TENSION **

A noirish thriller with a good cast, (Richard Basehart, Audrey Totter, Barry Sullivan, Cyd Charisse), and an excellent plot, (Basehart is the mild-mannered chemist planning on killing his faithless wife's lover). It was directed by John Berry, a minor jobbing director who made at least one outstanding film, ("He Ran All the Way"), in his relatively short career. This isn't quite in the same class, (it gets rather convoluted before it's over), but it does what it says on the tin and both Basehart and Totter are excellent.

YARA ****

Filmed in the almost unbearably beautiful mountains of Lebanon, "Yara" is one of the most beguiling films you will see in a month of Sundays, setting out a way of life that might seem as remote as the place where director Abbas Fahdel chose to film it. Yara herself is a young girl who lives in the mountains with her aged grandmother. One day a handsome young man chances by and she is smitten but this is no conventional love story; indeed it's hardly a love story at all but an almost documentary-like account of a region and its people, (all the actors are non-professionals, essentially playing themselves), making do with what many of us might think of as very little yet living in what many of us might think of as a kind of paradise. This is one of the greatest of all films to deal with our place in the natural world, reminding us that great cinema need not necessarily announce itself with fanfares but with the quietude and simplicity of the gentlest of breezes.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD ***

Not as great as its reputation might suggest but damn good nevertheless. This was the film that basically introduced John Le Carre to an international audience. Richard Burton was perfectly cast as Alec Leamas, "The Spy who came in from the Cold" and his mission was to act as a double-agent and worm his way in with the East Germans and incriminate a spy from the other side so they will shoot him themselves.

The plot is complex, the characters beautifully realised and the performances all brilliant. As well as Burton at his near best, Oskar Werner was, as always, remarkably good as another Communist spy, Claire Bloom very nicely cast as the left-wing librarian Burton gets involved with and Cyril Cusack was a perfectly cool and ever so cynical Control. George Smiley even pops up in the form of Rupert Davies. The director was Martin Ritt and this remains one of his best films while Oswald Morris did the brilliant black and white cinematography.

THE MOVEMENT ***

Visually Benjamin Naishtat's "The Movement" is one of the starkest and most beautiful films ever made. Shot in black and white and dealing with a time of war and plague in 19th century Argentina it should immediately remind you of the work of Miklos Jancso, both in subject matter and in style or perhaps the films of Bela Tarr.

What little plot there is, is shorn away until there is nothing left but the barest of bones. Short scenes that don't automatically appear to be leading anywhere fade into blackness in a film shot mostly at night. The acting, and what dialogue there is, appears improvised and yet utterly brilliant. This is 'pure' cinema at its most basic and on the strength of it I predict one hell of a future for Naishtat.

LETO ****

Who would have guessed that the feel-good movie of the year so far would be a Russian rock musical, set in the 1980's and filmed in widescreen black and white? Kirill Serebrennikov's "Leto" works on a number of levels; as a picture of a still totalitarian Russia coming to terms with influences from the West, as a good old-fashioned musical and as a picture of relationships under pressure and the fact that it looks so damned beautiful, (should all movies be in black and white?), is just the icing on the cake. Throw in some awesome tunes from the period and what's not to love. I can even imagine a shirtless Putin head-banging to this just to keep his street-cred intact. The young cast, too, are excellent; this is a first-rate ensemble piece in which even the smallest part is perfectly played. Some of the musical numbers might remind you of the Elton John biopic "Rocketman" but this knocks that out of the ballpark. Don't miss it.

DEAD HORSE NEBULA **

We must be at least 20 minutes into Tarik Aktas' reasonably short film before the title appears on the screen. "Dead Horse Nebula" won its director the Best Emerging Director prize at the Locarno Film Festival and it's certainly original. That long, slow opening sequence tells us nothing about which way this Turkish film might go. A boy finds a dead horse in a field, he pokes it and its guts spill out, (this isn't a film for the squeamish). The authorities are called and the animal is burned. It could be a documentary but we get the feeling these people are acting. What follows is almost impossible to get a handle on unless you read the synopsis.

Aktas certainly doesn't make it easy for us by dispensing with conventional narrative in favour of a series of seemingly unrelated incidents. If there is a prevailing theme, it's death, both of people and of animals and how we react to it or rather the almost casual way the characters in this film react to it. It's a gorgeously photographed film though its leisurely pace and almost total lack of a 'plot' won't appeal to everybody but as a vision of man's relationship with nature, and I suppose with himself, makes it both intriguing and beautiful and should indeed mark Aktas out as a director to watch.

THE GOOB **

This coming-of-age movie scores brownie points over similar films of  its ilk if only for its setting. This isn't one of those cosy American high-school comedies but set rather in a working-class Norfolk of farmers and drag-car races which is probably as close to America as its likely to get. Guy Myhill's "The Goob" was co-produced by the BBC and it has the look and feel of those good BBC television 'plays' from 30 or 40 years ago but with added sex and swearing. It's meandering and well cast, (Sean Harris is the most familiar face), and a mid-movie suggestion it might go down the same road as "God's Own Country" is quickly banished, (the sex here is decidedly heterosexual). All the performances are excellent.

