ALL THE YOUNG MEN *

"All the Young Men" is a Korean war movie that finds an ageing Alan Ladd and an up-and-coming Sidney Poitier leading a platoon of soldiers into a snow-bound Korean pass where they have to hold a farm-house against all the odds. It's not a bad film, just a rather formulaic one full of stock characters yet it's even quite exciting at times. The writer/producer/director was Hal Bartlett, a B-Movie stalwart of the period who liked to tackle 'difficult' issues, a kind of poor man's Sam Fuller, (Poitier's presence here ensures racism rears its ugly head). The first-rate black and white photography was by Daniel L Fapp.

RICK **

"Rick" transposes the plot of "Rigoletto" to the world of New York big business sans the music. It's a nice, if obvious, dark little picture that almost no-one has seen. Bill Pullman is the corporate whizkid whose dirty dealings and total disregard for people's feelings come back to haunt him when he is 'cursed' by Sandra Oh's waitress that he's been particularly nasty to, (he gets her fired from her job for starters). Pullman is fine, (he's an underrated actor at the best of times), as is Aaron Stanford as his slimy younger boss and the movie is just nasty enough to make an impact. No classic then but far from being a dog either.

STRAIGHT TIME ***

Ulu Grosbard was one of the great American directors of the seventies and was certainly among the most underrated. He made "Straight Time" in 1978 and it's a terrific movie about crime and criminals though it's not a thriller nor even a heist movie. It's central character, Max Dembo, (a superb Dustin Hoffman), is a career criminal; crime is built into his DNA. When he's released from prison, where he's served 6 years for armed robbery, he at first seems repentant but it isn't long before he has a run-in with his unsympathetic and vindictive parole officer, (M. Emmett Walsh, excellent). From this point on, it's all downhill.

Were this film in French you wouldn't think twice in saying it was a Jean-Pierre Melville picture. Like Melville's work this film deals in criminal mindsets; it's about the minutiae of crime. Dembo and his associates are professional criminals but they are messy and arrogant, more likely to die an early death or spend more time in prison than out of it.

This is a beautifully acted, highly intelligent picture. Others in the cast include Theresa Russell, Harry Dean Stanton and Gary Busey, brilliant as a young would-be gangster not making much of a job of trying to stay on the straight and narrow. Adapted from the novel "No Beast so Fierce" by Edward Bunker, who also appears as another criminal, and beautifully photographed by Owen Roizman it really deserves to be better known.

MOMMIE DEAREST **

The movie may be a camp classic, ("Christina, bring me the axe"; "No wire hangers...EVER!"), and it is terrible but who can deny Faye Dunaway's tour-de-force. She may not always look that much like Crawford, (Dunaway never looked like anyone other than Dunaway), but her performance goes way beyond mimicry. I have no idea how true any of it is; we have to take Christina's word for it but we don't have to rely on this to know just how tough a cookie, (and how big a bitch?), Joan actually was and Joan certainly gets into her skin. Unfortunately the movie never aims high enough and we are very much in "Valley of the Dolls" territory here. Four writers may have been two or three too many and the director Frank Perry was probably not the right man for this kind of material. Still, he managed to get a couple of remarkable performances from his two Christinas, (Diana Scarwid and 10 year old Mara Hobel), though the men, especially Steve Forrest, are mostly terrible. It certainly enjoyable both as a piece of over-the-top trash and as an example of a very fine actress going a long way to making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. It's also a classic cult movie.

NEVER LET GO **

Nasty and brutish it may be but this British crime movie is also extremely gripping and very well done for what it is. Richard Todd is the salesman who goes after the thieves who stole his car. Adam Faith is the young thug who actually took it and, cast against type, Peter Sellers is superb as the psychotic Mr Big figure. A 17 year old Carol White, (she of "Cathy Come Home" fame), is Sellers' young mistress. The director was John Guillermin and he gives the film a nice sleazy atmosphere and makes very good use of his London locations.

ALIVE AND KICKING **

This piece of Irish whimsy makes "The Quiet Man" look like neo-realism. "Alive and Kicking" is a totally daft delight that finds old ladies Sybil Thorndike, Kathleen Harrison and Estelle Winwood 'escape' from their Old People's Home in England only to end up on an island off the Irish coast where, with the help of the locals, including a young Richard Harris, making his film debut, they set up a business knitting sweaters for the fashion market.

It's all very silly and, if you're Irish, probably deeply patronising but it's also hugely likeable. Harrison and Winwood are excellent but it is Thorndike who steals the show. This grand-dame of British theatre has a grand old time scurrying up and down cliffs in search of birds eggs or hunting rabbits with a shotgun, (well, at least her stand-in does). Stanley Holloway is in it, too as the rich Irish-American who proves to be their saviour. Ripe for rediscovery.

BEAT GIRL no stars

Hard to believe that this tale of beat girls, beat boys and sundry strippers was once considered scandalous and had an 'X' certificate slapped on it when it first appeared. It's another warning on what can happen when you let your teenage daughter listen to jazz or worse still, jive music! Of course, it's mostly terrible but it has built up something of a reputation as a cult movie in recent years. (The club scenes and a chicken run stolen from "Rebel Without a Cause" are surprisingly good).

David Farrar is the rich architect who remarries; his new wife is Noelle Adam and she has a shady past and newcomer Gillian Hills is his pouty teenage daughter who resents her. The cast also includes Christopher Lee, Adam Faith, (not at all bad), Peter McEnery and a young Oliver Reed, (billed here as Plaid Shirt). The director was Edmond T Greville who brought a middle-aged man's disapproving eye to bear on the proceedings.

