HATTON GARDEN ****

The most we had any right to expect from "Hatton Garden" was a fairly accurate reconstruction of the crime and yet another addition to that long line of British gangster pictures and TV shows. What we got instead was one of the all-time great heist pictures, be that on television or in the cinema, and a masterclass in great acting, helped along by Paul Whittington's superb direction and a brilliant screenplay from Jeff Pope and Terry Winsor.

Spread over four nights it told the story of the 2015 Easter Weekend Hatton Garden robbery and its immediate aftermath. The first two nights concentrated solely on the robbery, filmed with a documentary-like precision and up there with the very best of them. The subsequent two nights showed how the police finally caught up with these, not-very-bright, geriatric robbers.

As the thieves who couldn't agree on anything, (it's amazing they were able to pull the job off in the first place and they very nearly didn't), Timothy Spall, Kenneth Cranham, David Hayman, Brian F. O'Byrne, Geoff Bell and Alex Norton were absolutely terrific with Spall and Cranham taking the lion's share of the honours. This wasn't just a bunch of fine British actors playing at being stock criminals but beautifully fleshed-out portrayals of living, breathing ordinary individuals and the real pleasure of "Hatton Garden" was watching great actors act. Yes, it was also a hugely entertaining crime caper, all the better for being based on fact, exciting and often very funny but it was so much more; proof that television can sometimes leave the current cinema trailing in its wake.

CROOKLYN *

Another semi-autobiographical Spike Lee Joint about growing up in Brooklyn in the seventies. "Crooklyn" is rich in atmosphere but low in incident. It looks great and the kids are terrific but you keep waiting for something to happen and when it does it's too late. In this picture, Lee's idea of action is a lot of shouting and running around. Maybe the problem was that he not only produced and directed it but also wrote it with his siblings; there's no coherence in the script. Maybe you needed to be there or maybe you needed to be called 'Lee'. The soundtrack consists mostly of a parade of soul classics but even these get wearying after awhile.

THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY **

Adapted by its director, Hossein Amini, from a little known novel by Patricia Highsmith "The Two Faces of January" turns out to be a highly satisfying tale of murder most foul very typical of Miss Highsmith. OK, so it's not on the same level as "The Talented Mr Ripley", "Plein Soleil" or "Strangers on a Train" but with its emphasis on plot rather than 'action' it's still a cut above a good many of today's so-called thrillers. Also typical of Highsmith is that the principal relationship in the film is between two men, (though one of them is married while the other starts to fall for the wife). The married one is Viggo Mortensen, apparently rich and touring Greece but also harboring a dark secret. The wife is pert little Kirsten Dunst and the man who falls for her is tour guide Oscar Issac. At first Issac thinks he has the upper hand, swindling Mortensen out of a few thousand dollars only to realise quite early in their relationship that he has bitten off more than he can chew. After awhile Dundst's character becomes almost redundant as the men start to play power games with each other. Whereas the male/male relationships in other Highsmith adaptations were mostly homoerotic with at least one of the characters clearly drawn as gay. Here the relationship is meant to evoke a father and a son, (Issac's character has issues with his dead father). This slightly dilutes the dark heart of the picture. Movies like "The Talented Mr Ripley" and "Strangers on a Train" worked as well as they did because the villain was clearly homosexual and psychopathic and you never knew where his temper and jealous rages might take him. In this movie Mortensen is undoubtedly the jealous straight guy while Issac is just too nice, (he's too sweet to be a real con-man). Still, all three leading players are excellent and Amini tightens the screws very nicely as the film progresses. Filmed, for the most part, in Greece it will also prove something of a boost for the Greek Tourist Board this summer.

THE DREAMED PATH ****

In the cinema of Angela Schanelec you cannot take your eyes off the screen for a second for fear of missing a vital piece of information. Schanelec doesn't make films that follow a logistical narrative path but rather she drip-feeds us a narrative that we must make sense of. There is sometimes a formal structure but often it's as if we have joined the characters in the middle of a conventional film rather than at the beginning and we leave them before the end as though her characters will live on after the film is over...or not; if a character's life is to come to an end it will happen off-screen. Either way, we the audience, will not be around to see what happens next. Of course, what happens 'in-between' wll most likely bore an audience seeking excitement or even something straightforward but if you are prepared to give yourself over to her style of film-making you may find yourself entranced.

Families are often at the heart of her films; particularly the dynamics between parents and children. Her latest film, "The Dreamed Path" begins with a couple meeting and seemingly striking up a relationship of sorts before swiftly moving on to embrace the boy's relationship with his ill mother and surly, blind father. The characters speak metronomically as if not quite in the same world that the rest of us inhabit or, as the title suggests, in a dream while 'stories' that appear to be developing lead nowhere. This is difficult, even challenging, cinema, in which even the passing of time is subverted as past and present intermingle and characters find themselves in places they ought not to be in, again as in a dream, (for once any synopsis handed out with the film is very welcome).

