THE ONES BELOW *

"The Ones Below" is a decent enough little chamber piece on the perils of parenting, particularly if you suspect the neighbours downstairs covet your new-born baby. It marks the directorial debut of writer David Farr, (he wrote "The Night Manager" for television), and it's nicely done but in the end it's just too unpleasant to be entertaining. Basically a four-hander and well played by Clemence Poesy as the new mother convinced her neighbours are up to no good and by David Morrissey and Laura Birn as the neighbours, (personally I would have moved out five minutes after they moved in). It's let down only by Stephen Campbell Moore as Poesy's partner. Considering his outing in a similar role in the nasty little horror picture "The Children" some years back I would suggest Mr Campbell Moore get the snip sooner rather than later.

ULYSSES' GAZE *

You might think that in making a film about Greek cinema or at least about a fellow film-maker Angelopolous would have made his greatest masterpiece but "Ulysses' Gaze" may be his most lugubrious film. Perhaps working mostly in English didn't help or the one-note performance of Harvey Keitel as the exiled film-maker returning to his homeland in search of 3 reels of lost film by the Manakia Brothers was to blame.

The structure is just as complex as anything by Angelopolous as Keitel moves back and forth in time but he also makes for an uneasy observer of Balkan history and the conflict in Sarajevo and ultimately the material feels less profound than I'm sure the director intended; there's only so much old ground he can cover. It isn't a bad film; I don't think Angelopolous could make a bad film if he tried and visually it is very impressive. Rather it is simply a great disappointment from a man who can justifiably lay claim to being one of the ten greatest directors in all of cinema.

EASY A **

As female-orientated High School comedies go "Easy A" is a lot better than most. It may not be particularly original but it's smart and funny and in Emma Stone it had a star in the making. She's terrific and she's just the lynch-pin of a terrific cast that includes Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, superb, as her parents, Thomas Haden Church as an embarrassingly hip teacher, Lisa Kudrow as his equally embarrassing Guidance Counsellor of a wife and a whole host of marvellous young ladies as various friends and rivals who spread the rumour that Miss Stone isn't just a virgin any longer but an all-out slut. It was written by Bert V. Royal and directed by the obviously very talented Will Gluck, (it was only his second film), and is well worth seeking out.

THE SALVATION *

"The Salvation" is a grim, violent and really rather unpleasant art-house western that comes to us, not from America at all but by way of Denmark, the United Kingdom and even South Africa. Mads Mikkelsen is the Danish settler who comes into conflict with land-grabber Jeffrey Dean Morgan after he kills Morgan's brother after said brother has murdered Mikkelsen's son and raped and killed Mikkelsen's wife. It's a very stylish picture but also a deeply derivative one, It's painfully obvious that director Kristian Levring has seen one too many Spaghetti westerns and Clint Eastwood pictures not to mention paying tribute to John Ford whenever he can. As a genre picture it's perfectly acceptable; it's just not as original as it thinks it is.

YOSSI *

I normally don't watch sequels when I haven't seen the original but in the case of "Yossi" I thought I would make an exception. It's a sequel to "Yossi and Jagger" and it takes up the story of Yossi, an Israeli doctor, after the death of his lover, Jagger, who was killed when they were soldiers in the Lebanon. Other than providing some kind of happy ending for Yossi this time round this seems to me a somewhat pointless film despite being very well written, directed and acted. As gay 'romances' go it's certainly up-front and honest and hardly sentimental but the 10 year gap between the two films gives this the feeling of an afterthought. Nevertheless, it's still a welcome addition to LGBT cinema if only for treating both its characters and its audience with some degree of intelligence

THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL *

Geraldine Page finally picked up a long overdue Oscar as the cantankerous widow longing to see her hometown of Bountiful one more time before she dies in Peter Masterson's fine and understated adaptation of Horton Foote's play "The Trip to Bountiful". Foote himself did the screenplay and there's really very little to it but Foote was a master of making the small, inconsequential things of life seem important. Unfortunately there is nothing small about Page's performance; this is acting with a capital A. Never the most subtle of performers, Page deploys every mannerism in the Method Actor's Handbook pulling out all the stops in a shameless bid to finally get that Oscar. The best performance comes from John Heard as the son torn between a nagging wife, (an excellent Carlin Glynn), and an overpowering mother. It's just a pity we don't see more of him.

THEOREM ****

At the beginning of "Teorema", in a wordless, sepia-tinged montage, we are introduced to almost all the main characters in Pasolini's film. It's a clever device, almost Hitchcockian, and it could be the beginning of a thriller, though being a Pasolini film we know this won't be a thriller. The character who doesn't appear in this montage is played by Terence Stamp but suddenly there he is right in the middle of things and his affect on everyone is profound. Who is he and why is he here? It's never made clear, of course. Although a very physical presence his role is allegorical. Is he an angel, (there is a strong religious element in the picture), or a devil or simply a seducer since he does seem to have sex with everyone in the family, male and female, including the maid who ends up levitating and performing miracles. He certainly affords everyone a form of release, turning their lives upside down and with it their bourgeoisie pretentions. If we are going to tear down the bourgeoisie we may as well do it with sex; it's a lot more fun than beating them to death.

Stamp, of course, remains the most beautiful thing on screen though Silvana Mangano as the mother gives him a run for his money. No-one really has to act; all they simply have to do is respond to Pasolini's camera and, with no real narrative structure, that's fairly easy. Sex may be Pasolin's weapon of choice but the film is quite clearly a Marxist 'fantasy' and is also very obviously the work of a gay director. I'm not so sure anymore if it's the masterpiece I thought it was all those years ago bu it stands up remarkably well and remains one of the great Italian films of its decade.

THE WONDERS ***

Chanelling both Olmi and Fellini, Alice Rohrwacher's "The Wonders" represents Italian cinema at its best. Like Olmi's "Tree of Wooden Clogs" or more recently, Frammartino's "Le Quattro Volte" it's another classic picture of rural life with a touch of late Fellini thrown in, (in the form of the slightly surreal television competition that gives the film its name).

It's about a family of bee-keepers, struggling to make a living in Etruscany. The German father is something of a wastrel, the mother has mostly given up and it's left to the oldest daughter to hold things together. The writer and director Alice Rohrwacher, it was only her second feature film, neither romanticises or sentimentalises their situation and the film works both as a rural idyll and another wonderful addition to the cinema of childhood, (the adults seem to be figures in the background). Intelligent and very moving.

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.