I DON'T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE no stars

People sleep quite a lot in Ming-Liang Tsai's "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone", be it alone or together and if you hear snoring in the cinema you might find it's not only on the screen that people are sleeping. Few films lasting two hours are about so little or move so slowly. The plot, if there is one, could be written on the back of a very small envelope and for all that happens on the screen, the movie could quite easily be cut by about 75% without losing anything.

Fundamentally, it's about one man nursing another back to health while elsewhere two women look after a young man in a coma. No-one says very much though it would appear that these two strands do come together at the end. It's certainly well photographed and there's definitely a palpably hot-house atmosphere on display but it's also impossible to feel anything for any of the characters and you may feel your time might have been better spent at home taking a well-deserved nap.

IN A WORLD ... ***

A joy from start to finish. Lake Bell wrote and directed "In a World..." and also plays the central character, a Hollywood voice coach competing to be the new voice of the trailer, you know the one who sells the movie to you while you're munching your popcorn and it's one of the funniest films I've seen in a very long time and like a lot of the best comedies the jokes are exclusively verbal.

Bell's terrific and she draws terrific performances from the rest of her cast including Eva Longoria playing herself in a brilliant cameo, (Bell is teaching her to sound like a Cockney gangster's wife). In fact, this is the kind of small budget comedy that should have gone onto Oscar success and become a classic rather than simply a cult movie but cult or classic, this is one to savour; it's a real gem.

FREAK SHOW *

What young gay teenager wouldn't want to have Bette Midler for a mother, (even if she is a nasty lush), and that's precisely whom young Billy Bloom, (Alex Lawther), gets in "Freak Show". Billy is the freak show of the title; an out, flamboyant teenage queen whose behaviour and appearance don't go down too well in his new high school but, this being a fairy-tale, his new best friends just happens to be the school jock, (Ian Nelson). Lawther is terrific but this mostly feel-good comedy has very little else to recommend it, (Abigail Breslin is good as a young bitch and there's always the wonderful Celia Weston), but this kind of thing has been done much better elsewhere and is neither as funny or as uplifting as it thinks it is. Lawther, the audience and indeed the Divine Miss M deserve better.

SURPRISE PACKAGE no stars

Stanley Donen may have been the producer and director and the stars might be Yul Brynner and Mitzi Gaynor, as well as Noel Coward, but this comedy is a British production, filmed mostly on the island of Rhodes and shot, not in picture-postcard colour, but in black and white. The thin plot has deported gangster Brynner planning to steal exiled king Noel Coward's crown and the largely British cast includes George Coulouris, Warren Mitchell, Lyndon Brook and Eric Pohlmann as a corrupt police chief. Brynner does his best but he's not a natural comic actor and this is one of his poorest performances and try as he might, even a miscast Coward can do nothing with the mostly limp material, (though at least he does stop the show when he sings the title song). The film's real surprise is Gaynor as Brynner's moll. She's no actress but she sure is sprightly in that perky Mitzi Gaynor way of hers. It's not terrible; in fact, it's quite amusing in its very daft way but it's hardly Donen's finest hour.

MR NOBODY *

Jaco Van Dormael's "Mr. Nobody" is a terrific looking film with image after image appearing in front of us as if in a dream for this is a sci-fi film that isn't really meant to make too much sense. The 'plot', for want of a better word, is simply the story of one man called Nemo, the 'Mr Nobody' of the title but it's not like any 'life story' you might have seen since Mr Nobody doesn't really exist, except perhaps in the imagination of Mr Van Dormael and this is the kind of film that could easily be re-edited without losing its sense or lack of it. You might indeed call it self-indulgent, particularly since it goes on for over two and a half hours and since there are no real 'characters', actors like the talented Jared Leto as Nemo are unable to leave their mark. This is the kind of film that almost wilfully sets out to alienate an audience. It's certainly imaginative and, as I say, it looks fantastic but don't waste your time trying to make too much sense of it; take it as you find it and you might even enjoy it, particularly if you live in Europe
where, apparently, it was something of a hit. 

ADOPTION ****

One of the great films about women made by a woman, Marta Meszaros' "Adoption" is about the most fundamental need of many women, to be a mother. Kata is a 43 year old widow, living alone but having an affair with a married man who is not prepared to leave his wife. One day she asks him to father a child with her, which she will raise alone, but he refuses. Then she meets Anna, a young girl from the local boarding school, who asks Kata if she can use her house to meet her boyfriend. A friendship develops between them that might lead to all their problems being solved.

Meszaros shoots her film mostly in close-ups as if by focusing on these faces we are also getting inside their heads. It's an unusual treatment of an unusual subject, one that in an American film would have been sentimentalised out of all proportion. As Kata, Katalin Berek is extraordinarily good and the director, one-time wife of Miklos Jansco, never deviates from the intensity of her subject, making this a deeply moving film. Not much seen these days, this remains a key film of the seventies.