THE ANGEL WITH THE TRUMPET *

You could say "The Angel with the Trumpet" is the story of a house or, at least, the story of a family and it was a very strange picture to have come out of Britain at the time until you realise it was a remake of an Austrian film made 2 years earlier. It begins at the end of the 19th century and follows one particular family living in the same house in Vienna up to the rise of Nazism and it's populated by a cast of well-known British thespians being very British while pretending they're Austrian. It was directed by the actor Anthony Bushell who also appears and it features early performances from a couple of actual Austrian actors, namely Maria Schell and Oskar Werner.

The star of the picture is Eileen Herlie, who basically links the stories through the decades. She's really quite superb but the film is stiffer than a shop full of corsets and virtually everyone else miscast. It's certainly beautifully designed and photographed and Bushell's direction is both imaginative and subtle but who in hell did they imagine would pay to see it. This kind of yarn went out with the Ark or at least with D. W. Griffith. A curio that is virtually unknown today, (the original isn't known at all), but one that, in its very odd way, may be actually worth rediscovering.

THE LONG HAUL no stars

The problem with "The Long Haul" was that it came out only a month after Cy Endfield's much better "Hell Drivers" to which it bore quite a resemblance, They were both British made thrillers about corruption in the trucking business though this had at least one eye on the American market with Victor Mature cast as the honest trucker who goes astray and Diana Dors as the femme fatale who leads him away from dull wife and family. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the film is that Dors actually manages to give a half-way decent performance, though really she's much too glamorous for the character she's playing. Mature's his usual thick lug with a granite jaw and a granite brain though Patrick Allen isn't bad as the main villain and there's a certain seedy authenticity about the locations. It's largely been forgotten, (whereas "Hell Drivers" has built up quite a reputation), but it will pass a rainy afternoon amicably enough.

GRAND ISLE no stars

If "Grand Isle" had been made in the 1940's in black-and-white it would have been a B-Movie and probably a pretty good one but we are now 20 years into the 21st century and movies have gotten bigger, glossier and a lot more explicit but not necessarily better so "Grand Isle" is a '40's B-Movie tarted up with sex, violence and a highly improbable storyline about a young handyman, (Luke Benward), who finds himself holed up for the night with an obviously psychopathic couple, (Nicolas Cage and KaDee Strictland), in a big old house during a hurricane.

It's a move that cries out for the Val Lewton treatment with someone like Jacques Tourneur at the helm but what we get instead is something akin to '70's softcore horror porn with a surprisingly low-key performance from Cage. This time round it's Strictland who has the showier part while young Benward has both the looks and just enough acting chops to suggest he just might make it in the movies but the best performance by a mile comes from Kelsey Grammer as an investigating detective whose idea of talking down a shooter is suggest they have a beer together. Grammer seems to be having so much fun that he gives you the impression you might be watching a good movie; I can assure you you're not. A C+ for effort.

BRUCE LEE AND THE OUTLAW *

I am sure there is a fine line between observation and exploitation and I'm not sure Joost Vandebrug hasn't crossed it in this documentary about Romanian street kids and of one in particular, Nicu, and his relationship with 'Bruce Lee', the so-called king of the tunnels where many of these street children live. It's certainly brilliantly made. Vandebrug shoots so up close and personal you can practically smell what it's like down there, (and he's on first-name terms with his subjects who trust him unconditionally), and he filmed it over a period of years with Nicu, (the outlaw of the title), narrating or at least keeping us up to date with what we're seeing. He then edited the picture so that Nicu's story emerges and yet I kept feeling it was done so as to draw our attention as to just how good a film-maker Vandeburg is and not specifically to the terrible conditions in which these people live. In the end, even the 'carers' don't quite come off as the decent human beings I am sure they are. Deeply depressing.

DOMINICK AND EUGENE no stars

People with a mental or physical handicap are mother's milk to actors, or at least Oscar-bait because these kinds of roles allow actors to transform themselves, into someone they're not, either physically or 'mentally' or both. In "Dominick and Eugene" it's Tom Hulce who's 'slow' after a head injury has left him childlike. He's the Dominick character and he lives with his twin brother Eugene, (Ray Liotta), who's studying to be a doctor and the movie is about their relationship as Eugene ponders whether to move away and what will happen to Dominick if he does. Then there's the added complication of Eugene's budding romance with Jamie Lee Curtis.
 

