Film Reviews by Steve

One of Christopher Nolan's less complex films, but still convoluted by normal standards, even if it simplifies Christopher Priest's source novel. The story about rival stage magicians in Victorian London is itself a sort of intriguing illusion, though it exceeds its grasp in the final reveal- what it calls 'the prestige'.

And like any magic trick, it loses fascination once the apparatus of the deception is shown, which means it's only a one time deal. However, until it lays that last card, this is a beautifully produced period thriller, with standout photography- in Panavision- and set design, for which it received Oscar nominations.

Nolan relates the tangled tale with suspense and contributes a well designed screenplay which isn't difficult to follow despite the non-linear plot structure. Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman get close to making the obsessive magicians credible, and there's a surplus of major star quality in the support cast.

Then... for its ultimate act of showmanship, the story casts aside the arcane laws of 'magic' and mutates into science fiction... The director works hard to make this okay, but the big climax is a disappointing hoax. Still, it's well worth experiencing once and this- for me- is the director's most accessible picture.

This was once my idea of a quintessential French film; a chilly, intellectual analysis of a love triangle between members of an elite which is dense with elliptical talk about feelings and philosophical abstractions; where the woman is extremely gorgeous but the men more what is best described as characterful.

Though that also sounds like Harold Pinter... A talented classical violinist who specialises in Ravel is about to move into an apartment with a married man but then falls in love with his partner in the business of repairing string instruments. So we hear some tasteful music set against their psychological anguish.

Emmanuelle Béart is the standout not only for conveying her emotional vulnerability, but also miming pretty well on the fiddle. Plus she brings her exceptional beauty. Daniel Auteuil- her then real life husband- plays a genius at evaluating the tone of a musical instrument, but a mere dilettante in the art of love.

And it is his heart which is in deep freeze. André Dussollier is the least starry of the trio as an entrepreneur whose dream second act is suddenly in doubt. Claude Sautet directs with an absence of style because it's an actors film which is a little theatrical. It's one of those French films they sadly no longer make.

Sensitive and beautiful period adaptation of Rebecca West's debut novel set during WWI. There's an exceptional cast, with Alan Bates as a wealthy landowner and officer whose PTSD triggers the amnesia which takes away his memories of the previous 20 years...

Which means the entire marriage to his selfish and proud- but attractive- aristocratic wife (Julie Christie). He renews a connection with his earlier love for a tenant of the estate (Glenda Jackson) who has grown careworn in relative hardship.

Ann-Margret is improbably cast as a poor relation/spinster, but she's fine. There's an implication the shell-shock has allowed the soldier to subconsciously reject his social rank, as well as his marriage. Certainly the old flame is more steadfast than the wife.

There's a sumptuous production, from the lovely music to the Edwardian set decors. The events unravel at leisure. It gently finds fault with the inherited privilege of the aristocracy, but this is no polemic. Everyone accepts their status, which ultimately, is their tragedy.

The third in Richard Linklater's cultish 'Before' trilogy, co-written with its stars, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. Nine years after the romantic cliffhanger of Before Sunset (2004), Céline and Jesse are now a couple, with adorable twin moppets, but the compromises essential for a lifelong love affair are starting to unravel.

It loosely follows the template of walking and talking in a European setting, which began with Before Sunrise (1995), though this isn't applied as rigorously. While on the idyllic Greek coast they riff on issues relevant to middle aged parents, mostly related to gender responsibilities. And this builds to a bitter and epic row.

This instalment references the earlier films. In particular it draws on Céline's sudden, alarming meltdown in the back of the car in Sunset. Now she is more openly volatile, and this clashes with Jesse's natural complacency. They still share an incredible rapport, even when they are fighting! And they fall apart so eloquently.

But surely the fans expect the intelligent flirtation of the earlier films! This is something else, yet still irresistible! It's a reflection on how romance is challenged by the grind. And yet... the bitter altercation and barely suppressed resentment ends in reconciliation. Maybe their crazy on-off relationship will survive! I hope so...

