GANGSTER SQUAD **

The first thing that hits you about "Gangster Squad" is just how terrific it looks. This probably isn't how Los Angeles looked in 1949 but this is how LA looked in the pages of Life Magazine; "Gangster Squad" is done up to the nines and is dressed to kill. It's said to be inspired by real events and it's a kind of LA version of "The Untouchables"with an LA gangster named Mickey Cohen standing in for Al Capone. Cohen is a deliriously over-the-top Sean Penn. The Elliot Ness figure is Josh Brolin but as usual it's Ryan Gosling who steals the movie as an insolent, hot-headed young cop. It's certainly not very original and the violence is often so excessive as to be positively cartoonish. The critics didn't like it and the public didn't rush to it either but it's very enjoyable and, like I said, it looks amazing, (the DoP is Dion Beebe; the principal designer, Maher Ahmad).

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE *

Far from a direct remake of the Mexican original this American version of "We Are What We Are" keeps the original premiss and not much else. The first version felt more like a commentary on the social conditions prevailing in Mexico at the time rather than an outright horror film but one that worked in both contexts. This is closer to "Texas Chainsaw..." territory and as a genre piece it remains gruesomely effective but if it lacks the original's sense of social outrage it certainly generates its own sense of dread and probably gives Michael Parks the best line he's ever had.
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FIRE OVER ENGLAND **

 Directed by the American William K. Howard and produced by Erich Pommer this was England taking on Hollywood at their own game; an expensive all-star swashbuckling period piece with just enough propaganda to make it relevant to a country that, within two years, would be at war. It's a gorgeous looking picture, beautifully designed and superbly photographed by none other than James Wong Howe, making great use of both blacks and whites in the overall palette, (and how it was overlooked in both these categories at the Oscars I find it hard to believe).

Future real-life spouses Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh are the young lovers though neither gets star billing. That's reserved for Flora Robson as Elizabeth I and very good she is, as well as Leslie Banks as Robert Dudley. Raymond Massey is Philip of Spain and James Mason has a small role as a spy and there's a nice performance from Morton Selten as Lord Burleigh. It was, of course, a huge hit yet it isn't much seen these days which is a pity, for while it does err on the dull side on occasions, (a tighter script might have helped), overall it is very enjoyable.

AMERICAN GANGSTER ***

This real-life crime movie isn't the kind of film you might readily associate with Ridley Scott moving, quite effortlessly it seems to me, into Scorsese territory with the story of Frank Lucas, a New York drug king and his involvement with some very corrupt cops. A terrific Denzel Washington is Lucas, (why no Oscar nomination for something approaching a career-best performance), and Russell Crowe is very good as the honest cop out to nail him. This is a prestige production and no mistake with an outstanding cast that also includes Josh Brolin, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding Jr, John Hawkes and Ruby Dee, Oscar-nominated as Lucas' mother. Steve Zaillian did the excellent script from an article by Mark Jacobson and Harris Savides was responsible for the superb cinematography. Scorsese would probably have adopted a more kinetic approach but Scott doesn't disappoint, (he rarely does). No classic perhaps, but so much better than what I expected and what it might have been. Hugely entertaining.

ANNA KARENINA **

Much abridged and much altered Hollywood version of Tolstoy's novel, this would be of little consequence were it not for the fact that Garbo is playing "Anna Karenina" and she is close to magnificent. She completely transcends material you would never guess is taken from the book often called the greatest novel ever written. Vronsky is Fredric March; he isn't terrible but he's hardly someone a woman like Garbo's Anna would leave home and family for while Basil Rathbone is a superbly petulant Karenin. Perhaps the film's sweetest surprise is Maureen O'Sullivan's Kitty; it's a lovely performance and may be the best thing she ever did even if her part has been cut to nothing. Production values are, of course, splendid in the high gloss fashion of MGM. Director Clarence Brown was no Cukor but he kept things galloping along for all of the film's 90 or so minutes.

