Keanu Reeves, I must apologise. For years, like other film critics, I cast aspersions on your acting talent, belittled your intellect, and cracked jokes about your name, which means “cool breeze over the mountains” in Hawaiian. Only now do I realise I was foolish and misguided. That YouTube video of you giving up your seat on the New York City metro is only the latest evidence that, onscreen and off, you are awesome.

You were 50 last year, but wear it so well there is now a “Keanu Reeves is a vampire” internet meme to set alongside the “Sad Keanu” one from a few years ago. But it was ever thus. Born in Beirut but brought up in Toronto, you were already in your twenties when you played a teenager in River’s Edge (1986), faced with the dilemma of whether or not to snitch on a schoolmate who murders his girlfriend.

Your first cult success was as Theodore “Ted” Logan, the bodacious airhead destined to bring about worldwide peace and harmony through the music of his band Wyld Stallyns (sic) in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its even more excellent sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. But from then on, in the eyes of many, you WERE Ted. “It was clear that Keanu was actually very like his Bill & Ted character in real life,” Monique Roffey of The Independent wrote after meeting you in 1994. “A handsome surf blockhead who got lucky.”

Between Bill & Teds, you played your first action hero – “The name’s Johnny Utah!” – in Kathryn Bigelow’s hilarious surfer-heist movie Point Break. “He’s an actor willing to take risks,” said Bigelow. As if to prove her point, you next played a bisexual street hustler in My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant’s modish riff on Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 2. “Keanu is really well-read,” said Van Sant, “but he doesn’t think he is. And he’s very intelligent.” Unfortunately I failed to notice this, and wrote, condescendingly, “Reeves, bless his cotton socks, seems out of his depth playing a two-faced character who bears no resemblance whatsoever to Bill or Ted.”

John Wick.

The consensus that you were an airhead was only confirmed when you played Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Coppola, who said, “He’s a very magical boy. He worked really hard.” Not hard enough for us critics, alas. How we scoffed as you wrestled with the Queen’s English – “I know where the bar-stard sleeps!” To be fair, your accent was no worse than Anthony Hopkins’s hammy Van Helsing or Gary Oldman’s hissy Slav – it was an all-round Bad Accent Movie. But you were an easier target for our derision.

You were already broadening your range, but all we critics saw was Ted. You played your first villain, blackhearted Don Ted, sorry, Don John in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (“I’d pay to see Keanu Reeves in leather trousers and I think a lot of other people would as well,” said Branagh), and wearing kohl and hair extensions as Siddhartha in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Ted, sorry, Little Buddha, which made us scoff all the more.

We stopped scoffing when we saw you in Speed. “He’s an action hero for the nineties,” said its director, Jan de Bont. “What makes him stand out is that he dares to let emotions show. We’ve had enough of the cartoony type action heroes.” But I still had to get my little dig in, describing you as “cuteness personified with his buzz-cut hair, and tight white T-shirt, and the sort of slightly baffled expression that I see on my cat when she can’t quite remember where the cat-flap is.” Miaow.

You turned down an 11 million dollar paycheck for Speed 2: Cruise Control to play Hamlet (to mostly respectful reviews) at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg. But when you played the leading role in Johnny Mnemonic, adapted by cyberpunk godfather William Gibson from his own story, no critic could resist the temptation to be snide about the delicious irony of surfer-dude Ted playing a mnemonic courier with three billion megabytes of information in his head. “I can’t think of an actor who could use a brain implant more,” quipped Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly.

We snarked about your minor weight gain in Chain Reaction, but had to eat our words when you played the sleekest computer nerd in history in The Matrix (1999). There were signs, too, that your IQ was nowhere near as low as we’d been painting it; for The Matrix, you were paid $10 million plus 10% of the gross, which rose to $15 million and 15% for the two sequels. But you said, “Money is the last thing I think about. I could live on what I have already made for the next few centuries,” and gave $80 million to the crew.

Street Kings.

You alternate blockbusters like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Constantine (in which you were heinously miscast) with romances like The Lake House, hardboiled character roles such as the one in Street Kings, indies like Henry’s Crime, and experiments like Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly. You’ve been getting respect from film buffs for Side by Side (2012), a documentary about digital film you produced and presented, and from martial arts fans for your directing debut, Man of Tai Chi.

47 Ronin may have been an absurd effects-laden bastardisation of the traditional Japanese story, and may have triggered internet debate as to whether your English-Hawaiian-Chinese-Irish-Portuguese ancestry contains sufficient Asian blood to justify your playing the “half-breed” hero. But you know what? I don’t care. So long as you’re in it, I’ll go and see it. And John Wick, in which you play a former hitman who comes out of retirement to go after the mobster who kills your puppy, more than repays our devotion with its terrific scenes of combat (cutting back on the CGI and hyper-editing so you can actually see what’s going on, which is a novelty these days) and amusing worldbuilding (a hotel for hitmen!). It’s a blast.

You have repeatedly reinvented yourself, pushed your limits, bounced back from turkeys and critical derision, and had a more extraordinary and wide-ranging career than most of your contemporaries. Sheila Johnston, author of a Keanu Reeves biography, concurs: “He’s done an amazing job of sustaining his career, keeping his integrity and seeing off all the detractors who thought he was a flash in the pan.”

The tabloids don’t know what to make of you, since you keep your private life private. You’re polite and affable in TV interviews, but your interviewers talk twice as much as you do. But that zenlike reserve, once assumed to be an indicator of nothing going on underneath, now seems increasingly sage in the age of incontinent social media, selfies, and ceaseless psychobabble.

And you still use public transport. And give up your seat. You, sir, are a class act.

This piece was first posted on the Telegraph website in December 2013.

Critical clichés come and go. Twenty years ago, I noted that “an absolute gem”, “razor-sharp dialogue” and “reminiscent of the world of David Lynch” were all current, and I daresay those lines still crop up from time to time. Today we get a lot of mileage out of “makes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre look like a Sunday School picnic” and the ever-popular title + drug formula (“this movie is like Die Hard on crack”).

But of all the clichés regularly trotted out in the 21st century, surely the most heinous and overused is “guilty pleasure”.

The phrase has history. In 1978, the American magazine Film Comment launched a series of articles called “Guilty Pleasures” in which eminent film-makers or critics listed favourite films which – at that time – fell outside the rigid critical consensus of what were deemed by eminent cultural commentators to be “good” or worthwhile. In the first of the series, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, “The notion of the ‘good bad’ film has, I think, just about had its day. It implies a kind of apology – as if in an ideal universe all films would be made by Bergman or Herzog.”

Hence, Ebert confessed to admiration for “Russ Meyer’s overlooked masterpiece” Mudhoney, and Last House on the Left, Wes Craven’s slasher reworking of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. A few issues later, Martin Scorsese admitted to liking not just Howard Hawks’ critical favourites, such as Bringing Up Baby or Rio Bravo, but his kitschy (albeit glorious) Land of the Pharaohs (“I watch this movie over and over again”). Today all these films have their apologists – indeed you would be hard-pressed to find a film that didn’t have its defenders. But in the 1970s sticking up for such titles would have raised a few chuckles in high-minded film study circles.

Then in 1983, Film Comment invited John Waters, director of such deliberately tasteless cult favourites as Pink Flamingos, to contribute to the series. And his list blew the entire concept out of the water. “I blab on about how much I love films like Dr Butcher, M.D. or My Friends Need Killing, but what really shames me is that I’m also secretly a fan of what is unfortunately known as the ‘art film’.”

The Last House on the Left (1972)

Waters’ secret viewing vices, in other words, turned out to be the films of critics’ darlings Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Marguerite Duras. “Miss Duras makes the kind of films that get you punched in the mouth for recommending them to even your closest friends,” wrote Waters. “Her films are maddeningly boring but really quite beautiful.”

But his selection suggested there is no such thing as high or low art in cinema. There’s not even good or bad, let alone “good bad films” or films “so good they’re bad”. Basically, there are films that succeed in engaging your heart or mind (or even both) in some way, and then there are others that send you to sleep. It’s not interesting whether or not you like something – what’s interesting is why.

As early as 1986, Robin Wood poured cold water on the whole idea of Guilty Pleasures in his book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, writing that he found the feature “an entirely deplorable institution… The attitude fostered is essentially evasive (including self-evasive) and anti-critical: ‘Isn’t this muck – to which of course I’m really so superior – delicious?'”

I should confess that I have used the words “guilty pleasure” while writing about films as diverse as Cocktail, Knight Moves, Disclosure, Fortress 2: Re-Entry, Basic Instinct 2, Deep Blue Sea and The Devil Wears Prada. But lately I’ve been steering clear of the term, because I now find it embarrassing. It’s a yellow-bellied euphemism, and its use smacks of feeble-minded prevarication. It says more about the user than the film.

Why not say instead, “A film I’m too insecure in my own judgements to admit to having enjoyed on its own merits.” Or “A film everyone except me hates.” Or “A film I somehow feel is beneath me, even though I found it a lot of fun, because it’s not serious-minded drama with a redeeming social message.”

In any case, unless you’re a devout Catholic and are obliged by your religion to own up to your sins in the confession box, why on earth should a pleasure be “guilty”? Why not just enjoy it for what it is? Time for a moratorium on Guilty Pleasure.

ADDENDUM: These are screengrabs of Roger Ebert’s Guilty Pleasures article in the July/August 1978 issue of Film Comment. I am posting them here purely to illustrate the article. Copyright, of course, belongs to Film Comment and to the estate of Roger Ebert, and if either of these parties wishes me to remove these images I will gladly do so. (If Film Comment ever decided to compile their Guilty Pleasures articles into a book, I am sure it would sell wonderfully well.)

This piece (without the addendum) was first posted on the Telegraph website in April 2014.

The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012)

My linguistic role model has long been the hitman hero of Trevanian’s wonderful 1979 novel Shibumi, who alleviates the boredom of solitary confinement in a Japanese jail by teaching himself Basque, a notoriously difficult language, from a children’s book. Conveniently forgetting this character was also a Master of Go and could kill someone with a pencil, and that I wasn’t and couldn’t, I somehow got it into my head that learning a foreign language was simply a question of willpower.

After two years of studying Flemish (I live in Belgium, so that’s not quite as insane as it sounds), I decided it was time to take the plunge and watch Belgium’s 2014 submission to the Academy Awards in the best foreign language category, without subtitles. Felix Van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown, set in Ghent, is the heartbreaking story of Didier, a ukelele player, and Elise, a tattoo artist, whose six year old daughter is dying of cancer. How hard could it be to understand?

Pretty damn hard, as it turned out. Flemish is the Belgian version of Dutch, and even after two years of sporadic exposure to the language (I live in a part of Brussels where French is predominant), the film’s dialogue still sounded to my ears like the distant gargling of Scottish drunks. Beyond the formulaic pleasantries, the only thing I understood was the swearing, and then only because everyone swore in anglo-saxon. So I threw in the towel and turned on the subtitles – only to find those were in Flemish too.

My reading is slightly better than my oral, so I managed to limp to the finish line, only slightly hampered by the subtitles going out of focus whenever I got something in my eye, which happened quite a lot during the hospital scenes. As expected, The Broken Circle Breakdown was desperately sad, but brilliantly acted and beautifully filmed, with a super Belgian bluegrass soundtrack. And I did pick up some new vocabulary – “klootzak” (which means bastard) and “kutwijf” (which, according to my Van Dale dictionary, means “fucking bitch”).

But how useful are films when you’re trying to learn a foreign language? One of the reasons given for native Dutch speakers’ remarkable proficiency in English is that – with the exception of cartoons for very small children – Hollywood movies and British and American TV series on Dutch and Flemish television, and in cinemas, are always subtitled, never dubbed. It worked for them, so why not for me? Or would all that foreign dialogue go in one ear and straight out of the other, without ever lodging in the middle, in the brain? Or does it only work if you’re still at the sort of tender age when learning comes more or less automatically?

According to the English-as-a-second-language blog English Attack!, subtitles, even if they’re in the same language as the dialogue, are not helpful at all, because “reading and listening constitute two very different brain functions” and provide a crutch that doesn’t exist in real-life situations. On the other hand, I wasn’t getting on too well with The Broken Circle Breakdown till I added the subs.

De helaasheid der dingen (2009)

Perhaps the solution is to watch the same film repeatedly till you can do without the subtitles and quote chunks of dialogue by heart. In which case, I would have to find a film more lighthearted than The Broken Circle Breakdown, or indeed Belgium’s last Oscar nominee, Bullhead, starring the extraordinary Matthias Schoenaerts, and even more downbeat than The Broken Circle Breakdown, if that’s possible. Or Van Groeningen’s last film, De Helaasheid der Dingen, which translates as The Misfortunates (I prefer the French title – La merditude des choses, literally The Shittiness of Things – which could almost be a generic all-purpose banner heading for Belgian movies), and is all about how awful it was growing up in a fictional town in Flanders. Actually this last one is very funny and features some of the worst mullets in movie history, but the humour is darkest gallows variety, probably best in small doses.

We anglophones, of course, are at a disadvantage, since most of the movies that come our way are already in English, but even Hollywood can cough up occasional nuggets of foreign vocab. I first learnt the Spanish word for “nothing” when James Spader sneered “The girl was, is and will always be – nada!” in Pretty in Pink. And how many anglophones learnt their French swearing from The Merovingian’s “Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d’enculé de ta mère” in The Matrix Reloaded?

Just how necessary is dialogue anyway? I recently made a point of going to see Shaun the Sheep Movie in London, since I wasn’t sure I would be able to find a subtitled version when it opened in Belgium – only to find it was pretty much a silent movie with sound effects. And silent movies invariably got by with just a few intertitles, as did Blancanieves (2012), Pablo Berger’s exquisite quasi-silent reworking of the Snow White story, which only the terminally stupid could find confusing.

But even films with dialogue you don’t understand can be enjoyed on at least a visual level, particularly when there’s more to them than people sitting around in rooms talking. The first time I saw Blue Velvet it was dubbed into Italian – a language with which I had only the vaguest acquaintance, but a subsequent viewing of the original English version confirmed that very little of it had gone over my head. When I lived in Japan I regularly watched Japanese films without subtitles, though admittedly these tended to be, for example, anime in which witches were burnt at the stake, or action-thrillers in which bank robbers sexually molested their hostages; I don’t suppose I would have got very far with an Ozu-type talkfest – though Ozu’s films would themselves probably be worth studying for their visual composition alone.

Anyhow, my next linguistic project is clear. It’s tackling the boxed set of Raúl Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon – 272 minutes in Portuguese, which I accidentally bought with Dutch subtitles instead of English ones. Sure to be a doddle.

Blancanieves (2012)

This piece was first posted on the Telegraph webside in October 2013. It has since been edited and added to.

The Godfather is great, but The Godfather: Part II is greater. It’s that rare thing – a sequel that doesn’t just match but actually surpasses the original film. Not content with just recycling the same story, it illuminates and elaborates on it, adding a classically tragic dimension by using flashbacks to show the origins of the Corleone family, and then moving forward in time to show that same family ripping itself apart.

Conventional wisdom has it that sequels are inferior to the original films, but we all know there are a few titles that buck the trend. It’s not difficult coming up with a list of them; the hard part is getting everyone to agree with your choices. You’re on safe ground with The Godfather: Part II, which won twice as many Oscars as the first film, or with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, since Star Trek: The Motion Picture had been such a dog’s dinner that the only way to go was up.

But there are plenty of people who will disagree with my contention that Star Wars is inferior on all counts to its first sequel (we’ll draw a veil over the sequel and prequels after that). George Lucas may be a genius as a producer and world-builder, but he can’t write or direct for toffee, so it helped that The Empire Strikes Back (I’m sorry, but I am not going to refer to it by its abominable retroactive retitling, Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back) was made by people who knew their craft, notably Irvin Kershner, a useful if not inspired director, and screenwriters Leigh Brackett (veteran of a couple of Howard Hawks classics) and the up-and-coming Lawrence Kasdan.

It helps, of course, if you’re not as bowled over by the original film as everyone else. Alien was revolutionary in terms of setting and design, but once the creature had burst out of John Hurt’s chest, I found the repetitive way each character gormlessly wandered off to get killed a dreary cliché already done to death by so many horror movies. Aliens, on the other hand, was no longer a horror film but a war movie that grabbed me by the throat and didn’t ease up for the entire 137 minutes.

There are those who prefer Terminator 2: Judgment Day to The Terminator, but I’m not one of them; give me killer Schwarzenegger to the kiddy-friendly version any day – even if the special effects were flashier. I’m not alone in marginally preferring Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 to the original Toy Story, but there are other partialities where I’m certainly in a tiny minority. Perhaps it was the result of lowered expectations, but I found Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Ghostbusters II and The Lost World: Jurassic Park a lot more fun than their predecessors.

Then there are the sequels where a talented director seizes on increased resources to do things he couldn’t afford to do in the lower budget of the original. With Mad Max, George Miller conjured an eye-popping white line nightmare for only 400,000 Australian dollars; but 4.5 million enabled him to add even crazier stunts and an epic quality to Mad Max 2. That 20 minute carmageddon at the climax is surely still the best extended multi-vehicle car chase ever filmed, and if you’ve never seen it in 70mm, you’ve never lived.

Likewise, if Sam Raimi whipped up a colourful orgy of demonic possession for peanuts in The Evil Dead, an increased budget of 3.6 million allowed him to remake it as even bigger, funnier and more splattery Evil Dead II.

For the best sequels, though, you’d have to go back to the first great golden age of Hollywood horror. James Whales’ The Bride of Frankenstein is even weirder and more phantasmagorical than his Frankenstein; they’re both stone-cold classics, but many of us prefer the second film. And while Cat People (1944) is a classic of psychosexual horror, its nominal sequel, Curse of the Cat People, makes me cry like a baby; unlike its predecessor, it’s not a horror film, but a sensitive study of childhood. Just as, 42 years later, Aliens would swap its predecessor’s horror elements for those of a war movie, it switches genres.

Perhaps this is one of the keys to making a sequel that can match its predecessor for quality; not serving up more of the same, but offering something completely different – albeit recycling some of the characters and set in the same fictional landscape.