In the past I sometimes felt as if I were intruding on the privacy of Schanelec's characters but in "The Dreamed Path" they seem so cut off from reality that really isn't a consideration. It also may mean that this is her least accessible work and her least involving film. That said, it is also so much better than almost anything else you are likely to see this year; it simply shouldn't be missed.

ROCKETMAN ***

Unlike "Bohemian Rhapsody", which director Dexter Fletcher is said to have a hand in after Bryan Singer 'left' the project, "Rocketman" is less of a straightforward rock star biopic and more of a jukebox musical that uses the songs of Elton John and Bernie Taupin to tell the story of one, Reg Dwight, who remodeled himself, as in any good adult fairytale, from a shy schoolboy into a glam-rock icon called Elton John. It's also, presumably, more truthful since it was made with Elton's blessing and gives us a warts-and-all portrait that lets us see the monster he was, or at least believed he was, before turning into the sweet-natured, sober and charitable saint he is now and whatever you think of his music I suppose credit must be given for such an unflattering picture of a living artist.

That leaves the question, is it any good? Well, actually yes. There are missteps to be sure; not all the production numbers come off and there's a little bit too much misery before he seeks rehab. It's told in flashback, ending when he reinvents himself as the Elton we know now and before meeting his husband, David Furnish but it's a well-told tale, (Lee Hall wrote the fine screenplay), and it does have an outstanding performance from Taron Egerton as the Rocketman of the title. If Rami Malek can pick up an Oscar for putting in a pair of false teeth and camping it up as Freddie Mercury then Egerton, who does his own singing, should at least get nominated for what is a much better performance. There's good work, too, from Jamie Bell as Taupin and nice cameos from Stephen Graham and Gemma Jones, (the granny).

The villain of the piece is nasty Richard Madden as John Reid who gets Elton coked up and into bed and then treats him like dirt and unfortunately Madden can't give his character any shadings, if indeed he had any, Their sex scenes might put off a few Aunt Ednas and rednecks but then it's unlikely they would be going to see an Elton John biopic in the first place. Everyone else should have a ball.

THE RAFT no stars

This documentary, made now by Marcus Lindeen, but dealing with events that happened in 1973, ought to be hugely exciting, (given the subject matter), but is, in fact, quite boring. It shows and describes a journey across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to Mexico by six men and five women on a raft as part of a sociological experiment on, amongst other things, aggression by the anthropologist Santiago Genoves.

A good deal of the film is actual footage shot on the raft at the time while in the present those still left alive look back and analyze the experience and it is this part of the film that drags it down. It's like a not very good play in which ancient actors act at playing younger versions of themselves while even the events that happened on the raft turn out to be more than a bit ho-hum. It's really like an intellectual version of "Big Brother", set at sea, and you know how boring that turned out to be. Anyone looking for a bit of titillation is bound to be disappointed.

PARK ROW ***

Samuel Fuller was a newspaperman before he was a filmmaker and his passion for journalism and free speech infuses every frame of "Park Row" making this one of his most enjoyable pictures which, for a movie about the printed page, is intensely cinematic. Of course, whether Fuller was a good journalist, a great journalist or even a lousy journalist I can't say but he had one of the great eyes in American cinema and he knew, in movie after movie, how to bombard our senses with a host of images that gave his films, be they westerns, thrillers, war pictures or, in this case, simply a picture about the founding of a newspaper, the feeling they were ripped from today's headlines.

The plot of "Park Row" is relatively thin. Gene Evans is the newspaper man who becomes the editor of a crusading newspaper in opposition to the more powerful paper from which he's just been fired. It is, in other words, a feelgood movie about a David triumphing over a mean old Goliath, (in this case represented by Mary Welch's excellent performance as the owner of the rival paper), but it's a populist picture with none of the sentimentality that Capra would have brought to it. Indeed, being a Sam Fuller picture, there's a fair amount of violence en route to the happy ending. It also has one of Fuller's best scripts; this is a movie full of crisp dialogue that makes great use of factual material. Amazingly, despite it's substantial critical reputation, it's seldom revived. Time, I think, to rectify that.

L'ASSASSINO ***

"L'Assassino" was Elio Petri's remarkably assured debut. It's a Kafkaesque story of a man, (Marcello Mastrioanni), under investigation for the murder of his former mistress, (Micheline Presle), The film flits back and forth between the investigation and events in Mastrioanni's past life. It's clear from the outset that what interests Petri isn't so much the prospect of making a thriller but dissecting the protagonist's way of life. This is the Italy of La Dolce Vita or at least the sweet life that was emerging for people like Mastrioanni if they could only keep themselves free of accusations of murder. This is one of his greatest performances but the film itself disappeared soon after its release and is now something of a cult film. Carlo Di Palma was responsible for the superb black and white cinematography.

