Barry Lyndon

Year of Release:  1975
Director:  Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay:  Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray
Starring:  Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger, Diana Koerner, Gay Hamilton
Running Time:  187 minutes
Genre:  Period drama

In 18th Century Ireland, headstrong Redmond Barry (O'Neal), believing that he has killed an English officer in a duel, leaves his home to seek his fortune.  He embarks on many adventures as a soldier, spy, professional gambler, con-man in his quest to become one of the gentry.

This is possibly Stanley Kubrick's most underrated film, coming between the controversial A Clockwork Orange (1971) and the horror classic The Shining (1980).  However, this ravishingly beautiful period drama is one of Kubrick's finest works, and in my opinion it is a masterpiece.  It's based on the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray, who is possibly best known for writing Vanity Fair (1848).  Kubrick turned to the book when his planned film about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte fell apart, and was able to incorporate that he had already done about the 1800s into this film.  It's a film of two parts, divided by chapter headings, the first part dealing with Barry's scheming and adventures to achieve wealth and status, and the much darker second part is more of a domestic drama as everything falls apart.  While this stately film may not be as obviously groundbreaking as other Kubrick films, it is still innovative is several respects, perhaps most notably the technique filmmakers devised to allow scenes to be lit solely by candlelight.   Almost every scene in the film is like a painting you feel you could hang on your wall.  Ryan O'Neal plays Barry from a gauche, reckless young man, to cynical antihero, and ultimately tragic figure, with a kind of icy charisma, Marisa Berenson plays the unlucky Lady Lyndon  as a fragile, tragic character, hiding depths behind her blank, mask-like face.  Barry's stepson Lord Bullingdon is played by Leon Vitali, who would later become Kubrick's assistant, and if you have any interest at all in Kubrick or film-making, the documentary about Vitali, Filmworker (2017), is a must-see.  Michael Hordern's narration provides a witty, ironic commentary on the events on screen, a departure from the novel which is narrated by Barry himself.  The soundtrack uses classical music from Bach, Handel, Vivaldi and Schubert among others, and Irish folk music

"It was in the reign of George III that these personages lived and quarreled.  Good or bad, beautiful or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now."

           

Ill met by candlelight in Barry Lyndon

The Magnificent Ambersons

Year of Release:  1942
Director:  Orson Welles
Screenplay:  Orson Welles, based on the novel The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
Starring:  Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Richard Bennett
Running Time:  88 minutes (cut from 148 minutes)
Genre:  Period drama

The Ambersons are an old, vastly wealthy Midwestern family at the turn of the 20th Century.  However they face a change in fortune as the proud and willful son of the family, George (Holt), refuses to allow his widowed mother (Costello) to reunite with Eugene Morgan (Cotten), who she was involved with before George's father came along, and has remained her one true love.  Meanwhile the world around them is changing due to increasingly industrialisation, particularly the growing influence of the motorcar, and George refuses to move with the times.

This was Orson Welles' follow-up to Citizen Kane (1941).  The film was controversially re-edited by the studio who felt it was too long and depressing, so they cut it by an hour and substituted a more upbeat ending.  While this was going on Welles was in Brazil working on another film.  We are unlikely ever to see a Welles cut of the film, because the original negatives of the cut footage were destroyed, although Welles detailed notes for the film survive.  The composer, Bernard Herrmann, was so incensed by his score being cut by an hour that he demanded his name be removed from the film.  While we don't have the Welles Ambersons what we do have is a powerful and impressive film.  It's stylish and visually striking, and there are some fantastic performances from Welles' Mercury Theater company.  The opening sequences are masterful creating a surprisingly humorous elegy for a forgotten world.  It is a film about the dangers of overweening pride as well as the perils of refusing to move ahead with the times.  There are a very few places where it shows signs of heavy cutting, and the ending looks very obviously tacked on (which it was, of course) and doesn't work with the feel of the film.  While it is no Citizen Kane, there is still brilliance here and it has it's own flawed magnificence.