Then again, maybe this just means it’s not a sequel at all – simply another original film masquerading as one.

This piece was first posted on the Telegraph website in April 2014. It has since been edited, a bit.

Addendum: My Top Ten Sequels:

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Curse of the Cat People (1944)

The Godfather: Part II (1974)

Mad Max 2 (1981)

The Empire Strikes Back (1982)

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

Aliens (1986)

Evil Dead II (1987)

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

Batman Returns (1992)

Toy Story 2 (1999)

Eye (the white building shaped like a spaceship), as seen from my hotel room.

This was my fourth visit to Amsterdam’s Imagine Film Festival, which now seems to have turned into an annual jaunt for me. Comfy seats, well-behaved audiences, friendly staff who are endlessly patient when I try to practise my Dutch on them, and a great selection of genre films from around the world – in short, everything I want from a festival.

For the third time, it was held at Eye, the spectacular space-age building overlooking the IJ Harbour just north of Amsterdam’s Central Station, and easily accessible by a regular (free) ferry service. This year, I had already seen some of the bigger films – It Follows, Ex Machina, Alleluia and Lost River – so tried to pack my weekend with some of the more recherché titles, ones less likely to get a release in Belgium, where I live. Here are the films I saw. I’ve tried to avoid spoilers.

THE FRAME (USA, 2014)

This absorbing meta-fantasy was written and directed by Jamin Winans, who has already amassed something of a cult following for films like Ink (2009). This one was shot in Denver, Colorado, but to this non-American viewer it might have been any big U.S. city, from Los Angeles to Chicago. A thief (David Carranza) and a paramedic (Tiffany Mualem) from separate TV shows find their stories intersecting in mysterious ways, surveyed by a demonic figure (Christopher Soren Kelly) who takes on various guises and tries to prevent them meeting. But the thief’s show is approaching its season finale, and the showrunners are known to favour downbeat endings…

Williams has impressive control of his material, weaving in and out of the different realities in a way that leaves one intrigued rather than confused or irritated. He’s matched by two perfectly calibrated performances from his two leads, who skilfully balance their soap opera performances with real offscreen personalities. As their worlds begin to unravel, the film strikes out into gloriously nutty territory involving an ancient typewriter, Clotho-type threads of fate and a sinister Childcatcher-type figure who drives a squeaky bicycle/barrow through the increasingly unstable cityscape.

Williams stumbles only in the final 20 minutes or so, bludgeoning home his metaphysical themes so repetitively the film outstays its welcome by at least 30 minutes and he risks undoing all the good work of the subtle, intelligent build-up. The word “frame” has several meanings, right? OK, we get it, no need to belabour the point.

HOMESICK (Germany/Austria, 2015)

Jessica (Esther Maria Pietsch) is a highly-strung cello prodigy who moves into a grand old flat in Berlin with her preternaturally patient boyfriend. The pressures of a forthcoming international competition and disputes with their new neighbours gradually tip her over into neurosis and paranoia. The Imagine programme namedrops Michael Haneke, but the guiding influence here is clearly Roman Polanski’s flat-dwelling nightmare trilogy, with Jakob M. Erwa’s domestic psychothriller deliberately incorporating elements of Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant.

It’s elegantly done, with a cool greyish-blue colour palette, bravura performances from Pietsch and Tatja Seibt (unsettlingly ambiguous as the most formidable of the neighbours) and the issue of next-door noise is as fruitful a source of horror-comedy as ever. But Jessica’s descent into full-on loony tunes (signalled from the outset, so this isn’t a spoiler) trundles along overly familiar lines, topped off with a sadly predictable bait-and-switch denouement.

At one point, the young couple even adopts a kitten. I don’t suppose you can guess what happens to it.

BROTHERHOOD OF BLADES aka XIU CHUN DAO (China, 2014)

Lu Yang’s martial arts drama is set in 1627, towards the end of the Ming dynasty, when the young emperor is attempting to wipe out the influence of the eunuch clique. Three low-ranking officers of the imperial secret police are dispatched to kill the clique’s most powerful member, but all three have money problems, resulting in rash action, intrigue aplenty and no end of Doublecrossings-R-Us set in a milieu where corruption is apparently endemic.

The film’s most interesting touch is the characterisation of its three protagonists, who are never merely heroes – they are each of them morally compromised, though they do retain our sympathy, especially when the extent of the manipulations around them is revealed and their predicament appears hopeless. It’s no classic, but the fight scenes are competently staged, and the story barrels along at an energetic pace, with only a few longueurs and a slightly baffling ending, where you can’t work out whether or not someone is supposed to have died.

THE ANSWER (USA, 2015)

No sooner has a nerdy clerk got off with the hot chick at his office than they’ve been framed for the murder of their boss and have to go on the run from mysterious men in black motorcycle helmets. Could events be connected with the extraordinary abilities he has been trying to keep hidden since his childhood in an orphanage?

Iqbal Ahmed’s cheap and cheerful couple-on-the-run-from-aliens has a cheesy 1980s vibe (I found myself thinking the heroine was being played by Sarah Jessica Parker), the saddest ping-pong story ever told, and nice touches such as a secret code hidden in a 20-year-old hand-held Space Invaders-type game. But it overestimates its own amiability, the plot ends up running on the spot, and the film-maker ends up falling back on tired contrivances such as letting the heroine get kidnapped by the not-very-menacing bad guys.

NORWAY aka NORVIGIA (Greece, 2014)

Kudos to Yannis Veslemes – who wrote, directed, co-produced, scored and designed the first Greek vampire movie I’ve ever seen – for depicting his vampires as sleazy old neo-hippy deadbeats instead of following in the modern tendency to show them as glam young überbeings. It’s set in 1984, when a somewhat dissolute Eurotrash vampire called Zano (Vangelis Mourikis in a Rod Stewart wig) rolls up in Athens in search of fun. He finds it (sort of) at the Zardoz Club, hooking up with a femme fatale who ends up taking him on an extended nocturnal trek through the Athenian hinterlands before revealing her hidden agenda.

The last 15 minutes pack in more plot than the rest of the film, which meanders all over the place, but the wayward scenario is peppered with agreeably odd touches: amusingly upfront stylised miniature work, disco-dancing, junkie vampires, some kinky stuff involving gas masks and (I’m informed) a sprinkling of local pop culture references that will be lost on non-Greek viewers. But it’s a true original, worth seeing for a droll punchline.

FROM THE DARK (Ireland, 2014)

For me, the most agreeable surprise of the festival was this Irish horror pic directed by Conor McMahon, best known for the dead clown movie Stitches (which I haven’t seen, though I might seek it out now). Niamh Algar and Stephen Cromwell play a young couple who have the misfortune to get lost in the Irish countryside at almost exactly the same time that a farmer in the vicinity accidentally removes the stake from something buried in the peat. The couple ends up spending the night under siege in a farmhouse, desperately searching for sources of light (smartphones, Zippos, an angle-poise lamp) to fend off a Nosferatu-like creature whose only weakness is an aversion to it.

There’s not a lot of originality here; it’s not a game-changer, and adds nothing to the conventions of vampire cinema other than the idea of Peat-Bog Vampires (who actually behave more like flesh-eating zombies than recent cinema vampires), but it’s snappily paced, well-crafted, efficiently shot and edited on what looks like a tight budget, with smart dialogue establishing the two main personalities, a female character who turns out to be more resourceful than she looks, and some gleefully ironic symbolism as she and her boyfriend fight for survival.

I particularly appreciated a major moment played out entirely in shadow (shades of Nosferatu again) and the Gothic throwback of a heroine with a candelabra. I felt as though I were in the hands of people who loved the genre, and who knew what they were doing.

Probably the worst thing about this film is the generic title, which I am still having trouble remembering.

YOUNG ONES (South Africa/Ireland/USA, 2014)

Jake Paltrow (Gwyneth’s brother, but don’t let that put you off) wrote and directed this slow-moving but polished SF western set in a post-apocalyptic near-future where water has become the most precious commodity. Michael Shannon plays a patriarch who stays loyal to his parched land; Kodi Smit-McPhee (my, how he’s grown) plays his gangling teenage son; Nicholas Hoult is a smooth-talking motorbike-riding huckster with questionable ethics. Elle Fanning rounds out the cast in the underwritten role of Shannon’s rebellious daughter.

There are touches of Mad Max 2 in the design, if not in the action, and the domestic details of this future-world are nicely realised – painted pigeons, dishes cleaned with dirt instead of water. Robots are an everyday reality, but not in an antagonistic Westworld way; when Shannon has to put down the mule he uses to trade with local water-drillers, he replaces it with a mechanical one. And his crippled wife (it’s hinted that her husband was responsible for her injuries) is hooked up to a hi-tech pulley system that enables her to walk during family visits.

The robot mule plays a vital part in the denouement, but otherwise this is a traditional revenge western that will probably be appreciated more by aficionados of that genre than by SF fans. Giles Nuttgen’s dusty-looking desaturated cinematography and Nathan Jones’ score put the finishing touches to the widescreen epic feel.

REVERSAL (USA, 2015)

I like the idea of José Manuel Cravioto’s revenge thriller a lot more than its execution. Tina Ivlev plays Eve, who manages to coldcock the creep (Richard Tyson) who has her chained in his basement, and makes a break for it. This is the point at which many tie-up-and-torture psychothrillers end (the ones that don’t kill off their protagonists, that is) so the prospect of seeing what happens next is intriguing.

Unfortunately, what happens next is that Eve, instead of summoning the emergency services as you or I would do, decides instead to drive around with The Creep tied up in the back of his truck, trying to rescue the other women he has imprisoned in makeshift sex-dungeons in other houses all around town. It’s not inconceivable that she would do this – it’s just that the screenplay never gives her a good reason not to go to the cops, so I spent the rest of the film rolling my eyes at her stupidity, especially when The Creep, whom she has insufficiently restrained, sporadically breaks free and has to be subdued all over again. It seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble to go to, as well as a course of action that threatens to get her killed at any moment.

Some of the female prisoners Eve tries to liberate don’t react in expected ways, which makes it interesting, and The Creep turns out to have not been acting alone; “I’m not the hunter; I’m just the zookeeper.” But the male characters we encounter are so uniformly despicable, Eve behaves so idiotically, and the women (with one exception) are such helpless victims that the scenario becomes tiresome and repetitive, and undercuts any hopes you might have had that this was going to be a rousing slice of female empowerment exploitation. There’s a last-minute twist which has been so heavily telegraphed that it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Brownie points to the film-makers for attempting to tweak the formula, but maybe some female input at the writing stage might have helped? Just a suggestion.

It was shot in North Hollywood, so the settings range from underpopulated desert terrain to indeterminate industrial buildings to sprawling low-rise residential, though the interiors are so samey you suspect most of these were shot in the same place with the furniture rearranged.

EVERLY (USA, 2014)

Did I say “female empowerment exploitation”? Look no further than Joe Lynch’s bloody shoot-em-up, starring Salma Hayek as a woman determined to extricate herself from the clutches of the mob (apparently Yakuza-adjacent, judging by the tattoos and cultural artefacts). Nearly all the action takes place in a luxury apartment-cum-brothel at the top of an apartment block (exteriors were filmed in Rotterdam, interiors in Serbia) as Hayek shoots, hacks and slices her way through a cast of cannon-fodder goons, killer-hookers and oriental torture experts. The film’s catchphrase, repeated by sundry characters, seems to be, “That’s a lot of dead whores,” which isn’t nearly as funny as the film-makers seem to think it is.

Alas, Everly’s motivation is not so much to save her own skin as to preserve that of her small daughter, currently lodged across town with Everly’s mother. It’s here the film drops the ball with excessive harping on maternal feelings. Nothing wrong with having a kid as a plot device, but Everly overeggs the pudding, which is a shame, because Hayek is great as a female John McClane in a vest. Less gushing sentimentality and more pragmatic cynicism wouldn’t have gone amiss.

THE ADMIRAL: ROARING CURRENTS aka MYEONG-RYANG (South Korea, 2014)

The Korean admiral Yi Sun-Shin (1545-1598) is considered by many military history experts to be one of the three most brilliant naval commanders of all time. (The others are Horatio Nelson and Michiel de Ruyter, subject of a recent film – in which the bad guys are the English.) This historical epic from Kim Han-min (War of the Arrows) depicts one of Yi’s most famous feats – defeating an invading Japanese force of 133 warships with only 13 ships at the Battle of Myeongnyang in 1597.

Choi Min-sik, of Oldboy fame, plays the grizzled but wily Yi, who spends most of the first half of the film arguing with pigheaded superiors and jealous peers, and struggling to raise the morale of troops already hammered by defeat. The subtitles were in Dutch so some nuances might have gone over my head – though it didn’t strike me as a very nuanced story. I did learn one excellent new Dutch word, though – schildpadschip. (Literally “turtle-ship” = a heavily armoured precursor to the modern battleship.)

In the film’s second half, we get down to business – the Big Battle Scene in all its CGI splendour. Apart from a heroic spy, the Japanese are uniformly depicted as swaggering bad guys who cheat at duels and use sneaky things like ninjas, snipers and ships laden with explosives. The Korean good guys fight back with rocket-propelled arrows (!), cunning tactics, and knowledge of the local currents, which (according to the movie) sporadically configure themselves into an actual maelstrom.

It’s a lot of fun, particularly if you like big battle scenes, though ultimately not as satisfying as John Woo’s Red Cliff, which had better-written characters and more thrilling intrigue. Everyone in The Admiral: Roaring Currents is a stereotype, including the Admiral himself (though Choi’s natural screen charisma just about makes up for it) and the thrust is unashamedly nationalistic. This approach clearly works, though, since it became the most successful film of all time at the Korean box-office.

It’s worth noting, perhaps, that it was released during the inquiry into the MV Sewol ferry disaster in April 2014, in which 304 passengers died. Captain and crew were charged with abandoning ship and negligent homicide, there was wide-ranging criticism of ferry regulations and rescue services, owners were prosecuted, offices were raided and the Prime Minister of South Korea resigned in a case that traumatised the nation. Under the circumstances, you can see why South Korean audiences might want to seek consolation in a more glorious nautical episode from their past.

Helen Mirren and Robert Addie in Excalibur (1981)

Filming began last month on Knights of the Round Table: King Arthur, first in a projected six-film franchise based on the King Arthur legends. Even if you have doubts about the film’s director, Guy Ritchie (whose Sherlock Holmes movies were lively enough) this is surely good news, for whereas television seems to be broadcasting a new Camelot-set mini-series every other month, the mythology is curiously underrepresented in the cinema.

Which is odd, considering there’s enough action, romance and magic to forge an entire genre, one that even has the potential, perhaps, to develop into a British equivalent of the Western, exploring the relationship of landscape, history and myth to national identity. Nor is there any shortage of material, which ranges from Chrétien de Troyes and Thomas Malory to T.H. White, to adventures of the lesser-known knights and damsels with fat plaits, and a full panoply of ghost ships, deadly chairs and questing beasts, all ripe for the picking, that I remember from a King Arthur book I had as a small girl in a richly illustrated edition I have been trying in vain to track down ever since.

You wouldn’t even need a huge budget – just look at some of the films in the list below. But perhaps a blockbuster franchise is just what is needed to get the overfamiliar Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle out of the way at an early stage, enabling more adventurous film-makers to move on and explore some of the more obscure stories. Here then, is My Top Ten of Best Arthurian Movies. Or, to be more accurate, the Only Ten Arthurian Movies I Can Think Of Off the Top of My Head. I have no doubt there are other films on the subject I have forgotten, so, as always, suggestions are welcome.
 
 

Knights of the Round Table (1953)

Stanley Baker as Modred and Anne Crawford as Morgan Le Fay in Knights of the Round Table (1953)

MGM’s version of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is just as stupid and glorious as you’d expect. Ava Gardner is gorgeous as Guinevere, the Tintagel locations are the real McCoy, Lancelot (Robert Taylor) has a clever horse which saves him from quicksand and the Technicolor kirtles are truly velvety. “Modred” (Stanley Baker, more virile than all the rest of the knights put together) is not Morgan Le Fay’s son, but her lover. Elsewhere, men poke big swords through each other’s armpits, and knock over parts of Stonehenge.
 
 

The Sword in the Stone (1963)

The Sword in the Stone (1963)

Disney’s adaptation of the first part of T.H. White’s fabulous magnum opus The Once and Future King is one of the studio’s most underrated animated features. It’s the story of 12-year-old orphan Arthur – known as Wart – in his lowly pre-Excalibur days. Merlin teaches him the ways of the world by transforming him into a squirrel, a bird and a fish, sings Higitus Figitus (sample lyric: “Hockety pockety wockety wack”) and duels with purple-haired witch Madame Mim, which even now I find more scary than amusing.
 
 

Camelot (1967)

Camelot (1967)

Joshua Logan’s lumbering film version of the Lerner and Loewe musical (not the team’s finest hour, it has to be said) is another adaptation of The Once and Future King, specifically the section dealing with the love triangle. Vanessa Redgrave is fine as Guinevere, but Richard Harris is adorable as Arthur, telling us How to Handle a Woman in semi-Sprechstimme, and altogether sexier than Franco Nero as Lancelot. The frocks and furs won an Oscar.
 
 

Lancelot du Lac (1974)

Lancelot du Lac (1974)

The Arthurian myths have strong links to France, and who better to suck all the colour out of the legend than gloomy French auteur Robert Bresson, who (as usual) uses an amateur cast delivering dialogue in an emotionless monotone, evoking a joyless mediaeval world in which life is short, sharp and bloody, with bagpipes. It’s an uncompromising vision, not for the faint of heart. Some of the more extravagant bloodletting looks like a rehearsal for the duel with John Cleese as the Black Knight in…
 
 

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

“Funnier than Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac” wrote the reviewer from Time Out – and he was right. I’ll go further, and call this the best Arthurian film ever made. Co-directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, it perfectly captures the digressive, peripatetic nature of the myths, and fully exploits the English landscape to mystical effect – all on a budget that doesn’t even stretch to real horses. Too many highlights to mention, but let us raise a kingly goblet to Graham Chapman, whose performance as Arthur binds all the mayhem together so beautifully.
 
