arnie even more moral high-ground – The Running Man makes very clear he doesn’t enter this sadistic blood-sport to protect himself (oddly in this totalitarian dictatorship, criminals still have enough rights to choose not to sacrificed on national television) but to save the lives of his Red Shirt pals. Their deaths also serve to justify the ruthless violence Arnie hands out (though of course he refuses to kill an unarmed, injured opponent just so we know all the other bodies he dropped must have deserved it).

It’s all set in a charmingly quaint 80s view of the future: power-suits for the rich and jump-suits for the convicts, with clunky TVs and worn-out urban environments. The Running Man throws in its odd surreal, camp and bizarre touch, not least the sight of Mick Fleetwood (buried under prosthetics) playing himself as the resistance leader. Its pumped-up TV show is packaged like a hyper-violent 80s mega-smash, hosted by real-life actor-turned-quiz-show-host Richard Dawson, gleefully embracing self-parody as a venal, heartless bully full of two-faced smarm with the audience while treating his staff like dirt.

Dawson, in all his larger-than-life awfulness, actually makes a pretty good foil for the muscle-bound Arnie, not least because he understands exactly what the Austrian Oak wanted from this film. Because Arnie knew people didn’t really want social commentary or satire – they wanted a black-and-white world where the ex-Terminator could smack, punch and shoot things with gleeful abandon while testing out a host of potentially quotable catch-phrases. Essentially The Running Man is a sort of Tom-and-Jerry cartoon with a sheen of social commentary, that panders shamelessly for our love of watching outré villains suffer grim and painful ironic deaths.

And you know what? Arnie was right. Because, however stupid (and its very, very stupid) The Running Man is, no matter how cookie-cutter, uninspired and predictable every single second of it is – it’s perfect, brain-dead, beer-in-hand, Friday night fun. And while the progression of Rollerball to this is a perfect example of how lobotomized Hollywood had become, at least this is fun.

Cyrano (2021)

Slight but enjoyable musical, with the flaws of the original but some virtues of its own

Director: Joe Wright

Cast: Peter Dinklage (Cyrano de Bergerac), Haley Bennett (Roxanne), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (Christian de Neuvillette), Ben Mendelsohn (De Guiche), Monica Dolan (Marie), Bashir Salahuddin (Le Bret), Joshua James (Valvert), Anjana Vasan (Sister Claire), Ruth Sheen (Mother Marthe), Mark Benton (Montfleury), Richard McCabe (Priest), Peter Wight (Ragueneau)

Edmond Rostand’s play has been reinvented time-and-time again. After all, who can’t relate to a man convinced he’s unlovable and uses his poetic heart to write the words to help his rival woo the woman they both love. Erica Schmidt’s stage musical with songs by Aaron and Bryce Dessner from The National, pretty much keeps everything but kicks out the famous oversize nose in favour of making Cyrano a man with dwarfism. Bringing him to life – both here and on stage – is Schmidt’s husband Peter Dinklage, with his stage and screen love Roxanne portrayed by Haley Bennett, wife of Cyrano’s director Joe Wright.

It all helps create an easy-going feeling to Cyrano, a decent, at times impressive musical, that never quite turns into something really lasting but presents several fine songs in its middle act. It’s unfortunate that it’s opening section – and largely forgettable initial number – set the scene less than compellingly, dutifully repeating Rostand via a show-boating Cyrano easily besting a preening actor in a battle of wits, all while casting faintly longing looks at impressed Roxanne. What it doesn’t really do is seize the attention. In fact, what it does is really remind you what a slight story Cyrano de Bergerac really is: and that it only really starts with the Act Two introduction of Christian.

It’s certainly, it feels, where Wright’s interest begins. The romantic triangle between the three – Cyrano and Christian both in love with Roxanne, Roxanne in love with Christian and (perhaps) sub-consciously with Cyrano – introduces drama and stakes into a film that until then largely lacks either. Contrasts are drawn between Cyrano and Christian who share honour and decency, but are polar opposites in terms of confidence. Christian is physically and socially assured but crippled with inarticulate shyness when asked to speak; Cyrano can turn his feelings into poetry, but is convinced he is an unlovable imp, his confidence forever crushed by his appearance.

