GUILTY BY SUSPICION no stars

 Yet another movie about the HUAC and the Hollywood Ten but far from the best. Irwin Winkler directed and was given screenplay credit after the original writer Abraham Polonsky insisted on having his name removed from the credits, (the central character is based on Polonsky). Winkler takes a gloves-on approach and yet one at times that seems to border on hysteria and despite a first-rate cast this is still a pretty terrible movie.

Robert De Niro is the Polonsky character, a director returning to Hollywood in the middle of a communist witch-hunt where it seems anyone working is an informer and anyone who doesn't 'name names' can't get a job. It's fundamentally fiction but fiction that mixes in real characters such as Darryl F. Zanuck, Sterling Hayden, Howard Da Silva etc. For added 'authenticity', (there's even an abysmal reference to "High Noon"), but this only reduces everything to the level of caricature and as movies about Hollywood in general go, this one is way down the pecking order.

De Niro, probably thinking by appearing he was doing his bit for 'liberalism', tries very hard throughout to make his character seem in some way profound but fails miserably. Annette Bening is his faithful ex-wife, Martin Scorsese, in a good cameo, is a director based on Joseph Losey but it's left to Sam Wanamaker as a lawyer on the side of the committee rather than his clients to give the film a modicum of class. The movie does kick-start magnificently in the last ten minutes when De Niro gets in front of the committee and does his Joseph N. Welch bit but by then it's much too late. How could a movie with this subject matter and this cast be this bad?

ROBBERY **

 Peter Yates' "Robbery" may be based on the Great Train Robbery but it begins with a spectacular car chase through the streets of London after a robbery of a lesser kind. It may not be up to the standard of Yates' later "Bullitt" or "The French Connection" but as car chases go it does the business and sets the scene for an above average crime flic and one that's been largely forgotten.

Stanley Baker, who also co-produced, is the mastermind and other villains include Barry Foster, Frank Finlay, George Sewell, Clinton Greyn and William Marlowe while an unlikely James Booth is on the side of the law. It came at the tail-end of a good period for British crime movies and was probably influential in giving Yates his break in America. Joanna Pettet gets star billing as Baker's wife but may as well not be in the picture.

A PAGE OF MADNESS ***

 This avant-garde silent classic is like a Japanese version of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and since there are no inter-titles we have to figure out for ourselves what is happening, not always easy when the imagery is as elusive as this. Of course, the title "A Page of Madness" and the setting, presumably a mental hospital or asylum, should be more than enough but as for figuring out what is 'real' and what is not, now that's another matter entirely but then, you may ask yourself, in a film like this should we worry too much about 'plot'. Better instead to concentrate on Kinugasa's extraordinary direction, his brilliant use of the camera and the incredible performances of his cast which seem to go beyond anything as simple as mere acting. If this were a Russian or German film it would probably be high in the polls of the greatest films ever made and yet it is hardly known at all. You may not understand it but I defy you not to be blown away by it.

PRIVATE WORLDS no stars

 I suppose in 1935 this was considered a fairly daring movie; a 'serious' look at psychiatry and the goings-on in a mental hospital, clearly designed to educate as much as entertain. Times have changed, however and today "Private Worlds", directed by the redoubtable Gregory LaCava from Phyllis Bottome's novel appears both ridiculously outdated and patronizing as progressive doctor Claudette Colbert, (miscast), and new superintendent psychiatrist Charles Boyer learn not only to work together but to fall in love at the same time.

At least both these actors are sufficiently talented to spark off each other when together though the rest of the cast are very much a mixed bag. As the doctor passed over for promotion in favour of Boyer and his mousy wife Joel McCrea and Joan Bennett are frankly terrible but Helen Vinson as Boyer's pushy sister who seems to be suffering from more than a little dose of nymphomania and the great Esther Dale as the old-fashioned matron are fun to watch. It may not be much of a movie but in its sensationalism, (some scenes could be lifted from Samuel Fuller's "Shock Corridor"), at least it's entertaining.

GERONIMO, AN AMERICAN LEGEND ***

 One of Walter Hill's very best pictures and one of the most underrated of all Westerns, "Geronimo, An American Legend", deals only with that period when Geronimo jumped the reservation having initially surrendered to General Crook until his final surrender and imprisonment in Florida and it's a film very much on the side of the Native American.

Geronimo, beautifully played by Wes Studi, is neither hero nor villain but simply a proud man forced to take a stand when circumstance dictates. It's a violent and certainly an action-packed picture that doesn't sensationalize events or exploit its protagonists. To give it an added air of authenticity it is narrated by a young lieutenant played by Matt Damon and there are fine performances from Jason Patric, Gene Hackman (General Crook) and Robert Duvall as an embittered scout. Unfortunately it wasn't a success but seek it out as it's certainly much better than its reputation would suggest.

KATALIN VARGA ***

 British director Peter Strickland didn't make his debut here in the UK but in Romania and like his subsequent films it was a horror movie but also like his subsequent films it wasn't a horror movie in any conventional sense. "Katalin Varga" is a story of revenge. Katalin is a rape victim and from that rape she had a son. Now, eleven years later the secret she hid from everyone rises to the surface. Her husband and her village treat her as if she were a 'whore' and banishes both her and her son so Katalin sets off in search of revenge.

Although set in the present events could just as easily be happening centuries ago. Katalin's means of transport is a horse-drawn wagon and the setting is the Carpathian Mountains. It's a film mired in the past, like the attitudes of its protagonists and it reaches its grisly conclusion in unexpected ways. Strickland may not be the most prolific of directors but he remains one of the most original working in world cinema today and this powerful, disturbing picture certainly marked him out as an exceptional talent.

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.