 

Perceval le Gallois (1978)

Perceval le Gallois (1974)

An alarmingly youthful-looking Fabrice Luchini plays the title role in this heavily stylised adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes’ 12th century epic romance; André Dussollier plays Gauvain, the French version of Gawain. Esteemed auteur Eric Rohmer almost rivals Monty Python for the barking madness of his low budget Arthurian vision, acted out against non-naturalistic sets and lovely colours that sometimes remind you of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The trees are made from metal, there are cartoon geese and a chorus of minstrels, who keep bursting into madrigals. But the horses are real.
 
 

Excalibur (1981)

Excalibur (1981)

John Boorman’s adaptation of Le Morte d’Arthur, shot on location in Ireland, is a heady brew of myth and magic, though the young and sexy cast (Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart are just two of the actors clanking around) is overshadowed by Nicol Williamson’s broad panto turn as Merlin and Helen Mirren slithering around in medieval fetish-wear as the scheming Morgana. When the film came out there was much amusement at the scene in which Gabriel Byrne keeps his armour on while having sex, though I’ve always found it even funnier that the entire Round Table keeps theirs on to eat supper.

Perhaps it was ill-advised to open the film with music from Götterdämmerung, since I personally find The Ring hard to dissociate from an entirely different set of European myths, but the soundtrack is on firmer ground with Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, of course, and there’s a memorable foliage-related moment set to O Fortuna from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana where myth and landscape merge to magical effect. It’s British film-making at its most eccentric and enthralling.
 
 

First Knight (1995)

Sean Connery and Julia Ormond in First Knight (1995)

Predictably, critics scoffed at Richard Gere as Lancelot in this Hollywood version of the Arthurian legend, but he makes a dashing romantic lead, exchanging soulful glances with Guinevere (Julia Ormond) under the very nose of gruff King Arthur (Sean Connery). This is lightweight historical fantasy, but not without its pleasures;  Jerry Goldsmith’s score is splendid, costumes and design (seemingly inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite vision of the Middle Ages) are exquisite, and you can’t help but admire any film in which an entire army disguises itself as a flock of sheep.
 
 

Prince Valiant (1997)

Stephen Moyer in Prince Valiant (1977)

Hal Foster’s faux-Arthurian comic strip, which has been running in American newspapers since 1937, was first filmed in 1954, with Robert Wagner in the title role, but I’m also fond of this cheap and cheerful Anglo-Irish-German co-production, in which evil Vikings steal Excalibur and plant a scrap of tartan so King Arthur will blame the Scots. True Blood‘s Stephen Moyer plays the Nordic prince with the dorky haircut; the cultworthy cast also features Joanna Lumley as Morgan Le Fey, Ron Perlman as Boltar the Dragon Man and Udo Kier as Sligon the Usurper.
 
 

King Arthur (2004)

Clive Owen and chums in King Arthur (2004)

Clive Owen looks hilariously ill at ease in his Roman helmet in Jerry Bruckheimer’s “true story behind the legend”. In other words, no magic, though claims to authenticity are instantly scuppered by Guinevere being played by 21st century twiglet Keira Knightley in a Dark Age bikini. Ray Winstone, Ioan Gruffudd, Joel Edgerton and Mads Mikkelsen are among the half dozen knightly stragglers and woad-painted warriors facing off against a mob of Saxon bovver-boys. Not unenjoyable, but then I’m a sucker for anything with fire-arrows.
 
 

 
This article was first published on the Telegraph website in February 2014. It has been extensively rewritten and added to.

A Touch of Zen was the first of King Hu’s films to play in London cinemas, but The Fate of Lee Khan (1973) was the first King Hu film I watched – at the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road in 1975. The first thirty minutes of deceptively casual knockabout comedy build into nearly an hour of almost unbearable tension. It was the first martial arts film I’d ever seen, though, as I later learned, it’s far from typical of the genre.

In any case, the skilful blend of comedy and tragedy, Sammo Hung’s fight choreography and – above all – the inclusion of six great action roles for women all made a massive impression on me. I treasured memories of it for decades until I was able to watch it again on a 1999 widescreen VHS from Made in Hong Kong, and concluded it had lost none of its power, though younger aficionados of martial arts and wuxia may now find the action a little rudimentary.

More recently, I found it included in a Region 1 DVD set called Martial Arts Movie Marathon 2. The quality is uneven, but it’s in widescreen with English subtitles, and still a thousand times preferable to the dubbed version on YouTube. On my last viewing, I decided to analyse why I found it so tense. (Some of the details here are taken from Verina Glaessner’s synopsis in the January 1975 edition of Monthly Film Bulletin.) I’ve tried to outline the structure of the story while avoiding spoilers (the secret identities mentioned here are made obvious from the outset), though – if you’re like me – you’ll prefer to see the film for yourself before reading any of this.

Employees of the Spring Inn line up to greet Lee Khan and his sister.

The action takes place in 1366. Mongol invaders rule Yuan Dynasty China, so the basic conflict is between evil Mongols and heroic Chinese resistance fighters. The formidable Lee Khan, Baron of Honan and head of the Mongol spy network, obtains a rebel war map from a Chinese traitor, and travels to Shensi Province with his equally formidable sister; now the rebels must get it back. (The fact that Mr Big has a sister, and that they’re very close, inevitably made me think of Scarface and Sweet Smell of Success, though this sister is in a class of her own, and there’s no suggestion of incestuous hanky-panky.)

Early on it’s established that Lee Khan prefers to stay in local hostelries rather in official residences. Wan Jen-Mi (called “Wendy” in the subtitled of the first print I saw) is warned in advance that he will be coming to her inn, the Spring Inn, and to expect some of his spies in advance. Thus the set-up establishes a classic MacGuffin (the map), primes us to expect the arrival of the chief antagonist, and implies that each character we meet in the interim could be more than they seem.

The final showdown is set out in the wide open spaces of the desert, but most of the film is set within the confines of the inn. The potentially theatrical setting, though, is filmed with cinematic use of the frame, and fluid movements linking the ground floor of the inn and its upper storey, which some of the characters are able to reach by jumping (presumably with the help of out-of-frame trampolines). The limited location is suggestive of a sitcom, or of the classic strategy by smart first-time film-makers of simplifying logistics by setting their story in a single location (Reservoir Dogs, Ex Machina).

Lee Khan and his crew.

The final showdown in the desert.

Already, this is cracking stuff. Wan Jen-Mi is a a woman in control; she keeps trouble off her back by granting sexual favours to the local magistrate, but runs her inn with a will of iron. The rebels identify themselves to one another via sets of coins; I’m not sure how these are any different from regular coins, but clearly they are.

In preparation for Lee Khan’s arrival, she hires four female rebels to pose as waitresses. “When they heard about the idea of killing Mongols, they got really excited.” Just the way these young women casually flip faceclothes or throw coins suggests they have hidden talents; we are informed they have “shady pasts” – one was a bandit, another a pickpocket. In fact, only one of the “waitresses” seems to show much social skill (she’s adept at flirting), and much of the knockabout comedy of the opening half-hour springs from their belligerent attitude to awkward customers – some of whom may be spies for the Mongols.

Also introduced into the mix are rebels posing as Wan Jen-Mi’s accountant cousin and his servant. Amid all the assorted brawls, the exposure of a cheat at the gambling table, and various other intrigues, everyone seems to have a secret identity. Will one of the waitresses inadvertently reveal her true nature to the wrong customer? At this stage, the film is reminiscent of The Hotel Inspectors episode of Fawlty Towers. 

But there’s a shadow looming over the hi-jinx – the imminent arrival of Lee Khan and his entourage. It’s always a great strategy, I find, to let the audience know that someone is coming… and then keep them waiting for the expected arrival, which in Lee Khan’s case is a thrilling one. The staff and customers of the inn fall silent as they see henchmen at the door, then another set of henchmen, then another… until Lee Khan and his sister finally step into the doorway.

One of the “waitresses”.

This takes place at around the fifty-two minute mark, which is when the stakes go up. Suddenly, we realise our heroes – who up until now looked relaxed and in control of the situation – are balancing on a knife-edge. The sister is a veritable ice princess who, when asked what she thinks of a situation, says, “The law calls for a beheading.” And so the casualties mount up. Lee Khan is no mug – he is well aware that he might be surrounded by enemies in disguise. An almost throwaway shot shows him testing his tea before drinking it.

At one point, two of the henchmen begin to play a game of Go, referred to as “chess” in the subtitles. Suffice to say this part of the film is a game of cat and mouse, tactics versus countertactics in a sort of Long Con, in which nothing and no-one is as they appear, and any slip could be fatal.

The story essentially falls into three acts: 1) the mostly sitcom set-up, with hints of trouble to come; 2) the nail-biting tension as identities are probed; and 3) the showdown as masks are dropped, the gloves are off, and the martial arts break out. King Hu takes no prisoners; there are survivors… but not many.

(I suspect Quentin Tarantino drew on Act 2 for the tavern scene in Inglourious Basterds, which builds a similar tension amid an imbroglio of secret identities, leading to a bloodbath.)

Hsu Feng as the formidable Ice Princess. In a very fetching hat.

Li Li Hua as Jen-mi Wan, owner of the Spring Inn. In a very fetching hat.

Angela Mao as the “waitress” who is also an expert pickpocket. Also in a fetching hat.

It’s to the film-makers’ credit that in a sprawling cast of characters like this, we can easily identify the individuals. Wan Jen-Mi  is played by Li Li Hua, whose mostly Chinese filmography also includes Frank Borzage’s China Doll. The “waitresses” have helpfully colour-coded uniforms; in some subtitles they’re identified as “Lilac”, “Peony”, “Chili” and “Peach”. The actress most Western viewers are likely to be familiar with is Angela Mao (Bruce Lee’s doomed sister in Enter the Dragon, and star of Hapkido and When Taekwondo Strikes), who plays “Peony” the pickpocket, and gets to show off some fancy moves.

The ice princess is played by an unsmiling Hsu Feng, the heroine of A Touch of Zen. The vaguely heroic looking fake accountant is played by Bai Ying, who also starred in King Hu’s The Valiant Ones (1975, which I’m currently trying to track down; if anyone knows of a decent DVD, please let me know), as did Roy Chiao, who plays Lee Khan’s most important henchman.

The eyes of Angela Mao.

Jen-mi Wan is also a pretty useful archer.

Bai Ying as the “accountant”.

Tien Feng and Hsu Feng as Lee Khan and his sister – the bad guys.

The big showdown.

I enjoyed this last viewing of The Fate of Lee Khan so much that I’ve decided to watch King Hu’s other films again – or at least the ones I can get hold of. So this post might be the first in a series. Watch this space.

Steve McQueen in Bullitt (1968)

Like everyone else, I watched last year’s teaser trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road with a mixture of eagerness and trepidation. Eagerness, because hot damn, it looked thrilling. Trepidation, because 1) Mad Max 2 ended with 20 minutes of multi-vehicle mayhem that has yet to be topped. How could the new film possibly live up to that? [ETA: having now seen the new film, I’m pleased to report that it does, pretty much, live up to it. So I’m adding 2) Mad Max: Fury Road to this list.]

The good news is that Fury Road is directed by the same man, George Miller, who once said, “In myth, the chase is an essential part of the heroic development.” The problem is that CGI takes a lot of the fun out today’s car chases, though it seems a bit churlish to complain when this means fewer injuries to stuntmen – the vehicular set-pieces in Mad Max 2 were insanely dangerous, and several went horribly wrong. Happily, although Miller makes use of CGI in Fury Road, presumably for some of the more life-threatening mayhem, he still favours practical effects and real stuntwork for the bulk of the action. This is real stuff, some non-virtual version of what is up on screen was actually happening in front of the camera – and you can tell.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

The big, complicated chases in, for example, Bad Boys II, The Matrix: Reloaded or the Fast & Furious franchise are invariably slick, spectacular and not unenjoyable, but they’re more like triumphs of weightless special effects and incontinent editing than classic displays of down and dirty driving.

For the finest examples of those, we have to go back in time. For reasons of practicality and to avoid excessive length here, I’m ruling out comedies (everything from the Keystone Cops to It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World to The Italian Job to What’s Up Doc? to Smokey and the Bandit to The Blues Brothers to The Cannonball Run) since the comedy car chase deserves a whole article to itself. Nor have I included films like Grand Prix or Two-Lane Blacktop, which are more race than chase.

The modern car chase began with 3) Bullitt (1968), in which the nearly 11 minute pursuit was not filmed by the second unit, as was then traditional, but by the director himself, Peter Yates. He’s not afraid of downtime; there’s a slow, deliberate build-up that makes the action, when it comes, all the more exciting.

Notable too that Lalo Schifrin’s cool score fades out, to be replaced by little more than the sounds of screeching tyres and gunning engines as Steve McQueen’s Mustang bounces over those San Francisco humps, first pursued by, and then pursuing, two killers in a Dodge Charger.

McQueen did some but not all of his driving; his chief stand-in was Bud Ekins, who had also performed McQueen’s motorcycle jump over the barbed wire in The Great Escape. During the Bullitt chase, Ekins also plays a motorcyclist who gets knocked off his bike; McQueen’s character stops chasing just long enough to make sure he’s OK – a nice character touch to remind us he’s one of the good guys.

The French Connection (1971)

The killer behind the wheel of the Dodge Charger was Bill Hickman, stunt coordinator and driver in two other classic movie car chases. First, William Friedkin’s 4) The French Connection (1971) in which Gene Hackman commandeers a Pontiac LeMans to chase a hi-jacked elevated train. And then, 5) The Seven-Ups (1973), directed by Philip D’Antoni (who had produced both Bullitt and The French Connection), which ends with NYPD cop Roy Scheider’s Pontiac Ventura Sprint Coupe getting its roof sheared clean off.

For The French Connection, Friedkin goaded Hickman into driving at 90 mph for 26 Brooklyn blocks without stopping, with director and camera in the backseat. “I would never do anything like that again,” Friedkin told George Pelecanos at an AFI talk. “It’s a good scene, but I was foolish.”

Vanishing Point (1971)

Hickman also worked, uncredited, on what was perhaps the greatest pure chase movie of the era: Richard C. Sarafian’s 6) Vanishing Point (1971), with a screenplay by the Cuban novelist G. Cabrera Infante. Barry Newman plays Kowalski, an ex-cop and Vietnam veteran who accepts a bet to drive a white Dodge Challenger (a car now so iconic that Quentin Tarantino explicitly referenced it in Death Proof) from Denver to San Francisco in 15 hours, a feat impossible without the help of more than one type of speed.

With the “Blue Meanies” (ie cops) on his tail, the film turns into one long chase punctuated by flashbacks, encounters of the post-Woodstock kind and mounting media interest. Sing ho for the open desert road and the typically 1970s nihilistic ending, echoed three years later as Peter Fonda and Susan George outrun Illinois police cars in 7) Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry – but they can’t dodge fate!

Perhaps the longest uninterrupted, if not the most stylish, car chase is the 40 minute wreckapalooza in 8) Gone in 60 Seconds (1974) written, directed, produced and starring H.B. Halicki alongside a yellow Fastback Mustang called “Eleanor”. Ninety-three cars are wrecked, not all the onlookers are extras, and not all the accidents are staged – filming had to stop while the director recovered from crashing into a telegraph pole.

Tragically, Halicki died in 1989 when another telegraph pole fell on him during preparations for Gone in 60 Seconds 2. His widow executive-produced the duff 2000 Nicolas Cage quasi-remake.

Walter Hill stripped the car chase movie down to its essential components in 9) The Driver (1978) in which Ryan O’Neal’s cool behind the wheel leaves Ryan Gosling in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive eating dust.

Isabelle Adjani and Ryan O’Neal in Driver (1976)

Some of the best mid-1970s car chases, meanwhile, were being staged in Italy, for ultra-violent “poliziotteschi” crime thrillers, many of them starring Maurizio Merli and his unflappable moustache. Movies like 10) Violent Rome (1975) are stuffed with political incorrectness, ultra-cool music – and some of the most thrilling car chases ever filmed, often shot without police permits on the streets of Rome or Naples. Umberto Lenzi claimed at a recent screening of his Rome Armed to the Teeth (1976) that some of the sirens that can be heard during a breakneck ambulance chase are real cops giving chase.

Maurizio Merli in Roma a mano armata aka Rome Armed to the Teeth (1976)

Friedkin tried to top his own French Connection car chase in his 1985 cop thriller in 11) To Live and Die in L.A. – and pretty much succeeded, as gonzo secret service agent William Petersen evades gunmen by driving the wrong way down a freeway (the panicked reactions of his less gung-ho partner, played by John Pankow,were real). Friedkin famously reversed the traffic flow to get the desired effect. But another of the director’s  attempts to breathe life into the convention – in the erotic thriller Jade (1996), in which the pursuit slows almost to a standstill in a Chinese New Year parade – was less successful.

By the 1990s, there were few action thrillers that didn’t have a car chase – and even fewer chases that were actually memorable. John Frankenheimer, who had directed Grand Prix back in 1966, had a late hit with the old-school chase-thriller 12) Ronin (1998) which featured a nice line in French pedestrians leaping out of the way of speeding vehicles (usually shouting a French oath as they did so), and added a topical frisson by having Robert De Niro’s Peugeot 406 pursue Natascha McElhone’s  BMW at breakneck speed through the sort of Paris underpasses where Princess Diana’s car had crashed only one year earlier.

But Hollywood directors seem to be losing the knack of directing such chases, piling on random sound and fury to mind-numbing effect. The pursuits in Quantum of Solace and The Dark Knight, to name just two examples, are a confusing mess. The fad for ultra-quick cutting doesn’t help, though Paul Greengrass, one of the few directors who knows how to use the technique coherently, pulled off a nice chase through Moscow in 13) The Bourne Supremacy.

Motorway (2012)

Perhaps we have to look east for the most exciting examples. Cheang Pou-soi’s 14) Motorway (produced by Johnnie To, one of the godfathers of the Hong Kong action movie, and co-starring the always wonderful Antony Wong) revisits the back-to-basics world of Walter Hill’s The Driver (and rather more successfully than Nicolas Winding Refn) and features some terrific stunt driving in a story about two cops taking on a getaway driver.

