THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN no stars

There's no denying that for what it is, "The Midnight Meat Train" is actually very well done but I also found this extremely gory American horror film, directed by Japan's Ryuhei Kitamura, to be pretty repulsive. It features a reasonably early Bradley Cooper performance as a New York photographer who becomes obsessed with serial killer Vinnie Jones, whose speciality is butchering people on late night subway trains. Actually the plot hardly matters and it certainly doesn't make much sense; it's just one appallingly violent encounter after another, with a slight twist to divert our attention but then as Jean Brodie might have said, 'For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like'. I don't so this won't be getting any recommendation from me. It's also not a patch on that much less gory but slightly similar British classic, "Death Line".

RENDITION **

At two hours it's a tad overlong and slower than it ought to be for its own good but this political thriller about international terrorism is, at least, intelligent if short of thrills. "Rendition" opened in 2007 to less than enthusiastic reviews though it was clearly a prestige production; you only had to look at the cast list to figure that out. Jake Gyllenhaal is the CIA operative with a conscience, Reese Witherspoon, the wife of a man suspected of being a terrorist, Meryl Streep a bitchy senior CIA official, Alan Arkin a senator, Peter Sarsgaard the senator's assistant with the hots for Witherspoon and J.K. Simmons in his pre-Oscar days when he was just a good character actor.

Of course, it's obvious we're meant to read more into this than if it were a 'mere' mad bomber kind of political thriller. We're meant to view this with a liberal conscience and to see the 'good' guys as being as culpable as the bad guys and where it's as hard to tell the heroes from the villains. It's certainly not a bad movie and it's very handsomely photographed by the great Dion Bebee but it's also a little on the obvious side with all the expected tropes firmly in place together with a slightly unnecessary 'twist' in the tail making it a good film rather than a potentially great one.

EMERALD CITIES **

Impossible to pin down, Rick Schmidt's cold-war, punk movie "Emerald Cities" is shoe-string movie making at its stringiest and totally unlike anything else. It's also been 'lost' for years but thanks to Nicolas Winding Refn has only recently been rediscovered and given a brand new lick of paint. It isn't quite a documentary nor is it totally plotless but with its use of non-professional actors and in the improvisatory way Schmidt films it, it feels as it's just been thrown together.

What plot there is involves Ed Nylund's Santa Claus impersonator heading to San Francisco in search of his daughter. Meantime, we are warned about the dangers of nuclear weapons and lectured on the possibility that Santa might indeed be real, all to a largely incomprehensible punk soundtrack. How you relate to it, of course, depends on how you relate to cinema in general and what you think cinema is. This is guerrilla movie-making, one man's demented vision of America in the Eighties and is, apparently, the last part
of a trilogy. I'm not quite sure I have recovered from it yet.

SUMMER HOURS ****

Seldom, if ever, in cinema have I seen a more touching, more honest or, indeed, more intelligent an account of the relationships between family members than in Olivier Assayas' "Summer Hours". The family in question are French bourgeoisie but in their concerns and in the way in which they interact with each other they could be any family anywhere; we know them immediately.

The period covered in the film is just before and not long after the death of the matriarch, (Edith Scob in a wonderful supporting turn), curator, in her own way, of her uncle's estate. He, Paul Berthier, was a famous artist and the house is dripping with expensive works of art, both by Berthier and other artists. The problem for her three adult children, (all beautifully played by Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jeremie Renier), is what to do with them, and the house in which they are kept, after her death.

Here is a picture that works on two distinct levels; on the one hand it's the study of ordinary people who love each other deeply and are caught in a crisis not of their own making and on the other, of the French themselves and their relationship with art in general and Assayas juggles these themes impeccably and not without a degree of humour. There are no real dramas or tragedies and even the suggestion that the mother, Helene, had a sexual relationship with her uncle, is almost shrugged off. There isn't a single frame of this gorgeous film that won't touch you or make you think of your own life experiences. A huge hit on the international art-house circuit it is, I believe, a masterpiece.
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HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT ***

