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.