THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED **

 If movies were the sum of their credits, both in front of and behind the camera, then "This Property is Condemned" might have been a masterpiece. It isn't but it's a damn fine, if underrated and largely forgotten, film nevertheless. Based very loosely on a one-act play by Tennessee Williams and with a screenplay in part written by Francis Coppola, (without the Ford), it's a sweetly tough romantic drama about the relationship between a small-town dreamer of a girl, (a superb Natalie Wood), and the railroad 'fixer', (an excellent Robert Redford), who comes to stay in her mother's boarding house during the Great Depression. It's fairly conventional, predictable even, but it oozes charm, is beautifully cast, (as well as the leads there's good work from Kate Reid as Wood's less-than-wholesome mother and Mary Badham as her kid sister), superbly photographed by James Wong Howe and has a fine Kenyon Hopkins score. Of course, by 1966 movies like this were no longer in fashion. Essentially it's a throwback to the kind of films Elia Kazan was making in the previous ten years and it would sit very nicely on a double-bill with "Splendour in the Grass". So, no masterpiece then or anything close to one but a very solid, grown-up entertainment of the kind we don't see too often these days.

OM BAR-D-BAR no stars

 "Om Bar-D-Bar" is a free-wheeling piece of what might best be described as 'experimental' cinema. It has a narrative but that narrative, along with the film's 'style', is all over the place. In America, of course, such films are fairly common in avant-garde cinema but this one hails from India and came out at a time when Indian feature films were meant to be nothing more exciting than the usual Bollywood production. This one may have Bollywood elements but, like everything else in the picture, they are subverted.

It was directed by Kamal Swaroop and it was clearly not aimed at a mass audience. if technically it's on the ropey side, (some of the night-time shooting is poor), it does show imagination and is often shot like a documentary. Of course, the big question is, is it any good or just self-indulgent? Swaroop clearly has skill, (though this is the only one of his films I've seen), but despite the skill and the imagination I found it very hard-going.

JUST MERCY ***

 "Just Mercy" might have been just another inspirational true story of the kind the American cinema seems very fond of and which they usually treat with much larger dollops of sentimentality than necessary but thanks to director Destin Daniel Cretton's expert handling of the material, a fine script and first-rate performances from Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx this is much more gripping, moving and intelligent than it could have been. It's the story of young African-American lawyer Bryan Stevenson and his fight to free wrongly convicted death-row prisoner Walter McMillan; Jordan is Stevenson and Foxx is McMillan. Of course, that's just the up close and personal element; what it's really about is America's Systemic Racism and although it's set thirty odd years ago the tragedy is it could have been made yesterday.

It's also a thriller, a kind of companion piece to "In the Heat of the Night" but without the grandstanding, Oscar-bait, crowd-pleasing elements and instead of a scenery-chewing Rod Steiger we have a much more nuanced Ralf Spall as a small town Southern lawyer. In fact, all the performances are first-rate with everyone underplaying superbly, (there's an Oscar-worthy turn from Tim Blake Nelson as a key witness), but the casting is just one of the film's many strengths. Cretton and Andrew Lanham's screenplay is humorous as well as honest while Cretton directs in that straightforward, classical style that Clint Eastwood has honed to perfection. Indeed Eastwood could easily have made this and if he had we would be hailing it as one of his finest films. Cretton has every reason to be proud.

THE CHILDREN ACT ****

 The British Cinema has a long literary tradition. Yes, we've had the Kitchen Sink Movement and Hammer and a whole lot of 'stiff upper lip' war movies but perhaps what the British Cinema does best is tell good stories, unadorned, often taken from good novels or, if written directly for the screen, following the format of a good novel and Richard Eyre's "The Children Act" is no exception, so it comes as no surprise that it was written by Ian McEwan and is based on his own novel and that the director has a very solid reputation directing for the theatre.

This is a 'problem picture' but since, Ken Loach apart, the British don't really do problem pictures there's also a strong back story about a marriage that's in trouble. The marriage in question is that of Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci, a very well heeled middle-aged couple. The central story, and the one that makes this a problem picture, deals with Thompson's role in a court case involving the son of Jehovah Witnesses who requires a life-saving blood transfusion contrary to his and his parents' faith. Thompson is the judge presiding in the case and it's her judgement that will decide the outcome.