Before hitting the big time with "Good Time", the Safdie Brothers made this uncompromising Indie gem about heroin addicts in New York based on the real-life experiences of leading actress Arielle Holmes. "Heaven Knows What" is like a 21st century version of "Panic in Needle Park" and it deserves to be just as well known. It's certainly not an easy watch but Holmes and co-stars Caleb Landry Jones and Buddy Duress are superb and you can tell the Safdies definitely had a future ahead of them. This might be off-kilter and low budget but it feels as if they had been making films for years. As "Good Time" finally showed, they have an unerring visual sense even when dealing with material as downbeat and as depressing as this and some scenes almost have a look of magic realism to them. With Holmes virtually playing herself we could just as easily be watching a documentary. The Brothers also inject a good deal of humanity into the material so while it is certainly depressing it never feels exploitative.

MARIO **

"Mario" isn't the first film to tackle the subject of what it must be like to be gay and a professional footballer and while it's no classic, it is a vast improvement on "The Pass". Of course, it's also a love story and as such it's nicely done. Mario and Leon play for the same team as strikers; they also share a flat and they hit it off from the start. Actually, it's probably all a bit too convenient that they're gay and fancy the football shorts off each other and I'm sure it's no co-incidence that both Max Hubacher, (Mario) and Aaron Altaras, (Leon), were cast as much for their looks as their acting abilities.

However, where the film scores, (no pun intended), is in taking the whole issue of homosexuality in football seriously. Mario and Leon's sexuality gets out and has to be denied. The club, supposedly, is behind them, their fellow players make homophobic jibes, if it becomes public their careers would be over etc. It's an issue largely ignored in the cinema so it's good to see it being dealt with now. At two hours it's still a little on the long side but it's well written and directed and both leads are fine, particularly Hubacher who brings considerable depth to the part of Mario and who obviously has quite a future ahead of him. As an addition to New Queer Cinema it is also both bitter-sweet and prevalent.

APRIL LOVE no stars

This dollop of candy-floss is just the thing to brighten up a wet summer's afternoon. It's a pretty mediocre film but at least it's pretty, shot as it is on location. It was designed as a vehicle for Pat Boone, a major pop star of the time but not much of an actor and for up-and-coming musical star Shirley Jones as his love interest. If they are too twee for your liking there's always Dolores Michaels and Arthur O'Connell to distract you. There are also a few decent songs on the soundtrack including, of course, the Oscar-nominated title song.

A PASSAGE TO INDIA ***

David Lean's last film "A Passage to India" was far from his best but it was certainly an improvement over both "Doctor Zhivago" and "Ryan's Daughter". Lean himself wrote the script, (and edited the picture), from E M. Forster's novel and it's an intelligent as well as a fairly sumptous epic, magnificently shot by Ernest Day and very well cast wth the obvious exception of Alec Guinness in brown face as an Indian Brahmin. It's not actually a bad performance and yet there is something vaguely offensive in having a white English actor 'blacked up' when there were so many very talented Indian actors available. On the other hand, you certainly can't fault Judy Davis as Adela, Peggy Ashcroft as Mrs Moore or Victor Banerjee as Dr Aziz.

Ashcroft is magnificent. She won several awards for this role, including the Oscar and there's excellent work from a first-rate supporting cast. At 164 minutes it's a little on the long side; it was as if, after "The Bridge on the River Kwai", Lean found it impossble to keep things tight. Nevertheless, this did mark something of a return to form and it doesn't disgrace the great novel on which it is based.

ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD ****

It was inevitable that, sooner or later, QT would get around to a film focusing entirely on the film-making process and the town he loves so well. The only question was, when? Well, at last he's done it, one film away from what he says will be his final film and as the title attests "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" is set in the past but again, typical of its director, he sets it at a very specific time, 1969, and around a very specific event. the murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by the Manson Family, and this just might be his masterpiece.

Knowing the subject in advance, of course, might lead us to suppose that Tarantino could still go down the road of earlier pictures like "Django Unchained" and "Inglorious Basterds", brilliant but mostly tasteless and jokey explorations of violence like an A-Movie version of a B-Movie aesthetic...but he doesn't. This is a love-letter to Hollywood, to the movies and to actors. Yes, the final half hour or so is dark and deeply disturbing, (yet it's also Tarantino funny and black as hell), and it might be too dark for the Academy but the rest is glorious; highly intelligent talk and often, (surprise, surprise), very moving.

