CUT BANK no stars

 Matt Shakman's "Cut Bank" is like the episode of "Twin Peaks" that got away; it's just too weird to dismiss out of hand and too lacking in substance to take seriously. I suppose you could describe it as American Gothic and its director did indeed direct an episode of that series and this too might have made a decent episode of a television series like "Fargo", (something else Shakman worked on), but there isn't enough here for a feature film despite a cast that includes Bruce Dern, John Malkovitch, Michael Stuhlbarg and Oliver Platt. It's also not helped in that the lead is Liam Hemsworth, arguably the least talented of that trio of acting brothers.

Cut Bank itself is one of those American small towns about the size of a pinhead and one the world has obviously forgotten about and where a murder can be inadvertently filmed without anyone really batting an eye. It's also the kind of place David Lynch would feel very much at home in. It's redeemed in part by Dern, Malkovitch and Stuhlbarg all at their daft best but God only knows what audience it was intended for; neither mainstream nor art-house, it might make for a passable midnight matinee.

A WHITE, WHITE DAY **

 The opening frames of Hlynur Palmason's movie "A White, White Day" conveys weather and landscape in a way very few movies have. It's clear seasons and time are passing in a dizzying, almost disorientating, fashion so when people finally appear, (an elderly man and his granddaughter), they feel as if they shouldn't be here and when we move indoors, it's like a alien place, particularly as there is a horse in the living room. And then it's back to more of the same, images of a landscape, but now with people occasionally appearing at a distance..

In part an intimate psychological study of its central character, Ingimundur, (a superb, award-winning performance from Ingvar Sigurdsson), and in part a study of the harsh environment in which he lives, Palmason's film is a visually stunning and often relentless 'thriller', dealing with the themes of grief, jealousy and revenge. It's also the kind of film that clearly belongs in the Northern Hemisphere where nature at its least forgiving determines both the landscape and the character of its inhabitants. You could say Ingimundur is the way he is because of his environment.

The plot evolves slowly yet inexorably with dialogue kept to a minimum. As a thriller it reminded me of the television series "True Detective" which certainly took its time and wasn't really concerned with resolving issues; the pace here is decidedly languorous and the film is open-ended. A huge hit on the festival circuit and the Icelandic entry for the Oscars, it should also prove very popular with art-house audiences.

THE WAYWARD BUS no stars

 Whatever merits there might have been in John Steinbeck's novel "The Wayward Bus" they certainly aren't obvious in this film version directed by someone called Victor Vicas. The movie is just another soap-opera about a group of people who find themselves caught up together in an enclosed space, (an airplane, a boat, a stagecoach or, as here, a very rickety old bus), each acting out their own dramas while a potential disaster looms, in this case, a storm.

They include Jayne Mansfield, Dan Dailey, Dolores Michaels and driver Rick Jason, who is about as good-looking and about as wooden as a Regency Cabinet while back at base said driver's wife, Joan Collins, is busy hitting the bottle as well she might after finding herself in a crock like this. The acting is mostly miserable though Mansfield is surprisingly good as a stripper with a heart of gold and that fine character actor, Larry Keating is excellent as a slime-ball while Charles G. Clarke's black and white, Cinemascope photography adds the tiniest touch of class. It's also mercifully short at 87 minutes.

ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI ***

 Obviously a labour of love for Oscar-winning actress Regina King, "One Night in Miami" is her film version of Kemp Powers' play about a night in which Malcom X, Mohammed Ali, (or Cassius Clay as he was back then), Sam Cooke and Jim Brown got together in a Miami hotel room discussing their lives as well as the struggle for civil rights. It's fiction, of course, and could have been painfully theatrical but King opens it up beautifully and draws superb performances from the whole cast with Leslie Odom Jr's Sam Cooke, (surely the Oscar is his to lose) and Aldis Hodge's Jim Brown the stand-outs.

Indeed it's very much an actor's piece and if the ground covered has already been covered elsewhere, this is material well worth repeating and as a piece of history that might have happened but didn't it provides much to ponder over. It's also hugely entertaining, funny and whip-smart, and by the time we get around to Cooke's rendition of "A Change is Gonna Come" there won't be a dry eye in the house.

