Tenet

Year of Release:  2020
Director:  Christopher Nolan
Screenplay:  Christopher Nolan
Starring:  John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh
Running Time:  150 minutes
Genre:  Thriller, science-fiction, spy

The Protagonist (Washington) is a secret agent who finds himself embroiled in a bizarre adventure involving weapons that are "chronologically inverted" meaning that they move backwards in time, and the effect comes before the cause.  These weapons have the potential to destroy the world due to entropy.

This film has had a difficult road to the screen, despite being one of 2020's most anticipated films, having been delayed three times due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Is it worth the wait?  Yes and no.  Tenet is almost textbook Nolan, for better and worse.  It features some incredible action set pieces, and much of it is really exciting, it also has some great performances, with John David Washington, in particular, impressive as the suave super-spy.  However the plot is extremely confusing and it is often hard to follow.  You really need to keep your wits about you the entire time, there is not much humour, and the dialogue is full of complex exposition.  It also has an air of coldness and detachment about the whole thing, which makes it hard to engage with the characters.  It is still worth seeing, though,  because when it is good, it is very very good, and there are times when it is an extremely exciting, complex thriller.

Robert Pattinson and John David Washington in Tenet 

Quills

Year of Release:  2000
Director:  Philip Kaufman
Screenplay:  Doug Wright, based on the play Quills by Doug Wright
Starring:  Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix, Michael Caine
Running Time:  119 minutes
Genre:  Period drama

Several years after the French Revolution, the notorious Marquis de Sade (Rush) is locked up in the Charenton asylum, run by the kindly Abbé de Coulmier (Phoenix), who encourages the Marquis' writing, because he believes it to be therapeutic.  However, unbeknownst to the Abbé, the Marquis is smuggling his manuscripts to a publisher, with the help of laundry maid Madeline (Winslet).  The Marquis' violently pornographic books cause a sensation throughout France, much to the displeasure of the Emperor Napoleon (Ron Cook), who orders all copies of the Marquis' works to be burned, and assigns the uncompromising Dr. Royer-Collard (Caine) to take over at Charenton and silence the Marquis by any means necessary.

This film may be very historically inaccurate, but it is a hugely entertaining, extremely dark tale, with deliciously sharp dialogue, laced with bitter humour.  It deals with creation, mental illness, censorship, hypocrisy, and control.  Despite his monstrous acts, which are discussed if not depicted, the Marquis de Sade, archly played by Geoffrey Rush, is portrayed as an anti-hero, a crusader for free speech.  Many people find his incendiary works liberating, particularly Royer-Collard's abused young wife, Simone (Amelia Warner), while for others they trigger horribly violent acts.  The cast all give good performances, and the film has a wonderfully gothic, gloomy atmosphere.

 Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade in Quills

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     

The Ipcress File

Year of Release:  1965
Director:  Sidney J. Furie
Screenplay:  Bill Canaway and James Doran, based on the novel The IPCRESS File by Len Deighton
Starring:  Michael Caine, Nigel Green, Guy Doleman, Sue Lloyd
Running Time:  109 minutes
Genre:  Thriller

London, 1965:  Secret agent Harry Palmer (Caine) is assigned to a section investigating a rash of bizarre resignations and disappearances of top scientists.  He soon finds himself embroiled in a murky world of espionage, betrayal and a sinister brainwashing plot.

The Ipcress File was intended to be a more downbeat and realistic alternative to the James Bind franchise and uses several crew members from the Bond films, including producer Harry Saltzman, composer John Barry and production designer Ken Adam.  While James Bond was a suave, sophisticated, public school educated, playboy, Harry Palmer is a cynical, bespectacled, working class Londoner, who lives in a bedsit, enjoys cooking and classical music and has a criminal background.  The film eschews the glamorous locations for deliberately drab London locations, and lacks the gadgets, set pieces and sex appeal, although Palmer does have a romance with fellow spy Jean Courtney (Lloyd).  It depicts the world of spying as basically mired in bureaucracy, with endless red tape, inter-departmental squabbling and office politics, which Bond would never put up with.  It is still an entertaining movie, stylishly directed by Furie, who makes good use of unconventional framing and tilted camera angles, invoking a disorientating, skewed world.  While Palmer is a more vulnerable lead then Bond, he is still handy with his fists and a gun.  Michael Caine became something of a sixties icon with this, his first lead role.  In Len Deighton's 1962 source novel, and it's sequels, the lead character (Harry Palmer in the film) is never given a name.  Like Harry Palmer in the film, Deighton was an accomplished cook and clippings of cookery articles written by him decorate Palmer's apartment, and in a scene where Palmer prepares a meal, the hands seen in close-up are actually Deighton's.     

Michael Caine is Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File

Hannah and Her Sisters

Year of Release:  1986
Director:  Woody Allen
Screenplay:  Woody Allen
Starring:  Mia Farrow, Michael Caine, Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest, Woody Allen, Max von Sydow, Carrie Fisher
Running Time:  103 minutes
Genre: Comedy drama

This film concerns the lives of three sisters over the course of two years.  Hannah (Farrow), is kind, loving, strong and stable, her husband Elliot (Caine), while he loves Hannah, is infatuated with her sister Lee (Hershey), who is living with mercurial artist Frederick (Sydow).  Meanwhile, the third sister, Holly (Wiest), a former cocaine addict, struggles to achieve her dream of becoming an actor while managing a catering company with her friend and rival, April (Fisher).  Also Hannah's ex-husband Mickey (Allen), a hypochondriac television producer experiences an existential crisis when he becomes convinced he has a brain tumor.

This is possibly one of Woody Allen's finest films, managing the very tricky art of successfully balancing both comedy and drama.  It manages to be tender and sentimental without being saccharine, profound without being pretentious, warm without being cloying and, where necessary, being biting without being cruel.  Allen manages to get good performances out of his large cast, and seems to have genuine affection for all of his characters.  If you are familiar with Woody Allen movies, than you'll know the kind of humor on display here, mostly wry, neurotic, intellectual wisecracks.  Of course, these days Woody Allen is problematic to say the least, and also this is a film almost entirely about very wealthy white people, in Allen's New York, people of colour are barely glimpsed.  Although this is a very affecting film about sisterhood, love, ambition and just trying to find a meaning to life.

Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest are Hannah and Her Sisters