R.B.1    1 A / V   W O M A N   & A V I E W J A N U A R Y    2 0 0 7

1 SERIAL NO. IM  448199

The Adventures of Barry McKenzie
Bruce Beresford, 1972; 1pt
Had it been American this would be one of those cult legends like The President's Analyst, but it isn't, so it isn't. And Peter Cook was in it so by law it wasn't allowed to be especially good (has Peter Cook ever been in a good film? Let's ask IMDb... The Bed Sitting Room is the best it's offering). But it was still alright, and it's always interesting to see a young Edna Everage if nothing else. Still... a point may be generous.

Aguirre: Wrath of God
Werner Herzog, 1972; 2pts
A pretty documentary-like trip down a river with a frightening looking man in studded armour.

Airplane
Zucker / Abrahams / Zucker, 1980; 2pts
Classic disaster movie starring Leslie Nielsen, Robert Hays and the great Julie Hagerty.

Alfie
Lewis Gilbert, 1966; 1pt
Surprisingly decent film, given a bad reputation by Michael Caine's inability to drop the character after an accident with a champagne cork at the wrap party.

Animal Farm
Halas & Batchelor, 1954; 3pts
Crazy old nonesense from the days before Clause 4 was rewritten.

Annie Hall
Woody Allen, 1977; 4pts
Woody Allen, Dianne Keaton and the Massed Lobster Players of New York star in the former's pleasingly snappy comedy.

Austin Powers in Goldmember
Jay Roach, 2002; 1pt
Worth it for another subtitling gag if nothing else.

Bad Education
Pedro Almodóvar, 2004; 2pts
Much celebrated offering from the queen of latin cinema: a spot of catholic school transvestism. Very nice and everything, but it never really seems to get anywhere.

Bad Timing
Nicolas Roeg, 1980; 1pt
There's a lot of worthy films on this week, at least two of which star Jack Lemmon. Here's one that doesn't. It stars Art Garfunkel. Join me, and together we can be Nick Roeg completists. Before he made this, he'd evidently been watching Vertigo. I'll say no more on the matter (there were no nuns) save it was worthy of a point.

Barry Lyndon
Stanley Kubrick, 1975; 4pts
Kubrick's epic and naturalistically lit travelogue of 18th century Europe. Sort of like Kubrick does Colonel Blimp. Three hours of Ryan O'Neal running around Europe being chased by Handel. How can you go wrong? Wheels out tedious NASA lens bollocks.

Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin)
Sergei M Eisenstein, 1925; 2pts
Worth it for the steps business alone. H was never the same again. A lot of my peers question my low score of Battleship Potemkin; apart from the steps it's pretty boring... I mean the steps are amazing, sure, but the rest is dull.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
Dario Argento, 1969; 1pt
Typical Argento slasher, with plenty of red paint.

Blackmail
Alfred Hitchcock, 1929; Silent = 3pts, Sound = 2pts.
Hitchcock's first talkie, which recently toured the UK in a silent version with some cast-off members of Gong strumming along. The sound version suffers slightly from '30s accents but once you get over that it'll be ok. Some great effects and a solid story (probably the first truly trademark Hitchcock film). The talkie is not as good as the silent version, mainly on account of pacing -- the film takes about ten minutes longer, which is mainly taken up by people stood looking at each other between lines of dialogue. The accents don't help: the crook and the leading lady were both too posh, though in fairness, the rest of the cast were fine. The talkie does have the infamous 'knife' business though. Which is novel if nothing else.

The Black Rider
Wolf Rilla, 1954; 0pt
Not as curiously cast as an accompanying BBC4 documentary would have us believe, rhis was a tight enough domestic thriller in the Ghost Train school (but not as good). It could've made low-budget Hitchcock fodder had it been floating around a decade or so earlier. As it was it was likeable jetsom, comparable to an early Carry On.

Blood for Dracula
Paul Morrisey, 1974; 1pt
It suffers from some dreary pacing, like many a cheap film can. But the concept of Dracula running out of virgins is a good one, and there's plenty of amusing lines and set-ups. Extended scenes of vomiting, and the Python-esque climax all add to an enjoyable and titular period romp.

Blow Out
Brian De Palma, 1981; 2pts
Sonic tribute to Michelangelo.

Boogie Nights
Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997; 3pts
Clearly inspired by Goodfellas and perhaps Carlito's Way, it also dripped a little with Tarantino-ish effects. Various little bits reminded me of Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown. But at the end of the day, all of these (except the De Palma entry) are better films than Boogie Nights. As is Magnolia. Boogie Nights isn't rubbish. But it's not something you need spend money on. It would've been better if there was less concentration on Marky Mark's character and a more Magnolia-ish spread of stories. The bloke who wanted to set up the hi-fi shop for instance... that was an interesting little story, but it was too little. The cocaine sale was good, but also tremendously derivative. Julianne Moore had a story herself that was squeezed into one and a half scenes that in the end seemed barely worth it. Same goes with Heather Graham's character. It looked, really, like a film that started out as a set of equally weighted stories that got rejigged through the pressures of a debut film. Maybe it grew the other way, in which case it's a shame that it didn't grow further. Though perhaps that would've been seen as a bit too Pulp Fiction.