Anne Baxter and Tim Holt in The Magnificent Ambersons

Mirror

Year of Release:  1975
Director:  Andrei Tarkovsky
Screenplay:  Aleksandr Misharin and Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring:  Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Larisa Tarkovskaya, Alla Demidova, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Tamara Ogorodnikova, Arseny Tarkovsky
Running Time:  106 minutes
Genre:  autobiography, drama

If you are unfamiliar with the work of acclaimed Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky it's worth bearing in mind that he once said that no film that is any good should be "enjoyable".  Even by Tarkovsky's standards Mirror is inaccessible.  This largely plotless film blends autobiographical fragments, Russian history, dreams, nightmares and fantasies.  It features many Tarkovsy hallmarks such as long languorous takes, switches between colour, black-and-white and sepia,  images of nature, fire and water, and levitation.  Tarkovsky's father, Arseny Tarkovsky reads his own poetry in voice over, and the director's wife, Larissa Tarkovskaya, and mother, Maria Vihnyakova, appear.  It is not a film that can be understood in the way that a normal film can be, it's like a film poem.  If you give yourself over to it's unique spell you will be rewarded with beautiful imagery, that lingers for years after you've seen it.  In fact it is a film that it's hard not to feel affected by.  It's a demanding film, but worthwhile.  At least after it, you feel like you have had an experience.

  A look into Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror

Sunset Boulevard

Year of Release:  1950
Director:  Billy Wilder
Screenplay:  Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D. M. Marshman Jr.
Starring:  William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Fred Clark, Lloyd Gough
Running Time:  110 minutes
Genre:  Drama, thriller, film noir

Joe Gillis (Holden) is a struggling Hollywood screenwriter, who hasn't had work in ages.  In danger of losing his car and his apartment, he hides out at a decaying old Hollywood mansion on Sunset Boulevard which turns out to be owned by faded star of the silent screen, Norma Desmond (Swanson), who lives alone with her enigmatic servant Max (von Stroheim).  Norma is determined to be a star again and has written a long and terrible screenplay of Salome, which she hopes to star in with Cecil B. DeMille directing.  Gillis persuades her to hire him as a script doctor, and soon finds himself drawn into her bizarre and twisted world of faded starlight.

Hollywood has always loved making films about itself, and this is one of the darkest and bitterest takes on the dream factory.  It has one of the greatest opening in film history, as we first meet Joe Gillis as a corpse floating face down in a swimming pool, and flashing back six months to tell the story of how he came to be there, the fact that the film is narrated by a corpse helps set the strange tone for the film, where everything seems slightly off centre.  Former silent star Gloria Swanson gives a memorable performance as the terrifying, pitiful and tragic Norma Desmond.  A great star forgotten and left behind by an industry and a world that has moved on without her, with nothing to sustain her but memories and dreams, she becomes almost heroic in her tragedy.  Joe Gillis, our nominal hero, is really more of an anti-hero, basically using Norma for her money, while mostly holding her in contempt.  The great silent director turned actor Erich von Stroheim appears as the sinister manservant Max.  There are several cameos from well known figures of the silent screen including Buster Keaton and Cecil B. DeMille.  Incidentally this is one of David Lynch's favourite films, and I can definitely see why.  It's a great film.

"I am big!  It was the pictures that got small"
- Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson)

Gloria Swanson readies for her close-up in Sunset Boulevard

Citizen Kane

Year of Release:  1941
Director:  Orson Welles
Screenplay:  Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles
Starring:  Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloane, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Agnes Moorehead, Paul Stewart, Ruth Warwick, Erskine Sanford, William Alland
Running Time:  117 minutes
Genre:  Drama

Following the death of controversial tycoon, Charles Foster Kane (Welles), one of the richest and most famous men in America, newsreel reporter Thompson (Alland) is sent to get a fresh angle on Kane's life by investigating the meaning of his last word, "Rosebud."  As he interviews those who knew and worked with Kane, Thompson builds a picture of his life from his poor childhood in rural Colorado, to his foundation of a huge newspaper empire, to his political ambitions, and troubled private life.