In which Ryan Gosling completely absorbs the late '60s urban samurai persona of Steve McQueen... And director Nicolas Winding Refn appropriates the existential alienation of Walter Hill's classic LA noir, The Driver (1978). As the title suggests, the story mainly deals with motivation. And how far will the protagonist go...

The answer is, all the way. This is superficially a gangster picture. Gosling plays an emotionally frozen getaway driver who is thawed by Carey Mulligan's lonely jail widow. Which brings him into jeopardy with the mafia. But despite the car chases and extreme violence this is really an arthouse review of urban sadness.

The weakness is the plot, including the banality of the stolen suitcase of laundered mob money. Its strength is the nocturnal atmos. Most of this is technique, with the turned up room ambience (the sound mix is excellent!), the lethargic performances, the soundtrack of '80s-style techno and the neon of the naked city.

Crucially, Gosling has enough star charisma to sustain all this numb despair. Mulligan is miscast and the rest of the cast hardly registers. But despite the narrative wrong-turns, Refn's craft makes it a decent ride; even the framing and the tracking shots crank up the thrills. One of the standouts in the 2010s noir revival.

Many decades on, This is Spinal Tap has aced the test of time- and there is zero cringe... Perhaps the pop culture reference points are less relevant. And overfamiliarity may have eroded the hilarity of arguably the funniest film ever made. Especially those scenes fans tell each other in pubs and on tour buses...

Like the disappointing model of Stonehenge, or the uniquely loud amp... But credit is due, as this stuff has entered the idioms of the English language. And now, a gag once overlooked may well get the laughs. Plus there's a surprising amount of fun just observing how much the actors are enjoying themselves...

Including the US cast doing the English accents, with Michael McKean and Christopher Guest giving us more or less Jagger as the scene dictates, with that strain of nasal camp. Or how uncannily Harry Shearer modulates his proletarian vowels. Americans really shouldn't be able to impersonate Brits so well...

Without their obvious affection for these guileless optimists, it might be too cruel to endure. Tap may be idiots but they are matchless companions on a screen for 82m. The legendary script is all bangers. My own favourite is the irrefutable logic of Viv Savage's personal philosophy: "Have a good time... all the time'.

Prominent entry in a small wave of films inspired by the 2008 global economic recession.... So when the tremors of the incoming collapse in US sub-prime mortgages are picked up by a risk assessor at a Wall Street investment bank, his boss unethically elects to dump stock on their competitors to save themselves.

It's essentially a filmed play which is heavy on reportage and exposition but lacks interesting plot complications. The Oscar nominated screenplay is a mixed bag; while the characters and situations are credible, the dialogue is clumsy. It's written in the David Mamet style, but without any of the verbal music.

The cast is generally solid even if there's no standout; they perform miracles with the clunky lines.While writer-director JC Chandor- on debut- clearly knows how financial markets work, he is less concerned with how all this impacts on the public. There is no one to voice popular opinion; this is not a polemic.

Most of the commentary is in the subtext; miss it and it's almost as if we are invited to empathise with these relentless sociopathic monsters. But the real-life poison is so toxic it saturates the film anyway... yet there is no anger. Still, any evidence of those horrifying events is welcome, because we seem to have forgotten.

Superior Japanese ghost story from the period when J-horror was rejuvenating a lacklustre genre. With Ringu (1998) this is the best of that wave, maybe because both are directed by Hideo Nakata and adapted from stories by Koji Suzuki, about the pressure of modern life on the traditional family.

In this case, it's a mother with a young child, who is going through a messy divorce. Hitomi Kuroki stars as the vulnerable, isolated working mum, whose long ago history of mental illness is being used against her by the father in a bitter custody battle over their feisty six year old daughter (Rio Kanno).

So is she crazy, or is she being menaced by the plumbing of her grimly brutalist apartment building? Or is it a spectral cry for help? There's a slow build while the maternal bond is established, plus a spooky back story about a lost child. Then Nakato goes for the big horror climax he delivered in Ringu.

