DARK PASSAGE ***

Bogie doesn't make his first appearance until half-way through "Dark Passage" though we hear his voice from the outset. He's an escaped prisoner and we see things through his eyes. He's doing life for the murder of his wife but he's innocent. He's picked up on the road by Lauren Bacall who knows who he is and who wants to help him. One reason we don't actually see Bogie is, for reasons of the plot, he has to have his face remodelled and it's only after the bandages come off we get to see those famously craggy features.

The director of this immensely stylish and underrated noir was Delmer Daves and David Goodis wrote the original novel. The initial trick of everything being seen though Bogart's eyes, (in other words, him 'being' the camera), does get a little tiresome but it's got a strong narrative and any movie that gives Agnes Moorehead a good, meaty role worthy of her talent is always welcome.


The weak link is Bacall who, after her stunning debut in "To Have and Have Not" never did anything as good again. Here she has to address the camera a good deal but never looks comfortable doing it. On the plus side it's very stylishly photographed by Sidney Hickox making very good use of the San Francisco locations and there's two terrific supporting turns from TomD'Andrea as a friendly cabbie and Clifton Young as the guy who first picks Bogie up on the road but isn't all he seems. It remains an unjustly neglected picture.

MICHAEL COLLINS ***

I'm always sceptical about biopics which purport 'to tell the truth' and my knowledge of the 1916 Rising and the Civil War which followed, and indeed of MICHAEL COLLINS himself, is sketchy at best so I can't say if Neil Jordan's film about Collins is accurate and to what degree but if anyone was going to get to the heart of Michael Collins it was Jordan, so I'm assuming the history lesson he is teaching us here has at least a semblance of the truth about it, give or take some tweaking here and there, (The Croke Park massacre, for example, while it did happen, is certainly over-extended for dramatic effect).

What's not in question is the film's power on a purely filmic level. This is a first-rate piece of film-making, less political tract, more Warner Brothers gangster melodrama, (it's even got G-Men), superbly photographed in noirish colour by the great Chris Menges and with a barnstorming performance by Liam Neeson in the title role, (and from all accounts it's a pretty accurate representation of 'the big man', too). Indeed, the film is splendidly cast throughout. There is excellent work from Aidan Quinn, Ian Hart and Stephen Rea as fellow rebels and an almost uncanny performance from Alan Rickman as DeValera. The fly in the ointment is Julia Robert's love interest and obviously cast with an eye on the American market. Still, she's marginally less embarrassing here than she was as MARY REILLY. Most of the other parts are taken by members of the Irish and British acting fraternity and watch out for a young Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the boy who finally does for Collins.

It isn't a great film by any means; it's much too schematic and it's anything but subtle, (incident piles upon incident at an alarming rate), but it's also hugely entertaining and has an epic quality that is very becoming. It would take two Englishmen, (Ken Loach and Steven McQueen), to really get under the skin of the Irish Troubles, then (THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY) and now, (HUNGER), but Jordan's film is no disgrace and can certainly be warmly recommended.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS *

After the somewhat frivolous Bond of Roger Moore, a rather more po-faced Timothy Dalton stepped into 007's shoes in "The Living Daylights". If Moore was something of a comedown on Connery, Dalton, in attempting to restore some of Connery's gravitas, was even more of a let-down. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS isn't really that bad and there are some great set-pieces but neither its villains, (Jeroen Krabbe, Joe Don Baker), nor its Bond girl, (a lack-lustre Maryam D'Abo), stay in the memory. Luckily Mr Dalton was soon be replaced by the altogether superior Pierce Brosnan before Daniel Craig claimed the role for his own.

FRANCES HA ****

"Frances Ha" is Noah Baumbach's, and presumably Greta Gerwig's, since she co-wrote the script with real-life partner Baumbach, homage to the French New Wave and the cinema of Woody Allen just as Gerwig's Frances is an Annie Hall
for the 21st century, even if she is sans her Alvy. She may not be the kind of girl you may want to spend too much time with in reality but on screen she is a monochrome delight, a kooky heroine with a pedigree that goes all the way back to Jean Arthur and Carole Lombard.

Of course, Frances Ha isn't her whole name but less than half of it, (the title is explained in the final frame), though if a simple Ha were her surname it would suit Gerwig perfectly. Her dizzy character is never off the screen and while she can be a pain in the ass at times she finally wins you over and is one screen character you could happily spend a lot more time with. That's all down to Gerwig, recently described as 'the Meryl Streep of mumblecore', superb here and growing better with every role. It's also a movie that confirms Baumbach's status as one of the most likeable and innovative young directors currently working in America and as a team I suspect he and Gerwig could be the Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon of contemporary New York. This is a lovely movie that sent me out of the cinema with the soppiest of grins on my face.