THE COUNTERFEIT TRAITOR **

 "The Counterfeit Traitor" is an overlong and certainly contrived WW2 espionage thriller that still manages, like all good espionage thrillers should, to generate a fair amount of suspense. William Holden is the American-born, Swedish oil-man blackmailed by the Allies into working as an agent in Nazi Germany and whose job it is to recruit others into helping him. A decent cast includes that fine and underrated actress Lilli Palmer with Hugh Griffith as Holden's British operative in Sweden as well as a silent Klaus Kinski, (which makes a change), and it's when things start to go wrong that the tension ups a gear. It's a Pelberg/Seaton production with George Seaton writing and directing so you know it's never going to be inspired but it's a robust entertainment nevertheless.

HAM ON RYE ****

 This small gem of an 'indie' movie has 'indie classic' written all over it. Opening on one of those American summers we all wish we could have lived through Tyler Taormina's "Ham on Rye" is a film that, in its first five minutes, could go any way. A Sofia Coppola "Virgin Suicides" rip-off? Surely not. Another gross-out teen comedy? No, these teens are too well-scrubbed, their parents perhaps just a little too off-the-wall. Come to think of it, everyone we meet in the first five minutes is just a little too off-the-wall. Is this a horror movie? Is Michael Myers lurking in the sunshine?

Perhaps it's that uncertainty demonstrated in the first five minutes that makes this the kind of movie you know you're going to treasure and if there's a precedent maybe it's the early films of Richard Linklater or something David Lynch might have made when he was sixteen, (as it progresses it certainly drifts off into Lynchian surrealism). There's no plot and the lack of 'action' is bound to alienate even its potential audience, teens of a certain age. Cineastes, however, will have a field-day with the onscreen images conjuring memories of other films as well as, hopefully, their own teenage years when doing nothing actually felt like doing something, (and there's an awful lot of doing nothing here). It's a young person's movie for sure and you could say Tyler Taormina has definitely arrived. I loved every bizarre moment.

BULL **

 Continuing proof that Independent cinema is alive and kicking in the USA. "Bull" is director Annie Silverstein's feature debut about the unlikely friendship that develops between an introverted 14 year old girl, (an excellent Amber Havard), and her ageing neighbour, a rodeo bullfighter, beautifully played by Rob Morgan, after she and her friends break into his home. It's a film whose pedigree goes back to the seventies and it's clear that in this American backwater very little has changed. This is Trump's America where people are so mired in poverty they will do or believe anything if they think it will alleviate their problems. It has a rough, documentary feel to it greatly helped by Silverstein's decision to use mostly non-professionals in her cast and it's superbly shot by Shabier Kirchner. It may not have the most original of scenarios but it does deal with a part of America largely ignored by filmmakers and it certainly heartfelt, clearly marking Silverstein out as a director with a future.

THE WHITE TIGER **

 Produced by Netflix and clearly aimed at an international, or at least a western, audience Ramin Bahrani's film version of Aravind Adiga's best-selling novel "The White Tiger" is a 'modern' Indian's vision of India filtered through western eyes. It's hero, Balram, (an excellent Adarsh Gourav), is an ambitious lower-caste servant who finagles his way into a rich landlord's home as a driver before circumstances force him to take drastic action to better himself and become, as he describes it, an entrepreneur.

it's an entertaining movie crammed full of 'local colour' with an eye very much on the tourist market but it lacks depth. Themes like poverty, the caste-system and political corruption, (rife it would appear), are glossed over in favour of a thriller plot as if dwelling on these issues in any detail would detract from what is primarily 'an entertainment'. The film feels a little too "Slumdog Millionaire" when it should be "Wall Street" with Gourav as both Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen. By the time it moves into darker territory it feels more than a little contrived. Still, it's redeemed by Gourav's outstanding performance, clearly marking him out as a talent to watch in the future.

THE LITTLE THINGS no stars

 Another serial killer movie more "Se7en" than "Zodiac" but nowhere near as fresh as either despite having three Oscar-winning actors heading the cast. An unusually subdued Denzel Washington is the slightly grizzled older cop, (been there, done that), Rami Malek is the young detective desperate to shake off any resemblance to Freddie Mercury and Jared Leto is the probable killer. It's a slow, handsome-looking film, so determined not to be sensational that it veers towards the dull side. The writer and director is John Lee Hancock so I guess the blame lies largely with him.

Denzel's character, the great detective whose intuition is almost superhuman, is a cliche too far; he's now the right age to channel his inner Morgan Freeman while Malek is just sleep-walking through his role. Leto, however, is outstanding, giving the movie a much needed kick as well as a touch of class, acting his co-stars off the screen though that fine and underrated actor Terry Kinney gives a lift to his few scenes as Malek's boss. Still, despite the cast and John Schwartzman's superb cinematography this could be just another episode of "C.S.I. Crime Scene". A real disappointment.