While he doesn't pull it off, the twist is so incredibly heartbreaking, it's still a knockout. He is a master of the style of millennial Asian horror but also conveys a huge emotional surge. It's an eerie ghost story which mirrors back our own existential fears; which is what the classics of the genre always do.

What everyone seems to know about this low budget horror is that Peter Cushing named it his worst film... though he is too forgiving of The Devil's Men (1976). Maybe it wasn't a happy shoot, but actually this is reasonable hokum. It's not made by Hammer, but is in that style with the decent production design and photography.

And there's Cushing, not as might be expected playing the entomologist who means to create a mate for a female blood sucking killer moth- which transforms into a human, posing as his sexy daughter. This time, Robert Flemying is on mad scientist duty and Cushing is the pugnacious investigator of the blood-beast's corpses.

Wanda Ventham does her best as the metamorphic were-moth but cult favourite Vanessa Howard is wasted in an insipid romantic role. Obviously this is standard B horror schlock, but still fun with plenty of murky Victorian atmosphere and occult dread. And while the story is crazy and poorly told, the dialogue is quite relishable.

Mostly the budget is hidden in the shadows, until finally the awful human moth must be revealed! Well, this is B horror... though way ahead of most poverty row monster pictures, mainly due to the cast and the gothic atmos. And it delivers a few pleasurable chills, before the time comes to explain what the hell is going on!

Probably the masterpiece of the new Hollywood cinema of the 1970s. It features Robert De Niro's signature performance as a New York taxi driver gone psycho due to the crime and immoral scum on the streets. It captures something intuitive about urban America in crisis, after Watergate and Vietnam and adrift in a deep economic winter...

And it reflects the brittle state of mind of screenwriter Paul Schrader. Travis Bickle is an isolated war vet who drives his yellow metal box through the mean streets at night while the sins of the metropolitan trash unspool in the reflected neon of his windscreen. Until he can't take it anymore. Though there is no catharsis through violence...

Travis is irredeemable, despite the inspired final twist... But he makes a fascinating point of view for this journey through an urban inferno. Some details no longer stand up: the sleazy tv noir sax of the taxi driver theme was a cliché even then; and while Jody Foster is astonishing, her role as a 12 year old hooker now seems inexcusably neutral.

Still, it introduced De Niro as a new kind of method-plus star. And though the bigotry and stupidity of the streets is hard to endure, that's really the point! There's the poetic pessimism of neo-noir, but looks more like social realism. The grainy/dirty/lurid photography is a strength, so 4k isn't much of a bonus. It's my pick of Martin Scorsese films.

Simply gorgeous remake of Ernst Lubitsch's precode heartbreaker, Broken Lullaby. That was released in 1932, the golden age of romantic melodrama, yet François Ozon's version is just as good, and its b&w photography, even more beautiful. The two lead performances capture all the glamour of the early studio era.

And that's Pierre Niney as a French soldier who kills a German in the trenches at the end of WWI and is driven to confess and seek forgiveness from the dead man's family, in particular his sad but lovely fiancée, played by Paula Beer. They share an exquisite chemistry, although their complex emotions remain unspoken.

Meanwhile, his evasions bring solace to the grieving parents. Much of the romance is insinuated by the stars, and there is even a subtle gay subtext discernible in the imaginary flashbacks. It is directed by Ozon with a sensitivity and creativity which is too little encountered, and then deepened by the elegant piano score.

The production design evokes the period with supreme taste.... Yes, it's slow, but all the better for it. This is a supremely well crafted, sentimental fantasy, a kind of cinema which hardly exists any more and is sure to appeal to melodrama aficionados as well as anyone one who has ever been moved by unrequited love.

The best of a trilogy of films by Ken Loach in the late 1990s made outside the UK and Ireland- though he doesn't stray from his usual themes. It's a condemnation of the exploitation of Hispanic workers in Los Angeles; based on a real life fight for unionisation rights by office cleaners.