The concept of exchanging oversize nose for Dinklage’s dwarfism works rather well, when every single camera angle constantly reminds us of Cyrano’s otherness. It also gives a wonderful showpiece for the excellent Dinklage, who brings an intense, grungy charisma to the role. He can do the Cyrano’s performative showmanship, but also expertly demonstrates this is a front to protect his true self from being seen and potentially rejected. It becomes clear Cyrano partly embraces his titanic ghost-writing (hundreds and hundreds of pages), without Christian’s knowledge, because he genuinely feels it is the closest he can come to experiencing a relationship, just as he believes should he ever speak his true feelings they would inevitably be rejected. Dinklage does a wonderful job of balancing inner vulnerability with a mask of cocksure, arrogant confidence.

Cyrano certainly misses the subtle indicators, from the start, that Haley Bennett’s Roxanne might well have feelings for him. Aware that Cyrano de Bergerac often presents not the most flattering picture of Roxanne’s intelligence (she is a woman, after all, fooled for years into believing all those romantic words came from her husband not her lifelong friend). Bennett however let’s a – again perhaps subconscious – suspicion play just around the corner of her eyes, not to mention that her feelings for Cyrano feel a lot closer to romantic from the start. Is she as scared of rejection as Cyrano, put off by his independent front? After all she values honest feelings – and Christian, even if his words come from someone else, is clear about the way he feels in a way Cyrano never is. Kelvin Harrison Jr. is rather charming as this sweet, kind, strangely shy young man, tongue-tied and bemused by long words but with a strong sense of right and wrong.

The film – and the musical – is at its strongest when these three are interacting. Wright’s filmmaking also comes to life, with his more staid and traditional visual set-ups for the theatre-set prologue giving way (via a dynamic one-shot full of ducking and diving camerawork as Cyrano takes out ten assassins single-handed) to a series of balletic scenes. Large-scale musical numbers are accompanied by people going about every-day tasks with a wonderfully choreographed grace: be that bakers rhythmically kneading dough and stocking ovens, to a mass of soldiers fencing in perfect harmony. The songs also pick up considerably in both power and humability, culminating in the affecting Wherever I Fall, an eve-before-battle group number that sees Cyrano’s regiment preparing themselves for what could-be their final night, beautifully shot with a mist-filled coolness.

Cyrano’s slight story remains its weakness and the film can’t quite decide how to expand organically the deception plot at its heart. It’s almost a shame it bravely closes the door on the film’s most obvious protagonist, with Ben Mendelsohn’s De Guiche getting a scowling ‘villainy’ number but proving himself a man of honour. Fundamentally the long introduction to the set-up and the five-year-later coda the film wraps up with end-up feeling unsatisfying. It’s actually too faithful to Rostand, carrying across the original’s flaws. Cyrano embraces the mix of romance, comedy and sadness in its wooing-by-proxy and the odd-couple friendship between Cyrano and Christian, but feels more perfunctory as soon as it has to move beyond this section of the film.

It’s a shame as that central section is actually rather effective with Wright bringing the musical numbers in particular to life with a real delicate beauty. There are some very good performances, especially the heart-felt work from Dinklage, but it eventually strains towards an epic scale its story isn’t quite strong or engaging enough to support.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Deliriously overblown and full of demented imagination even if it never quite feels necessary

Director: George Miller

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa), Chris Hemsworth (Dementus), Tom Burke (Praetorian Jack), Lachy Hulme (Immortan Joe), Alyla Browne (Young Furiosa), George Shevtsov (History Man), John Howard (People Eater), Angus Sampson (The Organic Mechanic), Nathan Jones (Rictus Erectus), Josh Helman (Scotus), Charlee Fraser (Mary Jabassa), Elsa Pataky (Mr Norton)

Is there a more demented mainstream film series than Mad Max? Furiosa follows the balls-to-the-wall excess of Mad Max: Fury Road with more of the same and a mythic atmosphere of Godfather Part II-backstory deepening. What you end up with might feel slightly odd or self-important – over two and a half hours of direct build-up for a pay-off we saw almost ten years ago (perhaps that’s why Furiosa ends with a cut-down play-back of the major events of Fury Road spliced into the credits, so we can all be reassured the villains left alive here got their comeuppance later). Furiosa is frequently overlong, a little too full of its love of expansive world-building and never quite convinces you that we actually need it – but then it’s also so bizarre, Grand Guignal and totally nuts perhaps we should just be happy that, in a world of focus-grouped content, it even exists.

