Modern Times (1936)

Chaplin’s silent swansong, is a funny but quietly impassioned attack on corporate greed

Director: Charles Chaplin

Cast: Charles Chaplin (The factory worker aka The Tramp), Paulette Goddard (The Gamin), Henry Bergman (Café owner), Stanley “Tiny” Sandford (Big Bill), Chester Conklin (Mechanic), Al Ernest Garcia (President of Electro Steel), Stanley Blystone (Gamin’s father), Richard Alexander (Cell mate)

As cinema entered Modern Times of its own, Chaplin had a profound sense that he needed to move with those times. The legendary comedian, whose Tramp persona had made him (possibly) the most famous man in the world, was a silent comedian starting to be left behind by sound. There is a rich relish in the fact that Modern Times, a joke-packed criticism of the coldness of modern industry, is both Chaplin’s last silent and first sound movie, a dipping of the toe in modern times and a valedictory swansong for the past. It’s a film that bridges the ‘modern’ and classic of cinema.

Chaplin is an assembly line-worker eventually driven to a nervous breakdown by the relentless, fast-paced monotony of his work (not to mention a death-defying encounter with the internal workings of the factory machines). Sent to recover in a hospital, he emerges into to find there is little in the world that a dreamer and romantic like him can understand. Again and again, things go wrong. He’s arrested for picking up a red flag in a union march, fired as a night watchman in a department store for helping starving thieves, hopeless as a factory repair man and struggles with tongue-tied silence as a singing waiter. But he and a young ‘Gamin’ (Paulette Goddard), both hope for a better life.

Modern Times has a deceptive structure. It’s easy, at first glance, to see is as four two-reelers thrown together: mini-films in the factory, prison, department store and café. But what Chaplin has created here is a picaresque fable, with the Tramp in the middle. (Only one sequence, with the Tramp as a repairman in a factory, feels superfluous repeating some jokes from the opening act). A morality tale of the modern era, where the big bosses and machines are indifferent to those on the bottom rungs, continually punctuated by the police riding up to bear away the innocent on the slightest pretext. It’s a masterclass of subtle repetition, with moments of contentment forever snatched away.

Chaplin’s most subtly political work became his most controversial. In a way few other films of the 1930s did, Modern Times engages with the conditions and politics of the Great Depression. Housing for the poor is ramshackle, with walls literally held up by mops. The factory alternates exploiting its workers at ever dizzying production speeds with ruthlessly laying them off the moment a slight economic downtown takes place. Union movements are ruthlessly stamped out: when the Tramp accidentally joins a march, he is arrested while the Gamin’s father is shot by police crushing another march. Poverty is ever-present – the Gamin ‘steals’ unwanted food to feed others, laid off factory-workers rob stores for food and when the factories are re-opened there is an almighty struggle from the desperate to get through the gates and claim a few hours of work.

Unsurprisingly Modern Times was condemned as possibly communist and suspiciously anti-American: Chaplin, turning a mirror on conditions in America started to be seen more-and-more by many as a suspicious alien (after all, he’d never taken on American citizenship). Nobody wanted to hear the funnyman turn prophet and many were suspicious of the comedian who used jokes to sweeten the bitter pill (even if, as per many of Chaplin’s messages, it was a rather naïve and simplistic one). It didn’t matter that Modern Times boils down to a plea for a universal love and understanding, it was somehow a creeping sign of the political dangers in ‘modern times’.

Today, distanced from the Red Scare, Modern Times looks far more like what it actually is: a pathos-filled, liberal eye on the working classes that champions the dreamers and the little guys over the corporations and the system. And who better as a hero for that than The Tramp? After all, this was a figure who had struggled against the odds for decades. Modern Times would see that struggle on multiple fronts: against the system, against the machines (literally so, as they swallow him up) and against a way of life that seems to be betting against him.

Even cinema was betting against the Tramp. Chaplin knew he couldn’t put off converting to sound forever. But he also knew the Tramp was a universal figure – and a large part of that was his silence. He never speaks in Modern Times – and when he sings, it’s in garbled, funny-voiced nonsense that effectively keeps him as a universal mute. It’s The Tramp’s final victory lap.

Chaplin’s comic timing remains masterful, and Modern Times is awash with marvellous, balletic set-pieces. Most famous is the opening factory sequence (which owes more than a debt to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and feels remarkably prescient of Orwell’s 1984 with its Big Brotherish boss), a crazed ballet of repetitive, fast-paced movement on the production line – culminating in the legendary sequence of him being sucked into the very gears of the machine. The factory cares so little about the men there, that a machine designed to feed them as they work is dismissed as impractical rather than inhumane – though it gives us a great set piece of Chaplin assaulted by this machine with soup, custard pies and morsels rammed into his face by a mechanical arm.

The comic invention continues through the prison sequence. It’s a sign of the sting under the surface of Modern Times that the highlights of this sequence come about due to the Tramp (accidentally) being high on a mountain of cocaine. Foiling a jail break through coked-up bravado – another wonderfully done sequence, timed to perfection and filmed in one-shot – the Tramp’s reward is not being allowed to stay (and get the roof and food he needs) but early release. (Modern Times finds time, before he goes, for a final pop at ineffectual, superior middle-class do-gooders, lampooning a crusading priest’s wife as coldly distant and the subject of a cheeky gaseous gag).

Modern Times develops into a sweet fairy-tale romance with the introduction of the Gamin. Paulette Goddard gives a radiant performance, full of confidence and comic vibrancy – she becomes the first female lead given near-equal treatment by Chaplin. The department store sequence is grounded with their relationship, from the Gamin taking the opportunity to sleep in a beautifully prepared bed. Their time in the shop at night is full of wonder at the comfort and luxury – that they never see in their own homes – and culminates in a beautifully shot roller-skating sequence, with Chaplin circling balletically on the floors of the shop. (Tellingly though, he does so on the edge of precipice marked danger – Modern Times never forgets that danger lies just round the corner).

It’s the Gamin who lands them a job at a bustling café – awash with spoiled, rich customers – via her dancing ability (there is a fabulously simple transition that sees her pirouetting on the streets to ending the dance in glamourous clothes in the café). Even this moment of happiness is foiled by the law – illogically chasing the Gamin for past vagary offences rather than leaving her to work. But it’s made clear that they are a partnership: fitting the humane message of Modern Times that our best chance of being saved is sticking together.

Modern Times is shot by Chaplin with a striking, sprightly inventiveness. There are signs throughout of Chaplin’s overlooked visual and editorial skill, transitions that are hugely cinematic, storylines that are communicated with maximum efficiency and clarity. As well as the influences of Lang, Chaplin shows a debt to Eisenstein with a striking early visual cut that sees a crowd of sheep (with one black sheep in the middle) cut to a crowd of workers emerging from a subway into the factory. Modern Times pushes its humane message with a gentle persistency, but never lets it dominate the comic and emotional force of the film. Chaplin is an entertainer with a social conscience – but he is an entertainer first of all – and Modern Times is never anything less than charming and funny, even when it is spikey.

Hamlet (1964)

Kozintsev’s masterful version of Hamlet is one of the greatest Shakespeare films ever made

Director: Grigori Kozintsev

Cast: Innokenty Smoktunovsky (Hamlet), Mikhail Nazvanov (Claudius), Elza Radziņa (Gertrude), Yuri Tolubeyev (Polonius), Stepan Oleksenko (Laertes), Anastasiya Vertinskaya (Ophelia), Vladimir Erenberg (Horatio), Igor Dmitriev (Rosencrantz), Vadim Medvedev (Guildenstern), Aadu Krevald (Fortinbras)

One of the main reasons Shakespeare remains timeless is that he can be shifted and adjusted through any society or perception and new riches will be discovered in his work. That’s why the, perhaps, greatest film version of Hamlet doesn’t even have an actual word of Shakespeare in it: Grigori Kozintsev’s epic, paranoia-tinged Hamlet with the dialogue translated into robust, poetic Russian by Boris Pasternak, takes huge liberties with the text but creates a richer, commanding and, above all, cinematic version of Elsinore than almost any other version yet made.