Bringing Out the Dead
Martin Scorsese, 1999; 2pts
It isn't the Ambulance Driver it should've been, but it's ok in a streaky headlight sort of way.

Bringing Up Baby
Howard Hawks, 1938; 3pts
Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn look after a leopard. As you do.

Capturing the Friedmans
Andrew Jarecki, 2003; 0pts
An interesting little documentary, though more for freak value than anything else. Compared to Super Size Me and Spellbound, it was nothing.

Carlito's Way
Brian De Palma, 1993; 1pt
A bit hackneyed, story-wise, and visually. It was a nice little film but essentially disposable.

Carravagio
Derek Jarman, 1986; 1pt
Pretty much as one might expect: some nicely constructed shots and Sean Bean prancing about with not a lot on. The composition could probably have been better, really, but this was more than made up for by the Fellini-esque Papal sequence.

Casablanca
Michael Curtiz, 1942; 1pt
Over-rated weapy, popular with wannabe pub landlords and the like. Gets the job done with some nice touches and some sturdy mahogany dialogue.

Cat People
Jacques Tourneur, 1942; 1pt
A triumph of style over special effects, this is the original and not that rubbish Paul Schrader nonsense. Miaow.

Celine & Julie Go Boating
Jaques Rivette, 1974; 5pts
Abba's Adventures in Acid-land: Celine & Julie use magic sweeties to explore a haunted mansion in this entertainingly silly 3¼ hr slab of cinema.

Citizen Kane
Orson Welles, 1941; 5pts
Everything you've heard about this film is true. Except all the stuff about it being over-rated crap, or the story about Orson Welles and the elephant. Citizen Kane is a brilliant film. One of the best ever made. That is all you need to know.

Clockwise
Christopher Morahan, 1986; 2pts
John Cleese steadily unravels like a coiled spring, bringing the shadow of a second layer of meaning to the title.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Steven Spielberg, 1977; 1pt
Good use of mashed potato and a memorable disco sequence.

Contraband
Michael Powell, 1940; 1pt
Contraband is Powell & Pressburger doing Hitchcock. The race against timetable is quite effective, and the leads are entertainingly played. But the spyring story is ultimately a little flat, despite the shootout in the room full of busts of Chamberlain.

A Cottage on Dartmoor
Anthony Asquith, 1929; 2pts
I thought Cottage on Dartmoor rather pretty. And it was good use of the flashback too. Some nice gimmicks in it: the use of stock newsreel to denote conversational blather in particular. The story in the end though was pretty empty and the end was too melodramatic to be sensible. But if you'd been told this was an early Hitchcock, you might be inclined to believe it.

Cover Girl Killer
Terry Bishop, 1959; 0pts
A perfectly acceptable serial-killer thriller albeit lacking the gore of the modern day genre. Instead we got Harry H. Corbett in a silly wig and glasses (a disguise, it should be pointed out). His performance was pretty decent, as was the basic premise. The dialogue too, particularly between the magazine owner and the detective, was entertaining and well written. On a better day it might've got a point out of me. Certainly, had it been a TV drama (as it would today) it'd've made a point. But I expect a bit more of films than I do of television.

The Cow (Gaav)
Dariush Mehrjui, 1969; 1pt
It's the story of a man who goes a bit odd following the death of his cow.

Cul-de-Sac
Roman Polanski, 1966; 5pts
Donald Pleasance in Lindisfarne Castle; American gangsters having trouble in Mablethorpe; A work of genius.

Dawn of the Dead
George A Romero, 1978; 3pts
Realising that this is the best of the Dead Trilogy, the BBC have put this on One (the others are on Two). Ten years after the Night, four people hide out in a shopping centre. If the first film is a comment on race relations, this is a comment on consumerism. But in reality it is just a good excuse for lots of zombies to comically mill about outside Dixons. Great fun, and one of the best sequels ever made.

Day of the Dead
George A Romero, 1985; 2pts
The theme here is the appliance of science and the interference of the military. Which means that it's treading a little into Alien territory, but so-be-it. And the Alien series never had a loveable Frankenzombie character to walk into doors and show a love of classical music. Actually, the military characters are a bit too thick and annoying really. But most of them die pretty quickly, so it's not much of a problem. It's not the best of the Dead series, but it moves the genre on into new territory, if that's the sort of thing you want from a zombie film.

Deep Red
Dario Argento, 1975; 1pt
David Hemmings does some DIY at David Shrigley's old house in this entertaining and extra-long Argento romp. Some nice touches and interesting camera work, though the last half hour comes over a bit second unit. Still, quite entertaining.

Desperado
Robert Rodriguez, 1995; 2pts
101 uses for a guitar case in the follow-up to / remake of El Mariachi.

Django
Sergio Corbucci, 1966; 1pt
Django (like Fistful of Dollars, a spaghetti reworking of Yojimbo) had some lovely moments in it. But the voices were lousy. Clint's growl is far superior. The shock value of the machine-gun reveal is a bit weak too nowadays, but for its day that was probably rather impressive mass-slaughter. Fistful is subtler and has better direction. Django has better set pieces.

Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Stanley Kubrick, 1963; 4pts
Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers, Slim Pickens and Peter Sellers star in Kubrick's satirical number.

Donnie Darko
Richard Kelly, 2001; 2pts
Harvey for the Playstation Generation. An interesting idea, though flawed in several places, mainly through some sloppy direction. I could go into details but I'd rather go to bed. Teenagers, unless you're being visited by malevolent rabbits, your emotional problems are nothing.

Don't Look Now
Nicolas Roeg, 1973; 3pts
Look out! It's Wee Jimmy Krankie!

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Michel Gondry, 2003; 3pts
Last week I was underwhelmed by the films I watched. This week was a different matter. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind surprised me by actually being as good as I'd been led to believe. It really was rather lovely and added more pebbles to the measure of Charlie Kaufman as a writer. Jim Carrey proved again that he can be not annoying if he's asked nicely enough, and the gimmickry of the central section of the film put me in mind of Powell & Pressburger. Great stuff.

The Evil Dead
Sam M Raimi, 1980; 1pt
Nice enough in a way, but it's a bit insubstancial, and not a patch on the fantastic zombie masterpiece Dawn of the Dead.

Evolution
Ivan Reitman, 2001; 0pts
Perfectly alright. It was, after all, just a remake of Ghostbusters (though not as good), but with aliens instead of ghosts. It was adequate enough idle viewing.

Fargo
Joel Coen, 1966; 4pts
The one great Coen Brothers film.

Farewell, My Lovely See Murder, My Sweet.

Le Feu Follet
Louis Malle, 1963; 1pt
Probably the most French film I've ever seen, with its tossy storyline in b&w, and Satie on in the background. Adequate though.

The Fifth Element (Le Cinquième Elément)
Luc Besson, 1997; 2pts
Comic sci-fi fantasy from Bruce Willis' renaissance period. Glossy and very orange, like we're told.

Flesh
Paul Morrisey, 1968; 1pt
Rather slow and drab in that low budget way. But it scrapes a point through the humour that slips in subtly. Flesh is doubtless more interesting than its sister work, Heat, as a string of vignettes that form a day in Joe's life. Perhaps the peak is a conversation with what looks like a young Chris Morris about the best places a new-to-the-trade rent-boy might loiter for sex. 

The Fog of War
Errol Morris, 2003; 3pts
In the last month or so, C4 have been serving up some recent and acclaimed ex-theatre documentaries. But B2 have beat them to this oscar-winning number, that had swarms of critics and journalists messing up their underpants when it came out. In it, Robert (S) McNamara sits in front of a camera and tells us all about his role in history, which is not insignificant given his stint as US defence secretary under Kennedy and Johnson. 25 hours of intense interviews are condensed to 105 minutes for our yummy consumption.

Foreign Correspondent
Alfred Hitchcock, 1940; 3pts
A nice film in the NxNW / 39 Steps mould, with some great special effects shots in the air-crash sequence, and some amusing dialogue. But it isn't as good as either of the other two Hitchcocks mentioned.

Frankenstein
James Whale, 1931; 1pt
Poor old Franky is a clumsy monster who gets into all sorts of scrapes. Classic horror.

Frenzy
Alfred Hitchcock, 1972; 1pt
Frenzy was a mixed bag, made good by some nice camerawork, and some amusing set pieces. Billie Whitelaw had two scenes, which was a bit of a waste: her first scene was a majestic performance; her second was her rushing off to the Royal Court because she had something better to do. The story was adequate B-Movie stuff.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Howard Hawks, 1953; 1pt
An entertaining little thing. The musical numbers were well constituted, and the script was pretty tight. If anything, the story itself was the flaw. The concept was fine but the conclusion rather naff.

Germany: Year Zero (Germana Anno Zero)
Roberto Rossellini, 1947; 2pts
Rossellini takes us around the playground that is a bombed-out post-war Germany.

The Girl Can't Help It
Frank Tashin, 1956; 1pt
Jayne Mansfield scares me. The woman is deformed. Waspish never seemed so entomic. Her character also scared me. But luckily, Gene Vincent was on hand to make it all alright again. And the opening sequence was superb. It should've just been a compendium of musical performances though.

The Goat
Buster Keaton & Malcolm St Clair, 1921; 1pt
Buster Keaton's The Goat, the short that featured in last week's Paul Merton's Silent Clowns, was nothing really special, though it pissed on the Chaplins this week. Most of it has been done to death in Warner Brothers cartoons, which is not really its fault, but also its best feature. Such is the problem though with old comedy, and old films in general. The Newcomen engine was brilliant in its day, but once Watt had tinkered with it and given us the Boulton-Watt engine, it was hard to see past the original's occasional self-destruction. The same is true of films. We can appreciate an old film for being inventive, but our enjoyment of it is coloured by subsequent innovation. WB ripped Keaton off but they did it better... or at least they got to me first, before I knew the gag. All that said, the Keaton did contain a fantastic shot, like out of The Crow or The Matrix or summat, with Keaton sat cross-legged on the front of a train, coming to a Close Up halt with a moody stare at camera. Very nice. And in a way it underlines the qualities of Keaton that are still impressive: the stunts. Chaplin relies solely on his clowninsh mimery to appeal to a modern audience. But Keaton has the benefit of a Jackie Chan like grace, and an expressionless sense of cool. Keaton is just moodier and cooler than the brash and twatty Chaplin.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo)
Sergio Leone, 1966; 4pts
Comic-strip spag-western, steeped so heavily in its own "Dollars" mythology as to turn itself beautiful.

