Film Reviews by Steve

Hyperkinetic blockbuster which may be pro-military propaganda for the US armed forces, but is still an impressive display of hi-tech cinema. This is produced by action impresario Jerry Bruckheimer, so don't expect subtlety, but it is also a measure of how spectacular the combat picture got before CGI took over entirely.

It received two well deserved Oscars in technical categories, for editing and sound, and a nomination for cinematography. Presumably Ridley Scott got his nod for co-ordinating the in-your-face sensory overload, and he actually does well to tell the story fairly coherently despite the complex chaos of the misadventure.

This is the 1993 project to capture the leader of the guerrilla army in control of Mogadishu, which resulted in the loss of 19 American lives... and up to 2000 Somalis. But there isn't much politics and what there is reflects only one side. This is all about the speeded up editing and effects, and the bravery of the real life soldiers.

There isn't serious analysis of the strategic blunders. And any involvement by other nations is blended out; this was a UN exercise. It mainly feels incredibly 4real, and then intensified by the adrenaline surge of Hans Zimmer's synth-score. The ensemble star cast hardly registers. It's like being there, but without the fear or guilt.

Flawed Hitchcock homage which was huge box office in 1976, but hasn't passed the test of time. A major problem is casting Gene Wilder as a romantic/action hero. Sure he was a popular '70s star, but hardly Cary Grant. Plus the racist language is impossible to overlook in what is supposed to be a family blockbuster.

Apparently Richard Pryor insisted this remain and claimed it would be funny. Well, he was wrong. Then there's a scene where Wilder blacks up and gets his groove on to escape from the cops, which is cringeworthy. Still, after this success the two comedians became a popular big screen double act in a string of star vehicles. 

Wilder plays a divorced, mid-life wage slave travelling by train from Los Angeles to Chicago to attend a wedding. He says he's going by rail to catch up on his reading, but really it's because this is a North by Northwest rip off and he's got to be seduced by Jill Clayburgh while being tangled up in will-this-do McGuffin.

Which is all fine, and it picks up on the hour when Pryor arrives as a sassy car thief who stops Wilder getting eliminated by the bad guys, led by Patrick McGoohan. Aside from these many reservations... this is serviceable mainstream comic action-adventure which often used to be shown on daytime tv. But isn't anymore...

This gave us something we never knew we wanted; the Xmas action film. Bruce Willis delivers performances from either end of his range; vest on and vest off. But he's well cast as a stubborn New York cop who touches down in LA to save his marriage... then rescues his wife and her snooty colleagues in a heist on their global corporation.

So it's a right wing Howard Hawks western set in a skyscraper. Public officials are incompetent or corrupt so the individual must protect what's his with a handgun. It's full of references to cowboy pictures, and the detective is likened to John Wayne. We get stunts and explosives, yet this is a blockbuster heavy with thematic content...

LA v NY... Gender issues... Corporate greed... The blue collar Irish-American Catholic takes down educated, white collar Europeans in a triumph of moxie over sophistication. Willis delivers the payoff one-liners with wry charisma and Alan Rickman sports the goatee of evil with relish. When these two are in conflict, this is so much fun.

The slim premise is overstretched and I'm ill-disposed to its politics. And stupid things happen all the time. But... if you can suspend disbelief and disregard the overload of subtext, it's a high-octane action picture with some feel-good comedy and a hero you can root for. Which introduced the notion of a body count into the festive season.

In the post millennium horror boom, many have mastered the look, but few hitched their technique to a story as spookily satisfying... This is old fashioned gothic melodrama; it's Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898), but with an extra spine-chilling twist.

In Jersey after WWII, a mother lives alone with her two children because her husband never returned from the front, and her fractured psyche is disturbed by apparent occult visitations. Nicole Kidman's brittle froideur makes her ideal casting as the neurotic widow.

There's a quality support cast with standout child performances (James Bentley, Alakina Mann) and especially Fionnula Flanagan as the sympathetic/insidious housekeeper in the old dark house of shadows, where the doors and curtains must always be closed.

