ALIAS NICK BEAL *

 Another variation on 'Faust', this time from John Farrow with a miscast Thomas Mitchell as the Faust character, a decent District Attorney who, somewhat inadvertently, sells his soul to become Governor and Ray Milland as his Mephistopheles, "Alias Nick Beal". It's certainly not in the same class as William Dieterle's "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and Milland is unusually stiff as the devilish Beal but its combination of old-fashioned fantasy and film noir still works and even without the direct reference to Old Nick this tale of a good man who sells out is a familiar one. This may not be the best version but the Faust legend has always proved popular and this was no exception, (it's quite highly thought of in some quarters). It's certainly stylish and it looks just fine but the pace is funerally slow and it's left to Audrey Totter as the temptress with a conscience to give the picture what lift she can

I WAS AT HOME, BUT... ***

 The title might make you think of Ozu's masterly tale of childhood "I Was Born, But...", however German director Angela Schanelec's "I Was At Home, But..." is an altogether more challenging affair, typical of the woman who made "The Dreamed Path". It's also a film about childhood, or at least a film with a child as one of its principal protagonists, but this rigorous and admittedly difficult film totally belies any cosiness or sense of closure, turning its attention instead, not so much on the child, but on a distraught mother who appears to be having some sort of breakdown.

Something, perhaps terrible, has happened to the child in question but Schanelec doesn't feel the need to explain it or even to explain the subsequent actions of anyone involved. We seem to have been dropped into the middle of something we don't understand and are left to work things out for ourselves. This is what life is like, she is telling us, not what we usually see when we go to the movies. With only a few films to her credit she is an already established auteur as well as one of cinema's great female directors and her work demands to be seen; just don't expect the obvious or even to be entertained but if you are prepared to enter into her world you will be amply rewarded.

MADCHEN IN UNIFORM ****

 A legend amongst LGBT films, Leontine Sagan's "Madchen in Uniform" is also so much more. This German film, made in 1931, not only presents us with a positive view of a lesbian relationship but it also highly critical of the rules and regulations prevalent in Germany at the time and it's extremely unlikely it would have been made even a few years later.

Set in a German boarding school, standing in for the nation and ruled over with a rod of iron by its disciplinarian headmistress, (Emilia Unda, terrific), a young girl, (Hertha Thiele), falls in love with her teacher, (Dorothea Wieck). That is the film's core but around it swirls a whole host of relationships and incidents, all beautifully handled by first-time director Sagan, (who only made two subsequent films in a very short-lived career). Indeed, on the strength of this film alone it's clear she could have been one of the major film-makers of her generation. All the performances are excellent, particularly that of Thiele as the fourteen year old schoolgirl, (she was actually twenty-three at the time). In some respects this is a film that could sit quite comfortably on a double-bill with Lindsay Anderson's "If..." and its status as a classic is richly deserved.

SHIVA, BABY ****

 

Emma Seligman's "Shiva Baby" is very definitely a movie in miniature, (it only runs for 77 minutes), but its bright, widescreen palette belies the fact as does the immense skill of everyone involved. It's a Jewish comedy of the old school but with a razor sharp edge, (think Elaine May), and it almost all takes place at a shiva, the 'after-party' following a funeral though we are initially introduced to its central character Danielle, (a terrific Rachel Sennott), having sex with her sugar daddy, Max (Danny Deferrori) in his apartment. You see, Danielle supplements her income, the one she gets from her rich parents, as a sex worker, not because she needs the money but because she seems to enjoy it and you can just imagine her reaction when she runs into Max at the shiva with wife and baby in tow.

The film, Seligman's first feature, began life as an 8 minute short which she has now expanded into the cinematic equivalent of a really good short story and as comedies of embarrassment go this is a gem. Sennott is a star in the making but then everyone in this film is pitch-perfect especially Molly Gordon as Danielle's ex-girlfriend, (yes, she's bisexual), and Polly Draper as the archetypal pushy but loving Jewish mother. Throw in a score by Ariel Marx that seems to be priming you for some 'Psycho'-like action and you have one of the very best films of the year.

THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY no stars

 If you're wondering what Mick Jagger gets up to when he's not prancing around the stage as a seventy-eight year old Rolling Stone I can tell you he's acting, and not very well, in "The Burnt Orange Heresy". It's based on the book by Charles Willeford and it's about a theft of sorts, here a canvas and it's carried out by a very devious art-critic, (the very unattractive Claes Bang), who is hired to 'steal' it by rich, reclusive Jagger from equally reclusive artist Donald Sutherland, (excellent). Needless to say, things don't go quite according to plan.

It's an interesting yarn that director Giuseppe Capotondi never develops, (he actually makes a thriller plot boring), though the beautiful and talented Elizabeth Debecki almost redeems it when she's on screen but ultimately this is a film with no meat on the bones and it just drifts along to its highly unsatisfying conclusion. Best just give it a miss.

GARDEN OF EVIL **

 Unusual and slightly above average western about three treasure-seekers in Mexico, (Gary Cooper, Richard Widmark and Cameron Mitchell). Who are hired by American woman Susan Hayward to rescue her husband who is trapped in a gold mine in Apache territory. Even if none of the actors are at their best here, director Henry Hathaway keeps things ticking along nicely and it's certainly a handsome looking picture, shot in Cinemascope by Milton Krasner and Jorge Stahl Jr. And with a good Bernard Herrmann score. Plot-wise it takes a little while to get going and if the title "Garden of Evil" hints at perhaps something a little more risque than what's delivered it's good matinee fare nevertheless and in the Hathaway canon is certainly undervalued.

UNCLE SILAS *

 As hoary old Victorian melodramas go "Uncle Silas" is as ripe as they come which isn't to say that it's a stinker. It's based on a Sheridan Le Fanu novel so you should have some idea of what to expect and it's been adapted for the screen by Ben Travers. Am eighteen year old Jean Simmons is the heiress who comes to live with her murderous uncle after her father's sudden death. Derrick De Marney camps it up as Uncle Silas and a totally over-the-top Katina Paxinou is Simmons' hard-drinking and scheming governess and they are the most entertaining things in the picture which is actually very handsomely designed and beautifully shot by Robert Krasker. A decent supporting cast that includes John Laurie and Esmond Knight hams it up just as you would expect them to and while anything resembling suspense is conspicuously absent the film is still good daft fun nevertheless.

WHERE'D YOU GO, BERNADETTE? ***

 Bernadette is the kind of woman you would cross the road to avoid and who would also cross the road to avoid meeting you and she's just the perfect character for Cate Blanchett to add to her portfolio of oddballs. She's also married to something of an oddball, (Billy Crudup), who's some kind of computer genius and between them they have managed to create a nice, normal teenage daughter, (newcomer Emma Nelson, superb), and they all live in a Seattle mansion that is literally falling apart. But Bernadette isn't just a sociopathic oddball; she is, or was, a great architect who dropped out and whose midlife crisis has lasted a couple of decades.

"Where'd you go, Bernadette" is a Richard Linklater comedy so you know we are in oddball territory to begin with. What you might not realise is that it's also very funny and naturally more than a little sad. It's like a walking, talking New Yorker cartoon brought to glorious life and not just by Blanchett, (no-one does crazy quite like her), Crudup and Nelson but by a terrific supporting cast headed by Kristen Wiig and with pitch-perfect turns from Judy Greer, Zoe Chao, Laurence Fishburne, David Paymer and Steve Zahn. I loved every crazy, off-the-wall and marvellously moving moment.

JERICHOW **

 Yet another variation on "The Postman Always Rings Twice". "Jerichow" is a Christian Petzold film so you know it's going to be a more esoteric, slightly off-the-wall thriller. Petzold is not a conventional director even if his plots tend to be. Thomas, (a taciturn Benno Furmann), a dishonourably discharged Afghanistan veteran, needs a job so after doing a favour for drunken businessman Hilmi Sozer, he ends up working for him and his beautiful, unhappy wife so you can imagine what happens next but, like "Transit", his very un-Casablanca like take on "Casablanca", this doesn't quite stick to the formula and perhaps you can tell that it won't from the unrelated opening scene.

Petzold doesn't really go for the big dramatic flourish so this tale of lust and murderous thoughts is surprisingly low-key but like the James M. Cain novel it's loosely based on, it all ends in tears. Indeed there are times when you wish Petzold would just opt for the more melodramatic course; as a thriller this is just a little short on suspense. The three leads are fine and there's a neat twist or two towards the end giving the film a more tragic dimension a more conventional ending would have lacked. Not Petzold's best film, then, but certainly worth seeing.

