Lost in Translation (2003)

Another masterpiece directed (and also written) by Sofia Coppola. It’s a gentle drama with comic elements. Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is in Tokyo to film a whiskey advert. He meets a young college graduate called Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson). They are both experiencing marital problems and get time alone in their hotel rooms to reflect on them. Bob’s wife faxes him home decor suggestions and posts him carpet samples, while Charlotte’s husband (Giovanni Ribisi) is an absent, immature photographer. Feeling alien, lonely and disorientated in a culture they don’t understand, the two develop a deep connection that goes beyond casual friendship. 

The film is poignant and touching. There are glimmers of romance between the pair, but it’s to the film’s huge credit that it resists that obvious option and instead focuses on the two characters and their far less predictable kind of relationship. Murray and Johansson each give the performance of a lifetime, perfectly handling the empathy and restraint evident in the sensitive script. 

Coppola creates a strange and lovely atmosphere, understanding that what goes unsaid can be more potent than the words actually uttered, and each successive scene builds upon that. By the end, you feel profoundly engaged with these characters in a way that doesn’t usually happen when you watch a film. 

There are too many perfect scenes to mention, but my favourite is the karaoke episode. Charlotte sings “Brass in Pocket” (The Pretenders) and Bob sings “More Than This” (Roxy Music). In each case, they seem to be using the song to communicate something to each other. 

A really special film. One of the very best.

True Lies (1994)

Action comedy thriller that cleverly pastiches the James Bond series, with a lot of added humour. James Cameron directs, handling a potentially complex plot extremely lucidly. He also indulges his usual tic for lots of white and blue backlighting.

Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) works as a secret agent for the Omega Sector intelligence agency. His wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) knows nothing about this and believes he’s a dull computer salesman. When Harry suspects her of having an affair, he contrives an elaborate scheme to fulfil her desperate desire for adventure and excitement but ends up accidentally dragging her into a dangerous terrorist plot led by Salim Abu Aziz (Art Malik). 

The film balances witty observation with genuinely exciting action. Discussing the villain, one of the teams says “They call him the Sand Spider.” “Why?” asks the head of Omega Sector (played by Charlton Heaton). “Probably because it sounds scary,” is the response. 

The ending is one of the most spectacular action sequences I have seen (Cameron is incredibly skilled at this), and the Harrier jump-jet sequence at the climax is absolutely heart-stopping.

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

The first film by Sofia Coppola is a hypnotic piece of work that adapts the 1993 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. It tells the story of the five Lisbon daughters, and the suicides that destroy their family. Consciously or otherwise it seems to echo Picnic at Hanging Rock – another mystery about disappearing girls – and in places it evokes the same hazy, dreamy atmosphere. Like that story, it’s as much about the after-effects of the key events as it is about what actually happens, as the girls enter the dreams and inner lives of those who knew them. 

Coppola also brings subtle, dry wit into the story, which is impressive given the macabre subject matter. One scene has the strict religious mother trying to burn the girls’ vinyl records (Kiss, Aerosmith, etc) only to nearly choke everyone with the toxic fumes they produce. 

There are clever, tricksy moments that shouldn’t work but somehow do anyway. At one point, an eye “twinkle” is added when Lux (Kirsten Dunst) smiles. At another point, we see “through” Lux’s dress to reveal that she’s written her new boyfriend’s name on her underwear. 

It also works as a teen story, and scenes such as the Homecoming ball – or the romantic moments when the boys and girls play each other records down the phone – would have been compelling as a youth drama in their own right, even without the disturbing undercurrents. 

James Woods and Kathleen Turner are excellent as the parents struggling to comprehend the nightmarish situation that grips their family, while Kirsten Dunst is especially strong as the most outgoing of the daughters.  

At the heart of the film is a mystery: the five girls are an enigma that the film wisely doesn’t even try to explain. And the eerie ambience is perfectly captured by Air’s original soundtrack. 

Trivia: it’s set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, just like Grosse Pointe Blank.

Somewhere (2010)

Drama directed by Sofia Coppola, the brilliant talent behind Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette and The Virgin Suicides. 

Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a famous actor living at Los Angeles hotel the Chateau Marmont. Recovering from an injury, he seems detached and numb. Plus, he’s receiving aggressive texts and it seems that his car is being followed. When he unexpectedly has to look after his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) for several days, his world begins to change. 

Like Coppola’s other modern classics, this is all about the characters and their relationships rather than the plot. She’s not afraid to let silences stretch, or to let scenes unfold at their own pace, and the film feels much more “real” as a result. 

Music once again plays a big part, with expertly chosen tracks often playing out in full because they fit the mood or tone so well. 

I like the fact that Somewhere is of no recognisable genre. It hints at evolving into a sort of thriller, but cleverly dismisses those elements and keeps the focus on the evolving father-and-daughter dynamics. A real treat.

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

David Lean’s adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel is a lavish but disjointed epic that grinds on for 200 minutes. Omar Sharif stars as the doctor of the title, who falls in love with young Lara Antipova (Julie Christie). The film takes in World War I, the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War with a plot that’s too meandering to summarise neatly. Sometimes it races through events briskly, while at other times it appears to linger on scenes that don’t warrant being stretched out – a problem with pacing. 

On the plus side, the colours are rich and the all-star cast is uniformly excellent. It’s nice to see Julie Christie and Tom Courtenay back together again two years after Billy Liar, even if they don’t have much chemistry this time around. Omar Sharif is charismatic, with twinkling eyes and an undeniable presence, while Alec Guinness has a certain authority as the doctor’s brother. Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger and Ralph Richardson are all compelling, too.

On the down side, sometimes the narrative signposting is muddled. For example, when Lara cannot find her husband after the battle, we assume he’s dead but she neither mourns him nor asks about him. It’s simply not clear how she feels or how we’re meant to respond. I wondered if this was because the plot had to be condensed to work as a film, but if that’s the case maybe it could have added some simple explanatory sentences to bridge chunks of narrative that had to be cut. And if that is the reason, it’s ironic that they still ended up with such an incredibly long film (it takes up both sides of a DVD) that often feels slow and cumbersome.

Anywhere but Here (1999)

Impulsive, restless Adele August (Susan Sarandon) drags her teenage daughter Ann (Natalie Portman) from Bay City, Wisconsin, to Beverly Hills, California, to begin a new life. It soon becomes clear that Ann is the more sensible of the pair, and her resentment builds as she considers the friends and family she’s been forced to leave behind. 

The film begins with a road trip and I would have liked more of that, but ultimately it’s not about their travels. The focus is primarily on the mother-daughter relationship and how that develops under increasingly strained circumstances. There are a few laughs, too, which emerge from a strong, character-driven script. 

Sarandon sparkles as the maddening but hugely appealing Adele. Portman gives a performance that unlike other films (Star Wars prequels, Garden State), suggests she’s a pretty solid actor who hasn’t always chosen the right roles. 

The conclusion is satisfying and emotional without being mawkish.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

The SS Poseidon is sailing from New York to Athens when an underwater earthquake creates a huge wave that turns the ship over. A small group of passengers do their best to survive, despite the water coming in and the fires breaking out.

I was curious to see this film, which I had often heard about. It’s trashier than I expected. There’s a shabby made-for-TV quality to it, and it has none of the big-budget grandeur of disaster classics such as The Towering Inferno. The characters are absurdly diverse “types”, including:
• a rogue preacher (Gene Hackman)
• an angry, bad-tempered cop (Ernest Borgnine) and his ex-prostitute wife (Stella Stevens)
• a gee-whiz American kid (Eric Shea) and his older sister (Pamela Sue Martin)
• a woman given no other function than to be “a fat lady” (Shelley Winters) and her thinner husband Jack Albertson (Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory)
• a nervous singer (Carol Lynley) whose band of beardy blokes doesn’t make it
• a kindly, injured waiter (Roddy McDowall)
• an absurd-looking runner (he jogs like a parody of a Carry On character), who’s too shy to have any luck with women (Red Buttons)

Meanwhile, Leslie Nielsen plays the captain. After seeing him in Airplane! and The Naked Gun, it’s strange to see him in a straight role: I kept waiting for the gags that never arrived.

