JAY KELLY *

 "Jay Kelly", (the movie), is, for the most part, beautifully acted but highly sentimental in that 'wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve' kind of way that redemptive Hollywood crowd-pleasers so often are and it's really quite a difficult movie to like. Has Noah Baumbach sold his soul for a mess of George Clooney's pottage? Why, I kept asking myself, did Baumbach make such a lifeless picture and why is Clooney playing such an egotistical asshole who goes on a redemptive journey to Italy to bond with his daughter? Surely Clooney the actor is nothing like Jay Kelly, (the man), so is this finally nothing but his Oscar-bait role? It might have been had Baumbach given him something to chew on but his screenplay here, (co-written with actor Emily Mortimer), is his most insipid to date.

What keeps the movie chugging along, (barely), is a superb supporting cast headed by a world-weary Adam Sandler and a more than usually subdued Laura Dern and if Jim Broadbent, Emily Mortimer, Stacy Keach, Patrick Wilson and, best of all, Billy Cruddup contribute nothing more than glorified cameos they are, at least, superb cameos and deserving of a lot more than the treacle that has been poured over them. Another 'movie about the movies' but one of least of them; something of a mess, in fact, from start to finish.

EDEN ***

 Perhaps the biggest and best surprise of the year so far and the last thing I might have expected from Ron Howard, "Eden" is fact-based although I knew nothing of the original story which naturally helped my appreciation. In 1929 the German philosopher Dr. Friedrich Ritter and his partner Dore Strauch moved to the uninhabited island of Floreana in the Galapagos where he planned to write his masterpiece on the state of the world and how he could 'heal' humanity. 

He claimed he needed and wanted solitude yet he sent letters back on passing ships building up a reputation as a visionary living in the wilderness and developing something of a following. Before long he was joined on the island by Heinz Wittmer, his wife Margaret who got pregnant there, and their son Harry. Needless to say they were not welcomed with open arms. In 1932 Ritter, Strauch and the Wittmers were joined by the so-called 'Baroness' von Wagner Bosquet and her three male companions. She planned to build a luxury hotel there and soon claimed the island for herself triggering a virtual war between the inhabitants.

Unlike previous Howard films "Eden" is both truly strange and beautiful and doesn't shy away from the horrors of life in something considerably less than a paradise. Was it madness that drove these people to act as they did or the environment or was it the environment that drove them to madness? If the film is to be believed both Ritter and the Baroness were already delusional before coming to the island and although the Wittmer's motives were questionable at least it was they and they alone who seemed to possess 'the pioneering spirit'.

Howard certainly handles difficult material with a genuine commitment and the film is superbly shot by Mathias Herndl but it's the cast who carry it. Jude Law makes for a grim and dangerous Ritter and Vanessa Kirby is suitably volatile as Strauch but it's Ana de Armas as the Baroness and in particular Sydney Sweeney as Margaret Wittmer who really own the film. They are both terrific with de Armas proving to be terrifyingly unstable and Sweeney being remarkably resolute in her resolve to do whatever she can to keep her family alive, (the scene in which she gives birth is the most frightening thing I've seen all year). "Eden" may not be an easy watch but it would be shameful if it doesn't get the recognition it deserves.

THE PASSAGE no stars

 It's hard to believe that this mediocre wartime thriller was directed by the man who made "Ice Cold in Alex", "Northwest Frontier", "The Guns of Navarone" and "Cape Fear".  J. Lee Thompson's "The Passage" boasted a starry cast, (Anthony Quinn, James Mason, Malcolm McDowell, Patricia Neal, Michael Lonsdale, Christopher Lee), all wasted playing various peasants, resistance fighters and Nazis as Quinn shepherds Mason, Neal and family over the Pyrenees pursued by McDowell's sadistic SS officer.

It's the kind of film that might have been made in the fifties but which was tarted up with large dollops of gratuitous sex and violence for the late seventies. In other words, it's not just poorly executed but thoroughly tasteless with everyone involved looking very uncomfortable, the exception being McDowell who camps it up no end and clearly relishes being the villain. One to avoid.

A WANT IN HER **

 How much private pain, if any, should we put into the public domain? You might say I stumbled on Myrid Carten's documentary "A Want in Her" almost my accident because a long time ago I knew her father Paul and have been aware of events in his life since, (his marriage, a stroke at a fairly early age), through a mutual friend but I didn't know his wife, Nuala, his daughter or anything of their lives.

Carten's film is fundamentally a study of her mother, an alcoholic who became a street drinker, (she and Paul separated some time ago), and it consists mainly of conversations between Myrid and her mother, telephone calls and 'home movies' courtesy of footage shot by a teenage Myrid on the camcorder her parents got her and it seems Myrid has been recording life and the world around her ever since.

Of course, there are other people in the film, too chiefly her two uncles, (her father Paul is never seen nor heard), and Carten's camera is like a scalpel taken to a festering wound. The Gallaghers, (Nuala's maiden name before her marriage), are shown as definitely dysfunctional but perhaps as we watch them squabble and bare their souls we could ask ourselves aren't all families a bit dysfunctional?

