Oppenheimer (2023): review: 8/10

 *

J. Robert Oppenheimer works on the Manhattan Project in the desert, seeking to develop an Atomic Bomb.

Is his team infiltrated by Soviet Agents? The Un-American Activities Committee investigates.

Cillian Murphy and the rest of the cast are excellent. The dramatisation of events is very effective. The camerawork is striking, often beautiful.

However, the film is too kind to Soviet Communists sympathisers and is overlong. Concision is a virtue in art.

*

Father Mother Sister Brother (2025): review: 8/10

 *

Three films, inter-related, by Jim Jarmusch, set in a country town in the USA, in Dublin and Paris, and featuring Tom Waits, Adam Driver and Cate Blanchett among others. 

The film concern relationships, small deceits, hypocrisies, and dishonesty across generations. All feature cars as visual devices, homes in states of dilapidation, as upper-middle class showcases or for sale.

The least satisfactory of these is Father, featuring Tom Waits and Adam Driver: unsatisfactory because of the clumsy performances both from Waits and Driver. Waits really is a dreadful ham.

The film suggests, with the Paris section, that only with the death  of their parents, can children live freely from a parental web of half-truths.

The film is beautifully shot.

I Swear (2025): review 8/ 10

 *

The life and career of a Scottish man who suffers from Tourette`s Syndrome, then seeks to promote better understanding of the condition and help others.

The film describes Scottish provincial and working class life, containing scenes which are in turns, disturbing, sad, and reassuring. It is occasionally funny, unsentimental and even disturbing in places.

It`s freshness of style is, thankfully, free of amateurishness of naivety.

Uptown Girls (2003): review: 8/10

No longer wealthy, a charming but unworldly girl loses her apartment. She moves in with a friend and has to change her attitudes to life and money.

She is also forced to take a job as the nanny to a spoiled, unhappy girl with strict, joyless attitudes; and whose father is in a coma, and whose mother is distant.

All the while she pursues an English guitar singer for romantic ends.

As a nanny, Murphy succeeds in bringing out gentler and warmer attitudes from her charge.

This is a sweet-tempered and intelligent film sustained by Murphy's charm and the well-directed central relationship between nanny and child.

Grandma's Boy (2006): review: 8/10

Having lost his apartment, a 35 year old computer gaming tester moves in with his grandmother and two other enderly women: one senile, the other sexually voracious. Meanwhile, a beautiful woman comes to manage a company project in his workplace: this causes great excitement in the otherwise exclusively male, nerdy office.

The film is very funny. The meeting of the culture of elderly women and nerds is inspired, and handled with wit and warmth.

A Village Affair (1995): review: 8/10

A depressed artist and her shallow lawyer husband move to a small village: there they make a aquaintance of a  sexually voracious brunette with very red lipstick, a spoiled young woman and the subject of  much gossip.

Well acted and sensitively made film about relationships and attitudes among the English country bourgesie, described through the prism of the artist's romantic crisis, which intelligently balances melodrama and seriousness.

Happy Tears (2009): review: 8/10

A woman returns from San Francisco to Philadelphia, to her father's house. There she helps her sister take care of their aging, occasionally bilious father.

This is a melancholy film depicting, in an episodic and occasionally surreal style, the world from a female perspective. It deals specifically with the heroine's desire for a commited relationship, her relationship with her sister and absentee lover, and her father and his chequered past.

Both filming and acting are elegant...perhaps even too elegant?

Everyone Says I Love You (1996): review: 8/10

The romantic tribulations of a wealthy New York family, including scenes in Venice and Paris.

The film is excellently narrated by Natasha Lyone- indeed all the acting is supurb- and includes various songs from classic musicals: the knitting together of the many characters is elegant, and the whole has a delightful energy.

Waltz With Bashir (2008): review: 8/10

An animated film focussing on an ex-serviceman of the Israeli Defence Force who is puzzed by his recurring dreams of dogs. Wishing to recall his experiences of the Lebanese Civil War he visits his comrades of the time and events leading to the Sabra and Shatila Massacre

The cartoon style is effective at conveying the sense of dream and memory recall, and the it is moving to see the protagonist study himself: the film explores mainly the memory of war, different attitudes to soldiering, to guilt, to trauma.

