Seven (1995)

Darkly, unrelentingly unsettling, Fincher’s true-debut is an outstanding psychological thriller

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Brad Pitt (Detective David Mills), Morgan Freeman (Detective William Somerset), Gwyneth Paltrow (Tracy Mills), Richard Roundtree (DA Talbot), R. Lee Ermey (Police captain), John C McGinley (‘California’), Julie Araskog (Mrs Gould), Mark Boone Jnr (FBI man), John Cassini (Officer Davis), Reginald E. Cathey (Dr Santiago), Richard Schiff (Mark Swarr), Kevin Spacey (John Doe)

Set in a city where decency and humanity goes to die, daylight is a stranger and everything is covered with constant rainfall, Seven covers the most chilling week-in-the-life of two detectives. One, disillusioned William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), is counting down to his early retirement. The other, his cocksure replacement David Mills (Brad Pitt) thinks he’s unbeatable and indestructible. But they are going up against someone who will shake them to their core, a calculating serial killer dispatching victims he judges guilty of the seven deadly scenes, framing their bodies in grotesque rituals. Can they track him down before he completes his terrible work?

Seven is one of the finest, and most influential, of all serial killer films. Dark, haunting and relentless, it’s a perfect package of grim foreboding and nihilistic terror, expertly directed by David Fincher. Seven is very careful about what it shows you, trusting far more in the horror of suggestion and witnessing the reactions of the characters – you come out of it convinced you have seen more than you have. It never lets you relax for a moment, always dreading the worst – yet so many people never saw coming its infamous final act with its unexpected, horrifying, reveals and darkly, hope-free conclusion. Seven offers almost no comfort and never pets you at ease only a despairing look at how terrible the world can be and how desperate the struggle for goodness can be.

In a visual design that’s reminiscent of Blade Runner, the world of Seven is almost permanently dark, dingy and rain-soaked, the crime scenes filthy, terrifying haunted houses of grimness. The chaotic sounds of the city, mechanical and uncaring, are everywhere: Somerset even sleeps with a metronome ticking in an attempt to impose sone order on his world. The score uses base beats and near-industrial sound, the editing mixes smooth classic cuts and sudden shocks, the camera work is awash with tones from the green of greed to the blood red of lust. Not there there is any comfort in daylight, since the brightest, most open sequence of this claustrophobic film (even the Mills’ apartment violently shakes from passing trains, a subtle hint no where is safe) takes place in a pylon-stuffed field and it’s the most horrific, nihilistic of the lot.

Seven though is also darkly seductive: it plays on our fascination with the dark ‘genius’ of Hollywood killers, their love of patterns and the twisted purity of their quest for perfection. The film’s opening sequence, showing the killer’s preparations in a series of jagged, disorienting cuts, even places us in his perspective. When he is revealed, he mixes prissy politeness with dark, obsessive love for his work. Seven understands out fascination with the pattern killer – just as we were obsessed with Hannibal Lector and the Terminator, the guy in control is intriguing. It punishes us for this by stressing the horrific impact of his crimes and the traumatic impact on the survivors, is nihilistic ending even more effective for all the dark enjoyment the viewer has taken out of Seven’s grim momentum.

It’s also benefits hugely from its play on the conventions of the odd-couple detective pairing. Somerset and Mills are chalk-and-cheese: Somerset is calm, methodical and professionally distant, Mills is volcanic, lacks focus and becomes terribly personally invested. One of the films few touches of humanity and hope is the growing friendship between these two – slow-burning to say the least – that sees them go from butting heads to sharing jokes and supporting each other’s calls.

The performances are excellent. Brad Pitt (whose clout helped ensure producers couldn’t neuter the film’s shocking ending) is full of jittery energy masking his insecurity, doubt and fear; so worried about looking weak he resorts constantly to anger. Lacking patience (hilariously he can’t bring himself to read Dante and Chaucer, as Somerset recommends, instead resorting to hiding Cliff Notes books in his desk) he investigates the crimes with gusto, focused on the exterior not the interior. He can’t only see the killer as a lunatic, an under-estimation that makes him easy to manipulate.

The moral centre is Morgan Freeman’s Somerset, a superb performance. Somerset is completely disillusioned, convinced any trace of goodness in the world has disappeared. Despite this, events prove him wise (but not above terrible errors) and determined with a strong moral centre. He’s empathetic about crime in ways Mills isn’t (at an early crime scene, one of his first questions is if the victim’s kid has seen the body, a question dismissed as irrelevant by his colleagues) and investigates from inside the killer’s psyche, seeking to understand his motives. Perhaps no other film than Seven has given Freeman so perfect a vehicle, his expressive eyes full of sorrow and regret, his careful decency a mask of detachment that he slowly lets slip to Mills and his wife.

As that wife, Gwyneth Paltrow gives a striking, endearing and perfectly judged performance in a small but crucial role. Tracy Mills is the one unquestionably decent person in this crap-sack world, perhaps why she and Somerset are drawn together. Seven has a wonderfully quiet, humane moment in all this horror, when the two meet to discuss parenthood, a beautifully played exploration of doubt and fear from Paltrow and quiet semi-regret from Freeman. It’s a role pivotal for the film, Paltrow leaving a deeply tender impression on the viewer.

It’s vital for the film’s final act pay-off. Seven is perfectly constructed, both in its pacing of the murders and in not dragging out the mystery of the motive too long (it knows, of course, that everyone watching the film is ahead of the detectives on that score). It’s crammed with stand-out sequences: a SWAT team house storming promises drama but turns into a dark twist on the wrong-door routine; a chase sequence after a chance encounter with the unseen killer gives a perfect shot of adrenalin. It’s all unbalancing us for a shockingly unexpected move by the killer (the actor’s identity carefully kept a secret in advance, meaning his reveal is a genuine shock for the uninitiated) leading to its horrifically nihilistic ending that I defy anyone to anticipate (except its now probably as famous as the identity of Rosebud or Keyser Soze).