Or perhaps the answer is to pep up the pursuit by adding another element. In 15) The Raid 2: Berandal, Gareth Evans doesn’t just give us an expertly choreographed multi-vehicle chase – he also gives us simultaneous Silat (an Indonesian martial art) in one of the cars. Howzat!

This piece was first posted on the Telegraph website in August, 2014. It has since been edited and updated.

I found the Internet Movie Cars Database an invaluable tool, as will you if you ever want to identify a certain marque you might have seen in a movie. The thoroughness is impressive; even cars glimpsed fleetingly in the background are identified.

The Assassination of JFK (artist unknown, found on The Kennedy Gallery)

“The story you know”, says the trailer for Parkland, a 2013 movie about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. You can say that again. It’s the assassination that launched a thousand conspiracy theories, and lent specific meaning to terms such as “book depository” and “single bullet theory”. In Ace Venture: Pet Detective, audiences had only to hear Jim Carrey say, “I was the second gunman on the grassy knoll!” to know exactly what he was talking about.

The most famous JFK assassination film, of course, is the home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder (played by Paul Giamatti in Parkland), footage that has been parsed, recreated and referenced so many times it has attained iconographic status. In turn, it has helped shape the event in the public mind. It wasn’t the first time an assassination had been caught on camera – footage of the death of Inejiro Asanuma, a chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, was broadcast live on Japanese TV in 1960. But it was the first political assassination to be so thoroughly absorbed, reworked and regurgitated by the American Film Industry.

One of the first artists to co-opt JFK iconography was Andy Warhol, whose Sixteen Jackies depicted serial images of the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy; he also cast some of his The Factory regulars in a never-completed film called Since (1966), a stylised recreation of the assassination in which Gerard Malanga shot Mary Woronov with a banana. “It didn’t bother me that much that he was dead,” Warhol said. “What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing.”

Sixteen Jackies by Andy Warhol.

Other early adopters include John Waters, who in 1968 restaged the assassination in his parents’ backyard for a 16mm short called Eat Your Makeup, in which Jackie was played by Divine, and Brian De Palma, whose second film, Greetings (1968), satirised JFK conspiracy theorists before most of us were even aware they existed. But it was with the rise of the new Hollywood counter-culture of the 1970s, paranoia and disillusionment bolstered by the Watergate scandal, that allusions to the assassination, both implicit and explicit, began to infiltrate mainstream cinema. Eighteen years before Oliver Stone’s JFK, David Miller’s Executive Action (1973), starring Burt Lancaster as a black ops specialist, used archive footage of Kennedy and a quasi-documentary approach to support the now-popular theory that Oswald was a patsy.

There were also echoes of the JFK assassination in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) and William Richert’s Winter Kills (1979). This latter film, adapted from a novel by Richard Condon (author of The Manchurian Candidate), had a troubled production history (one of its producers was murdered by the mafia in mid-production) and triggered a few conspiracy theories of its own, including that the Kennedy family had nixed it (Jeff Bridges plays the brother of an assassinated president, son of a Noah Cross-meets-Joe-Kennedy patriarch played by John Huston) and pressure had been put on the distributors to suppress it, to avoid jeopardising valuable defence contracts.

In American cinema, the events of November 1963 came to signal the demarcation line between the Age of Innocence and The Fall, and no Hollywood film set in that era could afford to ignore it. The cliché of extras huddled in collective grief in front of shop windows containing television sets, or characters weeping for reasons as yet unknown, became a feature of 1960s-set period films such as Philip Kaufman’s coming-of-age youth gang movie The Wanderers (1979) and the comedy-drama Mermaids (1990), and is currently to be seen (in a variation on the meme set in the White House itself) in The Butler.

Jackie and John Kennedy arrive in Houston on 21st November, 1963.

The elements familiar from Zapruder are now so familiar they have attained fetishistic status and can be repeatedly riffed on without elaboration. In David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), James Spader drives a 1962 Lincoln Continental, the car in which Kennedy was travelling. Variations on Jackie’s pink Chanel suit turn up on Michelle Pfeiffer, playing a Jackie-obsessed housewife in Dallas on the day of the assassination in Love Field (1992), and Parker Posey, a Jackie-obsessive with borderline personality disorder in the indie tragi-comedy The House of Yes (1997).

The ex-costumed crime fighter known as The Comedian is shown on the grassy knoll with a rifle in the opening credits to Watchmen. For In the Line of Fire (1993), images of a young Clint Eastwood were digitally inserted into footage of the 1963 Dallas motorcade. In Zoolander, David Duchovny reveals that the gunmen on the grassy knoll were male models. In The Salton Sea, Vincent D’Onofrio plays a noseless meth addict who stages a reenactment of the assassination with pigeons (one of them wearing a pink pillbox hat) in a remote-controlled miniature car.

And we haven’t even got started on the novels (Stephen King’s 11/22/63, Don DeLillo’s Libra, James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, Gregory Benford’s Timescape) Broadway musicals (Assassins), computer games (JFK: Reloaded) and TV shows (Mad Men, The X-Files) including an entire subgenre of sci-fi episodes in which time travellers attempt either to thwart the assassination, or to ensure it goes ahead as scheduled (Quantum Leap, The Twilight Zone).

As Warhol said, “The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel.” Over the past half-century, the assassination has been rehashed and referenced so much it has lost its meaning for everyone but the conspiracy theorists. Perhaps it’s a sort of public exorcism, in which the endless repetition of traumatic events divests them of their power to traumatise. Or perhaps it’s just an example of the media tendency to exploit public grief to such an excessive degree that the grief is eventually replaced by indifference.

Either way, expect 9/11 to receive the same treatment.

Dealey Plaza, Dallas (as seen in the 1973 film Executive Action)

This piece was first posted on the Telegraph website, in November 2013. It has since been lightly edited.

All pictures except Warhol’s Sixteeen Jackies taken from The Kennedy Gallery, a treasure-trove of JFK-related visual material.

Paul Rudd as Ant-Man.

For years, Paul Rudd fans, of which I am one, always used to ask the same question. Why wasn’t he a bigger star? The man is funny, handsome, versatile and smart. He has long been part of Judd Apatow’s unofficial repertory company, had a recurring role as Phoebe’s love interest on Friends, and was a co-creator and writer for the TV show Party Down, which in 2009 won the AFI TV Program of the Year award. And he’s great company on chatshows – just ask Helen Mirren.

Now it looks as though Ant-Man will finally boost him into the A-list ranking; he’s warm and funny and self-deprecating – just the ticket to give an effects-ridden Marvel superhero movie a relatable human presence. But do we really want Rudd to be a bigger star? His speciality has hitherto been more in scene-stealing supporting roles, nutty cameos or oddball indie films, as opposed to big-budget rom-coms and bromances that strive to tame the Rudd, flatten him out into a good-looking but bland leading man.

But maybe you’re not familiar with Rudd’s screen history? Here he is in ten films.

CLUELESS (1995)

Paul Rudd and Alicia Silverstone in Clueless.

Does he have a portrait in the attic, or what? Now in his mid-40s, Rudd barely looks older than he did in his breakthrough role as Alicia Silverstone’s stepbrother in Amy Heckerling’s delightful update of Jane Austen’s Emma. As the film’s Mr Knightley, Rudd is the foil to Silverstone’s match-making heroine, but beautifully sells the character’s switch from supercilious to smitten, in the process setting an entire generation of teenage hearts aflutter.

WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER (2001)

Paul Rudd and Elizabeth Banks in Wet Hot American Summer.

After playing Jennifer Aniston’s gay roommate in The Object of My Affection, and mangling the French language to adorable effect in The Château, Rudd went lowbrow for David Wain’s pastiche of summer camp movies, cast (and deliberately so) with actors a decade too old for their characters. The film flopped, but is now a beloved cult item, thanks especially to Rudd as irresponsible camp counsellor Andy, who throws a Kevin the Teenager-style strop in the canteen.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS (2003)

Paul Rudd in The Shape of Things.

Neil LaBute brings his own stage-play to the screen in this breath-takingly cynical dissection of human nature, an early demonstration that Rudd could do straight dramatic as easily as comic or romantic. He plays a nerdy part-time museum guard who falls under the spell of Rachel Weisz, with interestingly nasty results and a vicious pay-off.

ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF ROB BURGUNDY (2004)

Paul Rudd as Brian Fantana in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.

Up against major-league funnymen Will Ferrell and Steve Carell, Rudd holds his own as deluded TV reporter Brian Fantana in one of those comedies that mightn’t seem so hilarious the first time you see it, though by the third time around, and especially after several beers, it has you rolling on the floor, clutching your aching ribs. His would-be macho man can also be seen photographing cats in Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. “Time to musk up.”

THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN (2005)

Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd in The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Rudd plays one of Steve Carell’s buddies in Apatow’s surprisingly sweet comedy; his and Seth Rogen’s stupid but oddly inoffensive “You know how I know you’re gay” improvisation is one of the film’s many highlights.

WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY (2007)

Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Jason Schwartzman and Justin Long in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

Rudd has only an uncredited cameo in this underrated but smashing spoof of musical biopics starring the peerless John C. Reilly. But that uncredited cameo is as John Lennon. All four actors playing the Beatles are heinously miscast, and the Liverpudlian accents are atrocious – but that just makes it all the funnier.

KNOCKED UP (2007)

Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd in Knocked Up.

The scenes with Leslie Mann (Apatow’s real-life wife) and Rudd playing Katherine Heigl’s sister and brother-in-law are the highlights of Apatow’s bloated rom-com, which like most of the producer-writer-director’s films is really a bromance. Apatow liked this relationship so much he revisited it in the even more bloated and self-indulgent This is 40, thus demonstrating that Less is More. Or would be, if Apatow even knew what “less” meant. I can’t think of a single film he has directed that wouldn’t have been improved by having at least half an hour knocked off it.

I LOVE YOU, MAN (2009)

Paul Rudd in I Love You, Man.

Rudd graduated to leading man in the unexpectedly entertaining Role Models (2008) and this bromance, as a bridegroom-to-be who goes on “man-dates” to find a Best Man. Will slobby Jason Segel be the answer? It’s not as funny as it ought to be, but Rudd has a couple of priceless moments that sum up his approach, which is to aim for a trendy or macho pose and get it hilariously wrong. Like this inept James Bond impression.

WANDERLUST (2012)

Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston in Wanderlust.

Rudd and Aniston reunite to play penniless Manhattan yuppies who end up in a commune in an Apatow-produced comedy that could almost be the lighthearted flipside to the more sinister Martha Marcy May Marlene. As a portrait of the breakdown of a marriage, it’s often too raw to be funny, but Rudd shines in a couple of scenes, rehearsing his would-be swinger’s speech in front of the mirror, or being comprehensively outgunned in the guitar stakes by the commune leader (Justin Theroux).

PRINCE AVALANCHE (2013)

Emile Hirsch and Paul Rudd in Prince Avalanche.

At first sight, David Gordon Green’s low-budget remake of a 2011 Icelandic film appears to be yet another comic bromance along the lines of Green’s own Pineapple Express. Rudd (looking uncannily like a Super Mario Brother) and Emile Hirsch (looking uncannily like Jack Black) play workmates whose job is to paint yellow lines on a remote highway in a part of Texas ravaged by wildfire. But it turns into something altogether more interesting and non-formulaic. No belly laughs here, but a credible, touching portrait of two flawed individuals – and some of the best work Rudd has ever done.

This piece was first posted on the Telegraph website in October 2013. It has been extensively edited.

ETA: for some reason I left out the likeable rom-com I Could Never Be Your Woman, in which he impresses Michelle Pfeiffer with his dancing.

No appreciation of Rudd would be complete without mentioning his serial appearances on Conan O’Brien’s chatshow, in a recurring gag that has gone from being not very funny to tiresome to funny to hilarious.

And we mustn’t forget Celery Man. Now Tayne, I could get into.

Have I left out your favourite Paul Rudd performance? Please feel free to provide suggestions and links in the comments.

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet

In Jean-Piere Jeunet’s The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, the 10 year-old boy inventor embarks on an epic solo journey from Montana to Washington DC, to collect an award for his invention of a perpetual motion machine. On the way there, he rides trains and hitches lifts from truck-drivers and meets eccentrics.

But strangely enough, nothing horrible, or even slightly interesting, ever happens to him on the road. One thing follows another. It’s like Huckleberry Finn without any of the excitement or mythological underpinning. And even though it’s supposed to be taking place in the present, it’s bathed in that warm Jeunet glow that locates it not in the past, nor even in anything remotely resembling life as we know it, but in the land of whimsy. It’s not a film – it’s a FILMSY.

My Shorter Oxford defines whimsical as “characterised by deviation from the ordinary as if determined by mere caprice.” I think of it as a flight of fancy ungrounded in any sort of emotional, psychological, geographical or anthropological realism. I am all for fantasy, by the way, and am not an advocate of unadulterated realism, though it too has its place in the cinema. But the best fantasy is an integral part of the storytelling, and has ties to reality – albeit often in deep cover, buried beneath metaphor. Whimsy, on the other hand, is tetherless. It aspires to be surrealism or magical realism, but it’s really just pulling arbitrary rabbits out of a hat, trying to impress us with its off-the-wall kookiness.

This is subjective, of course. One person’s vomit-inducing filmsy is another’s life-enhancing work of art. I have already squabbled with a colleague who insists Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo is whimsy of the most pernicious kind. As a fan of the novel on which it was based (Boris Vian’s Froth on the Daydream, I refuse to consign it to the whimsy basket (it’s too satirical and dark and upsetting) but I see his point, for it does feature flying cars, barking shoes and Audrey Tautou.

So how can you tell if a movie will turn out to be a fantastical cinematic experience, or just a load of old filmsy? Keep your eyes peeled for these pointers.

Big Fish

The Director. Some film-makers should automatically come with a Filmsy Warning. Tim Burton (Big Fish), Wim Wenders (The Million Dollar Hotel) and Rian Johnson (The Brothers Bloom) flirt with whimsy. Jeunet, Gondry, Wes Anderson, Miranda July and the Polish brothers kiss it full on the lips.

Titles. Whimsical titles usually mean whimsical films. For some reason, pianos keep cropping up, as in The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes and The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean. And the word “hotel” should be approached with caution. The Million Dollar Hotel, co-written by Bono, is peopled by crazy lowlifes such as Milla Jovovich as a fey streetwalker who thinks she’s a fictional character (I’ve got news for you, sweetheart) and Mel Gibson as an FBI agent with an arm growing out of his back.

On the other hand, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel transcends whimsy, since the hotel is not just a metaphor full of kooky people, but actually provides a solid framework for the film’s characters and themes.

Wacky names. In Faraway, So Close! Willem Dafoe plays a character called Emit Flesti, to which I say Reggub ffo. See also Benjamin Button, Darkly Noon, Flower Hercules (played by Daryl Hannah, wearing a ruff, in Northfork), Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet. I realise many of these names were dreamt up by novelists rather than film-makers, but that’s no excuse.

Bricolage. Normally I would applaud any film that favours DIY-style practical effects over digital ones. But there comes a point where Jack Black and Mos Def cobbling together homemade versions of blockbuster movies (Be Kind Rewind) out of empty Squeezy bottles and corrugated cardboard, or small people running around amid giant furniture (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) or a kapok horse with a mane made of string (The Science of Sleep) cease to be inventive and amusing, and start to become tiresome. Please be advised there are parts in all of these films that I like – but there are limits.

Faraway, So Close!

Folksy wisdom. Otherwise known as banal homilies masquerading as deep-dish philosophy, often drawn from the works of John Irving. “My momma always said life was like a box of chocolates” (Forrest Gump)  “When it comes to the end, you have to let go” (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). “Keep passing the open windows” (The Hotel New Hampshire). “If we all went around doing what we wanted all the time, there would be chaos” (Simon Birch). “Men see things in a box, and women see them in a round room” (REALLY? Elizabethtown). Big Fish is pretty much a film ENTIRELY CONSTRUCTED out of this sort of naff maxim: “Sometimes, the only way to catch an uncatchable woman is to offer her a wedding ring.” Oh, for pity’s sake.

Quirky characters. The aforementioned folksy wisdom is usually spouted by Holy Fools – characters with learning difficulties, or sick people not long for this world. They solve people’s earthly problems, utter words of folksy wisdom (see above) and then die. Not soon enough, in most cases.

Female characters, meanwhile, tend to be variations on the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl (a term first coined by Nathan Rabin) typically played by Audrey Tautou. (See Amelie, Mood Indigo. In Tautou’s defence, the only films of hers that ever get distributed in anglophone territories seem to be ones in which she is at her most toe-curlingly gamine.) She’s ethereal! She has peculiar hobbies! She wears droopy cardigans! See also: Forrest Gump, The Million Dollar Hotel, Phenomenon, Michael, Simon Birch, Big Fish, Elizabethtown, Garden State.

Amelie and the garden gnome.

Cute digressions. Jeunet is the big offender here, always going off at a tangent to show us someone’s likes and dislikes, or the irrelevant back stories of minor characters or garden gnomes, often accompanied by faux-scientific facts and diagrams. The first few dozen times, it’s adorable.

Chapter Headings. Otherwise known as Subtitle Envy, and a sure sign of directors who want to be taken seriously as auteurs, if not authors. Wes Anderson seems almost pathologically incapable of making a film without putting a lot of writing up on screen. See also: The Brothers Bloom.

Angels. To paraphrase that line often misattributed to Hermann Göring, whenever I hear the word “angel” I reach for my revolver – unless it’s one of those When Good Angels Go Bad movies, like Prophecy or Legion, in which they beat each other up and burst into flames.

But Michael, Northfork, What Dreams May Come are sheer filmsy. I blame Wings of Desire, which in itself is not entirely awful, but this is more than one can say about its egregious sequel, Faraway, So Close!, or the Hollywood remake, City of Angels, in which heart surgeon Meg Ryan is stalked by a lugubrious celestial being played by Nicolas Cage.

It also encouraged a generation of pop stars to prance about in angel wings in their videos, trying to look beatific. Ho, rof s’nevaeh ekas.

Alanis Morissette, with angel wings.