There are three main characters, two fictitious and one real. The fictitious characters are actor Rick Dalton and his stunt double, Cliff Booth; the real character is Sharon Tate who, with her husband Roman Polanski, happens to be Dalton's next door neighbour. The film covers a period of three days, two in February and one in August. Dalton is an actor past his sell-by date, reduced to playing villains on TV and advised, (by a magnificent Al Pacino), to go to Italy and play the hero in Italian westerns. His stunt double and best friend has also seen better days. They are played superbly by a hardly ever better Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Indeed I think DiCaprio has only topped this performance once before when he played Jordan Belfort in "The Wolf of Wall Street".

It's a film full of set-pieces and both DiCaprio and Pitt have their fair share; Leonardo most memorably in one of those television westerns where is acting is Emmy-worthy until … (Tarantino even manages to cleverly put him into "The Great Escape" in the part actually played by Steve McQueen, very nicely reincarnated here by Damian Lewis), while Pitt has a scene of superb menace at the Manson ranch, one of several scenes where Tarantino pulls the rug out from under us with a punch-line that isn't what you were expecting.

Elsewhere, the real-life Sharon Tate, (a terrific Margot Robbie), is enjoying the fruits of her celebrity and also gets her set-piece when she visits a cinema showing "The Wrecking Crew", relishing her performance up on the screen. While hardly a downer on the film in general I did think Tarantino treated Miss Tate rather cruelly. Was she really this much of an air-head? Surely not or is he suggesting she only made it through the casting couch? Someone else he takes down a peg or three is Bruce Lee, (an excellent Mike Moh), in a very funny scene with Brad Pitt. In fact, his treatment of Lee has already lead to a few complaints from his friends and family. To that, all I can say is 'it's only a film'. And it's a great film. At two hours and forty minutes it isn't overlong even if the heart of darkness he finally uncovers did leave me feeling a little queasy. It's also full of great supporting performances and it blends fact and fiction seamlessly. His masterpiece? Probably.

BRAGUINO no stars

Not quite long enough to be a feature and perhaps too long to be a 'short', Clement Cogitore's film "Braguino" is more an ethnographic essay than a documentary. He filmed it in the wilderness of Eastern Siberia and it looks at the lives of two families living on opposite banks of a river but who don't get along. In the centre of the river is a small island where the families' children come and play, too young perhaps to understand the concept of 'feuds'. There is no narration; Cogitore lets his characters speak for themselves. It's a rare glimpse into a way of life that might have existed a few hundred years ago but which seems almost alien today. It only lasts 49 minutes but since almost nothing actually happens, (a bear is killed; the families square up to each other in a scene you think might develop into something but doesn't), these could be the longest 49 minutes of your life.

COLD WEATHER *

"Cold Weather" wasn't just written and directed by Aaron Katz but edited by him as well and while it does give off that 'labour of love' vibe, it also feels more than a little self-indulgent, too. Katz is a very 'indie' filmmaker who uses actors we don't know, (hence they feel like 'real' people), in good, off-the-beaten-track locations, keeping his plots reasonably thin. So far, so interesting. Unfortunately, he isn't much good at writing dialogue and his 'unknown' actors aren't strong enough to deliver it and make it...well, interesting. In fact, you might go so far as to say "Cold Weather" is a boring film about boring people leading boring lives.

However, a few things go some way, if not quite to redeeming the film, then at least to giving it a little lift. There's always the hang-dog face of leading actor Chris Lankenau who looks perpetually spaced-out, I wouldn't go so far as to call what he does 'acting' but at least he does look like a real slacker. Then there's his excellent use of those locations and finally there is something resembling 'a plot'. Katz obviously felt he was making a kind of indie neo-noir about a disappearing girl and a couple of amateur detectives. It doesn't really go anywhere but it just about holds our attention before the film evaporates before our eyes, which is a pity as I have a feeling Katz might have talent; maybe he just needs someone else to write his scripts.