Kozintsev was a leading Russian theatre director who had written extensively on Shakespeare. He bought to his film both a brilliantly cinematic eye but also a comprehensive understanding of the play. Kozintsev’s Hamlet is filtered through Stalinist Russia. Where other Hamlets of the era focused on Freudian themes and the poet Prince, his Hamlet would be starkly, strikingly political.

Here Elisinore is a place devoid of privacy, where every word is overheard and every action watched. It’s controlled by Claudius as an eminence grise turned king, a smooth and assured political player who understands the machinations of power and the importance of appearance. Koznitsev’s rearranges Claudius opening speech into three discrete chunks. The first sees a herald reading out Claudius’ announcement of his wedding and the new regime to a crowded courtyard of peasants. We then cut to crowded room of Ambassadors of various European powers roaming, where we hear snippets of conversation each delivering a separate line from Claudius’ oration. Finally, the conclusion of the speech, and his plans for Fortinbras, is delivered by the king himself to a room of nodding courtiers. That’s imaginative cinematic translation of Shakespeare right there.

This is a Hamlet that lives and breathes the fear of living in an oppressive regime, under the thumb of a smiling autocrat. Mikhail Nazvanov’s Claudius charms but has a resolute, ruthless coldness behind his eyes. The court is drenched in paintings of the great leader – including one grand armoured horseback painting that looks like a Claudius head has been swiftly painted over his brother’s. Claudius controls all privacy in the castle: Koznitsev fills the film with shots of closing doors, lowered portcullises and a constant stream of background observers for every conversation. Only Claudius can gain solitude – tellingly he is the only character who speaks his soliloquy out loud, because he is the only character who knows for sure his words are for his ears alone.

This Elsinore is a castle where knowing too much is dangerous and the threat of being wrapped up in the wrong side of a purge is a very real one. Laertes’ aborted rebellion may see him forgiven – but the citizens who follow him to charge into the castle are escorted way, hands bound, never to be seen again. Claudius’ soldiers are increasingly visible presence in every doorway and corridor. When Hamlet unsettles the King with the Player’s performance, the courtiers practically fly away from the would-be dissident, as if worried that even the faintest contact could infect them with the same danger of exile and death that Hamlet is flirting with.

In this authoritarian production, our Hamlet is not the poet prince that so many Western productions at the time presented him as. Instead, portrayed with a chilling intensity by Innokenty Smoktunovsky, Hamlet is a dangerous man, filled to the brim with suspicion and resentment, who trusts nothing and confides to no-one. Rarely alone in this crowded Elsinore, he strikes a lonely figure, who finds isolation only on the cliffs staring out to the sea. His soliloquies are all internal voiceover monologues – less due to their internalised nature, and more that you feel he cannot risk speaking his feelings out loud (an impression created by his voiceover of his “Too, too solid flesh” speech delivered while Smoktunovsky moves through a crowd of courtiers).

Hamlet’s destructive bitterness is sparked by the Ghost. Cutting the first scene, Koznitsev introduces Hamlet and us to the Ghost at the same time. Unlike the smooth, ornately collared Claudius, the Ghost is an armour-clad rigid behemoth, his face almost completely obscured by his helmet. (There is a brief shot of his eyes which I would have removed – better that it had been kept completely distant from us). The camerawork stresses both its deliberation and size while Dmitri Shostakovich masterful score helps to build its sense of power and might (so effectively, that only a reprise of its theme is enough to suggest its reappearance to Hamlet later). It is a terrifying, other-wordly figure.

Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet barely ever raises his voice but has the intense determination of a man of natural action. Koznitsev has removed virtually every line that dabbles in doubt, uncertainty or hints even vaguely at delay. Smoktunovsky is merely biding his time for his chance at taking a hit at Claudius – a chance that will rarely come, in a court crowded with military protection for the King. He never forgives and even the slightest delay rouses him to anger rather than self-analysis. Koznitsev has trimmed out most of his lines with Horatio, who becomes an almost silent, scholarly observer and makes Smoktunovsky even more of a distant figure, liable to break out into dangerous violence at any moment, with no regard for the consequences.

The most visible of those consequences is Ophelia, who Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet uses coldly as a tool for probing the weaknesses of his enemies. Portrayed with a touching vulnerability by Anastasiya Vertinskaya, Ophelia is likewise never alone, unable to escape a crowd of duennas, who train her in dancing like a clockwork toy. Polonius (here an arch and scruple free political fixer, played by Yuri Tolubeyev) shows almost no interest in her at all, bluntly dismissing her and her distress when his need for her is done. After his death, she is literally locked into a metallic corset by her maids and covered by a gauzy funeral dress – even her clothes are cages. Her madness scene inevitably takes place in a room full of soldiers: even at the end she cannot escape the eyes of strangers.

In the cold, Bergmanesque quality of Koznitsev’s film (the players, in particular, look like they have rolled in from The Virgin Spring), the stoney castle on the cliff (despite its renaissance, wood-lined interiors) is an imposing, terrible place. After the death of Polonius, Hamlet is dragged into (essentially) a show-trial (including a stenographer) before being dispatched to England. Rosencranzt and Guildernstern are empty-headed, ambitious minor officials who Hamlet displays not a moment’s hesitation in dispatching to their deaths. The only moment of reflection Smoktunovsky affords Hamlet is over Yorick’s skull – and even then, the cut suggests his focus is on the lost opportunities of great men. Certainly, Smoktunovsky’s grief over Ophelia is as much motivated by Laertes’ ostentatious show of public grief as sadness (and certainly not guilt, which he lacks entirely).

Koznitsev’s supremely visual film, beautifully designed and shot, reorders and reworks the text to maximum effect to continuously stress Hamlet’s highly political nature. It does mean characters like Gertrude fade into the background, but it repositions Elsinore highly effectively as a dangerous, ruthless place where life can be cheap. Like Stalinist Russia, the wrong word can condemn you and even our hero is as much a potential dictator as our villain. Hamlet is the most imaginative, revelatory and intelligently distinctive reading of the play on film, a production that interprets the play rather than just presenting it. It is a masterclass in adapting the Bard for the screen.

Watch the film here!

Heart of Stone (2023)

Dull franchise-starter shamelessly rips off every other successful action franchise it can think of

Director: Tom Harper

Cast: Gal Gadot (Rachel Stone “Nine of Hearts”), Jamie Dornan (Parker), Sophie Okonedo (Nomad “King of Hearts”), Matthias Schweighofer (Jack of Hearts), Paul Ready (Bailey), Jing Lusi (Yang), BD Wong (King of Clubs), Alia Bhatt (Keya Dhawan), Archie Madekwe (Ivo), Enzo Cilenti (Mulvaney), Jon Kortajarena (The Blond), Glenn Close (King of Diamonds), Mark Ivanir (King of Spades)

Heart of Stone is the first in a planned Mission: Impossible/James Bond style super-franchise for Netflix. You can’t miss this, as the entire film plays out like it’s been assembled from scenes salvaged from the cutting room floor of those series. Pretty much every single idea in Heart of Stone has been played out before (often more than once) and every single action scene has been performed, shot and edited elsewhere and better. Heart of Stone is really prime Netflix filler, the sort of brainless eye-candy that can play in the corner of a room while you scroll through your phone. Worryingly, one day, all films might be like this.

Gadot plays Rachel Stone. She’s a strictly “stay-in-the-van” tech expert for a MI6 team. Apparently set in a world where the security services aren’t predominantly made up of bland white guys from the same universities, the team consists of Parker (Jamie Dornan), Bailey (Paul Ready) and Yang (Jing Lisu). But she’s also “Nine of Hearts”, a super-agent of The Charter, a group of secret agents who use a super-computer (the Heart) to predict all outcomes and prevent disaster. When the Heart is under threat, Rachel has no choice but to reveal her identity – via a kick-ass fight scene naturally – to try and protect this super-computer which could destroy the world from falling into the wrong hands.