This was the first film of legendary actor, writer, producer and director Orson Welles, who had already made a splash with his Mercury Theater company, and his notorious radio production of The War of the Worlds.  It was a very experimental film for the time, with it's non-linear structure, unconventional camera angles, and pseudo-documentary sequences.  Famously it often tops polls as the best film ever made, while I am not sure if it is or not, it is a personal favourite of mine, and it is certainly a great film.  It offers much, but reveals little.  The great writer Jorge Luis Borges described Citizen Kane as "a labyrinth without a centre", and it is an entrancing puzzle.  It's mysteries, even when revealed, seem to lead to yet more mysteries.  Ultimately we end where we begin, outside, the forbidding gates of Xanadu.  The film is a technical marvel, and full of images that have become iconic.  The complex, literate script is beautifully written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, and the performances are very impressive all round.  The film pretty much disappeared on release, thanks in no small part to real-life newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who was enraged by the film, believing that Welles was having a go at him, and he tried to ensure the film was buried.  Fortunately Hearst failed, and this dazzling film could be reappraised as the masterpiece it is.

Orson Welles as Citizen Kane

A Fistful of Dollars

Year of Release:  1964
Director:  Sergio Leone
Screenplay:  Victor Andrés Catena, Jaime Comas Gil, Sergio Leone, Adriano Bolzani and Mark Lowell, based on Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa and Ryūzō Kikushima
Starring:  Clint Eastwood, Marianne Koch, Josef Egger, Wolfgang Lukschy, John Wells, Daniel Martin, Carol Brown, Benny Reeves
Running Time:  99 minutes
Genre:  Western, Spaghetti Western, action

The small town of San Miguel, on the Mexican-United States border, is divided between two smuggler families, who are engaged in a violent and long-running feud.  One day a mysterious stranger (Eastwood) arrives in town and, learning of the situation, decides that he can make some money by playing each side off against the other.

This relatively low budget film with no big stars, and from fairly unknown director, which was panned by the critics on it's initial release, went on to not only launch one of the biggest movie stars, and one of the most iconic characters but almost defined an entire genre.  If you don't know, the term "Spaghetti Western" were Westerns produced and directed by Italian filmmakers and usually shot in Spain.  A Fistful of Dollars was not the first Italian Western but it created the style and the hallmarks of the genre.  Leone wanted to make a Western that felt like an Italian film.  In this film, everything feels exaggerated, the streets of the small town are as wide as most modern city streets, the closeups are extreme so you can read every crevice on the craggy faces, the violence is stylish and fast moving.  This was the first film to star Clint Eastwood, who at the time was best known for the TV series Rawhide (1959 - 1965), and his "Man With No Name" became possibly his defining role (although in this film, an undertaker refers to him as "Joe").  The character is iconic, the man of mystery who you know about as much at the end of the film as you did at the beginning.  The fast shooting, quick drawing gunman with a permanent squint in the eye and sneer who always seems to be two moves ahead of everyone else.
The film is widely regarded as an unauthorised remake of the classic Japanese film Yojimbo (1961), directed by Akira Kurosawa who brought a lawsuit against the filmmakers.  Kurosawa stated "Leone made a fine film, but it was my film."  Leone pointed out that Kurosawa was not the first person to use the plot of an individual playing two sides off against each other, noting the Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest (1929) and the 18th Century play Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni.  However, the lawsuit was settled out of court.
A Fistful of Dollars is a must see for all fans of Westerns or action films in general.  Leone and Eastwood would ride again in two sequels: For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966).

Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name            

Mona Lisa

Year of Release:  1986
Director:  Neil Jordan
Screenplay:  Neil Jordan and David Leland
Starring:  Bob Hoskins, Cathy Tyson, Michael Caine, Robbie Coltrane, Clarke Peters, Kate Hardie
Running Time:  104 minutes
Genre:  Drama, thriller

George (Hoskins) is a small-time London gangster who is released after seven years in prison and is given a job a driver and bodyguard to call girl Simone (Tyson).  The two take an instant dislike to each other but their mutual animosity warms into a tentative friendship and George begins to fall in love with her.  On Simone's behalf, he embarks on a dangerous odyssey through London's sleaziest clubs and vice dens to rescue a young girl.

Irish director Neil Jordan is probably best known for such films as The Crying Game (1992) and Interview with a Vampire (1994).  In this stylish British gangland thriller, which plays a little like a London take on Taxi Driver (1976), Jordan moves from gritty realism to almost surrealism.  Bob Hoskins was Oscar nominated for his portrayal of the conflicted and strangely naïve hoodlum, who moves between a kind of gruff compassion to bursts of savage violence, he always seems like a powderkeg that can detonate at any moment.  Cathy Tyson is impressive as the enigmatic Simone.  Michael Caine appears as Denny Mortwell, George's suave, sleazy boss, a wealthy pornographer, pimp, procurer and blackmailer, and comedian and actor Robbie Coltrane provides one of the film's few glimpses of warmth and humanity as Thomas, George's eccentric but kind-hearted mechanic friend.  While this plays essentially as an above average British gangster thriller, it has a style and offbeat humour that really elevates it.  It is definitely worth watching, but be warned it goes into some very disturbing territory and gets really dark at times. 

Cathy Tyson and Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa     

Day for Night

Year of Release:  1973
Director:  François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean-Louis Richard
Starring:  Jacqueline Bisset, Valentina Cortese, Dani, Alexandra Stewart, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jean Champion, Jean-Pierre Léaud, François Truffaut
Running Time:  116 minutes
Genre:  Comedy, drama

In the balmy South of France, a film crew are working on a trashy, romantic melodrama called Meet Pamela.  As the cast and crew negotiate romantic entanglements, various personal and professional crisis, the dedicated but increasingly harried director (Truffaut) is just determined to get the film finished.

François Truffaut was one of the cinema's great directors, and this is one of his finest, and most purely joyful films, a celebration of film and film-making.  The film features Truffaut's regular alter-ego Jean-Pierre Léaud as the sulky, neurotic leading man who has an affair with brittle, British star Jacqueline Bisset, while Valentina Cortese plays a formidable Italian diva, who has a past relationship with the ageing Lothario Jean-Pierre Aumont cast opposite her, and Truffaut himself plays Meet Pamela's put-upon director.  The celebrated author Graham Greene has a cameo as an insurance agent, credited as "Harry Graham". Everyone seems to be having a great time in their roles, and the film, which opens with a dedication to Lillian and Dorthy Gish, two great stars of the silent screen, is full of references to films and filmmakers.  The story focuses just as much attention on the nuts and bolts of making a film, as it does on the interweaving stories of the actors and crew.  The film-makers have to deal with lack of time and money, journalists, investors, costumes, sets, even a seemingly simple shot of a cat drinking from a saucer of milk takes forever to put on film, and the film's most expensive and elaborate scene is destroyed due to an accident in the development lab.  The film is at times, surprisingly dark and has moments of real emotion, but the mood, predominantly, is one of joyful celebration, and crucially is very funny.

François Truffaut and Jacqueline Bisset in Day for Night

Man on the Moon

Year of Release:  1999
Director:  Milos Forman
Screenplay:  Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski
Starring:  Jim Carrey, Danny DeVito, Courtney Love, Paul Giamatti
Running Time:  119 minutes
Genre:  Biography, comedy, drama

This film tells the story of American entertainer Andy Kaufman (Carrey).  His bizarre performances fail at nightclubs, where the audiences want traditional comedy, but intrigue Hollywood agent George Shapiro (DeVito).  Despite his disdain for sitcoms, Kaufman rises to fame as Latka in the popular comedy show Taxi (1978-1983), which leads to appearances on Saturday Night Live, Late Night with David Letterman and others.  However Kaufman's live set, which is more performance art than comedy, as well as his taste for bizarre elaborate practical jokes and pranks, including appearances as his alter ego, the obnoxiously rude and untalented lounge singer Tony Clifton, and wrestling women in the guise of a professional wrestling villain, offend and alienate his audience and co-workers.

