Film Reviews by Steve

For many years, Woody Allen's characters fantasised about living in Paris... Owen Wilson plays a successful screenwriter who has just written his debut novel. He loves the city and dreams of the 1920s when it was host to American writers and the great artists of Europe. This is magic realism, and a close companion to The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Estranged from his materialistic fiancée and her rich, conservative parents, the author dreams so intensely of his golden age that he discovers a portal back in time, and meets Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Picasso. He gives his novel to Gertrude Stein. He explains his predicament to surrealists Dali and Man Ray.  

And he falls in love with Picasso's model/lover (Marion Cotillard), who herself dreams of La Belle Époque and Paul Gaughin and Toulouse-Lautrec, who in turn revere the Renaissance. The legends of the '20s are wonderfully cast, with Corey Stoll a stand out as Hemingway. It's a nostalgic reflection on the nature of nostalgia; an optimistic film which spills over with a love of life.

 And it's a spectacular flight of imagination. The photography of is drop dead gorgeous. The opening scene is a long montage of the landmarks which is more than touristic; it tells us, that this place is enchanted and to prepare for extraordinary things to happen. This is Woody's best film of the century.

One of the most gorgeous low budget films ever made. Not just the photography but the editing, lighting and set design. You could take a random still and paste it into a book of photography to represent the look of film noir and its melancholy beauty. Whether the decorative stars, its interiors in deep focus or the stunning location shots of Los Angeles.

It's a star vehicle for Burt Lancaster as an armoured car driver who has drifted back into LA to be sexually manipulated by his gorgeous ex-wife (Yvonne De Carlo) who plans to marry a gangster (Dan Duryea). The broken, doomed security guard offers his services to the mob as the inside operator in a heist.

The story is mostly told in layers of flashback, and seems influenced by Out of the Past (1947), with the pessimistic dialogue, the style of De Carlo's costumes and the gloomy, tainted romance of the lovers lost on the wrong turns of the lonely roads of noir. This is not the equal of Jacques Tourneur's classic, but exceeds it in visual artistry.    

The production code insisted that nothing will end well. But there are hints that America is moving out of postwar austerity; Yvonne works in a prosperous department store and Burt literally carts bundles of money around... Robert Siodmak assembles each scene with formidable craft. The plot is standard noir. But this is so beautiful.

This is faithfully adapted from a short story by DH Laurence, about a lonely eight year old boy (John Howard Davies), and his oedipal desire for his elegant, materialistic mother (Valerie Hobson) who is frustrated at the inability of her husband (Hugh Sinclair) to provide.

Aided by his uncle (Ronald Squire) and the gardener (John Mills), who both like a flutter, the child discovers that when he rides his rocking horse, he can predict winners of horse races at very advantageous odds. They become rich and use the money to try and quench Hobson's averice. But every time, the boy has to ride the horse harder for the same reward.

So it's a Freudian allegory. The rocking horse scenes are shot like wild, opiated, expressionistic dreams, and they build to a raw, intense climax. And a petit mort... These episodes are beautifully photographed, with a superb score. 

 It doesn't really work as a realistic narrative- there's no sensible reason why the boy should be able to predict horse race winners so successfully! But the film is a sinister and compelling parable on greed.  It's a classic of British cinema and a true original. 

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour brought the United States into WWII, Alfred Hitchcock planned to rework The 39 Steps into a propaganda film. David Selznick held the Master's contract but wasn't interested and offered the project and his director to Universal.

It hasn't the magic of the earlier film. Hitch couldn't get Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck and had a B film budget. But Robert Cummings is fine as the working everyman accused of industrial sabotage who flees into the American heartland to clear his name. He is that staple of Hollywood cinema: the individual who is placid in peace, but determined under threat.

Some encounters advance opportunities to express patriotism. Others teach us to be wary of strangers. I like the episode when the hero, hooked up with the prickly, suspicious Priscilla Lane, travels with a train of carnival performers who are eager to discuss the principles of democracy. 

