Spider-Man: No Way Home

Year of Release: 2021

Director:  Jon Watts

Screenplay:  Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, based on Spider-Man created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko

Starring:  Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Jon Favreau, Jamie Foxx, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Benedict Wong, Tony Revelori, Marisa Tomei, Andrew Garfield, Tobey Maguire,

Running Time:  148 minutes

Genre:  Super-hero, action, science-fiction

Following the public unmasking of Peter Parker (Holland) as masked vigilante Spider-Man, his life, and the lives of Peter's girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and best friend Ned (Battalion) have been made a misery.  Unable to escape the unceasing attention and endless controversy, Peter approaches powerful mystic Doctor Strange (Cumberbatch) to cast a spell to make the world forget that he is Spider-Man.  However, Peter's interference with the spell causes it to go wrong, bringing in supervillains from other dimensions to  Peter's universe.  

This is a sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) and is the 27th instalment in the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).  This also brings in characters from other non-MCU Spider-Man films such as Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004), Spider-Man 3 (2007), The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014).  There is also an appearance from Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock from the Netflix Daredevil series (2015-2018).  This is one of the better MCU films, with humour and genuine emotion, towards the end there were several audible sobs at the screening I attended.  The action is spectacular, with a particularly impressive set-piece set in the surreal Mirror Dimension.  If you are not familiar with the MCU in general or the Spider-Man films in particular, this is not a very good place to start, and may be quite alienating for newcomers.  However, it is fun to see the old familiar faces, and they generally work well, even if there are too many adversaries for the film's good.  Crucially the film has some real emotion.  Peter Parker deals with some devastating losses, and there is some real weight in his scenes with MJ (of course Tom Holland and Zendaya are in a relationship in real life).  Peter is in many ways defined by his non-super powered support network, MJ, best friend Ned and his Aunt May (Tomei) who frequently act as his conscience and reminder that, in the immortal phrase, "with great power there must also be great responsibility." As always with MCU films there are additional scenes in the end credits.

Tom Holland in Spider-Man: No Way Home 

Salem's Lot

 Year of Release:  1979

Director:  Tobe Hooper

Screenplay:  Paul Monash, based on the novel 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King

Starring:  David Soul, James Mason, Lance Kerwin, Bonnie Bedelia, Lew Ayres

Running Time:  183 minutes

Genre:  Horror

Writer Ben Mears (Soul) returns to his childhood home of Salem's Lot, a small town in Maine, where he hopes to write a book about the nature of evil, inspired by the sinister Marsten House, the local "haunted house".  However, Ben is not the only newcomer to Salem's Lot.  Debonair antiques dealer Mr. Straker (Mason) plans to open a shop with his mysterious partner Mr. Barlow (Reggie Nalder).  Before long the town is plagued by a mysterious disease and a spate of disappearances.  It quickly turns out that Barlow is a vampire who is feasting on the townspeople, who become vampires themselves.  Soon, it is up to Ben, horror-obsessed teen Mark (Kerwin) and Susan (Bedelia), daughter of the local doctor, to stand against a town of the undead.

Directed by Tobe Hooper, who made his name with the classic horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), this was originally shown as a two part miniseries on NBC TV in America, and it has been released subsequently as a 150 minute TV movie and a 114 minute theatrical movie which lops off over an hour of material and includes more gruesome alternate takes of certain scenes to increase the gore quotient.  The three hour version has a slow start, and is definitely too long, and has some obvious breaks for adverts.  It also pulls some of it's punches in deference of TV standards and practices.  However, sometimes it really works well. David Soul, best known for the TV show Starsky & Hutch (1975-1979), is pretty bland, but James Mason steals the show as the silkily sinister Straker.  The production is full of veterans, such as Lew Ayres and B-movie stalwart Elisha Cook and soon-to-be familiar faces such as Bonnie Bedelia, who is probably best known as Bruce Willis' estranged wife in Die Hard (1988) and would appear in Needful Things (1993), another Stephen King adaptation about a sinister antiques dealer in a small Maine town; Fred Willard who would go on to appear in This Is Spinal Tap (1983) and the Anchorman films; and Kenneth McMillan who would appear as the grotesque Baron Harkonnen in the David Lynch film Dune (1984).  The novel is a solid slice of early Stephen King, and the film follows it fairly closely.  The main difference is that Barlow in the novel is a suave Count Dracula style vampire, but here he is a grotesque, silent monster, inspired by Nosferatu (1921) with blue-white skin, bat-like ears and rodent-like teeth, with shining yellow eyes.  It is pretty slow to begin with, opening like a kind of off-beat soap opera, but if you stick with it, the second half is genuinely creepy,  The floating vampire children, with their shining silver eyes, scratching and tapping at windows, begging to be let in, are memorably eerie.  The decayed interior of the Marsten House is creepy, and Barlow's sudden appearances are quite frightening, particularly when he appears as a small, crawling bundle on a kitchen floor, before rising up to unveil himself in front of a terrified family.  This has become something of a cult film in recent years, and while some may struggle with the length and slow pace, it is worthwhile sticking with it.