Outside of the sitcom Taxi Andy Kaufman never achieved mainstream acceptance, but he became kind of a cult figure, inspiring the REM song from which this film takes it's title.  He is portrayed here as a talented, if unconventional performer, who there was never really a niche for, and probably still isn't.  Carrey turns in a superb performance as Kaufman, and has great support form Danny DeVito as his loyal but frustrated manager (DeVito starred alongside the real Kaufman in Taxi), ass well as Courtney Love who is underused as Kaufman's long-suffering partner Lynne Margulies, and Paul Giamatti plays Kaufman's sidekick Bob Zmuda.  The cast from Taxi also make cameo appearances as themselves.  The film is stylishly made, starting with Carrey as Kaufman interrupting the film's opening credits to tell the audience the film is already over and they should go home.  It never really gets under the skin of Kaufman and, if you want to find out what made the man tick you won't learn it here.  In fact after the film, it's unclear how much of Kaufman was real and how much was just an elaborate put on.  Which probably would have pleased him no end.
A documentary about the film's deeply strange production was released on Netflix in 2017 called Jim & Andy:  The Great Beyond.        

Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon

Heavy Metal

Year of Release:  1981
Director:  Gerald Potterton
Screenplay:  Daniel Goldberg and Len Blum, based on stories and artwork by Richard Corben, Angus McKie, Dan O'Bannon, Thomas Warkentin and Bernie Wrightson
Starring: John Candy, Jackie Burroughs, Eugene Levy, Harold Ramis, Richard Romanus, Alice Playten, Susan Roman, Percy Rodriguez
Running Time:  90 minutes
Genre:  Science-fiction, fantasy, horror, animation

This Canadian adult animated anthology film adapts several stories from the comic book Heavy Metal.  A young girl is terrorised by "the sum of all evils", a glowing green orb called the Loc-Nar (Rodriguez) which shows her several stories to illustrate how it has spread chaos and destruction throughout time and space:  In the nightmarish New York City of 2031, cynical taxi driver Harry Canyon (Romanus) tires to save a woman from hired killers; A nerdy teenage boy (Candy) is transported through time and space to a bizarre fantasy world where he is transformed into a bald, musclebound warrior; On a space station a witness in the trial of a criminal space captain transforms into a giant rampaging monster; In the Second World War, a badly damaged B-17 bomber heads home after sustaining heavy casualties, but, under the Loc-Nar's influence, the dead come back as zombies;   A woman (Playten), abducted by aliens, forms a relationship with a robot; A silent warrior woman avenges a brutal attack on a peaceful city.

Since it's release, this has become quite a major cult movie, although it really has not aged well.  Loaded with sex and violence, it's very juvenile and, to put it mildly, it is problematic.  Loaded with gratuitous nudity, women are almost always depicted as sex objects, and in  a couple of places sexual assault is played off as a joke.  It feels like a missed opportunity to bring adult animation and more edgy fantasy into the mainstream, but feels like a compendium of all the things that the genre is criticised for.  On the plus side some of the animation is very good, each story had it's own animation team and so each has it's own distinctive feel, and some of the imagery is really startling, so it never really gets dull. As you would expect from a film called Heavy Metal the soundtrack is packed with heavy metal and hard rock songs, which now just feels kind of quaint.  Coming across at times like the cover of a seventies rock album or fantasy paperback cover come to life, this can be enjoyed as mindless, noisy, late-night fun, but it lacks any charm, and there's a nasty quality to it that leaves a bad taste. 