Seven is astonishingly brave in all its pulsating thrills and perfectly judged tension for offering very little hope. This is a film where good is essentially powerless against evil: Somerset is too detached to beat evil, Mills so invested in his own black-and-white world he’s easy prey for the coldly manipulative. The film’s conclusion is a punch to the gut, but logical in a film where we’ve seen ordinary people indifferent to the worst of humanity and evil being so devilishly determined and ingenious in its actions no one stands a chance to beat it. You can criticise Seven for its small beats of misogyny: while Tracy is pure, like a fairy-tale princess, the two female victims are a shallow, preening model while the lust victim is not the man who uses prostitutes but the prostitute herself – an attitude we shouldn’t be surprised the killer has, but is unquestioned by any of the (all-male) investigators. (I was uncomfortable with this when I first saw it in the nineties, and time hasn’t changed my mind).

But aside from that, Seven is a darkly compelling masterpiece, a brilliantly unsettling film from David Fincher, at last allowed to deliver a film that exactly matched his vision (in a way Alien 3 did not). The battle to keep its nihilistic dark and shocking ending was a battle well-won, and it makes for a film that is a chilling exploration of evil in the world as well as a compelling, darkly-bloody film noir set in a world of unrelenting hopelessness. One of the greatest serial killer films ever made.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Starting as a cleverly structured homage, it becomes increasingly more nostalgia driven as it goes on

Director: Fede Álvarez

Cast: Cailee Spaeny (Rain), David Jonsson (Andy), Archie Renaux (Tyler), Isabela Merced (Kay), Spike Fearn (Bjorn), Aileen Wu (Navarro), Daniel Betts / Ian Holm (Rook)

It’s always a surprise how many Alien films there actually are (at least nine if you count all the Alien vs Predators). Perhaps we forget because so many of them have been less than great. So, saying Alien: Romulus is the third best Alien film isn’t exactly high praise. After all, beyond Alien and Aliens the bar is pretty low. Alien: Romulus has a lot going for it, not least the fact it’s clearly been made with love by a director who adores the series. It makes it all the sadder that, the longer it goes on, the more it becomes a fan-boy remix of a elements from the other films. It ends up as much of a nostalgia obsessed, easter-egg piece of fan bait as any recent Marvel film, but at least entertaining.

Set some time after Alien – it opens with a mysterious Weyland-Yutani ship plucking the original Xenomorph (wrapped in a protective cocoon) from the Nostromo’s wreckage– ourhero is Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a young worker in a grim mining facility planet. Working for credits for passage home – a target the company constantly changes – she lives with her adoptive ‘brother’ Andy (David Jonsson), a gentle, glitchy synthetic reprogrammed by her late father. They have a chance for freedom when her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) and his crew asks her and Andy’s help to plunder cryostasis chambers from an abandoned ship so they can survive the nine-year journey to another world. But the ship (Romulus and Remus) is, of course, the one we saw earlier – and on board are a host of facehugger experiments, leading inevitably to Xenomorph slaughter.

Alien: Romulus starts very strongly, carefully reconstructing the stylistic look and feel of the original (right down to the spot-on sound design of all those 70’s future computers blinking into life, chuntering old fax machines). The crapsack colony feels perfectly in-tune with Aliens, as a mix of Western frontier town and industrial hellscape. Álvarez’s film brings the franchise back to its roots, after the mystique-shattering of Ridley Scott’s prequels. Romulus is a haunted house in space, a psychopathic alien lucking around every corner. As the tension slowly builds – helped by the fact we, obviously, know a lot more about what those odd spidery-things suspended in animation are – Alien: Romulus feels like a return to the factors that made the series work in the first place.

Álvarez dials up the sexualised body horror of this revolting creature and its unstoppable relentless cunning. Alien: Romulus is full of the revolting invasiveness of these animals, the icky body horror of creatures hatching inside you, with the nightmare-fuel monstrosities getting worse as the film goes on. Playing out in a poorly lit ship, the creatures scuttle from the corners of the screen to impregnate or dissect their victims. He also has some neat original ideas, including deducing the face-huggers detect body heat and movement (having no eyes) so the only way to evade them is to raise the room temperature and move slowly (such a good idea, you wish he made more of it).

It’s also a film that looks at the all-round weapon nature of these creatures, specifically their acid blood. The team can’t shoot the things – they’ll melt through the decks and cause instant decompression – and when one does die, its blood floats through zero-gravity as an almost impossible to evade thread. One character dies not from the jaws of the xenomorph, but from sticking a cattle prod into its cocoon, acid spilling out into his eyes, hands and chest (not pretty).

It’s opening act also offers an intriguing relationship between its two leads, one a potential proto-Ripley with a strong moral compass, the other a very different type of synthetic. Andy, well-played by David Jonsson, is gentle, clumsy and naïve, a vulnerable people-pleaser who loves cringy Dad jokes, prone to the android equivalent of epileptic fits under pressure. By establishing the closeness between these two characters, Alien: Romulus explores a new angle of the series study of the relationship between humans and their creations: are these synthetics people or property?

Rain clearly loves Andy: she may resent the bullying he receives from some of the anti-synthetic crew, but also willingly reprograms him when needed and plans to leave him behind so as not to fall foul of anti-synthetic laws back home. Reprogramming Andy drastically alters his personality – David Jonsson does a great job switching his body language, demeanour and accent (back to his native British) – as Andy becomes a more familiar Alien electric reflexes and ‘needs-of-the-many’ andriod. What’s intriguing here is its implied part of this is due to Andy’s own suppressed resentment at his treatment by the humans as somewhere between a child and a screwdriver.