It's a slight story but it deals with deeply depressing material while Hulce goes through all the usual tics you associate with this kind of part. The problem is it feels as if he's acting all the time. The other problem is that Pittsburgh, where the movie is located and was filmed, seems to be populated for the most part with the kind of lowlife who takes advantage of Dominick at every turn. I think if I lived there I would probably sue for libel. If director Robert M. Young makes good use of his Pittsburgh locations he also makes it look like the kind of town no-one might want to live in. I came away from the picture feeling slightly queasy.

COUNTRY ***

Like "The Grapes of Wrath" before it, Richard Pearce's "Country" is about poverty-stricken farmers up against the banks and the kind of weather that could wipe them out in an instant. It may lack the poetry of Ford's masterpiece but Pearce gives it a wonderful documentary-like feeling helped by terrifically naturalistic performances from Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard. Its dramas don't feel manufactured, just as the family at its centre feel like a proper family, despite the obvious star quality of its leads. It is, in fact, the kind of film Americans do better than almost anyone else when they set their minds to it; strong, honest and intelligent and it seldom puts a foot wrong. I'm just amazed Pearce's career never really went anywhere.

GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE **

Gregory La Cava's "Gabriel Over the White House" is a Capraesque fantasy but without any of Capra's corn. Rather, under La Cava's direction, this is a fairly serious satire on Roosevelt and the New Deal with Walter Huston as a potentially weak US President who, after a near-fatal accident, becomes an all encompassing do-gooder, doing whatever he can for the mass unemployed and the American people. However, good intentions may not be enough and as the movie progresses it takes a surprisingly dark turn.

It's certainly well made even if its message is sledge-hammered home with too much emphasis on the religious aspect and the potential conflict between good and evil. Also Huston is unusually stiff here and it's left to Franchot Tone and Karen Morley as his secretaries to inject a little feeling into proceedings. It wasn't successful and it's hardly ever revived but today it feels surprisingly prescient with Huston's President reminding you, at times, of someone much closer to home.

LE TESTAMENT D'ORPHEE *

Cocteau claimed that this, his last film, was a look back over his life or rather 'the poet's' life. Lucky for us he did for otherwise this collection of strung-together scenes would make little sense, (even with Cocteau's explanation it still makes little sense). "Le Testament d'Orphee" opens with a scene from his 1950 masterpiece "Orphee" so you might be forgiven for thinking that what follows will be an analysis of that film. Hardly, as Cocteau 'playing' himself goes off in search of whatever takes his fancy at this very late stage in his life, (he was to die three years later).


As a film it's an uneasy mix of pure cinema and bad theatre but as surrealism it's not unimpressive and is suitably vague and he does manage to get a lot of French stars on screen as if they were queuing up to appear in a Cocteau film in the mistaken belief that if it's Cocteau it's going to be a masterpiece. The problem is that Cocteau is a bad actor, even when playing himself, and he's hardly ever off the screen. Of course, there are things here that are extraordinary, (and it's almost an obscene pleasure to see Maria Casares), but much, too, that is terrible and nothing that might suggest the man himself was a genius.

HOMICIDAL no stars

William Castle's homage to "Psycho" may have been something of a cheap rip-off but "Homicidal" is still entertaining, if hugely predictable. As it stands, it's like something that might have turned up on television as an episode of "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" but is given something of a lift by Jean Arless (aka Joan Marshall) as the homicidal Emily, Eugenie Leontovich, the old lady in the chair, and Burnett Guffey's excellent cinematography. It's a pity then that Robb White's screenplay was is shockingly derivative so the 'scares' when they come just aren't scary, (despite the 'fright break'), and the plot twist is obvious thirty minutes into the movie, (and logically, it's also preposterous) so that even if we hadn't just seen "Psycho" we could still figure it out. Also the acting by leads Glenn Corbett and Patricia Breslin is poor meaning this one is strictly for the fans.

THE BLOOD OF A POET ***

A masterpiece of the avant-garde, Jean Cocteau's "The Blood of a Poet" demonstrates not just an extraordinary imagination at work but remarkable technical skill as well and you must remember that this was also Cocteau's first film. A young artist, (Enrique Rivera), brings a statue to life, on her instructions enters a mirror, (a sequence he was later to develop in "Orphee"), and finds himself in a strange hotel where nothing is real. Plot-wise, that's it but the imagery shows just what cinema was capable of even as early as 1932.