MY OLD LADY no stars

The problem with "My Old Lady" is that it suffers from an excess of good taste and a severe dearth of a good plot. Kevin Kline is the down-on-his-luck American who inherits a Paris apartment together with its 92 year old tenant Maggie Smith and her daughter, Kristin Scott Thomas and he has them until Smith dies. Not only that but he must continue to pay Smith 2,400 euros a month. As written and directed by Israel Horovitz from Horovitz's original play, nothing of any consequence happens. The three principal performances are fine but the material is gossamer thin. It's the kind of idea that might have seemed good at the time but which came to nothing. It might have made for a decent 30 minute short but stretched out to feature length it's almost unendurable. Paris looks nice though but even Paris can't save it.

THE GUNMAN no stars

Despite a terrific cast, (Sean Penn, Javier Bardem, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, Mark Rylance), this lack-lustre thriller never really builds up a head of steam nor is it ever really credible. Penn is the former assassin who, eight years after his last kill, finds himself the target for a change. It begins in the Congo before moving to London, Barcelona and Gibraltar and it's certainly handsomely shot though to make up for the deficiencies in the script director Pierre Morel lays on the tourist shtick a little too heavily and a film needs more than just pretty pictures to sustain our interest. Nobody is really at their best though Rylance, in much too small a part, works wonders with the material he's been given. Watchable, nothing more.

CAST A DARK SHADOW **

It's a load of old tosh but its also a lot of fun with a grand cast pulling out all the stops. Dirk Bogarde is the psychopathic killer who does away with rich wife Mona Washbourne, making her death look like an accident but when he finds she's made a will leaving all her money to her sister in Jamaica he marries Margaret Lockwood for her money only to find she's not quite so easy to get rid off. They, as well as Kay Walsh as a rich newcomer to the district and Kathleen Harrison as a slightly dotty maid, are all at the top of their game and Lewis Gilbert directs as if he actually wanted us to take all of this seriously. It may stick very much to its one-room set, betraying its theatrical origins, but thanks to Gilbert and cinematographer Jack Asher it remains resolutely cinematic.

LEGEND OF THE LOST **

Considering that for most of this film there are only three characters on screen and two of them are very badly played by John Wayne and Rossano Brazzi, (the third is a sultry looking Sophia Loren and she's very good in an underwritten role), Henry Hathaway's "Legend of the Lost" is a surprisingly entertaining piece of nonsense, complete with lost treasure and some gorgeously photographed desert locations courtesy of Jack Cardiff. There isn't much else yet Hathaway manages to keep us watching, maybe with a promise that something is going to happen even if in the end, it hardly ever does. It's success probably had a lot to do with the Westener's love of deserts and exotic locations, (maybe there's a touch of the T. E. Lawrence in all of us). It's hardly the best of Hathaway but there's no denying it's very enjoyable.

MRS MINIVER *

There's no denying that this tub-thumping piece of jingoism is reasonably entertaining for what it is and that it's very well made, (you expect nothing less from Wyler), and pleasingly acted, (Garson and Wright won Oscars and Pidgeon, Whitty and Henry Travers were all nominated though it was really Whitty who should have won), but it's so patronisingly middle-class it is almost offensive. It's supposed to be about a 'typical' middle-class British family at the beginning of and during the early years of the Second World War but this is Hollywood's idea of England and the Minivers are about as close to real-life as the inhabitants of "Downton Abbey" or even Neverland, (the 'typical' Minivers are so middle-class they have their own servants), and at well over two hours all this sweetness and light, with a little sentimental tragedy thrown in, is enough to melt your teeth. Amazingly it won six Oscars including Best Picture, was a huge hit and is much loved by many, though not by me.

ALPS **

The Greek director Yorgos Lathimos may possess the most perverse and idiosyncratic imagination in movies. After his Oscar-nominated breakthrough movie "Dogtooth" and prior to his international hit "The Lobster" he made "Alps", a completely off-the-wall 'comedy', (you might have trouble finding the jokes), about a group calling themselves 'The Alps', who stand in for the recently deceased in order to help the relatives through the grieving process. An American writer/director might have made this into a sci-fi/horror film along the lines of Frankenheimer's "Seconds" but Lathimos treats it like a fairy-
tale, albeit not one you might tell your children. This movie has a surreal sensibility that is both disquieting and blackly funny. On hindsight, "The Lobster" might seem like a natural progression though God knows where Lathimos might go from here.

UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN no stars

If Maurice Pialat's "Under the Sun of Satan" reminds you thematically in some small way of Bresson's "Diary of a Country Priest" perhaps it's because both of them are based on novels by Georges Bernanos and both deal with a priest's lack of faith but whereas "Diary of a Country Priest" was rooted very much in a terrible reality Pialat's picture is largely phantasmagorical, you might even say supernatural. Gerard Depardieu is the doubting priest and Sandrine Bonnaire the misguided, possibly 'evil' girl whose soul he tries to save and it's so dour and po-faced it feels like a parody.


It's obvious we are are meant to take it all very seriously but this is the worst kind of intellectual tosh; at least those dire exorcist horror movies involving priests don't have any pretentions to being anything other than what they are on the surface unlike this nonsense which controversially won the Palme d'Or but was booed by a large section of the audience who obviously saw through it. There are those who think it's a masterpiece but when set beside the Bresson picture it seems to me to be something of a travesty.

PARKLAND **

Parkland was the name of the hospital that President Kennedy was taken to after being shot in Dallas and Peter Landesman's film deals with the events of that day and the days that followed. It's a somewhat better film than the critics gave it credit for though it doesn't add anything to either the truth or the legend and prefers instead to concentrate on how the assassination affected the people on the ground, the hospital staff, the secret service agents, the Oswald family etc.

It's well cast and well played by some very talented players, (Marcia Gay Harden as a nurse, Billy Bob Thornton, Ron Livingston and David Harbour as secret service men, Paul Giametti as Abraham Zapruder, Jackie Weaver and James Badge Dale as Oswald's mother and brother; even Zac Efron as a young doctor who fails to save Kennedy's life is excellent). Landesman shoots it in a semi-documentary style which is fine though perhaps the editing is a little on the busy side; he doesn't seem to like to hold a frame for more than a few seconds at a time. I don't know, of course, how close any of this is to the facts but presumably the film was researched to within a few inches of its life and no matter how often this story has been told on screen it continues to be very moving.

ANOTHER MAN'S POISON no stars

Even an excellent cast can't redeem this appalling and ridiculously plotted so-called thriller that Bette Davis and her then husband Gary Merrill made in Britain in 1951. She's a crime writer who has murdered her husband and he's a bank robber on the run who poses as the dead husband, (don't even think of asking how any of this came about). She's also having an affair with her secretary's finance, (Anthony Steel), and then there's always the nosy vet from the neighbouring farm, (Emlyn Williams). It was based on a play by the actor Leslie Sands and you can tell, (Val Guest, of all people, did the adaptation), and was directed by Irving Rapper. It's far from one of his best efforts. In what may be her worst performance Bette camps it up like a parody of herself with only Emlyn Williams coming out of it with something like his reputation intact. Needless to say, it wasn't a hit.

IMPACT no stars

"Impact" is an okay murder yarn that starts off very well but which gets progressively sillier as it goes along. Brian Donleavy is the rich schmuck whose wife, Helen Walker, plans to murder so she can inherit his fortune and run off with her lover. However, it's the lover who ends up dead leaving Donleavy to ponder his future and whether he should take revenge or not. As soon as the then 72 year old Charles Coburn turns up as the investigating cop you know the movie is heading for trouble and by the time new girlfriend Ella Raines starts running around like Nancy Drew minus her Hardy Boys, things have gone fairly pear-shaped. Still, Donleavy makes a fairly personable hero and Walker was always good, particularly when she was being bad. Shorn of 30 minutes or so it might have made a tight little B-movie; as it is, it's drawn out way beyond its welcome.

BLACK SUNDAY **

There are a number of versions of Mario Bava's "Black Sunday" in existence. The one I've just seen is the dubbed version known as "The Mask of Satan" but whichever version you see it is still something of a shocker and a classic. It's a tale of witchcraft and vampirism, photographed in luminous black and white by Bava and based on a story by Gogol. It was also the film that basically launched the career of Barbara Steele and turned her into a cult figure.

She plays Princess Asa, a witch condemned to death but not before she's forced to wear 'the mask of Satan', a kind of facial iron maiden, (the pre-credit sequence where all of this happens is one of the highlights of horror cinema). Two centuries later she is resurrected by two unwitting travellers who happen to stumble upon her tomb, (one of them played by the very handsome, very wooden English actor John Richardson). Exchanging gore for more subtle and disquieting imagery the film was, nevertheless, banned in the UK and established Bava, not just as a force to be reckoned with in horror cinema, but in world cinema generally. The material may be deeply silly but the handling of it certainly isn't.