As a study of the massacre itself, and of specific historical events, however, it is insufficient: but to say that is perhaps to criticise it on the wrong terms.

Frozen River (2008): review: 8/10

In New York state near the Canadian border, a poor white woman and a poor Mohawk woman's paths cross over the matter of a stolen car.

The film is bleakly interesting as a study of poverty and race relations between Native Americans and whites: it is difficult to enjoy, though it is expertly made.

Rachel Getting Married (2008): review: 8/10

A troubled woman goes from her rehab clinic to participate as a bridesmaid at the wedding of her sister, where she manages to annoy almost everyone.

Shot in pseudo-documentary big brother style, the film includes some dull passages, which help increase it's realism. The film largely concerns the nastiness of women.

The acting is excellent, so much so that the result is sometimes almost embarassing to watch.

To Have and Have Not (1944): review: 8/10

American Bogart is in Vichy Martinique, where he runs a fishing boat : he is approached by French Resistance to assist them, but is initially to selfish and cynnical.

The film is saved from obviousness by his sexually charged relationship with the extraordinarily feline Lauren Bacall, an amusing alchoholic sidekick and Hoagy Camicheal's crooning. The camerawork is exquisite too.

Fight Club (1999): review: 8/10

An insurance evaluator seeks escape from his alienation, first by visiting support groups (for conditions for which he does not suffer), then through fighting.

This film is diverting: violent and comical- simultaneously a satire on consumerism, corporate values, therapy culture, the "mens' movement", and anti-corporatism.

The denoument is far too long, however, and the film could happily be reduced by 20 minutes.

Peter and Vandy (2009): review: 8/10

Ennui and irritability wreck romance.

Witty and observant with much good, if occasionally stylised, acting, and an interesting use of flashbacks. It has something in commpon with Linklater's romance films.

It also includes splendid arguments about the tipping of bar staff and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

What Women Want: (2000): review: 8/10

An advertising executive, known for exhibiting sexist attitudes, loses his position as creative director to a woman: not long after he mysteriously gains the ability to hear the thoughts of women. He also has to deal with his 15 year old daughter.

A highly successful romantic comedy, full of amusing incidents, perfectly paced and scripted.

Ordinary People (1980): review: 8/10

The troubled son of wealthy Illinois family consults a psychiatrist and starts a relationship with a girl with a mullet hairdo and thick socks.

Featuring The Psychiatrist as Detective (mother is The Culprit, of course): the piece is sympathetically filmed and intelligently acted, indeed is often quite moving, and seems to prefigure more recent slacker films such as "Garden State".

Do the Right Thing (1989): review: 8/10

Set in a lower class Brooklyn neighbourhood during some hot summer days, this film focusses on a pizzeria and local racial tensions, primarily between blacks and Italians, but also including hapless Hispanics and Koreans.

Though the film is well acted and lively in style, the script is pedantic in its relentless tracing of the racial issues. It presents a very unsympathetic image of blacks, who are shown variously as envious, promiscuous, sloppy, hostile, irresponsible, lazy, argumentative, drunken and destructive.

Zodiac (2007): review - 8/10

A newspaper cartoonist becomes obsessed with finding a serial killer in the Bay area.

The film largely, and interestingly, deals with relations between the press, the police and the public at large.

Briskly filmed and excellently acted, and sometimes moving.

The Illusionist (2006): review - 8/10

A magician stages tricks in late Austro-Hungarian Empire, where he comes to the attention of the police.

Beautifully shot: the film seems primarily to be about totalitarianism.

Mississippi Burning (1988): review- 8/10

Two FBI cops investigate murders in Mississippi: the superior is ascetic and fully committed to the civil rights project, while his accomplice, played by Hackman, is morally ambiguous and scepetical.

The film works through, with little subtlety, the imposition of Federal Law in a small southern town.

The relationship between Hackman and his accomplice- which could be illuminating about the attitudes of southerners who grudgingly accepted racial segregation- is not as enlightening as it might be. Equally, the black characters operate, as do the KKK policemen who oppress them- as caricatures.

Nonetheless, the film is extremely entertaining.