Film Reviews by Steve

True story based on the the disappearance of a US citizen during the CIA backed military coup in Chile, led by Augusto Pinochet... which led to the mass imprisonment, torture and murder of political prisoners. It's based on a book by Thomas Hauser about attempts to find Charles Horman, a young journalist touring South America, who is arrested by the fascist junta. 

His father and wife search for him, but how to locate one man in a land of undocumented corpses where there are no human rights? They are obstructed and lied to by US government officials intent not only on hiding their complicity, but are themselves engaged in oppressing liberal Americans. Costa-Gavros brings his considerable experience in directing political films.

He adopts a documentary approach; but while this feels authentic, it is also as compelling as a thriller, with Vangelis' electro-score accenting the raw emotions. Jack Lemmon is supremely well cast as the naive, conservative father who believes in the virtue of the American way, but is quickly disillusioned. Lemmon was nominated for an Oscar as was Sissy Spacek as the wife.

Watching this as a teenager was a massive insight into US overseas conspiracies, as well as the atrocities inside the sports stadiums of Chile in '73. It makes the news make sense. This is a heartbreaker which lays bare the reckless corruption of American foreign policy and is always relevant. It is periodically withdrawn but currently the first amendment holds fast.

If this has dated at all, it's only in good ways. The pre-CGI effects/models look astonishing. Plus the incredible stunts. The pulsing '80s techno soundtrack is just right. And even though its budget is clearly a limiting factor, this just adds to its cyberpunk/tech-noir charm. This is the blockbuster-action picture which plugs in and turns on for non-genre audiences.

And it's where Arnold Schwarzenegger crossed over to a mainstream, multiplex audience. The role of a monosyllabic cyborg from the future with an Austrian accent is an ideal fit. The Terminator must kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) because she will be the mother of the rebel who brings down Skynet, the computer network which controls the dystopian future.

Michael Biehn is the dissident who travels across time to protect her, and more. There's a classic sci-fi script; it's loaded with necessary exposition, but the info is so thrilling it doesn't matter. It's also full of punchy, laconic dialogue. The mechanical SFX are crucial, but the human factor is primary; Hamilton establishes herself as the ultimate female action hero...

And not a 1D sex symbol in lycra either. Her evolution from good-girl doormat into the mother of the revolution is the emotional core of the story. Plus the long climax is as intense as the action film can be. Yes, this is sci-fi, but absolutely convincing within its own genre rules and the themes have entered the culture. It's now a factor in how we fear the future...

RoboCop- the cyborg law enforcement agent played by Peter Weller- is essentially a hybrid of Dirty Harry and the Bionic Man. And RoboCop- the action/SFX blockbuster directed by Paul Verhoeven- is satirical, dystopian futurism, like Judge Dredd. Still, even if the premise is not groundbreaking, it's fertile, relevant... and entertaining!.

And it’s a bonus see the mechanical effects just before CGI turned action pictures into cartoons. In a shabby, near-future Detroit, society has collapsed due to rapacious billionaire greed and violent organised crime. Weller plays an honest cop who is murdered by the gang of feral lawbreakers which runs the illegal trade in narcotics.

So Omni-Consumer Products upcycles his corpse into an inexorable agent of law enforcement; part human/part machine. And who wouldn't want an omnipotent robot to clean the scum off the mean streets. Even if it ultimately reports to the board? But the gizmo runs amok when the dead man’s memories reassert themselves…

There are few surprises and the cast can’t do much with the banal script; and we mostly just see the actor’s mouth behind the mask, spitting out recycled Schwarzeneggerisms. But the theme of the corporate ownership of justice now applies even more than in ’87. And its pre-digital effects and stunts look better than they ever did.

Obviously like Airplane (1980) but this time spoofing '70s cop shows. Maybe it won't play for younger audiences, as they are unlikely to have done the prep by wasting their childhood watching Kojak and Starsky and Hutch on tv. Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker return to their brief, unsuccessful network series, Police Squad! 

They repeat many of the same gags, while borrowing a few from others- the exchange about shooting murderers in Central Park, who are actors performing Julius Caesar, is taken almost verbatim from Dirty Harry (1971). And fans of Raymond Chandler will recognise two direct lifts, which may be intended as tributes... 