A FEW GOOD MEN **

A terrific entertainment if a somewhat uneven film. "A Few Good Men" was a huge hit when it came out in 1992 and was nominated for Best Picture. It's a courtroom drama set among the military and it was written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by the talented Rob Reiner so what's not to love. Well, Demi Moore for starters. Moore wasn't much of an actress and cast here as a ball-bustin' attorney she's clearly out of her depth. The male lead is Tom Cruise as a smart-alecky young lawyer; it's one of his pin-up performances, easy on the eye but hard to listen to.

There are, however, several decent performances among the supporting cast; Kevin Bacon as the young prosecutor, Wolfgang Bodison as one of the accused, the always excellent J T Walsh as a decent officer, fer Sutherland, very good as an officer unworthy of the uniform and then there's Jack Nicholson who eats the rest of the cast for breakfast, lunch and dinner and then spits them out. Nicholson is scenery-chewingly brilliant as the commanding officer who runs his base like it were a prison and he gets all the best lines or maybe he just makes every line he's given sound like the best line. Of course, where the film really scores is in the courtroom. Even second-rate courtroom dramas are fun and this is among the best. In th end, it may not be another "Anatomy of a Murder" but it is definitely several rungs up the ladder.

SOLITARY FRAGMENTS ***

The lives of a group of women are forensically examined in exemplary fashion by the Spanish director Jaime Rosales. Rosales is one of the least known of European directors but is also one of the most innovative. Here he uses split screen to a great effect than almost anyone else in recent memory. It's brilliant, it's simple and it never feels 'tricksy'. The setting is Madrid and this superbly acted film is as profound and as moving as anything by Almodovar.

The central characters are Adela, (Sonia Almarcha), a young mother who has moved to Madrid with her baby son and Antonia, (Petra Martinez), an older woman with three grown-up daughters. These women make up the backbone of the film and it's their resilience in the face of tragedy that is the main theme of the picture. The men in their lives do their best but they can't measure up; they are secondary characters, patient and somewhat lost. This is a 'women's picture' in the very best sense of the term yet since its debut at Cannes it's been shamefully overlooked. Seek it out.

BULLET IN THE HEAD ***

With "Bullet in the Head" Jaime Rosales has made a film that is told entirely in images. There is a lot talking in the picture but none of it is heard; he is keeping his audience at a distance, both literally and metaphorically, allowing us to see events unfold but keeping us far enough away that we can't hear what the characters are saying. What we do hear is the background noise of everyday life. This is 'realism' gone overboard. Often the film feels like a documentary, like something Frederick Wiseman might have made but with all dialogue removed.

You may ask what the point of it all is. Why tease us like this? Why set up situations in which we can play no part? In actuality would we be interested enough in any of these people to want to spend this amount of time just looking at them? But then consider how often we may have looked at someone on a bus or on a train or simply walking down the street and wondered what might be going on in their lives? How often have we simply looked at strangers on a regular basis and felt we knew them? Of course, sustaining our interest is the problem. Since for about three quarters of the film's length nothing actually 'happens' this relatively short film, (85 minutes), might seem interminable and it's clearly aimed at the kind of art-house audience who will 'put up with it', forcing themselves to go along with what is clearly an experimental film.

As well as a lack of dialogue there is also no music score though Rosales does at least give us a single central character to follow. The title, of course, provides the clue and that's what keeps us watching. Audiences will always hold on when there's an anticipation of violence though any synopsis of the film that might suggest a thriller is clearly misleading. This certainly won't be to everyone's taste but it does represent the work of a bold and innovative filmmaker who remains shamefully undervalued. Cinema needs more artists like Rosales.

DREAM AND SILENCE ****

Over the course of three films I have learned to expect nothing from Jaime Rosales other than the unexpected. Consequently he is a filmmaker in danger of alienating his audience with films that are bold and experimental and quite different from those of his contemporaries. But Rosales is far from simply an experimental filmmaker; his films also deliver a punch to the gut that can leave an audience reeling. I think he is one of the masters.

He chose to film "Dream and Silence" in widescreen black and white. It begins in silence and I wondered if, like "Bullet in the Head", this was going to be another wordless film, but no, Rosales wants us to really get to know his characters, even when keeping them at arm's length or even off screen. This is a film about family and a family forced to deal yet again with tragedy and loss; the black and white cinematography is entirely appropriate to the chilly feelings being expressed.

Rosales is also a magnificent director of 'actors'. Because of the documentary-like fashion in which Rosales films his players there is a naturalism to the performances rare in contemporary cinema which, of course, is only to be expected as he often uses non-professional actors 'playing' characters with the same names as themselves which is what he does here; everything flows organically. This really is a pretty immersive experience and it shouldn't be missed.

KILL YOUR DARLINGS **

John Krokidas' film"Kill Your Darlings" deals with a little-known about incident in the early lives of the writers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs when their friend and associate Lucien Carr killed his mentor and lover David Kammerer. It's a surprisingly gripping tale thanks in large part to Korkidas' superb direction and some very fine performances, in particular from that brilliant young actor Dane DeHaan as Carr and a surprisingly mature Daniel Radcliffe as Ginsberg, finally putting Harry Potter to bed once and for all. Perhaps what's most surprising is just how much this film draws you in considering there's no-one you can really empathise with; everyone comes across as narcissistic and rather unpleasant but the film is so well-made that hardly matters. I doubt that even Harry Potter's grown-up followers will find much to relate to here but for a discerning audience this is well worth seeking out.