WITHOUT HONOR **

 This little B-Movie, clocking in at a very economical 69 minutes, could easily have been an episode of "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" with some top-notch guest stars, one of whom gets dispatched in the first ten minutes and he's the biggest name in the picture. The ridiculous plot hardly bears thinking about and yet it's that very plot that makes this so interesting. Laraine Day is the adulterous wife who accidentally stabs her lover but that's only the beginning of her troubles. While her lover lies conveniently in the box-room her snake of a brother-in-law, her lover's wife and her husband all gather in the sitting room; yep, it's mostly all done on the one set. It gets progressively sillier as it goes along but the very game cast, that includes Franchot Tone, Dane Clark and Agnes Moorehead, add a welcome touch of class, (Moorehead's terrific). It may not be in the same class as something like "Detour" but it's still so much better than a lot of big studio productions of the time.

FAREWELL AMOR ***

 "Farewell Amor" is director Ekwa Msangi's feature film debut but you would never guess it as this remarkable film feels like the work of someone who has been making films for years. The plot revolves around an Angolan woman who comes to America with her teenage daughter to be reunited with her husband after an absence of 17 years only to discover they are virtually strangers and it's told from the point of view of all three of them. However, this is no grim problem picture but a surprisingly upbeat account of lives coming together and how something as simple as dance, for example, can engage people on the most basic of levels.

The three central performances are outstanding as Msangi glides her cast seamlessly through the twists and turns of her characters' lives while getting in some nifty dance moves in the process. The fact that the wife and mother, (a splendid Zainab Jah), is deeply religious while her husband, (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, equally good), has lost his religion, if he ever had any, doesn't help matters just as her fidelity and his infidelity over the years proves a major hurdle they must overcome. But, as I said, grimness is put on the back-burner and this lovely character study is all the better for it.

TIME ****

 This astonishing documentary, with footage taken over two decades, is essentially a video diary in which Fox Rich fights to have her husband released from prison where he is serving a 60 year sentence for armed robbery but, as the title "Time" attests, it also deals with the time that passes from the opening home movie shots of a young Fox Rich and her family to the present day where we discover that Fox has had a successful life and runs her own business as well as successfully raising a large family. Of course, this hasn't stopped her continuing the fight on her husband's behalf but using her success to her and her husband's best advantage.

It's structured like a fiction film in which every moment is real and it's as gripping as any Michael Mann thriller and it's so magnificently shot, (in black and white by Nisa East, Zac Manuel and Justin Zweifach), and edited, (by Gabriel Rhodes), it almost takes a suspension of disbelief to realise that everything we are seeing is real. This is one of the great documentaries, (the director is Garrett Bradley), mainly because it subverts the documentary genre. This is no 'bleeding hearts' portrait of despair, (Fox and her husband really did carry out the robbery), but the study of a powerful woman doing what she can to fight a system rigged against her.

If this were fiction it would probably be an Oscar-bait vehicle for Viola Davis but you know that no-one, least of all Fox herself, is acting and yet she is giving a performance, performing in the hope that everything she says and does will get her husband Rob paroled and as we follow her on her journey we also follow her sons on theirs. As a study in resilience and what is possible this is amazing and deeply moving. It's a demonstration of what I would call 'pure cinema' where the only dramatic effects come from the material itself; a masterpiece.

THE WOMAN WHO RAN ****

 I remember once generalising that any film that takes three hours to tell its story can't really be that good. Of course, such generalisations are rubbish; films are as good or as bad as they are whether they are ten minutes long or ten hours but there's something to be said for 'the miniature'. Little films can be beautifully polished gems and there are many small films of seventy-five minutes or so that you wish would go on forever.

Sang-soo Hong's "The Woman who Ran" is one such film. It's a conversation piece and there's a lot of small talk but it's so beautifully directed and acted you feel a sense of privilege just being with these people and these people are mostly female friends, or maybe just acquaintances, spending time together. When a man makes an early appearance, in a terrifically written and very funny single take sequence, he seems something of an intruder but Hong has so much fun with the scene he makes for a very welcome intruder. Mostly, however, it's just women talking about their lives, the men in their lives, their pasts and the pleasure or otherwise of eating meat and I wish it could have gone on for another hour or so.