THE HALFWAY HOUSE ***

 This virtually unknown little gem was recently picked by my friend Alex Ramon as one of his ten best films in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films ever made. While I wouldn't go that far it's certainly extraordinary and hopefully, thanks to Alex, a film well worth discovering.

"The Halfway House" of the title is a place not dissimilar in cinema to many other houses in which a group of people find themselves trapped, metaphorically or literally, in what we might describe as a loose genre that stretches from "The Old Dark House" through "Dr. Terror's House of Horrors" all the way to some of the home invasion movies of today.

Set during the closing years of the Second World War, the people here are a sundry bunch who arrive at an Inn in the Welsh countryside but it's an Inn that really shouldn't exist, having been destroyed by a bomb the previous year. Their hosts are Mervyn Johns, (always good in a ghost story, for indeed this is what it is), and his real-life daughter Glynis Johns, and all of them have problems that need sorting out.

It's clear from quite early on that this will indeed be a ghost story of sorts. It's also an Ealing comedy and a piece of wartime propaganda, (Ireland's neutrality and possible 'friendship' with Germany is touched on and how many war films of the period would think of that angle). You might even say it's an anti-war film since the futility of war is also a theme.

Very loosely adapted by Angus MacPhail and Diana Morgan from the play "The Peaceful Inn" by Denis Ogden it's also beautifully acted by its ensemble cast with Francoise Rosay, Esmond Knight, Alfred Drayton and Tom Walls the standouts. Basil Dearden was the director though Alberto Cavalcanti also had his hand in it and it's not only one of Dearden's most neglected films but also one of his best. Perhaps not top ten material, then, but one for the ages nevertheless.

MEMORIA ****

 Nobody goes to an Apichapong Weerasethakul film for action or excitement unless, of course, they like their excitement to be of the purely cerebral kind. Weerasethakul makes films so slow there are times when you think they've stopped altogether. In "Memoria", his first film largely in English (and Spanish), Tilda Swinton is the woman who hears loud noises in her head, like a heavy object being dropped, and which of us hasn't been awakened from sleep on hearing something similiar? But strange things happen around Tilda, such as car alarms going off for no reason or a man seemingly dying and then coming back to life as he sleeps beside her.

Sounds of every kind play a major part in "Memoria" and naturally where you have sound you must also have silence and from that silence the 'recreation' of sound and therein lies the cerebral excitement of Weerasethakul's most recent feature, the external piecing together of what is happening inside Swinton's head and since we can't physically get inside her head it's left to the actress to convey in her expressions and her movements what she is experiencing, more often than not without the help of dialogue, (this is a film of long silences).

Of course, Weerasethakul's films have always been about the relationship of a character to their environment, emphasised by the amalgamation of sound and vision, "Tropical Malady", being perhaps the most notable example as reality and the purely fantastical merge without explanation and this could be its sister film. Is Swinton simply suffering from a tropical malady or, like Uncle Boonmee, could she be recalling past lives?

In some ways this is Weerasethakul's most accessible film. Always a sublime maker of what we might term 'metaphysical thrillers' but which tend to keep us at a distance here, thanks to Swinton's quietly magnificent performance, he really draws us in. With its allusions to mysticism and danger we are practically in the realms of a suspense movie though certainly not one that will appeal to a mass audience. Weerasethakul will always remain an art-house director and it's in art-houses that this extraordinary film will prosper. See it at all costs.

THE SON *

 Florian Zeller wrote three separate plays, "The Father", "The Son" and "The Mother", though the plays are not directly connected. In 2020 he made his directorial debut with "The Father" and showed great skill in transforming a very theatrical piece into something wholly cinematic. Now he has given us the film version of "The Son". The subject is mental illness and how families deal with it and cinema has been dealing with these kind of issues almost since the beginning and family dramas like this have been grist to the mill for American cinema for decades, usually treating the subject sensationally. Zeller, however, treats the subject with a clinical coolness and it's a failing the film never recovers from.

