THE BLUE FLOWER OF NOVALIS *

 "The Blue Flower of Novalis" opens and closes with a shot of its protagonist's anus so you may well think you know what you're in for...or maybe not, since this documentary look into the life of gay poet Marcelo Diorio isn't quite like other films or documentaries. It's fundamentally a conversation piece between Diorio and an unseen interviewer and your tolerance for it will depend very much on how well you relate to Diorio or films of this kind which moves from a straightforward interview into staged memory and fantasy scenes that are surely purely scripted. Is Diorio always acting or is he just being himself and is there any reason for us to care one way or the other about someone so clearly egotistical and then, of course, there's the question as to why co-directors Rodrigo Carneiro and Gustavo Vinagre would have wanted to make this in the first place, (we are also privy to Diorio having fairly graphic sex). Boring and fascinating in equal measure and aimed at a very niche, and probably exclusively gay, market.

3 IDIOTS ****

 The title may conjure up images of the 3 Stooges and the crude humour of the opening might suggest a Hindi "Porky's" but with a running time of almost three hours "3 Idiots" clearly has its mind on higher things. It's a Bollywood buddy-movie devised as an epic and determined to outdo all the competition and being a Bollywood movie is full of large-scale musical numbers as well as a lot of very broad and very funny comedy.

The 3 idiots of the title meet as engineering students, become life-long friends but are separated by that old fickle finger of fate. It's also bold enough to deal with such issues as suicide and poverty and, of course, the caste system and is lifted onto an altogether higher plain by a terrific performance from Aamir Khan as 'the idiot' the other two worship and who, naturally, isn't an idiot at all but the sharpest tool in the box and he's brilliantly supported by Sharman Joshi as his potentially suicidal friend and Omi Vaidya as his number one rival. Brilliantly directed by Rajkumar Hirani this is the kind of film Hollywood could learn a lot from and which, had it been a Hollywood film, might well have swept the boards come Oscar time.

THE FAREWELL *

 A comedy about dying but coming from the Chinese-American director Lulu Wang, less maudlin than it might have been. Nai Nai, (an excellent Shuzhen Zhao), is the Chinese grandmother with only three months to live, so her American family come up with an excuse to fly to China to visit her; they plan a wedding which gives them a reason to celebrate rather than to mourn, (and the wedding itself is superbly done).

This is a sweet-natured, sentimental film that still feels like it's strung out way beyond its expiry date and is ultimately redeemed by Zhao's performance. As the granddaughter who wants the family to tell Nai Nai the truth, the much vaunted Awkwafina is so laid back as to be almost horizontal, (she still won a Golden Globe), and yet a lot of people love this film, (maybe they're Chinese and 'get it'). It's at its best when it points up the differences between East and West but that's not enough to make a movie and ultimately this is less "The Farewell" as something of a long goodbye.

THE BIG OPERATOR *

 The title's something of a misnomer since "The Big Operator" in question is none other than the diminutive Mickey Rooney. This Albert Zugsmith movie, which he produced in 1959, is a gangster flic about a mob-ruled union with Rooney as 'Little Joe', a corrupt union leader and it has a better than average supporting cast headed by Steve Cochran, (in a rare good-guy role), Mamie Van Doren, (miscast but coping as Cochran's sweet, blonde wife), Mel Torme, (good in a rare dramatic role), as well as Ray Danton and Jim Backus.

The plot's nothing new and, to be honest, the script is fairly ridiculous but it's reasonably well directed by Charles Haas, nicely shot in Cinemascope by Walter Castle and makes for an entertaining 90 minutes. Rooney drifts through it and you would hardly call what he does 'acting' but he was a star, all five foot two inches of him, a punk Little Caesar and he dominates the picture. It's certainly no classic and it's certainly no "Touch of Evil" but it's a good, tawdry genre picture and perfect drive-in fodder.