An alien arrival in Heavy Metal

Sleepers

Year of Release: 1996
Director:  Barry Levinson
Screenplay:  Barry Levinson, based on the book Sleepers by Lorenzo Carcaterra
Starring:  Kevin Bacon, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Bruno Kirby, Jason Patric, Brad Pitt, Brad Renfro, Minnie Driver
Running Time:  147 minutes
Genre:  Crime drama

In the summer of 1967 four boys growing up in the tough Hell's Kitchen neigbourhood of New York City, accidentally injure a pedestrian in a thoughtless prank.  They are sentenced to do time at the Wilkinson Home for Boys, a brutal reform school where they are regularly abused by sadistic guards.  By 1981 the four friends, all affected in different ways by their experiences at Wilkinson, have drifted apart until they are reunited by a violent act of revenge.

This stylish crime drama is based on a controversial bestseller by Lorenzo Carcaterra, which he insists is autobiographical, although there are disclaimers at the end of the film denying the events ever took place.  This is an entertaining, if unwieldy film, which is almost like three in one.  The opening scenes of the film depict the boys (played by Joe Perrino, Brad Renfro, Geoffrey Wigdor and Jonathan Tucker) growing up in Hell's Kitchen, under the watchful eyes of suave local crime boss King Benny (Vittorio Gassman) and tough but kindly Catholic priest Father Bobby (Robert De Niro), and is kind of a coming of age street movie, kind of a cross between Mean Streets (1973), which also starred De Niro, and Stand By Me (1986), with shades of the De Niro directed A Bronx Tale (1993).  The second, and by far the most disturbing passage, which depicts the boys' abuse at the hands of the sadistic guards (headed by Kevin Bacon) feels like a mix of Scum (1979) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994).  In the third and longest section, the film turns into a legal drama, with the boys bow adults (played by Jason Patric, Brad Pitt, Billy Crudup and Ron Eldard).  It's a stylishly made film with the opening section having a bright sun-dappled "summer of innocence" look, and the second section has  bleak, wintery look, with muted colours.  The abuse that the boys suffer is depicted an almost impressionistic way, while it is obvious what is happening, none of it is really shown.  The film's tonal changes are sometimes jarring, but it is an entertaining and involving film, with a fantastic cast, although Brad Pitt fans may be disappointed that he doesn't appear until about an hour into the film. 

Jason Patric and Robert De Niro in Sleepers

The Invention of Lying

Year of Release:  2009
Directors:  Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson
Screenplay:  Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson
Starring:  Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Louis C.K., Rob Lowe, Tina Fey
Running Time:  100 minutes
Genre:  Comedy, fantasy

This film is set in an alternate world in which the human race has not developed the ability to lie.  In this world everyone says exactly what they think all the time.  The story focuses on Mark Bellison (Gervais) an unsuccessful screenwriter who is constantly unlucky in love (in this world there is no concept of fiction so all films are basically documentaries consisting of dry readings about historical events).  After an unsuccessful date with the beautiful and successful Annie (Garner), later being fired from his job and threatened with eviction from his home, Mark manages to tell the world's first lie.  In a world where the whole concept of deceit or falsehood is completely alien, Mark finds that his new ability comes with some unexpected consequences.

This is a frequently funny romantic comedy with a fantasy edge, which allows Gervais to once more play the schlubby loser character that he does so well.  As with the Jim Carrey comedy Liar Liar (1997) this deals with the fact that lying is sometimes essential, if only to maintain the social niceties.  if we just went around saying everything that came to mind all the time with no filter, the consequences would be disastrous.  It does have a surprisingly subversive edge, though, particularly in regard to religion, and there are moments of real emotion where Gervais demonstrates how good an actor he can be.  The rest of the cast are all talented comedy performaers and keep the laughs flowing solidly, there are also plenty of entertaining cameos from the likes of Edward Norton, Jason Bateman, Philip Seymour Hoffman and regular Gervais collaborators Stephen Merchant and Shaun Williamson.

Jennifer Garner and Ricky Gervais in The Invention of Lying