KING KONG VS GODZILLA *

One of the great bad movies, a Japanese-American co-production which was released in the West in an atrociously dubbed version which only makes the already bad acting seem even worse but then nobody goes to a movie entitled "King Kong vs. Godzilla" to see the humans. Yes, in 1962 Toho Pictures gave us not one but two monsters for the price of one as well as the mother of all battles and some really dinky toy tanks and trains. Of course, it's gob-smackingly awful and the racial stereotyping is appalling but once the two big guys get together you're prepared to overlook almost anything. Very small kids will love it.

ENEMY **

The old doppelganger theme gets yet another workout, this time from director Denis Villeneuve, as Jake Gyllenhaal's somewhat uncool and uptight history professor discovers he has a double. This causes him no end of consternation as he sets out to track down his other self who happens to be an actor. In both roles, and never really off the screen, Gyllenhaal is excellent as always while Villeneuve once again proves himself a dab hand at suspense. If ultimately there is less to the picture than meets the eye it is still very stylish and even disquieting at times and while not one of its directors best films remains a very enjoyable divertissement.

THE FINAL CONFLICT no stars

If "The Omen" and its first sequel "Damien; Omen II" were nothing more than decent and rather enjoyable entries in the Anti-Christ genre this, the second sequel, is a genuine classic; at least, a classic as far as bad movies are concerned. This is a howler of the first-order with Damien now fully grown and doing battle with a cabal of monks lead by a particularly worried-looking Rossano Brazzi. Damien himself is played, appallingly, by Sam Neill though Neill's bad acting is part of the fun. About midway through the Messiah is reborn, (you know, the Second Coming and all that), but since Damien doesn't know exactly which child born on that particular day is, as he calls him, the Nazarene he orders the killing of every child born on that date just as Herod did when he wanted to bump off the infant Jesus.

You might get the impression that as a conclusion to the trilogy they were rather grasping at straws and if they felt they really did need to bring the Messiah into it they could have done so with at least a degree of intelligence rather than reduce everything to the camp nonsense it so obviously is but then, of course, we were never meant to take any of this seriously in the first place. "The Final Conflict" is certainly enjoyable; I laughed out loud several times in the most inappropriate places though I felt a bit queasy as I pondered the relationship that seemed to be developing between the adult Damien and Lisa Harrow's young son and remember, however entertaining you might find it, it's still a load of old codswallop.

SUDDEN FEAR **

The "Sudden Fear" of the title is what Miss Crawford experiences when she discovers that the young actor she has married, (an excellent and Oscar-nominated early performance from Jack Palance), is planning to murder her. David Miller's thriller is both extremely enjoyable and highly implausible with Joan pulling out all the stops and also picking up an Oscar nomination for her trouble. The movie marked something of a late career boost for her and was largely instrumental in launching Palance who clearly had a knack for playing the bad guy. As Mr Palance's partner-in-crime Gloria Grahame seems to be having a lot more fun here than she did in the overrated "The Bad and the Beautiful".

ANY DAY NOW ***

Travis Fine's remarkable film "Any Day Now" deals with the very thorny issue of gay parenting or more specifically, gay adoption. Alan Cumming, (superb), is the drag artist who feels responsible for the mentally handicapped child next door, (a terrific Issac Leyva), after his mother is picked up by the vice squad and who decides to do something about it by legally adopting the child himself with the help of his new lover who just happens to be a lawyer, (a very good Garret Dillahunt).

It's the kind of topic the movies tends to shy away from and it has all the potential for mawkishness but Fine manages to steer clear of sentimentality; the result is both intelligent and very moving, yet not without a degree of humour. Of course, it also deals with issues that many will find grim and distressing and it proves to be a challenging watch. This is one gay-themed film that lays it very much on the line and is all the more powerful for it. In an age when so many polemical films are cut and dried and conventionally on the side of the angels here is one that is content to bleed like an open wound. You won't forget it in a hurry.