EL ****

"El" is still one of Luis Bunuel's greatest films. It is a story of obsession and jealousy and how obsession can lead to madness, (or is obsession itself a form of madness?), and it's relentless. It begins on Holy Thursday at mass when Don Francisco spies a young woman in the church. He follows her outside and though she's engaged to a friend of his, he pursues her and marries her and on their wedding night she discovers just how jealous he can be. Ultimately this jealousy has terrible consequences.

Of course, Don Francisco happens to be a pillar of society and the church and this is another devastating attack on Catholicism and on hypocrisy by its director. It is in many ways a horror film and is all the more disturbing for being so grounded in the everyday. As the mad Don Francisco, Arturo De Cordova is superb; it is, without doubt, the greatest role of his career while the beautiful Delia Garces perfectly captures the spirit of the terrified wife. Amazingly, it is one of the least revived of all Bunuel's films despite being up there with "Nazarin" and "Viridiana". A masterpiece that would make a great double bill with Hitchcock's "Vertigo", (it's the most self-consciously Hitchcockian of all of Bunuel's films).

CONQUEST **

This frivolous epic may be novelettish at best but it is also sumptuous and highly entertaining and with Garbo and Boyer in the leads it couldn't be anything less. He's Napoleon, (and Oscar-nominated for his performance) and she's a Polish countess called Marie Walewska, (the film's alternative title), with a husband over twice her age, (the great Henry Stephenson). Initially she just admires Napoleon but then falls in love with him, leaving her husband and risking scandal and the movie works as a likeable if trite romance greatly helped, of course, by the chemistry between its stars, both of whom are outstanding. A splendid supporting cast and the kind of art direction that only money can buy also go to making this something of a treat.

TRIPLE FRONTIER **

A disappointment but only slightly. "Triple Frontier" is directed by J.C. Chandor who co-wrote the screenplay with Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow is one of the Executive Producers. It's an action picture, a Colombian drugs movie and a heist movie. There are fine set=pieces and it looks terrific; the mostly Colombian locations are beautifully photographed. The problem is for a Chandor/Boal picture there isn't much depth.

This is a buddy movie in which the good guys cum bad guys are played by Ben Affleck, (who never really learned to act in a fairly long career), Oscar Isaac, (who needs better material than this if he is to make an impression), Charlie Hunnam, (who's actually not too bad here), and Garrett Hedlund and Pedro Pascal, who are both cast in very one-dimensional roles. It is, in other words, formulaic even if the formula isn't a bad one but it's no "Sicario" and it's certainly no "Salvador". It's brainless and it's exciting and we've seen it all before, ("Three Kings" had a not dissimilar plot and was a much better film). Chandor and Boal can, and have, done better.

THUMBSUCKER **

Mike Mills may not be the most prolific of filmmakers, (he's only made three feature films in the last 10 years), but he's certainly one of the most idiosyncratic. If "Thumbsucker", his debut feature, feels like the kind of small, quirky picture that sometimes gives independent movies a bad name it might simply be because it deals with aspects of growing up that even small, independent movies tend to overlook.

Our teenage hero, (an excellent Lou Taylor Pucci), has issues that tend to stem from his inability to stop sucking his thumb but that's only the tip of the iceberg. This is essentially a film about psychoses but it lacks the hysteria we tend to associate with American films on that subject. Even its attitude to teenagers and teenage sexuality is distinctly European. Good performances, too, from Tilda Swinton and Vincent D'Onofrio as Pucci's parents, (only to be expected), but also from Vince Vaughan, never better as Pucci's teacher though Keanu Reeves, woefully miscast as a hippy dentist, is his usual wooden self. Worth seeking out.

THE ROMANTIC ENGLISHWOMAN **

It may be regarded as minor Losey but it's by no means dismissable and is set once again amongst the Upper Crust and the Hoi Polloi. "The Romantic Englishwoman" of the title is Glenda Jackson, (superb as always), married to novelist Michael Caine, (not at his best here). She's bored by the life she is leading which is no life at all really and he's got writer's block and has turned to writing for the cinema. It begins in Baden Baden where she's gone 'to find herself' and where she meets cocaine smuggling gigolo Helmut Berger, (much too prissy to be a convincing love interest). When she returns to England Berger follows her, landing on her doorstep where Caine welcomes him with open arms planning to make him a character in the film he is writing.

It was adapted by Thomas Wiseman and Tom Stoppard from a novel by Wiseman and there is nice streak of dark, and at times very funny, humour running through it though you would be hard pressed to call it a comedy. It wasn't well received when it came out and hasn't been much seen since. Ultimately it's Glenda's film reminding us just how good an actress she could be in a well-written role, here making mincemeat of her co-stars.