The complex relationship between these two is the heart of Alien: Romulus and its most original element. It’s a shame the film loses focus on this the longer it goes on. As Romulus hits it’s second half, Álvarez succumbs to fanboy temptation until finally he can’t go more than thirty seconds without referencing an line or scene from an earlier Alien film. Slowly the parade of painfully recognisable features (even an utterly out-of-character reprise of ‘Get away from her you bitch’) begins to depress you as Alien: Romulus gives up the idea of being something fresh and settles for being a passionate piece of fan-fiction, unable to imagine anything beyond the scenarios it’s already seen play out somewhere else.

Alien: Romulus becomes as much a nostalgia trip as anything else Hollywood makes these days. Right down to recreating a digital version of the late Ian Holm as ‘Rook’, Romulus and Remus’ version of Nostromo’s Ash, for a prominent role. The recreation is pretty good, Rook is an interesting character – sympathetic to the heroes at first, but increasingly reverting to form – but there is something uncomfortable about it. This is, after all, a recreation for nostalgia of a dead actor, without his consent (though with his families) not as a visual cameo but as a crucial character. How long before we get more and more of this?

It’s a slightly unsettling note, even if I ended up enjoying Alien: Romulus more than a should have. Part of me liked seeing Ian Holm again. Hypocritically I don’t mind quite so much riffs on films I like –hypocritical since I was annoyed by the same thing in Deadpool & Wolverine. But I wish Alien: Romulus had settled for subtle recreation of details while striking out somewhere unique. What it actually ends up doing is suggesting that, once you strip it down to its roots, there isn’t much to Alien beyond slasher-in-space. Which makes you think, for all its flaws, perhaps Prometheus was a braver movie for trying to do something that wasn’t that.

But then I’ll also definitely watch it again. So maybe that makes me part of the problem.

The Hidden Fortress (1958)

Kurosawa’s samurai entertainment is overlong but has just enough action and adventure

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshiro Mifune (General Rokurota Makabe), Minoru Chiaki (Tahei), Kamatari Fujiwara (Matashichi), Susumu Fujita (General Hyoe Tadokoro), Takashi Shimura (General Izumi Nagakura), Misa Uehara (Princess Yuki), Eiko Miyoshi (Yuki’s lady-in-waiting), Toshiko Higuchi (Prostitute)

A princess hides in a castle from the wicked forces who have captured her kingdom. Her only hope is a noble general who has concealed the kingdom’s gold in bundles of wood, hidden in a lake at a mysterious castle. The general needs to get the gold and the princess through miles of hostile territory, with only a pair of greedy, incompetent peasants to help. This fairy tale structure is spun by Kurosawa into a samurai action-adventure with Mifune (inevitably) as the general, Misa Uehara as the Princess and Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara as the peasants. It’s good fun, overlong, but an entertaining ride – and one now best known now for its influence over Star Wars.

Kurosawa, after pouring his heart and soul into Throne of Blood, needed to relax. He decided it was time for an entertainment, something to please the crowds. The Hidden Fortress is certainly that, Kurosawa’s first film shot on impressive widescreen Tohoscope, with plenty of horse-bound action and swordplay. It’s really a Kurosawa Westerns, with heroes on the trail on a mission with bad guys to foil. But, as is sometimes the case with Kurosawa, it’s length and scope frequently makes it feel slightly indulgent, while it’s mix of comedy and drama doesn’t always sit comfortably together.

The Hidden Fortress is though highly cinematic. As well as Kurosawa’s enjoyment of the wide-angle lens – soaking up the slopes of Mount Fuji, often rolling in a beautiful mist – it frequently employs Kurosawa’s love of fast-editing tricks, in particular fast wipes to move us seamlessly from one place and time to another (one of many flourishes that influenced George Lucas who made these Kurosawa wipes internationally famous). A horse charge, where General Makabe chases down the samurai hunting them, is a grippingly frenetic with its pace and energy.

Kurosawa mixes this with comedy, though his unusual POV characters. In another move cited by Lucas’ as the inspiration for C3PO and R2D2, much of The Hidden Fortress takes place from the perspective of its peasant sidekicks. But, unlike the genial droids, Tahei and Matashichi are greedy, cowardly and selfish, frequently proving themselves untrustworthy. But, then in a touch of social commentary, perhaps they don’t owe anything to a general who treats them as slaves and (initially) plans to kill them once they are no longer useful. They are played with energetic larger-than-life force by Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara that contrasts neatly with the gruff authority of Mifune.

It’s them we follow from the start, feuding over robbing the body of a slain samurai before being flung into the slave mines of the Princess’ former kingdom. One of Hidden Fortress’ gently played themes is the class difference between these two sons-of-the-soil and the upper-classes they (reluctantly) serve. For starters, that service comes with no choice – it never occurs to Makabe that they have a say in the matter – and they are told almost nothing about the purpose of their journey. They are instead tools for a higher purpose, just as the Princess’ similar-looking maid is sent to town to be captured and executed, to help protect the bloodline of the royal family.

It’s an attitude the Princess – well played by Misa Uehara as a stubborn young woman, full of righteous indignation at her restrictive office – comes to deplore. She, unlike anyone else among the elite, questions the idea of the poor as unimportant puppets for their betters, and it is she who is drawn to protect people, including a mis-treated prostitute who she insists Makabe buys the freedom of. It’s also she – more than anyone else, including the two peasants – drawn towards the anarchic Fire Festival they encounter, with its dismissal of worldly goods and embracing of enjoying life. But, perhaps Kurosawa’s point is it’s only the wealthy who can afford to indulge themselves with such thoughts: peasants have far fewer options and no choice but to scrabble in the dirt for coins.

This social commentary would perhaps be more widely discussed if the film had kept Kurosawa’s original title, Three Bad Men in a Hidden Fortress: a title that tips Tahei, Matashichi and Makabe into the same morally ambiguous pot, all obsessed with worldly needs (money or the continuation of the royal house) over any concerns about those around them. But, somehow, it’s easier to focus on the wheedling greed of the peasants, and overlook the lofty cold distance of the general, because he’s a noble guy, brave and daring who spares his opponent after a fair duel.

