FIVE MILES TO MIDNIGHT no stars

Seldom in the history of movies has there ever been a more mismatched couple than Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins. She's the Italian wife, he's the American husband and they aren't getting along. Then he's killed in an air-crash but being the star we know he's still alive, particularly since he just took out life insurance. Anatole Litvak made "Five Miles to Midnight" in 1962 and it's a very formulaic thriller with lame performances and limp dialogue and a plot that's been done better dozens of times before. It's watchable and Loren isn't bad but a miscast Perkins is awful; we know he can play the psychopath but it's as the strong, romantic and attractive leading man that he's utterly unconvincing and we have to convince ourselves that it was supposedly this side of his character that made him attractive to Loren in the first place. Throw Gig Young into the mix and you know you're in trouble. One to avoid.

SANTA FE TRAIL no stars

"Santa Fe Trail" is one of the oddest westerns ever made. It pits John Brown's Abolitionists against the US Cavalry, paints Brown as the most black-hearted of villains, even if clearly he was on the side of 'right' and shows him as the real architect of the Civil War. Historical accuracy is banished to the sidelines as this epic of sorts covers a lot of territory, both literally and metaphorically. Michael Curtiz directed, though here that's not necessarily for the best, and again Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland are the romantic leads with Ronald Regan as a young George Custer, Raymond Massey as Brown and Van Heflin as a weakling and even at this early stage of his career Heflin is the best thing in the movie. The script is something of a stinker; the movie is half over before you get an inkling as to what it's actually about or what it's political point of view might be, (let's just say it's a distant cousin of "The Birth of a Nation" and leave it there). Curtiz just about handles the set-pieces with a degree of professionalism though there is some very misguided comedy. It's certainly no-one's finest hour.

UNCLE HOWARD ***

Howard Brookner isn't a name that many people know. He was a young film-maker in the 1980's who died of AIDS, aged 34. He made a highly acclaimed documentary about the writer William Burroughs and a mainstream movie, "Bloodhounds of Broadway" with Matt Dillon and Madonna but little else is known. Now his nephew Aaron Brookner has made a portrait of his uncle, "Uncle Howard", that reclaims him for posterity. Luckily for Aaron, Howard left a lot of film behind, of his work and of his life and moved in circles that included, not just Burroughs, Zappa and Warhol but film-makers like Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo who were more than happy to talk about Howard. What emerges is a fascinating picture of a talented and beautiful man whose life ended much too soon. It's also a wonderful picture of a society, many of whose inhabitants are no longer with us. It's honest, enlightening and very moving and Aaron Brookner is to be commended for giving it to us.

THE AWAKENING OF THE ANTS ***

Not a lot happens in this film from Costa Rica about famly life and yet the detail is superb. Although scripted, acted and designed it could be a documentary about a young wife and mother's dissatisfaction with her life. Isa, (a lovely, naturalistic performance from Daniela Valenciano), has an attentive, loving if demanding husband and two young girls. She works as a seamstress and they get by reasonably well but her husband wants another child and she's afraid that if she gets pregnant again it will rob her of whatever little freedom she has left.

"The Awakening of the Ants" is a feminist take on domesticity beautifully directed by Antonella Sudasassi with as much affection as pique. She condemns no-one; there are no villains in the picture, just ordinary people dealing with what life throws at them on a daily basis and I am sure there are millions of us who could identify with Isa and her husband. It's a small film that deals with 'small' issues but it's also very appealing with characters you actually care about; something you can't say about too many films these days.

THE DEAD ZONE **

A Stephen King adaptation worthy of taking its place next to Kubrick's "The Shining", this one directed by the estimable David Cronenberg in a manner more straightforward than we were used to at the time. Christopher Walken, (excellent), is the young schoolteacher who awakens out of a five year coma only to discover he has the ability to see a person's future, (or their past), simply by grasping their hand; needless to say, the futures he sees aren't always rosy.