SEED *

Visually, Don Palathara's film "Seed" has much more in common with the cinema of the great Satyajit Ray than it does to what we know as Bollywood. Unfortunately what it lacks is Ray's ability to engage with his characters or to make us feel involved in what is happening to them. It may be visually very beautiful, (he shoots it in black and white and often in single takes with very little cutting), but it is also very, very slow; a look at his inspirations on the final credits will tell you all you need to know.

What his camera does is observe at great length people doing very little, (a masturbation scene is nicely 'out of place' but he films it off-screen). What it most closely resembles is a documentary about nothing in particular which is a pity as Palathara has a remarkably good eye and this might have made a great 30-minute film had he not dragged it out to feature length so that ultimately even our admiration for his skills starts to pall quite early on. Still, I am keen on seeing where he will go from here. An art-house crowd who like those 'inspirations' might lap this up but Palathara needs to be his own man.

SUMMER AND SMOKE *

Hardly the best of Tennessee Williams and this film version does nothing to improve on it. The director was Peter Glenville who may have been highly proficient on stage but who had no real idea of what made good cinema and this is turgid at best. Geraldine Page may have been ideally suited to the role of the repressed spinster Alma but her tremulous, hesitant and, of course, highly mannered performance is just annoying and you know something is askew when the usually wooden Laurence Harvey more than manages to hold his own against her. He's the good-for-nothing young doctor who seduces her and whose body just drives her wild with desire as a certain Miss Bowles might say. As the local tramp Rita Moreno barely gets a look in though Una Merkel makes a brave stab at playing Page's dotty mother, (she and Page were both Oscar-nominated). Williams later revised the piece under the title "Eccentricities of a Nightingale" which was filmed for television with Blythe Danner and Frank Langella.

CAN HEIRONYMUS MERKIN EVER FORGET MERCY HUMPPE AND FIND TRUE HAPPINESS

The title alone was enough to kill it dead in the water but if you got past that and made it into the few cinemas that showed it then the first ten minutes might have finished you off but this hugely self-indulgent picture is actually worth sticking around for. Okay, the gags are terrible and Newley, who directed it, co-wrote it, composed the music and plays the lead is no Orson Welles but there is a surfeit of imagination at work here and presuming it is mostly autobiographical, (his wife, Joan Collins, and children play his wife and children), few artists, and Newley surely is that, have ever been so self-critical in public; it's as if he wants us to hate him.

Fellini, of course, is the most obvious object of his affections, (he even gets a name-check), which probably riled the critics the most. How dare he think he could remake "8 1/2" and as a musical comedy, they probably screamed, and needless to say the film was not just a gigantic flop, both critically and commercially, but often figures in lists of the worst films ever made. It's certainly not always an easy watch; like a traffic accident it's very hard to look at what's happened yet impossible to look away. It's also impossible to ignore.

LOVE EDUCATION ****

Sylvia Chang's glorious film "Love Education" deals with the kind of subjects cinema often ignores or simply uses for purely dramatic effect, namely life, death, the passing of time, the past, the present and the conflict between generations though I admit not too many of us work in the media and have a family crisis blown up on television as a major news story. Indeed, the initial premise of the film may seem far-fetched but Chang, who also co-wrote the picture as well as playing one of the leading roles, treats the central subject, not to mention a couple of subplots involving her daughter's singer boyfriend and an unruly schoolboy, in such a low-key, off-hand manner that the film feels both realistic and utterly charming.

Chang plays, (and not all that sympathetically, either), a school-teacher who wants to move her father's grave from the country to the city so that her recently deceased mother can be buried with him. The problem is he had been married before and his first wife insists on guarding his grave like a bulldog. To make matters worse Chang's daughter, who works on television, has filmed a graveside altercation between the two older women that has gone public.

Despite moving into the territory of reality television this remains a film about ordinary people living ordinary lives and it's a wonderful picture of life in contemporary China where the past and the present seem to collide on an almost daily basis and where bureaucracy defeats even the best of intentions. The performances by everyone are outstanding and the film is funny and deeply moving in equal measure. In fact, this is a gem that cries out for a much wider distribution than it is currently getting.

THE EXTRAORDINARY SEAMAN no stars

John Frankenhimer made "The Extraordinary Seaman" in 1969 and it was one almighty flop; hardly surprising considering it was an extremely unfunny comedy set in the Philippines during the Second World War. If it showed us anything it was that Frankenhimer couldn't do comedy and watching this you might assume that David Niven, Alan Alda and Mickey Rooney couldn't do comedy either or maybe the war with Japan just wasn't that funny or maybe it was the continual cross-cutting from the movie to newsreel footage that killed it. The female lead was Faye Dunaway, who already had "Bonnie and Clyde" behind her; that she survived this muck is testament to her abilities both as an actress and as a star. Extraordinary indeed, but for all the wrong reasons.

