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.