Although it's a tale of the supernatural, King and Cronenberg keep the suspense on a very basic level with a strong degree of moral ambiguity thrown in for good measure helped, not just by Walken's performance, but by a fine supporting cast that includes Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom and a terrific Martin Sheen as the kind of politician who should never be allowed to run for public office. Perhaps because its horrors are subdued, (both by King and Cronenberg standards), the film isn't really seen much now but it remains a superior example of its kind and is worth seeing.

THE MIRACLE OF THE SARGASSO SEA ****

I can already see the American remake, directed perhaps by David Fincher, (though I would hope they leave well enough alone). "The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea" is a kind of police procedural set in Mesolongi, one of the lesser known parts of Greece and definitely off the tourist trail, that centres on the lives of two women, the female chief of police whose involvement in a terrorist raid in Athens ten years earlier has lead her here, and Rita, who does what menial jobs she can to get by. After a death in the town, their lives intersect.

This Greek movie works both as a dark thriller and as a troubling psychological picture of damaged lives. Both Elisabeth, the police chief, (Angeliki Papoulia), and Rita, (Youla Boudali), have reasons to be fearful and to hate their lives and anyone, on either side of the law, seems like the kind of person you would neither want to know or trust; there is something very unwholesome in Mesolongi. Syllas Tzoumerkas' picture makes the films of Yorgos Lanthimos feel like a walk in the park. This may be the first of his films I've seen but I certainly hope it won't be the last.

CALIFORNIA SPLIT ***

"California Split" is Robert Altman's most loose-limbed movie. It's a virtually plotless look at at a couple of gambling buddies, (Elliot Gould and George Segal, both superb), coasting from day to day, losing as much as they win, filmed with so much over-lapping dialogue  that conversations seem to disappear into the ether. It's also one of the great movies to explore friendships between men with one foot in the mainstream and the other in the experimental. Consequently, it wasn't really a success, either critically or commercially. Despite the drawing power of its leads people just didn't seem to know what to make of it. It's certainly a brilliant piece of film-making and its lack of structure makes it one of the most 'Altmanesque' of Altman films. It may not be in the very first tier but it still knocks spots of the best of almost anyone else

STOCKHOLM *

The events that took place in a Stockholm bank one day in 1973 were bizarre indeed and lead to the psychological condition known as 'Stockholm Syndrome' by which a captive becomes emotionally attached to their captor though I am sure, if you tried, you could trace this condition back to the cavemen. The events are described here as absurd and they are. I'm not sure how closely Robert Budreau's film "Stockholm" (aka "The Captor") sticks to the facts which are certainly stranger than fiction and anyway, "Dog Day Afternoon" covered very similair events to much greater effect so this feels like something of an after-thought, a kind of "Dog Day Afternoon" in miniature.

As the chief hostage taker Ethan Hawke chronically overacts though Noomi Rapace isn't at all bad as the hostage who falls for him in a very strange way but genuine laughs and real suspense are both conspicuously absent and it's just the very weirdness of what's happening that holds your interest, (and then, barely). I'm sure there's a really great movie to be made on this subject and maybe "Dog Day Afternoon" was it; this one is merely watchable.

SPENSER CONFIDENTIAL no stars

I wish Peter Berg didn't make such formulaic films because he's certainly a skilled filmmaker and he uses those skills to lift material we've seen a hundred times before. His latest movie, "Spenser Confidential" is another buddy-cop film...well, let's call it a buddy ex-cop and his boxing room-mate film. They're out to find the killers of a couple of cops, one a good cop and the other a corrupt one, in Boston. The ex-cop here is Mark Wahlberg and the room-mate is Winston Duke and the movie is below the standard we have come to expect from co-writer Brian Helgeland. It's not bad exactly but you get the impression that Wahlberg and everyone else are only there for the pay-checks. Next time round, maybe they might actually earn their money.

