VOX LUX ***

 You can say one thing about Brady Corbet; he's not afraid to tackle big subjects in an original fashion. I hated his first film, "The Childhood of a Leader" which I found pretentious and clunky but at least it aimed high and was 'different'. On the other hand I found "The Brutalist" bold and innovative even if it did slip into melodrama by the end. Now I am finally catching up with his middle film, "Vox Lux" which came and went without too many people seeing it and I think it may be his best film to date.

It begins with a school shooting in which Celeste, whom we've already been introduced to in a home video, is a survivor. The movie is her story. Written once again by Corbet and Mona Fastvold it's clearly aiming for the all-encompassing "bigger picture", a life on camera with a solemn-sounding narrator, (here, Willem Dafoe), recounting the story while Scott Walker's incredible, if at times bombastic, score pounds us into submission.

It's a movie that keeps threatening to fall apart but it never does. This is material we've seen before and often, whether in tackling real or fictional artists but Corbet keeps shifting the perspective and subverting the cliches and he's greatly helped by his cast, (Raffey Cassidy and Natalie Portman as two versions of Celeste with Cassidy also playing Portman's daughter, Jude Law as her manager, Stacy Martin as her older sister and Jennifer Ehle as her publicist), as well as by the superb cinematography of Lol Crawley and that score by Walker but really this is Corbet's film. Throughout he's in total command of his material and he never puts a foot wrong. If, like me, you missed it first time round do try to see it now.

BRING THEM DOWN ***

 Not even John B. Keane could come up with a rural Irish tragedy as bleak as the one director Chris Andrews and his co-writer Jonathan Hourigan give us in "Bring Them Down". The drama here is very simple. Two neighboring sheep farmers, one now married to the former girlfriend of the other, suddenly after twenty years find themselves at war with each other over the disappearance of two rams. Following on from a crime seemingly committed without real malice there's no road for these men to go other down into some kind of pit where death appears to be the only way out and forgiveness doesn't appear to be an option.

"Bring Them Down" is a grim movie but there is certainly an uncommon brilliance to it. Andrews handles the film's bleak scenario beautifully showing us the same events through two sets of eyes and it's very well acted by Christopher Abbot and Paul Ready as the two opposing farmers and by Colm Meaney as the ailing father of one of them and best of all by the brilliant Barry Keoghan as the son of the other.

As I've said before Keoghan may be most versatile actor of his generation with all the charisma of a young Brando and here he must restrain his natural tendency to break out and giving a fully rounded portrayal of someone not quite sure of his own actions. This may be a dark and unrelenting movie yet it grips like a vice.

THE HORRIBLE DR. HITCHCOCK **

 Forget the preposterous plot and concentrate instead on Riccardo Freda's superlative direction and his sublime use of color and you have one of the great unsung horror films, Filmed in Italy with a largely Italian cast, (the leads are dubbed), it uses Poe as the jumping off point for an original screenplay  by Ernesto Gastaldi as "The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock", (one of the film's several known titles), kills his first wife then tries to recreate the beauty of her resurrected corpse using the blood of wife #2, (Barbara Steele, who else!). It's nonsense, of course, but splendidly over-the-top nonsense that deserves to be better known.

THE BRUTALIST ****

 The cinematic equivalent of those great door-stopper novels certain authors feel obliged to write from time to time, Brady Corbet's "The Brutalist" has a great deal to recommend it even if it does fall short of greatness, (a dip into melodrama slightly takes the edge off things near the end), and for a movie that runs for 3 hours and 35 minutes, (with a self-imposed 15 minute intermission), it fairly gallops along. Of course, it also leaves itself open to accusations of pretentiousness; this is a big movie with big ambitions, shot in 70 mm and in VistaVision.

It is the story of Laszlo Toth, (Adrien Brody in a career best performance), a Jewish Hungarian architect and a Holocaust survivor who, when the film opens, finds himself in America where he encounters the excessively rich Harrison Lee Van Buren, (Guy Pearce in another career best performance), who commissions him to design a building in memory of Van Buren's mother and basically that's it but if you think this might be just a long, boring film about buildings, think again. There is a depth and a depth of feeling to Corbet's film, (which he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold). rare in what we might describe as commercial cinema.

Toth has his demons and he carries them with him wherever he goes. He's an alcoholic and a drug-addict with a fierce temper and as it turns out those demons also make themselves manifest in the people around him and in particular in the man who might have been his savior. Pearce's Van Burren is a monster and it is his treatment of Toth that ultimately draws the film into the realms of melodrama. His wife, (Felicity Jones, very good), whom he left  behind in Europe, when she does finally arrive, (after the intermission), turns out to be a lot tougher than she looks and maybe not quite as simpatico to Toth as he would have hoped. In other words, life seems to have dealt him a bad deal.

For the most part Corbet treats all of this with the straightest of faces and a considerable amount of technical skill. This is an epic of the old-fashioned kind; long, sprawling and perhaps biting off more than it can chew. Toth is a 20th Century Job and his ills do tend to become wearying after awhile and somewhat circuitous. There were times when I thought, haven't we been here before; just give the guy a break. And yet it's never miserabilist; there's a streak of black humor running through the film and it does provide a sense of closure. In fact, this is just the kind of film the Oscar-givers love.

LONGLEGS no stars

 This hugely overpraised horror film sacrifices suspense and shocks for a nonsensical plot about a serial killer though it would appear it's the Devil who takes centre stage. It says he gets the best tunes but it's unlikely any of his tunes here will chart. "Longlegs" is nothing more than a pretentious and self-consciously arty horror movie with a woefully one-dimensional performance from Maika Monroe as the FBI agent on Longleg's trail.

If the film has a plus side you could say it's very attractively photographed and the casting of an almost unrecognizable Nicholas Cage as the serial killer gives the film a certain OTT liveliness but the psuedo-supernatural element and all that business with the dolls scuppers the film. Whatever happened to the good old bad old days of the likes of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" when serial killers were serial killers and devil dolls were devil dolls and never the twain met. Mostly a load of codswallop.

THE GIRL WITH THE NEEDLE **

 Horror movies come in all shapes and sizes and there's no denying that black and white Nordic art-house movies, by their very 'look', can often be classed as horror movies particularly when set in the past and dealing with what we might call 'grim' subject matter.  Magnus von Horn's "The Girl with the Needle" qualifies on all accounts from the superimposed faces and silent screams of its pre-credit sequence to its attempted abortion with a needle in a Turkish bath and that's before we even get close to the film's real horrors; the ghost of Bergman is never  far away.

Karoline, (Vic Carmen Sonne,  excellent), is a young seamstress whose husband comes back from the Great War with most of his face missing while she's pregnant by her employer who drops her like a hot potato. She is saved from a botched abortion by Dagmar, (a terrific Trine Dyrholm), who seems to be running some kind of black market adoption agency and who takes Karoline under her wing but this so-called act of kindness isn't what it seems.

The horrors inherent here are the horrors of trying to survive in a cruel world in which survival doesn't seem like an option. This is the grimmest of morality plays in which every image feels like a slap in the face. It might look amazing but as we come to realize just how terrible the actions of these people are the further we withdraw from them and from the movie itself. As I said, horror movies come in all shapes and sizes.