On second viewing, the biggest laugh is Leslie Nielsen as Lieutenant Frank Drebin, outside the sky-high hotel window of a busty visitor, hanging from the huge stone phallus of a giant statue... which is an indication of how sophisticated this is... but it's still funny. And this gets nearer to why it is still so bloody hilarious.

There's slapstick, a whole lot of puns and dad jokes and absurd non-sequiturs... But it only really pays off because of Nielsen. Is this one of the all-time comic performances? Sure, he's just doing schtick, but he transforms so-so material into comedy gold. Hard to imagine even the legendary Peter Sellers surpassing this...

Creepy psychological horror which stretches its slender premise maybe further than it can  take, but then delivers one of the most unsettling final reveals in cinema! A Dutch woman vanishes at motorway services in southern France leaving her boyfriend to obsessively search for three years.

When eventually contacted by her murderer, the unhappy stooge pays a horrifying price for the truth... Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu is disturbingly convincing as the psychopathic serial killer and dominates Gene Bervoets and Johanna ter Steege as the young Dutch couple. Which is fair enough.

Director George Sluizer underplays the tension; there are no jump scares or horror music cues, or flashy gimmicks, which makes that denouement feel a long time coming. Critics have likened the approach to Alfred Hitchcock... but there is no comparison in terms of suspense or iconic set pieces.

This is more procedural. But the way the story puts the audience in the viewpoint of the imperilled hero is an inspired conceit which the Master would have endorsed. The viewer wants the truth as much as the fixated, anguished schmuck! It's a must-see, though the pay-off only works the first time.

This was new direction for Nick Broomfield who had achieved some minor celebrity as a provocateur, making controversial documentaries. It's a reconstruction of the real life deaths of 23 Chinese illegal immigrants at Morecambe Bay in 2004, trapped by the tide as they scraped up cockles in the dark.

The victims are conveyed to their deaths by a chain of events which begins with the criminal gangs in China and continues in the UK with administrative corruption and then the local racist thugs who assault them. And then completed by their isolated, horrific drowning. Clearly this is very difficult to watch.

The drama is quite flat because this is reportage; dreadful, but raw and without much insight or finesse, maybe because it was improvised by a non-pro cast. But the catastrophe is so appalling the film becomes deeply moving anyway. And upsetting. The ciné-vérité approach makes it seem personal.

In addition, Broomfield explores the shabby practices of the food industry, particularly the major supermarkets; he exposes the connection between their tragic fate and the food in our mouths. This is a political film perhaps influenced by Ken Loach, and Broomfield delivers a shocking, shaming polemic.

By the new millennium, stories about teenage vampires had become a multimedia bonanza. This is adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own Swedish bestseller. It takes the usual rules of the Dracula legend and then applies them to a couple of lonely 12 year old kids growing up on a brutalist housing estate in '80s Stockholm.

Both are isolated and maladjusted in their unorthodox families. They are looking for love, but this isn't a romance. It begins as a reflection on their friendship with a light touch on buzz issues like gender, abuse, sexuality... Only one is a boy suffering from social anxiety and classroom bullying... and the other is a bloodsucking vampire!

There is occasional horror, gore and mayhem but this is unlikely to appeal to scare junkies. It's a cult item for sensitive teenagers; apparently the title references Morrissey! Even so, ultimately it becomes clear that the girl- really a castrated boy, but hundreds of years old- is grooming the actual vulnerable child to be her protector.

This is presented as a viable outcome, though it's doubtful social services would be so sanguine. The main weakness is the two inexperienced child actors (Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson). Among the positives, the director has an eye for visual imagery and framing. And it demonstrates the resilience of vampire mythology.

Famously there's not a drop of blood to be seen in this fun Amicus horror anthology. There are four contemporary tales adapted from short stories by Robert Bloch... and he also wrote the script with the uninspired framing scenario. None of them are groundbreaking, but they each impart a satisfying final twist.

The studio kept the budget way down low by setting most of the intrigue in a single interior. Oh, and via the shamefully shoddy effects and models, though the set design of the house of horror is decent. And as usual Amicus were able to support their genre stars with a few celebrities from television and the stage.

