Their Finest (2016)

Comedy drama.

A writer named Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) is hired by the Ministry of Information in 1940 to help create propaganda films during World War II. She faces sexism and other setbacks, has to deal with the ego of star actor Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy), and develops an up-and-down creative relationship with her co-writer Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin). 

It’s subtle and witty, with the film-within-a-film aspect working extremely well. Initially it has the feel of a “Sunday night TV drama”, but it acquires depth as it develops. Arterton is excellent, conveying an emotional range that you might not expect after seeing her brief appearance as MI6 agent Strawberry Fields in the James Bond film Quantum of Solace.

21 Grams (2003)

Powerful and disturbing drama directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Danny Huston.

The plot interweaves the lives of several characters, told with extensive flashbacks. The mixed-up chronology can be challenging – it might have worked better in linear sequence – but the material is harrowing in any order. The relentlessly dark subject matter includes alcoholism, drug addiction, bereavement, born-again religion, relationship separation and terrible psychological anguish. 

Del Toro, Penn and Watts are all excellent, tackling extremely difficult scenes. It’s searing, gut-wrenching storytelling that is quite painful to watch. 

It’s visually striking, too. The colour and graininess of the film changes with the mood and tone of the events, but overall there’s very little lightness or hope offered.

Deliverance (1972)

A masterpiece. This is a survival thriller directed by John Boorman, and adapted by James Dickey from his 1970 novel. 

It stars Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox as four friends who take a disastrous canoe trip in the northern Georgia wilderness before the river is dammed and an entire community is erased. 

It works on multiple levels, like all great art. There’s a theme about poverty and the dispossessed – an entire band of society with no voice and no rights is abandoned and eradicated. Plus, there’s an ecological theme: we can never truly master the environment. There are also various moral questions that arise from their encounters with crazed locals. 

There’s a wonderful and poignant soundtrack. The film is beautifully shot. The characters are extremely well drawn. The dialogue is believable. The acting is uniformly strong. The storytelling is lucid. It’s moving, gripping and profound.

Ronin (1998)

Woeful action thriller directed by John Frankenheimer and written by John David Zeik and David Mamet. 

Robert De Niro stars as one of a team of special operatives working in France, hoping to seize a special suitcase from a super-criminal. But, inevitably, there are double-crossings and other complications... 

It’s deeply odd. The directing is off, somehow, with strangely framed shots and stilted camerawork lingering on the wrong details. Whenever someone is portrayed as waiting, they are forced to sit and sip coffee. That soon stands out as a conspicuous, awkward directorial tic. People just can’t stop drinking coffee in this film. There’s a kind of flatness that comes from a below-average script and actors who don’t believe in the lines they’re speaking. Jean Reno and Sean Bean have a degree of presence, but unfortunately they don’t have fleshed-out characters. Even De Niro is clearly struggling to rise above the shoddy material. 

The “Ronin” concept falls flat, with forced references to Japanese warrior culture not really working at all. It looks cheap, and it’s amazingly dull for a film with so many high-speed car chases. Parts of it are so ridiculous that it becomes laugh-out-loud funny. 

The music is intrusive and ill-judged – for example, when a “romantic” theme is matched to a dramatic scene. 

All in all, a total mess that should be regarded as a set text for film students wanting to learn how not to make a thriller.

Magnum Force (1973)

Vigilante action thriller, with Clint Eastwood reprising the role of Harry Callahan from the original Dirty Harry film. This time he’s investigating a series of murders of criminals in San Francisco by a traffic cop (played by David Soul). 

Directed by Ted Post, it looks great, with imaginatively and intelligently framed shots. There are gorgeous old American cars and luxurious open spaces. 

There’s an excellent soundtrack by Lalo Schifrin.

French Kiss (1995)

Lame, tepid rom-com that’s neither romantic nor funny. 

Meg Ryan plays Kate, an extremely annoying American living in Canada. She flies to France after her oddly charmless fiancée ditches her for a French “goddess”. Kevin Kline plays Luc, a small-time French crook who offers to assist Kate in getting back her fiancée, but who – inevitably – falls in love with her. 

There’s a good idea for a film in there somewhere, but the characters’ actions simply don’t ring true. Also, the convoluted “crime” sub-plot fizzles out somewhat. You see a few French locations, but it doesn’t even work as a “tourist brochure” kind of film. It’s a teeny bit racist, too. 

It’s badly in need of a sharper, wittier script to make more of Ryan and Kline’s considerable talents.

The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017)

When Warsaw Zoo is attacked by the Nazis at the start of World War II, zookeeper Jan Zabinski (Johan Heldenbergh) and his wife Antonina (Jessica Chastain) are unable to save the animals, but manage to rescue and protect hundreds of Polish Jews from the Germans. 

It’s a powerful and moving story – especially given that it’s based on real events. Chastain is superb, as is Daniel Brühl as Lutz Heck, Hitler's chief zoologist, who develops an uneasy connection with Antonina. 

It’s unbearably tense in places and harrowing in others.

Sweet Charity (1969)

Musical directed by Bob Fosse and written by Neil Simon, adapted from the stage musical. 

Shirley MacLaine plays Charity, a dancer who dreams of falling in love. She’s unlucky with a thief and a film star, but then she gets trapped in a lift with the nervous Oscar Lindquist (John McMartin), who she eventually comes to believe really loves her. 