You could say it was also decidedly homoerotic. Cocteau's artist, his poet, is shirtless almost throughout and Cocteau puts great emphasis on his physicality at least until the midway point when the poet becomes a card player in full evening dress and the statue, his partner and film becomes a surreal satire on the bourgeoisie, (his object of desire is now a young, black angel). Of course, looking for any kind of meaning in a film like this is basically pointless; just give your soul over to it and hopefully you will find Cocteau's soul gazing back at you.

MA **

We've been here a hundred times before and yet this kind of schlock-horror is still ridiculously entertaining even if the taste it leaves can usually turn more than a little sour. You know the story; sad, lonely and obviously psychopathic female befriends flathunter/new mom/injured writer or in this case, a group of horny teens and then makes their life hell. Here she's outwardly sweet, if much too accommodating, Octavia Spencer, "Ma" as she becomes known to the boys and girls she takes under her wing and she'll go to any lengths to keep them close.

Tate Taylor, who directed Spencer to an Oscar in "The Help", has fun with the over-familiar material and Spencer milks it for all its worth; the teens are fine and other grown-ups include Luke Evans, (one of the dads), Juliette Lewis, (now old enough to be one of the moms), and Allison Janney as Spencer's hard-as-nails employer. There's nothing new here but it's good to see a teen-orientated chiller that's not founded on the supernatural and even if we are invited to stick the knife in Ma by the film's end, Spencer's gloriously over-the-top performance goes a long way to lifting this a notch or two out of the ordinary.

DORIAN GRAY no stars

You won't get too many Wildean epigrams in this dire updating of "The Picture of Dorain Gray" to Swinging London and hot spots further afield. now retitled simply "Dorian Gray". It's an Italian/British/West German co-production, (most of the cast are dubbed), directed, (very badly), by Massimo Dallamano and starring the admittedly beautiful Helmut Berger as Dorian. Berger had the perfect face for the park; blankly handsome with the emphasis on the blank. He was a very limited actor whose face seldom betrayed any emotion; just right, in other words.

Unfortunately, Dallamano reduces it all to the level of soft Eurotrash porn though to be fair it is nicely photographed and does make good use of its locations. Richard Todd is Basil and Herbert Lom is Henry Wotton, (he's the one dishing out the epigrams), but their talents are totally wasted. In fact, outside of what were commonly called 'the dirty mac brigade' I can't imagine what audience this was intended for and ultimately it's really quite offensive. Avoid at all costs.

THE LAST TYCOON ****

One of the great movies about the movies and probably the most underrated. It's also possibly the most underrated of Elia Kazan's film, (it was to be his last), just as it was to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's final, and unfinished, novel. "The Last Tycoon" was based on Fitzgerald's time in Hollywood and its central character, Monroe Stahr, (a superb Robert De Niro), is said to be based on Irving Thalberg. Stahr is the hottest producer in Hollywood; his wife was the biggest star but she died and then one night he sees Kathleen Moore, (newcomer Ingrid Boulting, very good), a girl who, if not the double of his late wife, looks very like her and he falls for her in a strange, almost existentialist way.

Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay and it's a wonderfully knowing account, not just of the movie business, but of the transcience of human relationships. If Stahr knew as much about people, particularly women, as he does about movies, he might be a happier man, (he begins almost every conversation with 'Do you ever go to the movies'). Of course, Kazan knew as much about the movies as anyone and he's in his element here. There are wonderful asides about the business of making movies, both from an artistic as well as a commercial, perspective. He's also assembled a superb all-star cast as various actors, directors, writers and business people with Jack Nicholson, Jeanne Moreau, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum and a young Theresa Russell the stand-outs but the film flopped and is now regarded as something of a cult movie. It may not be Kazan's late masterpiece but it is still quite wonderful.

SUN IN THE TIME OF THE SHOGUNATE ***

Who would have guessed it? A genuinely funny farce out of Japan at a time (1957) when the likes of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu were keeping the straightest of faces, "Sun in the time of the Shogunate" was actually voted the 4th greatest Japanese film of all time by that most prestigious of Japanese film magazines 'Kinema Junpo'. It's certainly not that; anyone of the films by anyone of the aforementioned directors would leave it in the cold but it's still a sublime entertainment nevertheless and it's easy to see why it's so popular in its own country.

