Film Reviews by Steve

Olivier cut the great play down (it's still 150 minutes!), particularly the (edgy, paranoid) comedy and left us with a film about identity as we journey deeper into the prince's state of anxiety and insecurity. It is in deep focus black and white and set in an Elsinore of yawning shadows and expressionist perspectives. It's basically Shakespeare-noir. The film is all about Olivier, and though there is a fine cast, his performance mostly eclipses them. And though Larry was too old (at 41, his mother was played by Eileen Herlie who was 30) it's still a brilliant portrayal and the film is my choice for the best of the Bard on screen. And it won the best film Oscar, which I think still makes it the only wholly British produced film to do so.

Mike Leigh had seemed to have lost his alchemic ability to distil contemporary life in the mid noughties, and how timely he should return to form in 2008. The year the banker's crash triggered austerity. The period when social media began to amplify the splintering of England. It is from the frontiers of this divided nation that Leigh and his cast are reporting. The brilliant Sally Hawkins lives the personality of the title; but she is tough and combative as she needs to be given that experience will burn away your optimism like a match. The core of the film is the exposure of her dayglo, might-never-happen but sincere and conscientious primary school teacher to a trigger-unhappy, randomly prejudiced conspiracy-theorist driving instructor created by Leigh regular Eddie Marsen. Happy-Go-Lucky emotionally channels the anger, the passive aggressive anxiety which is the hum in the wires of the circuits of contemporary British life. Typically the film has divided its audience hugely! Here we are, twelve years on and it seems all the more prescient that Leigh made this when he did. 

So wretched were Roger Corman's early films (Viking Women, The Wasp Woman) that it's tempting to look at his this later horror classic and wonder if there is some other hand at play. Maybe Twilight Zone veteran Charles Beaumont who wrote the literate and philosophical script. Or Nicolas Roeg who filmed the rich colour palette of the six illustrative rooms. True, Corman's work had improved in the sixties, and his other Poe derived films were fine, but this is on another level. It is a medieval allegory (influenced by Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal according to Corman) about how unchecked power will have a tendency to end in atrocity, Vincent Price is perfect as Prospero, the aristocratic Satanist who machinates as the plague closes in on the domicile of his empire. Corman criticised his British crew for working too slowly. This was made in five weeks rather than his usual four! But they produced the the best film of his long career.

Arthouse parable on the interface between colonialism and indigenous culture. This is a brilliant blend of atmospheric strains, including the ambient silences, John Barry's spiritual orchestral score, the otherness of the South Australian outback locations and Roeg's own woozy, narcotic images. The whole film is carried by a seventeen year old Jenny Agutter, Aboriginal debutant David Gulpilil and the director's eight year old son, Luc Roeg and hardly anyone else is on screen. Roeg's work was philosophical and idiosyncratic and usually incorporated improvisation, broken time structures and unusual casting. They make for a strong deep vibration of eeriness. The whole is then balanced by two contrasting conclusions, both disquieting in their different ways.

Sumptuous art film, dense with wit and visual imagination. I'm not a big Fellini enthusiast, who this film repeatedly references, but that was no impediment to liking this film, one of my favourite of the century. An Italian state-of-the-nation film whose bitter world view works for anywhere in the west. Be sure to watch the beautiful, poignant closing credits.

Lengthy but gripping kidnapping drama is quite bleak for a mainstream American film. Well acted, particularly by Paul Dano in a support role. Slow to get moving but imaginative and empathetic once in its stride, while not giving up all of its secrets. Note: such a realistic recreation of child abduction has the power to be quite upsetting.

Caper film about a heist carried out by street magicians is exciting until, typical of illusion, it all falls apart when the trick is explained, upon which it becomes a frustratingly idiotic anticlimax. Maybe worthwhile for the ride, but be prepared to be hugely disappointed.

Handsome, touristic (set in Greece), leisurely psychological thriller is well acted and well set up, but suffers for lack of an interesting conclusion. Good for enthusiasts of Patricia Highsmith. Better watch the similar Plein Soleil with Alain Delon.

Shallow and rather voyeuristic indie from the point of view of a kidnapped mother and son is probably a sincere recreation, but has little to say, and fails to follow though on its ideas. Well acted by Brie Larson, who deserved a better script.

Starts off with a nostalgic recreation of seventies dystopian post nuclear event films, but Saoirse Ronan's alienated teen lead made it difficult to care.

Very long, poorly scripted, pointless revisionist western. I'm still angry. Maybe ok for lovers of gratuitous violence.

Utterly ridiculous, implausible melodrama somehow crosses Fame with Full Metal Jacket. Works a bit if you find some elements of allegory in what is at face value an unbelievable situation. Well made (hence three stars) but not actually worth making.

Maurice Ronet moves through a photogenic 60s Paris and its beautiful artists and philosophers in search of a reason to live. Effective use of the music of Erik Satie by Louis Malle, in a sort of suicide note to the enervated post war intellectual scene. A stylish, but inevitably downbeat experience. My pick as the director's best film.

James Franco, what have you done. You were in 127 Hours. You were great.... But this... Obviously a heavy amount of money was thrown at this piece of US religious right propaganda, in which a load of actors playing frat-jocks and nerds/etc get to meet their maker for having sinned. The stars rather smugly play themselves as stars, but that's the least of its problems. One day, will they have to answer for this?

All horror films ask you the same question. Is it right that I should be watching people reenact suffering and fear for my own entertainment? Good horror films leaven this guilt with intelligence, imagination and sensitivity. This piece of trash just offered torture for it's own sake, just to push the experience of screen brutality that little bit further. With no reward. Just the sensation of humanity bumping along the bottom of the extremes of possible depravity.