Ben Mears (Davis Soul) in Salem's Lot

Husbands

Year of Release:  1970

Director:  John Cassavetes

Screenplay:  John Cassavetes

Starring:  Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, John Cassavetes

Running Time:  140 minutes

Genre:  Comedy drama

Following the death of a mutual friend, three middle-aged New York family men: Harry (Gazzara), Archie (Falk) and Gus (Cassavetes) indulge in a days long binge of heavy drinking and soul-searching, including an impromptu trip to London.

John Cassavetes is possibly most familiar as an actor in Hollywood films such as The Dirty Dozen (1967), Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Fury (1978), but his most important legacy rests with the groundbreaking independent films he made as director, writer and sometime actor.  After making a name with his directorial debut Shadows (1959), Cassavetes had his first sizeable success with Faces (1968), which allowed hims some studio backing for Husbands.  While Cassavetes came up with the film's story and scenes, the dialogue and action came out of long improvisation sessions with his fellow actors, and Gazzara, Falk and Cassavetes' characters were more or less based on the actors themselves.  The basic plot of Husbands, three guys go out on a booze filled bender for days on end, could apply to any number of comedies, both good and bad, but few go as dark as this does.  This is a film defined by absence.  It starts with a series of still snapshots of a barbecue or pool party where Gus, Harry and Archie are clowning around with their families and their friend Stuart, whose funeral opens the main action of the film.  We never learn anything about Stuart, but it seems as if he was the lynchpin that kept the gang together.  The other three spend the film seeming unmoored, and despite being very similar, they don't seem to like each other very much.  Also, despite the film's title, we never see much of their family lives.  Harry's wife appears briefly and they have a violent argument, and we see Gus' children, played by Cassavetes' own children Nick and Alexandra, but we see nothing of Archie's family.  It is hard to sympathise entirely with this pretty unpleasant trio of middle-aged, middle-class white guys who are creepy, mocking, violent or rude to almost any woman unlucky enough to cross their path.  Following Stuart's funeral they ride the subway, have an impromptu late-night basketball game and get drunk and sing in a bar, when it comes time for them to go to work and spend some time with their families, the three shoot off to London to drink, go to casinos and pick up women (including Jenny Runacre).  This is a tough film to watch, and it's often very uneven.  It's sometimes profound, often dull, sometimes cruel and occasionally funny.  It all ends on a very inconclusive note.

Peter Falk, John Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara are Husbands

Career Girls

 Year of Release:  1997

Director:  Mike Leigh

Screenplay:  Mike Leigh

Starring:  Katrin Cartlidge, Lynda Steadman, Mark Benton, Kate Byers, Andy Serkis, Joe Tucker

Running Time:  83 minutes

Genre:  Comedy, drama

Two young women, Annie (Steadman) and Hannah (Cartlidge), reunite in London for the first time in six years, when they shared a flat as students.  As the two reconnect, memories of their former friendship resurface, both good and bad. 

Following the multi Oscar nominated Secrets & Lies (1996), British director Mike Leigh went for a much more low key approach with this small, funny and often touching comedy-drama.  It's a character study of two women and deals with how places and people change over the years.  As students, Annie is painfully shy and diffident, suffering from dermatitis on her cheek, while Hannah is loud, arrogant, confident and yet very brittle, masking her feelings with odd affectations and games (such as frequently using her treasured copy of Withering Heights as a divination tool).  Six years on, Annie seems a lot happier, her skin has cleared up, and while still shy, she has a lot more confidence.  Hannah has a good job in a stationary supply company, she is still confident and cutting, but kinder and more at ease.  Not much really happens in the film.  Annie is visiting Hannah for the weekend, and goes around to view flats with her to keep her company.  In the funniest sequence in the film, Hannah trades a succession of barbed one-liners with a sleazy yuppie (played by Andy Serkis) who is trying to sell his flat, but soon seems more interested in Hannah and Annie than property.  Over the course of the weekend they encounter a succession of old friends and boyfriends, perhaps most tragically the stuttering, socially awkward Ricky (Mark Benton) who was a flatmate of theirs in college but ran out when Annie didn't reciprocate his romantic feelings.  Mike Leigh's style involves starting off with only a very vague idea of a plot, and allowing the actors to shape and develop the story along with their characters over long periods of rehearsal, so with the right actors his films are often very perceptive in regards to character, but his technique does not really make for particularly strong narrative.    Katrin Cartlidge (who previously worked with Leigh on Naked (1993)) and Lynda Steadman are both excellent, and they get good support from the rest of the cast.  There is a bit too much coincidence in that they keep happening upon so may old friends over one weekend in a place the size of London, which Hannah does comment on a couple of times, and Hannah especially is pretty unpleasant in her student scenes, but the film is about growth and change and they do win you over.  This is a film where the characters feel like they have a existence outside the film, and by the the film's gently optimistic conclusion, you are left wondering where Annie and Hannah found themselves in another six years.