Here a seventeen year old boy, Nicholas, (beautifully played by newcomer Zen McGrath), finds difficulty in just living. His parents, (Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern), are separated. Jackman now lives with his partner Vanessa Kirby and has a new baby son and Nicholas, who has been living with his mother, now wants to move in with them. He does but his situation doesn't improve. Nicholas is seriously ill and needs treatment, not just a change of scene.

In many ways this is an actor's piece and all the performances, including a cameo from Anthony Hopkins, are first-rate but it's the cool detachment Zeller brings to the material that keeps us at a distance, never allowing us to get emotionally involved. This is a deeply serious subject and Zeller treats it with an appropriate seriousness and yet there were times when I craved for the psychodramas of the past. Like Jackman I, too, felt shut out from Nicholas' pain and the last thing a film like this should do is alienate its audience; sometimes good intentions just aren't enough.

MARLOWE no stars

 You could say Neil Jordan has gone down in the world. This neo-noir based, not on a Raymond Chandler novel but on John Banville's more recent take "The Black-Eyed Blonde", is a very poor addition to the genre, handsomely shot by Xavi Gimenez to resemble Edward Hopper paintings but totally lacking in thrills or atmosphere and surprisingly badly acted.

An over-the-hill Liam Neeson plays an over-the-hill "Marlowe", (that's the title but in this day and age that name in itself is unlikely to draw in an audience; a dear friend of mine actually thought it might be a biopic of Christopher Marlowe). For the uninitated he's the same Philip Marlowe who's been played by Mitchum, Garner, Gould, Dick Powell and both Montgomery's, Robert and George and of course most famously by Bogie but Neeson's Marlowe is instantly forgettable.

He's been hired by femme fatale Diane Kruger to find her lover who's disappeared. It's the same old schtick movies like this thrive on but here the tortuous and convoluted plot feels like a pale imitation of the real thing as if someone came up with the idea of let's make it more baffling than "The Big Sleep". Jessica Lange, far from her best, is Kruger's mother but it's left to Danny Huston, now almost a dead ringer for his father, to breathe a brief modicum of life into proceedings. Unfortunately, some smart one-liners aside, the movie was dead before it started.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT **

 It was perhaps the greatest of all antiwar novels and in 1930 it became the greatest of all antiwar films and until this day that American film version, directed by Lewis Milestone, remains largely unsurpassed. In 1979 there was a television version directed by Delbert Mann which was given a cinema release in some countries and now Germany itself has tackled "All Quiet on the Western Front" in this epic version directed by Edward Berger..

It's all there; the multitudinous corpses, the dead animals, the mud in the trenches, the gas. What isn't there is Remarque's novel. For some reason Berger and fellow writers Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell have chosen to veer away from the original though he does keep a few key incidents. As war films go, however, this one is certainly grimly realistic even if there is still something vaguely 'Hollywood' about it, brilliantly photographed but perhaps a little over-egged in the art direction department. The battle scenes may be among the finest ever filmed, (they are certainly among the most horrific), but maybe they are just 'too much'; never has the old adage 'War is Hell' been more appropriate. Berger has conjured up a hell on earth and on a huge scale. He makes his point and then he makes it again and again.

The film's hero is young Paul Baumer, (very well played by Felix Kammerer), who goes from idealistic schoolboy to battle-scared veteran almost overnight. He's joined in his living nightmare by 'Kat', (Albrecht Schuch, also very good), an older veteran but closer in age to be more of an older brother than a father figure as was Louis Wolheim to Lew Ayres in the original.

It very seldom leaves the battlefield except for those scenes with the high command and with Daniel Bruhl as the diplomat charged with trying to negotiate a ceasefire. A certain cynicism is the order of the day here that leaves a somewhat sour aftertaste. Is it as good as Milestone's version? No, but then less is more and sometimes the horrors left to our imagination are greater than all the blood and guts contemporary cinema can serve up. On a technical level it is very well done and I don't see it going away empty-handed at the Oscars but neither do I see it going down in history as one of the great (anti)war films.

THE OUTFIT ***

 In this cleverly title picture Mark Rylance is the bespoke tailor in 1950's Chicago who finds himself caught in the middle of a gang war. "The Outfit" of the title could refer to the kind of outfit who kill people or to the kind that Rylance makes in his workshop. The action never leaves said workshop yet director Graham Moore never lets the tension flag.

