Film Reviews by Steve

This was a great leap forward for Dirk Bogarde who was never quite so convincing before Hunted. He portrays a murderer who travels across country with a small boy (John Whiteley) who has witnessed his crime. The boy is abused by his guardians and is starved of love and hungry with the need to give affection. They flee north pursued by the police and of course, their relationship deepens and they effectively save each other. It is an episodic road film in which the pair cannot trust anyone but each other. I think this is the best of Charles Crichton's many fine films for Ealing, it is understated for such a melodramatic narrative, the evocation of industrial Britain is satisfying and we really care about these two. There were quite a few films made after the war about a child's unconventional relationship with a surrogate parent (these two made another, The Spanish Gardener), and this is one of the best examples.

Gréville had a career in France before moving to the UK in the thirties and was something of a stylist. He transformed unremarkable scripts into imaginative visual works not usual for such budgets. Noose is British film noir, a story of a pair of sparring reporters (Carole Landis in her last role before killing herself, and an anodyne Derek Farr) up against the mafia. And while that doesn't sound likely, particularly as Landis works in the fashion department, it is merely the setting for Gréville's directorial elan, and a few startling performances. Joseph Calleia is memorably menacing as the mob boss, his principle tools being intimidation, torture and a lack of brains. Landis brings some attractive screwball glamour. But, not so much stealing the film, as heisting the whole venture intact, is Nigel Patrick as a motormouth go-to front office mafia fixer. One of the great performances in British films, massively enjoyable, and credit Gréville for allowing Patrick to dominate to such great effect. The film pitches awkwardly between violence and comedy, and the ending is a disaster, but this is a classic because of the directors visual style and Patrick's superb characterisation.

It's often said that great books make bad films but that is clearly untrue and here is a prime example. This is a wonderful adaptation of L.P. Hartley's classic memory novel, scripted by Losey's frequent collaborator, Harold Pinter. The story is set in 1900, so it is late Victoria but visually it creates what is now my image of Edwardian rural England, across the class divides. A boy spends the summer at a country estate passing illicit messages between Julie Christie's aristocratic beauty, and Alan Bates' earthy farmer. The boy, Leo is unable to understand the repercussions of the relationship he helps to prosper. It is a slow, languid film set in the long summer of our distant pasts against the grey, drizzly world of the grown up Leo's present reality. From where he understands the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Losey is another American who made his way to the UK to escape the scrutiny of HUAC and his filmography is like a red album of consistent hits (with Modesty Blaise his Yellow Submarine).

Performance has gained a reputation as a classic British gangster film but really it is a modernist work about identity. The performers, particularly James Fox (Chas) and Mick Jagger (Turner) change under each other's influence, and their sexuality blurs. Performance owes much more to Ingmar Bergman's Persona than it does to the Krays, violent though it is. Donald Cammell wrote the quotable script under the influence of Joe Orton, full of cheeky, threatening non-sequiturs. Nicolas Roeg was responsible for the head-movie visuals which I think are the main attraction, the film increasing representing an acid trip, including the scenes played backwards and the strong colour themes. Warner Brothers apparently thought they were getting The Rolling Stones' version of a Hard Day's Night and were shocked by the sexual content and how grimy it all looked and shelved it for two years. It has become a cult favourite, better known as years go by.

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.