I’ll say one thing for Heart of Stone – it does a neat reveal of a surprise (but guessable) villain. Other than that? You’ve seen it all before. Many, many, many times – usually done better. When a battle atop a zeppelin makes you think “Hey, didn’t The Rocketeer do this a lot better almost 30 years ago?” you know your film is in trouble. Heart of Stone is like a gruesome Frankenstein’s monster, where every single stitch can be clearly seen. A Bondish opening credits sequence is stitched to a series of M:I risky stunts, with fights and car chases from Bourne and more than a dash of better TV shows like Alias and Person of Interest. It’s put together with a perfunctory box-ticking which only reminds you how many years of care goes into the franchises it’s ripping off.

Everything unfolds in Heart of Stone pretty much as you would expect it. When a character pulls out a photo of the doll’s house he’s planning to buy for his niece’s birthday, you know he’s doomed. When the Charter sends agents to infiltrate a base, but leave Gadot behind, you know you’re about to watch a “wrong door” routine. Inevitably we get a “you’re off the case” dressing down for Stone from her boss. A secondary villain is clearly an ally in waiting. Characters are defined with thinly sketched traits. Glenn Close ticks the box of “inexplicable big-name cameo”, popping up to lean on a fireplace. It’s all drearily, depressingly unimaginative and predictable.

I ended up letting my mind wander aimlessly around the nonsense of this world. How does the Charter fund itself? How secret is it – everyone seems to know about it and after the early distress about Gadot blowing her cover it then charges about with barely a token effort at subterfuge. Why would an organisation called the Charter name some (but not all) of its agents after cards? Are there four separate branches in different places for the four “decks”? Are the numbers randomly assigned – since “Jack” seems to work for “Nine”. Why choose a codename system that takes three words to spit out (it even slows Stone down at a vital point trying to explain who she is)? Are Aces all low?

The fact I spent so much time thinking about this sort of thing kind of says it all. I would feel sorry for Gal Gadot at the centre of this except, as a producer, she must have had a say in how this derivative mess was put together. She’s woefully miscast in a role that exposes all her limitations rather than playing to her strengths. Gadot simply hasn’t got the charisma and comic timing to play a wise-cracking maverick: she’s at her best as earnest and well-meaning (see Wonder Woman where she plays a sweet innocent), but here as a sort of would-be Ethan Hunt she’s a washout. Every second she’s on screen only reminds you how good Tom Cruise is at this sort of thing.

She can do a stunt or two, to be fair. It’s unfair perhaps to say that all the big, risky stunts are all too clearly performed in front of a greenscreen or by a double, but Gadot can throw a punch. But Stone is a bland, aimless, patchwork character, whose every reaction seems like it’s guided more by what the script needs at that moment rather than any consistent logic. The entire cast more-or-less falls into the same uninspired bucket, either going through the motions (Sophie Okonedo) or not given enough to do (Paul Ready is probably best-in-show here, making a lot of a some fairly duff lines and predictable plot arcs). Perhaps, since the audience has a decent chance of finishing every line before the characters do, the actors were as disheartened as we are watching it.

The most depressing thing about Heart of Stone is it looks like a grim look into the future. As Hollywood writers strike against the threat of AI, is it possible that all films will one day be put together with the robotic predictability of Heart of Stone? Even the title sounds like a ChatBot came up with it.

1900 (1976)

Bertolucci’s bloated, self-indulgent and simplistic film is a complete mess

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Cast: Robert De Niro (Alfredo Berlinghieri), Gerard Depardieu (Olmo Dalco), Dominique Sanda (Ada Fiastri Paulhan), Donald Sutherland (Attila Mellanchini), Laura Betti (Regina), Burt Lancaster (Alfredo Berlinghieri the Elder), Stefania Sandrelli (Anita Foschi), Werner Bruhns (Ottavio Berlinghieri), Stefania Casini (Neve), Sterling Hayden (Leo Dalco), Francesca Bertini (Sister Desolato), Anna Henkel (Anita the Younger), Ellen Schwiers (Amelia), Alida Valli (Signora Pappi)

After The Conformist and Last Tango in Paradise, Bertolucci could do anything he wanted. Unfortunately, he did. Perhaps the saddest thing about 1900 is that you could watch The Conformist twice with a decent break in-between during the time it would take you to watch it– and get a much richer handle on everything 1900 tries to do. Bertolucci went through a struggle to get his 315-minute cut released: perhaps the best thing that could have happened would have been if he had lost. Not only would the film be shorter, but it would be remembered as a lost masterpiece ruined by producers, rather than the interminable, self-indulgent mess we ended up with.

1900 – or Twentieth Century to literally translate its title Novecento – follows the lives of two very different men. Born minutes apart in 1901, Alfredo (Robert De Niro) is the grandson of the lord of the manor (Burt Lancaster), while Olmo (Gerard Depardieu) is the grandson of Leo (Sterling Hayden), scion of a sprawling dynasty of peasants. They grow up as friends, Olmo becomes a socialist and Alfredo an indolent landlord and absent-minded collaborator with the fascists, embodied by his psychopathic land agent Attila (Donald Sutherland). Their small community becomes a symbol of the wider battle between left and right in Italy.

In many ways 1900 is an epic only because it is extremely long and beautifully shot in the Bologna countryside by Vittorio Storaro. In almost every sense it fails. It offers nominal scale in its timeline, but its attempt to become a sweeping metaphor for Italy in the twentieth century falls flat and it focuses on a small community of simple characters, many of whom are ciphers rather than people. All of Bertolocci’s communist sympathies come rushing to the fore in a film striking for its political simplicity. It never convinces in its attempt to capture in microcosm the forces that divided Italy between the two world wars, nor invests any of its characters with an epic sense of universality.

Instead Bertolucci presents a world of obvious questions and easy answers. Every worker is an honest, noble salt-of-the-earth type, working together in perfect harmony to fight for rights. Every single upper-class character is an arrogant, selfish layabout, caring only about their back-pockets and the easy life. Bertolucci suggests fascism only arose in Italy as a means for the rich to control the poor, and never allows for one moment the possibility that any working-class person was ever tempted to take their side. It never rings true. (Bertolucci skips a huge chunk of the fascist 30s and 40s, possibly because this fantasy would be impossible to sustain if he actually focused on the history of that era.)

Bertolucci uses his two protagonists to make painfully on-the-nose comparisons between working class and rich with De Niro’s weak-willed Alfredo always found wanting compared to Depardieu’s Olmo. Even as children, Olmo is braver, stronger and smarter. Olmo has the guts to lie under the moving trains (Alfredo runs), Olmo stands up for what he believes in (Alfredo looks away), Olmo puts others first Alfredo whines about his own needs. Hell, Olmo even has a bigger cock than Alfredo (something they discover comparing penises as children and re-enforced when as young men they share an epileptic prostitute and she ‘tests’ them both).

The upper classes hold all the power but can do nothing without the working class. During the 1910s, a strike by the workers on the Berlinghieri leaves the clueless rich unable to even milk their moaning cows (they buy milk instead). Sterling Hayden’s peasant patriarch is a manly inspiration to all, while Lancaster’s increasingly shambling noble is literally and metaphorically impotent (Lancaster’s role is like a crude commentary on his subtle work in The Leopard). At one point he even pads around barefoot in horseshit to hammer home his corruption. (Incidentally this is the only film where you’ll ever see a horse’s anus being massaged on camera to produce fresh shit to be thrown at a fascist.)

For the rich, fascism is the answer. Continuing to shoot fish in a barrel, Bertolucci scores more easy hits by presenting our prominent fascist as an out-and-out psychopath. Played with a scary relish by Sutherland – in the film’s most compelling performance – no act of degradation is too far for Attila. Along with his demonic partner-in-crime Regina (a terrifyingly loathsome Laura Betti), he routinely carries out acts of violence, horrific murder and child-abuse, even literally headbutting a cat to death while ranting about the evils of socialism.