It’s also because The Hidden Fortress is less focused on these elements – Seven Samurai did the snobbery of the samurai class and the mixed motives of the working classes more effectively in any case – and more on being a rollicking, road-movie entertainment. It’s Western-style (in both ways) misfit band adventures, features expertly filmed action set-pieces. Best of all the previously mentioned chase, and a gripping one-on-one duel between Rakabe and his rival General Tadokoro (a fine performance of quiet dignity from Susumu Fujita), that is edge-of-the-seat in its mix of graceful camera work and exciting sword play.

The Hidden Fortress is entertaining, but it’s hard to escape the feeling there is too much of it. Despite not being as long as Seven Samurai, it feels less forceful narratively, largely features less compelling characters and is less well balanced between depth and action. Its plot feels almost deliberately lightweight and the resolution feels rushed. The film’s fairy-tale simplicity really needs a relatable hero at its heart – but the focus on the sometimes irritating peasants means we don’t get that. Fundamentally, The Hidden Fortress is an adventure story from a director, taking a rest from more complex work. It entertains, but feels like it lives in the shadow of other films, even before its connection to Star Wars turned it into a footnote in another film’s story.

Titanic (1997)

Cameron’s film is easy to knock, but is a triumph of romance, scale and real-life tragedy

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Jack Dawson), Kate Winslet (Rose DeWitt Bukater), Billy Zane (Cal Hockley), Frances Fisher (Ruth DeWitt Bukater), Kathy Bates (Molly Brown), Gloria Stuart (Old Rose), Bill Paxton (Brock Lovett), Suzy Amis (Lizzy Calvert), David Warner (Spicer Lovejoy), Danny Nucci (Fabrizio De Rossi), Victor Garber (Thomas Andrews), Bernard Hill (Captain Smith), Jonathan Hyde (J Bruce Ismay)

Get on any ship, and I guarantee you’ll see two people at the bow standing, one in front of the other, with their arms stretched out. If that doesn’t tell you something about the lasting impact of Titanic nothing will. Titanic was a sensation: top of the box office for months with the sort of repeat-viewing producers dream of; My Heart Will Go On went platinum and half the world was in love with Leonardo DiCaprio. It won 11 Oscars, made a billion dollars and is a film everyone knows even if (hard to believe) they ain’t seen it. James Cameron took an enormous punt on Titanic – Romeo and Juliet meets disaster movie on legendary ship – and it paid off in spades. Because, no matter your cynicism, you can’t deny he created a film millions of people invested in to an extraordinary scale, staged with the epic sweep, gorgeous detail and pounding disaster thrills that channelled David Lean, Luchino Visconti and Irwin Allen all at once.

Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) is destined for a life of dutiful, unimaginative marriage with spoilt millionaire Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) when she boards Titanic as a first-class passenger in Liverpool on 10 April 1912. Also boarding the ship (but in steerage) is drifter and would-be artist Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio). When he saves her from taking her own life by jumping from the ship, they form a bond which flourishes into a love that will change both their lives. But not as much as the iceberg the ship is ploughing relentlessly towards across the Atlantic.

It’s very easy to take a pop at Titanic. Its romance sometimes succumbs to Mills and Boon cliché and Cameron’s script has more than its fair share of clunky lines (it’s one of those rare Best Picture winners with no screenplay nomination). Plenty of people hated it in a fit of inverted snobbery as a whole generation took this modern romance to its heart. But Titanic reveals the truth of the magic of movies: it uses a traditional romance to build our emotional investment in the sinking and the lives of ordinary passengers, more successfully than any other Titanicfilm had before or since.

Cameron knew the mountain he had to overcome. After all, this was the most famous disaster since Pompeii: where was the tension? So, he opens with a modern-day setting, a treasure hunt among the real ship’s ruins, with the hilariously named Brock Lovett (a game Bill Paxton in a thankless role) searching for a priceless diamond, the Heart of the Ocean. His only link: the older Rose (a plucked-from-retirement performance of charm and hidden fire from 87-year-old Gloria Stuart), who becomes our window to the past. This allows the audience to be told the geekily excited “ain’t it cool” details of the sinking with the same sort of distance we’re used to thinking about it. The film then becomes a lesson in making us learn, like Brock, this wasn’t an anecdote but a horrific disaster that killed 1,500 real people (made worse because we know exactly what’s going to happen to this ship every step of the way). The MacGuffin is intended to look as trivial as it does by the film’s end.

His key tool for this was his Romeo and Juliet love story told, for all its airport-novel lack of originality, with a vibrant, earnest intensity. Helped by fantastic chemistry between two talented actors, you have to work hard not to care for Rose and Jack (no accident those initials). And through their eyes, the whole ship comes to life, Just as the special effects camera sweep through the ruins, turns it from a ghost shop into a living breathing place, where ordinary, real-life dramas play out in every corner. It’s a perfectly judged entry point for bringing history to compelling life, playing on emotions we’ve all felt: love and fear of death.

The film splits neatly into two acts. The first is the romance and, whatever you say, it’s a cinematic romance for the ages in its old-school sweep. As we watch them bounce round the ship, make each other laugh, dance and fall in love, the utter lack of cynicism is really winning. It’s so overwhelmingly genuine and heartfelt, you can’t help feeling it yourself. Both help each other find new depths: for Rose, the willingness to embrace her own choices, for Jack a maturity and responsibility he’s lacked. Bathed in golden cinematic light and backed by James Horner’s superb score, they become two people we really invest in being together. It’s so earnest and honest it even gets away with otherwise ridiculous scenes like “draw me like one of your French girls Jack”.