MY FOOLISH HEART **

There isn't a great deal of J. D. Salinger's short story "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut" left in Mark Robson's supposed film version "My Foolish Heart" but it's a superior example of the 'woman's picture' nevertheless, thanks almost entirely to a superb Susan Hayward as the unhappily married woman recalling her first love, (Dana Andrews, always a good bet). The director was Mark Robson and it's one of his better pictures while the Epstein's (Julius J. and Philip G.) did the screenplay, again a good sign. Hayward was Oscar-nominated, as was the famous title song which, in its many incarnations, has outlived the film. No classic, then, but an intelligent and likeable picture that deserves to be better known.

THE SILENT PARTNER **

Daryl Duke's excellent and underrated thriller "The Silent Partner" is an ingenious heist movie with an over-active vicious streak and a couple of very good performances from Elliot Gould as the bank clerk who figures out his bank is going to be robbed and steals the money himself and from Christopher Plummer as the bad-to-the-bone crook out for his money and revenge. It's a simple enough plot but it's a tale well told, full of neat twists and Plummer is indeed splendidly nasty just as Gould is wonderfully duplicitous and there's good work, too, from Susannah York as the colleague Gould's in love with and who's not quite as innocent as she appears. Director Duke, who also made "Payday" and very little else for the big screen, does nothing to detract from the action and keeps it all bubbling along nicely. A sleeper that slipped under the radar and is now ripe for rediscovery.

I'M ALL RIGHT, JACK. ***

One of the great British satires. This time the Boulting Brothers' targets are the Trade Unions and, of course, the class system and the film is the brilliantly funny "I'm All Right, Jack", a very loose sequel to their earlier "Private's Progress" and it has a cast of some of the best comic actors ever gathered together in a British comedy. Ian Carmichael is that upper-class twit Stanley Windrush, Terry-Thomas is the galloping major and, best of all, Peter Sellers is Kite, that little Hitler of a shop steward. Then there's Dennis Price, Richard Attenborough, Margaret Rutherford and more British character actors than you can shake a union card at. A huge hit at the time, (Sellers won the BAFTA for Best British Actor), and it's still as funny today. Yes, it does sound crudely racist but then so was Britain back in 1959 and for once the jokes are on the racists, another sign of just how good the Boulting Brothers actually were.

SWIMMING POOL ***

If people must do riffs on Hitchcock why can't they all do it as well as Francois Ozon who not only ticks all the right boxes but has fun doing it in sunny climes. Not for him the slapdash suspense of just having a body buried in the woodshed but a deliciously unsettling piece of pop psychology in which two women from different generations, sharing the same fairly enclosed space, find they simply don't get along and since they are played by Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier, what's not to like.

Few actresses in movies have matured as well as Rampling. To think that thirty years earlier she would have been the sexy little minx of a daughter giving some starchy matron a hard time; now she's the matron with a rod of steel determined not to be put off her stroke by any interfering little sexpot while Sagnier has a ball as the thorn in her side.

Since the movie is entitled "Swimming Pool" and since Rampling has expressed her dislike of such places you just know that the pool will become the third character in the picture but which of the two women is going to use it to their advantage and why isn't Sagnier's father, (Charles Dance), Rampling's publisher who suggested she vacation in the house in the first place, (it's in France), not answering Rampling's calls? Oh, and Rampling writes crime fiction.

This is Ozon at his most playfully erotic, taking nothing too seriously but teasing us at every turn. That fact that he does it in such gorgeous surroundings is an added bonus but then Ozon is such a confidently assured film-maker the surroundings hardly matter. A treat.

ODETTE no stars

Only the team of Herbert Wilcox, (producer and director), and Anna Neagle, (his actress wife), could take a story like "Odette" and make something as dull as this. Odette Sansom was a British agent working in Nazi occupied France so the potential for excitement and drama was evident but everyone connected to the film pussyfoots around the issues it raises and treats Odette as if she was the Virgin Mary. Of course, Neagle was never a serious actress to start with and throughout behaves as if she had done nothing more than spill something on her dress at a Royal Garden Party, her stiff upper lip hardly quivering at all while actors as fine as Trevor Howard and Peter Ustinov can do nothing with the leaden material they have to work with, (only Marius Goring goes some way to lifting the film out of the doldrums), and the whole thing drags on for two hours. Odette's story should have been both moving and inspiring and with a better writer, a better director and a better actress it might have been but this half-hearted attempt by the British Establishment to honour a genuine heroine simply falls flat.