We’re back on the desert wasteland of post-apocalyptic Australia as motorbike riding goons kidnap young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) from the Green Place hoping to use her to persuade crazed war lord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) to lead his forces there. Despite the heroic efforts of her mother (Charlee Fraser), Furiosa remains a captive with only a secret tattoo on her arm (guess what’s going to happen to that…) to guide her home. Dementus provokes a resources war with cult-leader Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), with Furiosa traded, then escaping a hideous fate as one of Joe’s wives, instead growing up secretly-disguised as a boy (becoming Anya Taylor-Joy) as part of Praetorian Jack’s (Tom Burke) War Rig crew. Then the war between Immortan Joe and Dementus explodes again, foiling Furiosa and Jack’s plan to escape and giving Furiosa a change at revenge against Dementus.

That sprawling plot outline hopefully gives an idea of the ambitious bite George Miller is taking out of his world. While Fury Road took place over, at most, a few days, Furiosa stretches well over twenty, so gargantuan in scale and newly invented locations (as well as the mountainous citadel, we get the oil-rig nightmare of Gas Town and the Mordor-like Bullet Town) that it squeezes most of the entire Act Five war between Dementus and Immortan Joe into a brief, tracking-shot, montage. Furiosa is actually rather like a fever-dream Freud might have had after reading an airplane thriller, split into on-screen chapter titles – each with portentous (and sometimes pretentious) names like ‘The Pole of Inaccessibility’ – and a self-important narration dialling up mythic importance. If Fury Road was like someone stabbing an adrenalin-filled syringe straight into your heart, Furiosa is a like being told a detour-crammed story by someone a bit the worse-the-wear after a long night.

Not that Furiosa shirks on the banging madness of Fury Road’s slap-in-the-face action. It features a mid-film War Rig vs motor-bike raiders pitched-driving battle that is so extreme you wonder no one got crushed under wheel while making it, perfectly capturing the addled madness of Fury Road. A Chapter 4 pitched battle at one of Furiosa’s Dystopian-on-speed locations sees destruction, devastation and disaster on an even grander scale than anything else Miller has done before in this series, with an entire mining crater turned into a whirligig of firey destruction. That’s not forgetting three desperate desert chases – the finest of which is the film’s opening sequence, which see Furiosa’s mother track down and ruthlessly dispatch Furiosa’s kidnappers with a velociraptor-like ruthlessness and efficiency. No wonder Miller can put a whole war into a single shot – and why he feels comfortable ending Furiosa with a surprisingly personal and small-scale confrontation.

The main confrontation is between Furiosa and her self-proclaimed warlord – and would-be surrogate Dad – Dementus. Furiosa gives Chris Hemsworth the opportunity he’s been waiting for, allowing to flex his comic muscles, chew hilarious lumps out of the scenery and still show his menace. He makes Dementus an overgrown child, brilliant at stealing but with no idea about how to use them, obsessed with self-improvement (his dialogue is full of verbose, overwritten phrases, like a psychotic thesaurus) and only really happy when he’s smashing something. Introduced framing himself like a zen-like messiah, it doesn’t take long until he’s charging around on a chariot drawn by motorbikes, tasting other people’s tears and giving self-aggrandizing speeches while torturing Furiosa’s nearest-and-dearest. It’s a gift of a part, funny, scary, loathsome but strangely likeable even when he does awful things.

Opposite him, Anya Taylor-Joy actually has less to work with as Furiosa (she only takes over the part almost an hour into the film). Although this is meant to be a Furiosa film, it rarely feels like its telling us much more than we already know, especially since much the skills that ‘makes’ Furiosa what she is in Fury Road takes place in montage and her desire for freedom and to protect others are swiftly established so that any new-comers can unhesitatingly root for her. If Dementus is all talk, Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa is silent and simmering, her humanity either shrinking or quietly growing from moment-to-moment. She has a quiet romance with Tom Burke’s world-weary Praetorian Jack, but this really about converting her into a mythic figure of vengeance rather than making her a personality.

