SWIMMING POOL ***

If people must do riffs on Hitchcock why can't they all do it as well as Francois Ozon who not only ticks all the right boxes but has fun doing it in sunny climes. Not for him the slapdash suspense of just having a body buried in the woodshed but a deliciously unsettling piece of pop psychology in which two women from different generations, sharing the same fairly enclosed space, find they simply don't get along and since they are played by Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier, what's not to like.

Few actresses in movies have matured as well as Rampling. To think that thirty years earlier she would have been the sexy little minx of a daughter giving some starchy matron a hard time; now she's the matron with a rod of steel determined not to be put off her stroke by any interfering little sexpot while Sagnier has a ball as the thorn in her side.

Since the movie is entitled "Swimming Pool" and since Rampling has expressed her dislike of such places you just know that the pool will become the third character in the picture but which of the two women is going to use it to their advantage and why isn't Sagnier's father, (Charles Dance), Rampling's publisher who suggested she vacation in the house in the first place, (it's in France), not answering Rampling's calls? Oh, and Rampling writes crime fiction.

This is Ozon at his most playfully erotic, taking nothing too seriously but teasing us at every turn. That fact that he does it in such gorgeous surroundings is an added bonus but then Ozon is such a confidently assured film-maker the surroundings hardly matter. A treat.

ODETTE no stars

Only the team of Herbert Wilcox, (producer and director), and Anna Neagle, (his actress wife), could take a story like "Odette" and make something as dull as this. Odette Sansom was a British agent working in Nazi occupied France so the potential for excitement and drama was evident but everyone connected to the film pussyfoots around the issues it raises and treats Odette as if she was the Virgin Mary. Of course, Neagle was never a serious actress to start with and throughout behaves as if she had done nothing more than spill something on her dress at a Royal Garden Party, her stiff upper lip hardly quivering at all while actors as fine as Trevor Howard and Peter Ustinov can do nothing with the leaden material they have to work with, (only Marius Goring goes some way to lifting the film out of the doldrums), and the whole thing drags on for two hours. Odette's story should have been both moving and inspiring and with a better writer, a better director and a better actress it might have been but this half-hearted attempt by the British Establishment to honour a genuine heroine simply falls flat.

NON-FICTION ****

I love a comedy and I love smart movies and intelligent conversation and I love books and here they all are, rolled up together in Olivier Assayas' marvellous new film "Non-Fiction". At his best no-one can touch Assayas for smart talk and this time he's got a great subject, the dumbing down of culture, particularly the written word as books disappear to be subsumed into the World Wide Web, the Cloud, whatever, as people write and read blogs but don't pick up a printed book.

I don't doubt for a minute that anyone reading this review will know what I'm talking about. Film criticism on an electronic device is a symptom of what Assayas is talking about here. Indeed, Juliette Binoche's character is an actress in a television cop show. She's married to Alain, (a superb Guillaume Canet), a publisher who wants to move over to e-books. Vincent Macaigne is an author whose new manuscript Alain has decided not to publish and who uses his own life and the people he knows as material for his work. He's also having an affair with Alain's wife, (Binoche), leading to a great running joke at the expense of Haneke's "The White Ribbon".

It's all good fun, aimed at people who read books, in whatever form, discuss politics and watch Bergman and Haneke and even "Star Wars" movies. Assayas knows his audience and isn't afraid to poke fun at them. You might call this a very French film; it's full of intellectuals having sex and cheating on their partners, not that I'm suggesting these are specifically French concerns. Of course, you don't need to be French or even an intellectual to enjoy this. It's very funny and brilliantly acted by a large cast. Binoche is as good as she's ever been and both Canet and Macaigne are simply wonderful. You do need a tolerance for smart talk, however, as in this film conversation is what passes for action. A movie for our times and not to be missed.

THE ASSISTANT ***

Following on from the Harvey Weinstein scandal and other instances of sexual abuse and harassment by the rich and powerful I'm sure movies like "The Assistant" are going to become more common place but I doubt if many of them will be this strange, this unsettling or indeed this good. Although fiction, "The Assistant" looks and feels like it could be a documentary and Kitty Green, whose first feature this is, does indeed come from a documentary background.

The assistant of the title, (a beautifully subdued Julia Garner), is a young woman employed in the New York office of a media mogul, not just as a kind of secretary, but as someone to clean up, (literally), the mess (literally), that her boss leaves behind and to take whatever verbal abuse he dishes out. She is safe, it would seem, from sexual harassment because, as she's told, 'she's not his type'.