NON-FICTION ****

I love a comedy and I love smart movies and intelligent conversation and I love books and here they all are, rolled up together in Olivier Assayas' marvellous new film "Non-Fiction". At his best no-one can touch Assayas for smart talk and this time he's got a great subject, the dumbing down of culture, particularly the written word as books disappear to be subsumed into the World Wide Web, the Cloud, whatever, as people write and read blogs but don't pick up a printed book.

I don't doubt for a minute that anyone reading this review will know what I'm talking about. Film criticism on an electronic device is a symptom of what Assayas is talking about here. Indeed, Juliette Binoche's character is an actress in a television cop show. She's married to Alain, (a superb Guillaume Canet), a publisher who wants to move over to e-books. Vincent Macaigne is an author whose new manuscript Alain has decided not to publish and who uses his own life and the people he knows as material for his work. He's also having an affair with Alain's wife, (Binoche), leading to a great running joke at the expense of Haneke's "The White Ribbon".

It's all good fun, aimed at people who read books, in whatever form, discuss politics and watch Bergman and Haneke and even "Star Wars" movies. Assayas knows his audience and isn't afraid to poke fun at them. You might call this a very French film; it's full of intellectuals having sex and cheating on their partners, not that I'm suggesting these are specifically French concerns. Of course, you don't need to be French or even an intellectual to enjoy this. It's very funny and brilliantly acted by a large cast. Binoche is as good as she's ever been and both Canet and Macaigne are simply wonderful. You do need a tolerance for smart talk, however, as in this film conversation is what passes for action. A movie for our times and not to be missed.

THE ASSISTANT ***

Following on from the Harvey Weinstein scandal and other instances of sexual abuse and harassment by the rich and powerful I'm sure movies like "The Assistant" are going to become more common place but I doubt if many of them will be this strange, this unsettling or indeed this good. Although fiction, "The Assistant" looks and feels like it could be a documentary and Kitty Green, whose first feature this is, does indeed come from a documentary background.

The assistant of the title, (a beautifully subdued Julia Garner), is a young woman employed in the New York office of a media mogul, not just as a kind of secretary, but as someone to clean up, (literally), the mess (literally), that her boss leaves behind and to take whatever verbal abuse he dishes out. She is safe, it would seem, from sexual harassment because, as she's told, 'she's not his type'.

This is a genuinely frightening film that goes beyond what has come to be known as the #MeToo Movement. It paints a horrifying picture of what powerful people can do to subordinates given the chance, (I know because I too worked with such people but I, at least, had the balls to stand up to them...and not get fired). What distinguishes Green's film is that she never over-dramatizes, (if anything, she holds back almost to the point of boredom), uses actors who are not well-known to us, (a magnificently obsequious Matthew Macfadyen is the best known person on screen), and films it, not as a clammy thriller, but as a fly-on-the-wall slice of life. There is none of the triumphalism of "Bombshell" on display here, just the chilly feeling that an unseen monster is lurking out of camera shot and destroying the lives of everyone around him.

EDGE OF DOOM *

"Edge of Doom's" credentials were certainly first-class. It was a Samuel Goldwyn production directed by Mark Robson with a screenplay by Philip Yordan and a cast that included Dana Andrews, Farley Granger, Joan Evans, Robert Keith and Paul Stewart but the story was gloomy, (Granger's the youth who kills a priest and Andrews is a priest who tries to find out why), even if the treatment showed a certain amount of imagination. Unfortunately, Andrews was totally miscast as a priest, (he tells the story in flashback and is appallingly sanctimonious), while Granger, never much of an actor, can't bring his character to life. Where it does score is in Harry Stradling's black and white cinematography and in Richard Day's art direction, both of which capture the seedy, poverty-stricken milieu perfectly. It wasn't a hit; the grim story obviously put audiences off but it's just unusual enough to be interesting and it does deserve to be better known. Just a pity it's so glum.