Film Reviews by Steve

Back in the days of the spaghetti western this must have seemed awfully old fashioned, with its retro-studio era conventions. There's the corny country title ballad; the extensive chat promoting American individualism; all the way to the elegiac conclusion in a graveyard. Henry Hathaway (or Ford/Hawks) might have shot it in the '50s.

Most of all, there's John Wayne who won his only Oscar as Rooster Cogburn, the frontier Marshal with an eyepatch who goes into Indian country to bring back a cold blooded killer (Jeff Corey) with the dead man's teenage daughter. Though it's a standard Duke performance, which doesn't look much into the dark side of gun law.

Ultra-square country singer Glen Campbell is also in pursuit of the murderer. Wayne had been cast against pop acts at least as far back as Rio Bravo (1959) so this wasn't a novelty. And post-Woodstock, such a mainstream artist wasn't going to bring in the kids. This is for fans of the Duke, and it's easily the best of his later westerns.

Wayne establishes some odd couple chemistry with Kim Darby, who portrays the vengeful teenager as an androgynous kook; though her dialogue says she's another conservative. The year before, Sergio Leone made Once Upon a Time in the West and in comparison this is passé. But still above average for a '60s Hollywood western.

Polemical account of the real life military trial of three Australian soldiers for the murder of prisoners during the Second Boer War (1899-1902). Edward Woodward plays Harry 'Breaker' Morant, a lieutenant born in the UK who enlisted in Adelaide after years of settlement. Bryan Brown is his larrikin comrade-in-arms with Lewis Fitz-Gerald as a younger, more naive recruit.

The standout- and central- performance is from Jack Thompson as the inexperienced lawyer who has to defend the accused against a stacked deck. Writer-director Bruce Beresford claims this is not intended to be about the duplicitous officer class selling out colonial oiks in order to facilitate their own objectives while preserving moral superiority. But that's exactly what it is!

This belongs in a subsection of the Aussie New Wave which creates an origins myth to encourage the drive to independence. This isn't objective truth, but it is an emotive condemnation of Empire and the privilege/hypocrisy of the ruling class. And who can't get behind that, wherever you're from? Beresford claims it's more about the validity of the Nuremberg defence...

Which is the mitigation they were just following orders. And that is also a theme. The action is opened up with skill from a stage play, with South Australia standing in  for the Veldt in the flashbacks. The Oscar nominated screenplay obviously channels Paths of Glory (1957); while this isn't quite in the same class, the history is compelling and it lands a big climactic haymaker.

This is a spectacular historical epic, but the costumes and art direction never overwhelm the narrative drawn from an astonishing true story. This is an account of Pu Yi who was appointed into the nominal role of Chinese emperor aged three, and was sealed within the feudal magnificence of the Forbidden City in Beijing while the world changed beyond the walls.

During his later incarceration by the Communists, there's a flashback from a modern country back to the crackpot traditions of his childhood, which is so disorientating it might induce whiplash! The history is captured by Bernardo Bertolucci with conspicuous craft, intelligence and splendour. Vittorio Storaro's Oscar winning photography is... simply awesome.

The main strengths are implied by its Oscars; it won big for the visual and technical aspects, but none of the actors were even nominated. Still, all four who play Pu Yi through his life are well cast, even if not star names. And Peter O'Toole as the incorruptible Scottish tutor is missed when he exits on halfway. He appears in the best scenes, inside the palace.

There are also well deserved Academy Awards for the big ones; Best Picture and Direction. Plus the score by Ryûichi Sakamoto et al, which made the album charts. Maybe the episodic events after Pu Yi leaves the Forbidden City lose some coherence...but the (Oscar winning!) screenplay tells the story pretty well. And any interest in the history is amply rewarded.

Lightweight but fun comedy-drama which, like Noah Baumbach films generally, makes some engaging observations on contemporary, urban, bourgeois lifestyle, while rarely being actually hilarious or profound. This one owes a massive debt to Woody Allen, particularly Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989)...

Though not on a similar level of quality. There are decent ensemble performances with Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as married documentary film makers shaken out of their midlife rut by a younger couple in a hurry to succeed in the same field. Well, Adam Driver is; his kooky wife (Amanda Seyfried) makes ice cream.

Which may hint at a weakness. The script seems overextended for such a slender premise, yet the female roles are underwritten.  Plus Baumbach loses his self-assurance in the more dramatic material, which means he squanders a potentially clever climactic twist... Though the last shot in the airport is a doozy!

Maybe it's not reasonable to expect more when what we get is entertaining enough. There are witty insights on Millennials and social media. There's some acute, commentary on what we lose as we get older and how that might not be a bad thing... Anyway, Millennials are middle aged now; and this film is already a period piece.

Superior comedy-drama from Mike Leigh set among his boomer contemporaries as they become aware of their fears of growing old; mainly the loneliness. A series of commonplace encounters revolve around a comfortable North London couple (Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen) who have done quite nicely for themselves.

Meanwhile, their friends are struggling. There's a familiar cast drawn from the director's stock company, with Lesley Manville best as a dizzy middle aged singleton who is fast becoming a burden on her pals... though her desperation doesn't extend to considering the corpulent boozer (Peter Wight) interested in her.