The setting is a brothel in Shinagawa and the action hardly ever ventures outside. The central character is a delightful con-man known as 'The Grifter' who arrives with his friends one night but without a penny in his pocket to pay for the services they receive so he stays...and stays and stays, first to the chagrin of the owners, the girls and the customers but in time he becomes a part of the furniture, doing little deals here and there until he becomes virtually indispensable.

Of course, such a plot is as old as hills but director Yuzo Kawashima keeps it spinning along at lightening speed helped by a wonderful cast headed by Furanki Sakau as The Grifter. Even a subplot involving a group of nationalists with a plan to blow up 'the foreigner's quarters' fits perfectly into a film that, while set at the end of the 19th century, also manages to pass comment on a Japan not long out of a world war. Amazingly, it's not well-known in the West at all but it's a classic of its kind and is well worth seeking out.

CALVARY ***

I'm not really a fan of "The Guard". It was certainly entertaining and reasonably funny but it was also deeply derivative; it often felt like something John Michael McDonagh's more talented brother Martin might have thrown out as not quite up to the mark. "Calvary", McDonagh's new film, is a considerable improvement, if again not wholly successful. For a start, it doesn't feel remotely 'realistic' but then, I hear you ask, why should it be. Realism is not necessarily a prerequisite for a successful drama but this film feels 'scripted', full of stock characters teetering, and sometimes falling over, into cliche. What McDonagh has given us here isn't so much a realistic drama but a parable, a passion play set over the course of a week in which a kind of Christ figure, (in this case, a 'good' priest), waits for his own Calvary which he knows is coming.

It begins in the confessional when someone we don't see tells the priest, (Brendan Gleeson), that he will kill him a week on Sunday. The would-be murderer's reason for this is two-fold; as a child he was repeatedly raped by a priest now dead and secondly, why kill a bad priest? Isn't it a much greater affront to an uncaring God to kill a good priest, a man who is totally innocent?

McDonagh is reputed to have said that this is his 'Bresson' film and yes, there is something Bressonian about the hell that Gleeson is living in, for here is a rural Irish community that could have come out of Dante and have been drawn by Bruegel. There are drug addicts, a rent boy, adulterers, disbelievers, even a child murderer, all well played but none particularly feasible, (it's hard to accept that a policeman who openly avails himself of the services of a gay rent boy would slap a priest in the pub or that a priest would start firing a gun around a bar and then get beaten up by the barman). If you can't believe in the characters then it is hard to accept the initial premiss.


Still, if this film is something of a failure it's an honest and an ambitious failure. The last ten minutes or so are quite devastating and Gleeson, as always, is superb. (Stand-outs in the supporting cast include Chris O'Dowd's cynical wife-beating butcher and Dylan Moran's drunken land-owner). As to who the potential killer is, McDonagh keeps us guessing to the end, throwing in the customary red-herrings to side-track us on the way. It's a film I believe has been overpraised and yet there isn't much else like it out there at the moment. See it and judge for yourselves.

GOODBYE, DRAGON INN ****

A tone poem on the nature of cinema as an entity, an art-form and a place, Ming-Liang Tsai's "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" is unlike almost any other film you will see. To say it will appeal mostly to people who love cinema may not necessarily be true for here is a film that challenges what many people believe cinema should be; entertainment perhaps, something communal and if we view it as a means of expression surely that expression should be more universal than what we get here and yet for many of us, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" will strike us as being intensely personal. For many, this is a film that will stir up what drew us to cinema in the first place.

It's almost totally silent, reminding us that in its infancy cinema was silent. We hear snatches of dialogue from the film within the film, (the martial arts classic "Dragon Inn"), that is being shown in the cinema where almost all of 'the action' takes place but there are no sub-titles. There are only a handful of characters in this cavernous auditorium but they don't communicate. If there is any unification between these people it's through the medium of cinema. There is the lame woman who acts as ticket collector and cleaner, the projectionist, an elderly man and his grandson and a number of gay men who cruise the cinema for sex, (though far from explicit these scenes have a remarkable homoerotic charge making this an essential gay film), and perhaps a ghost.

You could say, of course, that few of these people are there to see the film but were Duane and Sonny there to watch "Red River" in "The Last Picture Show" or was it just a ritual that has to be adhered to as part of a larger scheme, (in their case, growing up; here staving off loneliness). It's also a film about looking; seeing this in a cinema not unlike the one on screen we become part of the experience and it is clear from the extracts from "Dragon Inn" that Ming-Liang Tsai is very much in love with movies.


