Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Remarkable adaptation of the popular stage musical by Norman Jewison, shot in a way that still seems fresh and lively. There are so many good things about this film...

The songs are strong and memorable. Plus, they work with and within the narrative. They aren’t merely irrelevant add-ons, as is often the case in lesser musicals. 

Topol’s warm, well-rounded character is extremely watchable. It's difficult to imagine anyone else filling the part so well or being so funny. He’s rolling his eyes and fourth-walling it constantly. And the device of him talking to God offers a useful way for him to directly address the audience and bring us into his inner world. 

Even when the film embraces dream sequences, it works.

Julie & Julia (2009)

Nora Ephron’s comedy-drama tells the story of two cooks:

• in the 1950s, we follow the fortunes of Julia Child, an eccentric American, who popularised French cuisine in the USA. 

• in the early 2000s, we see New Yorker Julie Powell being inspired by Child’s book to cook all of its 524 recipes in just one year – and blog about the experience. 

It’s a curious biopic in that neither of the women meet. Nor are their individual stories especially noteworthy. But the way the film alternates between their two lives really works. 

Meryl Streep effectively captures Child’s manner. I thought she was hamming it up ludicrously, but a look at archive footage of Child reveals that her strange exclamations and lurching around are an accurate impersonation. Only the accent (not American enough) slightly lets it down. Amy Adams is extremely charming, giving off a vulnerability and emotional depth that makes it very easy to identify with her. 

Stanley Tucci, and Chris Messina play the two husbands. The former is especially strong as the diplomat continually being relocated. It’s refreshing that his love for Childs is so pure and uncomplicated.

The Notebook (2004)

Summer 1940: a young couple meet at a South Carolina carnival and begin an intense relationship. She’s from a wealthy family and her parents don’t want her associating with “trash” in the form of this poor lumberyard worker. 

Present day: an old man reads a romance story to an old woman with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. Inevitably, we soon twig that they are the same couple and that the notebook he reads from is her journal. 

There are quite a few problems with this flashback device:

• despite being asked to accept this contrivance, I never once believed it was the same couple.

• more troublingly, the Alzheimer’s plot simply doesn’t work. It’s never explained how Allie can remember the story Noah is telling her, nor who she thinks he is for the majority of the time (i.e., when she’s forgotten he’s her husband). 

• the “miracle” ending is, frankly, ludicrous. 

The highly watchable scenes with the younger version of the couple seem to have greater emotional intelligence, almost as if two different films have been bolted together. Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams have a degree of chemistry together, and they exchange some good lines about the complexity of relationships that confirm this isn’t merely a dumb script. Plus, Joan Allen and Sam Shepard convince as Allie’s mother and Noah’s father. 

There’s a sweetness to the summer romance and you do find yourself rooting for the young couple. But it could have been a far better film if we’d left them in the past.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) works at Life magazine as a “negative assets manager”. His world is humdrum but he daydreams incredible and heroic scenarios, often involving a colleague he has a crush on. When the magazine is threatened with closure and their jobs are endangered, Walter needs to locate a missing photographic negative for the image that will feature on the magazine’s final front cover. This takes him on a journey to Greenland, Iceland and Afghanistan in search of a photojournalist (Sean Penn), as his actual existence becomes as remarkable as his fantasy life. 

Stiller is charming as the “dull” worker who inevitably becomes a rugged hero. Kristen Wiig is hugely appealing as the woman he falls for (and she even gets to sing him David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”). Shirley MacLaine is a nicely rounded character as his mother. 

This rousing film is funny in places (such as Stiller’s ongoing conversation with a dating agency) and heartwarming in others (you root for him to keep his job and win over the girl). Often it looks like a mobile-phone advert (vivid colours, exotic locations, emotive music), but oddly that works because the idealised escapism of unreality is a central theme. 

It’s unusual, rewarding and refreshing.

Another Year (2010)

This heartbreaking domestic drama by Mike Leigh focuses on a fundamentally decent but rather self-satisfied suburban English couple, Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), and their various relationships. We get to know Gerri’s troubled work colleague Mary (Lesley Manville), Tom’s unhealthy, unhappy old friend Ken (Peter Wight), Tom’s widowed brother Ronnie (David Bradley) and their son Joe (Oliver Maitman). 

Although there are flashes of humour, a bleak thread of tragedy runs through it. Lesley Manville’s acting is astonishing as she expertly conveys a lonely desperation. It’s very rare that you see a performance that seems so incredibly real. Every facial expression counts. Even the way she holds her wine glass (there’s a lot of wine in this film) serves as a reflection of her inner suffering.

The Post (2017)

I’m not much of a Spielberg fan, as documented elsewhere, but I bought this without realising he was involved. 

It tells the story of how the Washington Post acquired and published the Pentagon Papers, which incriminated the US government in their handling of the Vietnam War. Meryl Streep plays Katharine Graham, who owns the newspaper. Tom Hanks plays Ben Bradlee, its editor. 