Both the leads carry-off it off superbly. No mean feat considering the challenge of making the film – not least being submerged for weeks in freezing cold water during night shoots. Kate Winslet makes Rose burst with life from the depths of fear and doubt, effortlessly carrying much of the movie. It’s often overlooked that Rose drives much of the pace of the romance, as well as clearly being the more sexually and romantically experienced partner. Leonardo DiCaprio – who found it a burden for years, as it turned him from proto-DeNiro to heartthrob pin-up – gives an infectious energy to Jack’s fortune-cookie mantras, while growing in authority as the film progresses towards disaster.

Cameron fills his golden-hued recreated Titanic with the sort of detail we’ve not seen since The Leopard. Sure, his view of the haves and have-nots is hardly subtle (from ruthlessly posh, heartless Brits to plucky, happy-go-lucky Irish working-class), but it makes it very easy to relate to the injustice, bullying and casual snobbery. In Rose’s fiancée Cal, Billy Zane unselfishly plays an utter rotter: a coward, a snob who mocks Picasso and has never heard of Freud, a bully who treats Rose like a pet dog and puts his own needs (and safety) first at every turn. Titanic might be a ship of goodies and baddies (most egregiously in its clumsy slandering of First Officer Murdoch, a clumsy mis-step Cameron later apologised to Murdoch’s family for), but it’s undeniably alive.

It’s that quality of life which makes the sinking of the ship so horrifyingly intense. Cameron’s extraordinary second-half of the film – effectively a souped-up, horrifying remake of A Night to Remember (including quoting shots from that film) – never lets us treat this like a historical curiosity. Instead, it hammers home in intense, tragic detail, the shocking loss of life and the desperate, futile attempts of so many people to survive. Told in close to real-time, superbly edited and practically dripping in freezing water, it’s terrifying in its unstoppable intensity. Suddenly the scale of this mighty ship shrinks into an ever smaller world of fear. Events advance with horrifying speed, as the ship slowly then terribly quickly, disappears, made worse by our knowing in advance every step.

Cameron breathes life into dozens of small tragedies that surround Titanic. The band that played on. The Irish mother who puts her children to bed, knowing they cannot escape. The wealthy elderly couple who lie together while the water washes up around them. The hysterical children separated from their weeping father who remains on board. The priest who spends his dying moments comforting his flock. The camera catches moments of terror in the eyes of people we have seen fleetingly in the film. Titanic drains any sense of perverse excitement at the disaster from you. By the time the survivors are pleading for rescue in the freezing Atlantic, you’ll be as shell-shocked and shaken as the witnesses in the lifeboats.

Watch Titanic with your cynicism parked, and it is an extraordinary piece of epic, romantic film-making. The cinematography, production design, costumes and editing are all perfect and James Horner’s inspiring score takes the film’s slightly mushy romance to a higher level. There are great performances from the likes of Kathy Bates and Victor Garber. And the second half grips like a horrific vice, never letting go. There’s a reason this film gripped the hearts of the whole world in 1997: it knows exactly what it is trying to do and excels at doing it. And never, in any film, has a historical disaster hit a viewer with as much punch as Titanic does.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Paranoia in small-town America is superbly executed in Siegel’s creepy sci-fi thriller

Director: Don Siegel

Cast: Kevin McCarthy (Dr Miles Bennell), Dana Wynter (Becky Driscoll), King Donovan (Jack Belicec), Carolyn Jones (Teddy Belicec), Larry Gates (Dr Dan Kauffman), Virginia Christine (Wilma Lentz), Ralph Dumke (Police Chief Nick Grivett), Jean Wiles (Nurse Sally Withers), Bobby Clark (Jimmy Grimaldi)

‘Look, you fools, you’re in danger! Can’t you see?! They’re after you! They’re after all of us! Our wives, our children, everyone! They’re already here! You’re next!’

Those paranoid screams from Dr Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) are part of the iconic conclusion of Don Siegel’s thrilling B-movie sci-fi conspiracy, full of the creeping horror of not trusting your own eyes or ears. It’s set in small-town Santa Mira, a sweet-as-apple-pie slice of Americana, where everyone knows everyone and life never changes. Until, of course, it does. Dr Bennell returns from a conference in Los Angeles to an epidemic of people claiming their loved ones are no longer their loved ones but that something about them is different. Bennell shrugs this off, more focused on his budding romance with fellow divorcee Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) – until he finds a clone of his friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan) growing in their home and faces the horrific truth: alien invaders are replacing people in the town with emotionless duplicates bent on world domination.

Siegal always claimed it was just a movie. That he wasn’t interested in political statements. You can believe that if you like, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ power stems from the terrible political and social parallels it draws with the real-world. The inversion reeks of 50s McCarthyite paranoia at communist infiltration, those suspicious Pinkos uninterested in individuality, only in protecting the system, where people are just cogs in its wheel. Even today, it still feeds on our fear of ‘the system’ absorbing us, crushing all that individuality we pride ourselves in having.

Even scarier at the time, Invasion doesn’t happen in the big city (where individuals are all getting lost anyway), but in that most American place of all, sacred small-town America, of picket fences and lifelong neighbours. If it can happen there, Invasions suggests, it really could happen anywhere. It’s one of many instances where Siegel makes the low-budget work effectively: in the same way he made a massive city full of people you don’t know the perfect space for a killer in Dirty Harry, he makes an intimate community the worst possible place to see people drained of humanity.

Invasions of the Body Snatchers uses that low-budget and limited locations to excellent effect. The bulk of the action taking place in the character’s homes and offices is actually more chilling. Watching a pod person mow a lawn, while his terrified niece (an effective performance from Virginia Christie) swears up-and-down he’s definitely not really her uncle, or a child running in terror from the home of his preternaturally calm mother is even more scary. That gets even more disturbing when our heroes discover replicas of themselves growing in their basements, or watch their small-town streets suddenly turn into a sea of emotionless duplicates.