And it all ends up with the famous showdown up on top of the Statue of Liberty, a location offering a very literal illustration of what they were fighting for. It's a minor Hitchcock, but out of a meagre budget and B-stars he still made a fine film of comedy and suspense. Which gives us a reason to fight.

Unpretentious social realist crime film from Cy Endfield, one of the directors who pitched up in the UK after being forced out of Hollywood by the communist witch hunt. His early productions in this country were formula cheapies released under a pseudonym.

For this British classic, he went back to his own name and politics.  It's a proletariat story about how the workers fight each other and the bosses exploit their division. It was surely influenced by Henri-Georges Clouzot's gorgeous, fatalistic trucker-noir The Wages of Fear. This isn't in that class, but it stands comparison with any of Hollywood's haulage melodramas.

There is an unbelievable cast from top to bottom, Banks to Peters. Patrick McGoohan and the great Stanley Baker excel as the toughest maniacs in the drivers pool, half way between a bonus and oblivion. But Sean Connery is in there too, and a hard to recognise Jill Ireland. Herbert Lom, Peggy Cummins, William Hartnell. It goes on, and on.

The exciting truck chases are extremely well filmed. There's a low budget, but lots of compelling action, and its political message still stands. It seems to have developed a cult following. It's a key entry among many excellent British noir and gangster films made after WWII.

Woody Allen describes his milieu as left wing, Jewish intellectual, so maybe it's an oddity that he is reluctant to address politics. This is his most political film, which reflects on the kind of toxic capitalism associated with Bernie Madoff or Allen Stanford. But it's still an oblique approach, which focuses on the wife (Cate Blanchett), based on Ruth Madoff.

Jasmine's husband (Alec Baldwin) is involved in multiple crooked Ponzi schemes, some managed through her. Triggered by his infidelities, she calls the FBI and he is jailed. After mental collapse and some degree of recovery, she goes to live with her sister (Sally Hawkins) in San Francisco.

This is a febrile drama, pitched closer tragedy than comedy. Perhaps most of all, it is a vehicle for Blanchett's powerful performance as a woman who has lived a life of delusion. Compelled to face reality, she falls apart, utterly. She elevates the film, supported adroitly by Hawkins. Cate won a well deserved Oscar.

The story isn't as assuredly plotted as usual for Allen, and turns on two big coincidences. There are some lovely widescreen pictures of San Francisco and brilliant cast performances. Jasmine's ultimate unravelling at the climax is pitiful. She's a terrible moral washout, but the human capacity to forgive is damn near inexhaustible. 

Ernst Lubitsch revolutionised Hollywood in the early sound era. More than anyone he brought together the influences which defined '30s screwball. This musical comedy is based on a German operetta; but the songs are few and do not impede the lively reflection on the game of love.

In the garrison in Vienna, the soldiers spend most of their time on romantic manoeuvres. Maurice Chevalier plays the charming lieutenant who falls in love with Claudette Colbert, a violinist. He plays the piano. They make music together. The soldier winks at his lover during a parade, only for a minor royal to assume he was gesturing at her.

To avoid a scandal, he marries the prudish princess (Miriam Hopkins). This being a Lubitsch film, Colbert teaches the royal frump how to seduce her reluctant husband. Which leads to the startling musical number Jazz Up Your Lingerie! Colbert and Hopkins aren't yet the screwball legends they became, though Claudette sparkles.

It's Chevalier's film, and he is irrepressible, whether crooning his boulevardier songs or revelling in the precode innuendo. Or indeed, smiling and winking into the camera. He is a walking libido. The playful dalliance is made joyful by his ebullient persona. It's not quite peak Lubitsch but it's an exotic delight, and was a huge hit.

While the box office rewarded American gross-out comedies through the '90s, Mike Leigh continued to make acutely observed crystallisations of the state of England, often profound and carrying a huge emotional undertow. This one is about a family in Essex about the time Margaret Thatcher lost power.