THE LEFT-HANDED GUN **

One of the strangest westerns ever made. Arthur Penn's "The Left Handed Gun", adapted from a play by Gore Vidal, came right at the height of the 'teenage rebel' cycle of the fifties with Paul Newman's Billy the Kid having more in common with James Dean's Jim Stark than any Western outlaw I can think of. The film wasn't a success; it's highfalutin dialogue and over-the-top acting proving too much for a general audience who, if they looked just below the surface, would have easily detected a homosexual subplot involving Hurd Hatfield's character who acts as a kind of Greek Chorus. It marked the screen debut of Penn who didn't make another film for four years though it's now built up something of a cult reputation. It isn't really very good, and it is very self-conscious, but it is also too bizarre to dismiss out of hand.

THE MATING SEASON **

This farce may not be the best thing Mitchell  Leisen ever did but it's a charmer nevertheless and it gave Thelma Ritter one of her best roles as well as having a cracker of a script from Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch and Richard L. Breen. It's the old mistaken identity plot with Ritter, who happens to be the mother of new groom John Lund, being mistaken for the hired help by Lund's new socialite wife, Gene Tierney. Don't even think of asking how this happens; farces are never founded on realism. Best you just sit back and enjoy what ensues and savor three first-rate comic performances from Ritter, Tierney, (an excellent light comedienne), and Miriam Hopkins as Tierney's snob of a mother. Only Lund, never much of an actor, (he only made 28 films and retired in 1962), lets the side down. Otherwise, "The Mating Season" is a real treat of a feelgood movie.

COLD IN JULY **

When Richard Dane, (Michael C. Hall), shoots and kills a burglar his life, and that of his family, comes under threat from the dead man's father, (a grizzled and menacing-looking Sam Shepard), or so it would seem because Jim Mickle's excellent thriller "Cold in July" doesn't quite go in the direction we expect. It was adapted from a novel by Joe R. Lansdale but it could have come from Jim Thompson. It's also beautifully acted by Hall, Shepard and Don Johnson as a very unconventional private detective. It's certainly pulp fiction; it might have even been a B-Movie once upon a time, now given a high gloss finish. Very enjoyable, even if the violence may not be to everyone's taste.

THE MIRACLE OF THE BELLS no stars

Hollywood piety; the worst kind. Russell Janney's novel "The Miracle of the Bells" was a big bestseller but this screen version came out of RKO, a studio not famed for their blockbusters and the director was Irving Pichel who was hardly a name to conjure with. It might have launched Alida Valli as a major star had it been more successful. She plays a young actress cast as Joan of Arc, who dies of TB the day after the picture is completed. Fred MacMurray is the press agent who loved her and who brings her body back home for burial while a highly unlikely Frank Sinatra is cast as a poverty row priest.

The title really gives the game away; you see, Valli isn't just playing a fine actress but a deeply religious one as well and it's hardly a mere coincidence that her only film role was playing a saint while MacMurray's idea to have all the local church bells ring continuously for three days and nights is both a tribute and a marketing ploy and if there's anything good about the present picture it's MacMurray who rises above the cloying sentimentality, proving once again he was one of the most underrated actors in movies. Valli looks beautiful but is defeated by the material. The real miracle is that the book sold and the movie found some kind of audience.

DU BARRY WAS A LADY *

"Du Barry Was a Lady". This M.G.M musical, which Arthur Freed produced and with songs by Cole Porter, is almost completely unknown. It's certainly a curiosity. The stars are Red Skelton and a very glamorous Lucille Ball, (dubbed by Martha Mears). A young, handsome, light-on-his-feet Gene Kelly is the romantic male lead and Zero Mostel features as a comic stooge. The flimsy plot, for what it's worth, revolves around a nightclub where Ball is the star attraction and the highlight is a fantasy sequence set in the court of King Louis XV with Ball as Madame Du Barry. Unfortunately it isn't very good, (which is probably the reason it is very seldom shown). The director, Roy Del Ruth, doesn't know how to build on the material and it just drags along with breaks every now and then for 'guest' acts like Tommy Dorsey and his Band, (actually they are probably the best thing in the picture). Watchable then, but no classic.

FIXED BAYONETS *

You always know what you're going to get from a Samuel Fuller movie; it's sure to be rough around the edges and for most of the time it'll certainly be in your face. Fuller wrote and directed "Fixed Bayonets" early in his career and it isn't much revived. Like the more polished "The Big Red One"
it's a war movie but this one is set in Korea. It's very much a B-Movie and it's poorly played but like all of Fuller's work there isn't an ounce of fat to be seen. This is a lean, tough film that overcomes its Poverty Row origins with taut dialogue, excellent photography (by Lucien Ballard) and some very fine action sequences. It's also totally unsentimental and fairly bleak, evoking a genuine sense of claustrophobia as the men take to hiding out in a cave and while Fuller was never a great director of actors he certainly knew how to photograph faces. A cast that includes Richard Basehart, Gene Evans and Skip Homeier look not so much like themselves but like real grunts giving the film the added realism it needs.