Writer-director Alejandro Amenábar obviously owns an interesting collection of gothic horror and contributes many inspired flourishes of his own. He reveals the dark secrets cautiously, and by degrees; this is a ghost story that chills through eerie insinuation.

This intelligent adaptation of George Orwell's landmark novel of ideas is inevitably a downbeat experience, but also incisive and horrifying. As well as the topicality of its release in 1984, the intention was to re-imagine the text as dystopian science fiction, though the script is actually scrupulously faithful to the author's ideas.

Sometimes these are spun into dialogue or the voice over of Winston Smith as he begins to lose faith in the totalitarianism of future Britain. He even reads out lines from a manual! This isn't always cinematic, but still philosophically thrilling! Okay, it helps to know the novel, but then... it's among the most widely read books ever.

All of its concepts are here, including the impression of the nation stuck between WWII and the threat of Stalinism. The incredibly muted colour palette is appropriately dour, but still allows optimistic colour to seep into Winston's illusion of freedom. And John Hurt makes one of the most iconic names in literature live and breath.

Richard Burton is intellectually terrifying as O'Brien, while Suzanna Hamilton makes Winston's hazardous romance with Julia into a heartbreaker. Where Orwell is schematic, director Michael Radford brings in glum realism. The novel is often called unfilmable... Well... perhaps. It's certainly difficult to imagine it could be done better.

Alongside the Spaghetti Westerns of the 60s-70s, there was a surge of Italian gangster films, usually with US stars and Hollywood money. So this is towards the end of that tradition, though its ambition and critical acclaim now sets it apart. It's a huge epic set in 1978 with flashbacks to the '20s-'30s about a Jewish gang in New York, mostly during Prohibition.

A street gang of feral youngsters learns how to get rich on murder and vice. Then the repeal of Prohibition leaves a range of possibilities for such criminals now out of business, including taking their methods into legal commerce and politics. The kids grow up to become Robert De Niro and James Woods, who eventually choose different paths in their third act.

There's a famous line of dialogue: 'This country is still growing up. Certain diseases it's better to have when you're still young'. The theme reflects on crime as the virus in the blood of US capitalism. The killers went semi-legit! While this is the main interest, there is a relishable feel for the period and decent star performances. And it's the last film of a great director...

But even at 229 minutes, Sergio Leone had to slash the release edit, and what's left is full of holes. Maybe this is why the flashback is from the point of view of De Niro smoking opium! It's extremely violent* and there's the usual problem with mob operas; everyone is a lowlife scumbag. Yet despite these issues... it's my pick of the post-Godfather neo-gangster wave.

*including a distressing sexual assault.

It's difficult to still feel the impact this made in 1957: the critics objected to the graphic blood and gore in buzzy/gaudy Eastmancolor (it's cheaper) but this is almost invisible now; and though it influenced gothic horror for a decade, after 1960 this became secondary to the b&w contemporary scares of Psycho.

Still, Hammer's adaptation of Mary Shelley's classic novel (1818) was a eureka moment for the studio and brought together many of the cast and crew who would define its new direction, including director Terence Fisher, and screenwriter Jimmy Sangster who claimed not to have seen the Universal version (1931)!

Which is hard to believe... His masterstroke is to make Baron Frankenstein an unambiguous bad guy and his creation merely a symbol of his sociopathic overreach. Bad news for Christopher Lee whose role as the creature lacks the dignity of Karloff, though advantageous for Peter Cushing as the mad scientist.

And thus, their partnership was born... As was standard at Hammer, the splendid period art direction is at odds with the B film budget. Maybe best of all is James Bernard's invigorating orchestral score. A monster hit in its time, this has lost the power to shock; but it remains a crucial rite-of-passage for horror buffs.

Notoriously impenetrable neo-noir/head movie which is least interesting when any attempt is made at literal analysis. With the non-linear narrative, extensive dream sequences, doppelgangers and surreal digressions, David Lynch isn't making that sort of picture. This is more of a midlife review of his career in cinema so far.