Jim Broadbent plays the comical father, the sort who got on his bike to look for work, and never gave up, but wasn't cut out to be an entrepreneur. He has two daughters, the excellent Jane Horrocks as a secret bulimic, and Clare Skinner, a plumber who looks to America for cultural inspiration.

The heart of the story- and its hero- is Alison Steadman as the wife and mother who keeps all these diverse fragments together, with resourcefulness and untutored eloquence that no one will ever recognise or reward because they are spent in the home. Her performance is inspirational and hugely poignant.

The centrepiece is a scene where the mother tries to motivate her depressed daughter (Horrocks) with a description of her own struggles, the only time she shows her heart. And her selfless pragmatism. It's a fine film anyway, with a subtext which reflects on the impact of Thatcherism. But Steadman's portrayal lifts it up among the best of UK cinema.

Nicholas Ray usually found unconventional perspectives on genre films. This is film noir, about an out-of-control big city policeman ( Robert Ryan) who is so brutalised by his experiences that he becomes frustrated, isolated and unable to relate to others. Then the writer/director takes him out of his normal habitat, and places him into a rural setting.

The detective is pressured by his chief to close the case of a cop killer, but disciplined when he gets results by any means. Hated by the public and tormented by the ceaseless feed of crime on the police radio, he becomes consumed by anger. The only women he meets are sex workers or those who fetishise his violent threat.

He is sent upstate to the Colorado mountains to take over a case. Ida Lupino plays the blind recluse whose brother is suspected of murder. Because of her disability, she is all feeling. In contrast, when she asks to touch the cop's hand to better know him, we sense his emotional numbness and his psychological sickness.

This film is dominated by Ryan's deep performance as the traumatised cop. The percussive brass score by Bernard Herrmann drives the action. There is a brilliant script from Al Bezzerides, full of dark poetry with a touch of the spiritual. It's an unconventional film noir that moves from pessimism towards the faint possibility of hope.

Jules Dassin was one of the talented American directors who came to Europe after WWII to flee McCarthyism. And the themes of (breathless) escape and absence of law are central to his UK debut. Richard Widmark plays a no-hope hustler living on stolen time, who spends his days on the run through a noirish London prowled by bigger, more savage beasts.

When he tries to break into the lucrative wrestling game, he calamitously provokes the Mr Big (Herbert Lom) who runs the racket in the capital. This is an underworld without police, where everyone is on the make, where the criminals bring down each other and only the strongest and most ruthless survive.

It is a cleaned up version of Gerald Kersch's incredibly pessimistic and fatalistic novel; the prostitutes become night club hostesses, etc. Dassin made the socialist film he never could in Hollywood and portrays London as a Darwinist concrete jungle, never more potently than in an astonishingly brutal wrestling scene.  

Widmark is indelibly sleazy as the doomed wannabe. The ensemble support cast is all brilliant apart from the misplaced glamour of Gene Tierney. Googie Withers is always worth seeing.  And it looks a knockout. Maybe this is the only UK noir that fully stands up to Hollywood on their own terms.

Classic espionage drama about the brainwashing of British scientists which is pitched rather closer to the spy-procedural fiction of John le Carre's circus than the sixties consumerism of the cartoonish James Bond franchise. But which has a little of both.

Director Sidney Furie gives the film a fascinating look, with the bright colours, deep focus set ups and expressionist camera angles which give it a pop art sensibility. And the clothes are fantastic, particularly the suits of Harry Palmer (Michael Caine). This is a very stylish production.

And the star plays a full part, as the remote, numb agent conducting an internal investigation into a leak at the MOD. Caine in his trademark glasses, delivers the nerdy cool that he became less deservedly more famous for elsewhere. The familiar support underplays to great effect.

And they're perfect with the clipped dialogue. But what elevates everything is John Barry's haunting, introspective soundtrack, which gives the film its cold war froideur.  It's a key '60s London film and one of the greats of the spy genre. 

My pick for the best Woody Allen film from his later period. It's a fake documentary about a self destructive and egotistical shack-reared jazz guitarist (Sean Penn) who was briefly famous during the depression. He feels constantly frustrated because he is only the second best on his instrument in the world, after his hero, Django Reinhardt.