LONE SURVIVOR **

The title kind of gives it away; when a movie calls itself "Lone Survivor" you can pretty much bet that the cast are going to get wiped out, save one that is. Peter Berg's war movie is about a mission in Afghanistan and it's based on a true story. It belongs very much to the "Black Hawk Down" school and even if we know the outcome it's still a terrifically exciting picture, technically brilliant, (photography, editing, sound are all superb), and harrowingly realistic in its portrayal of men in combat.

Essentially it's one long battle scene fought on the side of a mountain and it's unrelentingly grim. However brilliantly made this may be it's something of an endurance test; after a while the sight of bullets ripping through flesh begins to wear you down. There is just so much pain you can take. It's also very well played although when, movingly, the photos and the videos of the real combatants are displayed at the end it is difficult to relate them to the actors who played them. But while extremely violent I never found it exploitative and it's certainly worth seeing though after such a gruelling experience I'm not sure when I might want to see it again.

THE FALL *

Visually Tarsem Singh's "The Fall" is one of the most beautiful films ever made. The credit sequence, shot in slow motion and in black and white, is breathtaking and when it goes into full colour it is never less than gorgeous. It's a kind of Arabian Nights phantasia as Lee Pace's hospital patient, (he's an injured stuntman with suicidal tendencies), tells a series of tall tales to a another patient, a little girl with a broken arm, (an enchanting Catinca Untaru), The problem is the stories are too 'adult' for children, as are the sequences set in the hospital, and too inconsequential for an adult audience. However, imagery this beautiful is rare, (Singh shot the film in a number of world-wide locations), and if there isn't much here to tax the brain, the eye is constantly dazzled. Unfortunately, in this case, that really isn't enough.

TOBACCO ROAD no stars

When John Ford filmed "Tobacco Road" in 1941 the play was still running on Broadway. It opened in 1933 and even today only "Life with Father" has had a longer run for a non-musical production. It was based on Erskine Caldwell's risque novel about dirt-poor Southern farmers and after his success with "The Grapes of Wrath" Ford might have seemed like a fairly obvious choice for the film version but Caldwell was not Steinbeck and this was no "Grapes of Wrath".

It's tolerable enough but Charley Grapewin's old codger Jeeter, a supporting character now given centre screen, gets on your nerves very quickly. In fact, everyone in this picture gets on your nerves very quickly, (they are all portrayed as greedy imbeciles). William Tracy is terrible as the son and a youthful Gene Tierney, (it was only her second film), is totally miscast as sex-pot Ellie May. If Marjorie Rambeau is a little less grating as Sister Bessie it's perhaps because she, at least, is trying to underplay her part and only the great Elizabeth Patterson comes out of this with any dignity. In other words, it's certainly nobody's finest hour, (except perhaps cinematographer Arthur Miller), and Ford's least of all. The only real surprise about it is how it was ever a hit in the first place.

KING CREOLE **

To say that "King Creole" is Elvis Presley's best picture isn't really saying much for whatever else Elvis was he was never an actor. Actually, I much prefer Siegel's outstanding and underrated western "Flaming Star" and the nonsensical but hugely enjoyable "Jailhouse Rock"but this was Michael Curtiz and the source material was the trashy but serious best-seller "A Stone for Danny Fisher" by Harold Robbins. It also had the best cast of any Elvis film, including a couple of Oscar  winners, (Dean Jagger as Elvis' father and Walter Matthau as a mobster). Then there was Carolyn Jones as the vamp who turns our hero's head, Vic Morrow as a thug, Paul Stewart as a club owner and Miss Sweetness and Light herself, Dolores Hart as the girl Elvis falls for. Miss Hart must have taken her good girl role seriously since she was to take the veil shortly afterwards. It's reasonably entertaining and is very crisply photographed by Russell Harlan. The New Orleans setting also helps and the songs are pretty good.

THE FACE YOU DESERVE **

Before "Tabu" and the "Arabian Nights" trilogy catapulted him into the international limelight Miguel Gomes gave us "The Face You Deserve", his debut feature, which now seems in its quiet, phantasmagorical way something of a dry-run for the classics that followed. It's two strangely surreal episodes tenuously use the fairy-tales "The Sleeping Beauty" and "The Ugly Duckling" as jumping off points though making sense of what follows may not be so easy. In many ways its like "The Arabian Nights" in miniature or something that, once upon a time, Luis Bunuel might have made. It certainly marked Gomes as a director to watch although the film itself didn't make much of an impact outside its native Portugal, (it has never received a British cinema release), and it won't appeal to a mass audience. Cineastes, however, looking for a challenge, and fans of Gomes' later work should lap it up.