HOUR OF THE WOLF **

Bergman made "Hour of the Wolf" in 1968 and it's one of his most personal films. It also verges on a parody of what we expect a Bergman film to be, being a typically dark and forbidding study of the artist destroyed by his own demons. Moving between a conventional horror film and a wholly individualistic study of madness it's not in the front rank of Bergman pictures yet it is still quite remarkable and is head and shoulders above anything a lesser director might have turned out. As the artist losing his sanity and the wife barely able to cope both Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann are superb while the luminous black and white cinematography is by Bergman regular Sven Nykvist.

POLICE ***

You know "Police" isn't going to be a conventional policier simply because it's directed by Maurice Pialat and Pialat doesn't do conventional. Yes, there's a 'thriller' plot involving drug dealers but the plot is secondary to the way both the police and the criminals are seen to go about their business which in many ways is much the same, (a crooked lawyer, nicely played by Richard Anconina, moves between them with seemingly consummate ease).

The central character is Gerard Depardieu's charming, brutalising inspector who thinks nothing of beating up suspects to get a confession and both he and the film may remind you of Kirk Douglas in "Detective Story" and it's a beautiful piece of acting. Equally good, as the drug dealer's girl that Depardieu falls for, is Sophie Marceau. Ultimately the 'thriller' plot is all but jettisoned as Pialat digs deeper into the lives and backgrounds of his characters which is just as well as the plot becomes both very complicated and a little ridiculous. Still, this is a Pialat picture; mean, melancholy and fiercely intelligent.

THE GOLEM ***

Looked at in an historical context "The Golem" is a remarkable film. Made in Germany in 1920 it is about the persecution of the Jewish people but centuries earlier. Was it popular with Hitler and the Nazi High Command? Perhaps, since this is about the creation of a giant creature called The Golem whose initial purpose is to help the Jews but whose activities turn nefarious as the film progresses. It is, therefore, one of the first monster movies and while in no way frightening is as much as genre classic as James Whale's "Frankenstein", (the similarities are manifold).

The Golem is played by Paul Wegener, who co-directed the film with Carl Boese, and visually this is one of the great medieval pictures, (the DoP was the great Karl Freund). It is designed in a fairy-tale fashion, each image looking as if it was conjured from the pages of a very old book. Yes, it does have a touch of the 'Penny Dreadfuls' about it but that only adds to its strange charm. Seldom revived, it is, nevertheless, a classic that really ought to be seen.

TREAD SOFTLY, STRANGER no stars

Probably the only good thing you can say about this British crime movie is that it makes excellent use of its North of England locations, (it was filmed mostly in Rotherham), and has some good, atmospheric photography by the great Douglas Slocombe. Otherwise, it's pretty terrible as femme fatale Diana Dors, (far from her finest hour), urges down-on-their-luck brothers George Baker and Terence Morgan to robbery and murder. It is atrociously scripted (by producer George Minter and Denis O'Dell), directed (by Gordon Parry) and acted (by the entire cast) and has largely been forgotten. It should have stayed that way.

THE HOLCROFT COVENANT no stars

By the time John Frankenhimer made "The Holcroft Covenant" his star had already waned. It's a terrible picture and it's hard to believe it was directed by the same man who made "The Manchurian Candidate". It's another Nazi conspiracy thriller adapted from a Robert Ludlum novel by three of the best writers in the business, (George Axelrod, Edward Anhalt and John Hopkins), so what went wrong? Well for starters it could be a case of too many cooks for there isn't a believable line of dialogue in the entire film which zooms all over the place at great speed but goes absolutely nowhere; the budget obviously allowed for some nifty location shooting and Gerry Fisher's cinematography is one of the film's few saving graces.

It's also preposterously plotted and atrociously acted. Michael Caine, (dreadful), is the lead and Anthony Andrews, Victoria Tennant, Michael Lonsdale and Lilli Palmer are among the others who are wasted in this rubbish. That fine British character actor Bernard Hepton manages to come out of it smelling of roses which is really something of a miracle. Of course, perhaps it was meant to be a comedy but if it was it isn't a particularly funny one.

