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.

THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH *

Robert Shaw's play "The Man in the Glass Booth" might have seemed an odd choice for the American Film Theatre series popular at the time as it wasn't that well known and it certainly was no classic. On the other hand, it offered a great part for its leading actor and Maximilian Schell's performance here is a tour-de-force. Is he the rich, Jewish survivor of the Holocaust or is he, in fact, a Nazi war criminal? That's the question posed by Shaw's play and now this less than exciting film version directed by the less than exciting Arthur Hiller. If it's worth seeing it's for Schell who was nominated for the Oscar for this performance. Needless to say, the original is seldom, if ever, revived.

HOUSE no stars

It's very easy to see why "House" has become something of a cult movie for this Japanese horror-comedy is the just the right, or more probably, the wrong side of bonkers. Director Nobuhiko Obayashi shoots it like a demented home-movie; a slapstick fairy-
tale about a group of schoolgirls spending their summer vacation in a haunted house but this is a haunted house movie unlike any other, one that uses animation, silent film techniques and even Japan's role in WW2 to advance what little story it has. It's a surreal fantasy in which technique is everything and it's definitely a young person's movie; watching it I kept thinking of the Monkee's TV show or a psychedelic mishmash of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood directed by William Castle on acid. It's also an acquired taste, one that's passed me by.

SO LONG, MY SON ****

From China, a masterpiece. "So Long, My Son" is an epic account of two families dealing with the trials and tribulations of life in China from the 1980's to the present and is the kind of confident, heartfelt drama many Western filmmakers can only dream about. This is a family saga worthy of Ozu but perhaps even more grounded and down-to-earth, superbly acted by everyone, (leads Jingchun Wang and Mei Yong won Best Actor and Actress at Berlin and deservedly so), superbly shot on a large canvas by Hyun Seok Kim and brilliantly directed by Xiaoshuai Wang. It may not be the easiest film to follow; Wang doesn't tell his tale in a linear fashion as we move back and forth in time as memories are triggered but then who said cinema has to be easy to follow.

Of course, this isn't just a family drama but a comment on Chinese society and is consequently an intimate epic and a beautifully realised political saga at the same time. The 'One Family, One Child' policy is at its core and it is this need for family and for human contact in general that dictates the film's structure. Wang alternates between long shots and close-ups to emphasise the distance between the characters just as the use of colour and music, and naturally make-up, delineate the passage of time. The film begins with a death and death is never far from its surface and yet it's never sentimental but at times almost unbearably moving. Like I say, a masterpiece and one of the finest films of recent years.

PACIFIC HEIGHTS **

A home invasion movie from a time before the term was even fashionable, "Pacific Heights" is a classic 'tenant from hell' picture. John Schlesinger filmed it in San Francisco in 1990 and it's about what happens when new landlords and romantic partners Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith 'rent' an apartment in their house to Michael Keaton. I say 'rent' though Mr Keaton doesn't actually pay them any money; he just moves in like a cuckoo in the nest and takes over with the intention, it seems, of getting the rightful owners out and that thing, a certain Mr Bumble called 'a ass', the law, would appear to be on his side.

This is a slow build of a movie, leading inexorably to a violent climax, signalled early on by Keaton who is obviously a psychopath while Modine is an obvious worm who just has to turn, (though it is Griffith who has the balls in this relationship). It was written by Daniel Pyne, who apparently got the idea from having a tenant of his own he couldn't get rid off. It's certainly a nightmare scenario, even without the psycho element. It may not be a great Schlesinger movie; there's nothing very distinctive about it, but it turns the screws nicely and will make you think twice about renting out that spare room.

EXTRACTION **

"Extraction" is a big, mostly dumb and very violent action flic that has the common sense not to try to be anything else and is actually a surprisingly good example of its kind, providing, of course, that this is the kind of thing you like. The plot is simple; the action relentless. A Mumbai drug-lord's son is kidnapped and it's up to mercenary Chris Hemsworth to get him back. Neither he nor the film hang around. As I've said, it's both violent and relentless; a non-stop catalogue of killings and mutilations, choreographed to bloody perfection by first-time director Sam Hargrave. Of course, there isn't a frame that's actually believable. This is a live-action video game, based on a graphic novel, brilliantly photographed by Newton Thomas Sigel in and around Dhaka and with enough good guys and bad guys killing each other relentlessly to keep it on the boil for two hours. Brains may be largely in short supply but there's certainly no shortage of brawn.

APRES MAI no stars

The problem with autobiographical cinema is that it can be very self-indulgent or just downright dull depending on the life being portrayed. Olivier Assayas made "Apres Mai" in 2012, looking back to his student days in the Paris of 1971. To give the film its English title it was a time when there was "Something in the Air", revolution mostly. It was a time when France, indeed the world, was changing. Assayas himself went on to have a very successful and productive career in cinema but you would never guess it from this film in which he is a callow youth , (played by newcomer Clement Metayer), going through the motions most of us went through at the time without realising we only made a difference if we were part of a much larger picture. Autobiographical cinema is better when it makes that larger picture the centre of attention. Of course, maybe I'm just an old cynic who now finds that period of student revolution not so much 'something in the air' as something in the past. Fundamentally this is a film for Assayas acolytes and old hippies who want to relive their youth, very well done for what it is, but ultimately adding little to the Assayas canon.

BLOWING WILD no stars

Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck must really have been down on their uppers when they agreed to do "Blowing Wild", a profoundly third-rate tale of oil prospectors in South America. Cooper and Ward Bond are partners trying to strike it rich. Anthony Quinn is an old pal who's already made it and Stanwyck is Quinn's wife who once had a fling with Coop and wants to start over. Actually, both Stanwyck and Quinn are very good and there's a nice supporting turn from Ruth Roman as the girl Cooper falls for.

There's enough talent on display for this to have been a much better film than it is but in the end it's only a very pale imitation of the likes of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "The Wages of Fear" and about a dozen other better pictures from Hollywood's Golden Age. Of course, director Hugo Fregonese didn't have much imagination to start with or maybe it fails because Philip Yordan's screenplay was well below his usual standard. Either way, the best I can say for it is that it just might tolerably pass a wet afternoon.