And it's about the experiences of the Central American diaspora, who do the low paid jobs no one else wants in the land of the free. Loach and writer Paul Laverty also rebuke the iniquities of corporate corruption and US healthcare. And weirdly, there's a scene satirising Hollywood liberals!

The move to LA gives Loach a palpable boost, with the bright sunshine and a lively cast of mostly amateur Mexican actors, led by Pilar Padilla as a feisty illegal immigrant not afraid to push back. And there's some effective humour too, which may indicate the use of improv....

We get real-deal star charisma from Adrien Brody as a union leader; one of only three actors in Loach films to go on to Oscars for Best Actor*! Sure, it's agitprop on behalf of the unions, suitable for open day teaching sessions. But it pushes the right buttons, and with considerable impact.

*Frances McDormand in Hidden Agenda (1990) and Cillian Murphy in The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006).

Many film makers draw on their own education for inspiration... but no one else has been able to tell a story as historically significant... This is a detailed, sensitive reflection on Louis Malle's experiences in a French Catholic boarding school for boys in 1944, during the German occupation.

Which is already intriguing... Yet this is mainly context for a real life scenario in which the school is used to hide Jewish children from the Nazis. Raphaël Fejto plays one of these... a loner who is bullied but develops a close friendship with one boy (Gaspard Manesse, in a fine juvenile cast).

Eventually the strategy attracts the attention of the Gestapo, which is the deep emotional driver of the story. But Malle also explores the condition of male puberty, the impact of parental separation on child development, and key religious motivators like guilt and shame and denial.

The real life headteacher was a proper war hero. The kids were exposed to horrific, life defining events. But for the Jewish boys, so much worse. This is an overwhelming heartbreaker which argues for tolerance and humanitarianism; and is the final triumph of a great director.

Another visit to the strangeness of Aki Kaurismäki's Helsinki. This is a companion to his comedy-drama, The Man Without a Past (2002). Most significantly they both draw on classic Hollywood noir. Anyone who has seen Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (1949) is going to notice similarities.

The persona of the melancholy fall guy (Janne Hyytiäinen) who works as a security guard is so reminiscent of Burt Lancaster in his early crime melodramas. He's a kind of no-luck washout set up by a femme fatale (Maria Järvenhelmi) on behalf of some pragmatic Russian gangsters.

But of course this is Kaurismäki so it takes place within his usual idiosyncrasies- the minimalist acting, the incongruity, the ordinariness. There are recurring scenes carried over from The Man Without a Past: like the awkward dinner date, the tethered dog, the trio of violent thugs...

Only the mood is darker and sadder. The small, lonely lives are not redeemed and there are no consequences for the guilty. The comedy is muted... The director subverts the style, but this has all the standard pessimism of studio age noir.

Hal Hartley's feature debut is proper independent cinema, self financed rather than rolled out by the subsidiary of a major. It feels like a superior graduate picture. It's a comedy without laughs, but the script is witty and the performances are likeable. The dayglo cinematography is ideal for this kind of hyper-irony.

This inevitably gets labelled 'quirky'; it's a Long Island romance between a paroled murderer and a teenage kook who is waiting for the bomb to fall, which mainly satirises small town life. It conveys the new ironic tone in '80s US cinema borrowed from David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch before it got tiresome in the '90s.

So the understated performances are about ironic detachment. The two leads are also on debut, with Robert John Burke as a saturnine mechanic who returns to his hometown after a long spell inside and picks up with a schoolgirl/model, played by Adrienne Shelly. In 1989 she was an instant pinup for cool indie kids...

While everyone else went for Melanie Griffith. Any response will depend on how much whimsy can be tolerated. But this is decent quality stuff and surprisingly entertaining because very little is happening. Nice to see those '80s haircuts and clothes again. Maybe the budget prohibited the usual jukebox soundtrack.

*RIP Ms. Shelly