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD *

Danish director Thomas Vinterberg brings nothing new to his adaptation of Thomas Hardy's "Far from the Madding Crowd", even going so far as to trim the novel into a bite-sized two hours. Whatever Schlesinger's longer version lacked it now feels like a masterpiece in comparison. Of course, it's not an easy book to bring to the screen, the main problem lying in the casting. Bathsheba Everdene is an almost impossible character to get 'right'. On the one hand she is forward-thinking and independent, a heroine ahead of her time, while on the other, she allows herself to be romantically manipulated and is very much the agent of her own misfortunes. Julie Christie got the independent free spirit bit off to a tee and almost carried off the love lorn element but Carey Mulligan is simply miscast; she's much too 21st century to be convincing and in this shortened version she vacillates way too much. I was never convinced by her behaviour any more than I could understand Matthias Schoenaerts' puppy-dog devotion to this fickle woman.

Schoenaerts doesn't go for getting the accent right and plays the role as a dreamily attractive hunk who never takes his shirt off or says very much. Slightly more successful are Tom Sturridge's Sergeant Troy, though he lacks the brooding sexuality Terence Stamp brought to the role and Michael Sheen is quite affecting as Boldwood, even if, again, he is no Peter Finch. Indeed this version is so sanitised and so cosily romantic it could have been made in the 1940's. It isn't bad, exactly but it feels very much like something the BBC might have produced on television.

THE WAIT no stars

This visually beautiful, if self-consciously arty, Italian film marks the feature debut of Piero Messina who certainly displays all the promise of a major film-maker if he can only learn to move things along at a somewhat more acceptable pace and be less concerned with the 'look' of his films and more concerned with the feelings of his characters. This is a somewhat high-toned piece based on a play by Pirandello and it's very much designed around the performances of Juliette Binoche as a grieving mother and Lou de Laage as her son's girlfriend. It's certainly well done but it also smacks of the worst kind of art-house cinema; this is Antonioni-light. See it by all means though you may have to keep pinching yourself from time to time to stay awake.

NOBODY RUNS FOREVER no stars

Not terrible but not good either. "Nobody Runs Forever" is a 1968 British thriller involving international politics and murder in a reasonably tortuous plot. It's also a Betty Box/Ralph Thomas picture which means it was never likely to set the world on fire; workmanlike is about the best you can say for it. What distinguishes it is the cast. The usually reliable Rod Taylor is the Australian policeman sent to London to arrest Christopher Plummer's Australian High Commissioner for the murder of his first wife and finding, when he gets there, that Plummer isn't the villain he's been painted. Lilli Palmer is Plummer's current wife. (she's the best thing in the picture), Camilla Sparv is his secretary and Daliah Lavi, a very fatale femme. Franchot Tone even pops in for a cameo appearance as does an uncredited Leo McKern. It's not particularly exciting and it is rather far-fetched and it will never rank in any list of decent conspiracy thrillers but at least it passes an entertaining couple of hours.

DESTROYER **

Nicole Kidman with 'ugly' make-up, (a little over-applied, if you ask me), is the LA detective with issues out to catch the demonic villain from her past and who was responsible for screwing up her life. This means we jump back in time to when Kidman was a much prettier young undercover detective, (this time made up to look much younger than her actual 51 years), infiltrating said villain's gang, a mission that leads to a heist that goes badly wrong. Catching Silas now, (for that is the name of the said villain played grimly by Toby Kebbell), will, she hopes, lead to closure of a sort.

As a crime movie Karyn Kusama's "Destroyer" is slow and detailed with a couple of beautifully executed action sequences. The fact that in the present day sequences Kidman is working alone and with impunity might make it feel a little less credible than if she had a partner but that's a minor quibble in a movie that has a touch of the Michael Mann's about it while Kidman is always good value for money. Nice too to see a feminist take on what is usually a fundamentally male-orientated genre even if it could to with a trim here and there.

NIGHT MUST FALL **

A critical failure at the time of its release and considered something of a let-down for its director and star, (it was certainly an odd choice of material), this 1964 film version of Emlyn Williams' play, (it was written in 1935 and filmed two years later with Robert Montgomery), is nowhere near as bad as people say. It's the one about the young psychopath, (a terrific Albert Finney), who worms his way into the affections of elderly invalid Mona Washbourne, (superb), and her initially stand-offish daughter, (an excellent Susan Hampshire). The problem is that in attempting to get to the psychological heart of the piece director Karl Reisz drains it of all suspense and Clive Exton's screenplay, (I haven't seen or read the original play), is a bit on the dull side. But neither is it a disaster and I have never understood why it disappeared so soon after its initial appearance.

THE GREAT GABBO *

Add caption

This is the one in which Erich von Stroheim plays the crazy ventriloquist controlled by his dummy. He's "The Great Gabbo" and, as befits Mr von Stroheim, he's completely over the top but then OTT was what made him famous, in film and in life. The movie itself is entertaining enough, even if it goes down the musical-comedy route and isn't the chiller we might have expected. Betty Compson is fine as the girl Gabbo is in love with and who drives him to even greater levels of distraction than he might otherwise have reached.