TWENTYNINE PALMS no stars

Bruno Dumont is famous for his sex scenes which are explicit if not altogether numerous. When they aren't having sex his characters usually mope and do very little. Some people mistake this for depth. "Twentynine Palms" is a road movie, filmed in America, mostly in English with a little French and no subtitles, in which a photographer and his lover drive across the desert to a place called Twentynine Palms, stopping every so often to have sex. You might say that if Antonioni could get away with it in "Zabriske Point" then why can't Dumont, the difference being, of course, that Antonioni was an artist with something to say about the state of America at the time while Dumont's concerns are much more insular, interested in nothing but his two characters and even then, not much interested in them.

It might have helped if the characters themselves were interesting but they are simply self-centered and dull while the landscapes, (endless roads, rocks, cacti and motels), are equally boring. It's really just another case of the old ennui and the sexual act doesn't get more interesting just because it's being performed on the top of some rocks, (though I suppose it does give an extra layer of meaning to the expression 'Getting your rocks off'). Also for some reason Mr Dumont chooses to end things very badly indeed for his dull couple, perking the film up a tad in the closing minutes

THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH **

Originally denied a certificate in the UK Sergio Martino's Giallo "The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh" is stylish, violent and sexy in equal measure, even in this dubbed version. It's the type of film that does exactly what it says on the tin and fans of the genre certainly won't be disappointed. Personally, I've never really seen the attraction of badly dubbed sexploitation pictures in which beautiful women get hacked to death in gloating close-up while either a discordantly jangly or quasi-religious score throbs away in the background.

Here a serial slasher is terrorising women in Vienna and terrorised ambassador's wife Julie Wardh, (the gorgeous Edwige Fenech), suspects it's her ex-lover Jean. Of course, Mrs Wardh has a strange vice in that she enjoys kinky, rough sex and what Giallo would be complete without a dollop or three of kinky, rough sex and several more dollops of explicit female nudity not to mention a whole barrel load of red-herrings. Just the kind of thing that might have played in the cinemas of Soho (or Derry's Palace Picturehouse), back in the day and very enjoyable it is too.

MACHINE GUN KELLY **

It opens splendidly with a heist carried out without dialogue but to a jaunty Gerald Fried score making me almost wish Roger Corman's "Machine Gun Kelly" were a silent film. It isn't, of course, but this Z-Movie, made in eight days, is a lot of fun. It's not a biopic of the title character; he's real enough but everyone else is basically an invention 'for dramatic purposes' and it has a lot of the punchy quality of the old Warner Brothers' gangster movies.

Charles Bronson is excellent as Kelly and Susan Cabot is suitably hard-boiled as his moll while the supporting cast includes the always watchable Connie Gilchrist and Morey Amsterdam, he of 'Dick Van Dyke Show' fame. No-one would ever conclude from this that Corman was a great director but give this to me anyday over certain European art movies that pass for masterpieces in some quarters.

EXECUTIVE SUITE **

An all-star cast, including a batch of Oscar winners, was the obvious draw for this movie set in the cut-throat world of big business. Without them, I doubt if would be half as entertaining as it is. The overly familiar plot has a certain Mr Bullard, President of a large corporation, dropping dead outside his office and the squabbles that ensue amongst those subordinates who want to step into his shoes. It's a very glossy soap opera, adapted by Ernest Lehman from Cameron Hawley's novel and directed by Robert Wise, so you know it's going to get a very professional job of work.

You also know it's going to be well acted and for the most part it is. There's William Holden, (the decent one), Fredric March, (the nasty one), Barbara Stanwyck, (the hysterical mistress), Walter Pidgeon, (the very decent one), Louis Calhern, (the skunk), Dean Jagger, (the lazy one), Paul Douglas, (the cheating one), as well as June Allyson, (the loyal wife), Shelley Winters, (the disloyal secretary) and Nina Foch, Oscar-nominated, as the loyal secretary. Unfortunately none of them can make the material sexy; stocks and shares and who runs what department are hardly likely to get your blood up. Still, it did get four Oscar nominations and it does have its followers and finally it just has about the right number of knives in the right number of backs to give it a much needed boost.