There is also a hell of a lot snuck under the censor’s watchful eyes (maybe they only half-watched B-movies?) Its sharp screenplay includes plenty of surprisingly racy talk about between Bennell and Becky about his ‘bedside manner’ (‘that comes later’ he wryly tells her), or the fact that both of these characters talk openly about ‘going to Reno’, a popular euphemism at the time for divorce. For the time this is a surprisingly frank discussion of sex, not to mention the possibility of contented divorce (even Bennell’s nurse teases him about his flirtations with married ladies). What’s interesting is to consider is, if part of the appeal of the film is the horror of the familiar disappearing, perhaps the open acceptance of both divorce and sex suggests the process is already happening in different ways? Perhaps the safe world of picket fences is collapsing anyway, into something more permissive (and, who knows, plenty of people might well prefer that).

The creepy body-horror of the pods the duplicates grow in is also surprisingly disturbing for a 50s sci-fi. Splitting open to reveal the half-formed people inside, covered in foam, or the creepily serene complete copies that emerge, there is something deeply unsettling about it. No wonder Bennell’s instinct is to destroy them if he can with a garden fork, a surprisingly graphic choice. It’s hard to imagine a major Hollywood picture getting away with this sort of nightmare imagery.

It helps to build the terror of the film, which grows more-and-more relentless. Much of the final third of Invasion mixes a cat-and-mouse game with Bennell and Becky’s desperate flight from the town. It culminates in Bennell – in a scene really sold by Kevin McCarthy, who is the picture of (literally) square-jawed determination and reasonableness – disintegrate into just the sort of ranting lunatic (as he would do again in a cameo in the 1978 remake) the pod people decide they can let go, because ‘no one will believe him anyway’. Siegel shoots this sequence of paranoid ranting with a fast-cut mix of close-up and unsettling angles, as Bennell fails utterly to get anyone on the highway to slow down and listen to his warnings, like that nightmare of shouting when no one can hear you.

Perhaps it was too much for the producers, who added their own reassurance, introducing a framing device where Bennell recounts his tale to two reassuring figures of authority. I like to think Siegel – who uses visual metaphors for creeping paranoia and panic effectively throughout the film – deliberately shot these sequences as dully as possible (they remind me above all of the pedestrian final sequence of The Magnificent Ambersons) either so that we forget them (which we do) or perhaps to suggest their mundane nature implies these two-dimensional doctors and FBI agents might just be pod people themselves.

Despite the framing device, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a tightly paced thriller, that builds in intensity throughout and uses its small-town setting as an excellent metaphor for the terrifying thought of your own family being invaded and subverted by a horrendous outside force. It makes for a compelling B-movie and leaves a deeply unsettling feeling behind: no wonder it has inspired so many remakes and reinventions. The terror of the people you know being the same and yet so completely alien and different, is going to have impact on every generation, no matter the context.

Throne of Blood (1957)

Kurosawa’s Macbeth adaptation beautifully captures much of the spirit of Shakespeare

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshiro Mifune (Taketoki Washizu), Isuzu Yamada (Lady Asaji Washizu), Minoru Chiaki (Yoshiaki Miki), Takashi Shimura (Noriyasu Odagura), Akira Kubo (Yoshiteru Miki), Yōichi Tachikawa (Kunimaru Tsuzuki), Takamaru Sasaki (Lord Kuniharu Tsuzuki), Chieko Naniwa (Forest witch)

Shakespeare is universal. What more proof do you need, than to see Macbeth very much present in Throne of Blood, Kurosawa’s samurai epic version of the Bard’s Scottish play. Kurosawa’s film takes the plot of Shakespeare’s tragedy, with touches of Japanese Noh theatre, told with his distinctive visual eye. It makes for truly great cinema, one of Kurosawa’s undisputed masterpieces – even if it loses some of the greatness of Shakespeare along the way.

You can though see Shakespeare from the beginning in Kurosawa’s mist filled epic (bringing back memories of the Scottish Highlands). A badly-wounded soldier brings news to Lord Tsuzuki (Takamaru Sasaki) of the defeat of his traitorous former friend thanks to the brilliant generalship of Washizu (Toshiro Mifune). Meanwhile, in the forest, Washizu and his fellow general Miki (Minoru Chiaki) encounter a witch (Chieko Naniwa) who prophesies that Washizu will one day be the Lord. When other prophesies proof true, Washizu starts to think how he could make the last true as well. His ambitions are encouraged by his wife Lady Asaji (Isuzu Yamada), who persuades him murder is the best tool for succession. But can they live with the consequences of their crime?

So much, so Shakespeare right? Throne of Blood ingeniously translates Shakespeare’s plot to an entirely different setting, one of feudal Japan. It also translates some of the Bard’s most striking verbal imagery into visuals: the strange mixture of rain and sunshine (‘so foul and fair a day’) that Washizu and Miki wade through before they meet the witch; Miki’s horse thrashing wildly through the courtyard like Duncan’s; the lamps that light the way to Tsuzuki’s chamber (like Macbeth’s dagger). Kurosawa’s visual transformation of the play’s imagery is breathtakingly original.

On its release Throne of Blood was savaged by Western critics for its cheek, before critical consensus shifted to proclaim it one of the greatest of all Shakespeare adaptations. But do you still have Shakespeare without the language (and by that, I don’t mean from English into translation, but its complete removal). Kurosawa’s film makes no attempt to replicate the poetry of Shakespeare (most strikingly, its equivalent of the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech is Washizu shrieking “Fool! Fool” as he sits in frustration, a neat image but one where you’d wish Mifune had been given more to play). But Throne of Blood may not be a complete Shakespeare adaptation, but it’s possibly one of the greatest adaptations ever made of a Shakespeare story.