The poor meanwhile are all good socialists. Olmo, decently played by Depardieu, and his wife Anita (an affecting Stefania Sandrelli) rally the workers to stand against charging cavalry and protect their rights. Bertolucci even has Depardieu flat-out break the fourth wall for a closing speech, spouting simplistic platitudes direct to camera about the inherent wickedness of the landowner. Depardieu at least seems more comfortable than De Niro among this Euro-pudding (every actor comes from a different country and the soundtrack is a mismatch of accents and dubbing, not least Depardieu himself). Rarely has De Niro looked more uncomfortable than as the empty Alfredo, a role he fails to find any interest in, like the rest of the actors never making him feel like more than a device.

Bertolucci, stretching the run-time out, also embraces numerous tiresome excesses. Rarely does more than 20 minutes go by without a sex scene or a sight of someone’s breasts or sexual organs. From children comparing penises, to Depardieu performing oral sex on Sandrelli (just outside a socialist meeting), to De Niro and Depardieu getting hand-jobs from a prostitute, to Sanda dancing naked and high on cocaine or the revolting exploits of Attila and Regina, nothing is left to the imagination. As each goes on and on Bertolucci ends up feeling more like a naughty boy than an artist, so praised for his sexual licence in Last Tango that he feels more is always more. The excess doesn’t stop with sex either: at one point a worker silently cuts his ear off in front of a landowner to make a point about his stoic nobility.

1900 eventually feels like you’ve stumbled into a student debating club, where a privileged student drones on at great length about the evils of the rich, while quaffing another glass of champagne. It has moments of cinematic skill – some of its time jump transitions, in particular a train passing through a tunnel in one time and emerging at another, are masterful – but it’s all crushed under its self-indulgence. From its length to its sexual and violence excess, to its crude and simplistic politics delivered like a tedious lecture, everything is crushed by its never-ending self-importance.

Faust (1926)

Murnau’s gorgeous masterpiece is a technical wonder and a painterly visual treat

Director: FW Murnau

Cast: Gösta Ekman (Faust), Emil Jannings (Mephisto), Camilla Horn (Gretchen), Frida Richard (Gretchen’s mother), William Dieterle (Valentin), Yvette Guilbert (Marthe Schwerdtlein), Eric Barclay (Duke of Parma), Hanna Ralph (Duchess of Parma), Werner Fuetterer (Archangel)

It’s a story that has fascinated for generations: is any deal worth your soul? Murnau’s breath-taking Faust myth throws in an extra wager: can evil corrupt a man so absolutely that not a single trace of good can be left? That’s the opening deal Mephisto (Emil Jannings) makes with his Archangel (Werner Fuetterer) counterpart. Their battleground? Faust (Gösta Ekman), an elderly alchemist, who has lived a life of faith and good works.

Faust was (until Metropolis) the most expensive German film ever made. Like Metropolis it was designed to help Weimar challenge Hollywood as the centre of the filmic universe. Murnau had direct control and several versions were made for distribution to key markets around the world. Faust was filmed over a huge period, partly for the all the multiple re-takes needed for those different versions, but also due to Murnau’s quest for perfection. Throw in cutting-edge special effects and luscious sets and you had Murnau’s own Faustian pact for success.

The film – as carefully restored today – that emerged is a work of expressionist genius jammed, particularly in its opening and closing acts, with a series of striking images balanced between fantasy and horror. Murnau used models, double exposure and transitional editing tricks to gorgeous, revelatory effect and crafted stunning images of supernatural horrors. Faust’s opening shot shows the horsemen of the Apocalypse riding through the clouds before a confrontation between a giant, satyr-like Jannings with huge wings and a similarly winged Archangel with flaming sword (the actors were strapped into stunning giant wings and Janning’s porcine like make-up is particularly demonic).

From there Murnau plays the first of his games of scale by showing Mephisto towering, mountainous, over Faust’s town, unleashing a black cloud of plague. Mephisto’s powers are demonstrated with a host of cinematic tricks: circular light then fire engulfs Faust when he summons him, Mephisto’s eyes are pinpricks of burning light (created by damaging the negative), he appears at every turn Faust makes and later shifts size, appearance and even duplicates himself while performing magic (always with gusts of terrible smoke).

The cinematic tricks continue as Faust is taken on a sort of magic carpet ride across Europe, Murnau’s camera dizzyingly flying over a series of highly realistic models of towns, forests, mountains and storming seas. The launch of this flying carpet is achieved by a miraculous double exposure shot that shows Mephisto and Faust flying out of a small window (standing upright on a cape) in one uninterrupted shot. The dizzying array of effects and visual imagination help us immediately understand why Faust is so tempted to harness the powers of this seemingly scruffy beggar (though Mephisto soon translates himself into a sharply dressed courtier).

It also ties in with extraordinary beauty of Murnau’s expert use of light and shadow. Faust is introduced as an old man, lecturing on astronomy to a room full of rapt students, lit by the glow of his astrolabe. Faust’s rooms are a light tunnel of instruments and books. His town turns from a thriving market, to a towering collection of shadowy buildings, holding a mass of swarming, panicked humanity, running in fear of the plague. Pools of light frame action: twice in the film, Murnau captures dying figures in perfectly composed outlines of light against a sea of black, the first (a priest) lying dead at his altar while smoke drifts up past the light he rests in.

Faust could almost be seen as a film about light. Murnau’s camera is continually artfully framed around painterly compositions with streaks of shadow and light. But it is also a thematic issue. Mephisto uses fog and smoke to power his magic, as if trying to obscure the light that represents the good. In Murnau’s world, light is frequently offers the possibility of hope – even the film’s closing fire offers a chance of redemption. Smoke becomes an obstruction, allowing evil to flourish.

Faust frames its hero initially as man using evil in desperation for the greater good against the plague. Faust is played Gösta Ekman, a Swedish actor in his thirties flawlessly made-up (the make-up is extraordinarily convincing) as the wizened alchemist before Mephisto restores his youth. Ekman is equally convincing in both roles, his angry rejection by the townspeople driving his descent into gred. Opposite him Jannings is a viciously cruel ball of scheming greed, under a surface of joviality.

Needless to say – after all this is a morality tale – it is the allure of sex that eventually brings Faust down. He surrenders his virtue for a night of passion with the beautiful Duchess of Parma. (The cruel Mephisto, having given Faust the sort of entrance to the court of Parma that inspired Disney’s Aladdin’s entry into Agahbar, maliciously murders the Duke after stealing his wife). Murnau’s Faust is all about the awful temptations of worldly pleasures over the hard graft of good works.

Faust also understands that temptation can come in reclaiming the moments we have lost. Faust longs for the sort of excitements he never had as a young man – too many books not enough bonks – but also for the simplicity of youth, where the possibilities of the future and happiness of home were everything. Faust’s middle section – and its weakest, an oddly farce-tinged dark-romantic-comedy – revolves around Faust’s courtship of Gretchen (Camilla Horn – in a part originally intended for Lillian Gish). Murnau raises the possibility that Gretchen’s feelings for Faust are controlled by Mephisto – via a magic necklace – but this idea is largely forgotten, possibly because Murnau’s film needed something uncorrupted by the Devil.

That incorruptible is what powers the final act of Faust as consequences – many caused by Mephisto, who cheats and abuses Faust’s trust and subtly works to destroy the lovers while bringing them together – come home to roost for its characters. Murnau’s film is very strong on the brutality of medieval justice – burnings and public executions are only moments away – but also on the spiritual strength from true love. Love is of course the answer, in Faust’s sentimental resolution, but there are worse answers to the question of what makes us human.