Nothing really happens and the film moves at a snail's pace yet this is the least boring of art-house movies; it's an immersive experience and whether you see it alone or with others, if you have any feeling for cinema at all, you can't fail but to be touched by it though I suspect, for many, it will be like watching paint dry.

LE PETIT SOLDAT ***

Filmed mostly in Geneva, Godard's "Le Petit Soldat" is as much a love letter to that city as his Paris-set films were to Paris. The inconsequential, free-wheeling plot hardly matters. Are we to take his hero seriously when he says he's a secret agent? Isn't spying and war just another game for Godard whose real concern is beautiful young intellectuals playing at being in love? This time his beautiful young lovers are Michel Subor and Anna Karina and they are photographed in luminous black-and-white by Raoul Coutard, (visually it's one of the most gorgeous of all his films), and yet it's not that well-known. Perhaps it was just too much like "Breathless" or just too cine-literate for its own good. Whatever the reason it's not often revived now but it is certainly well worth seeking out.

THE CONSTANT NYMPH no stars

Deeply, deeply strange. It must have been a hit of some sort when it first appeared in 1943 since Joan Fontaine was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar but now it's hard to imagine this extremely old-fashioned load of twaddle having an audience of any kind. It was based on a book and then a play and set in some strange studio-based Swtizerland and then in some strange studio-based London where French avant-garde composer Charles Boyer lives with his rich, spoilt wife Alexis Smith while her sickly schoolgirl cousin, (a very overage Fontaine), pines for him.

I think it's meant to be a 'women's picture' or romantic drama of the kind director Edmund Goulding was famous for but it's much too bizarre to be engaging on any level while a supporting cast that includes Peter Lorre, May Whitty and Charles Coburn is totally wasted. It's never revived which is perfectly understandable and is nobody's finest hour though in its favour, it's too terrible to be actually boring.

ESSENTIAL KILLING no stars

Boredom personified. As an Afghan prisoner who escapes when the vehicle in which he is traveling crashes, Vincent Gallo, in a totally wordless performance, is excellent, (Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival), but Jerzy Skolimowski's picture "Essential Killing" goes nowhere very, very slowly. Skolimowski brings a documentary-like fidelity to the material that might be admirable in another context as Gallo is pursued through the inhospitable terrain by his mostly faceless and nameless enemies. It's fairly grim stuff; the 'essential killing' of the title is what Gallo is forced to do in order to survive but this isn't "The Revenant" and as man-in-the-wilderness movies go it has little to recommend it.

HUSTLERS *

Based on a true story "Hustlers" is about a group of pole-dancers who turn to crime; "Widows" it ain't. What it is, is a glossy female caper about sisterhood turning sour that takes too long to get to the point, though it is mostly redeemed by a star turn from Jennifer Lopez, (looking stunning), as the tough cookie who masterminds the hustle. The film itself is a fairly minor affair that for some obscure reason has wowed a lot of the critics with 'Sight and Sound' putting it in their top twenty films of the year. There is a story to be told here for sure but sadly we've seen it all before.

THE DAY OF THE LOCUST ***

Critically much maligned but really rather an outstanding screen adaptation of Nathanael West's 'difficult' novel about Hollywood in the 1930's and based on West's own experiences there as a 'hack' writer. The British director John Schlesinger helmed the picture, bringing much the same jaundiced eye to bear on proceedings as he did in "Midnight Cowboy". Waldo Salt wrote the excellent script and the outstanding cast included Karen Black as the wannabe actress trying to make it big in the movies, Burgess Meredith as her drunken father, William Atherton as the young art director in love with her and Donald Sutherland as the sad and lonely Homer Simpson that Black all but destroys and whose presence instigates the films tragic ending. The great Conrad Hall photographed the picture and the monstrous child is Jackie Earle Haley.

HUMPDAY ***

A classic comedy of embarrassment from writer/director Lynn Shelton who brings an unerringly accurate eye to her tale of two life-long buddies who decide to make a 'gay' porn video together, ('Two straight guys bang each other'), drawing totally terrific performances from leads Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard, (the guys), and Alycia Delmore, (Duplass' much too talented wife), in the process.

It's a very funny and surprisingly truthful picture, full of the kind of people you would probably cross the road to avoid, (with the exception of Delmore who is sexy and sweet in equal measure). Amazingly the premiss never feels that far-fetched; the chemistry between Duplass and Leonard is strong enough to make you think there might be more to their friendship than meets the eye and if their characters aren't that endearing the movie most certainly is.