This is a genuinely frightening film that goes beyond what has come to be known as the #MeToo Movement. It paints a horrifying picture of what powerful people can do to subordinates given the chance, (I know because I too worked with such people but I, at least, had the balls to stand up to them...and not get fired). What distinguishes Green's film is that she never over-dramatizes, (if anything, she holds back almost to the point of boredom), uses actors who are not well-known to us, (a magnificently obsequious Matthew Macfadyen is the best known person on screen), and films it, not as a clammy thriller, but as a fly-on-the-wall slice of life. There is none of the triumphalism of "Bombshell" on display here, just the chilly feeling that an unseen monster is lurking out of camera shot and destroying the lives of everyone around him.

EDGE OF DOOM *

"Edge of Doom's" credentials were certainly first-class. It was a Samuel Goldwyn production directed by Mark Robson with a screenplay by Philip Yordan and a cast that included Dana Andrews, Farley Granger, Joan Evans, Robert Keith and Paul Stewart but the story was gloomy, (Granger's the youth who kills a priest and Andrews is a priest who tries to find out why), even if the treatment showed a certain amount of imagination. Unfortunately, Andrews was totally miscast as a priest, (he tells the story in flashback and is appallingly sanctimonious), while Granger, never much of an actor, can't bring his character to life. Where it does score is in Harry Stradling's black and white cinematography and in Richard Day's art direction, both of which capture the seedy, poverty-stricken milieu perfectly. It wasn't a hit; the grim story obviously put audiences off but it's just unusual enough to be interesting and it does deserve to be better known. Just a pity it's so glum.

DRAGON INN ***

Long considered one of the masterpieces of the wuxia genre King Hu's "Dragon Inn" is a visually superb epic that's closer in tone to Leone than Kurosawa and it features some of the most balletic fight sequences in all of cinema. The plot is virtually irrelevant; there are good guys and there are bad guys and that's really all you need to know while even the comedy works beautifully. The action takes place almost entirely around the inn of the title and the film was further immortalised by Ming-liang Tsai when he chose it to be the film screening in the near empty cinema in "Goodbye, Dragon Inn", (they would make a great double-bill). It's been surpassed in people's affections by King Hu's later "A Touch of Zen" but this is arguably more fun and it established Hu as a force to be reckoned with in international cinema, a genre master as well as a great visual stylist. Wonderful.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS **

A huge hit in its day, (the New York Film Critics named it the Best Film of 1939), and one of the most beloved of all screen romances, William Wyler's version of "Wuthering Heights" is everything a Grade A Hollywood picture should be but it's just not Bronte. This is the Yorkshire Moors California-style with a hand-picked cast of first-rate actors acting to the best of their abilities but they are not quite the characters Emily Bronte conjured up.

Laurence Olivier is a brooding, sexy Heathcliff, Merle Oberon a surprisingly good Cathy, David Niven is a reasonably dashing Edgar and Geraldine Fitzgerald a fine Isabella and, of course, it looks great, (Gregg Toland won his only Oscar for it). In fact, of its kind, it's almost perfect, (Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur did the adaptation), and perfectly entertaining and of all the versions of the book it's still the one to fall back on and yet it doesn't feel authentic. This is a "Wuthering Heights" for people who haven't read the book and don't want to; Samuel Goldwyn's "Wuthering Heights" rather than Emily Bronte's. Once you get your head around that, there is still a lot to enjoy.

THE RAT RACE **

"The Rat Race" began life as a Garson Kanin play and Kanin himself did the screenplay with direction duties going to an up-and-coming Robert Mulligan. It's a rom-com with a hard nose and a tough edge about a naive young saxophone player from Milwaukee, (Tony Curtis, very good), who comes to New York and finds himself sharing a room with an honest, hard-boiled taxi dancer played by Debbie Reynolds. The obvious happens but the writing, direction and acting, (Jack Oakie, Kay Medford and Don Rickles are in the supporting cast), are good enough for that not to be a problem. This movie is something of a charmer and Reynolds is the real surprise. It was probably the first time she had a good, meaty role and she's excellent making you wish she had been given more serious parts during her career. There's also some nice jazz on the soundtrack.

HONEY BOY **

Film as therapy. Shia LaBeouf wrote "Honey Boy", (it was directed by Alma Har'el), and plays his own father in this movie about a child actor, (Norah Jupe), who grows into a deeply troubled adult actor, (Lucas Hedges), and is based on LaBeouf's own life and while the movie is well done and terrifically acted by both LaBeouf and Hedges, (getting better all the time), it's not very entertaining. LaBeouf Sr. was obviously a seriously troubled individual himself and if this movie is to be believed he screwed up LaBeouf Jr's life and there's nothing very edifying in watching it being played out as quasi-fiction while these kind of 'biopics' have been done often and better before. Watching LaBeouf and his alter-egos Hedges and Jupe bare their souls feels disconcertingly voyeuristic. Still, see it if only for some very fine acting and keep telling yourself, it's only a movie.