INSIDIOUS **

You don't need the creepy credits, although they are well done, or Joseph Bishara's ultra-creepy score to tell you that INSIDIOUS is going to be 'a scary picture'. All you need to know is that it's about a nice couple, (Rose Byrne and the preternaturally youthful Patrick Wilson), and their unbearably, sycophantically cute son and his siblings moving into a new home to know that 'evil' in some shape or form ain't far away.

Once upon a time a new home meant Mr Blandings was building his dream house, now it's all Amityville horrors. Actually, INSIDIOUS isn't at all bad; here is a movie that does exactly what it says on the tin, giving us the heebie-jeebies if not quite scaring the living daylights out of us and the story is a tad more original than the usual possession/haunted house movie. Eventually the family have to bring in some psychics to help them get rid of the creatures that have followed them from one home to the next which in turn leads Wilson into taking an out-of-body journey into his past in the film's protracted climax. Just where are Ghostbusters when you need them.

If we're not talking Oscars here, (basically this is nothing more than a first-rate Saturday night chiller), it at least shows that director James Wan is in full control of his material and even if her role is nothing more than filler, (here playing Wilson's naturally concerned mother), it's always nice to see Barbara Hershey.

SILENT SOULS ****

Clocking in at a very economical 78 minutes Aleksey Fedorchenko's SILENT SOULS is a remarkable and remarkably beautiful Russian film dealing with both grief and identity but in a manner that is both uplifting and almost surrealistically comic. It is the kind of film that Abbas Kiarostami might make or, in a much broader fashion, the Coens. The plot is both simple and minimalist. A man's wife has died and he wishes to take her body to be buried in the spot where they had spent their honeymoon, and in the custom of their race, but he does not want to involve the authorities so he enlists the help of a colleague, Aist, the film's narrator and its central character and it becomes a road movie unlike any other.

Almost nothing happens and yet there is a great feeling that in the midst of death life goes on and that people continue to struggle for happiness at all costs. It's a melancholy subject but it isn't treated in a melancholy way. Little is actually said; these are indeed silent souls and what little story there is unfolds in almost totally visual terms and the cinematography of Mikhail Krichman is superb. An outstanding film that certainly doesn't deserve to get away.

HOME FROM THE HILL ***

If, like me, you consider Vincente Minnelli one of the all-time great directors then you have to accept that his melodramas are just as good as his musicals. In the fifties and sixties he made a series of heightened melodramas, grandly operatic in tone and shot largely in Cinemascope and colour, (the 1952 "The Bad and the Beautiful, which he made in black and white, is perhaps the most famous of his non-musicals but it's a piece of Hollywood hysteria I've never actually liked). If the subject matter of most of his films gravitated towards soap-opera, the style he applied and the look of these pictures was extraordinary.

Minnelli was fundamentally a designer and Cinemascope gave him the opportunity to use the screen as a vast canvas in which he could place his characters. A lot of these films are among the most visually stylish of their period. Of course, he was also blessed with very strong scripts and outstanding casts. He made "Home from the Hill" in 1960 and it's not as well-known as some of his other films. It doesn't deal with as 'controversial' a subject as homosexuality like "Tea and Sympathy", the same level of hysteria as "The Cobweb", the deep intensity of "Some Came Running" or the insider knowledge of the movie business of "Two Weeks in Another Town" but it remains a hugely exciting piece of cinema nevertheless.

It's a family drama and a surprisingly intimate one considering its two and a half hour running time. Robert Mitchum is the small-town patriarch who can't keep it in his pants and is living in a loveless and sexless marriage with Eleanor Parker. Their son is George Hamilton, initially a momma's boy but taken under his father's wing when he turns 17 and George Peppard is the young rough-neck who, it turns out, is Mitchum's illegitimate son.

The very fine screenplay was by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr from a novel by William Humphrey that veers from small-town soap opera to faux Greek tragedy complete with a Greek Chorus of gossipy old men and like almost everything Minnelli did he handles the interplay between his characters with the same brio as he handles the widescreen and his use of colour. It's also beautifully played by the entire cast with Peppard proving to be the revelation. It may be the least revived of his films but it's still unmissable if you do get the chance to see it.

Q & A *

Q & A isn't one of Sidney Lumet's better films. For one thing, it rehashes too many of the themes of crime and punishment that Lumet handled to greater effect elsewhere and it also manages to be both racist and homophobic while purporting to condemn both racism and homophobia. but neither is it totally negligible either. It's another study of police corruption; the bad cop is Nick Nolte and the decent, young assistant D A who goes up against him is Timothy Hutton. They are both fine but the best performances are those of Armand Assante as a Puerto Rican gangster with his own agenda in wanting to bring Nolte down and Patrick O'Neal as Nolte's equally corrupt boss. It's based on a book by Edwin Torres and Lumet himself did the screenplay. It could do with some trimming as it runs for well over 2 hours and it's a flabbier picture than either "Serpico" or "The Verdict"
but it's visually impressive, (the DoP is Andrzej Barkkowiak), and there's enough plot to hold our interest. Let's call it middle-of-the-road Lumet.