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH **

 Coppola's first film in ten years was this very strange and somewhat unwieldy adaptation of Mircea Eliade's novella about a professor who, after being struck by a bolt of lightening, regresses to a much younger self, (a kind of Benjamin Button in reverse), allowing him to go find his 'lost' love and continue his life studies, beginning during the rise of Nazism in Europe and moving into the atomic age. It's the kind of wordy, literary picture that the American cinema often tackled as if doing us a favour by bringing the great works of literature to the masses and which, in too many cases, were often just clunking bores but then this is Coppola, a man never afraid of experimentation or of taking a risk so "Youth Without Youth" is, if nothing else, a bold movie.

It was a failure, of course. Critics no longer raced to find a lost master making a grand comeback and audiences, the few that went to see it, found it bewildering and bewildering it is. Tim Roth, a great actor who has never really been given his dues, is the professor and he's perfectly cast here but Coppola's screenplay does him no favours while poor Bruno Ganz is straddled with the awkward role of the doctor who helps him while Coppola, who despite his best efforts, is still guilty of literaryitis, (this is wordy in the worst possible way). Who did he think would go to see it? On the plus side, like so much of Coppola's work, it looks terrific. Cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. bathes the film in a gorgeous autumnal glow. Yes,  it may ultimately be a failure but it's an honourable one and is still worth seeking out.

FRIENDS WITH MONEY ***

 If this small gem of a movie feels at times like an extended episode of a really rather good television series, don't knock it. Good television these days is often so much better than many mainstream movies. Nicole Holofcener made "Friends with Money" in 2006 and the friends, as we have come to expect from Holofcener, are female though the title is a misnomer since not all the friends have money. They are Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack and Jennifer Aniston and Aniston is the poor one. She's also the single one; the others are married to Simon McBurney, Jason Isaacs and Greg Germann and like all good friends they not only interact but interfere in each other's lives.

As you might also expect from Holofcener, "Friends with Money" is often very funny, touching and whip-smart and all four women are superb with Aniston proving the real surprise. The men mostly trail behind them though Britain's McBurney is excellent as McDormand's husband that everyone just assumes is gay while Scott Caan makes for a terrific sleaze-ball of a personal trainer who will sleep with any woman that moves. Never destined for mainstream success, this may have slipped off the radar but it's a movie that cries out for rediscovery.

THIRST **

 If you know the original source novel it may take you awhile to recognize Zola's "Therese Raquin" in this tale of a vampiric priest, transposed to present day South Korea. The priest is Father Sang-hyun, (a superb Kang-ho Song), whose crisis of faith leads him to take part in a somewhat extreme medical experiment and since this is also a horror film, as well as an off-the-wall adaptation of a literary classic, naturally the experiment goes wrong and very soon the good father is lusting after blood and the nubile young wife, (Kim Ok-bin, also superb), of an old boyhood friend.

"Thirst" is a Chan-wook Park film so you know there will be a lot more sex and blood than religion and its horrors will be poetic as well as extreme. Park may be one of Asian cinema's foremost stylists but you mustn't take any of this too seriously. Since Dracula we've had all sorts of vampires, some exploring the myth with a high degree of seriousness, others poking fun; Park tries to combine the two with a reasonable degree of success. It's certainly stylish and it's certainly different and yes, it even manages to get Zola in there, too. Just don't expect too much of him.

MAGNUM FORCE **

 With a screenplay by John Milius and Michael Cimino, "Magnum Force" really out to be better than it is but then you realise the director is Ted Post so maybe we should be thankful it's as good as it is. Post was a jobbing director of limited talent so you might say he was really only as good as his material. "Magnum Force" was the second, in what turned out to be, the 'Dirty Harry' franchise and as follow-ups, (as opposed to sequels), go this is an enjoyably crude yarn.

This time round a group of rogue cops, (David Soul, Tim Matheson, Kip Niven and Robert Urich), are dispensing their own brand of justice, killing bad guys, (and anyone else who gets in their way), and it's up to Harry to stop them. Are you in any doubt that he would? It's a good plot and, to be fair, Post handles the action sequences with considerable aplomb. Unfortunately Clint walks through it as if on autopilot but then, as actor, he too was really just as good as his material.