This 1961 French landmark drama is Peter Greenaway’s favourite film, and has also appeared in the list of ‘worst films ever made’. So which is it? European cutting-edge masterpiece or pretentious nonsense?

Well, it’s certainly a gorgeous-looking, very beautiful puzzle. Set in a beautiful country house with a clipped, precise garden, the ‘plot’ revolves around a couple, X and A. He, X, keeps telling the beautiful A (Seyrig) how they met at the house last year, and have returned to decide whether to have an affair. She however remembers nothing of this, even though his decriptions of her clothes, hair and perfume are incredibly detailed.

Her husband meanwhile lurks around the shadows of the house and gardens, baffling people with a fiendish card trick in which he never seems to lose. He also seems to suspect something about X, and asks his wife what she has been doing all day.

The film is rightly famous for one shot in particular, of the various characters standing stock still in the garden with the sharp light throwing pin-sharp shadows on the grass of the manicured garden. It sums up the film – formal, posed, self-knowing and baffling in equal measure. But what does it all mean?

There are several theories about what is going on here. Is A suffering from amnesia? Does X have some sort of wish fulfillment? Is he – or she – having some sort of elongated dream? Or is it all in the jealous husband’s head? Whatever the answer, it’s an intriguing puzzle involving several techniques way ahead of its 1961 date – over-exposure, grating music, different volumes, repeated lines of dialogue, cut-aways, long shots. Some viewers find it unbearable, some merely tedious, others a refreshing and unique experiment. It’s certainly worth another look, and is another beautifully restored work from the BFI.

Overall verdict: Beautiful, baffling puzzle that is as dreamy as it is annoying.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

Cinema in 1970s America produced some fine paranoid political thrillers – The Parallax View, The Conversation, All The President’s Men – but this one seemed to get lost somehow. Perhaps it was timing – it was actually released in 1981 – or the fact that it opened to a disastrous New York Times review and was effectively buried. Maybe people were tired of hearing about Vietnam and feeling a collective guilt about their country. Rarely seen on British TV and only really known because of the presence of a young Jeff Bridges, it’s a real discovery to see this classic film on the big screen again.

The mighty Bridges stars as Richard Bone, a gigolo waster who sells yachts to the rich and spends his time with his old pal Alex Cutter (Heard) and his wife Mo (Eichhorn). Bridges is good-looking, lean and utterly without direction in his life, while Cutter has returned from Vietnam with one leg, arm and eye, and, not surprisingly, a drink problem he shares with his wife. She seems bored by his boozy ramblings, and accuses him one night of “waiting for his life to start again”.

One dark, rainy night Bone’s car breaks down, and he witnesses the dumping of a body into a dustbin but is apparently unable to identify the driver of the Cadillac. At a carnival with his pals he suddenly recognises the suspect, JJ Cord, a wealthy and hugely powerful businessman. He is not 100% sure, but Cutter, desperate for someone to blame for the world’s evils and wrongs, becomes convinced of Cord’s guilt and hatches a plan. For him, Cord represents establishment America, the sort of man who has never fought in a dirty war or got his hands dirty. When the victim of the horrible murder’s sister meets Cutter they form a pact to get Cord one way or the other. Bone, though, is unsure, and seems to share his apathy with Mo.

Neither a straightforward thriller nor a classic buddy movie, Cutter’s Way is almost impossible to categorize. It’s almost Raymond Chandler territory, except the Malone character doesn’t seem to care who the murderer is. It’s filmed in a dreamy, sunset-lit world in which lawns are always green, cars are polished and the next cocktail is moments away. Its power comes from a script which is never preachy but tackles big subject head-on – Cutter’s pivotal speech about the abuses of power and capitalism is a masterpiece – but its real meaning is always ambiguous. It is never made clear whether Cord has actually committed the horrible murder or not, and Bone’s confusion about what he saw is constant throughout.

The overall effect is a deeply unsettling but immensely immersive experience which haunts long after the stunning last second of the film. The performance of Bridges is, it almost goes without saying, sublime – louche, handsome, charming but hollow and incapable of caring about anyone but himself. It’s Heard though who catches the eye equally, in the difficult role of Cutter. Battered, slovenly, permanently drunk and seriously paranoid, he still manages to make a Cutter a sympathetic character, desperate for love from his brittle, sharp-tongued wife and respect from his peers. In one remarkable scene he returns home from a bar, wrecks his neighbour’s car and gets into a swearing match. When the cops turn up he becomes the epitome of polite, well-spoken youth, much to the neighbour’s astonishment.