As a piece of film-making it certainly shows Carten's skill but I also found it deeply intrusive.  Carten herself has defended her film by saying it's cathartic and helps people in a similar situation, (showing they are not alone? But then do people in that kind of situation really believe they are alone?), but personally I found much of what Carten shows us as simply too private, too painful and something that perhaps should have been worked out within the family circle and far from the camera's gaze and in the end I think it told me more about the film-maker than the subject, (both her uncles tell her to switch the camera off on separate occasions). It ends on a positive note; Nuala is now sober but is she happy? We can only guess.

WITNESS TO MURDER ***

 One of those great little B-Movies that not many people have seen. Barbara Stanwyck, (excellent as usual), sees George Sanders, (also very good), murder a girl in the apartment opposite but no-one believes her except, of course, the killer who goes out of his way to convince the police she's insane.

Ok, so "Witness to Murder" may not have the most original of plots but it's certainly a tale well told and what it does have, as well as a bona-fide star turn from Stanwyck, is some stunningly good atmospheric black and white cinematography from the great John Alton, a very good screenplay by Chester Erskine and first-rate direction from the underrated Roy Rowland. A real treat.

HOT MILK ****

 The matter-of-factness of the relationship that springs up between Sofia, (Emma Mackey) and Ingrid, (Vicky Krieps), is what distinguishes first-time director Rebecca Lenkiewicz's feature "Hot Milk" from other recent LGBTQ+ films. It begins with the kind of casual pick-up that suggests both women's gaydars are working at full throttle. Sofia is in Spain, (though the film was shot in Greece), with her domineering mother Rose, (an absolutely superb Fiona Shaw), for a 'cure' at a clinic presided over by Gomez, (Vincent Perez), since Rose can't walk and Gomez believes her problems are psychosomatic.

Fundamentally Lenkiewicz's film is about women who have no control over their lives. Though clearly independent-minded Sofia can't break free of her mother just as Rose is unable to divest herself of her own past and while Ingrid would appear to be the film's free spirit she is also in a relationship with Matty, a black man she seems happy with but almost certainly doesn't love and the movie is a little gem. Sofia is studying Margaret Mead and like Mead, Lenkiewicz is allowing us access to these characters as if we are interlopers or just eavesdroppers in their lives.

Dramatically for a lot of the time not a lot happens. Ingrid admits to killing someone 'a long time ago' which makes her character the one most prone to melodrama and there are intimations that the unorthodox clinic and Gomez and his daughter/nurse, (Patsy Ferran), aren't quite what they seem but it's ultimately Sofia who begins to unravel, not surprising you might think given she is Rose's daughter, and the film begins to play out like a thriller you can't quite get your head around. In the end what is resolved? As Hitchcock said, it's only a movie but for at least nine-tenths of its length it's a very fine one.

THE SURFER no stars

 Are Australians really the least hospitable people on the planet or is that just in the movies? Or is just me who thinks every Australian film features nothing but psychos, serial killers and the kind of weirdos you certainly don't want to run into when you decide to go surfing at a local beauty spot which is what Nicholas Cage as "The Surfer" chooses to do in Lorcan Finnegan's movie of the same name.

Arriving at the beach with his surfboard and son in tow Cage very quickly finds that as an outsider he is not welcome but being beaten up and robbed, (of his surfboard, phone, watch and car), doesn't deter our Nick who perseveres until what, they take his life as well? As a thriller, Finnegan's film doesn't stand up because it's all too far-fetched to ring true but then is any of this true or, like in Frank Perry's "The Swimmer", is it all in Cage's imagination and if it is, do we really care?

Maybe what "The Surfer" needed was an actor less associated with being crazy on camera, something Cage has made his speciality. Maybe what this movie needed was a Ralph Fiennes, an actor we might more closely identify with, (even if I can't see Fiennes on a surfboard). Unfortunately as Cage suffers everything God and the world can throw at him he not only loses it but his audience as well. In the end this never amounts to anything other than another Crazy Cage movie, a little more original in the telling perhaps than your usual multiplex fare but also both pretentious and hard to swallow.

THE HOUSE ON CARROLL STREET **

 Enjoyable sub-Hitchcockian thriller that manages to combine Nazi war criminals with the HUAC hearings. Kelly McGillis is the uncooperative witness who starts playing amateur detective when she stumbles on some very unsavory Germans in league with one of the senate committee.  "The House on Carroll Street" was directed by Peter Yates who brings his customary level of professionalism to proceedings, (it's a period piece and the period detail is first-rate).

Of course, all amateur detectives need a professional in their corner and Kelly finds hers in Jeff Daniel's FBI man. It may fall well short of "Notorious" or indeed any other similarly themed Hitchcock movie but it's got a good plot and a fair quota of thrills and as well as Daniels and McGillis it's also got a splendidly sleazy villain in Mandy Patinkin, (the nasty committee guy) and Jessica Tandy doing her spunky old lady bit. The fine screenplay is by Walter Bernstein.