Hanks is terrific, giving one of his most convincing performances. I really believed in his character, rather than merely thinking “there goes Tom Hanks again” (as is usually the case). Streep was less impressive, perhaps because there’s too much of Graham being weakly indecisive in the first half before she suddenly finds her mojo and seems to become a different character in the second. In reality, it surely can’t have been that straightforward or simplistic. Likewise, the connection to Watergate at the very end seems abruptly and conveniently bolted on, while other threads are left dangling. What happened to Daniel Ellsberg (played by Matthew Rhys), who first leaked the papers? And what happened to Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), the Secretary of Defense, who was friends with Graham at the time of the leak?

The Post is interesting because of the historical moments it alludes to, but it’s difficult to accept it as an accurate account of events. And there’s something mannered and stilted about the way it’s filmed that prevents it ever becoming truly engrossing.

Something’s Gotta Give (2003)

Silly but amiable rom-com directed by Nancy Meyers. 

Harry Sanborn (Jack Nicholson) is a womaniser in his sixties who only dates women half his age. Then he meets his girlfriend’s mother, the successful playwright Erica Barry (Diane Keaton), and discovers a deeper connection that surprises him. 

Keanu Reeves is passable but underdeveloped as the doctor who also falls for Keaton. Frances McDormand is oddly underused as Keaton’s sister. And Amanda Peet is the weak link as Keaton’s daughter, with a narrative arc that’s all over the place. For example, she’s distraught to learn that her father (Paul Michael Glaser) intends to remarry, but then this is never mentioned again. Indeed, Glaser’s character seems to have been pretty much edited out of the film – or never written into it in the first place. 

In some ways it’s as formulaic as its title, with daft slapstick and several improbable moments. But Nicholson and Keaton are such pros at this kind of thing that they make the most of the flimsy material and it ends up being highly watchable.

The Ice Storm (1997)

Superb drama directed by Ang Lee and adapted from Rick Moody’s novel. It details the interwoven fortunes of two neighbouring families in Connecticut across the Thanksgiving weekend of 1973. They are members of the wealthy middle-class, with designer homes and seemingly everything they could wish for, but somehow they have lost their way.

The cast is superb. Kevin Kline plays Ben Hood, a father of two who’s having an affair with his friend and neighbour’s wife (Sigourney Weaver). Bored and restless, the two couples have troubled children too – perhaps unsurprisingly. Everything comes to a head on one dramatic, frozen night, as the fractures in their marriages and issues relating to the children’s insecurities seem to point towards a horrifying and inevitable conclusion.

It’s harrowing stuff – more so than I remembered from seeing it at the cinema in 1997. 

Another disturbing thought: in 2021 we are as far from 1997 as 1997 was from 1973.

Funny Lady (1975)

Barbra Streisand is charming and endearing as Fanny Brice in this colourful sequel to Funny Girl (1968). I preferred it to that earlier film, as it seems looser and more playful. Brice is struggling to get over her marriage to Nick (Omar Sharif), but falls in love with impresario Billy Rose (James Caan).

There’s plenty of comedy and the script is sharp. The interplay between Streisand and Caan is especially watchable, even if you can never quite believe in their romance. Then again, that may be the point: these characters are rivals rather than soulmates.

The film slightly loses its way in the second half, becoming more of a conventional musical. The point at which Barbra sings from a small biplane is just ludicrous. Likewise, her attempt to sabotage a theatrical rehearsal in a swimming pool by clowning around in the water doesn’t really work as a scene or ring true with the story we’ve started to believe. Another oddity is Roddy McDowall cast as her gay friend Bobby. He hangs around and doesn’t say much in a way that suggests the film doesn’t need him at all.

But at her best, Streisand is hugely charismatic and when she gets a chance to really act – as she does in a few scenes – the results are impressive.

Frances Ha (2012)

Directed by Noah Baumbach, this is a poignant comedy-drama about friendship, growing up and loneliness.

Greta Gerwig stars as a 27-year-old New Yorker trying to find her way in life. We follow Frances as she flits between jobs and apartments, unsure of what she should do with herself. The common threads are her wish to be a dancer and her unconditional love for her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner). 

It’s charming and often very funny, but deeply melancholy too. It’s shot in black and white, and the street scenes of New York (and briefly Paris) look stunning. There’s a wonderful scene in which she runs across the streets to the sounds of “Modern Love” by David Bowie. 

It seems to be highly influenced by Woody Allen (see Annie Hall and Manhattan), but it has greater emotional depth. Gerwig is incredibly believable and endearing.

Unlike so many films, Frances Ha stayed with me for quite a while afterwards.

La Dolce Vita (1960)

Federico Fellini’s startling, iconic drama seems hugely innovative in terms of structure and subject matter. 

Rather than one linear plot, we see a series of connected episodes. Brilliantly, these episodes dovetail with the fact that the protagonist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) is a journalist. We observe what he observes across a few days and nights living and working in Rome. 

The section starring Anita Ekberg as the Swedish-American film star Sylvia (including the famous moment at the Trevi Fountain) is especially vivid. 

Its commentary on the invasive role of the media and paparazzi (the word itself comes from this film’s character Paparazzo, played by Walter Santesso) seems ahead of its time. 

It can be interpreted many ways. There are flashes of surreal humour and darker undercurrents – sometimes cleverly combined, such as a segment dedicated to a sighting of the Madonna by two children.

There’s also an appearance by Nico, looking younger and more radiant than you ever thought she could.