This article was first posted on the Telegraph website in June 2014. It has since been revised.

George Bancroft, John Wayne and Louise Platt in Stagecoach (1939)

The Western is dead. Long live the Western. Observers have been predicting the genre’s demise for more than a hundred years. Edward Buscombe, in The BFI Companion to the Western, quotes a trade reviewer who as early as 1911 dismissed it as “a gold mine that had been worked to the limit”. But by 1953 Westerns were making up more than a quarter of Hollywood’s output, and much of television’s too; my generation of post-war Baby Boomers was weaned on The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke and Rawhide.

In the 1960s, that figure went into a slump. The cinematic landscape was changing; the studio system was in decline, and traditional Hollywood film-makers were struggling to adapt to younger audiences and changing attitudes. The emphasis changed from righteous armed struggles against lawlessness, might is right and the triumph of civilisation over savagery, to psychological portraits of outlaws or gunslingers, revisionist studies of the hero’s role in the modern world, acknowledgements that Native Americans were people too, and allegories of Vietnam. The romantic camaraderie of John Ford, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks was superseded by the more brutal, nihilistic visions of Samuel Peckinpah, Arthur Penn and Sergio Leone.

But if the number of Westerns fell, the genre never really disappeared – it just went underground for a while. The history of cinema is so inextricably bound up with stories of the wild west that western DNA inevitably seeped into other genres. Just as Westerns were a peculiarly New World variation on old world tales of mythological heroes or wandering knights, so, from the 1970s onwards, the cowboys, gunslingers and bounty hunters of yore passed their batons on to cops and detectives, hitmen and cosmonauts. Henceforth the Western disguised itself as road movies, action films or science fiction. Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel bridged the gap with Coogan’s Bluff, while John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 was a modern urban reworking of Rio Bravo. Many of Carpenter’s other films, like those of Walter Hill, are Westerns in all but name.

Clint Eastwood in Coogan’s Bluff (1968)

Science fiction movies such as Westworld, Outland, Battle Beyond the Stars, Back to the Future Part III,  or Serenity barely bother to disguise their Western roots. But, essentially, any film in which the characters have to pass through hostile territory held by “savages”, or rid the universe of its bad guys, usually by resorting to violence rather than, say, diplomacy or the legal system, is cleaving to the Western tradition, whether it’s Sylvester Stallone in South East Asia, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Central America, Bruce Willis or Eddie Murphy in Los Angeles, or Mel Gibson and Danny Glover skipping the sort of paperwork that real-life cops would need to tackle in favour of the latterday equivalent of galloping around on horseback, yelling “Yeehaw!” and brandishing Smith & Wessons.

This sort of genre slippage allowed Western conventions to move with the times. In science fiction, for example, Native Americans could be replaced by unstoppable killer robots or invading extraterrestrials, with no need to worry about charges of racism (unless we’re talking Jar-Jar Binks, or unless the story is a deliberate race-related allegory such as District 9). Critics are less likely to feel uncomfortable about the ethics of vivisection or worry about the necessity to respect alien culture when the enemy is an evil monster from outer space in Independence Day, the credits of which ended with the assurance that, “No animals or aliens were harmed in the making of this film.”

These days, you can spot the influence of the Western in everything from The Expendables to There Will Be Blood to Predators. Avatar is pure Cowboys and Indians – and is clearly on the side of the Indians, who also seem to have hitched their star to that of the Green Party.. Even Lotso, the apparently avuncular strawberry-scented bear who turns out to be the chief villain in Toy Story 3, is a successor to Burl Ives in The Big Country or one of the monstrous patriarchs from an Anthony Mann western. But if there’s one genre that hews to old-fashioned pre-spaghetti Western conventions more than any other, it’s movies about superheroes.

Yul Brynner in Westworld (1973)

The superhero, like the cowboys or the gunslinger, has a distinctive costume and behavioural code. His weaponry and mode of transport are fetishised. He often has a sidekick (Kato = Tonto). His story always climaxes in an OK Corral-type showdown against the villain, often with superpowered fisticuffs or souped-up six-shooters, and he always comes out on top, proving that might is right. And the female characters are as marginal as in any Western; while they’re not being decorative, the function of Mary-Jane Watson or Rachel Dawes or Gwen Stacey is essentially to be kidnapped and rescued and/or placed in the fridge as motivation.

The one big difference is that superhero stories are almost always urban, with gothic cityscapes taking the place of Monument Valley or the Tabernas Desert, but their topography is just as recognisable as that of John Ford’s wide open spaces. Superhero movies are already showing signs of following the Western pattern by moving from popular escapism into the darker, more introspective territory of The Dark Knight or Watchmen, but the superhero genre is still in its infancy. We have yet to see a superhero Stagecoach, let alone superhero equivalents of such later landmark Westerns as A Fistful of Dollars or The Wild Bunch.

Kodi Smit-McPhee in Young Ones (2014)

Viggo Mortensen and Viilbjørk Malling Agger in Jauja (2014)

Eva Green and Mads Mikkelsen in The Salvation (2014)

Meanwhile, the unabashedly Western-style Western picked itself up after the doldrums of the 1980s, notched up a couple of Best Picture Oscars (Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven – both, incidentally, by film-makers who had acted in Westerns before directing them) and started to evolve as a new generation of non-Hollywood film-makers explored the genre’s possibilities and gave it a new look, pushing it into new areas. Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil was an exemplary Civil War Western, Antonia Bird’s Ravenous a cannibal Western black comedy.

More recently, New Zealander Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford puts a new spin on one of the old west’s most iconic characters, while Australian John Hillcoat transposes an outlaw scenario to the outback. Young Ones is slow-burning dystopian science fiction (featuring a robot mule!) filmed Western-style in South Africa. The Salvation is an Anglo-Danish-Spanish Western, also filmed in South Africa, Slow West a British-New Zealand co-production, filmed in New Zealand, Jauja a multinational art movie filmed (mostly) in Patagonia. Bone Tomahawk is an American indie filmed in California, but mixes it up by stirring an unexpectedly strong dose of splatter into the mix.

With Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight due to open at the end of 2015, the genre is looking more versatile and robust than it has for years.

Kurt Russell in Bone Tomahawk (2015)

This piece was first published in the Guardian in February 2011, to tie in with the U.K. release of the Coen brothers’ True Grit. It has been  edited and updated.

The Salvation (2014)

The Salvation has everything you expect from a western: guns, horses, vengeance, Ennio Morricone-esque music, squinty close-ups and untamed landscape with Monument Valley just visible in the distance. But wait. Those prairies are so familiar – yet there’s something slightly odd about them… Are they not just a shade dustier and redder than usual?

Because The Salvation was filmed in South Africa (with discreet CGI additions) by a Danish director – Kristian Levring – and a multi-national cast including Mads Mikkelsen, Eva Green and Eric Cantona. It’s a Danish-British-South African co-production, and the only major Hollywood name is that of Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the hardboiled heavy. Yet the film is unmistakably a Western. It’s also a sign of the genre’s rebirth, not as mainstream blockbuster cinema but as a representative of the indie, the arty, the hip and the anti-Hollywood.

While the Western used to be viewed as the quintessentially American genre, the “New World” was a land whose occupants and native culture were increasingly displaced by the proponents of Manifest Destiny and an incoming tide of immigrants. The Old West was populated by a babel of different nationalities, so perhaps it’s not so surprising that countries other than the United States feel they have a stake in Western storytelling.

Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

The most celebrated variation is the Spaghetti Western – primarily Italian, though often in collaboration with Spain, France or Germany. The best known are Sergio Leone’s Dollar Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly) and Sergio Corbucci’s Django, so violent it was refused a BBFC certificate until 1993, and which spawned at least 100 (official and unofficial) sequels, including the certifiably demented Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! (1967). Corbucci’s masterpiece is The Great Silence, which pits Jean-Louis Trintignant against Klaus Kinski in a snow-covered landscape (filmed in the Pyrenees), with the no-less-welcome-for-being-inevitable Morricone score, and an ending that can still leave the viewer shellshocked.

Crueller and more cynical than the traditional Hollywood variant, Spaghetti Westerns nevertheless gave that fading genre a much-needed shot in the arm in the 1960s with its anti-heroes, innovative scores, and an operatic approach that reached its apogee in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, some of which was actually shot in Utah as well as in the usual spaghetti locations in the Spanish province of Almeria.

But even A Fistful of Dollars was twice-removed from Hollywood. It was a sneaky remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (itself a reworking of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest – or The Glass Key, depending on who you’re talking to), in which Toshiro Mifune’s scruffy Man with No Name character is a ronin (an itinerant masterless samurai) in 19th century Japan.

Kurosawa had already shown his affinity for Western-style action in The Seven Samurai, later remade by Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven. Samurai, with their moral codes, martial prowess and outsider status, have much in common with classic Western gunslingers, who arrive, like Shane, out of nowhere to solve (or cause) problems for regular folk before drifting on.

Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

Tears of the Black Tiger (2000)

Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Django Western , is a knowing Japanese (English-language) pastiche of the genre, prefaced by an introduction from Mr Pastiche himself, Quentin Tarantino, though its jokey stylisation is nothing like as much fun as the action-packed The Good, The Bad, The Weird from Korean director Kim Jee-woon, starring Lee Byung-hun as the handsomest Western villain of all time. In terms of OTT stylisation, however, neither of these can hold a candle to Tears of the Black Tiger, a one-of-a-kind Thai Western resembling a feature-length compilation of those campy photo montages by kitsch Gallic artists Pierre et Gilles, or to Sholay, a “Curry Western” filmed in the rocky Ramanagara region of the Indian subcontinent, in which the action is interspersed with  Bollywood-style musical numbers.

The possibilities were limitless. In his cult acid classic El Topo (1970), Alejandro Jodorowsky mixed Western iconography with Kung-Fu (the TV show) mysticism and a fat streak of symbolism, but didn’t stray far from the genre’s topographic origins since it was filmed in Mexico. In South America, Glauber Rocha exploited the inhospitable landscape of Brazil’s hinterland to explore class conflict in Black God, White Devil  (1964) and its sequel Antonio das Mortes (1969), which won him a Best Director award at Cannes.

Australia’s untamed terrain and history of legendary lawbreakers such as Ned Kelly make it an obvious setting for Antipodean horse operas, sometimes known as “Meat Pie Westerns”. For example, John Hillcoat seems to be channelling Sam Peckinpah in The Proposition , set in an unforgiving landscape populated by Irish psychos, English racists and pragmatic Aborigines, where everyone except fragrant Emily Watson is drenched in sweat and covered in flies.

Spaghetti Westerns weren’t the first Euro Westerns. Karl May (1842-1912) wrote novels about Winnetou the Apache that became so popular with German readers that, despite their non-Aryan hero, they weren’t banned by the Nazis, perhaps because the idea of noble savages in natural settings chimed with a certain Teutonic romanticism. Starting with Der Schatz in Silbersee (Treasure of Silver Lake), eleven Winnetou films were made between 1962 and 1968, filmed in Yugoslavia and starring French actor Pierre Brice. For an anglophone, hearing traditional-looking Cowboys and Indians speaking German is a truly “unheimlich” (uncanny) experience.

Meanwhile, East Germany’s state-owned studio DEFA had its own “Indianerfilme” genre, revisionist “Sauerkraut Westerns” in which the villains were white and the Native Americans heroic, often played by strapping Yugoslav actor Gojko Mitic in films such as The Sons of Great Bear (1966) and the gloriously titled Chingachgook, die Große Schlange (1967), with Saxony-Anhalt providing suitable plains and mountains.

During the Cold War, Soviet Russia developed its own “Ostern” (Eastern) genre, also known, inevitably, as “Borscht Westerns”, usually set during the Revolution or the Civil War and filmed in the Urals, but featuring themes and action akin to those of their Hollywood counterparts. Czech director Oldrich Lipsky parodied Hollywood silents and satirised capitalism in his cult musical comedy Western Lemonade Joe (1964), set in Stetson City, where the clean-living hero prefers the soft drink “Kolaloka” to whisky.

The Finns got in on the act with Western comedies Speedy Gonzales Noin seitzemän veljeksen poika (1970) and its sequel Hirttämättömät (1971). But the nearest French film-makers have come to exploring the genre was Claude Lelouch’s transposition of his epic romantic style to the Arizona setting of Another Man, Another Chance, starring James Caan and Geneviève Bujold. More recently, live-action adaptations of popular French comic-strips Blueberry and Lucky Luke offered skin-deep Western pastiche.

The weirdest European oater is probably Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Whity (1970), a Gothic Western exquisitely photographed by Michael Ballhaus in the first of 16 films he filmed for  the German director. Unusually for the genre, it unfolds mostly in interiors, though there’s some horse-riding and a few glimpses of Spanish desert. The weirdness is only exacerbated by histrionic performances, make-up that makes the white characters look like vampires, Hanna Schygulla as a saloon chanteuse singing Berlin-style cabaret, and a provocative attitude to race relations (blackface alert!) which makes Tarantino’s Django Unchained look positively restrained.

Conspicuous by their absence from the non-American Western roster are British examples, which would surely have been called “Roast Beef Westerns”, had there been enough of them. Odd examples include The Singer Not the Song (1961), a J. Arthur Rank peculiarity filmed in Torremolinos with a screenplay by Nigel Balchin, which features Dirk Bogarde as a leather-trousered Mexican bandit learning to respect John Mills as a Catholic priest. There is also, of course, Carry on Cowboy (1965), starring Sid James as the Rumpo Kid and Charles Hawtrey as Chief Big Heap. Shalako (1968) is an Anglo-German western directed by Canadian-born Edward Dmytryk and filmed in the spaghetti stomping grounds of Andalucía; Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot are the stars, but this is chiefly remembered (by me, anyway) for a scene in which Native Americans force Honor Blackman to eat her own necklace.

For more recent examples, we must console ourselves with the 1995 pre-Spaced no-budget feature debut of Edgar Wright – A Fistful of Fingers, filmed in Somerset.

This article was first posted on the Telegraph website in September 2014. It has since been edited and revised.

Le Rallye Dante, Rue Dante.

As has been my habit for the past few years, I spent Christmas in Paris, where the festival is treated like any normal bank holiday. It’s traditional to pig out (usually on seafood) with your family and watch terrible TV on Christmas Eve rather than on Christmas Day itself, when all the cinemas are open and public transport operates a regular bank holiday service – a civilised alternative to the U.K. yuletide lockdown. Most of the shops and some of the bars and restaurants are closed, but you can always find plenty of places open to serve you food and/or a glass of wine.

As always, I spent most of my time going to films and exhibitions, drinking in bars or just walking around, taking photos – the ones here were all taken with the camera app on my iPhone. As you can see, I like taking pictures of opticians’ signs and tobacconists’ carottes, and managed to add a few to my burgeoning collections.

The terrorist attacks of 13/11/2015 didn’t appear to have had much effect on everyday Parisian life, other than the presence of armed forces standing guard over the Christmas markets or strolling down some of the busier streets. Otherwise, it appeared to be business as usual.

Films seen: Kill Your Friends, The Forbidden Room, Studio 54: The Director’s Cut, The Maggie.

Expos visited: Kuniyoshi, le Démon de l’estampe + L’estampe visionnaire, de Goya à Redon (Petit Palais)
Visages de l’effroi – Violence et fantastique de David à Delacroix (Musée de la Vie Romantique)

P.S. A Parisian friend gave me a magazine issued by the Mairie de Paris in February 2015 to celebrate the work of the cartoonist Cabu, who was killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015. Here are some pages:

DVDs and Blu-Rays are all very well (and what on earth did we do before VHS?) but in 2015 I resolved to watch as many old films on the big screen as possible. I’d already seen some of these on video or TV, but as you’re probably aware, the experience of watching something in the cinema is totally different to seeing it at home. You are obliged to concentrate, there are fewer distractions, you can’t break off to answer the phone or make a cup of tea, and thus it’s easier to immerse yourself in the experience, and harder to get bored.

(I wish imdb would oblige people who leave comments on a film to describe the circumstances under which they watched it – in the cinema? on TV? on a tablet or iPhone? Downloaded or streamed? Thus, whenever some idiot complains that a film is “boring” you would be able to ascertain whether or not they’d done more than glance for a few minutes at a postage-stamp-sized image before breaking off to talk or text or surf or post comments about it.)

I saw most of these films at the Cinematek in Brussels, where seasons included the work of Vincente Minnelli, Conrad Veidt and Christopher Lee. The vaguely related (they’re both listed in the Cinematek programme, but you can’t use the same tickets or cards) Flagey cinema had a Jacques Tati retrospective. I also saw films in Paris and Amsterdam. I have also been making an effort to watch more silent movies; the Cinematek screens them with live piano accompaniment.

This is the first time I’ve compiled a list like this; I mainly did it because I was curious to see how many old films I’d seen during the year – I haven’t counted TV or DVD.

Please note these aren’t reviews – they’re a cobbling together of notes and fragments of old tweets, more as an aide memoire for my own future reference than for public consumption. The entry for Out 1 – noli me tangere is particularly rambling and incoherent, and is unlikely to make a shred of sense unless you’ve seen the film.

The Big Gundown aka La resi dei conti (1966)

Saw this at the end of 2014, but squeezed it into the list because it was so great. Spaghetti westerns are best watched BIG, and Sergio Sollima directs the hell out of this one. Lee Van Cleef (underplaying) pursues Tomas Millian (overacting). Terrific use of landscape, ace fight choreography, great characters, good plot and an Ennio Morricone score. Also, a monocle-wearing Prussian, whose every appearance is accompanied by a few bars of Für Elise on the soundtrack.

Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987)

Norman Mailer adapted and directed his own novel, and it’s a riot of OTT performances and bonkers artistic choices, nearly all of them bad. Flashbacks within flashbacks, other flashbacks from the POV of people who weren’t even present. Also a random dog. My first view of this in 28 years, first time on the big screen. More entertaining than expected. There’s also this:

L’assassino… è al telefono (1972)

Seventies giallo set, unusually, in Flanders. Telly Savalas as the world’s most inept hitman, repeatedly trying and failing to kill amnesiac Anne Heywood in Bruges. And he doesn’t use il telefono at all! Climax in a deserted theatre with the slowest safety curtain ever.