UNFRIENDED no stars

It was bound to happen. We have now moved from CGI to literally looking at a computer screen and it you think flicking between Facebook and Skype and God-knows-what-else on your actual computer is annoying wait until you see"Unfriended". Actually this movie, which takes place in real time on a computer monitor, moving back and forth between a group of nasty, randy teenagers who are being menaced by an unseen presence, is something of a technical marvel and it does provide the occasional frisson but it's also headache-inducing and hard to sit through. It's actually one of the few films that will look better on your tv or computer screen than in the cinema where the size of the screen just seems out of place or perhaps it's just one of those films that's best not seen at all since the originality of the concept is quickly swallowed up by the silliness of the plot. Amazingly, a sequel is on the way.

TOO LATE FOR TEARS no stars

The title might suggest a weepie of sorts but "Too Late for Tears" is a film noir and a fairly mediocre one at that. It's actually got a very good story (by Roy Huggins from his 'Saturday Evening Post' serial), but the treatment is poor. Lizabeth Scott is the greedy femme fatale who will stop at nothing, including murder, to hold onto the bag of money that lands in her lap, or at least in her car. Scott was never much of an actress and she's terrible here. As the blackmailer whose money she steals Dan Duryea is his usual excellent self and there's a nice supporting turn from Arthur Kennedy as Scott's sap of her husband. As I said it's got a decent enough story but director Byron Haskin wasn't the man to do anything with it and it just limps along to its rather torturous conclusion.

SAMMY GOING SOUTH ***

SAMMY GOING SOUTH. A road movie with a difference since the road young Sammy must travel runs all the way from Port Said in Egypt, where his parents have been killed in an air-raid, all the way to Durban in South Africa where his Aunt Jane lives. This is something of a late classic from Alexander MacKendrick, a movie in which the central character is a child but which isn't really a children's film, (though children will relate to it), and it's utterly devoid of sentimentality. On route he meets a number of people who both help him and hinter him on his journey and he learns to 'grow up' very quickly. One of the people he meets is Edward G Robinson's old diamond smuggler and in the end it is he who is really Sammy's salvation, (and as ever, Robinson is superb). As Sammy, Fergus McClelland is also superb; MacKendrick is a very fine director of children. Filmed on location in Africa, it is also visually very impressive.

FATHER BROWN **

Robert Hamer directed this thoroughly delightful comedy based on one of G K Chesterton's "Father Brown" stories, (it's also known as "The Detective"), and cast Alec Guinness as the priest and amateur sleuth determined not only to catch master thief Flambeau, (Peter Finch), but to save his soul as well. The humor is gentle and very British and both Guinness and Finch are marvellous as the detective and the criminal who  strike up a fond rapport with each other. Others in the fine cast include Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker and Bernard Lee. Underrated and worth seeking out.

SONS AND LOVERS *

Freddie Francis won a much deserved Oscar for his superb black and white, widescreen cinematography on this 1960 screen version of "Sons and Lovers" which was directed by another great cameraman, Jack Cardiff. It was a huge success in its day, tying with "The Apartment" for the New York Film Critics' Best Picture prize but apart from Francis' cinematography it has very little to recommend it. This is a sanitized, unbearably literate treatment of Lawrence's novel with a hugely miscast Dean Stockwell in the crucial role of Paul Morel, Lawrence's alter-ego. The American Stockwell just about manages the accent but makes Morel a soulless, spoiled brat. As his coal-miner father Trevor Howard also struggles but, as always, Wendy Hiller is superb as the clinging, overly possessive mother and an Oscar-nominated Mary Ure isn't bad as Clara Dawes. It may have felt reasonably daring in 1960 but Lawrence deserves better than this kid-gloves approach.

THE PAPERBOY **

"The Paperboy" looks and feels like a trashy pulp novel. I haven't read Peter Dexter's original book but it may have been just that. It's told in flashback by maid Anita, (singer Macy Gray), and it deals with a murder and a possible miscarriage of justice. The murder, as it turns out, is really only a red-herring, (there are other murders to make up for it), and even the miscarriage of justice is virtually thrown away as a major plot point.

It's set 'in the past' in a place close to the Florida Everglades where racism is rampant. The paperboy of the title is the extraordinarily handsome Zac Efron, (who at least makes up in looks what he lacks in acting chops), whose job it is to deliver the newspapers his daddy prints. On the other hand, the paperboy could just as easily be Matthew McConaughey as his older brother, a reporter who has returned to the family fold to write a story about a man on death row whom he believes is innocent. He has another writer with him, a sophisticated black man from 'London, England', (he stands out like Virgil Tibbs in this backwater). The guy on death row turns out to be something of a neanderthal and is played brilliantly by John Cusack and he has a tramp of a girl-friend on the outside who he had never even met 'in the flesh', so to speak, (Nicole Kidman, terrific and giving the film all the sleazy kick it needs). It's she that Efron falls for in a puppy-love kind of way and it's this tiresome infatuation that makes up most of the film's plot.

In the end it shudders into some kind of life with a lot of unsavoury revelations and a double murder. It's all very watchable and there are some good soul numbers on the soundtrack and you may be inclined to think Kidman, (and perhaps even Cusack), were robbed of Oscar nominations but it's hardly likely to do much for director Lee Daniels' faltering career.