THE WAKHAN FRONT ***

High in the mountains of Afghanistan something very strange is happening. Soldiers of a French platoon fighting the Taliban begin to vanish, as if into thin air; then the remaining soldiers discover that members of the Taliban are disappearing, too. Clement Cogitore's superb movie, "The Wakhan Front" (aka "Neither Heaven Nor Earth"), has been described by its director as 'Ford meets Shyamalan'; others have compared it to Antonioni. Perhaps it's best to think of it as "The Hurt Locker" crossed with some 1950's sci-fi paranoia picture.

Director Cogitore, making his feature debut, brings a documentary feel to his highly unconventional war movie which naturally plays out like a ghost story. The only recognisable face in a fine cast is Jeremie Renier as the captain trying to come to terms with the inexplicable while sound and imagery are perfectly deployed to create a sense of unreality out of something very real and physical. This is certainly a major movie by a filmmaker with a real future ahead of him and it's been shamefully ignored.

O FANTASMA **

An almost fly-on-the-wall look into the life of a young gay garbage collector in Lisbon. Sergio, (Ricardo Meneses), seems comfortable with his sexuality; he likes to cruise and he's certainly getting enough casual sex, (explicitly shown), but his fetishes and his infatuation with a young rich boy would indicate he's not entirely happy. Joao Pedro Rodrigues' first film, "O Fantasma" doesn't offer much in the way of plot and you can't say Sergio's life is particularly interesting but Meneses plays him with an unabashed physicality that at times seems to go beyond mere acting. It's not a particularly pleasant picture but while it deals with 'sensationalist' material, it feels honest, at times even dull and never exploitative and as an addition to New Queer Cinema, it's certainly different.

ABSOLUTE POWER **

Beyond far-fetched. Clint Eastwood is the burglar who, while robbing a particularly palatial house, just happens to see two of the President's bodyguards kill a woman the President was planning to have sex with, at least until they both turned violent. The President's Chief of Staff, Judy Davis, plans on blaming the killing on a botched robbery, very handy when you have a real-life robber on the premises, even if you don't know he's there.

This is just the opening of Eastwood's movie "Absolute Power", which may be one of his lesser efforts but which is highly entertaining nevertheless. A top-notch cast helps; Gene Hackman is the President, an excellent Ed Harris is one of the investigating cops, Scott Glenn and Dennis Haysbert are the trigger-happy security men and then there's Laura Linney, E.G. Marshall and Richard Jenkins while Davis pulls out perhaps one stop too many as the overly zealous Chief of Staff. It may be totally barmy but as barmy goes it's undeniably good fun and at times is actually very suspenseful. Not so much a who-done-it as a 'Did-they-really-think-they-would-get-away-with-it-just-because-I'm-the-President?

CHEF ***

In his script for "Chef" Jon Favreau isn't afraid to allude to the size he's ballooned to. Favreau isn't just the scriptwriter but also the director and star of this excellent foodie picture in which he plays a world-class chef who loses his job after a food blogger gives him a bad review and who then sets out to turn his life around. It's a sweet movie made all the sweeter by the mouth-watering dishes on display. It's obvious that Favreau is having a good time here and you get the impression that the first-rate cast, (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Sofia Vergara, Scarlett Johansson, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Downey, Oliver Platt and a terrific kid called Emjay Anthony), are as much friends as co-workers and that the movie is a labour of love. It was a commercial success, if not a runaway one, but surely cult status is destined to follow.

LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF ****

Watching "Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf" I kept telling myself that only the French could have made it and that the ghosts of Prevert and Carne and especially Vigo were hovering above that famous bridge. Alex and Michele are as much the children of paradise as were Garance or Baptiste. They are tramps living on the streets of Paris or more precisely on the now derelict Pont-Neuf bridge, (it's being renovated), and to someone who isn't French their love affair is very Gallic. No ordinary tramps, he is a fire-eating acrobat and she is a painter who is going blind and since they are played by the remarkable Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche you know their story will be as grand as it may be tragic.