Besides, any interpretation is going to have the first half going on inside someone's head- which is such a letdown. None of the online academic essays add much to the experience, including by the director! Rather than dwell on the significance of the colour red, maybe enjoy the many references to classic noir and old Hollywood...

Plus the contemporary cynicism aimed at the film business and the Los Angeles moral inferno. Best of all is Naomi Watts' virtuoso performance as a small town ingénue aiming to break into the movies who gets tangled up in the mystery of a femme fatale (Laura Harring) with amnesia and a handbag full of bankrolls. Or does she?

Anyone who has seen this surely remembers Watts' audition scene, which damn near stops the picture. And there's satisfaction to be had from the maverick director's late career success. But, despite the larger audience, the complexity means this will still mainly appeal to David Lynch aficionados. Who knew there are so many?

Amiable comedy-romance which is typical of its decade but better than most. Nineties hotshot Cameron Crowe revises a few of the character types from his script for Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), except the kids are now five years older and starting work while learning the rules of enduring love...

There are agreeable ensemble performances as the twenty-something metropolitans who play the dating game with the stakes bigger than in High School. They live in condos for single occupants and do yuppie jobs. Kyra Sedgwick is the standout as a lovelorn ecologist who only recently got burned.

The trump card is to set their standard rites of passage experiences in Seattle, in the emerging grunge scene with a soundtrack which features an impressive A-Z of future stars (except for Nirvana!). Matt Dillon is the idiot stoner/slacker in a local band stringing along Bridget Fonda's compliant good-girl. 

The rocker laments metal has become lifestyle music. Crowe must know this is the film equivalent. Nothing much matters, the dialogue is fun but incredibly obvious. It's just a conventional lifestyle picture- a beer commercial- for '90s gen. x kids who may now be ready to revisit for reasons of nostalgia. 

This royal melodrama is an outlier for Ealing Studios; it is neither the social realism they usually produced after WWII, nor the issues led advocacy often directed by Basil Dearden. Also, it stars Stewart Granger, but isn't the sort of historical romp he starred in for Gainsborough or the swashbucklers he made in Hollywood.

Now it is mainly remembered as the studios' first colour production which received a (well deserved) Oscar nomination for set design. And it looks extremely lavish. But if it was meant to bring zest to a nation entrenched in postwar austerity, then it failed because the audience stayed away. And what about that gloomy title?

My best guess is this was intended as rapprochement towards Germany as it's the story of the Hanoverian King who became George I of Britain, and so a reminder of our common heritage. But then he is portrayed (by Peter Bull) as a malign rogue! Still, it looks sumptuous, particularly the masked ball, with fireworks.

But it's overwritten and Dearden obviously not at ease in historical melodrama. Granger is ok in a static role, but otherwise the casting is a disaster; Joan Greenwood barely registers as a romantic lead and Flora Robson bizarrely plays a coquette! Critics say there is some real history here, but alas, not much entertainment.

Quality arthouse parable faithfully adapted from Paul Auster's 1990 modernist novel, which is unapologetically highbrow, but still accessible. This is Philip Haas' debut as director and he exclusively made films from the sort of modern classics that win literary prizes, and it's a shame there wasn't much of an audience for them.

It features James Spader's signature performance in the centrepiece role, as a loud, unsophisticated card shark who is bankrolled by a more level headed stalwart (Mandy Patinkin) in a high-stakes poker game with a pair of eccentric millionaires (Charles Durning and Joel Gray). And that's already an intriguingly offbeat cast.

When the challengers recklessly lose, they agree to pay off the debt by building a huge, pointless wall in the grounds of the wealthy duo's mansion with the stones from a medieval castle- while the winners go to Europe. And we also get M. Emmet Walsh as the obsequious/insidious go-between who manages the futile project.

So it's a surreal allegory for the iniquities of capitalism... which is deepened by the unique imagination of the author and the eerie, dreamlike ambience of Haas' staging until it generates a considerable emotional charge. And we may begin to empathise with the two schmucks. It's a head movie, but more engaging than that implies.