THE CAPTAIN ***

The story told in "The Captain" really stretches credulity and yet it's true. A young deserter from the German army in the closing days of the War finds a captain's uniform and when he puts it on isn't just mistaken for a captain but becomes, in his own mind, a figure of great power; in fact, he becomes a mass murderer yet amazingly no-one in authority, or even the grunts he comes across, think to question his age. We are told at the end of the film that when he was charged with war crimes he was only 21 years old.

This German made film looks at a shocking event in their recent history and it shows, without apology, the terrible things the Nazis did but, significantly, it doesn't condemn the German people; there are 'good' Germans here, too or rather Germans so sickened with what is happening they rebel in what little way they can. Things happen here that happen in many war films if perhaps in a more surreal fashion but fundamentally the real theme of Robert Schwentke's film is how, once an idea is planted in the mind, it ceases to be an idea and becomes a reality.

Surely there must have been evidence that our young deserter, (Max Hubacher, terrific), was always a monster and putting on the uniform only gave credence to this but more significantly the uniform itself becomes a symbol of power to others. It's like those psychological experiments where simply saying something is fact makes it so, particularly if you have a prop, only in this case it was no experiment but quite possibly the very personification of evil. "The Captain" will chill you to the bone.

A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG no stars

Possibly the worst film ever made by a great director. Chaplin made "A Countess from Hong Kong" in 1966, nine years after "A King in New York" which, although a failure at the time, now seems like a lost masterpiece compared with this totally unfunny farce. Working in colour for the first time and with two Oscar-winning actors, Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, this could have been, should have been the final work of genius rather than the self-indulgent disaster it turned out to be.

Brando is the American diplomat sailing from Hong Kong to America and Loren is the exiled Russian countess who has stowed away in his cabin. Loren looks as gorgeous as she ever did and even manages to give a comic performance of some depth but Brando looks very uncomfortable as if he knows just what a load of merde he's landed himself in, (it's one of his few really bad performances; even Sydney Chaplin as his best friend out-acts him).

Charlie himself turns up in a cameo and it's sad to see him make his final appearance in something as bad as this. It's now fashionable to try to find favour with the picture as if someone like Chaplin could never have made anything quite so terrible but let me assure you that with "A Countess from Hong Kong" he could and he did.

SYMPATHY FOR MR VENGANCE ****

Let's forget about the extreme violence for a moment, if that's possible, and just say than Chan-wook Park is one of contemporary cinema's great visual stylists and that "Sympathy for Mr Vengance" is a terrific looking picture. It's also highly original, a kidnap drama with a deaf mute hero who kidnaps a little girl so he can get the money to pay for his sister's kidney transplant. You might even say it would be darkly funny if the 'comedy' were more pronounced but then comedy isn't really Park's style. His style is violence which, for maximum effect, he keeps in the background until he's ready to spring it on us in a welter of blood-letting. as well as having a remarkable eye for composition; sometimes the sheer beauty of his images allows him to get away with things that other directors couldn't. "Sympathy for Mr. Vengance" is an horrific film with its horrors delivered so matter-of-factly they shake you up in ways more conventional films don't and I can't imagine an American mainstream director treating this material in quite the same way. This may yet prove to be his masterpiece but I'm not sure I'd ever want to see it again.

THIS IS MY STREET *

This slice of so-called British realism came after a slew of really outstanding kitchen-sink dramas and was really something of a let-down. As directed by the lack-lustre Sidney Hayers it's more of a throwback to the British films of the forties and fifties, watchable certainly but nothing to get excited about. It's also let down by the highly inadequate performance of the pretty but vacant June Ritchie, cast here as the unhappily married housewife seduced by randy neighbour Ian Hendry. He's excellent, certainly a lot better than his material. However, none of the supporting cast, including a very young John Hurt, make much of an impression.

THE OCCUPANT no stars

A home invasion movie with a difference. "The Occupant" is a slow-burn of a Spanish thriller that has a nice idea but which just crawls along, building suspense at a snail's pace. Javier, (Javier Gutierrez), has lost his job and is forced to give up his expensive Barcelona apartment so naturally, what do you think he does? He finds a spare set of keys and sneaks in when the new tenants are out. Then he insinuates himself into their lives planning on destroying the husband's career, marriage and just about everything else he holds dear.