Overall verdict: Classic slice of American cinema when they could do paranoiac political thrillers like no-one else. A must-see if you’re a Bridges fan – and a must-see if you’re not.  Haunting and brilliant.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

There has been an avalanche of powerful, thoughtful films about the Middle East in recent times, from Paradise Now to The Stoning of Soraya M, The Kite Runner, Eyes Wide Open and many more, and this Oscar-nominated Canadian-financed effort deserves its place in that distinguished list.

The story uses the flashback method to look at Lebanon in the 1970s. Canadian twins Jeanne and Simon’s mother dies and, through notary Lebel, leaves them two letters they must deliver – one is to their father, the other to their brother – neither of whom the twins knew or, in the case of the brother, even knew existed. Simon is too distraught to even contemplate it and refuses to help, so Jeanne travels to the Middle east and goes on a journey to piece together her mother’s story. Slowly she uncovers a terrible history of religious bigotry, torture, rape and even murder.

Her mother Nawal, in true Romeo and Juliet style, had a baby with a Muslim father which had to be placed in a Christian orphanage by her grandmother. She then tries to find her baby but the ‘enemy’ has invaded, and she witnesses a terrible slaughter in a bus. Now politicised, she assassinates a politician and is thrown into an appalling prison, where despite being raped and tortured she survives, becoming known as the ‘singing woman’.

Jeanne, overwhelmed by all of this information, persuades Simon to join her and solve the mystery – she still doesn’t know who the father is or, even more remote, the identity of the brother. He reluctantly agrees, persuaded by the notary, and becomes more involved in his mother’s dark history.

If all of this sounds drily political it isn’t – director Villeneuve knows exactly how to tell the story with just the right amount of personal drama. Crucially he also knows exactly how much horror to show and when to pull back – the bus attack sequence is full-on, bloody and terrifying, but later a rape scene is merely hinted at. He also wraps the political history in the mystery of the story, which makes it always watchable even when the politics threaten to overwhelm. He even admits that “viewers of the film need to understand the gist of what can be understood while accepting that the situation has become too complex to be boiled down to black and white”.

While the politics may at times verge on the baffling, what holds the attention throughout is the stunning commitment of the cast. Azabal as the mother Nawal is a picture of complex, battered, brave defiance, a woman who has been through almost incomprehensible horrors but remains dignified to the end of her life. Her children, played by Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin and Gaudette, are just as good, especially Desormeaux-Poulin as the determined but baffled Jeanne, a maths genius living the good life in modern day Canada but utterly stunned by the discovery that her mother’s life was so appalling.

Overall verdict: Brave, compelling drama which attempts to cover its massive subject in a very human way. It’s never easy viewing but it’s gut-wrenching stuff.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

To celebrate the Blu-ray release of the newly restored Apocalypse Now on June 13th, the landmark film is getting a theatrical re-release, and it’swell worth seeing on a big screen if you’ve never done so before. It’s difficult to know what to add to this extraordinary film’s legend, except to say seeing it in on a big screen in a dark room is a reminder that sometimes cinema can transcend itself and become something truly great.

What is also very obvious after all these years is just how good Sheen is in it – a truly remarkable performance, always holding the attention even though his character is a strung-out, boozy psychopath given an impossible mission that he is not expected to get back from. Based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but quoting TS Eliot, the story is actually pretty simple. Vietnam captain Willard is roused out of his Saigon rest for a special mission – to track down and terminate with extreme prejudice Colonel Kurtz (Brando), a brilliant military man who has gone loco and is living native near the Cambodia border.

From here the film is a journey up a dangerous river with Willard slowly learning more about his nemesis and trying to figure out what made Kurtz lose it so suddenly – with some nasty encounters along the way. The most famous of these is with Lieutenant Kilgore (Duval), a bloodthirstly lunatic more interested in surfing and Wagner than winning the war. Once Willard gets past him he leads a small team in their boat up river and into his own personal heart of darkness, and the meeting with Kurtz.