The ensemble of interlopers palliate heavily with alcohol as they re-run long ago memories of youthful adventure, while their future options dwindle over another year. Their neediness is sometimes exasperating, but the settled husband and wife have the reserves of kindness typical of all Leigh's ordinary, quiet heroes. 

There isn't the intuition for the zeitgeist we often get with his films; this a happy-sad look at the early premonitions of old age. But there is the usual emotional awkwardness, plus the reflections on class, social mobility and metropolitan living. And it's worth seeing just for Manville's last, long closeup, which is a heartbreaker.

This critically adored arthouse-fantasy made little impact on release but is now standard in lists of all time horror classics. The setup is pure gothic, though this is more like dreamy/languorous screen poetry which chills through unsettling b&w imagery and transgressive themes. So there are zero jump-scares... 

But there is a seriously impressive cast led by Pierre Brasseur as an imperious surgeon who means to transplant a new visage onto his once beautiful daughter after she is burned in a car accident; and is willing to expend other young women in his crazy enterprise. Alida Valli is no less disturbing as his submissive enabler.

Presumably this alludes to the Nazi doctors of WWII. Everything the mad medic does is insane, but- to the duo- unavoidably, regrettably necessary; as with the fascists, the end always justifies the means. Though what makes it so horrific and unsettling is his aristocratic assumption of superiority over his lonely victims.

And director Georges Franju absolutely understands that while hospitals are modern white palaces of medicine, they also accommodate practices which might look to the uninitiated like torture, endorsed by staff who are just following orders.  Édith Scob's sad-face mask is a horror icon, but there's so much more...

Flawed Hitchcock homage which was a huge office hit, but hasn't passed the test of time. A big problem is the casting of Gene Wilder as the 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 on it 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 comic stars 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's going by rail because he wants to catch up on his reading, but really it's because this is a North by Northwest rip off and he's going to be seduced by Jill Clayburgh while he gets tangled up in McGuffin.

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

This is only a loose adaptation of Jack London's classic adventure story, but there is some attempt to enter into the spirit of the text. The viewpoint character isn't the feral wolfhound; this is a Disney film about a boy and his dog. However, it is less anthropomorphic than usual; nature is red in tooth and claw.

The content about the survival of the fittest in the wilderness of the Yukon still endures. More modern concerns about ecology are not much explored. Ethan Hawke plays the inexperienced juvenile who pitches up in Alaska to exploit the gold rush, and is mentored by an old hand played by Klaus Maria Brandauer. 

Not much of that is from the book! Still, this is more about the animal performances, with Jed in the title role, and an awesome cameo from Bart as a brown bear who fancies the boy for dinner. The narrative gets more conventional towards the climax with some standard baddies. Though, they are at least from the book...

The bloody animal fights are a weakness, but of course, no CGI. The set design and authentic locations add some grim period realism. This is easily the best version of the novel and any changes are to make it more convivial for a family audience; it's an exciting adventure for kids which should crossover to grownups.

Some pre-knowledge of the works of French polymath Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) would be useful! And that notion at least sends a warning about the kind of concentration that will be necessary. This is the third in Éric Rohmer's series of Six Moral Tales and as usual, he expects his audience to be well read....

OK, my exposure to Pascal goes no further than his triangle, but close attention is rewarded. This is about  the philosophy of chance and how it is playfully utilised by Rohmer's intellectual characters to explain their potential to find a partner for marriage. And to discuss at length the validity of these theories...

Like all of Rohmer's films, this is dense with dialogue but without much plot. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays an engineer who does complex arithmetic for relaxation. His pal is a professor of philosophy (Antoine Vitez), and together they visit Maud, a medical doctor (Françoise Fabian). They talk while interesting connections emerge.

These long, cerebral conversations are demanding, but personal and captivating. Surely this influenced Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, except this is intellectual rather than romantic. I'd expect its appeal would only extend to a small cult, but it was nominated for two Oscars, so who knows? 

Some pre-knowledge of the works of French polymath Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) would be useful! And that notion at least sends a warning about the kind of concentration that will be necessary. This is the third in Éric Rohmer's series of Six Moral Tales and as usual, he expects his audience to be well read....

OK, my exposure to Pascal goes no further than his triangle, but close attention is rewarded. This is about  the philosophy of chance and how it is playfully utilised by Rohmer's intellectual characters to explain their potential to find a partner for marriage. And to discuss at length the validity of these theories...

Like all of Rohmer's films, this is dense with dialogue but without much plot. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays an engineer who does complex arithmetic for relaxation. His pal is a professor of philosophy (Antoine Vitez), and together they visit Maud, a medical doctor (Françoise Fabian). They talk while interesting connections emerge.

These long, cerebral conversations are demanding, but personal and captivating. Surely this influenced Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, except this is intellectual rather than romantic. I'd expect its appeal would only extend to a small cult, but it was nominated for two Oscars, so who knows?

Crazy low budget Universal monster picture with a gallery of genre oddballs played by a deep cast of B-picture stalwarts. Ralph Morgan is a quadriplegic who holds his highly respected physicians responsible for his extreme deformity. He invites the doctors to his spooky old estate, only for someone to murder them!