The concept is good, but it’s poorly executed and poorly written. There’s a lack of dramatic tension. Too much of the film becomes a logistical challenge of getting a group of people past an obstacle or from one room to another. The ship is meant to be upside down most of the time, but it rarely looks that way. You only see it in close-up, and the lack of contextual shots mean that what you do see looks like a set. It made me respect the action sequences in James Cameron’s Titanic even more than I did already. 

Character-wise, there are sections that are unintentionally comical – ridiculous, even. Often, one person is speaking and everyone else is holding a strange facial expression, such is the lack of dynamism in the group scenes. There’s a lot of unnecessary shouting, too. And you can tell when someone’s about to die because of the conversation they have beforehand. 

Gene Hackman makes the most of the sub-standard material, but he can only do so much. 

All these points aside, it’s entertaining enough.

Anna Karenina (2012)

When I first saw this lavish Joe Wright/Tom Stoppard adaptation of the Tolstoy novel, at the cinema in 2012, I wasn’t sure what to make of it at all. The radical decision to stage many of the scenes in a theatre set means that you never know quite what to believe – is the action really taking place or is it a stylised manifestation of a character’s feelings? On second viewing, I began to see it as a masterpiece that deliberately pulls apart the “reality” it constructs – perhaps to suggest that everything we do is a sort of fiction. It has a lot of fun with this – for example, switching from footage of a real train to a toy train and seeming to delight in the fact that it’s obviously a miniature model. In another scene, a letter is torn up and thrown into the air. The pieces keep falling because they have become snowflakes. Sometimes a door or window on the stage opens to another place entirely. There’s a sort of Escher logic to it, and you wonder how on Earth they planned it all so cleverly.  

The danger is that such a stylised approach might limit the film’s emotional impact, but if anything it works the other way, elevating simple scenes into works of art that magnify the characters’ situations. It would presumably have been so much easier to make the film as a standard costumer, but instead it operates on a higher level. 

Keira Knightley is appealing and convincing in the title role. Jude Law looks nothing like himself as her rigidly controlling husband. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the dangerous, icily charming Count Vronsky, who Anna has a devastating affair with. The love story is expertly told. There’s a parallel tale of what happens when passion and freedom conflict with social conformity. Should you follow your heart or do what’s expected of you by your peers and your class? For Anna, of course, neither option works out well.

Gregory’s Girl (1980)

An absolutely lovely comedy directed by Bill Forsyth, the talent behind Local Hero and several other great films.

Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) is a schoolboy who is part of the hopeless school football team in a small Scottish town. When the pretty, athletic Dorothy (Dee Hepburn) joins the team, he is instantly smitten. But although he doesn’t know it yet, it’s her Susan (the wonderful Clare Grogan) who truly likes him.

John Gordon Sinclair captures the awkwardness of being a teenager better than anyone else ever has. He’s hilarious in his good-natured but gawky, fumbling attempts to be with the girl he thinks he loves. He’s helped by his little sister Madeline (the remarkably composed Allison Forster), who is much more mature and worldly wise than he is.

Every character is so well drawn. The script is rich enough that each of Gregory’s friends is developed as a fully rounded individual. Plus, so many little details have the ring of truth about them that you can’t help recognising your own youth in these experiences.

There’s a gentle sweetness to this film that makes it timeless. You will never see anything more charming or romantic. And as it works round to its very satisfying conclusion, you realise you have been smiling for the full 90 minutes.

The Sheltering Sky (1990)

John Malkovich was annoying in Deepwater Horizon and Dangerous Liaisons, but I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was just the roles, I reasoned. But no, he’s equally annoying and repulsive in this film too. I have an almost animal dislike of his voice, his face and even his walk.

It’s the 1940s. Kit Moresby (Debra Winger) and her husband Port (Malkovich) are travelling in northern Africa. They are accompanied by their friend Tunner (Campbell Scott) and repeatedly encounter an eccentric English mother and son (Jill Bennett and Timothy Spall), who add little to the narrative.