Faust returns to its heights in the torch-lit terror of its final section and the raw emotionalism of Ekman’s desperate, guilt-ridden performance, forcing his way through an enraged crowd hoping-against-hope that he can save the day. Faust is at its finest when centring Murnau’s extraordinary technique, a series of technical and visual marvels that makes you fall in love with cinema. At times it works best as a collection of extraordinary visuals and concepts – and I could do without some of that long middle act between Faust and Gretchen – and some of the acting is sometimes a little too broad. But it’s an extraordinary and unique piece of cinema – and a startling visual expression of the power and temptation of evil.

Cross of Iron (1977)

Grim war film, full of blood and horror, but lacking the depth it needs to really make an impact

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Cast: James Coburn (Sergeant Rolf Steiner), Maximilian Schell (Captain Stransky), James Mason (Colonel Brandt), David Warner (Captain Kiesel), Klaus Löwitsch (Krüger), Vadim Glowna (Kern), Roger Fritz (Lt Triebig), Dieter Schidor (Anselm), Burkhard Driest (Maag), Fred Stillkrauth (Reisenauer), Michael Nowka (Dietz), Arthur Brauss (Zoll), Senta Berger (Eva)

If War is Hell, it makes sense that Sam Peckinpah eventually bought it to the screen. Cross of Iron is, perhaps surprisingly, his only war film. But, in a sense, Peckinpah’s grim explorations of the brutal realities of violence made all his films war films. And what better setting for his grim eye than the gore and guts of World War Two’s Eastern Front. If war has any rules they fell silent in this hellish clash where no quarter was given and no decency could be found.

Sgt Steiner (James Coburn) knows this. A grizzled soldier, who despises war, Nazism and officers, he fights through the horrors of the front to protect his men. As the Wehrmacht flees, crushed by the late 1943 advance of the Russian army, the only hope is the vain chance of staying alive. But Steiner’s new commander, Captain Stransky (Maximilian Schell) has other ideas: a Prussian elitest, he’s here for an Iron Cross and the fact he’s inept, cowardly and inexperienced isn’t going to stop him. The clash between Steiner and Stransky will leave a trail of futile bodies in its wake.

Cross of Iron may well just be the grimmest war film this side of Come and See. Shot on location in Yugoslavia, Peckinpah films the Eastern Front as a muddy, chaotic mess where no one seems to have the faintest clue why they are there or where they are going. Soldiers huddle in shallow trenches, officers sit in dusty, crumbling bunkers, the sound of machine guns and the explosion of artillery forms a constant backdrop. Battles are smoky, horrific events with bullets flying, ripping through bodies that explode in squippy mess. Bodies are strewn across the battlefield. Even in the progress to the front lines, tanks absent-mindedly roll over bodies left ground into the muddy dirt.

Peckinpah brings his unique eye for violence to bear. Violence frequently takes place in slow motion, bodies twisting and turning in a crazed dance that seems to go on forever as bullets rip through them. The camera never flinches from the blood of war and the films throws us right into the middle of brutal firefights, tracking through smoky, muddied fields full of bodies. The soundtrack is punctuated by distant artillery gun fire. There is no heroism and the sole focus is staying alive. The soldiers have no interest in politics, no passion at all for the war – only one of them, the smartest dressed, is a Nazi. It’s simply something they vainly hope to survive to see the end of. Even the grizzled veteran Steiner hates the killing, hates the violence, hates the waste.

It makes us loath even more Maximilian Schell’s puffed-up braggart Stransky, a man born wearing an officer’s uniform but hopelessly ill-suited for it. Under fire at his first attack, Stransky is hopeless, reduced to bluntly stating the obvious (“My phone is ringing!”) and confusedly rambling about attacking, withdrawing and counter-attacking all in the same breath. Schell was born to play Prussian primma donnas like this, and he gives Stransky a real cunning and survival instinct. Despising Nazism – he sees himself as above the crudeness of the party – he’s a born manipulator, skilfully deducing the sexuality of his aide to blackmail him, but also a rigid stickler for the rules unable to comprehend a world where he isn’t on top.

He’s the antithesis of Steiner, who has everything Stransky wants: respect, glory, guts. Coburn is, to be honest, about ten years too old for the role (his age particularly shows during his brief respite in a base hospital, where he has a convenient sexual fling with Santa Berger’s nurse), but he’s perfect for the hard-as-nails humanitarian, who hides under the surface deep trauma at the horror he’s seen. Steiner is the natural leader Stransky wants to be and has the Iron Cross Stransky wants. Worst of all, Steiner doesn’t give a shit about the medal, when it’s the be-all-and-end-all for Stransky.

Stransky is so out of step, even the veteran front-line officers think he’s despicable. Colonel Brandt (a world-weary James Mason) scoffs “you can have one of mine” when he hears of Stransky’s dreams while his cynical aide Kiesler (a scruffy, shrewdly arch David Warner) takes every opportunity to show his disgust. Stransky is ignored by the soldiers and is rarely filmed away from his bunker, where he reclines on his bunk like an emperor and avoids any trace of conflict.

So, he knows nothing of the horrors of Steiner’s war. We however do. Cross of Iron opens with a successful raid on a Russian encampment. One of the victims, a young soldier his body torn apart by a mortar, is met with barely a reaction by the soldiers (“We’ve seen worse” says Steiner). Another captured Russian boy is later released by Steiner – and promptly machine-gunned in front of him by advancing Russian soldiers. Caught behind the lines, Steiner’s men are picked off one-by-one despite his desperate efforts to keep them alive.

Cross of Iron went millions over budget – largely due to Peckinpah’s chronic alcoholism (he binge drank every day while shooting and spent days at a time unable to work) – and as a result the ending is abrupt and overly symbolic. (Peckinpah and Coburn had about an hour to cobble it together and shoot it before the filming wrapped up). Peckinpah throws in some clumsy fantasy sequences (especially during Steiner’s fever dreams in hospital) and overly heavy-handed reaction shots from Coburn, overlaid with quick cuts to various horrors or shots of lost friends, which over-stresses the horror of war. Much as Cross of Iron skilfully shows the grimness of conflict, it doesn’t balance this with real thematic weight and depth like, say, The Wild Bunch does.

It’s part of Cross of Iron’s flaws. Under the surface, I’m not sure that Cross of Iron has much more to say, other than war is hell. And with Peckinpah’s work here, there is a sort of satanic, indulgent glee in all that mayhem and slaughter, the bodies riddled by bullets. Peckinpah is a sadistic preacher, the sort of sermoniser who is so keen to tick off the evils of the world, that he doesn’t want to miss a thing. The film feels a little too much at times as a grungy, exploitation flick yearning for art.

But it still has a visceral impact that makes it stand out as grizzled war-film, helped by a granite performance by Coburn, with just enough vulnerability beneath the growls. A tough watch and a flawed film, that lacks the real insight and psychological depth it needs, but with some compelling – and shocking – moments.

Oppenheimer (2023)

Nolan’s masterful musing on the morality of science is both challenging and compelling

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Cillian Murphy (J Robert Oppenheimer), Emily Blunt (Kitty Oppenheimer), Matt Damon (General Leslie Groves), Robert Downey Jnr (Lewis Strauss), Florence Pugh (Jean Tatlock), Josh Hartnett (Ernest Lawrence), Casey Affleck (Colonel Boris Pash), Rami Malek (David Hill), Kenneth Branagh (Niels Bohr), Benny Safdie (Edward Teller), Dane DeHaan (General Kenneth Nichols), Jason Clarke (Roger Robb), David Krumholtz (Isidor Issac Rabi), Tom Conti (Albert Einstein), Alden Ehrenreich (Strauss’ aide), Gary Oldman (President Truman), Jefferson Hall (Haakon Chevalier)

“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. These words from The Baghavad Gita are synonymous with J Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project as he witnessed the destructive force of his creation, the atomic bomb. Fittingly, Nolan’s fascinating and ambitious film opens with a reference to Oppenheimer as Prometheus: the man punished for all time for stealing fire from the Gods. Oppenheimer uses everything from thriller to courtroom drama, to explore the moral responsibilities of science: if we can do a thing, does it follow that we must?