AGAINST ALL ODDS **

 As long as you don't compare "Against All Odds" with the original this remake of "Out of the Past" is a perfectly serviceable neo-noir with just enough changes to its tortuous plot to keep our interest for all of its two hour running time. A well-cast Jeff Bridges is now in the Mitchum role while James Woods is a suitably sleazy stand-in for Kirk Douglas. Rachel Ward doesn't quite cut it in the Jane Greer role but in one of those movie homages Greer is now cast as Ward's mother, the kind of rich bitch any daughter would run away from and she may be the best thing in the picture. There's also a nice turn from a then 70 year old Richard Widmark as another villain. 

If it has a fault it's that the pace is too languorous for the material nor can director Taylor Hackford resist a pretty picture, resorting every now and then to music video imagery, quite literally in a scene with Kid Creole and the Coconuts. It may be better than its reputation but if you also feel its been undervalued, considering Tourneur's version is a film-noir masterpiece that might be understandable.

I SAW THE TV GLOW *

 Another Indie movie that has garnered high praise from those bowled over by its strangeness and its refusal to conform to narrative norms, "I Saw the TV Glow" is certainly different and doesn't fit into any preconceived genre. Perhaps best described as a Young Adult Coming of Age movie rather than the 'horror' film it was sold as though unlike most 'coming-of-age' movies this one definitely errs on the side of the phantasmagorical if sadly rather pretentiously so. However, it is visually superb and often highly imaginative but what it lacks is substance. LGBTQ+ issues, while fairly central to the plot, are underdeveloped while the one-dimensional performances of the leads might only make you want to shake them out of their stupor. Good score, though.

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME ****

 You know exactly what you're going to get from a Wes Anderson film. a totally idiosyncratic world, one indeed unique to its director. Wes Anderson's films look and sound like no others and his admirers are many but, as the old saying goes, sometimes you can have too much of a good thing and I've been finding the Anderson formula wearing rather thin of late.

"The French Dispatch" and "Asteroid City" both looked typically terrific and while they had flashes of Anderson's earlier brilliance I felt they relied too heavily on Anderson's waywardness, being mostly surface with little substance so it was with a degree of caution I approached "The Phoenician Scheme" but I'm happy to report that this not only has substance, (admittedly of the kind only Wes Anderson can supply), but style to spare and is certainly his best film since "The Grand Budapest Hotel". It may also be his funniest film to date.

The title sums it up as this film is all about The Phoenician Scheme though if you can actually figure what that is you're a better man than I. All I can say with certainty is that Benicio Del Toro plays a kind of magnate called Zsa-zsa Korda, (a bit of Trump perhaps by way of Charles Foster Kane), who wants to leave a legacy behind but needs the help of various backers to do so and so it goes with each one given a chapter of their own all the way to the daft but strangely moving denouement.

Of course, Anderson's films seldom make sense and this one makes less sense than most and yet it feels as fully formed as anything he's done with every piece fitting perfectly into place and every performer entering Anderson's world as if born to it.

Del Toro is only the linchpin of a faultless cast that also includes Micheal Cera, Alex Jennings, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Hope Davis and a delightful Mia Threapleton as Del Toro's only daughter and a very unconventional nun. Of course, if you don't 'get' Anderson you won't get this. I laughed all the way through but there were few chuckles elsewhere. This, like all his films, is one for the fan-base but it marks a real return to form and may even draw in a few converts. It shouldn't be missed.

THE EXCEPTION **

 "The Exception" is aptly named as this war-time-romance-cum-espionage yarn is very much the exception to the rule as to what we might have expected in our multiplexes in 2016. This is definitely a thoroughly old-fashioned film that wouldn't have been out of place in the 1940's albeit without the full-frontal nudity.

The setting is the home of the former Kaiser Wilhelm II, (a superb Christopher Plummer), where Captain Brandt, (Jai Courtney), has been posted, supposedly to protect the former Kaiser but really to spy on him for the Third Reich. There's also a British spy, (Lily James), in the household and it's not long before James and Courtney are banging about in the servant's quarters.

It's totally far-fetched, of course but it's got a good script and one that's not without humor and the performances are first-rate, (the cast also includes Janet McTeer. Ben Daniels and, as Himmler, an excellent Eddie Marsan). It's not the kind of film that was ever likely to win Oscars nor would it appeal to the Marvel crowd but it's very entertaining and certainly worth seeing.

THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR **

 Charming frippery. No-one's quite at their best here, not Tierney, Harrison, Sanders or Mankiewicz but it has a lightness of touch that is very engaging and if we must have movies about people falling in love with ghosts and vice versa this is as good an example as we're likely to get. Tierney is the widow who moves to a seaside cottage with young daughter Natalie Wood but it's a cottage that's haunted by the ghost of Rex Harrison's gruff sea-captain. What follows may be predictable but it's nice to see Tierney in something light for a change. With a lesser director than Mankiewicz it might have fallen apart but he keeps it on course. No classic but perhaps unfairly overlooked.

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.