SORRY, ANGEL *

 Fundamentally ordinary yet incredibly self-centred, the characters in Christophe Honore's "Sorry, Angel" are not easy people to like. They are mostly a group of gay and bisexual men with complicated lives who find that relationships aren't necessarily what they're good at; even having a job, earning a living or just being 'themselves' also seem to pose a problem. The two main characters are Jacques, a writer in his thirties, (Pierre Deladonchamps), and Arthur, (Vincent Lacoste), a younger student, who meet, have sex and then go about the business of falling in love but find 'happy ever after' something of a pipedream.

It's territory Honore has explored before and more explicitly but this well-crafted, if overtly cool, movie represents something of a step forward if only in terms of style. This is a more formal, less kinetic, Honore but one still unable to shake off that sense of ennui. The performances are excellent but the characters aren't engaging. Also setting it at a time when AIDS was more prevalent than it is now seems like an unnecessary plot device rather than an attempt to get us to understand or care more about the people we see. Throw in a girlfriend and Jacques' young son and you get the impression that Honore is going out of his way to be 'cool' as if making a gay epic but one without a centre. Add a load of references to cinema and literature and you know exactly who this is aimed at. One for the fans, I'm afraid.

THE FAN *

 Another psychopathic fan movie and another considerable waste of the talents of the great Maureen Stapleton. Here she's secretary to a 'big star' and she's terrific for the short time she appears in the movie. The star being psychopathically stalked is Lauren Bacall, who's actually quite good playing in full, imperious diva mode. The stalker is Michael Biehn, (excellent), and while the movie is trashy and often tasteless, (it's peculiarly homophobic), it's also surprisingly enjoyable in a bad movie kind of way. Unfortunately it's an ugly looking picture and the editing is somewhat perfunctory so points knocked off there. Otherwise, more than passable midnight movie fare.

THE VOICE OF THE MOON no stars

 Federico Fellini's virtually unknown final film is neither the almost total disaster many people claim it to be nor the late masterpiece it could have been. It is, however, typical Fellini, certainly typical of his work from the mid-sixties on, full of whimsical middle-aged men and large-breasted women. We could be back in the Rimini of "Amarcord" but instead we are in a mythical town where nothing seems real and with everything unfolding as if in a dream. It's certainly hugely self-indulgent while lead Roberto Benigni has always been an acquired taste. In its favour you might say that two minutes in and you know you are watching a Fellini film even if it's a bad one; his signature is in every frame. If, like me, you regard him as one of cinema's great visionaries you will be massively disappointed and if you've always thought of him as overrated you can safely say 'I told you so'. I wish I could simply chalk it down as an interesting failure but it's less than that; a sad end to a greatly distinguished career.

THE GOOD LIAR **

 Once upon a time it would have been unheard of for a movie to get off the ground on the strength of leads whose combined ages totalled one hundred and fifty nine. On the other hand, mention that those leads are Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Helen Mirren and you just might manage to sell it. In "The Good Liar" Sir Ian is an ageing con-man and Dame Helen potentially his next victim, whom he meets on an online dating site and one of the film's pleasures is watching these two great thespians act their little cotton socks off. 

The target audience may indeed be readers of 'The Oldie' but if you dismiss this simply as one for the wrinklies you'd be missing a very enjoyable old-school thriller. Russell Tovey is here to cater for the younger market though you might feel his character is a bit superfluous while director Bill Condon makes great use of locations both in London and Berlin. Unfortunately the plot goes a little off the rails at the end so marks knocked off for that but still nice to see something as old-fashioned as this in 2019.

CALL NORTHSIDE 777 *

 This movie about a piece of real-life investigative journalism was much lauded at the time of its release, mainly for being one of the first features to be filmed in the actual locations where the events took place. It's certainly a good-looking picture, well directed by Henry Hathaway in an unhurried, unsensational fashion and yet it's dull. This is the story of a man in prison for life for a murder he didn't commit and of one reporter's efforts to get him reprieved but there's no excitement, no sense of urgency; it's certainly not a whodunit.

"Call Northside 777" falls into that category of films you admire for the skill with which they're made but which don't engage you on an emotional level and given the subject, this one should. James Stewart is the reporter and he goes about his duties earnestly but without conviction, (it's one of his least interesting performances), and it's left to Richard Conte, the prisoner, to give the film whatever feeling it has. He's very good but it's a small role. The rest of a good cast are largely wasted and the real star of the picture is Joe MacDonald who did the superb location photography. It's not seen much these days and is hardly likely to hold an audience raised on the likes of "All the President's Men"

THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED **

 If movies were the sum of their credits, both in front of and behind the camera, then "This Property is Condemned" might have been a masterpiece. It isn't but it's a damn fine, if underrated and largely forgotten, film nevertheless. Based very loosely on a one-act play by Tennessee Williams and with a screenplay in part written by Francis Coppola, (without the Ford), it's a sweetly tough romantic drama about the relationship between a small-town dreamer of a girl, (a superb Natalie Wood), and the railroad 'fixer', (an excellent Robert Redford), who comes to stay in her mother's boarding house during the Great Depression. It's fairly conventional, predictable even, but it oozes charm, is beautifully cast, (as well as the leads there's good work from Kate Reid as Wood's less-than-wholesome mother and Mary Badham as her kid sister), superbly photographed by James Wong Howe and has a fine Kenyon Hopkins score. Of course, by 1966 movies like this were no longer in fashion. Essentially it's a throwback to the kind of films Elia Kazan was making in the previous ten years and it would sit very nicely on a double-bill with "Splendour in the Grass". So, no masterpiece then or anything close to one but a very solid, grown-up entertainment of the kind we don't see too often these days.