Great Expectations
David Lean, 1946; 2pts
John Mills is the wondrously dim Pip, dealing with the issues of benefaction, transportation and immolation.

Gremlins
Joe Dante, 1984; 2pts
There is some rot talked about obligatory Christmas films. Here's a genuine example. Although apparently, a mogwai is for life, not just for Christmas.

Happiness
Todd Solondz, 1998; 1pt
I thought it lacked something, though I heartily approve of its wilful taboo-breaking line of comedy. However, I thought the best story was Joy, for who everything consistently went wrong. I'd've liked more of that.

Harvey
Henry Koster, 1950; 3pts
Donnie Darko for grown-ups.

Heat
Paul Morrisey, 1972; 1pt
Like its sister work, Flesh, this is rather slow and drab in that low budget way. But it scrapes a point through the humour that slips in subtly. A brutal reworking of Sunset Boulevard in which Joe's lays are evidently selected for their lack of pulchritude, Heat continues and develops the theme of sex as a means of financial investment. But at the end of the day, Sunset Boulevard did it a lot better.

Hell in the Pacific
John Boorman, 1968; 2pts
Lee Marvin and Mifune Toshiro star in this classic depiction of Hegelian philosophy. Or, if you prefer, this WW2 equivalent of I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here...

Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Alain Resnais, 1959; 2pts
No Marienbad, but it was ok. Did look like he'd been commissioned to do a documentary and got bored after quarter of an hour.

Ice Cold in Alex
J Lee Thompson, 1958; 3pts
John Mills, Sylvia Sims and Anthony Quayle test-drive an ambulance, in this Carlsberg-sponsored war-flick.

I Know Where I'm Going!
Powell & Pressburger, 1945; 2pts
This week's Archers selection is the one with the woman who goes to the Scottish island and has some fun. Some nice gimmicks on the train, but everything starts to go all a bit Mills and Boon the further we get. Which is a shame. Still, there's some nice diversions along the way. Wicker Man for mums.

The Italian Job
Peter Collinson, 1969; 2pts
There's a lot of mediocre films on this week. Stuff that is ok, but you wouldn't want to necessarily own. Here's the best of them. Some rate it a classic, but take away the minis, the bus, and some van doors, and you're left with a flimsy sub-Ealing crime-caper where most of the entertainment comes from some stuttering reel-to-reel computers. I'm being harsh, of course. It's not a classic but it's at the top end of the 1pt-ers.

Jackie Brown
Quentin Tarantino, 1997; 5pts
Once upon a time, not so long ago, an odd little troll called Quentin Tarantino crawled out from under his bridge and decided to do good. Here is that good. He will be missed.

Journey into Fear
Norman Foster (and Orson Welles), 1943; 1pt
A Kane quicky (look, there's Joseph Cotten again), "assisted" in his direction by Norman Foster (though the film predates Foster's trademark curved glazing).

Kes
Ken Loach, 1969; 2pts
A lovely little thing, spoilt somewhat by the tossy piddle-piddle music... the kid and his teacher discuss how magical the silent flight of the bird is, but we are not allowed to share in this experience.

Knife in the Water (Noz w Wodzie)
Roman Polanski, 1962; 2pts
Polanski's Polish breakthrough, in which a middle class couple make the curious decision to take a hitch-hiker on their boat trip.

The Lady and the Duke
Eric Rohmer, 2001; 0pts
The Lady and the Duke was not crap, exactly. The story was alright. The film just had the aesthetic charm of an Open University dramatisation. The naff comp-gen painting business was the least of its problems really... the stagnant sets weren't moody or stark enough to be artistically interesting. They were just cheap TV. And it really did smell of Schools & Colleges or something in its construction and deportment. It was a poor film with no sense of pace or design; merely a series of incidents strung together with some pretty dresses and some weak VT effects.

The Lavender Hill Mob
Charles Crichton, 1951; 1pt
Alec Guinness fails to smuggle some gold Eiffel Towers in this archetypal Ealing comedy.

Lawrence of Arabia
David Lean, 1962; 3pts
Four hours of sand constitutes this minimalist experimental offering from David Lean. Take sandwiches and a flask of tea.

The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse
Steve Bendelack, 2005; 2pts
This was at its best when entering Pythonesque territory with its seventeenth century sections, and at its most mundane when actually in Royston Vasey. In a way, this offers some semblance of hope for the future.