WINTER KILLS ***

"Winter Kills" was a satire, and often a very funny one, on the Kenndy assassination, based on a novel by Richard Condon who also wrote "The Manchurian Candidate" and despite an all-star cast, mostly in cameo parts including an uncredited and silent Elizabeth Taylor, it was a gigantic flop both with the public and the critics, (though Vincent Canby thought it was the best American film since "Citizen Kane"). It's certainly not that but of all the conspiracy thrillers and paranoia pictures of the seventies it's the most fun.

Jeff Bridges is excellent as the dim-witted brother of the assassinated President running around trying to find out who organized the hit and John Huston is superb as his father, the real power behind the throne. Nice work, too, from Anthony Perkins and, in the Jack Ruby role, Eli Wallach. I'm not quite sure what audience writer/director William Richert had in mind when he made this but in the intervening years it has built up quite a considerable cult reputation and it certainly shouldn't be missed.

PARENTS **

Bob Balaban's satire on 1950's America is a riot of colour and pitch-perfect period settings that looks like it came straight from the closet of a certain Douglas Sirk and one that makes "Mad Men" look positively dull in comparison. It's also a pretty decent horror-comedy as young Michael, (Bryan Madorsky), comes to the realisation that his seemingly perfect parents are cannibals and even he might be on the menu. "Parents" was just too strange and off-the-wall for commercial success but is now thought of as something of a cult movie. The parents in question are superbly played by Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt and Sandy Dennis is very good as the school's chain-smoking psychologist. Not the forgotten gem I once thought it was but still dark enough to earn its place.

THE WOUNDED ANGEL ****

In Kazakhstan life is hard and childhood, as we know it, is virtually non-existent. Children and adults alike do what they can to get by. Emir Baigazin's remarkable. virtually plotless film is divided into a number of chapters, each one examining boys struggling with the pain of the everyday and a life, if a life it is, far removed from what we in the West are used to.

I don't know if any of the 'actors' are professionals but the performances Baigazin draws from his mostly young cast are extraordinary. There is no music score and little dialogue, (which is just as well as the subtitles on the print I saw were poor). It is, of course, deeply depressing, as grim a picture of childhood as the cinema has given us yet filmed with a startling purity. This is only Baigazin's second film but, if given the distribution it cries out for, it should establish him as a major player in world cinema.

APOSTLE **

Torture porn from Gareth Evans, the man who gave us "The Raid" and its sequel. "Apostle" certainly scores top marks both for weirdness and extreme nastiness and with its island setting and strange religious cult it should remind you of "The Wicker Man" but that's really where the similarities end. This is a much darker chiller as Dan Stevens heads off to rescue his sister who has been kidnapped by cult leader Michael Sheen only to find that things are even worse than he imagined. Apart from the excessive gore Evans over-eggs the pudding in terms of plot so it isn't always that easy to follow and it isn't helped by Stevens' grim performance. On the other hand, Sheen has a field day as one of the bad guys and it certainly looks great. At 130 minutes it's a tad on the long side but it's certainly not lacking in imagination and I can see cult status beckoning.

BERNIE **

Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction and if "Bernie" is to be believed then that old adage certainly holds true. Richard Linklater's highly original comedy is based on the real-life case of Bernie Tiede, an apparently thoroughly lovable, deeply religious man who one day shot dead his friend and benefactor Marjorie Nugent, dismembered her corpse and kept it in a freezer for nine months before he was finally caught. The dichotomy was that everyone was on Bernie's side, (he was sweetness personified), while everyone hated the victim who was meanness personified.

Linklater tells Bernie's tale as a kind of faux-documentary with the good people of Carthage, Texas talking directly to the camera, (the townspeople play themselves), and films it as if it were some kind of cartoon come to life. It's a style that suits the material perfectly and he gets first-rate performances from Jack Black (Bernie), Shirley MacLaine (Mrs Nugent) and Matthew McConaughey (the prosecutor). It's very funny though I'm sure there was a conspicuous lack of humour in the real-life scenario and the film remains, rightly or wrongly, very much a tribute to Bernie Tiede. You can't help feeling it's a tribute he deserved.