Not the best of Patricia Highsmith on the big screen, but this BBC co-production captures the psychology of her novels unusually well: with the true nature of an alarming sociopathic outsider obscured by a bland exterior. And the innocent- if flawed- bystander dragged under by an inexorable vortex of dumb bad luck/fate.

It's a loose adaptation which loses its way, but for over an hour this is genuinely strange, especially the eccentric, intermittent romance between a sad washout and a volatile, emotionally insecure loose cannon... who are both poignantly alone. He is recovering from mental breakdown while being divorced by a vindictive wife,

All this is raised well above the level of a TVM by the lead performances. So that's Paddy Considine as the diffident stalker who obsesses on Julia Stiles as an oasis of normality in his void of disappointment; except she turns out to be even crazier than he is. Okay, this has now become a familiar plot riff, but still makes a reliable hook... 

Besides, the cruel wife is the real freak... Writer-directer Jamie Thraves creates more neo-noir melancholy than actual suspense but the stars make the ambient hysteria quite immersive. Plus there are decent small town Canadian locations. This should interest Highsmith buffs or anyone in need of outré late night melodrama.

Cult sci-fi parable/head movie about a solitary alien who comes to Earth in search of a means to take water back to his dying planet, but is compromised. Its big idea- from Walter Tevis' novel- is the spaceman is corrupted by an acquired humanness...

Which now seems to have become a popular science fiction motif. There is some topicality in his planet being advanced in electronics, but has turned into a desert due to the heat and aridity. But on release, the main interest was in the stunt casting of David Bowie.

Though a limited actor, he looks astonishing as the wan, diaphanous extraterrestrial who sets up a corporation to front and finance his real project, but is ultimately subverted by the humanity he learns from tv. And then neutralised by earthly capitalists.

It's quite long, with most of the best scenes in the first half, but looks stunning, with the arthouse photography, the futuristic set design and SFX and especially the otherworldly atmosphere of the New Mexico desert. This is Nicolas Roeg still at about his peak.

The best of many big screen accounts of the invasion of Guadalcanal in 1942 by the US Marines, which was the first US victory of WWII and accomplished with many casualties. This is loosely adapted from a novel by James Jones, who was there. The approach combines bloody realism with an abundance of interpretation.

Though any apprehension regarding Terrence Malick exploiting the immense sacrifice of the soldiers to post his own personal philosophy is soon laid to rest. This may be the most empathetic view of their experiences ever attempted. Sure this is cine-poetry; a beautiful looking arthouse war with a melancholy soundtrack...

But it really feels like we see through the eyes of the men. For over two hours this is terrifying, until the last 30 minutes when the author's voice gains control. The ensemble cast is led by Jim Caviezel and few of the many celebrities get much more than a cameo. My standout is Woody Harrelson's pretty harrowing death scene.

And I'd like to see more of John C. Reilly. The reflections on nature and man's tribal heart are not illuminating, but this excels as cinematic art which also conveys the combat events with some coherence. 1998 was the year of Saving Private Ryan which critics felt should have won the Oscar. But this would have got my vote.

This is mainly remembered as Clint Eastwood's first film back in Hollywood after his spaghetti westerns. However they had not yet been released in the US where he was still better known for Rawhide. It was made by the star's production company and he appointed as director a colleague from his television days.

Ted Post is not a film maker on the level of Sergio Leone... but he obviously saw the Dollar trilogy as he borrows some of the visual motifs, like the extreme closeups and a feel for the grotesque. And there's a faint echo of Ennio Morricone in the music score. Plus there's Eastwood who clearly is ready to be a cinema star.

He carries the film as a cattleman erroneously hanged by a posse of diverse vigilantes who becomes a lawman obsessed with bringing them to justice. So it's a standard revenge western, and it's effective for about an hour before it explores at length several less interesting philosophical and historical themes... 

It threatens to become anti-death penalty as the Marshal grows dismayed by how bloodthirsty is the law, but never quite comes together. Bruce Dern as a weaselly gunman stands out in a strong support cast, but second billed Inger Stevens is wasted. It's decent entertainment for western buffs and fans of the star.