The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp
Powell & Pressburger, 1943; 4pts
For the first thirty minutes or so I was thinking: I'm sure this is a good film, but there's no sign of it yet. Then he has his duel and we crane up through the snow, and I suddenly realise that my memory is still sound. Great stuff. This has been doing Sunday afternoons on ITV for the last umpteen years. Now BBC2 have it, so you're buggered if you need a pee.

The Life & Death of Peter Sellers
Stephen Hopkins, 2003; 2pts
The story of Peter Sellers' life is only moderately interesting, being as it is much the same as any other British comedian turned Hollywood star. It is not the story so much as the frighteningly convincing portrayal, and the entertaining directorial set-pieces that make Life & Death of Peter Sellers a decent film.

The Likely Lads
Michael Tuchner, 1976; 2pts
The two friends and their significant others go on a caravan holiday, with philosophical consequences. Half-decent big-screen port about a loser who likens life to boxes of chocolates.

Local Hero
Bill Forsyth, 1983; 0pts
Local Hero is not lovely. It's mawkish tripe that made me physically sick. No. It didn't really make me sick. I've been reading too much Brooker. But it was pretty nasty. The music wasn't helping.

The Long Goodbye
Robert Altman, 1973; 1pt
The over-rated and now over-cooked Robert Altman delivers his contemporary rendering of Chandler. Alas, it seems that the modernised Marlowe has had to have everything that makes him an original character surgically removed. I prefer Marlowe to, say, Mike Hammer because Marlowe is witty, intelligent and passive. Altman's Marlowe can't string together a casually dismissive line if his life depends on it, and spends most of the time kicking out and swearing at the police. At the beginning this Marlowe is fine, but as events unfold he is increasingly seen to be an impostor. Despite this gaping chasm of a problem, the film is fundamentally adequate, and the characters are far from uninteresting. They're just not the ones advertised on the back of the box.

Lost Highway
David Lynch, 1997; 2pts
Bill Pullman joins a video club, goes driving at night and turns into someone else in this slice of Lynchy fun and games.

The Magic Christian
Joseph McGrath, 1969; 0pts
One of them "crazy" late-'60s films that always seem to have Peter Sellers in. It was pretty rubbish really.

The Magnificent Ambersons
Orson Welles, 1942; 3pts
Q. How do you follow up Citizen Kane? A. With great difficulty. This was the attempt: an under-cooked elephantine project, buggered about with by RKO to bring it into line with the economics of the day. The result is a little disappointing though it has its moments.

The Man Between
Carol Reed, 1953; 2pts
A Carol Reed film: a cross between Third Man and Odd Man Out but without being as good as either.

Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom)
Dziga Vertov, 1929; 2pts
Soviet camera-trick demo-film from 1929. Great fun.

The Man With the Golden Arm
Otto Preminger, 1956; 0pts
Frank Sinatra is a heroin addict whose wife is in a wheelchair, and whose life is getting him down. Trainspotting for the bobbysock generation. Alright as cold turkey poker dealers with munchausen-syndrome wives expressionist kitchen-sink dramas go.

El Mariachi
Robert Rodriguez, 1992; 3pts
Good bloody honest fun with a couple of guitar cases in Mexico. Farce with guns.

Marilyn
Wolf Rilla, 1953; 1pt
Yet another rendering of The Postman Always Rings Twice. This time though, it comes with added class-consciousness (including a wonderful performance by the lead woman who employs a marvelously class-transcendent accent), and even some hinted-at lesbian unrequitement. Decent stuff with a tight script but it's difficult to go too awry with the postman.

The Masque of the Red Death
Roger Corman, 1964; 0pts
Visually rather splendid, with some nice use of colour, though  nothing of any weight to the film. Vacuous fluff in which Vincent Price prances about some pretty sets. The budget only stretched to one midget.

A Matter of Life and Death
Powell & Pressburger, 1946; 3pts
David Niven gets his. Wartime Britain and Heaven are the settings for Powell & Pressburger's popular zombie romance. Not their best film, and probably not as good as Truly, Madly Deeply, but better than Ghost and Ghost Dad. And there's a great staircase if nothing else.

Memento
Christopher Nolan, 2000; 3pts
Guy "Babysham" Pearce has some memory problems in this novelty flick, but nothing a felt tip can't sort.

Monsters Inc.
Pete Docker, 2001; 2pts
Comp-gen fur-fest. You never really get past how amazing that is, which is perhaps as well because, beyond the door gimmick, the story is pretty flimsy.

Moonraker
Lewis Gilbert, 1979; 2pts
It's been a while since I saw Moonraker. I'd forgotten how good it was: clearly one of the best Bond films, very much in the mad, over-the-top style established by You Only Live Twice. Ludicrously silly, complete with laser-guns and Jaws' romantic sub-plot, while still having a story and so avoiding the pitfalls found in Octopussy (a Bond-film where the pre-shoot script seemingly consisted of a single mangled half-pun and nothing more).