It can’t be the host- obviously- as he has no arms or legs… The denouement is completely wild! But fun. Bela Lugosi as the creepy butler and Lionel Atwill as a bumptious medic are only there for name recognition and hardly figure…

In a uniformly relishable cast, the standouts are Irene Hervey as a straight-arrow psychiatrist, Fay Helm as the neurotic relative scared out of her mind and Nils Asther as an unorthodox mystic. There’s a memorable scene where he teleports a skeleton via arcane, yogic ritual!

This is all astonishingly overstated. Ford Beebe is a minor director of serials, but he creates plenty of foggy/shadowy atmosphere from his studio backlot swamp and secret passages. It’s a ludicrous mishmash of melancholy, hokum and weirdness- yet irresistible.

This is the forgotten production in the creative big bang of Universal horror; an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's influential locked room mystery set in mid-19th Century Paris. Not much Poe remains, but we do get the ape! Bela Lugosi is a carnival showman immersed in a maniacal scheme to crossbreed his simian sideshow attraction with a sweet, beautiful young lady.

Sidney Fox (she's a girl!) gets top billing, maybe because she was dating the head of the studio. But Lugosi dominates as Dr. Mirakle, the carny with a sideline in cutting edge evolutionary biology. He trains the ape to scale an apartment building and kidnap her for his experiments. Which are pretty sordid, even for precode.

It's a bit slow and creaky like all early Universal horrors. Critics claim it borrows from German silent, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), especially the climax as the primate drags his victim over jagged rooftops. This isn't of similar stature, but it's a fair comparison. And the painted, expressionist city is memorable.

There is plenty of atmosphere, but zero logic. Which is fine in the woozy trance of early horror. It's Lugosi's gift to seem to belong in this opiated fantasy. His performance is ridiculous, but absolutely appropriate! Robert Florey doesn't create much suspense, or any scares, but it's still transgressive stuff, and he gets it all done in an hour.

If anyone knows anything about this minor Universal horror, it's that it triggered a prohibition on scare films in the UK which lasted for a decade, and a shorter pause in the US. Naturally, there's nothing shocking here. Now it looks like an irreverent, if transgressive romp. There's even a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe through the medium of interpretive dance!

It's a loose mishmash of plots which mostly involve Bela Lugosi as an infatuated doctor planning to murder the family of a beautiful woman (Irene Ware) he desires... while he deliberately botches cosmetic surgery on Boris Karloff to ensure he assists in these nefarious schemes...

The mad medic has a secret torture chamber with the freaky guillotine from The Pit and the Pendulum. But otherwise, there is little Poe here. It has that awkwardness many badly directed early talkies have. Like everyone is struggling to make conversation. But now it's 1935 so there is no excuse.

Still it's always fun to see the two stars engaged in diabolical conflict. Karloff sends up his role as Frankenstein's monster. And at barely a hour, there are few longueurs. Lugosi comes up with a new atrocity every ten minutes. But the main takeaway is that the censors/critics must have been crazier than Lugosi to ban this.

The outrage caused by this beating Raging Bull to Best Film at the 1981 Oscars always seemed phoney; this is a worthy winner, just... very different. It's a domestic drama set in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago where a respectable family suffers the aftershocks of a fatal accident while they get stuck in the stages of grief.

The favoured son dies in a boating accident while his introverted younger brother is rescued. There are intense ensemble performances with Donald Sutherland as the well-meaning dad who just wants to believe everything is ok and Mary Tyler Moore as the brittle trad-wife/mother who can't feel any love for the survivor...

The standout is Timothy Hutton; this comes alive when he is on screen as the schoolkid who can't live with the guilt and may be heading for another suicide attempt. His scenes with Judd Hirsch as a cranky psychotherapist cut deepest. Hutton won the Oscar for Supporting Actor on his feature debut, but he plays the central role.

Robert Redford also won an Oscar for a debut- as director. His use of music is excellent and the autumnal background brings some atmosphere, but he occasionally loses control of the emotional throttle. This is better as a rites-of-passage about teenage anxiety than a study of midlife bourgeois disappointment, but works either way.

How timely that in 2008, Mike Leigh should rediscover his alchemic ability to intuit change in British society; the year the financial crisis triggered austerity and way back when the internet began to amplify our divisions; this is a report from the pressure points of a disunited nation.

Poppy may be an optimist; but she is also resilient because otherwise her positivity will burn out, like a match. Sally Hawkins' virtuoso performance is among the greats of UK cinema. From a potentially irritating, dayglo romantic, she deepens and darkens into an unlikely hero.

Poppy is a funny, liberal primary school teacher, still living the single life while flatsharing in North London at 30.  The core of the film is her exposure to a furious, far-right driving instructor (Eddie Marsan). He is a vehicle for the sort of lunatic conspiracies which are now commonplace.

Today this feels incredibly prescient... It channels the anger and passive-aggressive anxiety which is the hum in the wires of the circuits of contemporary British life. While it divides the audience, as Leigh's films usually do, for me this is one of the standout pictures of its decade.