This is because Throne of Blood captures so many of the core thematic concepts of Macbeth, not least its destructive, nihilistic force and the terrible, crushing burden self-imposed destiny and ambition sets. Toshiro Mifune’s Washizu may more of a brute than Macbeth, but his blustering, aggressive exterior hides a weak man, insecure and dependent on others. His weakness is in fact a lack of imagination, his inability to picture a life outside of the tracks laid down before him by the witch. His lack of independent thought is recognised by his wife, Asaji who nudges and pushes Washizu in the direction she (and he, deep down) wishes at every opportunity.

Washizu is soon trapped in a cycle of murder and disgrace he can’t escape. The walls of the room where he and Asaji plot the murder of Lord Tsuzuki is still smeared with the blood from the seppuku of its former owner who also betrayed Tsuzuki. Whenever he enters the forest, Washizu seems almost wrapped inside its branches, unable to find his way. Before a dinner to host the murdered Miki, Washizu listens (like Claudius) to a noh actor recount details of a crime all too similar to his own. As Lord, Washizu cowers powerlessly in it just as its previous owner did. Even the film itself is a grim cycle of the inevitability of destruction: Kurosawa’s open mist rolls away to reveal a monument to the castle before the castle itself emerges to take its place, the film returning at its end to the same mist-covered monument. These bookends also stress how transient (and pointless) this grappling for power is – nature will eventually claim all.

But it also suggests a world where death is so inevitable, that you might as well seize what power you can when you can. Even Miki – the film’s finest performance from Minoru Chiaki, full of subtle reactions of resignation and disgust – turns a blind eye (despite his sideways glances of disgust at key moments) to Washizu’s crimes, to further his son’s promised hopes for the throne. Asaji is motivated by her belief that there is no sin in seizing what you can from our brief time in this world, firmly telling Washizu that not only is it his duty to deliver the prophecy but – in a world where Tsuzaki gained power by murdering the lord before him – he would hardly be the first and that no previous killer trusts a potential new rival in any case.

Asaji is strikingly played by Isuzu Yamada, a quiet, scheming figure who sees everything and has an inner strength her husband lacks. Like Mifune, she uses the striking poses of Noh theatre to fabulous effect – Asaji herself moves, on the night of the murder, in a noh dance craze – and to communicate the dance of power between them throughout that long night. Kurosawa also uses silence beautifully with Asaji, most strikingly of all her silent, almost supernatural, collecting of drugged saki for Tsuzaki’s guards: as she walks into, disappears into darkness, then reappears carrying the drink all that is heard is the squeak of her robes across the floor. Yamada’s controlled, Noh-chill makes her brief collapse into futile hand-washing madness all the more striking.

After the long night of the murder, Kurosawa presents a world that grows more and more uncontrolled. In a brilliant innovation, Asaji provokes the murder of Miki by lying (perhaps?) about being pregnant, making Washizu desperate to protect the chance of a royal line. Miki’s murder leads to his terrifying pale ghost silently challenging an increasingly wild Washizu, who thrashs weakly around the room seemingly without any control. Mifune’s powerfully gruff Washizu becomes increasingly petulant and desperate, lambasting his troops and clinging to the letter of the prophecies rather than their more detailed meaning. Mifune’s striking poses – inspired by noh theatre – seems to trap him even more as hyper-real passengers in a pre-determined story. If Kurosawa’s adaptation has rinsed much of their complexity out, he firmly establishes the couple at its centre as trapped souls in an inescapable cycle.

Kurosawa innovates further by introducing a sort of Greek chorus of regular soldiers, ordinary warriors under Washizu’s command whose faith in their commander (they clearly know he murdered Tsuzaki) shrinks as Washizu’s grip on the situation fails. Washizu clings to belief in his invulnerablity – even after the prophecy about the impossible circumstances needed for his defeat (as if a forest can ever move!) is told to him in a fit of mocking laughter by the androgynous witch and a string of suspicious woodland spirits.

It culminates in Washizu instigating his own destruction, bragging to his men about the obscure circumstances that will lead to his defeat – leading to his own disillusioned men fragging the panicked lord the second the situation comes to pass. Kurosawa’s ending is visually extraordinary, Washizu pierced with so many arrows he resembles a human porcupine (Mifune’s terror was real, the actor dodging real arrows). Just as Asaji collapses into madness, Washizu’s fate is ignoble – Kurosawa doesn’t even afford him Macbeth’s brave duel against Macduff, this great warrior instead going down without so much as inflicting a scratch on Throne of Blood’s Malcolm and his forces.

Throne of Blood focuses beautifully on some (not all) of the key themes in Macbeth. It presents a fatalistic world where choices are few and the deadly cycle of death never seems to stop. Kurosawa interprets this all beautifully, transferring Shakespeare’s verbal imagery into intelligent, dynamic imagery. Sure, in removing the text it removes the core thing that makes Shakespeare Shakespeare – and also leads to the simplifying of its characters, in particular its leads who lose much of their depth and shade. But as a visual presentation reinvention of one of Shakespeare’s stories, this is almost with parallel, a triumphant and gripping film that constantly rewards.

Late Spring (1949)

Ozu’s marvellous heart-rending simple tale of difficult family decisions carries universal strength

Director: Yasujirō Ozu

Cast: Chishū Ryū (Shukichi Somiya), Setsuko Hara (Noriko Somiya), Yumeji Tsukioka (Aya Kitagawa), Haruko Sugimura (Taguchi Masa), Hohi Aoki (Katsuyoshi Taguchi), Jun Usami (Shuichi Hattori), Kuniko Miyake (Akiko Miwa), Masao Mishima (Jo Onodera), Yoshiko Tsubouchi (Kiku Onodera)

In post-war Japan, Professor Shukichi (Chishū Ryū) and his twenty-seven-year-old daughter Noriko (Setsuko Hara) live together in contentment. But what is to be done when her Aunt Masa (Haruko Sugimara) proclaims its time Noriko left the nest and made her own life, with a marriage Masa can arrange with a family friend. Can Noriko’s reluctance be overcome, or will it need the imminent threat of her own father’s potential remarriage to an attractive widow?

