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The Leopard

Visconti’s masterpiece is one of the best examples of the period epic ever made, a film that makes Merchant/Ivory look like kids messing about with the dressing-up box. It tells of the arrival of democracy in Italy and the decline of the fine old aristocratic way of life, as seen through the eyes of the enigmatic head of an ancient Sicilian family. The shock of this Italian-language movie is the person playing that central role, a mutton-chopped Burt Lancaster, the actor who started life as a circus acrobat. Why was a man more associated with horses and the high wire, a man so often smeared in diesel, playing an aristocrat and standing on … Read more
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No

Robert LePage directs this exercise in dry wit and history, a French-Canadian comedy of manners cut down from his seven-hour play The Seven Streams of the River Ota. It’s set in Japan at the time of the 1970 Expo, 25 years after the end of WWII. Meanwhile back in Quebec the secession movement is reaching its high water mark and the national government is so rattled it is on the verge of imposing martial law. No is a clever, sophisticated film (and at times in a slightly self-satisfied way) whose title gives us a taste of things to come. No – a pun on the Japanese style of Noh theatre, was also the … Read more
Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality

Miss Congeniality

Call it nominative determinism but the Kirk Douglas-dimpled Sandra Bullock is often the most bullish person in the movies she’s in. This is presumably why somebody thought she’d be ideal playing a tough cop who makes an ugly-duckling transformation in order to go undercover at a beauty pageant. It’s completely unbelievable, of course – Bullock never for a second looks less than a Hollywood A list star, even when made up to look like a dog. But who wants believable when there’s fun to be had? And so we yield to Bullock’s brilliant comic interplay with Michael Caine, as her camp coach in feminine poise (see what I mean by unbelievable), and if … Read more
Jason Statham and Brad Pitt in Snatch

Snatch

Two years after Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Guy Ritchie returned with a film that looked, felt and almost smelt the same. Except this time around the story is about bare-knuckle fighting and diamond heists, and Brad Pitt (for the ladies) is playing an Irish tinker, just one of a number of silly ethnic stereotypes, which include Russian gangsters, Jewish jewellers and  a Turkish boxing promoter called Turkish (played by Jason Statham, one minute before he launched his action hero career). Lock Stock traded in the same currency, you’ll remember. As well as Pitt, Snatch is studded with other non-British actors, such as Benicio Del Toro and Dennis Farina. Nevertheless it often feels … Read more
Madeleine Carroll handcuffed to Robert Donat in The 39 Steps

The 39 Steps

There are several filmed versions of John Buchan’s novel. The other two notables have Kenneth More and Robert Powell in the lead. But this one, in spite of its antiquity, is the best. It stars debonair, pencil-moustached Robert Donat as the innocent man forced into going on the run after accidentally getting caught up at the wrong end of someone else’s spying caper. The “innocent” theme was something Alfred Hitchcock was already comfortable with in 1935 and one which he’d return to repeatedly, most notably in North by Northwest. If you’ve read John Buchan’s original book, you’ll know The 39 Steps is a taut thriller full of derring-do, a rattling good read even … Read more
Gérald L'Ecuyer

The Grace of God

Now this one is a hard sell. It starts with its director, Gérald L’Ecuyer, addressing the confessional camera, telling of the 16 psychiatrists and the one doomed affair he went through to make this film. Then the film proper starts and it turns out it’s all about a young man and his tangles with psychiatrists and doomed love over a ten year period. This is followed by a whole load of shots from out of the window of a moving train. And that – confession, fiction, train window – is pretty much the mix for the whole of the film’s 70 minutes, which build towards an explanation of how and who this gay … Read more
still of al pacino in dog day afternoon large picture

Dog Day Afternoon

Look at all those 1960s heist movies – gents with David Niven accents in cat-burglar outfits effortlessly walking out of Monte Carlo with a heist of diamonds. How different the 1970s heist movie. In the decade when it became apparent that, economically, everything was falling apart, director Sidney Lumet caught the mood perfectly in a bank job movie set in a city crumbling faster than most others, New York. And there’s Al Pacino as our hero. Not a normal bank robber, but a slightly rubbish one, married but gay, cackhandedly stealing money so his boyfriend can have a gender reassignment operation – sexual orientation being another one of those little things that seemed … Read more
Lorraine Stanley and Georgia Groome in London to Brighton

London to Brighton

London, 3.07am, in a horrible manky toilet, Joanne, a very young girl (Georgia Groome) is having the lipstick wiped from her teary face by Kelly, an older woman (Lorraine Stanley), whose bulldog features have taken a battering and who’s wearing a skirt so short she can only be a prostitute. Who are they? What’s going on? Who is the vile piece of shit (Johnny Harris) who is soon on their case? As the two females gobble fast food in the stall, then decide to take flight to Brighton on the coast, we are hungry for answers. This relentlessly and properly unpleasant film is the feature debut by Paul Andrew Williams and from the … Read more
Jackie Chan in Police Story

Police Story

There are plenty of people who think of Jackie Chan as a brilliant martial artist who has squandered his gifts on silly comedy. Even they, the Chan purists, acknowledge the brilliance of Police Story, Chan’s best film. And now that we’re in 2013 and Chan is nudging 60 years old, he’s never going to trump it. From the opening scenes in which Chan hangs on to a double decker bus with an umbrella as it careens around Hong Kong, to the final sequence in a shopping mall during which he smashes through glass, hops from one escalator to another – not forgetting the most gob-smacking of all, the downhill drive through a shanty town … Read more
Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel

The Blue Angel

This is the film that made Marlene Dietrich a household scandal back in 1930. It’s the story of how a pompous but respectable schoolteacher is lured on to the rocks by Lola-Lola, the nightclub singer in a Weimar-era club who can’t help “Falling in Love Again” (which Dietrich sings here). Poor Emil Jannings, who played the professor, thought he was the star of the film – as well he might since he’d won the Best Actor Oscar the year before, at the very first Academy Awards. He resisted director Von Sternberg’s choice of Dietrich, then a nobody, as the temptress. Von Sternberg had discovered her acting in a stage play quite by accident. … Read more
audition

Audition

The horror film has a special use for the young female body. How often does one crescendo with some girl in a tight white T shirt – if not Jessica Biel then someone pretty similar – running endlessly, screamingly away from a scaggy male assailant with a hook/axe/chainsaw/knife? Meanwhile a man with a Steadicam aimed right at the young woman’s breasts in turn runs backwards away from her, to the nodding appreciation of the largely male audience. Audition turns the tables – a sad sack of a Japanese salaryman pretends to be a producer holding auditions for a film. In reality he’s doing try-outs for something more permanent and less well paid – … Read more
Aleksei Kravchenko in Come and See

Come and See

Best Of lists are designed to infuriate, obviously, to provoke debate. But even so, it seems beyond the realms of the credible that Elem Klimov’s Come and See only made it to number 71 when UK television’s Channel 4 ran a Best War Movies Ever poll a few years ago, while Ridley Scott’s fart in a biscuit tin, Black Hawk Down, sat happy at number 9. The 1985 Russian film is the best film about the Russian experience of the Second World War, one of a handful of real contenders for the best war film ever made. Following a tender 14-year-old (Aleksei Kravchenko) as he is first pressganged into joining a ragtag militia … Read more

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