A vengeance we’ve already seen pan-out in Fury Road. I’ll be honest, for all the grand scale of Furiosa, I don’t really feel I learned anything about its central character here I hadn’t already picked up from Theron’s brilliantly expressive performance in the first film. For all the impressiveness of the scale, a lot of Furiosa boils down to physically showing us things that were implied in the first (second?) film – from locations, to the reasons why Furiosa lost her arm to giving us clear reasons for her motivations. But all this is already there – and with brilliant economy – in Fury Road. Telling us all again feels like Miller giving us the footnotes (Furiosa Silmarillon perhaps?) rather than anything truly new and the Homeric backdrop Miller is going for never really clicks into place.

So the most successful swings are not narrative but visual. Furiosa reminds you what an absolutely insane extreme world Mad Max is. Death cults of radiation-deformed albinos? Villains who bottle milk straight from the nipple (not a cow’s), while another obsessively fondles his exposed, pierced ones? A villain who straps a battered old Teddy bear to himself? Action set-pieces that throw in everything – flying bikes, lava lakes and arms stoically lopped off? Even time-jumps are done imaginatively, like a wig, caught in a branch, decaying in front of our eyes. Every single design decision in this – and the gorgeously sun-kissed photography – is dialled up to eleven for George Miller’s very personal vision of pulpy, dystopian chaos.

You can wonder at times – as I did – whether we really needed a two-and-a-half hour film that’s expands the thematic depth of a chase movie which already outlined its characters motivations and personalities with impressive economy. But then, there are moments in Furiosa that just feel like they’ve been pulled out of someone’s crazy dreams. It’s put together with such a good mix of pulp poetry and head-banging craziness by George Miller that after a while you just go with it. And it sticks with you in a way focus-grouped Marvel films never seem to.

Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

Wajda’s masterpiece of subtle but stinging Soviet criticism and one of the great European films

Director: Andrjez Wajda

Cast: Zbigniew Cybulski (Maciek Chełmicki), Ewa Krzyżewska (Krystyna), Wacław Zastrzeżyński (Szczuka), Adam Pawlikowski (Andrzej), Bogumił Kobiela (Drewnowski), Stanisław Milski (Pieniążek). Ignacy Machowski (Waga)

When the dust settles from the chaos of uncertain, terrible times what will we it leave behind: ashes or a diamond? It’s a question Poland is asking on the final day of the war, 8^th May 1945 –what fate will come under Soviet rule? Wajda’s War Trilogy comes to its end and, even considering the quality of the first two films in the series, Ashes and Diamonds is a quantum leap in filmmaking, an extraordinary mix of realism and poetic ambiguity. Wajda captures this turning point in Polish history with a series of encounters between a group of characters in a single location on one night. Ashes and Diamonds can lay claim to being one of the greatest films from Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, a breathtakingly rewarding mix of subtle messaging and tragedy.

Home Army fighters – those paying attention to Wajda’s earlier work will be well aware the Polish government strongly disapproved of these forces loyal to a democratic Polish government – Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) attempt to assassinate communist leader Szczuka (Wacław Zastrzeżyński). Instead, they accidentally murder two regular workers. They are ordered to take a second attempt on their target after he attends a celebration with a host of Polish and Soviet dignitaries at a local hotel. But triggerman Maciek is torn, trapped in a cycle of war that has killed his friends, uncertain about whether to continue in the crusade that has consumed his youth or explore a life he glances at with barmaid Krystna (Ewa Krzyżewska). Will Maciek complete his mission or accept Poland’s future lies not with the ‘liberating’ Soviets?

Wajda’s restructuring of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel is the culmination of the entire War Trilogy’s style: a careful criticism of Stalinism, buried behind ambiguous characters and images that provide enough of an interpretative fig-leaf that the Polish authorities could convince themselves his work was politically acceptable. Nearly everything in Ashes and Diamonds is subtly open to interpretation, carefully hiding its message in plain sight: the war is bringing ashes to Poland, not diamonds. Certainly, today, that’s the only interpretation you could take from Wajda’s extraordinary ending: our assassin writhing in painful, fearful death-throws on a rubbish heap while the hotel guests dance slowly and hypnotically into a doorway bathed in light. The beautiful ambiguity though is clear: look, Wajda could say to his political masters, they’re heading into the light while the Home Army soldier literally dies in a pile of rubbish. How more pro-Soviet can you get?