It’s extremely unusual. It's big on colour, with the bright pinks and purples of the Batman TV series. There's a bizarre, bolted-on psychedelic interlude featuring Sammy Davis Jr. And there's an intriguing use of stills amid the action. 

I was disappointed with the ending, and it was interesting to find an alternative – and superior – conclusion as one of the DVD extras.

The Queen (2006)

Drama directed by Stephen Frears about the Queen’s reaction to the death of Princess Diana in 1997, and the new Prime Minister’s role in her subsequent actions. 

Helen Mirren plays the monarch. Martin Sheen plays Tony Blair, brilliantly capturing something of his personality. 

It’s subtle and surprisingly funny, working as social history, gentle satire and an insightful character study.

Of course we’ll never know how accurate it is in terms of the private conversations within the palace, but the general trend of events is backed up by actual news footage (as well as our memories of living through that remarkable period).

Milk (2008)

Biopic of Harvey Milk, who campaigned for gay rights in California until his assassination in 1978. 

Sean Penn is superb in the main role, with a fascinating twitchy energy and a set of mannerisms that make him incredibly watchable. Josh Brolin is excellent as Dan White, a San Francisco city supervisor and political rival. 

The assassination is referenced right at the start, so you know what’s going to happen. As such it’s painful to watch the film proceed to its inevitable conclusion.

Philadelphia (1993)

Directed by Jonathan Demme, this is an emotional drama starring Tom Hanks as Andy Beckett, a lawyer who is dismissed from his firm for being a gay man with AIDS. Denzel Washington plays Joe Miller, the lawyer who represents him in court. 

The drama comes from two parallel threads. The first details Andy’s swift decline in health. The second deals with Joe having to work through his homophobia and put aside his prejudices to do what he knows is right. Washington is excellent at portraying that conflict. You can see his mixed feelings in every scene, as he slowly comes round to what his conscience is telling him. 

Parts of the film are unusually shot, and especially a section in which Andy enters a heightened state while listening to opera. Later, in the courtroom, unusual camera angles are employed to show his faltering consciousness.

It’s to Demme’s credit that he doesn’t opt for a tragic feel to the inevitable ending. Instead, he introduces a celebratory quality based on the sense of community and family love that the film has successfully established around Andy. 

There’s a strong soundtrack, mixing classical music with new songs written for the film by Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young.

Freaky Friday (1976)

Excellent body-swap comedy from Disney. 

A mother and daughter switch roles, with comedic results. Jodie Foster plays the daughter, while Barbara Harris plays the mother. There’s plenty of silly slapstick, as pretty much everything goes wrong for both of them, but the film also makes some interesting points about gender roles (Annabel realises that her idealised father is actually a chauvinist pig) and the expectations of US society in the 1970s. 

Foster is fine enough at playing her own mother, but Harris is superb as her own daughter – really making you believe she's a teenager trapped in an adult's body.

There’s a superb theme song, too – "I’d Like to Be You for a Day" – although there's some confusion about whether or not it's sung by the two female leads.

Layer Cake (2004)

Brit crime thriller starring Daniel Craig as a drug dealer who – just as he’s about to retire – becomes wrapped up in a dangerous world of gangsters. 

It’s highly stylised, but oddly unsatisfying. The twists and turns of the plot are difficult to follow. And some parts seem clichéd, such as the Scorsese-lite touch of using “Gimme Shelter” on the soundtrack. It’s violent and nasty, too. 

Michael Gambon is an impressively horrid villain, and Daniel Craig is always watchable, but there’s a shallowness that makes it hard to like. It aims for “gritty” but only achieves “depressing”.

Scent of a Woman (1992)

A masterpiece quite unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. It’s the very blackest comedy, an extremely moving drama and a fascinating character study. 

A New England preparatory school student Charlie Simms (Chris O’Donnell) is in trouble, after witnessing a rule-breaking prank, and also in need of money. He takes on a curious job: looking after a retired lieutenant colonel (Al Pacino) while his niece is away for the weekend. The colonel is not only blind but also volatile and difficult, and he takes Charles to New York with a somewhat different plan in mind.

Al Pacino is at his very best as the seemingly deranged colonel. His various outbursts are funny and terrifying at the same time. There are some superb scenes, including a tango in a restaurant and a high-speed test-drive of a Ferrari. 

The film surprises with its structure, too. After one emotional peak regarding the colonel’s death wish, there’s another one as Charlie’s future is addressed. This could all have been terribly uneven, but it’s so well done that it works perfectly. 

The script is spot on. The soundtrack by Thomas Newman is appropriate and matches the narrative. Pacino’s presence is incredible.

Calamity Jane (1953)

Google: “The boisterous Calamity Jane Canary, the Wild West heroine, who dresses like a man, helps bring a star attraction to Deadwood and finds love.”

Doris Day is compelling and easy to like as the boisterous heroine in this brassy and colourful musical. Howard Keel is less appealing as Bill Hickok – a low, booming voice but not a great deal of charisma. Allyn Ann McLerie is charming as Katie Brown, the would-be singer and actress whose visit to Deadwood changes their lives. 

It’s lively and energetic. What makes it fascinating is the approach to gender politics. Calamity has to make herself “acceptable” to men by wearing a pretty dress and getting away from “female thinking”. It’s possibly the most sexist film I’ve ever seen.