J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is a Renaissance man and leading theoretical physicist who dabbled more than a little in left-wing politics. The woman he loves, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), is a die-hard communist, the woman he marries Kitty (Emily Blunt) is a former party member, his closest friends are all members. Associations like these will later haunt him after he is approached by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to use his organisational skills, political savvy and charisma to run the WW2 nuclear programme where maverick scientists work hand-in-hand with the army. Despite his position, Oppenheimer remains untrusted by many. In the aftermath of the war, these suspicions will be used by his opponents, among them Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jnr) ex-head of the Atomic Energy Committee, to bring about his downfall as Oppenheimer preaches disarmament.

Much like Dunkirk, Oppenheimer is told in two timelines, intersecting with scenes replayed from different perspectives in subtly different ways. In “Fission” we see Oppenheimer, effectively on trial in 1954 for his security clearance, recount his life story, chronological flashbacks taking us through the development of the bomb. In “Fusion”, shot in gorgeous black and white, we follow the 1959 senate hearings to confirm Strauss in a cabinet post, and see his reminiscences of Oppenheimer’s post-war struggles to control the monster he has unleashed.

Oppenheimer is a brilliantly made, cinematically adventurous film: you would, of course, expect nothing less from a distinctive talent like Nolan. Brilliantly intercutting multiple timelines, it’s a film that is as much an experience as a story. This is a behemoth, filled with moments of flair and breath-taking use of sound and vision to affect mood. In particular, the film’s oppressive sound design bears down on the viewer like the pressure of the bomb itself. This means moments when we are released from its grip carry real impact. As Oppenheimer – already plagued with doubt – triumphantly announces the successful use of the bomb, the war-like celebratory pounding of scientists’ feet disappears from the soundtrack leaving Oppenheimer’s words echoing impotently around the room.

The pounding score and epic, sweeping camerawork (even more striking, since so much of the film takes place in small rooms filled with conversation) help Nolan to build up Oppenheimer’s mythic status and simultaneously strip him bare. Literally so at one point as, when questioned on his sex life in his hearing, Oppenheimer is seen naked in the room (as exposed as he must be feeling) answering questions with a naked Jean Tatlock astride him, staring into his wife’s eyes.

Oppenheimer labours, with the best intentions, to create a weapon before the Nazis. In its middle act, Nolan’s film focuses on the propulsive excitement of creation. The thrill of obstacles being overcome and solutions being found. The joy of a diverse team coming together for a single goal. We find ourselves longing for problems to be overcome, swept up in the desire for the endgame, as anxious as the scientists when it looks like rain will prevent the vital first Trinity test of the bomb.

Oppenheimer feels the same. Powerfully, intelligently and magnetically played by Cillian Murphy, this is a man who is a host of flaws crammed with impossible genius. A charismatic room leader, who is awkward in personal interactions. A charmer who rudely fails to remember his brother’s girlfriend’s name at a party. An inspiring leader who alienates people with ease. Murphy captures every inch of Oppenheimer’s staggering intellect and delight in intellectual problems, just as he also embodies the man’s arrogance and crushing self-belief.

So, it’s as crushing to him as it is terrifying to us, when the bomb explodes and the realisation hits us. Nolan’s sensory experience of a film fades down to silence as Nolan lets the camera float across the all-consuming fire of the silent explosion (the noise only comes when the shockwave hits) and suddenly the chilling implication of this terrible weapon becomes clear. This is a device that will kill millions. Oppenheimer knows it: he slowly shrivels into haunted guilt, Murphy seeming to shrink into himself as he finally understands what he has done.

Images of nuclear destruction both obvious (ashen bodies and nuclear flashes) and subtle (the out-of-focus vibration of background around Oppenheimer, as if sensing an approach shockwave) will haunt him and us for the rest of the movie. While many scientists – foremost among them Benny Safdie’s bull-headed Edward Teller and Josh Hartnett’s WASPish but decent Ernest Lawrence – feel little guilt. But Oppenheimer, and we, can no longer avoid questions of moral responsibility raised by those such as Niels Bohr (a quietly effective Kenneth Branagh).

Are there some discoveries better not made? Because once the genie is out of the bottle, it cannot be stuffed back in again. In this new world every world power must always have more. More bombs, bigger bombs, better bombs. And it explains why, like Prometheus, Oppenheimer must be punished. The tool of his punishment being his communist sympathies, embodied in his yearning attraction to Jean Tatlock (an under-used Florence Pugh). Nolan’s film is very strong on the terrifying paranoia of the secret state, where every word or association can be collected into a terrible portfolio of witnesses you cannot question, evidence you cannot see, testimony you cannot hear.

“Why don’t you fight” cries his wife Kitty, played with a dynamic, intelligent forcefulness by Emily Blunt. I could have done with a third act built more around Blunt’s starkly honest betrayal of a woman ill-suited to being a wife and mother, trapped in a world where that is all women can achieve (and which also trimmed a few witnesses from Oppenheimer’s trial). Why doesn’t Oppenheimer fight? Nolan has his theories, carefully seeded and confidently revealed.

Oppenheimer’s post-war clashes cover much of “Fusion”, anchored by a superbly under-playing Robert Downey Jnr (his finest work since Chaplin) as the outwardly avuncular, but inwardly insecure and bitter Strauss, who sees Oppenheimer as the embodiment of all the elitists who turned their noses up at him (no matter that Oppenheimer himself is an outsider, in a world of science run by WASPish types like Lawrence). Nolan’s film explores how morality is forgotten in an environment so rife with paranoia that the slightest expression of doubt is seen as treason.

Nolan’s film needs its vast runtime to keep as many balls in the air as it tries to. It’s probably a few too many balls. I would have loved more on Oppenheimer’s outsider status, as a Jew in American science (its not mentioned that the J stands for Julius, despite his claims it stands for nothing). Similarly, I would have welcomed more time to explore Oppenheimer’s complicated emotional life, in particular the fascinatingly complex relationship of some love, a fair amount of mutual respect and a large measure of mutual convenience with his wife Kitty.

But the film’s chilling musing on the horrors science can accidentally unleash while focused on progress is superbly explored and leaves a lasting impact. It’s a feeling that continues to be sharply relevant while we struggle with the implications of AI. Was there a need for the bomb? Perhaps there was. Were we ready for the bomb? No. And it is the failure of anyone, including Oppenheimer, to even consider this until it was too late that is the coldest warning in Nolan’s epic film.

Metropolis (1927)

Lang’s sometimes flawed science fiction epic is one of the most influential films ever made

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Brigitte Helm (Maria/The Machine), Alfred Abel (Joh Frederson), Gustav Frölich (Freder), Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Rotwang), Fritz Rasp (The Thin Man), Theodor Loos (Josaphat), Heinrich George (Grot), Erwin Biswanger (11811/Geogry)

It’s 1927 and for too long Hollywood had held sway over the movies. But there were plans in Germany to change that. The booming Weimar film community, arguably the artistic hub of World Cinema, felt they had a shot at claiming the sort of global success Hollywood had made its own. No expense would be spared to bring Fritz Lang’s science-fiction spectacular, Metropolis to the screen. It was met with such a muted reaction, that the original epic cut was sliced to ribbons, parts of the film lost for all time, and for decades it lived only in a mutilated form. But it was visionary and extraordinary enough to inspire virtually every single science fiction film that followed it.

Metropolis is a sprawling future city state, run by Joh Frederson (Alfred Abel). In it the rich live a gilded life in mighty skyscrapers, with private gardens, luxurious apartments and raucous parties. Beneath them – literally so – are the workers, living a Morlock-like life of drudgery in the factories and power stations that keep the lights burning. But all that could change: below ground Maria (Brigitte Helm) preaches hope for change, above ground Frederson’s son Freder (Gustav Frölich) falls in love with Maria and rejects his father’s way for the life of a prole. Frederson has a scheme of his own: to use a robot (Helm again) built by old friend (and one time rival for the affection of his late wife) the one-handed scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) to replace Maria and sow discord among a potential worker’s rebellion. But does Rotwang and his creation have a game of their own?