A NOS AMOURS ***

On the surface Maurice Pialat's "A Nos Amours" is about a promiscuous young girl and the film deals with both the dynamics of her sex life and her home life. You may say not much happens conventionally; the girl sleeps around and her life is observed episodically but you might also say the film is about the dynamics of acting. As the girl, Suzanne, 16 year old Sandrine Bonnaire, making her film debut, is virtually never off the screen and in her extraordinarily naturalistic performance it's almost impossible to know where Bonnaire ends and her character begins.

Pialat himself plays the father with a world-weariness that makes you wonder how much of himself he had poured into the part or why he hadn't chosen another actor for the role. As Suzanne's mother and brother Evelyne Ker and Dominique Besnehard are equally brilliant and make for a very realistic and dysfunctional family. It is, of course, very 'French', full of amour fou and Gallic passion and is certainly not the kind of film a British or American director might have made and for a film full of characters you are unlikely to empathise with or like it nevertheless holds you in a vice-like grip. It is also one of Pialat's finest achievements.

SICARIO ***

Denis Villeneuve is fast becoming one of those directors whose every move you anticipate with a mixture of dread and pleasure. His films may not be easy watches but, by God, are they exciting and not just in content but in terms of style. His new movie  "Sicario" is the kind of visceral action-thriller you might have expected from the American cinema of the seventies just as its complex plot harks back to a time when mass audiences were expected to take their brains into the cinema with them as well as their popcorn.


Sicario, we are told, is the Mexican term for a hit-man and there are a lot of hits in this film which uses the drug wars only as a backdrop to a tale of revenge. It's a film that hardly ever pauses for breath and which contains at least two terrific set-pieces in which all the elements of pure cinema, (cinematography, editing, sound, scoring), are brought together to terrific effect. The DoP is the legendary Roger Deakins and this could prove to be the film that will finally win him that elusive Oscar. It's also superbly played by Emily Blunt, finally getting a part worthy of her talents, as well as Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin, both in Oscar-worthy form, as a pair of very dubious enforcers of law and order. This is terrific, nerve-shredding entertainment.

ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS ***

Like Francis Ford Coppola's "One from the Heart", "Absolute Beginners" thrives on the artifice of the big Hollywood musicals of the fifties when this film is set, (it's based on Colin MacInnes' cult novel), but director Julien Temple is no Coppola and while this does have several sublime moments there are perhaps just not enough of them, (it's certainly uneven), and the young leads, Eddie O'Connell and Patsy Kensit, are terrible. However, on the plus side, the sheer artificiality works for, rather than against, the picture, there are a couple of good supporting turns, (James Fox, David Bowie, a surprisingly good Ray Davies), and it has a terrific score by Gil Evans. It also has a tendency to resemble a series of great music videos with big chunks of clunking narrative in-between. The 'Keep Britain White' ending, however well-intentioned, is an uneasy mix of seriousness, 'West Side Story' choreography and Walpurgisnacht. It was never going to be a hit but, like the novel, it has definitely built up a cult reputation.

LAST NIGHT no stars

"Last Night" is an intelligent, well-acted, written, directed and photographed film that, in the end, amounts to absolutely nothing. It's a 'will they, won't they' scenario; commit adultery, that is. She's Keira Knightely and he's Sam Worthington and he's left town for the night on business with a female colleague, (Eva Mendes), he fancies and who fancies him right back leaving Keira alone to casually and very co-incidentally run into old flame Guillaume Canet. Nothing very much happens; there is a lot of talk, some of it good but mostly inane, the kind of small talk people engage in when they have nothing to say. It might have helped if the characters were more attractive but frankly these are people I would leave town to avoid. It may be well done but it is also very, very dull.

FRAGMENT OF FEAR no stars

This mediocre and very un-thrilling thriller was directed by the American Richard C. Sarafian but shot in the UK and Italy. David Hemmings is the writer and former drug addict whose aunt, (Flora Robson), is murdered while they are on holiday in Italy. When he decides to pursue the case on his own strange things start to happen. There is a germ of a good idea here but it never materialises into anything and a good cast is totally wasted. A misfire that you certainly shouldn't waste your own time on.