In the best story, Christopher Lee is a grumpy widower who employs Nyree Dawn Porter as a nanny for his shy young daughter, who knows some clever tricks- for an 8 year old. Most of the comedy is courtesy of Jon Pertwee as a ham actor reluctantly stuck in vampire roles, and possessed by his secondhand cape...

The interest isn't so much Ingrid Pitt's eye-catching décolletage, as Pertwee doing an impression of his friend and co-star Christopher Lee; which is obvious, but apparently went over the actor's head! Shame Freddie Francis wasn't available to direct, but this is as good as any of Amicus' collections of spooky stories.

After the millennium there was a wave of films about the interconnectedness of things. Then social media happened and filmmakers turned their lens on how lonely we are. This has something of both. There are three online incidents which illustrate the sadness and isolation of modern life.

So, a struggling, separated couple (Paula Patton, Alexander Skarsgård) are victims of identity theft; an ambitious television journalist (Andrea Riseborough) exposes a chatroom stripper to the FBI; an adolescent boy (Jonah Bobo) attempts suicide after personal photos are spread around school...

Then a vague offline connection is revealed between the threads. The themes may no longer be fresh, but this is still well written with quality performances, led by Jason Bateman as the father of the afflicted teenager. While the film runs, the actors create an interesting and unsettling melodrama.

This mostly disappears on reflection, but leaves an impression of how the human need for connection has been monetised by social media, which exploits normal human frailty and spreads paranoia and anxiety... while amplifying the capacity of individuals to do harm... And 2012 was only the beginning!

*there is some nudity and swearing.

Unblinking look at violent teenage gangs, loosely based on writer-director Peter Mullan's own experiences growing up on a Glasgow council estate in the early 1970s. And he establishes himself as the successor to Ken Loach in the dynasty of British social realism.

His miracle is to make this brutally authentic but not so sickening it's impossible to watch. Well, there is aggro... but no gore. There is plenty of sweary gallows humour. And also some consideration of why all this is happening, but without any political editorials.

The scary ASBO excess is tolerable due to a mesmerising performance by newcomer Conor McCarron as the adolescent who gets big and goes wild inside a few weeks one summer and traumatises everyone... Including his abusive/alcoholic dad- played by Mullan.

You can sense the siren of migraine-inducing white noise going off inside the boy's head. This is a candidate for the most convincing juvenile delinquent film ever made. And many have tried. But it's too harrowing for entertainment and good luck with the accents.

*includes constant swearing.

This is from a period in the 1970s when environmentalists lobbied against nuclear energy. Now that big oil is the devil, it seems incredibly dated. It makes a fairly comprehensive case, though what is most startling now is how steampunk the technology is! Those combustion chambers and cooling networks look like they were designed to wobble loose... as they inevitably do!

In 1979 this seized the zeitgeist after the near miss at Three Mile Island. Now, the complacency of wealthy corporations by-passing safety measures still resonates, but the message has mostly expired. So this is just another Hollywood thriller... and an endearing memento from the decade when fashion got lost. It looks horrible, including the very austere photography.

Jane Fonda plays an ambitious reporter reluctantly presenting lifestyle fluff on a Los Angeles tv news station... while silently tolerating the ubiquitous sexism. When she interviews the head of publicity at a nuclear power plant, it's clear that in the background something is going very wrong. Jack Lemmon is the loyal company man who threatens to blow the whistle.

He's the main reason to watch; back then he portrayed the careworn, midlife American wage slave better than anyone. Eventually it loses credibility when he takes over operations at gunpoint, but there is an impression of a nation in decline evident in many '70s Hollywood films which feels very much like now. And it's fun to see Wilfred Brimley in the Homer Simpson role!

This Norwegian original is superior to the more widely known US remake of 2002. This version was filmed around Tromsø in the Arctic Circle. Stellan Skarsgård stars as a confrontational Swedish detective working in Oslo who travels north to investigate the murder of a 17 year old girl. But after he accidentally kills his likeable sidekick in some heavy fog, the inquiry gets a lot more personal.

And he must play sordid mind games with the main suspect, the provocative middle aged novelist (Bjørn Floberg) who was buying the victim expensive clothes. This isn't much of a whodunnit as the maverick cop mainly closes the case by blundering between the suspects. The interest is in the 24 hour cycle of sunshine, and the insomnia which widens the cracks in the cop's psyche...