It's a reasonably well made psychological thriller about a dangerously psychotic individual but it lacks credibility. A sub-plot involving a paedophile feels very manufactured while Gutierrez gives a strictly one-note performance. On the plus side it's nicely shot by Pau Castejan. Like I said, a nice idea lost in a film with too many red herrings.

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME ***

This classic was co-directed by Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack and while some of its effects might seem rather rudimentary by today's standards it's still a cracker. The basic story has been filmed countless times in one form or another but "The Most Dangerous Game" still knocks its competitors for six. Set in one of those exotic South Sea Islands so beloved of filmmakers in the 1930's, (you know, the kind of place where King Kong hung out), this is the one about the big game hunter, (Joel McCrea), becoming the hunted, victim to the monstrous Count Zaroff, (a splendidly over-the-top Leslie Banks). There's also a woman involved, (a screaming Fay Wray, naturally), and it's both exciting and superbly designed, (Zaroff's 'fortress' home could just as easily have housed Dr. Frankenstein or Count Dracula). Clocking in at just 63 minutes, this is a B-Movie with A-Movie credentials and is hugely enjoyable.

FOR ELLEN ****

Paul Dano is outstanding, (when is Paul Dano anything less than outstanding), as the rock star on a road trip to see his young daughter, Ellen, (the extraordinary Shaylena Mandigo). The Korean director So Yong Kim made this very American film and, like so many other 'outsiders', brings a very astute eye to both the characters and the landscape as well as paying homage, in its closing shot, to one of the great American films of the seventies.

Not a great deal happens but the films emotional core is very strong thanks, in large part, to Dano's extraordinary performance. He's never really off the screen and he dominates virtually every shot. His lack of an Oscar nomination is still something of a mystery to me. In the small but telling part of Dano's lawyer, a mother's-boy infatuated with his client, Jon Heder is also outstanding. Both these performances are Oscar-worthy but "For Ellen" is a small, independent film that never recieved the distribution it should have so not many people saw it. If you are one of those who allowed it to pass you by, seek it out; you certainly won't regret it.

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN ***

"The French Lieutenant's Woman" was another of those books everyone said could never be filmed. John Fowles wrote it, both as a Victorian melodrama and as a 20th century comment on such melodramas and he gave it alternative endings, one 'happy' and the other 'unhappy'. How could any filmmaker film this and make it feel original? The novel idea that Karl Reisz and screen-writer Harold Pinter came up with was to do a reasonably straightforward film of the Victorian novel in the style of any period drama but to intersperse it with scenes of the actors playing the characters in a modern story in which they are shooting the film of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and just as there is an illict love story between Charles and Sarah Woodruff, the French Lieutenant's Whore as she refers to herself, so too there is an illict love story between Mike and Anna, the actors who play them and in these roles both Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep are superb, even if Streep's put-on English accent is ripe for parody.

When the film was released it met with very mixed reviews. Some people felt it failed miserably in its cross-cutting while others thought it was something of a masterpiece. Neither view is entirely accurate. The Victorian scenes are indeed terrific, not just in how they are played but in their design and in the way they are shot by Freddie Francis while the contemporary scenes do feel out of place with the parallels to the Victorian story made much too obvious but at least this gives Reisz and Pinter their chance to give us both endings. It's not the greatest adaptation of a book but it never ceases to be fascinating all the way up to those alternative endings.

CHAOTIC ANA no stars

Ana, (Manuela Velles), is a young hippie living in a cave in Ibiza with her father, painting pictures which she sells to tourists. One day Justine, (Charlotte Rampling), happens by and takes Ana off to her colony of artists in Madrid where she meets the handsome Berber Said, (Nicholas Cazale). Julio Medem's "Chaotic Ana" aims to be a kind of dark fairy-tale with a heroine whose life is more chaotic than it first appears. Under hypnosis it seems she lived several lives before this one.

The problem is Medem's film can't quite make up its mind what it wants to be; a psychological study of a young woman with multiple (past) personalities, a cool thriller about a kind of cult, a political movie about refugees and Middle-Eastern politics or a movie about performance art? As Ana, Velles is certainly a blank slate but it's a blankless lacking in personality and unfortunately Ana is actually quite boring and she's the film's dominant character, (Rampling flits in and out, saying and doing very little), and at around two hours it's very long. This is a film with too many ideas that never amount to anything and is ultimately a lost opportunity.