CAT BALLOU **

This spoof western won Lee Marvin the Oscar for Best Actor but considering the opposition included Riichard Burton in "The Spy who came in from the Cold", Laurence Olivier in "Othello", Rod Steiger in "The Pawnbroker" and Oscar Werner in "Ship of Fools" perhaps giving Marvin the Oscar was overly generous. The film itself is highly enjoyable, a good follow-on from the Bob Hope spoofs and a nice precursor of "Blazing Saddles". It's got a good script from Walter Newman and Frank Pierson, lively direction from Elliot Silverstein and best of all, a first-rate cast that includes Jane Fonda, excellent in the title role of "Cat Ballou", Michael Callan, Dwayne Hickman, Tom Nardini, John Marley and as the balladeers Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye. It could be funnier I admit but it is also a very hard film to dislike.

CAREFUL, HE MIGHT HEAR YOU ***

One of the greatest and least sentimental films about childhood and one of the best, yet most undervalued, of Australian pictures, Carl Schultz's "Careful, He Might Hear You", taken from Sumner Locke Elliott's best-selling book, is about a young boy, known simply as PS, (terrifically played by 8 year old Nicholas Gledhill), caught in the middle of an acrimonious custody battle between his two aunts after his mother's death and his abandonment by his father. It's a very simple, straightforward film with excellent performances from Wendy Hughes and Robyn Nevin as the two women in question, John Hargreaves as the returning father and Peter Whitford as his uncle.

Schultz films it so that we see everything through PS's eyes and it's often very moving though Ray Cook's over-emphatic score sometimes drags it down while the period setting is beautifully captured in John Stoddart's designs and John Seales' superb widescreen cinematography. A sizeable international hit in its day it was named one of the top ten films of the year by the National Board of Review.

DIE, DIE MY DARLING nil

Had this been better, (or worse, depending on your point of view), it might have been a camp classic particularly with Tallulah Bankhead going further over the top than any of her contemporaries as the barking mad matriarch holding her dead son's girlfriend, (a very dumb Stefanie Powers), captive. "Die, Die My Darling" or "Fanatic", depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on, is dafter than most and is totally lacking in suspense but Bankhead, sans make-up, seems to enjoy torturing Miss Powers who deserves all she gets for being so stupid in the first place. It's certainly fun seeing Tallulah playing a religious nut though I kept wondering why she agreed to make this tripe since she was never a 'movie' name to begin with. Presumably she needed the money. Watch out, too, for Donald Sutherland playing a kind of village idiot. No doubt he's crossed it off his CV.

THE INTRUDER ****

In 1962 Roger Corman made "The Intruder". It wasn't just the most controversial film he ever made but one of the most controversial films ever made in the US. The subject was racism and he made it quite early on in the growth of the Civil Rights Movement. Even today it still packs a considerable punch. The Intruder of the title is William Shatner, a handsome, smiling stranger in a white suit who arrives in a small Southern Town preaching racism and hate, (it's not just African-Americans but Communists and Jews who are grist to his mill), and it's a much more terrifying film than any of his Poe adaptations.

Shatner gives a great performance in a great film but who might have guessed it. Corman was King of the Z-Movies and for many Shatner would never be more than Captain Kirk, a role he was still to play. Needless to say, the film virtually disappeared without trace and it's seldom revived but it showed Corman really was a film-maker to be taken seriously. It may still be only a B-Movie but it's one of the greatest B-Movies ever made.

AMERICAN WOMAN ****

The "American Woman" of the title is Sienna Miller and she's absolutely terrific here, so good in fact that she should have been a serious Oscar contender last year. She plays a single mother whose teenage daughter goes missing, leaving her to pick up the pieces and take care of her grandson. This slice of blue-collar Americana was directed by Ridley Scott's son. Jake and the film, like Milller's performance, is very fine indeed. This is the kind of intelligent, grown-up American film that was once commonplace but which we see so seldom nowadays as Marvel movies flood our multiplexes.