Lang had a brief to create a film that would be a box-office hit in America. No stone was left unturned in creating his epic. Metropolis took a staggering 17 months to film, running almost three times over its initial budget. It’s extended shooting schedule was a godsend for many of its extras, struggling to make ends meet while the Weimar Republic thrashed through the after-effects of hyperinflation. It’s a magnificent monument to Lang’s superb visual styling, marrying shadow filled expressionism with sweeping epic magnificence.

Metropolis’ strengths all lie in its stunning, inventive and breath-taking design work. That has been so inspiring, it has permeated vast swathes of our culture. Filmic visions of imposing, neon-lit, skyscraper packed modern Babels (Frederer’s headquarters is an art-deco reimagining of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel) all find their roots here: from Burton’s Batman to Scott’s Blade Runner. Any robot in the movies can chase its lineage back to Rotwang’s man-machine, as any mad scientist ancestor is Rotwang (from Dr Strangelove to Back to the Future’s Doc Brown). It’s the film that invented steam-punk, with its piston-filled machines, staffed by boiler-suited workers (it’s inspiration for a zillion music videos is not surprising). Everywhere you look in Metropolis it might feel like you are seeing something familiar, when in fact you are witnessing its original generation.

Metropolis is a cat’s cradle of differing moods and designs, woven masterfully into a whole. Frederson controls the city from a penthouse suite, while his immediate staff and family live in swish, very 1920s apartments. This contrasts sharply with the industrial-punk of the factories, cathedrals of technological movement, full of gears, levers and men performing tasks with a robotic, convey-belt repetition under a series of clocks. There are real cathedrals, legacies of an old world, where God has been left behind by the new Gods of work and efficiency. Under the ground, the workers live in personality free tenement blocks and chiselled out caves, which echo churches. Rotwang works in a laboratory part Frankenstein’s layer, part bizarre lecture theatre, all seemingly housed in a ramshackle house that wouldn’t look out of place in a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale.

A fairy tale is perhaps what Metropolis is, underneath all the astonishing technical sheen and directorial mastery. We follow a hero who exiles himself to live among the poor, eventually becoming their champion, with a damsel-in-distress he must rescue from a crazed wizard. The wizard even produces a magic imposter, who threatens to bring disaster. Metropolis’ plot often proceeds with the illogical progression of a fairy tale, with characters frequently making veering changes in allegiance or unveiling dastardly schemes that appear from nowhere or make little sense.

It’s similar in Metropolis biggest weakness: it’s simplistic plot, wrapped up in a casually naïve politically theory that attempts to find a balance between left and right, but essentially boils down to “why can’t we all just get along”. It’s loud proclamation that “The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart” is so vague that it allowed the film to be embraced by the left as a proto-socialist film supporting worker’s rights and the right as a film that revealed the workers as a mob and the fate of the world best left in the hands of elites who know what they are doing.

It’s part of the simplistic view the film largely takes of character and story, which frequently feels like an after-thought behind the film’s sumptuous production values and Lang’s expressive camera work. It’s also not helped by some of the acting which, particularly in the case of Gustav Frölich’s hand-claspingly camp performance, mines the depths of silent-movie ostentatiousness. Saying that Brigitte Helm is chillingly, wickedly artificial and physically disjointed as the fake Maria (a far cry from her more simpering ‘good’ self) and Abel underplays effectively as Frederson. Klein-Rogge’s insane glare and conflicting lusts also make a strong impression.

But none so strong as Lang’s mastery of visual symbolism. Freder’s terrified vision of the ‘heart machine’ that sits at the centre of the city’s power, transformed into a terrible Moloch with workers literally fed into its gaping, firey maw. Those same workers from the film’s opening with Lang’s brilliant visual conceit of shuffling, shoulder-drooping figures lurching into a gigantic elevator that lowers them into the ground. Rotwang’s birth of the fake Maria is a masterclass in light and cross-cutting, as is the simmering eroticism of the fake Maria’s dance at an orgiastic night-club, the screen filling with the slathering faces of the man she has enchanted.

It mixes with the Gothic power Lang brings the film in its closing sequence, seemingly inspired by mystery plays with their deep-rooted sins bubbling to the surface to condemn those alive today. There are echoes back to this in Freder’s dreams of Metropolis as a modern Babylon (hammered home, once, by the lost scene of a monk preaching in the cathedral) and in Maria’s Joan of Arc like status among the working classes – a mantle taken to its logical conclusion by her metallic replacement who leads a doomed insurrection. Again, all these concepts and influences are effortlessly held together into one magnificent whole by Lang’s fluidic, beautifully paced direction.

Metropolis lives today as a monument to creative science fiction film-making – it is the most ambitious and most influential science-fiction film ever, except perhaps 2001 and (in a very different way) Star Wars. It may be politically simple and its story may veer in unplanned directions and strange cul-de-sacs, but as a piece of visionary cinema it is nearly unparalleled. Even its existence today as a reconstructed, corrupted version of itself (after hours of footage were considered lost for decades) doesn’t not dim or diminish its mastery.

Rocky III (1982)

Rocky needs to build his way back to the top – again – in this boxing buddy movie

Director: Sylvester Stallone

Cast: Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa), Talia Shire (Adrian Balboa), Burt Young (Paulie Pennino), Carl Weathers (Apollo Creed), Burgess Meredith (Mickey Goldmill), Tony Burton (Duke Evers), Mr T (Clubber Lang), Hulk Hogan (Thunderlips)

Life is good for Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone)! Ten successful title defences and he is literally on-top of the world. Time to hang up his gloves right? Wrong of course. He’s challenged by hungry new up-and-comer Clubber Lang (Mr T), a brutal, never-beaten machine. Dismissive to all around him, Lang says Rocky has never taken on a proper challenger: turns out he’s right as Mickey (Burgess Meredith) only put Rocky up against challengers he knew he could beat. Lang takes Rocky apart in the fight – not before indirectly causing a fatal heart-attack for Mickey – and Rocky is a broken man. Who else can bring him back from the brink than his old frenemy, the Count of Monte Fisto himself, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers)?

Rocky III confirms that there are in only so many plots available for a Rocky film. This one shakes the formula up by having Rocky start at the top, then fall to the bottom, then rise back up again. But it’s the same story, now taking place in a slightly different style to the first two. Any sense of kitchen-sink drama is gone from Rocky III. You can see it in the body of Stallone, now a chisselled, Michelangelo sculpture. This is a cartoon with a happy ending, and the fact it’s entertaining doesn’t hide that the whole franchise was leaving reality behind.

Saying that, Rocky III makes a bigger push for tragedy than either of the other two. Stallone leans heavily into incoherent blubbing as Rocky cradles the body of his surrogate father, Mickey dying with one last growling word of wisdom. It’s, of course, the moral of all film mentors that they must eventually kick the bucket so their proteges can take their place. It shakes Rocky up like nothing before. That and the beating he takes from Lang, in a brutal one-sided beat-down.

One of the film’s claim to cult fame is of course the casting of Mr T as Clubber Lang. Growling and scowling like a cartoon heavy, with some punchy one-liners (“I don’t hate Balboa. I pity the fool!”), it’s a part that works due to Mr T’s charisma. Stallone shoots Clubber Lang like some sort of fighting lion, frequently employing slo-mo to focus in on Lang’s scowling face and flying fists, the soundtrack echoing with his roar. Mr T is the series best villain, a man so loathsomely cocky (literally no one likes him, not the crowds, the commentators, his fellow boxers…) that he propositions Adrian, shoves Apollo before the first fight and gives Mickey a heart attack.

You needed someone like that to bring together Apollo and Rocky as a super-team. Rocky III is the series first buddy-movie. It’s hard not to see something faintly homoerotic in Weathers and Stallone, bodies greased and rippling in muscles, eyeing each other up, running along beaches or the faintly sexual air to Weather’s delivery of lines about wanting a “special favour” from Rocky “after the fight”. No wonder there isn’t much time for Adrian in the film – what chance could she have when these two have such a mutual appreciation society going on? – with Talia Shire’s best scene as a sounding board for Rocky’s confession of fear about stepping back into the ring against Lang.