Designing Women (1957)

Lauren Bacall vs Gregory Peck in rom-com somewhat dated by its assumption that you will be INSANELY jealous of anyone your spouse hung out with before they met you. Career women, huh? But… five narrators! Bacall in fab frocks! Swishy choreographer (Jack Cole) who does dance-fu. (Clearly gay, but he bests a whole bunch of thugs with his dance steps. Bravo!) Peck is personable but alas no Cary Grant.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1971)

Second time on the big screen; first was in Paris, about 15 years ago. Reading contemporary reviews of Billy Wilder’s film, you realise with an ache in your heart that no-one got it. They complained the case wasn’t interesting enough. And even now, commentators on imbd write things like, “This film is awkwardly staged, poorly acted, badly written, and boring.”  But this is one of the most bittersweet films I know – it draws you in with light comedy, and then bam! Punch to the gut. I wrote more about it here.

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)

Wonderfully histrionic account of washed-up American star (Kirk Douglas) seeking redemption on a movie being shot at Cinecittà outside Rome. Two cats. Best ever hysterical drunk-driving with Kirk + Cyd Charisse in a Maserati 3500 GT Spyder in front of mad back projection; grand tour of Rome nightlife; Dracula dra-cha-cha! Some women (and men) get slapped and Kirk kicks someone’s backside.

And then there’s this, which plays in the background of one scene:

The Sandpiper (1965)

Elizabeth Taylor plays a free-spirited boho painter who lives in a shack at Big Sur and proves to be temptation incarnate for Richard Burton as a married headmaster of an episcopal boys’ school. Taylor is kind of miscast, but is never less than fabulous to watch. Film has dated, but Taylor’s unapologetic single mom who rejects society must have been quite radical for mid-1960s Hollywood. Screenwriters (including Dalton Trumbo) make an admirable effort to flesh out its women, making them more than stereotypes, and there’s are good supporting roles for Charles Bronson (as a beatnik who sculpts topless Taylor and karate-chops Burton) and Afro-American actor James Edwards.

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970)

Late Vincente Minnnelli musical, opens with blossoming flowers. Yves Montand hypnotises Barbra Streisand into giving up smoking and accidentally discovers she has lived a past life with an English accent in 1814. Cue Brighton Pavilion and Cecil Beaton costumes. Elsewhere, Barbra in baby-doll pyjamas that match her sheets. Montand sings the lovely song Melinda. And random New Yorkers (and a poodle) sing Come Back To Me at Streisand in Yves Montand’s voice – check it out, it’s like the demon-possessed people singing the Rolling Stones at Denzel Washington in Fallen!

Dragon Gate Inn (1967)

One of King Hu’s first big wuxia hits. Pure pleasure, a martial arts masterpiece. Villains descend on remote inn to kill offspring of unfairly disgraced general. Knights errant step in to save the day. The supercool swordsman (Shih Chun) is the actor who plays the nerd in A Touch of Zen. I failed to recognise regular Hu actor Bai Ying as the evil albino eunuch/Final Boss. The climactic fight incorporates the ancient art of several people running in circles around the villain to make him dizzy. Score is a mix of Peking Opera and almost avant-garde electronic, plus an unexpected blast of Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie.

Now out on dual-format DVD/Blu-Ray from Eureka’s Masters of Cinema.

Shaolin et les 18 hommes de bronze (1976)

Wacky goings-on at the Shaolin Temple, where the young orphaned hero is faced with mad tests, including dodging spikes, lifting dragon pots and battling with the bronze warriors of the title, before he leaves the temple to avenge his parents’ murderers. There’s a lot of late-breaking plot stuffed into the final five minutes. Not classic nor a must-see, but fun for aficionados.

Jour de fête (1949)

Les vacances de M. Hulot (1953)

My dad took me to see this when I was little. Ode to the French on holiday. Styles have changed but maybe not the rituals. Men in shorts. Quasi-silent with sound effects. Chuckles of recognition rather than belly-laughs. Packed with sight gags and keen wit. Frame teeming with detail.

L’ultimo squalo (1981)

Astonishingly witless Jaws rip-off with not as big a body count as one might like; directed by Enzo G. Castellari; starring James Franciscus and Vic Morrow. One genre where I don’t mind dubbing too much is cheap Italian exploitation like this; print I saw was dubbed into French.

Mon oncle (1958)

Jacques Tati’s first film in colour. This is the one with Hulot baffled by the gizmos in his sister’s ultra-modern house, and wreaking havoc in his brother-in-law’s factory. As always I find Tati more fascinating than funny – the mise en scène (there’s no other word for it) is astonishing, packed with detail and choreography. I suspect I don’t find Hulot that funny because I identify with him too closely, especially when he’s flummoxed by modern technology – I have problems with washroom taps all the time, always pressing and prodding and failing to make the water run.

Some great dog action, including a sterling performance from a teckel (dachshund) – the only trained canine actor. Lots of nice old American cars, including a Chevrolet Bel Air in spectacular green and pink.

Sylvie et le fantôme (1946)

Gentle romantic whimsy directed by Claude Autant-Lara, set in a dilapidated château whose strapped-for-cash owner is having to sell an old portrait, much to the sorrow of his 16-year-old daughter Odette Joyeux (aged 32) who is being wooed by young Jean Desailly (La peau douce) and François Périer (Orphée, Le samouraï).

The film is so whimsical it almost floats away, and Joyeux’s character really got on my wick (maybe because I was nowhere near as soppy as this when I was that age; maybe this is a middle-aged film-maker’s idea of what a 16-year-old girl is like) but is made palatable by a streak of melancholy, and a rather moving mute performance by Jacques Tati as the ghost who lives in the portrait. Meanwhile, grandfather hires an actor to pose as a ghost as an attempt to cheer up his granddaughter… Plus there’s a dashing young criminal on the run… Yes, a lot of people pretending to be ghosts plus one real ghost. Fun with sheets and double exposure SPFX.

Playtime (1967)

I’d never seen this on the big screen before, so jumped at the chance.

François Truffaut wrote that Jacques Tati’s masterpiece, “is a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently.” Tati’s alter ego, Monsieur Hulot, tries in vain to keep an appointment in a baffling Paris of angular modern architecture, trompe l’oeil glass and steel (in fact a specially constructed set) where familiar monuments such as the Eiffel Tower are glimpsed only fleetingly in reflections. Dialogue is limited to semi-audible muttering from an impeccably choreographed cast of tourists, bureaucrats, service staff, with another layer of sound effects added by footsteps, squishy chairs or fluorescent signs. It’s a long way from the crowd-pleasing comedy of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, but patient viewers will be rewarded by a dense, mesmerising symphony of social observation, beautifully composed tableaux and brilliant sight gags. (Billson Film Database)

Blade Runner – “the final cut” (1982)

Can’t remember how many times I’ve seen this now, but I knew all the dialogue.

The Ceremony aka Gishiki (1971)

Nagisa Oshima satire on class, ritual and the sins of the fathers. Some amazing widescreen compositions; a lot of stylisation which distances the viewer emotionally. Grimly funny, quite vicious and a bit disturbing; rather like a Japanese version of Festen.

The Innocents (1961)

First time on a big screen, and with an audience – exquisite black & white cinematography by Freddie Francis; and for the first time I was truly able to appreciate the widescreen compositions with their beautiful deep focus. A collective intake of breath when Quint appears at the window, followed by (extremely) nervous laughter. Watching this for the umpteenth time, it seems obvious Miss Giddens is insane, but if anything that makes the film all the more frightening. The perfect balance of supernatural and psychological – either way it’s scary.

Der Student von Prag (1926)

Henrik Galeen’s remake of Hanns Heinz Ewers’ 1913 film inspired by Poe’s William Wilson. Student and fencing champ Balduin (Conrad Veidt) is fed up with being penniless and strikes deal with the mysterious Scapinelli (Werner Krauss) who of course is the Devil in disguise. Balduin is haunted by own doppelganger, loses it. Famous images include the diabolical Scapinelli standing on a hillock. One drunken party scene seems to be an early example of hand-held P.O.V. My favourite bit is the Expressionist climax set during a storm, when the student is being followed down the road by his double – it looks like (but can’t be) a Vertigo-style dolly-zoom. Spine-tingling stuff.

The Man Who Laughs (1928)

Paul Leni directed this adaptation of a Victor Hugo novel about a clown called Gwynplaine (Conrad Veidt), disfigured in childhood by the king’s wicked minions, who carved his face into a Joker-like rictus. Grows up and joins a troupe of actors who treat him like a human being; also falls in love with a blind girl (Mary Philbin) who loves him back. Olga Baclanova plays the queen’s slutty sister. Veidt does amazing acting with his eyes. There’s a faithful dog called Homo. Which means, of course, plenty of title cards saying “Homo!”

Everyone laughs at Gwynplaine, though if you ask me he looks scary, not funny. But he’s a nice guy, so it’s terribly sad. The point where I really broke down and started blubbing was when everyone thinks Gwyplaine is dead and the other clowns are trying to hide this fact from the blind girl. Luckily Hollywood imposed its own ending on Hugo’s gratuitously cruel one. (And if you think that’s cruel, get a load of his ending for Notre-Dame de Paris aka The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.)

Out 1, noli me tangere (1971)

One of the highlights of my film year was getting to see all twelve and a half hours of Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 – noli me tangere, screened over a weekend at the Cinematek in Brussels. It’s a long way from being my favourite Rivette – Céline et Julie vont en bateau, Duelle and Noroît are more my cup of tea – but it reintroduced me to the pleasures of total immersion.

Maddening, indulgent, wayward, elusive, endless. Also oddly inspiring and compelling. Lengthy scenes of actors improvising and playing acting games, to no clear purpose. I do hope that’s mud or clay they’re smearing all over themselves. Primal therapy, full retard, Von Trier’s The Idiots, yoga, screaming, shoving horrible feet in her face. Sometimes the impro verges on violence. What if it got out of hand and someone died?

After two films, I’m more worried about deep vein thrombosis than falling asleep. Cigarettes, wine, crochet. Michel Lonsdale = boss. Juliet Berto (always pouting, always trailing things – bags, scarves) wears bellbottoms decorated with a labia-centric design and lives in an attic in the Bastille quartier; we get to see the Paris skyline from her window and it’s breathtaking. The entire movie is a snapshot of Paris in 1971, before Tour Montparnasse, Opéra Bastille and the centre commerciale at Les Halles; La Samaritaine is still open. Jean-Pierre Léaud repeatedly recites The Hunting of the Snark, pronouncing Boojum as “Boo-joom”.

Smoking in cafés – could you even make this film without cigarettes? Smoking near small children; once upon a time I might not have noticed this. Bernadette Lafont is FIERCE. I’m anxious about the tortoise. Parsing the clues. The ur-conspiracy theory movie. “These people might be killers.” Bulle Ogier talking about blackberry and rhubarb tarts. Léaud eating jam straight from the mug, getting the giggles. Are they stoned? Closed societies and initiation rituals. Implicit power struggles.

Scenes at Porte d’Orléans – lots of old Renaults and Citroëns, a car-spotter’s paradise. Before each film there’s a sort of “Previously on Out 1 – noli me tangere” collage. Small children staring into camera. Considering this is a French film, the food is remarkably unappetising – spaghetti triste, dry biscuits, jam out of a mug. The crochet shawls: Marie – purple, Ogier – sky blue, Lili – greenish, Rose – multicoloured poncho. “Decidement, tu es partout.”

Dialogue turns in boucles, just like an assemblée de syndic. The red queen is talking backwards. Pierre and Igor are absent. We never see what characters are looking at. Quentin and his clipboard at Porte d’Italie, bothering passers-by. The Mirror Shot. Lonsdale = Stephen King + Dan Aykroyd. Statue of Minerva.

“Pourquoi tu me regardes comme ça?” “Non, je te regarde normalement.”

Quintessentially French – chain-smoking, drinking red wine and talking bollocks. VERY disappointed the Cinematek didn’t hand out badges with “I SAW OUT 1 – NOLI ME TANGERE” on them.

Le diable par la queue (1969)

There seems to be an entire subgenre of French films about cash-strapped aristocrats struggling with the upkeep of their enormous old houses (see also: Sylvie et le fantôme). Like this charming Philippe de Broca comedy about eccentric and impoverished aristocrats trying to run their dilapidated château as a hotel. Yves Montand = dapper gangster on the run. Marthe Keller is frisky and delightful, climbs a tree in a micro-miniskirt, shows endless legs and irrepressible energy. Some hotel guests are naturists. Implied horrible accident (sound effects) with mill wheel. Unfeasibly young Jean Rochefort as paterfamilias.

The Sorrows of Satan (1926)

Famous shadow, made even more famous by post-punk-proto-goth band Bauhaus. Directed by D.W. Griffith. Faustian tale of struggling writer who can’t get published, sells soul to Lucifer and hangs out with loose women. (We’ve all been there.) Carol Dempster is the nice girl who impresses even Satan with her incorruptability. Lya De Putti plays a saucy Russian princess who steals our impressionable writer away from her. Orgies and fleshpots. Film’s MSP is Adolph Menjou, astonishingly timeless as a dapper Satan. He has one hell of an entrance:

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)

Directed by Freddie Francis. Dracula revived when blood trickles out of head wound and penetrates ice where he is frozen. The blonde lives! Victims are feisty redhead and brunettes. Dracula falls off a cliff and is impaled on a cross.

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)

Directed by Peter Sasdy. Begins with flashback to end of Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, this time witnessed by dodgy antique dealer Roy Kinnear, who keeps artefacts: red dust and signet ring. Vampire revived when blood is added to powdered Dracula blood, like Instant Whip.  Highgate Cemetery. Victims are hypocritical Edwardian/Victorian paterfamilias plus feisty brunette. The blonde lives! Dracula is killed by holiness (in a church where he already spent half the film). So not a very satisfactory ending.

“That was a damn fool thing to do.” “Possibly. But it amused me.”

The Face of Fu Manchu (1965)

Christopher Lee’s first outing as Fu. Not Hammer but Hallam. Nigel Green as Nayland Smith, not the brightest of bulbs; always ready for fisticuffs, but fails to recognise Fu Manchu’s daughter when she’s wearing spectacles or disguised (not very convincingly) as a little old lady. Dublin plays London. Body count = entire population of an Essex village. Not sure what Fu motivation is, other than to be very, very evil. Karin Dor plays German scientists’ daughter, first seen dusting ornaments. Gets kidnapped very easily. But saves the day! Hurrah! Fu’s minions (mostly played by swarthy white stuntmen, plus a few token Pan-Asians) are dacoits who strangle their victims with Tibetan prayer-shawls. Lee makes no attempt at a Chinese accent – thank God.

Violence report: protracted fisticuffs in a laboratory (turns out to be between two people on the same side as each other); whip brought out and brandished, but not used; special drowning chamber linked to the Thames; protracted fisticuffs in warehouse; assorted throttlings; stabby suicide under Fu hypnosis; protracted fisticuffs in cellar. Hoods and gowns like The Silent Three. Blowing up a Tibetan place = dodgy foreign policy. “The world shall hear from me again.”

The Last Command (1928)

The Russian Revolution according to Josef von Sternberg and Hollywood. Emil Jannings plays Russian general reduced after the Revolution to working as a movie extra in Hollywood. Jannings won first Best Actor Oscar; according to Susan Orleans, first choice for the award was Rin Tin Tin, but the Academy worried they might not be taken seriously. Jannings’ performances don’t seem to have aged as well as Veidt’s; they now seem excessively twitchy and OTT. Hard to fathom why passionate revolutionary Evelyn Brent would fall for this crusty old reactionary (he loves Russia! yeah, right). William Powell plays revolutionary-turned-Hollywood-movie-director who wants to give ex-General Jannings a taste of his own medicine.

Dracula (1958)

Terence Fisher. Second time on the big screen. So many changes from the novel that it takes me by surprise every time. Why does Van Helsing tell Mina not to touch the garlic in Lucy’s bedroom, but forget to tell the servant? Brunette victim (Lucy). The blonde lives! Finale surprisingly action-packed – Cushing and Lee really going at it and (literally) letting their hair down. Cushing leaping around like a swashbuckling hero.

Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966)

Directed by Don Sharp. Christopher Lee quaffs, dances cossack-style, treats the chicks like shit but is so great in the sack they flock to him anyway. Scoffs poisoned Milk Tray, is shot and falls out of a window. Filmed on leftover sets from Dracula Prince of Darkness; reunites three of its stars – Lee, Barbara Shelley (who is terrific) and Francis Matthews. Lee has ENORMOUS hands, with healing powers. Should have been called Rasputin: The Drunk Monk; last time I saw this much quaffing was in Barfly: Lee necks red wine non-stop, and at one point has ten empty bottles on his table. Hammer’s hard-pressed costume department pushed to the limit with Imperial Russia. But Lee’s scarlet tunic is spivvy.

54 (director’s cut) (1998)

Better than original theatrical version (cut against director’s wishes) but still not great. Characters sleazier, but arc still cleaves to the rise and fall of a New Jersey busboy scenario. I see no reason to change my 1998 verdict – I wish the movie had been about Steve Rubell instead of busboy. Still worth seeing for Mike Myers’s glorious performance as Rubell – creepy, funny, oddly sympathetic. Breckin Meyer very good as one of Ryan Philippe’s fellow barmen.

The ‘Maggie’ (1954

Directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Canny Scots give gullible but rich American a ride on their rickety steamboat and take him for all he’s got. More anxious-making than funny. Pretends to be heartwarming, but is actually quite bleak; presents characters as loveable when they’re anything but. Film posing as sentimental Ealing comedy but in fact is utterly cynical, almost grim.

Dracula père et fils (1976)

Vampire comedy directed by Édouard Molinaro (La cage aux folles, L’emmerdeur). Plot similarities to Love at First Bite; Dracula has to leave Transylvania because of Communism. Hammer and sickle = crucifix. Catherine Breillat plays young woman kidnapped and impregnated by Dracula in the 18th century, gives him a son; her sister Marie-Hélène Breillat plays main (present-day) love interest; father and son both fall for her. Son is geeky loser who ends up as a nightwatchman in Paris; father becomes a vampire movie star in London. Lee speaks French! In tenth and final appearance as Dracula – though character is named as such only in title and publicity. Lee’s shirts are puffier and floppier than usual. I laughed only a couple of times, but some of the vampire lore is fun. Two cats get eaten, offscreen.