Murder, My Sweet (Farewell, My Lovely)
Edward Dmytryk, 1944; 5pts
By far the greatest Chandler adaptation in existance. None of that Bogart toss: all chins and brooding. Rather, former musicals star Dick Powell is a refreshingly bright and playful Marlowe. All that nonsense with the boat, tacked on to the end of the book to bring it to length, is wisely dropped here, and the Dickensian web of character relationships is discussed as little as possible, leaving us to rely on the comic dialogue rather than the plot. Which is frankly for the best.

My Little Eye
Marc Evans, 2002 1pt
A reality TV horror had to be done, but did it have to be done in such a conventional teen slasher way? Could they not have been in a clean white Big Brother studio rather than an old scary house in the middle of nowhere? I think that would've been better. And the camerawork was too conventional; going out of focus now and again is not sufficient to convey CCTV. Why not actually film it as a genuine reality show? Apart from the probable expense of having to use loads of remote-operated cameras... In the end it was disappointing because it was so conventional. It was just another teen slasher, but with some cameras buzzing about. The soundtrack was shit, too... all that buzzing and hackneyed dial-up twitter. Ah, well... They've made one now. That exercise is out of the way.

My Name is Nobody (Il mio nome è Nessuno)
Tonino Valerii, 1973; 3pts
A great bit of daft spag west from the Scuderia Leone.

Night of the Living Dead
George A Romero, 1968; 1pt
This first number in the Dead trilogy is your bog-standard siege film, complete with flaming truck escape attempt, as per requirements.

North By Northwest
Alfred Hitchcock, 1959; 3pts
Cary Grant gets up the nose of an ex US president.

Odd Man Out
Carol Reed, 1947; 4pts
James Mason is an IRA bank-robber on the run in this beautiful bit of cinema.

Oliver Twist
David Lean, 1948; 2pts
A painfully posh Oliver falls into a life of crime and excessive coincidence.

Once Upon a Time in the West
Sergio Leone, 1964; 4pts
Epic spag western from the master of the genre. Great stuff. Doubters should take the plunge.

Orgazmo
Trey Parker, 1997; 0pts
A sex-industry comedy by the South Park creators. It started very well, but ran out of energy half way through. Still, it had some nice touches, and just about amused.

Performance
Nicolas Roeg & Donald Cammell, 1970; 1pt
James Fox and Mick Jagger are flatmates in this Man About the House odd-couple acid-fest.

Pi
Darren Aronofsky, 1997; 1pt
Pi was alright, but I was expecting it to be weirder. If it were in colour it could almost have been a TV movie. Perhaps that's over-doing it, actually. Yes it is. All the same, there was a rather similar Hammer House of Horror episode...

Picnic at Hanging Rock
Peter Weir, 1975; 1pt
It was quite whispy, and very nice if you're into schoolgirls in Edwardian summer-dresses traipsing around crags. Otherwise it was all a bit too floaty and lacking in substance.

Poodle Springs
Bob Rafelson, 1998; 0pts
Tom Stoppard attempts to sort out Raymond Chandler's barely finished last work in the script of this US TV movie. It was better than I expected (because I expected it to be shit), but still the dregs of HBO. The tie in to the JFK assassination at the end didn't really come off, and just made the whole thing slightly annoying.

The Postman Always Rings Twice
Tay Garnett, 1946; 1pt
Archetypal truckstop noir. What the kitchen table was made for. Warning: Contains roasted cats.

A Private Function
Malcolm Mowbray, 1984; 1pt
Palin stars in a pig-slaughtering comedy of manners from the pen of Alan Bennett. A perfectly good little farcelet but nothing profound.

Psychomania
Don Sharp, 1972; 0pts
Pretty much what we have been brought up to think of as B-movie: a cheap "horror" flick. I use inverted commas because it is a film which never sets out to scare, but embraces the occult more for something to do. It is an otherwise directionless biker movie for whom the addition of a stone circle and Beryl Reed just about makes things a little less tedious than they otherwise might be. But even then, it's woefully short of humour (although not entirely), and why they didn't dig the grave another six inches deeper so that his head wasn't sticking up over the turf... No. It was rubbish.

Raining Stones
Ken Loach, 1993; 1pt
Bob wants to buy a communion dress, but can't afford it. Laugh and cry as he tries to solve his problems. Rather pleasant. It has a great priest in it, which always helps. And Les Battersby puts in a good performance. Nice.

Rancho Notorious
Fritz Lang, 1952; 0pts
Our piecemeal flashback introduction to Marlene was pleasantly Kane, and the narrating song was fantastic; like something out of Python and the Holy Grail. But in the end the film was all a bit of inconsequential fluff. Lang never really did top M, did he...

Read My Lips
Jacques Audiard, 2001; 0pts
A French film starring Vincent Cassel. A good concept (deaf woman lipreads heist plot) let down by lackluster script and direction.

Rear Window
Alfred Hitchcock, 1954; 3pts
Something of a regular in ITV Digitalia. Last time it was on ITV1 it had someone hand-jiving in front of it, but that was late in the night-time. This is mid-afternoon, and designed to give an exit from the World Cup for those that require it. It's up against Serbia-M v Holland, which is what I'll be watching, I must admit.