This was only Leos Carax's third film but it confirmed him as one of the best directors working in movies and not just in France. It's a visually bold, near epic picture and at the time of its release was not considered a success; it was thought of as old-fashioned. Now, of course, it's thought of as the masterpiece it clearly is but while it confirmed Carax's artistry it could just as easily have ended his career. It was eight years until his next feature and since then he's only made one other film by himself, the brilliant "Holy Motors", (he is credited as one of the three directors of "Tokyo").

It hardly matters, of course, that "Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf" is fanciful and unrealistic, a paean of praise to cinema and not to life, (this is really "L'Atalante" in just another guise), but then isn't that why we go to the cinema in the first place? Let us hope it's not too long before Carax is enchanting us once again with his magic. We, and the cinema, need him.

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ABOUT MRS. LESLIE **

A strange little romantic drama that many people have never seen or even heard of. "About Mrs Leslie" is the story of an over-the-hill  New York chanteuse who accepts an invitation from a stranger, (Robert Ryan), to spend six weeks with him as his companion in California. It was based on a Vina Delmar novel, was directed by Daniel Mann and it gave Shirley Booth another plum part after her Oscar-winning turn in "Come Back, Little Sheba". Perhaps sexless, middle-aged romances weren't quite what the public was after at the time and the film all but disappeared and Booth, who came to movies late in life, never became a film-star, (she only made four feature films in her career). However, she did make it big on television in the long-running series "Hazel". She was a highly gifted actress and here she found the perfect partner in Ryan, surely among the most underrated of all great actors. There isn't a great deal in the way of plot but it does have a lot of charm and Booth looks like she could make reading the phone book sound interesting. One worth seeing.

THE DEAD DON'T DIE ***

Jim Jarmusch claims he made "The Dead Don't Die" because he wanted to make an entertainment that the general public could relate to and simply have fun watching. Showing it at Cannes, of course, also suggests he had one eye on the critics too, though they have been less than enthusiastic, hoping perhaps he might emulate his vampire masterpiece "Only Lovers Left Alive" and yes, if you are expecting a retread of that you will be disappointed. However, if you go to "The Dead Don't Die" wanting nothing more than a good, gory and very funny slice of schlock-horror you will love it as much as I did.

Of course, Jarmusch being Jarmusch can't content himself with a simple send-up; he has to go down the post-modern route of referencing the fact that it's only a film and a Jim Jarmusch film at that, so we have characters talking about reading the script and that the much played title song is, indeed, the film's theme song but these are the weakest aspects of Jarmusch's comedy. Otherwise this is a full-frontal assault on the funny-bone..

You can ignore what passes for a plot, suffice to say "Night of the Living Dead" is a good jumping off point, and relish a cast of Jarmusch regulars, (Adam Driver, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits etc), having a ball. Driver and Swinton may have the best of it, showing that even in a pastiche like this they still have the acting chops to carry it off. It's not flawless; the build-up to this zombie apocalypse takes too long and a few of the gags are repeated long past their sell-by date but I still laughed longer and harder at this than at any other movie I've seen this year and if it's minor Jarmusch, it still shows that even minor Jarmusch is often so much better than many of his peers.

SCARRED HEARTS ****

Luminously photographed by Marius Panduru in the now unfashionable Academy ratio, Romanian director Radu Jude's superb new movie "Scarred Hearts" is based on the writings of Max Blecher and deals with the time he spent in a sanatorium on the Black Sea. The year is 1937 and Blecher's alter-ego is Emanuel, suffering from Pott's Disease, a form of TB. Though not an asylum, the hospital is something of a madhouse. Operations are performed with the minimum of anaesthetic, if any, and the doctors have no qualms in telling the largely manhandled patients exactly what's wrong with them and everything, including sex between the patients, seems to be permitted. Emanuel suffers more than most but bears it all stoically, even managing to fall in love with a former patient, and there is a good deal of humour in the film. Lucian Teodor Rus, making his screen debut, is excellent as Emanuel, even if he does spend most of the film on his back and Serban Pavlu is superb as his doctor. I'm sure for many people a two and a half hour film about illness might seem something of an endurance test but Jude makes even the grimmest passages seem somehow life-affirming. A wonderful picture.