If Miller dominates the picture she is very ably supported by Amy Madigan as her mother and Christina Hendricks as her sister, by Will Sasso as her kindly brother-in-law and by Aaron Paul and Pat Healy as two of the men in her life, one sweet, the other sour while Brad Ingelsby's excellent screenplay captures the small-town milieu perfectly and despite it's grim subject, (domestic abuse is also to the fore), the film itself is never grim. Rather it's often funny, frequently very moving and something of a tonic and I can warmly recommend it.

THE WILD GOOSE LAKE ***

Gang warfare in Wuhan in this highly stylized Chinese gangster movie. There isn't a great deal that's new about Yi'nan Diao's "The Wild Goose Lake". Walter Hill, Jean-Pierre Melville or more recently Michael Mann could have made this but Diao's use of flashbacks to propel the story and his superb use of locations certainly give this an edge. Despite the fatalistic tone it's hardly what you would call existential despite moving at a fairly leisurely pace. The plot isn't always easy to follow and sometimes it's hard to know who belongs to whose gang or who's a cop and who isn't.

As a cop killer on the run, Ge Hu is as cool as they come; in another lifetime Delon or Belmondo might have played this part and Lun-Mei Kwei is excellent as the film's femme fatale. In the end there is more atmosphere than action and the film's look finally overwhelms its content but it's great that in this day and age this kind of gangster film is being made and that China has taken such a fundamentally American genre and twisted it to its own ends.

SO PRETTY *

You won't see too many films like Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli's "So Pretty" which, you're probably saying to yourself, is a good thing. It's a seemingly plotless look at the lives of a group of gay and transgender people living in a communal situation, one of whom is Rovinelli herself, (Rovenelli not only directed the picture and acts in it but is also the producer, the writer and the editor). Nothing actually happens; most of the time they just eat, make love or read from a script which probably reflects the film we're watching and is apparently based on a book by Ronald M. Schernikau. I haven't read it but I don't think if I had I would be any of the wiser. Usually I find this kind of experimental film-making a real turn off but these people are so attractive and such pleasant company I actually found the film quite engaging. A one-off to be sure but not one to be dismissed either.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON **

Jim Mickle's "In the Shadow of the Moon" is a cross between a sci-fi film and a serial killer thriller and if the sci-fi elements far outweigh the serial killer parts it hardly matters because this enjoyable, reasonably intelligent and rather daft movie never stops to draw breath and gives its leading actor, Boyd Holbrook, a part he can finally get his teeth into. He's a cop investigating a series of murders in Philadelphia in 1988 that end with the apparent death of the killer. Skip forward nine years and the exact same kind of killings start all over again.

Of course, with this kind of movie you have to suspend disbelief from the start and if you are prepared to give yourself over to it, it's actually a lot of fun. In a good supporting cast Michael C. Hall is a stand out as a senior detective who seems slower on the uptake than he ought to be. Excellent cinematography, too, from David Lanzenberg and a good score from Jeff Grace make this something of a guilty pleasure.

THE TRIP no stars

No list of 'so-bad-they're-almost-good-but-not-quite-they're-still-bad' movies would be complete without the inclusion of Roger Corman's 1967 psychedelic 'classic' "The Trip". This was Corman's attempt to cash in on the counter-culture of sex, drugs and what, I guess, passed for rock 'n roll at the time and among those trippin', man, were Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper and Susan Strasberg. It looked great in a pop-art kind of way but there's no script to speak of, (Jack Nicholson 'wrote' it, presumably on the back of a small envelope), and the acting is non-existent. Needless to say the Brits were having none of it and it was banned in the UK, no doubt to preserve us from its corrupting influence. It didn't work; we still turned on, tuned in and dropped out and we certainly didn't need howlers like this to help us on our way.