Vladimir Cosma’s music is lovely. I thought at first it was by Krzysztof Komeda, the guy who scored Dance of the Vampires, particularly as there’s a blatant Polanski homage early on in the movie.

Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960)

The choice of viewpoint is one of their most important decisions a film-maker has to make, because it indicates not just whose story is being told but also, by extension, how it should be filmed. After the discovery of an abandoned car on a ferry and a shot of its driver’s corpse washed up on a beach, Ewan McGregor is present in virtually every scene of Roman Polanski’s The Ghost. He’s the film’s eyes and ears, our surrogate in the story, our entry-point into this world, right up until the film’s final shot.

Polanski has always excelled at this form of first person storytelling. Although the protagonists of Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, The Ninth Gate and The Pianist can frequently be seen within the frame, the unfolding story is nevertheless filmed from their point of view. This is achieved so seamlessly that we might as well be inside their heads, even though, in these cases, this approach never calls attention to itself, so we barely notice it. It’s as near as a film can get to the first person voice of written fiction without adding gimmicks such as voice-over narration or subjective camerawork.

Ewan McGregor in The Ghost (2010)

Alfred Hitchcock was another master of first person. We watch Rear Window entirely from the viewpoint of James Stewart, who is himself watching from the apartment where he’s laid up with a broken leg. In Vertigo and North by Northwest, we tag along with James Stewart or Cary Grant, just as mystified by the twists and turns of the plot as they are, until, almost grudgingly, the director cuts to another, more neutral point of view to explain to the audience (if not to the character) what’s going on.

The decision to cut to another point of view is a valuable tool in the storytelling kit, though it’s often used thoughtlessly. At what point should the audience be fed information to which the story’s protagonist is not privy? And will that make them more or less engaged with the central character? The revelation of both the randomness and hopelessness of Cary Grant’s predicament in North by Northwest actually tightens the screws, since the new information makes the audience aware that no-one will be coming to his rescue.

When, in Sicario, Dennis Villeneuve abandons Emily Blunt’s point of view and switches to that of Benicio Del Toro, I would contend that most of the tension drains out of the narrative, since we’re no longer sharing her experience but looking on it from a more detached and (in Del Toro’s case) less vulnerable viewpoint. Perhaps it was Villeneuve’s intention to reduce Blunt to an increasingly irrelevant onlooker to drive home his sociopolitical point, but it distanced this particular viewer and thumped home the film’s “message” in a surprisingly crude way.

Hitchcock is more cunning. Part of the shock effect of Psycho is that when our heroine is murdered in the shower, the point of view we’ve been sharing for the past 45 minutes is abruptly yanked away, forcing us to transfer allegiance to the nearest surviving character at hand – we’re like the disembodied demonic entity looking around for someone else to possess in Fallen. In Psycho, of course, that “someone else” just happens to be Norman Bates.

The view from James Stewart’s room in Rear Window (1954)

Naturally, when we’re seeing events through a protagonist’s eyes we’re also vulnerable to sharing the same errors of perception. Like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, we assume Faye Dunaway is a duplicitous femme fatale until, like him, we’re forced to consider another point of view. Or hearing with a protagonist’s ears, in the case of surveillance expert Gene Hackman in The Conversation, where we’re nudged into misinterpreting a vital line of dialogue, until – too late – we finally realise the real significance of what we heard.

And we’re now so familiar with film grammar that we take its conventions for granted. Films are peppered with subjective shots, but most of the time we don’t register the fact. For example, whenever there’s a close-up of a character looking at something, we assume the next shot will be of whatever they’re looking at, from the character’s point of view. In other words, it’s a subjective shot. If this revelatory subjective shot is postponed or withheld, the effect can be disconcerting or even frightening. Korean director Kim Jee-woon is an expert at delaying and withholding P.O.V. to scary effect, as can be seen in his segment of the portmanteau horror movie Three (2002) and in this scene from A Tale of Two Sisters (2003):

Subjective shots which extend beyond a few moments, on the other hand, are hard to miss. They often feel gimmicky or even physically upsetting. The impressionistic blur of the first reel of The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly traps the viewer in Jean-Dominique Bauby’s locked-in syndrome so efficiently that, at the screening I attended, one stricken filmgoer had to be helped from the cinema.

First sight upon waking up after a stroke in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)

Horror films, of course, stand and fall by their point of view. The Faux Found Footage fad has placed (usually fuzzy or wobbly) subjective camera sequences centre-frame, but we long ago became accustomed to the camera standing in for slasher-movie psychokillers who are stalking their victims, a device used to such creepy effect by John Carpenter in Halloween (1978). However, reversing the viewpoints of psycho and potential victim is fraught with peril in the hands of lesser film-makers; I’ve written here about how the fluctuating point of view dissipates the tension in The Woman in Black (2012).

Whenever our heroine is desperately searching for somewhere to hide, and then the point of view abruptly switches from her point of view to that of the psycho who is stalking her, I relax. There’s no need to worry about the heroine’s wellbeing so long as we’re sharing her stalker’s P.O.V. – because now the hunter has been placed in the role of the hunted, and all we have to do is wait for our heroine to go on the offensive. There’s a splendid example of this at the end (big spoilers!) of Nighthawks (1981) where a psychotic terrorist (Rutger Hauer) is preparing to murder the N.Y.P.D. detective who has thwarted him.

The psycho’s point of view; Halloween (1978)

Subjective viewpoint combined with the withholding of the revelatory shot can also work beautifully in comedy. In The Nutty Professor (1963), when Jerry Lewis drinks his Doctor Jekyll potion he switches to first person P.O.V., so that we share his point of view the shocked reactions from passers-by as he walks along the street, followed by heads swivelling towards him as he enters the nightclub – all this laying groundwork for the delicious reveal that he’s not the hideous Mr Hyde-like creature we were expecting, but “Buddy Love”, a slick lounge lizard who has been attracting everyone’s attention because of his preternatural cool.

Jerry Lewis entering the nightclub in The Nutty Professor (1963)

Most prolonged subjective sequences include at least part of the character’s back in the frame, as you can see in this still from The Nutty Professor. The extended Steadicam shot in which we follow the characters, thus sharing their viewpoint as they advance, has become an almost obligatory flourish of Hollywood auteurism, exemplified by Danny exploring the Overlook on his tricycle in The Shining or Henry and Karen entering the restaurant via the kitchens in Goodfellas.

Most of Brian De Palma’s films have at least one extended Steadicam sequence, often illustrating one character stalking another like James Stewart following Kim Novak in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, though De Palma rarely lingers for too long on his protagonist’s back, and knows how to ring the changes so he doesn’t seem to be repeating himself. Darren Aronofsky has almost made the Steadicam-follow his signature move, as can be seen in this supercut by Jacob T. Swinney. Gus Van Sant made recurring use of this sort of shot in Elephant (2003) (echoing the first-person shooter games to which the film alludes) and Derek Cianfrance used the conceit to kick off The Place Beyond the Pines (2012). Maybe it’s time for directors to find a new way to flash their auteurist credentials.

To date, the only commercial movie to use unadulterated subjective viewpoint all the way through is Lady in the Lake, seen through the eyes of Philip Marlowe (played by the director, Robert Montgomery, whose face can occasionally be glimpsed in mirrors) and in which the camera itself seems to get punched, blow cigarette smoke into a cop’s face or turn to ogle a dame. “You play the starring role!” trumpeted the trailer, in a foreshadowing of today’s interactive video games, or music videos such as the one for Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up, parodied so brilliantly here with a cat’s eye view.

Movie adaptations of video games, meanwhile, never seem to pull off the subjective experience of game-playing itself. The only memorable sequence in Doom is when the ho-hum action temporarily switches to the sort of first-person shooter set-up in which the original game is played, but so far, the nearest anyone has come to stretching this format out to feature-length is Van Sant with the aforementioned Elephant, where it seems almost designed to alienate casual game-playing audiences who might stumble across these “scenes with tracking shots of heads” (as described by a  disgruntled viewer on the imdb message boards).

Or maybe it’s just that gamers would rather play than watch.

Robert Montgomery (you only ever see his face in mirrors) & Audrey Totter in Lady in the Lake (1947)

A version of this post first appeared in the Guardian in April 2010, to tie in with the U.K. release of The Ghost. It has since been edited and expanded.

Lately, while watching Hammer horror films on the big screen, I have been surprised and delighted by the credits, sometimes spelt out in striking gothic typefaces, often in scarlet but also occasionally in fluorescent pinks and greens.

So, to amuse myself, I thought I would start taking screen grabs of them. This is the first batch – taken from DVDs (of varying quality) that I found around the house. But since this is only a small portion of Hammer’s output, I aim to be adding to them, and at some point might arrange them chronologically, or according to typeface, or according to featured creatures or characters.

In any case, this page is a work in progress.

“Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only,” wrote Samuel Butler. But he wrote that in 1872, when the movies were still no more than a twinkle in the eyes of the Lumière brothers, Woodville Latham and other early pioneers of the cinema.

Because mirrors in the movies reveal more than just “appearance”. They can display the soul, reflect psychological damage, or show things that aren’t really there. They can function as a portal to other worlds, or as a door to admit otherwordly creatures into our reality. They can bewilder and bewitch, distract and disturb. They can be symbols of ageing and death, madness and corruption. They can expose the truth, or hide it behind a veil of deception. They can be talked to, and they can talk back.

But, mostly, they are not to be trusted.

Here are twenty-three memorable mirror moments.

THE MULTIPLE TARGET PART 1 – THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947)

“With these mirrors it’s difficult to tell. You are aiming at me, aren’t you? I’m aiming at you, lover.”

Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth were already on the verge of divorce when he made her cut and bleach her trademark red hair to play Elsa Bannister, the femme fatale in this film noir. Welles wrote and directed it, and also plays the leading male role of an itinerant sailor with an absurd Irish accent. He gets a job on her wealthy husband’s yacht and finds himself market out as the patsy in a convoluted murder plot.

It’s a familiar tale with Welles – studio interference leading to a film deemed by some to be less than the sum of its parts. But what parts! Chief among them are the much-copied tryst in the aquarium (very fishy) and the demented final showdown set in a funfair hall of mirrors that prove as deceptive as Elsa herself. They also make for some spectacular images.

THE ABSENT MIRROR 1 – DUCK SOUP (1933)

The mirror gets broken right at the beginning of this brilliant Marx brothers sequence in which Harpo pretends to be Groucho’s reflection. Split second timing, reversed expectations and surreal visual gags add up to a comedy classic that has no need of dialogue or music.

Now they would do it with special effects. In fact, they already have – in 1988’s Big Business (see below).

THE KNOW-IT-ALL MIRROR – SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937)

“Magic mirror on the wall Who is the fairest one of all?”

No list of movie mirrors would be complete without the mother of all fairytale looking-glasses – the ego-boosting device in Snow White which goes horribly wrong when it reveals to the Evil Queen that she is no longer the prettiest person in the land. Vanity, thy name is Older Woman Worried About Losing Her Looks. There is always someone younger and prettier.

Magic mirrors can be seen in Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). But of course the best and creepiest magic mirror is the one in Disney’s 1937 animated film.

THE HAUNTED MIRROR PART 1 – DEAD OF NIGHT (1945)

“When I was dressing this evening, just as I was tying my tie, I suddenly realised that the reflection was all wrong.”

Robert Hamer’s short film about a haunted mirror is one of the highlights of Ealing’s deliciously scary portmanteau horror film in which guests at a house party relate their uncanny experiences to the assembled company, including an architect who is beginning to feel an uncanny sense of déjà-vu.

Googie Withers tells us how she bought an antique mirror for her fiancé, only for him to see reflections of the mirror’s past in it, not its present. And that past begins to exercise a baleful influence on his personality…

I’ve often wondered how THAT marriage worked out.

THE MIRROR AS PORTAL PART 1 – ORPHÉE (1950)

“Les miroirs sont les portes par lesquelles la Mort va et vient. Du reste, regardez-vous toute votre vie dans une glace et vous verrez la Mort travailler commes les abeilles dans une ruche de verre.” (Mirrors are the doors by which Death comes and goes. You have only to look at yourself in the mirror every day and you will see Death at work there, like bees in a glass hive.)

Art, Death, Immortality – the Big Themes. Using an array of rudimentary but startling practical effects, such as footage of a hand dipping into a vat of mercury, Jean Cocteau inserted meaningful mirrors into The Blood of a Poet (1930), La belle et la bête (1946) and this sublime update of the Orpheus myth.

Jean Marais puts on special rubber gloves and passes through the looking-glass into the underworld in search of his dead wife, borne along on invisible winds by Georges Auric’s haunting music. And all the while, he flirts with his own Death, played by Maria Casares in Dior-esque New Look, who swans around in a Rolls-Royce with a car radio that transmits the sort of enigmatic message used by the Resistance during occupied France in World War Two: “L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts. Deux fois.” (The bird sings with its fingers. Twice.)

Cocteau was full of good mirror quotes. “Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir un peu avant de renvoyer des images.” (Mirrors would do well to reflect a bit before sending back images.)

REFLECTIONS OF DEATH – PEEPING TOM (1960)

“I made them watch their own deaths. I made them see their own terror as the spike went in.”

Like the mirrors in Orphée (see above), the one in Peeping Tom reflects Death. But death in Michael Powell’s classic shocker isn’t poetic and seductive – it’s horrific. Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is a photographer and serial killer who not only impales his victims on the sharpened point of his photographic tripod – he makes them watch their own deaths in a mirror and films their terror as they die.

Mirrors figure in the sick rituals of some of cinema’s best known psychokillers. See also “The Tooth Fairy” in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, who places pieces of broken mirror in the eyes of his dead victims. The novel was filmed in 1986 as Manhunter, adapted again in 2002, and incorporated into the third season of the TV show Hannibal.

WRITING ON THE MIRROR – BUTTERFIELD 8 (1960)

Elizabeth Taylor gives an Oscar-winning masterclass in hangover management at the start of this deliciously trashy adaptation of John O’Hara’s novel about Manhattan model-cum-call-girl Gloria Wandrous, who makes the mistake of falling for a married heel (Lawrence Harvey) who humiliates her in cocktail lounges. It’s a tour de force of Taylorisme – lessons include how to drape yourself in a sheet, how to brush your teeth with bourbon, and how to scrawl furious messages on mirrors with lipstick.

Gloria comes to a sticky end, of course, albeit not half as sticky as her death in O’Hara’s novel.

No demise too horrible for a loose woman, it would seem.

ABSENT REFLECTIONS – DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES (THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS) (1967)

“There was no reflection of him in the mirror!” writes Jonathan Harker in Dracula by Bram Stoker.

It’s said that mirrors reflect the soul, which is the reason why vampires, who don’t have souls, traditionally don’t show up in them. Many vampire movies include scenes in which the vampires casts no reflection. Sometimes this is how their vampire nature is exposed to the human characters; sometimes it’s how the vampires themselves realise there are humans in their midst.

In the opening segment of the portmanteau movie The Vault of Horror, Daniel Massey discovers he’s the sole diner visible in a restaurant mirror, but two of the best mirror moments are in this bewitching horror-comedy by Roman Polanski (who had already inserted an early example of the “mirror scare” into Repulsion). The first is in a scene between the vampire hunter’s assistant (played by the director himself) and the Count’s gay son; the second takes place at the climax of the eponymous dance, pictured above.

MULTIPLE TARGETS PART 2 – ENTER THE DRAGON (1973)

“Remember – the enemy has only images and illusions behind which he hides his true motives. Destroy the image and you will break the enemy.”

Shades of Lady from Shanghai in the final showdown of this Hong Kong/American martial arts classic, the last film Bruce Lee completed before his premature death at the age of 32. The villainous Han slips through a cunningly concealed revolving door into his own private hall of mirrors to escape the well-deserved thrashing Lee has been giving him. The reflections confuse our hero – but only for a moment, before he remembers the words of the Wise Shaolin Abbot, and hits upon the smart tactic of smashing all the mirrors so he can see what is real.

Other movies featuring confrontations in mirrored rooms include the seriously bonkers Zardoz.

MIRROR CLUES – PROFONDO ROSSO (DEEP RED) (1975)

“Sometimes what you actually see and what you imagine get mixed up in your memory like a cocktail.”

Dario Argento’s giallo features two notable instances of mirrors as clues. A murder victim manages to write a vital clue on a steamed up bathroom mirror before expiring. When the steam disperses, the writing becomes invisible…

And the other instance is a SPOILER so it’s REDACTED.

THE “YOU TALKIN’ TO ME?” MIRROR – TAXI DRIVER (1976)

“You talkin’ to me? Well I’m the only one here.”

Travis Bickle uses the rear-view mirror of his cab a lot in the course of his work, of course, but also delivers the movie’s best-known monologue into a mirror in his apartment.

Paul Schrader’s screenplay originally just mentioned Bickle practising his quick draw in front of the mirror. Robert de Niro ad-libbed the rest, thus inspiring a gazillion fanboy impressions and send-ups.

THE DRESSING-ROOM MIRROR – RAGING BULL (1980)

“I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

Robert De Niro pulls off another mirror monologue in Martin Scorsese’s masterful drama about Bronx middleweight boxing champ Jake La Motta. De Niro endangered his health by piling on 60lb to film the scenes of the older, chunkier La Motta, and this time his monologue is the opposite of ad-libbed – it’s an intentionally stilted rendition of Marlon Brando’s speech from On the Waterfront, delivered in front of a dressing-room mirror as the former boxer psychs himself up before going on stage to deliver a stand-up routine in a nightclub.

See also: Mark Wahlberg at the end of Boogie Nights, pulling out his enormous but flaccid (prosthetic) penis in front of the mirror as he rehearses dialogue for the porn movie he’s about to perform in.

THE ALTER EGO + MIRROR WRITING – THE SHINING (1980)

“Redrum. Redrum. REDRUM.”