OM BAR-D-BAR no stars

 "Om Bar-D-Bar" is a free-wheeling piece of what might best be described as 'experimental' cinema. It has a narrative but that narrative, along with the film's 'style', is all over the place. In America, of course, such films are fairly common in avant-garde cinema but this one hails from India and came out at a time when Indian feature films were meant to be nothing more exciting than the usual Bollywood production. This one may have Bollywood elements but, like everything else in the picture, they are subverted.

It was directed by Kamal Swaroop and it was clearly not aimed at a mass audience. if technically it's on the ropey side, (some of the night-time shooting is poor), it does show imagination and is often shot like a documentary. Of course, the big question is, is it any good or just self-indulgent? Swaroop clearly has skill, (though this is the only one of his films I've seen), but despite the skill and the imagination I found it very hard-going.

JUST MERCY ***

 "Just Mercy" might have been just another inspirational true story of the kind the American cinema seems very fond of and which they usually treat with much larger dollops of sentimentality than necessary but thanks to director Destin Daniel Cretton's expert handling of the material, a fine script and first-rate performances from Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx this is much more gripping, moving and intelligent than it could have been. It's the story of young African-American lawyer Bryan Stevenson and his fight to free wrongly convicted death-row prisoner Walter McMillan; Jordan is Stevenson and Foxx is McMillan. Of course, that's just the up close and personal element; what it's really about is America's Systemic Racism and although it's set thirty odd years ago the tragedy is it could have been made yesterday.

It's also a thriller, a kind of companion piece to "In the Heat of the Night" but without the grandstanding, Oscar-bait, crowd-pleasing elements and instead of a scenery-chewing Rod Steiger we have a much more nuanced Ralf Spall as a small town Southern lawyer. In fact, all the performances are first-rate with everyone underplaying superbly, (there's an Oscar-worthy turn from Tim Blake Nelson as a key witness), but the casting is just one of the film's many strengths. Cretton and Andrew Lanham's screenplay is humorous as well as honest while Cretton directs in that straightforward, classical style that Clint Eastwood has honed to perfection. Indeed Eastwood could easily have made this and if he had we would be hailing it as one of his finest films. Cretton has every reason to be proud.

THE CHILDREN ACT ****

 The British Cinema has a long literary tradition. Yes, we've had the Kitchen Sink Movement and Hammer and a whole lot of 'stiff upper lip' war movies but perhaps what the British Cinema does best is tell good stories, unadorned, often taken from good novels or, if written directly for the screen, following the format of a good novel and Richard Eyre's "The Children Act" is no exception, so it comes as no surprise that it was written by Ian McEwan and is based on his own novel and that the director has a very solid reputation directing for the theatre.

This is a 'problem picture' but since, Ken Loach apart, the British don't really do problem pictures there's also a strong back story about a marriage that's in trouble. The marriage in question is that of Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci, a very well heeled middle-aged couple. The central story, and the one that makes this a problem picture, deals with Thompson's role in a court case involving the son of Jehovah Witnesses who requires a life-saving blood transfusion contrary to his and his parents' faith. Thompson is the judge presiding in the case and it's her judgement that will decide the outcome.

The film of "The Children Act" is, indeed, the kind of literary cinema the British do brilliantly but it's more than that and not just because it deals with a serious and contentious issue but because of the immense skill of all involved. McEwan has adapted his novel superbly and Eyre directs it beautifully and at its heart lies a truly terrific performance from Thompson, too often cast these days in eccentric supporting roles but here given the opportunity to finally carry a picture again. Tucci, too, is excellent as the errant husband and in a first-rate supporting cast Jason Watkins and Fionn Whitehead, (the boy in question), are stand-outs. This is highly intelligent cinema, as gripping in its own way as any thriller and is a very pleasant and welcome change from so much of the  highfalutin art-house stuff we've been getting recently. Very highly recommended.

THE FIXER *

 A miscast Alan Bates is "The Fixer" of the title in John Frankenheimer's film version of Bernard Malamud's novel. Set in Czarist Russia, Bates is the Jewish handyman accused and imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit and Dirk Bogarde is the lawyer who does what he can to help him and there's a large, starry cast of mostly British thespians playing various Russians and Jews to the best of their ability or not as the case may be.

It was a prestige production in the MGM tradition of grandiose literary works and you half expect to see Richard Brooks' name on the credits but from Frankenheimer you expect more. In the early sixties he was the wunderkind of the American cinema, turning out exciting and edgy pictures like "Birdman of Alcatraz" and "The Manchurian Candidate" but this is stodgy and old-fashioned and it hammers its arguments home with very little subtlety, (it was written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo). Bogarde goes some way to redeeming it but not far enough.

AMATEUR no stars

 Hal Hartley isn't for everyone. He's certainly not going to appeal to the kind of audiences hooked on what Marvel are turning out and even the art-house crowd haven't always related to his brand of very dry, off-the-wall humour and the kind of one-note performances he draws from his casts and yet his reputation has remained rock solid for over thirty years. He made "Amateur" in 1994 with regular co-star Martin Donovan together with Elina Lowensohn and French legend Isabelle Huppert. The plot hardly matters; it's like a riff on the gangster movie but so daft you can discount it as any kind of thriller and too lacking in what we might call 'gags' to be classed as a comedy. 

Donovan is the amnesiac who wakes up, injured in an alley, before wandering into a cafe where he meets ex-nun, now porn writer Isabelle Huppert who then brings him home. So far, so regular but from here on it kicks off every which way; they could be making it up as it goes along and maybe they were though Hartley is credited with the screenplay. Of course, there are people who find all of this hilarious and perhaps even intellectually stimulating but it only took about twenty minutes for me to realise that Hartley has never been my kind of poison. For fans only.