The entire film is a sad poem to a lost Poland with Wajda carefully guiding our sympathy towards Maciek. On paper, there’s plenty to admire in Szczuka, clearly an honest, competent politician – but he’s also uncharismatic and dull, who we may respect but never love. All our sympathies are captured by Zbigniew Cybulski’s extraordinary performance as Maciek. Inspired by James Dean and Marlon Brando (having binged their films while studying in Paris), Cybulski effectively wears his own clothes and gives Maciek the sort of anti-authority cool Dean made his own. Our sympathies lie immediately with this young man turned reluctant warrior, angry and scared.

Cybulski’s performance isn’t just attitude. He makes clear Maciek is deeply traumatised by the things he’s seen and done. Those dark glasses he wears – which make him look both older, cooler and more cocksure (he looks noticeably younger and more vulnerable without them) – are a legacy of damage to his eyesight from the sewers of the Warsaw Uprising. There’s an odd childish vulnerability to him – he’s spooked by ants crawling across his machine gun during their opening botched assassination – along with a surly resentment at the never-ending demands of this war. But he’s also iconoclastic and passionate about the vision he’s been fighting for. All of this is beautifully captured by Cybulski.

Maciek is at the centre of this pained reflection on all that has been lost in the war. Wajda presents this lingering sense with a series of strikingly unforgettable images. Maciek and Andrzej toast their fallen comrades with burning shots of vodka, each lit like a candle as they remember another name. Flames mark death and loss throughout: the innocent man accidentally machine-gunned by Maciek falls with his jacket burning from point-blank gunfire, fireworks fill the sky when Maciek carries out his assassination.

And where is the Church in all this? Ashes and Diamonds come back time and again to the great spiritual guide in Polish lives (before Socialism). The early assassination takes place outside a countryside Church, its locked door failing to save the victims. It’s an ominous sign for a world where God may have fallen silent, or perhaps never spoke at all. In another brilliant touch of Wajda ambiguity, Maciek and Krystyna walk through a bombed-out church, encountering a giant crucifix hanging upside down. This is not only an extraordinary image – the thorns from Jesus’ head either seeming to visually skewer the lovers or pull them in – but also a confirmation or lament for how little God can help Poland. Maciek clearly doesn’t care, since he happily uses altar decorations to fix Krystyna’s shoe. Faith doesn’t matter in this world.

All people have to belief in is what they can muster in themselves. Perhaps that’s why Maciek has filled his life with the longing to keep the good old cause going. He’s lost so much, he can’t actually believe there is anything else he could really do. For all his flirting at the bar, brimming with cocksure cool, does he ever really believe he has any choice but to continue with what he has committed to do? Wajda frames Maciek in his final moments of choice, huddling under stairs, shadows seeming to box and cage him in.

He’s as trapped as the rest of Poland is. Szczuka is a decent man, but he’s also a Socialist fanatic horrified to hear his son fought for the ‘reactionary’ Home Army. Meanwhile, his Soviet paymasters carefully nuzzle themselves into control over the Polish authorities, Wajda presenting them always with a careful political neutrality. Cunningly, all criticism of them is placed in the mouth of a journalist who speaks nothing but the truth about the freedom-crushing Soviets – but he’s made a drunkard sleazeball (more than enough for the censors to dismiss his words).

Ashes and Diamonds is also a beautiful piece of filmmaking, crammed with Wellesian light and shadow. Despite mostly being a film about waiting and decision making, it’s also full of pace, energy and a sense of a world steamrolled out of existence. It has one of the legendary endings, not only the long, lonely death of our hero but also the hypnotic, slow dance of the Polish authorities, disappearing into the sunlight, unknowingly marching into a future that will extinguish them.

Wajda manages to communicate all this in a film which, thanks to its need to slip everything past the censors, is extraordinarily supple and subtle, never over-playing its hand and spreading its humanity. There are no real villains here, only a series of people at a turning point of history, presented with careful even-handedness, but in way that never intrudes on the obvious sympathies of the film. With extraordinary direction and a superb, era-defining performance from Cybulski, it’s a masterpiece of World Cinema.