It’s difficult to say who is the maddest character in the movie – an early contender is Harrison Ford’s uncomfortable officer handing out the orders, then Duval’s Kilgore, or Dennis Hopper’s totally acid-soaked photographer who has befriend Kurtz. The leading candidates though are clearly Brando and Sheen – but Brando, once he gets his chance to speak and explain his actions, reveals a purity of soul and brain that actually almost convinces the viewer he is sane. If you buy his agonising war stories, then it’s Sheen who is the bonkers one, but his remarkable performance always keeps you onside, and he never, ever, loses focus with his eyes, which you can’t say about any other character.

The making of the film is almost as infamous as the film itself – that it exists at all is something of a miracle. Sheen’s heart attack, Coppola’s money problems, the rumoured hundreds of hours of footage, a cast going way too method with their drug and alcohol use, all add to the film’s real edge, and, indulgent and windy though it sometimes is, it stands as one of the truly remarkable pieces of 70s cinema. It took two years to edit, and the sound use is truly remarkable – it was the first film to use the 70mm Dolby Stereo surround sound system, all of which is up there on the screen. It also has no opening or closing credits, which gives it a truly disconcerting air.

Overall verdict: You’ve almost certainly seen the film many times by now, but do yourself a favour and see it again on the big screen, it’s really worth it. It stands as a landmark piece of film and the high point of most of the actors involved in it. It nearly killed Coppola, but it was worth it.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

Charm – a much under-rated quality in a film. Richard Ayoade’s directorial debut has it is buckets, and it’s actually very hard to pinpoint why. This coming of age story shies away from the cliché, the obvious and the cute, so much so that all the characters are pretty unlikeable, yet the film is consistently touching, very funny and occasionally moving.

Its central character, Oliver Tate (Roberts), is the Adrian Mole-style narrator, a schoolboy stuck in a dull Welsh town, brighter than most of his classmates yet struggling with his big issues – getting beaten up, picked on by teachers and girls, specifically, Jordana, the object of his lust (Paige). She is not the prettiest or coolest girl in class, but seems as disaffected and bored by her dumb peers as Oliver, so he sets about trying to seduce her.

This he does by taking her to the cinema – Joan of Arc – and giving her the books which mean the most to him, including Friedrich Nietzsche. He also offers her his body on a red bedsheet, after making her dinner, which ends in predictable disaster, but his sheer love of words – his favourite book is the dictionary – eventually wins her over.

Meanwhile his parents, the painfully nerdy dad (Taylor) and bored mum (Hawkins), seem to have hit crisis point in their marriage, and Oliver is determined to sort this out as well. His effort double when mum’s old boyfriend – apparently her only one before marriage – turns up out of the blue and dazzles her with his ‘psychic energy’ – he is some sort of new age mystic, played to the hilt for laughs in a studded waistcoat and leather trousers by Paddy Considine.

The glory of Ayoade’s film is in allowing his child characters to be way more articulate and adult than their age suggests – this makes them very funny and the adults seem strangely dopey. He clearly loves all manner of cinema, especially the French New Wave and British classics, and throws all of it at the screen – freeze-frames, 3D stills, fast-forwards, chapter headings, vertical shots, but always with the story and crisp dialogue in mind. Visually too he creates a convincing world, of dusk shots, moody shores and almost monochrome use of colour, except for Jordana’s signature red duffle coat. This is used in the film’s one real false moment, a direct nod to Don’t Look Now which is so crushingly obvious it almost breaks the spell – there was simply no need.

The only other real criticism is that the story, so compelling for the first half, becomes less so when Oliver abandons his romance with Jordana – for actually pretty interesting reasons that are never fully explored – to try and save his parents’ marriage. It’s never quite as convincing or charming as the first hour, but it is a minor quibble. Ayoade manages to pull it back with a fantasy sequence which almost counts as a horror moment in an otherwise sweetly portrayed world, and a lovely ending.

Ayoade is best known for his portrayal of uber-geek Maurice Moss in the IT Crowd, a comedy in which he can pull off the silliest moments through sheer watchability. Thankfully he has brought the same qualities to his cinema debut, and if he can resist filling his films with nods to classic and sharpen up his stories he will be one to watch for a long time. Lovely film.