TENET ***

There's been a great deal of talk about the impenetrability of the plot of Christopher Nolan's latest blockbuster "Tenet" when, in fact, the plot isn't so much impenetrable, (the 'plot' itself, for want of a better word, is actually quite simple and is spelled out in the first fifteen minutes or so), as sci-fi silly. This is another time travel picture but instead of time travel it's called 'inversion' which is really time travel by the back door so that about midway through the forward thrust of the plot takes a back seat and we start going back in time or maybe 'back to the future'; at least I think that was what was happening. To be honest, by now I didn't really care. I had long stopped trying to 'follow' the movie and was now just sitting back and enjoying every daft minute of it.

Of course, it's not the first time Nolan has mucked about with 'inversion' or just played havoc with our perceptions of reality. "Momento" told its story backwards while I'm still puzzling over "Inception". This, you may argue, is cleverness for its own sake but I'm sure Nolan doesn't expect anyone to take a calculus or a set of algorithms into the cinema. He knows this is nonsense and he's just messing with us and messing with us on a supersonic level. First and last "Tenet", (oh, and the title's a palindrome, geddit?), is just a big, dumb-but-pretending-to-be-clever action flic with some of the most terrific set-pieces in years, (an 'inverted' car chase sets a new high). It's also got a deliberately cheesy script and some bravura tongue-in-cheek performances.

If John David Washington is a little too insouciant as the hero, (or the protagonist as he keeps referring to himself), he's ably backed up by a superb Robert Pattinson as his sidekick, a terrific Kenneth Branagh relishing his role as the villain to end all villains, (please cast him in the next Bond movie), and a spunky Elizabeth Debicki as a time-travelling wife, mother and potential love interest. You don't expect performances of this quality in nonsense of this kind so let's just say they are a bonus. The final bonkers, saving the world from total destruction climax is over-extended and the movie tidies itself up a little too smugly but I'll forgive these minor blemishes when everything else is so much fun.

MANHUNTER *

Of all the films to feature Hannibal Lecter, Michael Mann's "Manhunter" maybe the most subtle and probably the least obvious. It was based on Thomas Harris' book "Red Dragon" which was subsequently filmed with Hopkins reprising his role as Lecter but with very little subtlety and a lot of gore. Here Lecter is a superb Brian Cox in a performance that doesn't make you think of Hopkins at all. Unfortunately he's only on screen for a few short scenes. The rest of the time we have to endure William Petersen's one-note performance as Will Graham, the supposedly smart F.B.I. agent on the case. Personally I could never see Petersen catching a fly on fly paper let alone Lecter or the Tooth Fairy.

If Petersen is a problem the other problem is Mann himself. For some reason he's decided to turn "Manhunter" into an art-house movie devoid of the excitement a good serial-killer chiller needs. It's magnificently shot by Dante Spinotti but it doesn't engage you and it's climax is ... well, anti-climatic to say the least. No pun intended but Hopkins' Lecter had bite; this Tooth Fairy is a curiously toothless beast. If "The Silence of the Lambs" sequels were crude affairs at least you knew they were there. This one just disappears as you're watching it.

RESCUE DAWN ***

It's not often a film-maker moves from a documentary to a feature film with actors covering much the same material but then Werner Herzog isn't your average film-maker.  In 1997 he made "Little Dieter Needs to Fly", a documentary about Dieter Dengler, a U.S. naval pilot shot down over Laos, taken prisoner and who then escaped into the jungle. Perhaps in an effort to reach a wider audience, in 2006, he made "Rescue Dawn", a dramatization of Dieter's story starring Christian Bale and it's a humdinger of a movie with another typically brilliant Bale performance and some remarkably good work from co-stars Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies.

If you'd seen or even heard of the documentary you would know the scenario and if you know Herzog you know you're in for a rough ride. Unlike other Vietnam movies this isn't a political picture but a story of survival in terrain that Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre might have felt at home in. Superbly shot, mostly in Thailand, by Peter Zeitlinger, this is a gruelling, exciting picture that throws us into the action from the outset and, typical of Herzog, it's also very different from other POW films. It's certainly not an easy watch but then with Herzog, did you really think it would be?

NO SAD SONGS FOR ME no stars

Margaret Sullivan's last film and she didn't go out on a high. "No Sad Songs for Me" is a weepie and not a very good one. Margaret has only ten months to live, (she has cancer), but being the stoic, self-sacrificing type all she worries about is her husband, (Wendell Corey, very good considering the material), and her daughter, (Natalie Wood, obnoxious in pigtails). Rudolph Mate was the director and I suppose he did his best under the circumstances while Viveca Lindfors is 'the other woman' Margaret would be happy her husband settles down with after she's gone. Mercifully, her ten months fairly fly by and the movie manages to clock in at under ninety minutes.