As various episodes unfold and relationships become strained, you wonder what the point of their trip is. The couple clearly get little pleasure from travelling or from each other, and this makes for a film that feels uncomfortably slow and unrewarding. As their situation worsens you begin to sympathise with Kit, but every scene feels ponderous. A crossing-the-desert-by-camel interlude is needlessly drawn out, possibly just as an excuse to show off the admittedly remarkable scenery. Period detail and local authenticity are repeatedly prioritised over pace or momentum.

It’s based on the classic novel by Paul Bowles, who awkwardly narrates some of the action (not even reading his lines very well) and who has a pointless cameo as an elderly man in a café. His part, like so many things about the film, just doesn’t work.

Teen Wolf (1985)

Highly enjoyable comedy starring Michael J. Fox as a teenager who transforms into a werewolf. I was expecting the story to be about his struggle to conceal his true identity, but the brilliance of the plot comes from the fact that everyone he knows simply accepts his transformation, which makes him a better basketball player, a better dancer and a cooler guy all round. Suddenly he’s not average anymore. In fact, he does so well as a wolf that he then has to prove himself as...himself.

There are plenty of surreal and witty moments, but it’s also a standard American school comedy-drama with all the usual loyal friends, jealous enemies, feuding girlfriends and grudge-bearing teachers. Michael J. Fox is always easy to relate to and easy to like. There’s just something about him.

This film came out a month after Back to the Future, when Foxmania was at its height, so it couldn’t really fail. It made $80 million from a budget of just $1.2 million. It certainly doesn’t look expensive (much of it takes place on a basketball court), but that gives it a kind of immediacy too. With the exception of one Beach Boys hit, the pop soundtrack was seemingly commissioned especially for the film – third-rate MTV rockers and clunky ballads that are perfect for this particular story. Some of the songs are played in their entirety, giving the whole thing the feel of an extended promo video.

It’s silly, but gloriously so. It doesn’t get bogged down in explaining the wolf origins or even attempt to make sense of them, and is all the better for that.

A truly entertaining and satisfying 92 minutes.

Airplane! (1980)

Spoof disaster film that’s extremely funny. As with others in this series (see also The Naked Gun), no joke is considered too silly or too childish to be worth making. And there are a lot of them, too – a relentless sequence of gags – so I was laughing almost continuously.

The “plot” is almost irrelevant (mostly it’s just an excuse for the jokes), but it details how veteran fighter pilot Ted Striker (Robert Hays) and his air-hostess girlfriend Elaine (Julie Hagerty) have to safely land a plane after the crew and passengers suffer food poisoning on a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago. To complicate matters, Striker is “troubled” by his war experiences, and has a “drink problem” (he can’t locate his mouth when he raises his glass). Plus, Elaine has just broken up with him and he’s trying to win her back.

Leslie Nielsen is easy to love as the hopeless Dr. Rumack. In fact, the entire cast is superb. There is so much rich comic detail that you could watch it again and again.

What Lies Beneath (2000)

Claire Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her husband Norman (Harrison Ford) appear to have an ideal marriage and an ideal home. But the strain starts to show when Claire becomes convinced that their neighbour has murdered his wife. She also begins to observe spooky goings-on in her Vermont home, garden and lake. Norman encourages her to seek psychiatric help, but the weird events begin to escalate and it soon transpires that their marriage isn’t the fairytale story we might have imagined.

Director Robert Zemeckis does an excellent job with this Hitchcockian supernatural thriller. He’s masterful at storytelling (see Cast Away and the Back to the Future trilogy) and proves equally adept at building suspense. It’s genuinely frightening in places, not least because of the clever and claustrophobic way certain shots are framed.

The two leads are as good as ever, and Pfeiffer in particular builds a character you can easily believe in and relate to. There’s a major twist in the second half that changes everything, and both actors adapt their roles perfectly to make it work.

After an increasingly tense plot development, the pay off of the climax is extremely exciting. It’s real edge-of-the-seat stuff.

Limitless (2011)

Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is struggling with motivation in his work (he’s a writer) and relationships (his girlfriend Lindy, played by Abbie Cornish, has dumped him). Then he’s offered a “smart drug” named NZT-48 that unleashes and focuses the full potential of his brain, and his fortunes are radically transformed. Of course there’s a downside to taking it, as well as it bringing him into a world of ruthless people determined to get hold of the substance.