Repulsion
Roman Polanski, 1965; 2pts
Catherine Deneuve going mad in a flat. Good fun in a harrowing psychological trauma kind of way.

Rio Bravo
Howard Hawks, 1959; 0pts
One of the most tedious films I've ever seen. Overlong tripe.

Rome: Open City (Roma, Città Aperta)
Roberto Rossellini, 4pts
Priests and Nazis: the perfect recipe.

Rope
Alfred Hitchcock, 1948; 3pts
Here's Hitchcock's 'one-taker', with James Stewart and a body in a trunk. The copy of Rope I used to have on tape was from my old video, and so was grainy and had a dodgy soundtrack that would periodically splutter into extreme noise. So I taped over it, and was very proud to have fitted it into the 1hr 25min slot of room on the tape. However, as any of you who watched will have spotted, it was signed. Now this is admirable in a way, but at the same time... it's a little annoying for those of us who aren't deaf. I'm probably missing some great intricacies of hearing disability, but would subtitles not've done? Or maybe ITV could've used the C5 trick of having signing on digital but not on analogue. Or maybe we could've had two showings: one without a bloke covering up the corner of a masterpiece of cinema. Like I say, it's admirable in a way, but for those of us with working ears it's about as distracting as having someone repeating each line of dialogue very loudly and slowly.

Rosemary's Baby
Roman Polanski, 1968; 3pts
Mia Farrow is the drippy woman who suspects she's up the duff by Satan.

Saraband
Ingmar Bergman, 2003; 1pt
Nice, but not really nice enough.

Scum
Alan Clarke, 1979; 1pt
Questions of paternalism arise in borstal.

Sebastiane
Derek Jarman & Paul Humfess, 1976; 0pts
Just gay soft-porn, but in Latin. Hats off to it for that, but novelty aside, it will only really appeal to public-school classics-teachers.

Shakespeare in Love
John Madden, 1998; 1pt
Adequate enough Stoppard-penned period comedy.

Shallow Grave
Danny Boyle, 1994; 5pts
Better than Trainspotting by miles, this is Filmfour at the peak of its powers. Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston and Kerry "not done quite as well for herself" Fox share a flat in Scotland and then go all Vertigo on us when faced with a bag of money and a dead body. Why they don't just report the body but keep the money is something to keep out of your pretty little head.

Shrek
Andrew Adamson & Vicky Jenson, 2001; 1pt
It didn't really set my tail alight. It was alright. Pleasant enough. Nothing special though. Not really. And the ogre version of the princess was the better-looking anyway...

The Scarlet Empress
Josef von Sternberg, 1934; 1pt
Josef von Sternberg's luscious visual homage to Marlene Dietrich, stapled to a balsa-wood story about Catherine the Great.

Shaun of the Dead
Edgar Wright, 2004; 2pts
Adequate, but I was really expecting something more... It was a comedy zombie movie, and in that respect it wasn't actually anything new. Dawn of the Dead was a comedy zombie movie itself. Ok, this was slightly more comedy than that, but I was looking for it to do a lot more with the genre than it did. I wasn't disappointed exactly, because its a perfectly entertaining film, but it didn't quite live up hype.

Small Soldiers
Joe Dante, 1998; 1pt
Joe "Gremlins" Dante tinkers with the formula that made him big and produces another amusing family action toy thingy. Perfectly satisfactory.

Smoke
Wayne Wang, 1995; 1pt
Smoke is a nice enough film set around a tobacconists.

Snow White: A Tale of Terror
Michael Cohn, 1996; 0pts
Alright but looked a bit C4 TV movie. It wasn't nearly gothic enough on the whole.

Spider
David Cronenberg, 2002; 2pts
Atmospheric and temporally twitchy psycho-drama from David Cronenberg, starring Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Richardson
I watched Spider on the wrong telly, and ended up with a narrowed aspect as a result. This only added to the atmosphere, and I'm sure it made the recurring gasometer look a lot better. Ultimately, Spider is a work that relies on the acting skills of Miranda Richardson, as she plays the two mothers of the piece. And she does it very well, so that's alright then. But I couldn't go so far as to say that this was a must-see film.

Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope: Special Edition
George Lucas, 1977/97; 5pts
Here's the good Star Wars film. The first one. Slightly buggered up in 1997, but still better than the rest. Bit hammy though.

Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back: Special Edition
Irvin Kershner, 1980/97; 3pts
Some people will tell you that this is the best one, but they're misguided. Though it's many many light years better than Return of the Jedi.

Stolen Kisses (Baisers Volés)
François Truffaut, 1968; 1pt
Ok, but little better than the not entirely dissimilar Carry on Regardless.

Super Size Me
Morgan Spurlock, 2004; 1pt
Nice enough. Nothing truly breathtaking, but by no means crap. Seems to have given Jamie Oliver a few ideas too.

Taxi Driver
Martin Scorsese, 1976; 4pts
Robert De Niro's sight-seeing tour of New York.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Tobe Hooper, 1974; 1pt
Has some nice shots and a pretty good cast.