Rylance, as ever, is superb and there's excellent supporting work from Zoey Deutch as the receptionist in over her head and from Dylan O'Brien, Johnny Flynn and a delightfully over-the-top Simon Russell Beale as various goodfellas. There's also a very nice streak of black humour running through the film and while this may be a 'small' picture it is, in its own way, close to perfect.

PINOCCHIO *

A very different take on "Pinocchio" which, despite the inevitable cuteness, (those awful kid's voices, some terrible songs), is also much darker than expected. Producer, co-director and co-writer Guillermo Del Toro has chosen to set it in fascist Italy, (Mussolini himself is a character), and death, real and imaginary, is never far from the surface. It certainly looks amazing and is something of a technical marvel but both children and their parents will surely miss the fairytale magic that made the Disney version unique.

This might well have seemed like a good idea but that mixture of cuteness and ghoulishness never really gels and its all-star cast struggle to bring it to life, (Ewan McGregor makes for a very annoying cricket). I'm also not sure young kids will get it nor am I sure adults will appreciate Del Toro's messing with familiar material. Indeed it's something of a mess if, at times, a brilliant one.

WHITE NOISE ****

Noah Baumbach's most ambitious film to date is this comedy adapted from Don DeLillo's supposedly unfilmable novel. "White Noise" is in some parts Spielbergian sci-fi and Godardian fantasy with even a dash of Altman thrown in for good measure and you may have trouble finding the Baumbach we all know and love in this heady brew...or perhaps not. Baumbach was always at his best lampooning a certain kind of American lifestyle and this really is a brilliant satire.

Baumbach finds fun in all sorts of places; a disaster movie scenario, a send-up of academia, consumerism and the pharmaceutical industry and once again makes great use of Adam Driver's hang-dog persona and Greta Gerwig's vacant kookiness. He also casts Don Cheadle beautifully against type.

He and Driver are professors in the 'College on the Hill', Cheadle specialising in celebrity studies and Driver in Hitler studies, (apparently Driver's so charasmatic in his work that no-one can mention Hitler's name without a nod in Driver's direction). It may also be Baumbach's most accessible movie to date despite its unlikely source, very funny in a New Yorker kind of way and even serious enough to touch a nerve now and then. It may not be quite in the class of "Marriage Story" but it does confirm Baumbach as one of the best directors in America today.

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE *

 Many have tried but few do 'body-horror' quite like David Cronenberg so I suppose fans should welcome "Crimes of the Future" as a return to the kind of movies that turned us on, or indeed turned us off, Cronenberg in the first place. This is a sci-fi movie grounded in some kind of reality. Yes, there are 'monsters' but the monsters are us, recognizably human, but transmogrified into something beyond what we are now.

You see, humans are growing new organs and the most famous of these is Saul Tenser, (Viggo Mortensen, looking rather disinterested in what's going on). Saul has his new organs removed by his glamorous assistant Caprice, (Lea Seydoux), in a public display, captured mostly on people's mobile phones, which they call 'performance art'. Once upon a time this would qualify as a 'freak-show' but in this age of political correctness there are no longer any 'freaks'; vive la difference!.

You might say with this movie Cronenberg is challenging us to look at the human body differently and defying us to put words like 'freak' or 'deformed' out of our minds entirely or more cynically you could say he was exploiting his characters, feeding on our desire for the bizarre. Is "Crimes of the Future" any less of a horror film than "Shivers" or indeed "Freaks" or even "Nosferatu"?

It seems we love, not only to be frightened, but to be disturbed and it seems once again Cronenberg is out to disturb us. Unfortunately it also seems he may be out to bore us; there are no 'frights' in this horror film which moves at a funereal pace, an exploitation picture that is pretentious enough to think we should take it seriously and it is likely its limited appeal will be only to diehard Cronenberg fans. I doubt if anyone else will consider it one of his better pictures

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN ****

 A legend in the theatre, Martin McDonagh's film career has been patchy at best; close to sublime with "In Brughes" and "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" and almost irredeemably bad with "Seven Psychopaths". At least until now, since McDonagh's new film isn't just the best thing he's done on screen but very possibly the best thing he's ever done.