The film depicts the drug's brain-enhancing capabilities perfectly, cleverly visualising an explosion of sensory awareness: colours become brighter, vision becomes clearer, thoughts become more coherent. It makes you wish your brain was smarter and sharper. It also makes you crave some very strong coffee. There’s an excellent scene in which Eddie is attacked by a gang of thugs, and is able to fend them all off by recalling everything he’s ever watched or read about fighting – from Bruce Lee films to discussions on daytime TV.

The visuals are tricksy in places, showing you the world from Eddie’s drug-altered point of view – the endlessly telescoping street views are another nice touch – but that tricksy element works because it’s a film about perception.

Robert De Niro plays tycoon Carl Van Loon, who our anti-hero ends up working with. There's also a sub-plot about a murder that may or may not have taken place under the influence of NZT-48.

It’s an exciting, tightly plotted thriller. You never quite know where it’s going. And, contrary to my expectations, the ending manages to satisfy.

The Horse Whisperer (1998)

Epic weepie. When Grace (a teenage Scarlett Johansson) and her horse Pilgrim are badly injured in a riding accident, Grace’s mother Annie (Kristin Scott Thomas) drives them across America from New York to Montana to meet the gifted cowboy Tom Booker (Robert Redford). Magic ensues as the animal, Grace and Annie are all touched in different ways by Tom’s special healing qualities.

It’s a long, slow-burner at 170 minutes but it needs to be because it’s partly about the adjustment to a slower, more relaxed way of life. There’s an urban vs. rural thing going on, as well as a simple love story. Does Annie want to give up her hectic city life with the husband (Sam Neill) she’s not sure she loves? Or does she want to hook up with the country cowboy whose “whispering” has had such powerful effects on her and her daughter?

If there’s a criticism, it’s that Robert Redford – director as well as star – idealises himself in the role. He’s too good to be true: a super-sensitive genius with horses, but also wonderful with kids. He likes classical music and he’s full of wisdom. And despite being outdoors all day while working with animals, his jeans never get muddy. It’s very telling that the plot of the film deviates from that of the source novel, which offers a more complex set of events. If he could have allowed himself just one character flaw (short temper/heavy drinker, etc), he would have been so much more believable. Instead, he’s somewhat sanitised along with the plot.

Kristin Scott Thomas is intended to be unappealingly uptight and she succeeds a little too well in that, being downright unbearable for the first half of the story.

Overall, it’s worth watching for the huge landscapes and the gradual unfolding of several sets of relationships. I felt engaged, but not particularly moved.

The Killing (1956)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick, this is a brilliantly tense crime thriller. An elaborate racetrack robbery has been planned by ex-con Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden). Each of his team has a part to play before they can split the $2 million they aim to steal. But it all goes off the rails when one of the gang (Elisha Cook Jr.) tells his wife (Marie Windsor) about the plan and she tries to double-cross him by bringing her lover into the arrangement.

Although he’s a crook, Johnny seems so reasonable and easy to like that you find yourself rooting for him and hoping that he can escape with the money and his beloved Fay (Coleen Gray).

I really liked the narration by Art Gilmore, which describes events in parallel and employs clever time shifts. You find out what was happening concurrently and sometimes what happened just before the scene you are witnessing. The film is brilliantly shot, too, with elaborate use of shadows and light to create atmosphere.

The Graduate (1967)

Classic romantic comedy-drama directed by Mike Nichols and adapted from the 1963 novel by Charles Webb. It was the most successful film of 1967.

Dustin Hoffman stars as the graduate of the title. He returns to his family’s California home after completing his college degree but is uncomfortable with his parents’ expectations for him. He’s bored, too, and begins an affair with one of their friends (Anne Bancroft). This becomes more complicated when he then starts to fall for her daughter (Katharine Ross).

It’s an intelligent script that satirises the wealthy middle-class lifestyles of the time and makes the most of the social awkwardness Hoffman delivers so well.

The music, by Simon & Garfunkel, is extremely pretty and somehow suits the narrative perfectly, even though only ‘Mrs. Robinson’ was specifically written for the film.

I always liked the closing seconds, which are downbeat and not at all what you might have expected.