From a small-scale, intimate set-up like this – a slight story that can be summarised in little more than a few sentences – Yasujirō Ozu crafts a story of family, ageing, maturity and loss, sacrifice and regret that’s both uniquely Japanese and universal. So carefully is the whole film assembled, so patient Ozu’s intricate, formal structure of each scene that it’s ending of quiet, emotional force takes you overwhelmingly by surprise. It also leaves you challenging all sorts of perceptions you might have had about the rights and wrongs of duty and familial obligation.

Ozu’s Late Spring, like the greatest of his work – which this undoubtedly is – uses a series of carefully designed, stationary camera shots (so much so, it feels a shock when a camera tracks alongside Noriko and her father’s assistant Hattori, as they cycle to a beach) to carefully build a world both intimate and immediate and also oppressive. Furniture in rooms loom around the edges of the frame of the low positioned cameras or are lined up in such a way as if to force movement in one direction (such as, at one point, two parallel rows of chairs leading inevitably to a doorway). Characters are framed in doorways or surrounded by furniture, their choices visually whittled down to a single path.

It’s fitting for a film all about a decision – that everyone believes is for the best – being pushed directly onto Noriko. On paper of course, it certainly is. Surely, it’s no life for a young woman to essentially become nothing more than a housekeeper to her father? Noriko organises the house, dutifully prepares his meals, reminds him to shave – and seems completely content with this. But surely, it’s not what she should want – or indeed what anyone would want for her?

But yet it’s what she wants. Noriko is beautifully played by Setsuko Hara, in the first of her collaborations of Ozu. Hara creates a woman who is warm, bright, funny and greets every day with a beaming smile. She is content with her lot, shrugging off any idea of change. She barely seems to recognise the shy attempts at seduction that Hattori (a suitably bashful Jun Usami) tries – smilingly turning down his concert invitation (a concert we then see him attend alone, his hat filling the second chair he purchased) and reacting with smiling happiness when he reaffirms his long-running engagement is indeed progressing to marriage (far from, it is clear, his first choice).

Noriko’s world is only shaken by the suggestion of marriage, an idea that reduces her to withdrawn, downcast quietness, shuttering herself off from the world. The only thing that could horrify her more is the idea of her father remarrying – she’d already confessed her distaste at her honorary uncle, Shukichi’s colleague Onodera, re-marrying. Her rejection stems from her desire, it seems, for things to remain as they are – and people to do so as well. But that’s also because change requires the old life to be left behind – and her father makes clear he will accept a reduced role.

You could argue its right to push Noriko away from a life of sheltered self-sacrifice and towards something that feels more real and mature. That feels like the modern world. But isn’t this just the old social rules reapplying themselves in new ways? Late Spring takes place at a turning point in Japan. Shukichi and Masa are of a pre-war generation: their homes and clothing are as well, even their formal movements, speech, Shukichi’s love of Noh theatre and (in Masa’s case) clinging to old wives tales smacks of a pre-1945 way of thinking. There everything has a natural order – and Noriko’s marriage is an inevitable part of this.

But there are signs of a new Japan all around them – literally so, as the path to the beach is lined with American military and Coca-Cola signs and a Tokyo increasingly filled with Western coffee bars, along with kids playing baseball and giggling talk of Gary Cooper and other film stars. Noriko even has an alternative path presented in the form of her friend Aya (a charming performance by Yumeji Tsukioka). Aya has decided not to remarry after her post-war divorce, learned English, trained as a stenographer and dresses in the latest Western fashions. Her home is full of Western furniture and the traditional Japanese floor sitting leaves her with sore knees after minutes. She’s the sign of a new Japan on the horizon, one where traditions carry less weight, and choices can be more personal.

The problem is Noriko’s conservative choices don’t work in either worlds. She’s not radical enough to follow Aya (despite half-hearted enquiries), and the idea of non-marriage is alien in the world she wants to stay in. As Ozu and Hara make clear, this locks her into clinging to no change at all. She clearly would never-leave unless pushed. And a white lie from her father is what does it: for Noriko knows that would end her role in her father’s home and her duty to him would be leave. It’s the only duty that would never be her choice.

Nevertheless it’s clearly what her father believes is best for her. Beautifully played by Chishū Ryū, he’s a seeming curmudgeon at first who reveals himself to be a man of deep feeling and self-sacrifice – there is a beautiful moment when he outwardly denies his white lie about intended marriage, while his face subtly twitches. Ryū makes Shukichi a man of quiet dignity, determined to do the best for his daughter, regardless of his own feelings (which are clearly to continue things as they are).

So both parties work towards the ending of a way of life they both desperately want to cling to, doing so in a misguided act of duty towards the other. Is it though? Ozu makes that hard for us to be completely comfortable: our last sight of Noriko, in her wedding garb, sees her bow one final time to the father she loves while the film’s coda gives a heartbreaking moment of unbearable emotional toil for Ryū while he simply sits peeling an apple.

Does it have to be like this? The idea of a daughter subjugating her life to her father feels mistaken, but isn’t that her choice not ours? But how alien is such a conservative and non-traditional choice, in a country at a turning point between tradition and new possibilities? And can you blame people for sacrificing what they want, because they believe the result is better for someone else? It’s an eternally relatable scenario that gives Ozu’s film an undeniable, compelling emotional force, which creeps up on you and crashes over you like high tide waves Ozu closes the film with. Marvellous.

Mississippi Burning (1988)

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

Director: Alan Parker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Terminator (1984)

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

Director: James Cameron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twisters (2024)

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

Director: Lee Isaac Chung

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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