ENTER THE VOID no stars

Quite early on in Gaspar Noe's "Enter the Void" an addict smokes what I presumed to be crack and Noe's camera interprets for us the images that he might be experiencing, a kind of swivelling red gaseous mass, at first frighteningly tactile and then more soothingly diaphanous. Never having taken crack myself I still have no reason to doubt that this is probably what it's like and you think if anyone's going to give us an accurate picture of what taking drugs is like, then it will be Noe.

Unfortunately Noe is a filmmaker whose desire to experiment with all forms of film and whose desire to shock means he is in constant danger of alienating his audience. There are people who worship at his altar and who have hailed "Enter the Void" as his masterpiece but for me the technical brilliance on display doesn't make up for the bad acting and lousy dialogue. Great tracking shots and stunning cinematography are all very well but there is no-one on screen you can relate to and the inane things they say are painful to listen to, (I might have liked it more had it been silent), and in "Enter the Void" we have to listen to them and watch them for close on three hours.

The very flimsy plot has something to do with a Tokyo sex club and bar, The Void, where our drug-smoking protagonist meets his end, again very early in the picture, but who lives on as a kind of ghostly narrator for the rest of the film as he takes us on a long tour of his life and world. The film would be clever if it weren't so banal and the imagery is more likely to induce a migraine or a seizure. If the violence on this occasion is minimal, (at least for for Noe), the film is still no less repellent and a lot more boring than "Irreversible".

THE LONELY MAN no stars

Anthony Perkins had yet to find his feet when he made "The Lonely Man" in 1957, cast as former outlaw Jack Palance's son, but he's remarkably assured nevertheless. It's a so-so western from a mediocre director, Henry Levin, with Palance the lonely man of the title, wanting to go straight but finding both the law and his former partners doing all they can to see that he doesn't. A first class supporting cast, (Neville Brand, Robert Middleton, Lee Van Cleef, Claude Akins) ensure that it's never less than watchable and it's very handsomely photographed in black and white VistaVision by Lionel Lindon. It's a pity the script never really develops the characters beyond the one-dimensional and now it is very seldom shown.

WEST 11 **

This low-key British kitchen-sink movie is much better than it's lukewarm reputation might suggest. It's no masterpiece and it's certainly no "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" or "A Taste of Honey" but it's far from negligible and is worth seeing. It was directed by Michael Winner at a time when he actually made good films and stars the underrated Alfred Lynch as a feckless young man roped into a murder plot by Eric Portman's slimy and possibly bogus ex-army officer. Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall wrote the above average screenplay and it's superbly shot in its Notting Hill locations by Otto Heller. Others in a fine supporting cast include Diana Dors, Kathleen Harrison and Finlay Currie.

THE OMEN *

When you set it beside something like "Rosemary's Baby", "The Omen" isn't really much of a movie but it has attained a kind of cult status and is even seen as something of a classic in some quarters, spawning not one but 3 sequels and a remake. It also set a trend for movies about the Anti-Christ and benefited from a better than average cast headed by Gregory Peck, Lee Remick and David Warner while Billie Whitelaw is suitably unbecoming as one of Satan's handmaidens and it actually managed to pick up an Oscar for Best Score.

For anyone who still doesn't know the plot it's about Peck's American Ambassador discovering the child he has taken home from the hospital after his own baby dies is actually the Son of Satan! Unlike "The Exorcist" there are no swivelling heads and a distinct lack of green bile but there are a couple of spectacular deaths, including a terrific decapitation scene. The first sequel, "Damien; Omen II" is less po-faced and actually a lot more fun.

OLDBOY no stars

I'm not a fan of American remakes of foreign language films. I'm particularly not a fan of American remakes of Korean or Japanese horror movies or action flics and I'm certainly not a fan of Spike Lee's remake of "Oldboy", but then I was never a fan of Chan-wook Park's film "Oldboy"in the first place. I found it to be brutish and nasty if undeniably clever with a couple of memorable set-pieces, even if they were none too pleasant. Lee's remake is just nonsensical while the violence is even nastier this time round.

Now it's Josh Brolin who is the prick of a businessman kidnapped, while drunk, and locked in a small room for 20 years until one day he is mysteriously released. In the original it was interesting idea made even more interesting by its inscrutable Far-Eastern setting. Now it's just deeply silly and the shift to America is a major mistake. Even the great Samuel L Jackson as Brolin's jailer can't redeem this one, which represents a new low for its once talented director.