Film Reviews by Steve

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. 

The debut feature as director by playwright Kenneth Lonergan focuses on the special bond between a brother and sister. Their relationship is forged in the aftermath of the death of their parents, then is stretched by the brother's long absence, until he drifts home unexpectedly, broke and without direction.

What we get is a magical synthesis of character and actor. The script and the lead performances are outstanding.  Mark Ruffalo is the introverted, seemingly rootless loner; Laura Linney is a single mother who had to grow up fast to care for her now ten year old son (Rory Culkin), raised without his father.

 The subplot about a Linney's predatory boss (Matthew Broderick) is less successful. It's the brother and sister we care about. The literary script is so powerful because so little is spoken, and so much is insinuated. We gradually experience the tenacity of their bond. There are no scenes where love is tearfully declared.

In fact the best line in the film, the last line, which squeezes the blood out of my heart, is a way of avoiding saying how much they mean to each other. It miraculously avoids sentimentality while being a quietly emotionally overwhelming. This is one of the very best films of the current century.

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.

Fritz Lang's best American film and the pick of '50s noirs about organised crime. Glenn Ford plays an honest sergeant in homicide who is constantly frustrated by the mafia boss who owns the police and politicians. The detective gets warned off by his chief but after his wife is killed by an explosive.... the suspended cop goes solo.

Lee Marvin is splendidly repellant as the degenerate lunk who is strongarm for the mob. Ford enrols the help of his sexy, permmissive moll (Gloria Grahame) who wants revenge for the heavy throwing scalding coffee in her face. One of the most famous scenes in noir, and it still hits hard.

Ford is outstanding. But he is eclipsed by Gloria's sensational portrayal of the mercenary good-time girl who falls for the cop's burning obsession with revenge. She is so hot! It's a hypnotic performance and the centrepiece of GG's enduring cult appeal. 

 Almost everyone in this film is corrupt, but there are moving passages when some damaged working stiff sticks their neck out for the greater good. It's a landmark noir, because of the violence, the vigilante hero and its depiction of semi-legitimate crime. It scored Lang a big mainstream hit- which tones down his usual expressionism.

This started out in 1943 as a World War II army training film called The New Lot which was mostly shelved for not waving the flag hard enough. The script was reworked the following year by Peter Ustinov and the prolific Eric Ambler, performed by many of the same actors and transformed by Carol Reed into one of the great platoon films.

It fits into a sub-genre of the war film; which focuses on the transformation of a group of civilians into an effective combat unit which is then sent into combat.  It's a popular formula, but- for me- this is the best.  This is partly because of the talent on board, but also because the war was still on, and the outcome was uncertain.

The British combat films of the fifties never quite recaptured the authenticity, the sense of jeopardy and the habit of sacrifice of those made in the war years. The actors in this platoon were led by David Niven who had been a soldier, rejoined in 1939 and crossed the Channel on D Day.

Credit also to William Hartnall as the tough Sergeant with a heart. It is an understated and droll documentary style drama about the response of a diverse group of men to their conscription and training, with little fuss and no patriotic rhetoric. Apparently it was still used for army training around the world up to 40 years later.

When I first saw Val Guest's sci-fi classic, it was the witty script (Wolf Mankowitz) and the energetic thrust of the blokish Fleet Street backchat that made it so strong. Plus the contemporary doomsday payoff as the cold war powers' nuclear escalation leans into the apocalypse.

But now, it is the astonishing foresight- a coincidence I suppose- of its theme of global warming meltdown, as mankind looks to scientific solutions for political failures. Which today makes it a genre landmark, and incredibly prophetic.

It focuses on a daily newspaper (based on the Express) as it covers the last few days of life on earth in a dystopian London, and in particular on Edward Judd's recovering alcoholic and recently divorced hotshot reporter. Maybe the crisis is a metaphor for his unbalanced, ruined psyche?

Judd and Janet Monro, as the last meteorologist standing, are properly sexy and share an abundance of screen chemistry. The locations and visual atmospherics of an unravelling, burned out world are magnificent, including the tinted widescreen sunrise at the start of the film. It's probably the best ever British sci-fi. But it's much more than that. 

This is an unlikely buddy movie about the relationship between Edward D. Wood (Johnny Depp), the legendary director of bad films responsible for Plan 9 From Outer Space, and a heroin ruined Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) going through the final indignities of a career that peaked many years earlier.

It's an inspired idea, which is skilfully realised through an impressively imaginative script. The two leads are one of the screen's most endearing odd-couples; a pair of deadbeats who we are encouraged to reappraise for their love of cinema, and for their endurance.

The stars are sensational. And the support cast playing an entended coterie of exotic outsiders and weirdoes is outstanding. Bill Murray's charlatan clairvoyant is a standout. The recreation of the period is gorgeous, the black and white photography is lustrous. There is a lot of love here.

This is a phenomenally optimistic feelgood film which manages to largely avoid sentimentality while delivering a fascinating, vicarious experience of life on the peripheries of Hollywood in '50s poverty row pictures. Maybe a love of B films will enhance the experience.

Alberto Cavalcanti was a Brazilian who worked in the UK from the '30s, initially in the GPO documentary film unit. While this is propaganda, realism is key. It is presented by the church warden (Mervyn Johns) as if relating an actual news story, of the vanguard to a German invasion repelled by a local community in a picture perfect image of English village life. 

It was adapted from a story by Graham Greene as a vehicle for public information, to encourage watchfulness. It's an exciting and suspenseful tale with the typical dry humour and mustn't grumble make-do typical of the war films made from 39-45. But what is most special, is how intensely it is communicated.

This is the work of a nation for whom the prospect of invasion was a recent reality and still a possibility. And that feeling of jeopardy is palpable. There are three incidents which best convey that sense of threat:

When Muriel George reflects on being unable to have children, before brutally killing a Nazi soldier, knowing she will then die; when Patricia Hayes breaks down with fear before summoning the strength to carry on; and when Marie Lohr pockets a grenade to save a room of children. They are all familiar purveyors of minor roles. But here they are shattering.

John Huston's faithful adaptation of the WR Burnett novel is the common ancestor of all heist films. It wrote the rules of the genre and invented the three act structure of the caper story: the development of a plan and assembly of a gang; the enaction of the actual robbery; and a conclusion where it all falls apart due to the tragic flaws of both the logistics and the protagonists.

Sam Jaffe (Doc) works up an idea for a jewel raid worth a million dollars and interviews for a safecracker, a heavy (Sterling Hayden as Dix) and a getaway driver. He seeks finance from a lawyer (Louis Calhern) who is financially ruined and intends to steal the haul himself. Great to see a very young Marilyn Monroe as his sleepy-eyed, gold digging moll.

The heist mimics a legitimate business. As the crooked lawyer says, 'crime is just a left handed form of human endeavour'. Dix is a dumb, monosyllabic stick up man but the only one with any values (though rugged), a sense of duty (though distorted) and any loyalty at all. Jean Hagen plays his moll, the sort of bad luck dame who is always crying her fake eyelashes down a river of mascara.

Dix dreams of being back on the farm in Kentucky. But it's futile. As Doc says, 'we all work for our vice', and it's this that destroys each man. For Dix it is the horses. Doc is undone by his sexual fetish. It's a landmark film, full of imaginative flourishes and convincing jargon. It is a work of realism, but the pessimistic fatalism is ultra noir.