When little Danny, helped by his imaginary friend Tony, scrawls “REDRUM” on the door in his mother’s lipstick, he is not channelling Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8, nor is he paying homage to the three-time Grand National winner.

I’m not sure Wendy needed a mirror to help her realise this is backwards writing, but Stanley Kubrick hammers the point home with a couple of clunky zooms, one into a mirror, and a loud blast of discordant music – tricks usually derided when they’re used in horror movies directed by less-adulated film-makers.

THE REFLECTED SOUL – ALL OF ME (1984)

“What the hell are you doing in there?”

Steve Martin plays a lawyer who finds himself sharing his body with the soul of a deceased millionairess (Lily Tomlin), whose likeness he sees whenever he looks into a mirror (just as Scott Bakula would always see the “real” face of whichever body he was occupying that week in the TV show Quantum Leap). The result is a lot of funny bickering and some hilarious physical comedy from Martin as the two different personalities battle for control of the same body, though Tomlin matches him so expertly it’s a shame we only get to see her reflection.

THE ABSENT MIRROR PART 2 – BIG BUSINESS (1988)

Lily Tomlin again. Bette Midler and Tomlin, playing two sets of identical twins, perform a variation on the classic Marx brothers mirror routine (see above) in a hotel bathroom.

The main difference being, of course, that Tomlin and Midler and their “reflections” are being played by the same actresses, making it less a triumph of timing and choreography, and more a trick of special effects and stand-ins.

THE MIRROR AS PORTAL PART 2 – CANDYMAN (1992)

“If you look in the mirror and you say his name five times, he’ll appear behind you breathing down your neck.”

Bernard Rose’s clever transposition of a Clive Barker short story from Liverpool to Chicago takes as its hook (pun intended) a variation on urban legends such as that of Bloody Mary, who supposedly can be summoned – usually to baleful effect – if someone recites her name a certain number of times while staring into a mirror. In Rose’s film the apparition is that of the hooked-handed Candyman, who emerges through an interlinked bathroom mirror to bedevil and bewitch a graduate student (Virginia Madsen) who has been researching her thesis on urban legends.

See also: in one of segments in the Amicus portmanteau movie From Beyond the Grave (1974), David Warner tricks an antique dealer into selling him an old mirror at a knock-down price, only to find it’s the portal to a nether-dimension occupied by the soul of a serial killer…

THE WING MIRROR – JURASSIC PARK (1993)

“Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”

Big game hunter Bob Peck glances in the wing-mirror of the Jeep Wrangler – and sees a gigantic Tyrannosaurus Rex reflected in it. It’s the perfect fusion of frightening and funny, and a classic movie mirror moment.

THE ONE-WAY MIRROR – L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997)

The one-way mirror presenting a private view of the interrogation room or line-up of suspects is a staple ingredient of the cop movie (L.A. Confidential), the spy thriller (Salt), the comedy (Bean), and the horror movie (The Cabin in the Woods).

THE EROTIC MIRROR – ROMANCE (1999)

Catherine Breillat’s provocative film split audiences down the middle with its chic young Parisienne’s quest for erotic fulfilment, though it’s possible she might have found it a lot earlier if she’d gone easy on the gloomy soliloquising. Needless to say, most of the men I know found this slice of explicit arty erotica quite boring, though many of the women were rather taken with the scene in the corridor with the mirror. Enough said.

THE MAGIC MIRROR – HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE (2001)

“I show you not your face but your heart’s desire.”

After Redrum, cinema’s most famous backwards writing is probably that of The Mirror of Erised, which Harry finds in an abandoned classroom at Hogwarts, which is inscribed with the legend “erised stra ehru oytube cafru oyt on wohs i” – “I show you not your face but your heart’s desire.”

Thus Harry sees his mother and father, who were killed by Voldemort when he was a baby. But Dumbledore warns Harry of the mirror’s addictive qualities and says, “It does not do to dwell on dreams.”

THE HUNGARIAN MIRROR TRAP – THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE (2010)

This Disney special effects extravaganza is a lot more fun that you might expect, its potentially formulaic plot pepped up by a nerdy but intelligent hero (Jay Baruchel), a brace of duelling wizards (Nicolas Cage and Alfred Molina), a heroine (Teresa Palmer) who turns out to be not quite as useless as you expect, and some inventive ideas.

These include a Persian Rug Trick, a Chinatown dragon that turns into the real thing with its operators still trapped inside… and the “Hungarian Mirror Trap” which crops up in a public bathroom, and again in a car chase through the streets of New York.

THE SCHIZOPHRENIC MIRROR – BLACK SWAN (2010)

“The only person standing in your way is you.”

Natalie Portman gives an Oscar-winning performance in Darren Aronofsky’s Gothic body horror movie about a neurotic ballerina preparing for the dual role in a production of Swan Lake, and getting confused by her reflections, her understudy and her own evil id. There’s even some Tayloresque writing on a looking-glass in lipstick!

The climax, fittingly, involves a shard of broken mirror used as a weapon. But is it real or is it Memorex?

THE HAUNTED MIRROR PART 2 – OCULUS (2013)

“It was the mirror!”

The mirror jump-scare is such a cliché in horror films nowadays that it even has its own supercut, which references everything from Phantasm to The Broken to Mirrors (see below). So it takes a brave film-maker to make a haunted mirror movie that largely avoids it. Director and co-writer Mike Flanagan opts instead for creepy backstory and build-up, as well as a full complement of body horror, flashbacks and disorienting mindgames.

Karen Gillan sets out to prove her parents weren’t responsible for a bloodbath that took place eleven years earlier – it was a sinister-looking antique mirror called The Lasser Glass what done it.

This piece was first posted on the Telegraph website in July 2014, to tie in with the U.K. release of Oculus. It has since been  extensively revised and expanded.

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Anyone who thinks Hugh Grant is not an accomplished actor is surely underestimating how difficult it is to do light comedy. It’s harder than drama, but the secret is making it look effortless, and effortless performances are rarely appreciated – it’s the showy mannerisms and thundering speeches that win awards, not comic timing (which you only notice when it doesn’t work), casual asides and ironic self-deprecation.

You have only to look at Ridley Scott’s A Good Year, in which Russell Crowe (a very fine dramatic actor, and if you don’t agree, it just means you haven’t seen him in The Insider) makes heavy weather of the sort of Englishman abroad role Grant could saunter through in his sleep. Or at least, Grant makes us think he’s sauntering though his rom-coms and light comedies, that he just rolled out of bed and is simply playing himself – not for any high-toned thespian motivation, but for the pay cheque. And there’s the trick – he’s making us think that. But there’s more to it than meets the eye.

Grant’s father was Sandhurst-trained, his mother a teacher at a state-school. He won scholarships to Latymer and Oxford, where in 1982 he got himself noticed in Privileged, a glorified student production that was the Riot Club of its day. After five years of hard graft in rep, revue and supporting roles on TV, his film career sputtered into life with James Ivory’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s roman à clef Maurice, in which he played the title character’s posh homosexual love interest.

With James Wilby in Maurice (1987)

After that, he was pretty much typecast as posh, though the early performances were more fun than you may remember: dreaming of stocking-tops and fanged temptresses for Ken Russell in Lair of the White Worm (co-starring young Peter Capaldi on bagpipes); assuming the floppy shirt and consumptive cough of Frederic Chopin in Impromptu  (alongside Judy Davis as George Sand, Julian Sands as Franz Liszt and Mandy Patinkin as Alfred de Musset – the sort of casting that has us fans of bonkers biopics squealing with glee); doing a solid job as the least interesting person in the room in both Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon and John Duigan’s Sirens.

It was the massive success of Four Weddings and Funeral in 1994, frothy as Asti Spumante, that sealed his stardom, cemented his screen persona, and subsequently triggered rabid tabloid curiosity about his off-screen relationships with Elizabeth Hurley and Jemima Khan. The suave upper-class English ditherer whose amiable diffidence got him in and out of romantic jams was a role he would repeat in other Richard Curtis-scripted crowd-pleasers like Notting Hill and Love Actually (in which he played an unfeasibly likeable Prime Minister who falls for his tea lady), and to which he would add a caddish twist as the Mr Naughty (to Colin Firth’s Mr Nice) in the Bridget Jones films, and a more nuanced sliver of bachelor desperation for About a Boy.

Meanwhile, his Hollywood career got off to a dismal start with Chris Columbus’s cackhanded Nine Months, in which unplanned pregnancy throws him and Julianne Moore into an unfunny tizzy. Two weeks before its premiere in 1995, Grant was arrested near Sunset Boulevard while being pleasured in his car by a prostitute called Divine Brown. The fallout did nothing to help the movie, but Grant disarmed chat-show audiences with his honesty, saying “I don’t have excuses” and “I did a bad thing”.

Since then, his Hollywood films have been hit and miss: a rare outing into thriller territory in Extreme Measures as a doctor who stumbles across a conspiracy (and in which he is upstaged, as most actors are, by Gene Hackman); mixed up with the New York mafia in Mickey Blue Eyes, which had the misfortune to coincide with the superior comic mob deconstruction of the first season of The Sopranos, next to which it looked like a bagatelle; turning up the smarm as an English toff caricature for Woody Allen in Small Time Crooks; adding a subtle Essex twang to his scathing impersonation of a Pop Idol-type TV presenter in the misfired satire American Dreamz.

Two Weeks Notice (infamous for its lack of apostrophe) was a clunky rom-com that scraped by thanks almost entirely to the combined amiability of Grant and his leading lady, Sandra Bullock. And his expertise in the art of self-deprecation came into its own in the endearing Music and Lyrics, in which he played a washed-up pop star whose creative flame is reignited by Drew Barrymore, though not before we’ve been treated to pelvic thrusts aplenty in an adorable parody of 1980s boy band videos.

Alas, there was nothing remotely adorable about Did You Hear About the Morgans? from Marc Lawrence (who had also directed Two Weeks Notice and Music and Lyrics). Grant and his screen wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, exhibit zero screen chemistry as an estranged New York couple who witness a killing and end up in witness protection in rural Wyoming, where they behave like such spoilt brats you can’t wait for the killer to track them down and put us out of our misery.

But the actor’s voice work as the Pirate Captain in the underappreciated Aardman animation The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! was a triumph, and he won admirers for his articulate stance against tabloid press intrusion, which led to an appearance on BBC’s Question Time.

It may be going too far to mention him in the same breath as his namesake, the peerless Cary Grant. But there are similarities. Both have succeeded in creating a persona that audiences assume is the real them. Both are brilliant at light comedy. And both have a dark side they let slip every now and again.

If you were in doubt about Hugh Grant’s, watch An Awfully Big Adventure (1995), adapted from Beryl Bainbridge’s coming-of-age novel by the excellent Charles Wood and directed by Mike Newell the year after Four Weddings and a Funeral; Grant’s dissolute theatre director with nicotine-stained fingers is a malicious manipulator a long way from Four Weddings’ amiable ditherer.

The Rewrite (2014)

See also the Tykwer/Wachowski film of Cloud Atlas (2012), skilfully adapted from David Mitchell’s ostensibly unfilmable novel, in which Grant embodies Evil Through the Ages, no less, with an interesting variety of prosthetic teeth, ethnic makeovers and, as cannibal-in-chief, heavy tribal warpaint.  Not a lot of upper-class English dithering there.

“Nowadays I pretty much turn everything down anyway, because I just feel too old, certainly for romantic comedy,” Grant said at the premiere of The Rewrite (2014), another collaboration with writer-director Marc Lawrence, which turns out to be less a rom-com than a character study disguised as one.

There is romance, but this story of a screenwriter undergoing a mid-life crisis is more about growing old gracefully, coping with failure and owning up to your mistakes, which might not sound nearly as sexy or ingratiating, but turns out to be a lot more interesting to watch – particularly in the hands of an accomplished character actor who makes everything look so easy, and whose most extraordinary accomplishment has been hoodwinking us into thinking he doesn’t even try.

This piece was originally posted on the Telegraph website in October 2014. It has been lightly edited.

In 2010 a couple of French friends asked me if I would like to write a review of a zombie film for their new website, Tout ça (now sadly defunct). Since I had never had anything published or posted in French before, I leapt at the chance, attended a press screening of La horde at Cinéma Max Linder, and wrote the review you see below. I don’t kid myself that it’s fluent or elegant, but my editors made only minor adjustments before posting it, so I like to think it wasn’t that bad. Perhaps, to a native French speaker, it has a charming English accent. (Or not.)

If you don’t understand French but fancy reading this, Google Translate is a useful resource – though, alas, it does seem to me to have decreased in reliability each time I use it. But if you studied even just a bit of French at school, I urge you to give it a try anyway – you may find it easier to understand than you think.

So this is my first, and so far only, review in French.

Crêpage de chignon, by the way, is the French term for “catfight”.

THE HORDE, (aka LA HORDE), British poster art, from left: Jean-Pierre Martins, Claude Perron, Eriq Ebouaney, 2009. ©IFC Films

Le zombi, après Time magazine, est Le Monstre Officiel de la Récession. Plus l’économie s’affaiblit, plus les films de zombi à petit budget se multiplient. Pas étonnant, car le maquillage de morts vivants n’est pas cher et les histoires sont faciles à écrire. Les zombis veulent bouffer les vivants; les vivants, évidement, ne veulent pas être bouffés. Et ça y est!

Il n’y a pas longtemps qu’on a vu Bienvenue à Zombieland, [Rec] 2 et Dead Set. On va bientôt voir Survival of the Dead, Resident Evil: Afterlife, Doghouse… Parmi cette pandémie de mort vivante, un nouveau film de zombi a besoin d’un point fort pour se détacher de la foule. La horde, de Yannick Dahan et Benjamin Rocher, n’est pas le premier zombi-teuf français; c’est précédé par Les revenants (zombi d’art et d’essai) et Mutants (zombi montagnard). Mais disons-nous que c’est le premier film de zombi banlieusard.

On dirait que le modèle est Assaut (1976) de John Carpenter, (déjà inspiré de Rio Bravo) qui fut agréablement pillé par le thriller français Nid de guêpes même avant le remake officiel Hollywoodien. C’est à dire, des flics et des escrocs, coincés ensemble dans un endroit isolé, unis contre un ennemi anonyme, innombrable, implacable.

Ici, un poignet de poulets se glissent dans une tour HLM quelquepart au nord de Paris, avec le but de se venger sur les gangstas là-dedans, qui ont tué un de leurs camerades. La descente tourne mal, les flics survivants sont pris en otage et hop! Tout d’un coup, les morts se lèvent et se mettent à l’attaque. En même temps, des milles de zombis s’amassent à l’extérieur de l’immeuble. Ni avertissement, ni explication. Mais situation grave.

Aucun temps pour faire les présentations formelles. Bref, les flics sont durs, les malfrats sont durs, en plus les zombis sont durs aussi. Au début, le film patauge dans les imprécisions, comme si ne sachant pas comment se lancer dans l’histoire (une scène à un enterrement est particulièrement maladroite), mais aussitôt que les cadavres ambulants se déchainent, le tout roule comme un train fou.

La petite bande d’alliés se deplace dans les couloirs et dans les cages des escaliers pour faire… eh bien, pour faire quoi, exactement? Ils cherchent à se sauver, c’est clair, mais pour aller où? Car nous avons déjà vu avec eux, depuis la toiture, toute Paname est en pleine crise: la fumée, des hurlements, des explosions. C’est le bordel partout. Donc à quoi ça sert, de sortir? Ne serait-il pas plus pratique de rester en étage, derrière une porte bien blindée?

Mais bon, tant qu’il y a d’action, on n’a pas le loisir de chercher la petite bête. Et l’action, c’est pas mal. On a déjà vu (dans 28 jours plus tard et sa suite, par exemple) les zombis qui courent comme Usain Bolt, mais ici les zombis se battent aussi. Ou plutôt, ils jouent le rôle de punching-bag. Bien que la violence contre des humains ne semble pas toujours politiquement correct dans les films, vers les morts vivants toute cruauté extrême est admissible: les railleries sexuelles, les membres brisés, les visages reduites en purée.

D’autre part, le film doit se passer dans un univers alternatif où La nuit des mort vivants et ses centaines de suites et imitations n’existaient jamais. Il semble une éternité que nous sommes été tous au courant comment tuer un zombi: faut détruire le cerveau, soit le flinguer, soit l’écraser, soit le brûler. Pourtant ici, bien que nos braves font éclater une tête de temps en temps, c’est plutôt par hasard. Ils tirent dans les torses, ils font les coups de pied ou les coups de couteaux ou les coups de poing n’importe où dans les cadavres ambulants, et c’est n’importe quoi. Plein de fois je voulais crier, Nom de Dieu, in the fucking HEAD, putain!

Entre les séquences les plus marquantes, un crêpage de chignon hyper-vicieux dont une des participantes est vivante, l’autre décédée. Montage rapide, mais pas au niveau chiant comme dans (par exemple) Quantum of Solace. On voit aussi un seul mec bloqué sur une bagnole entourée par les MILLIONS de zombies affamés, ce qui est impressionnant, ne serait-il seulement parce que la production a réussi à rassembler tant d’extras mal payés mais quand même prêts à s’entasser dans un parking morne. Pas énormement de résonance métaphorique (les zombis banlieusards sont-ils la racaille? Ou sont-ils l’insurrection des opprimés? À débattre… mais de toute façon il faut nouer des alliances pour survivre) mais tout se déroule d’une vitesse assez haletante.

Dans un tel déchaïnement de carnage, on n’attend pas que les acteurs se distinguent, mais il faut quand même noter que Eriq Ebouaney, qui joue le gangsta-chef, a d’une présence formidable; que Claude Perron au visage jolie tête de mort, qui joue une des flics, est aussi dure que ses confrères; et que le vétéran Yves Pignot s’amuse bien en rôle de papy ex-militaire qui se met à trancher, broyer, étriper les zombis avec un tel bonheur qu’on n’ose pas imaginer ce qu’il faisait pour se marrer jusqu’à maintenant.

This review was first posted on the website Tout ça in February 2010. It has been lightly edited, and I have made what I think are improvements to the original French. Among other things, I have changed the spelling of “zombie” to “zombi” throughout, though both spellings are acceptable in French.