Film Reviews by NP

It's held back a little by the obviously shoestring production values, but there's something genuinely beautiful and moving in Dead for a Dollar's sincere evocation of the classical Western. The ghosts of Boetticher, Mann, De Toth et al are present in every frame.

The cast acquit themselves well and Hill's direction is always lucid and quietly purposeful; if streaming services like Netflix were worth a darn, they'd be giving him proper budgets to make a string of genre exercises like this.

There's an embarrassing and baffling racist joke towards the end which sadly mars the experience, but otherwise this is like slipping into a warm bath. Hawks is in complete command of his material – yes, it feels like a 50s movie made in the 60s, but why innovate when you've already achieved perfection? – and Wayne and Mitchum play their roles with the kind of ease and poignancy that can only come from a lifetime in front of the camera. Sublime.

The soft (studio mandated?) ending unfortunately undercuts the bitter cynicism on display elsewhere, especially when the cop tells our hero that he should leave it to the police to take on crooks like Figlia (yeah, right!). Nonetheless, this is a surprisingly explicit – arguably slightly heavy-handed – and impressively crafted indictment of capitalism red in tooth and claw.

A truly extraordinary, demented, delirious film. Aside from Lynch, Sternberg may be the best filmmaker at realising the quality of a nightmare on screen. The cutting between ever more dissolute and amoral characters exchanging enigmatic but unmistakably loaded glances is used to alternately erotic and sinister effect; the somnambulant pacing imbues events with an intoxicating air of fatalism, as if all the players in this murky, orientalist underworld are already members of the undead, doomed to enact their private obsessions to their undoing.

The plot is every bit as silly as the Showa era Godzilla movies, but almost completely lacking in their charm. You'd think that a film about a giant monkey fighting a giant lizard would allow itself to have more fun! I was simply bored during the whole thing, except for the two big smackdown sequences.

The sprawling, epic nature of this espionage story is its chief pleasure and most of the spy-craft sequences showcase Hitchcock's technical genius (especially the set-piece with the florist – a character entirely deserving of his own franchise). Okay, some of the actors leave something to be desired, but when the filmmaking is this impeccable I'm willing to overlook the flaws.

If you're a Hitchcock acolyte, you may find more to enjoy here than you'd expect. If you're ambivalent or prone to dislike him, this is probably not going to be for you.

Formally, this is a very beautiful piece of work. Hitchcock's precision with the camera – never wasting a shot, always prioritising clarity – makes so many filmmakers look hopelessly slack and sloppy.

Is it his most sensational or compelling narrative? No, not by a long stretch; it might've worked better – and been more quintessentially Hitchcockian – if the film had followed Julie Andrews' questing female protagonist for all of its length, as it does in the early sections, instead of cleaving to Newman's stolid and rather uninteresting professor. It is also sadly lacking in a lot of the black humour that the director famously brought to his films.

Nevertheless, it is more than watchable in my opinion, with a few wonderful and idiosyncratic set-pieces, like the clumsy and brutal murder of the East German agent at the farmhouse, the encounter with the eccentric Polish countess (the most emotional part of the film) and the escape from the theatre.

The 'All the world's a stage and every one of us is giving a performance' theme might be somewhat hoary, but Hitchcock delivers a reliably solid elaboration of it here, replete with the colourful supporting turns, sly humour and atmospherics that one would expect.

A nigh on perfect crime flick. Jean Gabin touches the sublime as an ageing gangster who just wants to go to bed. Also a clear influence on Scorsese's equally excellent The Irishman.

A visual tour de force. The rapid-fire editing and wirework transfigure the actors into living puppets inside an amorphous, ever-shifting psychedelic landscape, rendering a wuxia fantasy film into something more closely resembling an experimental Norman McLaren short. Filled with audacious imagery, like the sparks literally flying from off the side of the screen as two characters develop an almost instant physical chemistry. The plot is nonsense, of course, but one doesn't watch something like this for the story - it's pure, glorious spectacle.

Surprisingly interesting and fun! I was not a fan at all of his last film, Passion, which I thought lacked the subversive wit and panache of De Palma when he's on form, and which is quite often back in evidence here. There's something spectacularly tasteless about making a Hitchcockian chase movie centred on Isis and domestic terrorism, but De Palma makes the inherent schlockiness of the material work in his favour, leaning into the tensions between the subject matter and the execution to make a disturbing commentary on the way Islamist extremism feeds on and becomes a warped version of online celebrity, as exemplified in the hilarious moment when a suicide bomber grins stupidly as he waits for a drone to descend into the bull ring and capture his 'close-up'.

Sure, its shoestring budget is all-too-apparent, and the choppy editing and abruptly sidelined characters expose the troubled production history, but it's notable that De Palma can still put together a more memorable set-piece with all of this against him than most filmmakers can muster with Hollywood backing.

Actually think this is an unheralded masterpiece. Christopher Walken is utterly terrifying and the film itself is chilling and mesmeric.

Deeply moving and unexpectedly profound. Also, the cinematography on display here is consistently more experimental than whole swathes of modern art-house movies, using wide angles and borderline abstract geometric compositions to depict frail, mortal human bodies at the mercy of the unbending forces of military order and modern warfare.

How is it possible for John Ford to have made so many truly great movies?

It's not been helpful for John Ford's legacy that many of his major films - like The Quiet Man - conceal their profound and ambivalent ruminations on tradition and culture and tolerance beneath such seemingly whimsical surfaces: it means that many inattentive modern viewers will come to his films unprepared for their manifold complexities and likely to dismiss them out of hand as little more than quaint and antiquated trifles.

Just one thing that leapt out at me on a first viewing is that the romance between Wayne and O'Hara must be one of the richest and strangest ever put onscreen: they're equal parts lovers, dupes, fighters and tormentors - both strong-willed and myopic yet sympathetic fools who goad and misunderstand and love each other, and can't see past their own cherished ideas to conceive of their partner's full subjectivity, until, blissfully, they finally do, in the movie's magnificent extended climax.