The film of "The Children Act" is, indeed, the kind of literary cinema the British do brilliantly but it's more than that and not just because it deals with a serious and contentious issue but because of the immense skill of all involved. McEwan has adapted his novel superbly and Eyre directs it beautifully and at its heart lies a truly terrific performance from Thompson, too often cast these days in eccentric supporting roles but here given the opportunity to finally carry a picture again. Tucci, too, is excellent as the errant husband and in a first-rate supporting cast Jason Watkins and Fionn Whitehead, (the boy in question), are stand-outs. This is highly intelligent cinema, as gripping in its own way as any thriller and is a very pleasant and welcome change from so much of the  highfalutin art-house stuff we've been getting recently. Very highly recommended.

THE FIXER *

 A miscast Alan Bates is "The Fixer" of the title in John Frankenheimer's film version of Bernard Malamud's novel. Set in Czarist Russia, Bates is the Jewish handyman accused and imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit and Dirk Bogarde is the lawyer who does what he can to help him and there's a large, starry cast of mostly British thespians playing various Russians and Jews to the best of their ability or not as the case may be.

It was a prestige production in the MGM tradition of grandiose literary works and you half expect to see Richard Brooks' name on the credits but from Frankenheimer you expect more. In the early sixties he was the wunderkind of the American cinema, turning out exciting and edgy pictures like "Birdman of Alcatraz" and "The Manchurian Candidate" but this is stodgy and old-fashioned and it hammers its arguments home with very little subtlety, (it was written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo). Bogarde goes some way to redeeming it but not far enough.

AMATEUR no stars

 Hal Hartley isn't for everyone. He's certainly not going to appeal to the kind of audiences hooked on what Marvel are turning out and even the art-house crowd haven't always related to his brand of very dry, off-the-wall humour and the kind of one-note performances he draws from his casts and yet his reputation has remained rock solid for over thirty years. He made "Amateur" in 1994 with regular co-star Martin Donovan together with Elina Lowensohn and French legend Isabelle Huppert. The plot hardly matters; it's like a riff on the gangster movie but so daft you can discount it as any kind of thriller and too lacking in what we might call 'gags' to be classed as a comedy. 

Donovan is the amnesiac who wakes up, injured in an alley, before wandering into a cafe where he meets ex-nun, now porn writer Isabelle Huppert who then brings him home. So far, so regular but from here on it kicks off every which way; they could be making it up as it goes along and maybe they were though Hartley is credited with the screenplay. Of course, there are people who find all of this hilarious and perhaps even intellectually stimulating but it only took about twenty minutes for me to realise that Hartley has never been my kind of poison. For fans only.

CURE ***

 This Japanese serial-killer chiller is just grisly enough to satisfy the fan-boys and smart enough to please those who like to take their brains with them when they go to the cinema. People are being murdered in Tokyo and their killers are found close to the bodies but claiming either no memory or understanding of their crimes and it's left to laid-back detective Koji Yaskusho to figure out what's going on.

The film is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Cure" and since it first appeared in 1997 has built up something of a cult following. It's like a Japanese version of "Seven" and Kurosawa builds up the suspense beautifully, using tiny shock tactics rather than big jump-out-at-you scares and eliciting a genuinely eerie performance from Masato Hagiwara as the man who's probably behind the killings. A superb use of sound effects also adds to the general feeling of unease making this one of the most unsettling horror films of the last 25 years.

THE TROUT no stars

 Even the most avid cineastes are unlikely to be familiar with this very late Joseph Losey opus. It was his penultimate film, made in France in 1982, and starring a young Isabelle Huppert and Jeanne Moreau and frankly, it's pretty terrible. Huppert is the small-town girl with a gay husband, (Jacques Spiesser), and ideas above her station who, after hustling a rich, middle-aged couple, (Moreau and Jean-Pierre Cassel), at, of all things, bowls ends up going to Japan with Cassel's business partner.

The kindest thing I can say about it is that it's a strange movie that is also strangely dated, (there's lots of bad disco music), and it features some of the worst acting that either Huppert or Moreau ever did. There's the flimsiest of plots involving high finance but this, like much else in the picture, is hard to fathom. The best performance comes from the Polish actor Daniel Olbrychski as that business partner of Cassel's who has the hots for Huppert but even he can't redeem this hollow, empty affair that, together with "Streaming", brought Losey's illustrious career to a sorry end.

DEPARTURE *

 "Departure" is another of those precious coming-of-age films that the British or the French, in particular, tend to do rather well, this one being British but set in France where Juliet Stevenson and her teenage son Alex Lawther have come to sell the family's holiday home. Young Lawther, (twenty when the film was made but looking much younger), is also discovering his sexuality and it isn't girls he appears to be interested in, so when he spies a slightly older French boy on a bridge, his hormones start working overtime. Rather awkwardly, when Juliet meets him she, too, is drawn to him.