The Third Man
Carol Reed, 1949; 5pts
Vienna in post-war partition is the setting for Carol Reed's best film: a pretty gritty thriller with a big wheel and some dodgy drugs. One of the best 20 films ever made, in fact. This has been on quite a lot in the last couple of years. BBC4 had it for a fair bit, and now it's back at the spiritual home of Reed: Channel 4 on a weekday afternoon.

The Thirteenth Floor
Josef Rusnak, 1999; 1pt
One of those textbook sci-fi virtual reality yarns. Ok with it.

This is England
Shane Meadows, 2006; 1pt
Aw bless. It's like an English American History X, but shorter and not as good. But look, it's got a kiddiewink in it and he's loveable as jam. I wasn't overly bowled by it, but it filled a little hole.

The Thomas Crown Affair
Norman Jewison, 1968; 1pt
I like the split screen ponciness if nothing else.

Tony Takitani
Jun Ichikawa, 2004; 0pts
Here's a low-budget Japanese film which takes the best bit of Vertigo (the nice bloke altering the appearance of his new girlfriend so that she looks like his last one) and fails to do anything with it at all. Firstly, the titular Tony is not as nice as Jimmy Stewart and we get far too much back story of this Donnie Darko character turned middle-aged misery. Secondly, his wife pegs it far too late in the film for us to do much with the next woman. Thirdly Tony gets weird too quickly with the next woman and then promptly chickens out. The film peters away after that and we're left wondering why we bothered. What could've been a very interesting film is reduced to an overlong set-up and a bodged ending with no jam in the sandwich. To make matters worse, the incessant panning behind dark objects was gimmicky and annoying. A better film may have carried it, but not this. All that said, this isn't a dreadful film - it's too short to be dreadful (<90'). It's just a spilt vessel.

Trees Lounge
Steve Buscemi, 1996; 0pts
Trees Lounge wasn't as good as I expected it to be. Very indie. I watched it drunk. Didn't fall asleep, but I don't remember most of it. Maybe it got better towards the end. Or maybe I'm deliberately blocking out bad memories of Chloe Sevigny eating a 99.

Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens)
Leni Riefenstahl, 1935; 1pt
Shot at the Norisring motor circuit, this is Riefenstahl's sweet and sentimental coverage of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. This was at the start of the Auto Union / Mercedes domination of motor sport, as is partially demonstrated by the massive contingent of Nazis in the crowds. The film is breathtaking in its visuals, although it would've benefited from more in-car camerawork and less shots of the spectators and the somewhat animated commentator. In fact, there is shockingly little of the actual racing in the film, though such was the nature of documentary making in the '30s. Why not play the Supremes' "Stop in the Name of Love" along to the footage. It enhances the saluting.
The first 30' were dull. The middle was rather entertaining, then there was a lot of boring marching, before a couple of speeches rapped things up. Worth a point, certainly. Type something about Nazis being evil.

The Trouble with Harry
Alfred Hitchcock, 1954; Rating: 2pts
Alfred Hitchcock's tribute to Weekend at Bernie's.

28 Days Later
Danny Boyle, 2002; 2pts
Once upon a time there was a director called Danny Boyle. He made a really good film, then a not so good but really popular film, then an adequately good and adequately popular film, then something with Leonardo Di Caprio in that I've still never watched, and then some daft zombie movie set in London, with Godspeed You Black Emperor! all over the soundtrack. That is this. And it's rather good, though neither of the ends are much cop, and the whole thing is a bit derivative. I like the army business though.

24 Hour Party People
Michael Winterbottom, 2001; 1pt
Adequate. At times it was more than adequate, but in the end the subject matter wasn't quite there to make it truly engrossing. It's like making a film about Richard Madeley. Mm.

2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick, 1968; 5pts
It's got monkeys, talking computers and giant babies. How could it fail?

Vengeance (Joko, Invoca Dio... e Muori)
Anthony Dawson (Antonio Margheriti), 1968; 1pt
Vengeance was a perfectly alright meccano spag-west, with one or two nice killings, and some good shots. I liked the yellow-suited villain in his sulphur mine especially.

Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia)
Roberto Rossellini, 1953; 0pts
A bit crap really: Ingrid Bergman not communicating properly. I never want to see another film in which Ingrid Bergman suffers from a lack of communication.

Watership Down
Martin Rosen, 1978; 5pts
Tear-jerking post-apocalyptic thriller in which an epileptic sooth-sayer leads a disparate displaced community on a desperate quest to repopulate their new society. The only solution is to infiltrate and destroy a rival community and steal their womenfolk. Gripping, terrifying stuff, and all done with rabbits. A triumph of narrative and gore... Akira may be prettier but where's the lapine tragedy, the duplicitous infiltration or the sex lust? If anyone asks you what your favourite film is, tell them this. Have reasons prepared. 

The Wicker Man
Robin Hardy, 1973; 4pts
There was a time when this was a rarity, seen only in the background in Shallow Grave. Now it's omnipresent and reglued.

Withnail & I
Bruce Robinson, 1987; 4pts
Tossers in mud. Great fun.

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