He falls in with a mute, working class innocent (Samantha Morton) and then a slumming rich girl (Uma Thurman) thinking of turning the musician's demons into a novel. We follow him from east to west coast, with his legacy discussed by a number of talking head jazz critics. Including Woody.

Penn pulls off a small miracle keeping the mean and self-obsessed prodigy just the right side of sympathetic. The heart of the film though is Morton, whose silent rendition as the simple girl who suffers for her unconditional love is sensational. Thematically, this is a lot like Broadway Danny Rose.

The period atmosphere is convincing, the script is exceptional and the jazz guitar music excellent (Penn mimes pretty well). But it's Morton's film all the way and her overwhelming, incorruptible dignity and decency breaks your heart. It's among the greatest silent performance I've ever seen. 

It's 1938 and war in Europe is inevitable.  A diverse and disinterested assembly of British dilettantes, obsessives and eccentrics travelling by train through the Balkans, puts aside denial and appeasement and finally realise they must fight or die. This is a thriller from Alfred Hitchcock, but the premise is from the headlines.

In his film debut, Michael Redgrave plays a musicologist researching middle European folk music and becomes antagonistically entangled with Margaret Lockwood's pleasure-seeking it-girl on one last fling before marriage, and a dotty dowager/British agent who mysteriously goes missing.

Only Lockwood and Redgrave are willing to get involved, while they backchat and fall in love. This is a classic of Hitchcock's British years, but plenty of credit is due to Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat who developed the project. And they contribute a wonderful screwball script.

It's fast paced and suspenseful (naturally) with a brilliant cast of support characters, including the immortal cricket obsessed English everymen, Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne).  It's just so gloriously entertaining and the ultimate train thriller. One of the greatest UK films of the '30s.

Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich is transferred to contemporary Hollywood. Danny Huston stars as a hot talent agent surfing a west coast inferno of cocaine, gratis call girls, and the trash and autocrats of tinseltown. The story begins at the end. With Ivan's funeral, where there is an assumption is the dead man 'freebased his face off'.

And then we witness his descent through a decadent hell, to his death from cancer, in the arms of a hospice nurse. The director, Bernard Rose, became poison in Hollywood for this exposé of the film industry. It offers a vicarious insight into the iniquities of those with apparently limitless wealth and power.

Huston's gives us one of the great screen performances. His denial, his absolute fear of his mortality, played out behind the perma-smile of his unctuous facade; his inability to confront any situation without trying to manage or spin it. Even his own death. Somehow, he earns our pity.

There are heroes in the background, the ordinary people whose unregarded toil makes the privileges of the few possible. This is a profoundly moral film that invites us to identify with Ivan and judge ourselves against the possibility of a better life, and to remind us that time is running out. Few film have burned me as deeply as this.

This is Jack Clayton's masterpiece, a groundbreaking work of social realism which broke British cinema's prohibition on sex. The story begins just after the war, in a time of austerity. The son of a Yorkshire miner (Laurence Harvey) seeks wealth, not by raising his own class, but by getting a rich girl pregnant and marrying into money.

How revolutionary this film was in the late '50s is indicated by how difficult it was to cast. There was no one really suitable for these roles. The male lead was played badly by the inflexible Lithuanian born Laurence Harvey. Legendary French actor Simone Signoret was brought in to portray the damaged married woman who loses out to Heather Sears' virginal milltown debutante.

Signoret's consuming-Oscar winning- portrayal is a landmark. She a mature woman well into middle age for whom love and life has mainly brought disappointment; sexually, emotionally and socially. And yet, her sensuality, and her unreachable loneliness makes her painfully sympathetic.

It's hard to believe that any of the Rank school of leading ladies could have contributed something comparable. It's is one of the most powerful performances in any UK film. The supporting cast is exceptional with Hermione Baddeley particularly memorable. Clayton never got due recognition. This is the best film of the British new wave.