Beautifully photographed, intelligently written and directed by Andrew Steggall, whose first feature this is, and very nicely acted, "Departure" is one of those films you feel churlish criticizing, rather like throwing stones at a nun and I suppose you could say that in its own way it is absolutely perfect, perfect and lifeless and more than a little contrived. Since young Alex wants to be a writer you wonder how much of it may be autobiographical but if it is, what a dull coming-of-age Steggall must have had; you keep waiting and waiting for something to happen and when it does, it's a case of so-what. This is the kind of art-house film Joanna Hogg makes, which may be a recommendation to some and an anathema to others. As I said, it's 'precious'.

5 AGAINST THE HOUSE no stars

 A heist movie but not a good one. Phil Karlson was the director so you had the right to expect more but saddled with a dreadful script and poor performances all round he couldn't do anything to save "5 Against the House". For starters, the title is misleading as there's really only one against the house, psychotic Korean veteran Brian Keith. The other four are Guy Madison, (looking more like William Holden than ever), Kerwin Mathews, Alvy Moore and Kim Novak, (looking gorgeous but not doing much in the way of acting; even her singing is dubbed), and although it was Mathews who came up with the daft plan to rob a Reno casino they didn't really mean to keep the money. In fact, Madison and Novak were in the dark about the whole thing until the very last minute, (yes, it's as silly as it sounds). There is a trickle of excitement at the end but not enough to keep you awake. By the time the robbery comes around you will probably have drifted into a deep sleep and if you're lucky you might even be dreaming you're watching "Rififi" or "The Killing" instead.

REBECCA **

 Whatever you do, don't approach Ben Wheatley's new film "Rebecca" as a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's much beloved classic, not that it ever would have been; Wheatley is his own man and we always knew he would do things differently, in this case sticking more closely to the book and casting it in such a way as to banish all memories of Fontaine, Olivier and Dame Judith and in this he has been largely successful. Armie Hammer is a lot less melancholy, if a tad modern, than Lord Larry ever was. Lily James is much more down-to-earth and obviously a good deal more sensual than Joan while Kristin Scott Thomas gives Mrs. Danvers a human side that was totally lacking in Judith Anderson's performance. Indeed, regardless of what else you think of the film I doubt if anyone could find fault with Scott Thomas who effortlessly walks away with the picture.

It also benefits from a Manderley that really looks like it might be one of the finest houses in all of England and the whole thing is beautifully shot by Laurie Rose in widescreen and colour. Fans of Mr. Hitchcock's version are unlikely to be won over; however, newcomers and fans of Du Maurier's novel should find plenty here to please them though the device of not giving the new Mrs. De Winter a Christian name seems even more contrived this time round.

CHILD'S PLAY *

 There's evil afoot in one of those boy's schools were the boys are all played by actors in their early twenties. It makes you wonder at what age pupils graduated from American high-schools. "Child's Play" was adapted from a successful Tony-award winning Broadway play and was directed by Sidney Lumet. It's certainly not one of his better films but it's a nice grisly entertainment nevertheless about the feud between two senior masters, (James Mason and Robert Preston, both terrific), and a seemingly inexplicable eruption of violence amongst the boys.

Basically, it's a high-class horror film with possible demonology lurking in the chapel and would be more effective if the 'boys' weren't so clearly young men. Beau Bridges is the new young gym teacher and former pupil torn between loyalty to Preston and sympathy for Mason and David Rounds is good as a fairly liberal young priest. It's nonsense, of course, but the cast give it a real kick and Mason, in particular, might convince you that you're watching something serious. Understandably it isn't much revived.

THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME **

 Religion figures prominently in this slice of American Gothic from Antonio Campos but it's the old time religion of the Old Testament rather than the New and it's the Devil who's in the driving seat in "The Devil All the Time". Covering a period of about twenty years and with a multitude of characters, most of whom come to a sticky end, it's a darkly funny piece of Americana set in the backwoods of West Virginia where murder is more common than a prayer before bedtime.

We've been down these backroads before, of course, all the way back to the seventies. Scorsese cut his teeth on material like this as did Malick and Campos shows us you certainly can't keep a good genre down. It meanders a little and jumps back and forth in time maybe more than it should and it's certainly overlong but it's well-acted, (particularly by Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland), and very nicely narrated by Donald Ray Pollock, author of the original novel.