Annie (Lynda Steadman) and Hannah (Katrin Cartridge) in Career Girls

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Year of Release:  1964

Director:  Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay:  Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George, based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George

Starring:  Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, Tracy Reed

Running Time:  94 minutes

Genre:  Comedy

Paranoid United States Air Force General Jack D. Ripper (Hayden) launches a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.  As British RAF Group Captain Mandrake (Sellers) desperately tries to bring Ripper to his senses, President Merkin Muffley (Sellers, again) meets his generals in the War Room of the Pentagon, as they try to stop the attack before it's too late.  However, it becomes apparent that the Soviet Union have their own last gamble in the form of a Doomsday machine, which will be triggered automatically in the event of an attack resulting in the death of all life on the surface of the world, and the dawn of the age of the insane Dr. Strangelove (Sellers).

This pitch black comedy is a hilarious and terrifying satire on Cold War politics and the principles of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).  The film was based on the novel Red Alert (also called Two Hours to Doom) by Welsh author Peter George.  The book, which I haven't read, was a straight Cold War thriller, and Kubrick originally planned a straightforward adaptation, but as he was planning the film he found the whole idea of nuclear war too ludicrous to be dealt with other than as black comedy, and so brought in cult satirical writer Terry Southern to work on the film as a satire.  This would have been a brave film to be released in January 1964, only a couple of years after the Cuban Missile Crisis and only a couple of months after the assassination of President John F Kennedy, when the Cold War was looking like it might become pretty hot.  Politicians are represented by Peter Sellers in one of three roles he plays here as the ineffectual President Muffley; with the exception of Sellers' posh group Captain Mandrake who doesn't allow the threat of nuclear annihilation to dent his stiff upper lip, the military are represented as largely insane or incompetent; and the scientific community is represented by the insane wheelchair-bound Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove, Sellers' third role, who has to keep constantly wrestling with his right arm to stop it from snapping into a Nazi salute, and for whom the thought of nuclear armageddon sends him into ecstasy.  Celebrated British comedian Peter Sellers, who previously worked with Kubrick on Lolita (1962), is brilliant in his three roles.  George C. Scott plays the deranged hawkish General Buck Turgidson all flailing limbs and bulging eyes.  Sterling Hayden in genuinely disturbing as the paranoid Jack D. Ripper, who starts the whole thing because he is convinced there is an international Communist plot to "impurify our precious bodily fluids".  Slim Pickens plays the dedicated bomber commender who will let nothing stop him from carrying out his orders and, in arguably the film's most famous scene, rides a nuclear bomb, whooping all the way.  Keenan Wynn plays Colonel Bat Guano who arrests Mandrake for being a suspected (as he puts it) "prevert".  When Mandrake needs to go into a telephone booth to make a crucial telephone call Guano orders "don't try any 'preversions' in there or I'll blow your head off," and when Mandrake is short 20 cents for this vital phone call to the President, Guano reluctantly shoots up a vending machine to get some change telling Mandrake "you better get a hold of the President, or you'll answer to the Coca Cola Company."  One aspect of the film that has not aged well, is that there is only one female character in the film, Tracy Reed as "Miss Foreign Affairs", Turgidson's bikini-clad, centrefold mistress, and the only person of colour is James Earl Jones, as one of the bomber crew.   Moving from the besieged Air Force base, to the cavernous, shadowy War Room, lit by a circle of lights and vast, illuminated maps, and the cramped interior of the bomber, the film intercuts between three plot lines, each of which has a very different tone and feel

However, while the film is very much a product of the early 1960s, the pendulum does seem to be swinging more towards a Strangelove world.  It works as a thriller, a savage satire and it is also one of the funniest films ever made, with endlessly quotable lines "Gentlemen, please!  You can't fight in here.  This is the War Room!", and hilarious set pieces, one of the funniest being the President's call with the Soviet Premier ("One of our base commanders, uh, he had a little funny turn... He went a little funny in the head... And he went and did a silly thing... Well, I'll tell you what he did, he ordered his planes to attack your county... Well, listen, how do you think I feel about it?"). This is one of the best films of the Cold War era, and one of Stanley Kubrick's best films.

Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove

The Manchurian Candidate

Year of Release: 1962

Director:  John Frankenheimer

Screenplay:  George Axelrod, based on the novel The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon

Starring:  Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury, Henry Silva, James Gregory

Running Time:  126 minutes

Genre:  Thriller

Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Harvey) returns from the Korean War with the Medal of Honor and finds himself hailed as a hero, a position which his ruthless mother (Lansbury) and stepfather (Gregory), an ambitious politician, proceed to take full advantage of.  However Shaw and other members of his former platoon, including Captain Bennett Marco (Sinatra), suffer the same recurring nightmare.  Marco becomes convinced that something happened to them in Korea, and his investigation proceeds to uncover a disturbing conspiracy.

This is one of the classic Cold War thrillers.  Despite being made 60 years ago, and being very much a product of it's time, this still feels relevant today, with the central premise of a hostile power influencing democracy is disturbingly prescient, particularly when the chosen candidate is a populist rightwing fool.  Laurence Harvey turns in a great performance as the tormented, brainwashed Raymond Shaw, and Frank Sinatra, who really was a great actor, is fantastic as the haunted Captain Marco.  Janet Leigh doesn't really have anything to do, in her few scenes as Sinatra's love interest, but Angela Lansbury turns in a terrifying performance as the utterly ruthless Eleanor Iselin, who will do anything to gain political power, and seems to have a very unhealthy relationship with her son (which apparently was toned down from the book).  Directed by John Frankenheimer, the film uses skewed camera angles, reflective of Shaw's distorted frame of mind.  The brainwashing itself is played out in almost surrealistic dream sequences. While it drags in places, this still holds up as a disturbing, paranoid thriller, and for a big studio film from 1962, it does get quite surprisingly dark.  The film was remade in 2004, directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Denzel Washington.      

Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian candidate

The Woman in Black: Angel of Death

Year of Release:  2014

Director:  Tom Harper

Screenplay:  Jon Croker, from a story by Susan Hill

Starring:  Phoebe Fox, Jeremy Irvine, Helen McCrory, Adrian Rawlins, Leanne Best, Ned Dennehy, Oaklee Pendergast

Running Time:  98 minutes

Genre:  Horror

England, 1941: The second year of the Second World War and London suffers under the Blitz, a heavy bombing campaign carried out by German planes.  Teachers Eve Parkins (Fox) and Jean Hogg (McCrory) evacuate a number of children from the city to the relative safety of the country.  They are billeted in the large decaying mansion known as Eel Marsh House, in the middle of a vast, desolate stretch of marshlands.  However, Eel Marsh House is haunted by the malevolent, ghostly "Woman in Black" (Best) who begins targeting the children, particularly the silent, traumatised Edward (Pendergast).

This is the sequel to the 2012 film The Woman in Black, but it has no connection to it's predecessor at all, aside from the titular Woman in Black and the setting of Eel Marsh House, in fact this film is set 40 years after the first.  However Susan Hill, the author of the original 1983 novel The Woman in Black, did work on the story for this sequel.  This is atmospheric enough but it's not really particularly scary at all.  There are a few effective jump scares, but there is nothing here that fans of ghost stories have not seen many times before. The performances are good, particularly from Phoebe Fox as the troubled teacher and Helen McCrory as the stern headteacher.  Jeremy Irvine has charisma as the dashing pilot, with, of course, a troubled past, who romances Eve.  Eel Marsh House is satisfactorily creepy and dismal, and the acres of flat misty marshland make for a bleak, gloomy location which works for the material, and, as so often happens in these films, all the colours look as if they have been washed out.  The Woman in Black herself doesn't really appear that much, but makes herself known in a few effective scenes.  It's not really a very bad film, it's just very predictable, unoriginal and really not very frightening.  Although it is very bleak, and the fact that the Woman in Black targets young children might be upsetting for some viewers. 

She's behind you:  The Woman in Black (Leanne Best) approaches Eve (Phoebe Fox) in The Woman in Black: Angel of Death