Saying that, the inevitable training sequence – this is the film with the quest for “the Eye of the Tiger” – is great value. It’s fun to watch Rocky pick-up Apollo’s signature Muhammad Ali style quick feet and Weathers is very good as the former champ taking vicarious revenge who forms a genuine friendship with his old rival (I love it when Apollo shadowboxes in excitement when Rocky begins to turn the final fight in his favour). Of course, montage takes Rocky from down-hearted dope (suffering from slo-mo visions which play like a half-arsed panic attack) to freeze-frame triumph. (I’ll also say Rocky III rather neatly mocks Paulie’s kneejerk racism about training with ‘these people’).

To get to these expected beats, Stallone first needed to pad out the run time – and slight plot. Surely that’s the only reason for the bizarre Act One ‘exhibition’ match which sees a complacent Rocky fight an exhibition match against wrestler “Thunderlips” (a terrible cameo from Hulk Hogan), the sort of sequence you keep thinking must be a dream but is in fact real. We also get an initial training montage structured like a modern morality play, Rocky’s lazy prep for fighting Lang sees him living like a Hollywood hotshot, while Lang trains with a monastic dedication. No surprise who is going down in the ring (even if the first fight wasn’t only thirty minutes into the film).

The rematch though doesn’t disappoint, taking its lead from Ali’s rope-a-dope from the Rumble in the Jungle. And the real coda, which is all about friendship, is sweeter than this comic book, Roy of the Rovers film has any right to be. Rocky III replays some of the elements of the first two films, this time as a comic strip, but by focusing on a bromance (and throwing in a properly hissable pantomime villain) despite the fact you know it lacks any inspiration, you’ll still punch the sky when Rocky turns that final fight and leave the film whistling Eye of the Tiger.

Aparajito (1956)

Generational clashes lie at the heart of Ray’s heartbreaking second entry in his Apu trilogy

Director: Satyajit Ray

Cast: Kanu Banerjee (Harihar), Karuna Banerjee (Sarbajaya), Smaran Ghosal (Adolescent Apu), Pinaki Sengupta (Young Apu), Ramani Sengupta (Uncle Bhabataran), Charuprakash Ghosh (Nanda-babu), Subodh Ganguli (Headmaster), Moni Srimani (School inspector), Ajay Mitra (Shibnath), Kalicharan Roy (Akhil)

Satyajit Ray initially saw Pather Panchali as a one-off, a story from the works of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, not the start of a multi-film fable on the life of its young protagonist. But, such was the impact of Ray’s debut, it almost demanded a continuation of the story. Ray then adapted parts of two Bandyopadhyay novels, re-shaping them into a tale of Apu’s late childhood and adolescence, that difficult crossing point between childhood and adulthood. In doing so, he created a film full of life but also profoundly moving and quietly devastating. Rich, confident and powerful, Aparajito may just be even more affecting than its forbear.

Beginning a few years after the conclusion of Pather Panchali Apu (played as child by Pinaki Sengupta and later as an adolescent by Smaran Ghosal) lives in the holy city of Varanasi with his dreaming father Harihar (Kanu Banerjee) and tireless mother Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee). Apu is still the same inquisitive, observant, fascinated child he ever was and when his father’s death leads to mother and son returning to the country, he excels at the local school. Winning a scholarship to college at Calcutta, Apu he finds Sarbajaya’s love for him smothering, just as she is heart-broken by his growing distance and reluctance to write or return to visit her.

This universal story of children struggling to outgrow their parents and their parents longing to help them grow but desire to keep them close, a situation causing pain on both sides, that gives Aparajito it’s huge emotional force. We can totally understand why Apu, swept up in the excitement of Calcutta and forging of his own life (one that has the promise of being so much more dynamic than his parents), begins to feel the ties of duty to his mother (almost alone in the world without him) constraining. At the same time, having witnessed the never-ending sacrifice, patience and quiet devotion of Sarbajaya to her son, we want to slap him for his selfishness and lack of thought.

Ray’s film is superb at making us understand the impossible burdens Sarbajaya has taken on herself to raise her son. Ray constantly frames Sarbajaya in the act of waiting: in Varanasi we never see her outside of the courtyard of their shared tenement block, constantly preoccupied with household tasks. Ray frames Sarbajaya frequently in doorways, visually presenting her as someone constantly waiting on the outskirts, shadows cast across her – someone vital for ensuring order, but easy to forget on the outskirts of rooms. It also serves to make her look constantly trapped and overburdened with duty, shadows constantly cast across her.

These burdens magnify for Sarbajaya after the death of Harihar. Apu’s decent father is still a dreamer who lacks the dedication and drive to make something of himself. Do memories of his father’s desire to become a writer ending in a fever in a tenement block, subconsciously drive Apu later? Harihar collapses near the holy river, ill from the damp of the city that he trudges through barefoot night and day, hitting the ground in a shadow lit passageway – much like his wife, as if the city has crushed him with its burdens.

The city seems very different to the young Apu. Ray’s camerawork is gentle, full of leisurely sideways pans, which serve to make the city appear to us as it does to Apu: a never-ending stream of visual wonders. Pans across the riverbanks of the Ganges, full of beautiful temples and river vistas look as magical to us as they do to the young boy. Similarly, the Dickensian hustle and bustle of the city itself, full of streets and alleyways that Apu and his friends rundown with glee feel like treasure-troves of adventure, rather than the never-ending streets trudge they look like when we see them from Harihar’s perspective.

Ray’s camera frequently brings us back to the searching, questioning, fascinated eyes of young Apu, always expanding his horizons. Education and the wonders that books bring him, far beyond the horizons of his mother who can only think about how to bring about tomorrow, offer a similar excitement. Young Apu excels at school and delights in trying to share the wonders he has learned – about science, astronomy and geography – with his mother. Ray shows a mastery of simple montage as years fly by in minutes as we see each of Apu’s passions before a masterful transition with a slow zoom in and out on a lit candle carries across years from Apu as a child to an adolescent.

An adolescent who feels the pull of a world away from what he increasingly sees as the smothering pull of his mother. It is, of course, impossible to watch this without feeling how unfair – but also how natural – this is. Your heart breaks as Apu heads off to Calcutta with only a single cursory glance back to his devoted mother. The mother who still packs his bag, gives him her savings – and asks him to come home as often as he can. You can understand why a young man finds this constraining, even as you want to tell him how sharp his regrets will be as Sarbajaya’s health begins to fail (naturally, the boy falls asleep as his mother timidly confesses her fear of old age and sickness to him).

Apu loves his mother, there is no doubt about that. One vacation, arriving at the train station to return to Calcutta, he decides to turn back (claiming he missed the train) to spend one more day with his mother. He still relies on her wisdom and unreserved love and he thinks often of her in the city. But he’s a teenager and wants his freedom. Sarbajaya even understands this, just as her heart breaks for the loss of and loneliness his departure brings. Is there a sadder shot in the movies as Ray focuses on Sarbajaya slowly sinking down as Apu walks away to his future?

The impact is only increased by the gloriously moving, hollow-eyed performance of Karuna Banerjee, exhausted but untiring in her work to protect family and home. It’s a performance of quiet, bubbling grief and loss tightly packed under optimism and support for her son – a grief that only the audience sees. Smaran Ghosal is also very fine as the adolescent Apu, a boy we can never dislike for very naturally wanting to forge his own path, in a performance that feels extraordinarily real.

The humanity shines out again in Ray’s follow-up to his debut. Moving confidently from location to location, in a novelistic structure translated perfectly to the screen, Aparajito is rich, beautifully told and carries real, unbearable emotional punch for anyone who has ever been a parent or child. Another masterwork in a mighty trilogy.