Maybe this ceaseless, inescapable light represents his guilt, or the trauma of a career spent exposing the foul motivations of sleazy transgressors. But still, he strays far from the law. This was released ahead of the wave of Scandinavian noir which became popular in the new millennium. And it differs interestingly because rather than fill the screen with darkness, this is often dazzlingly bright.

And the screen is saturated in whiteness, whether the snow on the hills or the mist over the fjords... so it has its own unconventional atmosphere. Skarsgård gives some brooding psychological depth to the unravelling sleuth. It's slow, but still suspenseful and engagingly desolate and downbeat, which is deepened by the gloomy score of ambient electronics. And yes- you must visit Tromsø!

The Coen brothers' debut feature is an ironic spin on two related genres. The visual style is neo-noir, and the screenplay is hardboiled pulp fiction. The title is from Dashiell Hammett, and the influence is more the earlier Continental Op stories than his better known- more literary- later novels.

There's a routine murder setup about a husband who owns a bar in Texas (Dan Hedaya) who pays to have his wife (Frances McDormand) and her lover (John Getz) killed in a cheap motel by a sleazy/pragmatic gumshoe (M.Emmet Walsh). Only obviously the plan falls apart in complicated and violent ways.

The cast performances are no more than competent, with Walsh the standout as the whiny, duplicitous private dick. It's a low budget, independent production, so there isn't much gloss, which suits the pulp fiction more than the neo-noir; the photography has a trashy/tacky made for tv look.

This is best for the genre pessimism and the gloomy nocturnal atmosphere, with the neon lit soundstage, the dark, rainy highway and the dream-logic. Plus the ambient electronic score. Hard to imagine this will have much appeal outside the usual genre buffs, though surely the Coen faithful will love it...

*note. This copy of the original release is cropped for old 4/3 televisions and the sound and picture are poor. The directors' cut is slightly shorter, but then it could do with a trim... I've not seen it but I assume the revised bluray version is a better bet. 

Faithful adaptation of a war memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish classical pianist who hid in the Warsaw ghetto throughout the Nazi occupation of Poland, while his family was murdered in the death camp at Treblinka. It's a harrowing account of a survivor who endured mostly by pure luck while the city was destroyed by the German army.

This is personal for director Roman Polanski, who lived through WWII in similar circumstances after his parents were sent to concentration camps; his pregnant mother died at Auschwitz. Most of the first part of the story is familiar and suffers from a poor script and performances from the British support cast. It mainly restates the vileness of fascism.

The second half is stronger as the pianist appears to grow feral in the ruins of Warsaw, scavenging for food. Ultimately, when he plays Chopin for a German officer, we are assured that this music represents his humanity; it is his own personal resistance. Adrien Brody won a well deserved Oscar in the title role and maybe even eclipses Polanski's film.

His slow degradation is horrifying. While the narrative is dramatically uneven and reworks conventional situations, there is value as a warning from history. It demonstrates what atrocities the citizen is capable of when there is no law; whether it's obeying orders to clear the ghetto with flamethrowers... or trying to set fire to a hostel containing refugees.

A lifelong labour of love from Richard Attenborough, who was obviously able to call in a few favours as, aside from Ben Kingsley's uncanny Oscar winning performance as Mohandas Gandhi, there are dozens of British actors of a certain age, mostly cast just to deliver a line or two. Still, it's the title portrayal which stays in the memory.

The studious hagiography starts with the young lawyer thrown out of first class on a South African train in 1883 and ends with the assassination of the iconic leader in New Delhi in 1948. It looks spectacular, with the lovely photography of India in Panavision, but mostly there is political conversation, some editorialising and many speeches... 

So an interest in the history is surely essential. There is an attempt to explain the heart of the man, but for three hours this is overwhelmingly about his political vision for India, and his revolutionary means of achieving it through nonviolent resistance. The script is interested in exposition and communicating the ideas, more than realism.

The recreation of the period is exceptional. Attenborough tells the momentous life with clarity and impetus until the last 30m when the hero begins to fade out of events during the war of partition. Eventually the Mahatma seems to become a benign and mythic prophet; the dissident who gave the world a model for peaceful political protest.