NORWEGIAN WOOD no stars

NORWEGIAN WOOD is a tale of amour fou or whatever the Japanese equivalent is. It's very well acted by its young cast, directed with a great deal of fidelity and imagination by Tran Anh Hung and beautifully photographed by Mark Lee Ping Bin but it also moves at a snail's pace and it seems to last forever (well, 130 or so very long minutes). It's taken from a highly acclaimed novel by Haruki Murakami and I'm sure it's the kind of film that will appeal to young intellectuals who think that talking about sex a lot is 'cool', but then it's also set in 1968, a time when 'the sexual revolution' was at its height which might explain the relative sexual honesty but hardly excuses the film's slowness. Indeed, it's the kind of art-house movie Woody Allen might have taken the piss out of once upon a time and as it wound down to its grim conclusion I kept thinking what the Monty Python team might have done with this material.

ALBERT NOBBS **

“Albert Nobbs” may be the strangest film you will see all year; it could also be one of the best. It’s about a woman (Glenn Close) who lived all her adult life as a man in late 19th century Dublin. It’s not particularly well made but it’s powerful, moving and ... different. This movie is no “Tootsie” but a sad, at times tragic, at times funny account of a life lived out of kilter in a kind of twilight zone inhabited by neither one sex or another.

Nobbs reasons for his/her strange existence is that she needed to work at a time when it was easier for men to find gainful employment than it was for women. But, you may ask, when she went home in the evenings why didn’t she change into a dress and become the woman she was. In some ways the film asks this question but never really answers it. Instead it leaves it up to us, the audience, to fill in the blanks and in this case that, I feel, is a virtue and not a fault; we struggle to know and to understand Albert Nobbs and in doing so we become emotionally involved with her. This is a film about feeling; that it works is quite an achievement.

But Albert isn’t alone in her deception. She meets Hubert, another woman living her life as a man, (if for somewhat different reasons), and they become firm friends and it is Hubert who helps Albert move forward. But Hubert has a wife, (the excellent Bronagh Gallagher), and it is Hubert who encourages Albert to go down the same road. Are these women lesbians? Perhaps, but then again perhaps not. This isn’t a film about sexuality but about gender and it seems almost natural that even in late 19th century Ireland a woman might marry another and live as husband and wife.


Unfortunately, fine as Close and Janet McTeer (as Hubert) are it is hard for us to accept that they could pass for men. However, in one of the films best scenes, when they finally do put on dresses they look forever like two men in drag. Is this great acting or just wishful thinking on our part? I’m inclined to think it’s closer to great acting. Close is excellent as Albert, greatly helped by some fine make-up but McTeer is magnificent as Hubert. It is said the best actors are those who can sit still, do nothing and simply listen and a good deal of McTeer’s performance is doing just that, watching Close and reacting to what she says and does. You can read so much in McTeer’s face; this is an Oscar-worthy performance. There is also very good work from Pauline Collins, Brendan Gleeson and the aforementioned Bronagh Gallagher. Close co-wrote the script; it’s clearly a labour of love and it shows.

THE STRANGERS **

THE STRANGERS is one of the best in the recent crop of 'horror' movies in which people are terrorised in their homes by forces, real or imagined, outside of their control. In this case those forces are very real indeed and the movie is suitably unnerving, (writer/director Bryan Bertino uses sound to superb, unsettling effect). There's even a touch of the Michael Hanekes about it though the film isn't as direct in challenging our complicity in what we are watching as, say, a FUNNY GAMES or a BENNY'S VIDEO. We're more in HALLOWEEN territory here with masked boogie-men suddenly appearing at the corner of the screen. A pre-credit announcement informs us that this is based on actual events, which may or may not be true but even if it isn't, Bertino's film is still a sufficient guarantee of a sleepless night.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT no stars

Terrible. Why did so many major directors become a cropper when faced with fancy dress? Or more specifically, with swords and sandals and all things pertaining to the Bible. And how could so many good actors turn into shop-front dummies or develop the personalities of automatons when cast in this kind of drivel? Chewing the scenery was never an option since the scenery was always bigger than they were.

Here, the director becoming a cropper was Robert Rossen, (this was the nadir of an on-again, off-again career), and the actors following suit include Richard Burton, (in a blonde wig and very little else, as Alexander), Fredric March, Claire Bloom and Danielle Darrieux, who still manages to crawl out of this cess-pit of a movie smelling of roses, while a stock-pile of familiar British faces, (Harry Andrews, Peter Cushing, Barry Jones, Stanley Baker et al), play sundry Greeks and Persians. As a history lesson it would send any sixth grader to sleep, (you have to wait an eternity just to get a decent battle). I've always felt the recent Oliver Stone version was mightily under-valued. Compared to this, it's a bloody masterpiece!