On the surface, "The Banshees of Inisherin" is a very simple affair with a plot that could have been written on the back of an envelope. The setting is the ficticious island of Inisherin off the mainland of Ireland. The year is 1922 and the Irish Civil War is raging. Padraic, (Colin Farrell) and Colm, (Brendan Gleeson) are seemingly best friends until one day Colm tells Padraic he no longer wants to be his friend, that he finds him 'boring', and so what begins as a dark comedy worthy of Beckett or indeed the McDonagh who gave us "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" turns slowly but inexorably into a tragedy worthy of Ibsen and dealing with such themes as loneliness, depression, masculinity and friendship and with an ending as sad as any I've seen in the cinema, (though others may see it differently).

Of course, it all could just as easily have fallen on its slightly absurdist face. Here is a scenario that could have gone any which way; McDonagh is hardly known for his subtlety and yet he never puts a foot wrong. By the time we get to the last act you could hear a pin drop in a packed cinema.

It's also magnificently acted both by Farrell and Gleeson in career-best performaces, both underplaying to the extent that they totally disappear inside their characters and there is a third magnificent performance from Barry Keoghan, (please, just give him the Best Supporting Actor Oscar now), as Dominic, ostensibly the village idiot he may just be the most intelligent person on the island and that is his tragedy; such intelligence can't be contained especially when it goes unrecognized. A masterpiece.

JOHNNY NOBODY *

 There's a terrific idea at the heart of this Irish-set thriller, particularly if you're a Catholic. A drunken Irish-American atheist stands outside a Roman Catholic Church in a small Irish village and defies God to strike him dead when out of nowhere a stranger appears and does just that in front of the local priest and the whole village. Since the killer doesn't appear to have a past or an identity, he becomes known as "Johnny Nobody", hence the film's title.

So far so good; unfortunately we get the denouement about two-thirds of the way through and it's not a very good one. From here on things get progressively more far-fetched, like a cross between a poor man's "The 39 Steps" and "Witness for the Prosecution".

Actor Nigel Patrick both directs and plays the sceptical priest, Aldo Ray is the killer and a really rather good William Bendix, the victim. Others in the cast include a miscast Yvonne Mitchell, Cyril Cusack and Niall Macginnis as well as the usual stock company of Irish players. On its level it's entertaining matinee fare but it could have been so much better.

CONVICTED **

 "Convicted" is based on the play 'Criminal Code', previoulsy filmed by Howard Hawks in 1931 and as remakes go this one is very good indeed. Glenn Ford is the guy serving up to 10 years in prison for killing someone in a barroom brawl. Broderick Crawford is the D. A. who sent him down but believed the sentence to have been too harsh and who then finds himself the warden of the prison Ford ended up in.

It's a good story and, like the earlier version, is well cast. Both Ford and Crawford are excellent and a very fine supporting cast includes Millard Mitchell, Will Geer, Dorothy Malone, Frank Faylen, Ed Begley and Carl Benton Reid as a sadistic guard. The director was Henry Levin, normally associated with much lighter fare than this, but this is one of his finest films. It's largely disappeared but this tough, intelligent picture is certainly worth seeking out.

THE HAPPY ENDING no stars

 You could say writer/director Richard Brooks fashioned "The Happy Ending" as a vehicle for his then wife Jean Simmons and this finest and most undervalued of actresses was rewarded with an Oscar nomination for her performance. She plays the unhappy wife of John Forsythe, (shot in soft-focus, the early part of the film explores their 'youthful' courtship though they do make for very unlikely 'kids'), who finally leaves him in order to 'find herself'. Unfortunately the film itself is something of a slog despite being a reasonably well-acted example of 'the women's picture', (even Forsythe isn't bad), with good work from co-stars Shirley Jones, Lloyd Bridges and Bobby Darin, billed here for some reason as Robert Darin.

The problem is the dime-store novel plotting and dialogue straight out of the worst kind of television soap as Brooks explores the rotteness at the heart of American marriage. Apparently it was something of a hit at the time though it's now largely and mercifully forgotten though its theme-song, 'What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life', has become something of a classic.