THE HALFWAY HOUSE ***

 This virtually unknown little gem was recently picked by my friend Alex Ramon as one of his ten best films in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films ever made. While I wouldn't go that far it's certainly extraordinary and hopefully, thanks to Alex, a film well worth discovering.

"The Halfway House" of the title is a place not dissimilar in cinema to many other houses in which a group of people find themselves trapped, metaphorically or literally, in what we might describe as a loose genre that stretches from "The Old Dark House" through "Dr. Terror's House of Horrors" all the way to some of the home invasion movies of today.

Set during the closing years of the Second World War, the people here are a sundry bunch who arrive at an Inn in the Welsh countryside but it's an Inn that really shouldn't exist, having been destroyed by a bomb the previous year. Their hosts are Mervyn Johns, (always good in a ghost story, for indeed this is what it is), and his real-life daughter Glynis Johns, and all of them have problems that need sorting out.

It's clear from quite early on that this will indeed be a ghost story of sorts. It's also an Ealing comedy and a piece of wartime propaganda, (Ireland's neutrality and possible 'friendship' with Germany is touched on and how many war films of the period would think of that angle). You might even say it's an anti-war film since the futility of war is also a theme.

Very loosely adapted by Angus MacPhail and Diana Morgan from the play "The Peaceful Inn" by Denis Ogden it's also beautifully acted by its ensemble cast with Francoise Rosay, Esmond Knight, Alfred Drayton and Tom Walls the standouts. Basil Dearden was the director though Alberto Cavalcanti also had his hand in it and it's not only one of Dearden's most neglected films but also one of his best. Perhaps not top ten material, then, but one for the ages nevertheless.

MEMORIA ****

 Nobody goes to an Apichapong Weerasethakul film for action or excitement unless, of course, they like their excitement to be of the purely cerebral kind. Weerasethakul makes films so slow there are times when you think they've stopped altogether. In "Memoria", his first film largely in English (and Spanish), Tilda Swinton is the woman who hears loud noises in her head, like a heavy object being dropped, and which of us hasn't been awakened from sleep on hearing something similiar? But strange things happen around Tilda, such as car alarms going off for no reason or a man seemingly dying and then coming back to life as he sleeps beside her.

Sounds of every kind play a major part in "Memoria" and naturally where you have sound you must also have silence and from that silence the 'recreation' of sound and therein lies the cerebral excitement of Weerasethakul's most recent feature, the external piecing together of what is happening inside Swinton's head and since we can't physically get inside her head it's left to the actress to convey in her expressions and her movements what she is experiencing, more often than not without the help of dialogue, (this is a film of long silences).

Of course, Weerasethakul's films have always been about the relationship of a character to their environment, emphasised by the amalgamation of sound and vision, "Tropical Malady", being perhaps the most notable example as reality and the purely fantastical merge without explanation and this could be its sister film. Is Swinton simply suffering from a tropical malady or, like Uncle Boonmee, could she be recalling past lives?

In some ways this is Weerasethakul's most accessible film. Always a sublime maker of what we might term 'metaphysical thrillers' but which tend to keep us at a distance here, thanks to Swinton's quietly magnificent performance, he really draws us in. With its allusions to mysticism and danger we are practically in the realms of a suspense movie though certainly not one that will appeal to a mass audience. Weerasethakul will always remain an art-house director and it's in art-houses that this extraordinary film will prosper. See it at all costs.

THE SON *

 Florian Zeller wrote three separate plays, "The Father", "The Son" and "The Mother", though the plays are not directly connected. In 2020 he made his directorial debut with "The Father" and showed great skill in transforming a very theatrical piece into something wholly cinematic. Now he has given us the film version of "The Son". The subject is mental illness and how families deal with it and cinema has been dealing with these kind of issues almost since the beginning and family dramas like this have been grist to the mill for American cinema for decades, usually treating the subject sensationally. Zeller, however, treats the subject with a clinical coolness and it's a failing the film never recovers from.

Here a seventeen year old boy, Nicholas, (beautifully played by newcomer Zen McGrath), finds difficulty in just living. His parents, (Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern), are separated. Jackman now lives with his partner Vanessa Kirby and has a new baby son and Nicholas, who has been living with his mother, now wants to move in with them. He does but his situation doesn't improve. Nicholas is seriously ill and needs treatment, not just a change of scene.

In many ways this is an actor's piece and all the performances, including a cameo from Anthony Hopkins, are first-rate but it's the cool detachment Zeller brings to the material that keeps us at a distance, never allowing us to get emotionally involved. This is a deeply serious subject and Zeller treats it with an appropriate seriousness and yet there were times when I craved for the psychodramas of the past. Like Jackman I, too, felt shut out from Nicholas' pain and the last thing a film like this should do is alienate its audience; sometimes good intentions just aren't enough.

MARLOWE no stars

 You could say Neil Jordan has gone down in the world. This neo-noir based, not on a Raymond Chandler novel but on John Banville's more recent take "The Black-Eyed Blonde", is a very poor addition to the genre, handsomely shot by Xavi Gimenez to resemble Edward Hopper paintings but totally lacking in thrills or atmosphere and surprisingly badly acted.

An over-the-hill Liam Neeson plays an over-the-hill "Marlowe", (that's the title but in this day and age that name in itself is unlikely to draw in an audience; a dear friend of mine actually thought it might be a biopic of Christopher Marlowe). For the uninitated he's the same Philip Marlowe who's been played by Mitchum, Garner, Gould, Dick Powell and both Montgomery's, Robert and George and of course most famously by Bogie but Neeson's Marlowe is instantly forgettable.

He's been hired by femme fatale Diane Kruger to find her lover who's disappeared. It's the same old schtick movies like this thrive on but here the tortuous and convoluted plot feels like a pale imitation of the real thing as if someone came up with the idea of let's make it more baffling than "The Big Sleep". Jessica Lange, far from her best, is Kruger's mother but it's left to Danny Huston, now almost a dead ringer for his father, to breathe a brief modicum of life into proceedings. Unfortunately, some smart one-liners aside, the movie was dead before it started.