Overall verdict: Bang-on teenage comedy with oodles of appeal, lots of laughs and painfully sharp moments. One of the year’s best films so far.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

Here’s a question that would be great to put to a round-table of professional filmmakers. Can a great action sequence ever work without context? Think about it, would the foyer shoot-out in The Matrix have worked if we didn’t know a) what Neo and Trinity were capable of, and b) what was at stake? What if the “spinning corridor” sequence in Inception had taken place in the first ten minutes of the film. Would it have the same impact? Would it have any? This question might seem like the minutiae of critical thinking, but here it is vital because it largely decides whether Sucker Punch is any good or not.

We start strongly, with an excellent music only prologue telling the story of our protagonist, a petite blonde known only as Baby Doll (Emily Browning), and her tragic journey that concludes with her locked up in a mental institution. From here, the lines between reality and fantasy blur as Baby Doll and her fellow inmates of what appears to be the Asylum For Improbably Attractive Women, attempt to break free of both the institute and their tyrannical orderly, Blue (Oscar Isaac), with the film spending much of its time in a fantasy world of Baby Doll’s creation.

Unfortunately, that’s about as much as you get plot-wise. There’s little to no character development, and the girls, far from being post-feminist ass kicking warriors, spend most of their time being subservient and meek in the presence of either Blue or Baby Doll’s “spirit guide” (Scott Mann). The fantastical “Bordello” setting in which the female ensemble spend the majority of the story also misses the mark as an analogy for sexuality as a weapon and comes off more as a misogynistic directorial decision to keep the hormonal young men in the audience interested throughout the film’s contrived stages.

“Contrived?” you say. Absolutely, and this links nicely back to our original discussion: Action without context. Within the opening 20 minutes Baby Doll finds herself deep within her own fantasies, in the grounds of a Japanese temple, fighting three monstrous Shogun warriors. It looks great, its well choreographed and works well with 300 and Watchmen director Zach Snyder’s trademark ultra-stylised technique. But here’s the problem: Why is it happening? We simply don’t know. Baby Doll’s spirit guide instructs her to defend herself, but from what? In what is presented as the real world she is under no threat whatsoever at that moment in time, so the consequences of failing to defeat her foes are confused and largely irrelevant. Given that this format is rinsed out and repeated another four times over the course of the film, there is so much “Why?” to contend with that the audience is left struggling to care what happens next.

An ongoing theme of the film is examining the bleeding of fantasy and reality and vice-versa. There is a way of doing this well, providing the audience with a base from which to explore the disparate elements of the fantasy/alternate world (Donnie Darko is a prime example of this). Sucker Punch, however, takes this idea too far. There is too much crossover between the worlds and the audience loses its base. For lack of a better phrase, this film drowns itself in the waters of ambiguity.

Perhaps this is too harsh. Perhaps searching for deeper meaning in a film in which girls in short skirts hack up robots with Samurai swords is like searching for political commentary in The Fast And The Furious. To an extent, that’s true, but then, if you’ve got all the ingredients of a dumb action film, why not make a dumb action film? Nobody would think any less of you. Snyder needs only look at his own previous for evidence of this. 300 was as big and stupid as anything Hollywood has produced in recent history, and yet it didn’t shy away from its identity and was critically and financially well received as a result. Here Snyder tries to be too clever by half and by adding a labyrinthine “what’s real, what isn’?” element, has made a rod for his own back, and in doing so, alienates almost every demographic in the theatre.

It’s not all bad. Isaac as the antagonist is excellent, his Blue cutting a menacing overlord figure within the fantasy and a weasely coward in the real world. The film also places critical importance in its soundtrack and it lives up to these expectations, delivering a combination of pulse-pounding instrumentals and decadently twisted versions of old favourites, including The Beatles and The Pixies.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to cover up Sucker Punch’s manifold shortcomings. The whole thing feels forced, as if Snyder had three or four good ideas for action sequences and shoe-horned them into the first bankable idea (hot women escape from prison) that came into his head. Meaty, loud set-pieces mean nothing if they can’t be tied to something with substance and the pseudo-intellectual examination of the fantasy/reality divide is not a strong enough glue to hold the film together.

Overall Verdict: Too dumb to be smart, too smart to be dumb. Sucker Punch attempts to simultaneously thrill us and make us think and achieves neither. A couple of cracking action sequences and an aesthetically pleasing ensemble cant cover up the fact that this is a complete mess.

Reviewer: Alex Hall