My Favorite Movies

I know this is a controversial assertion, but Dead Ringers is the greatest movie of all time. Cronenberg's skillful technical realization of a complex concept and witty, knowing script make for a wonderfully multilayered movie about the tensions of love, sexuality and family; science, irrationality and madness.

But what exalts Dead Ringers, at least in my eyes, is Jeremy Irons', who gives two of his greatest performances, disturbed and disturbing, yet beautiful and emotive as the Mantle twins (for which he should have won both best actor and best supporting actor Oscars). Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay is that, even after multiple viewings, I still see him, on the screen, as two separate but intimately linked persons. Bujold also gives a brave, adult performance as the actress Claire Niveau.

One more thing needs to be mentioned is Howard Shore?s dark, affecting score

I first saw this film with great reluctance, but I was pleasantly surprised, not only by its uproarious comedy but also by its willingness to explore the dark emotional and cultural hinterlands of its complex characters, a double coup that few film comedies attempt, let alone master.

Muriel is a girl lost in a dysfunctional family, misled by her domineering, adulterous father, who not only neglects the emotional welfare of his family, but is also a monomaniac sucking the life out of Muriel, her submissive, put-upon mother and suppressed siblings. Adding to the misery of her uninspiring background is the philistinism and aggression of her small-town 'Aussie' society, from which she retreats into a world of ABBA-supported fantasy.

She escapes from this sorry situation by fraudulently using her father's credit card. She becomes like a bird, set free, with the encouragement of her worldly friend, small-town-girl-made-good, Brenda.

But it's not all plain sailing. Muriel changes her name and sets out to make the most of her new, fantastic life, but she and Brenda find themselves in crisis, a crisis that can only be solved by confronting the ghosts that lurk back at home.

All this sounds hard going because director PJ Hogan and his main actors, the outstanding Toni Collette and Brenda Griffiths, are committed to pursuing their characters emotional truths. However, while achieving more artistically than most high-minded dramas, Muriel?s Wedding also succeeds as a highly enjoyable comedy, because the former and latter go hand-in-hand.

Along with Mulholland Dr., this is Lynch's masterpiece, but more accessible. I think it is a spiritual study, concerning the loss of innocence and the consequent discovery, and after that acceptance, of the intimate duality of good and evil, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil, within the context of a recreated post-war Americana influenced by the paintings of Edward Hopper, surrealism and RKO film noirs of the 1940's.

Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern give touching performances as the young man Jeffrey and his girlfriend, Sandy. Rosselini has never been better, a kind of demented version of her real mother, Ingrid Bergman and Hopper gives a career-saving and inimitable performance (with the exception of Christopher Walken) as the embodiment of mad wickedness, Frank Booth.

And, of course, Badalamenti's nuanced score, as usual, compliments Lynch's film perfectly.

Lynch's TV Pilot-cum-Film is his first foray into Hollywood critique and the depredations of Hollywood- Naomi Watts is at her best here, embodying unrequited love and thwarted desire

A Romantic Comedy, though with Hopkins as a Romantic More Sandwiches Short of a Picnic than Hannibal Lecter


Performing under hot lights in front of strangers can be a nerve-racking, grueling experience. Inevitably, such a torturous experience can take its toll and lead to breakdown with dangerous consequences. Just such a fate is the theme of Magic.

Corky is a case in point. Being cautious and insipid in his debut, performing magic in a lousy New York bar, he ends up raging at his neglectful audience. Told by his dying mentor, who seems also to be something of a father figure, that he needs a 'charm', we find Corky a year later in a much-improved position. He has an agent, played with a wonderful ease and authority by Burgess Meredith, who brings TV executives to Corky's dressing room door with lucrative contracts involving prime time shows. This is all due to Corky having introduced a new element to his act, a fast-talking, foul-mouthed, outrageously funny dummy called Fats. Fats is the charm Corky's old mentor talked about, almost seeming to give to Corky what he himself lacks in presence and personality.

But even though he has the world at his feet, things aren't right with Corky. And, with stardom beckoning, he takes to the road on a journey out of the city to retrace the steps of his obscure childhood and painful adolescence, ending up knocking on the door of his unrequited first love, Peggy Snow, played by Ann-Margret. If this sounds like a romantic comedy, it is, though with Hopkins as a romantic more sandwiches short of a picnic than Hannibal Lecter, this is, to borrow the film's tag line, 'A Terrifying Love Story'. Sir Richard Attenborough, in a departure from his usual glitzy historical epics, brings to the film a wicked sense of humour and a focus on the macabre and bizarre, which complements Hopkins' eerie yet sensitive performance, as he plays Corky with adventurous risk, perfectly balanced between comedy and pathos.

How can a film about a sled be the greatest film in the world?!

The mangled remains of Stroheim's epic filmed novel of Frank Norris' novel, McTeague, with its crazy volte face between romanticism and naturalism, is the best film I have ever seen about the filthy lucre that is money. Watch this and you will never think of silent movies in the same way again!

The pretentious Tarkovsky somehow always makes good- a film about an artist losing his creative desire in the morass of the world, only to regain it- wtach it once in a cinema and it is unforgettable- even though I don't think I want to repeat the process!

A film about the contact between the supposed 'Heights' of the Academic life and the equally-arguable 'lowness' of working class life, beautifully embodied by Caine and Walters- and with a great hummable eighties soundtrack. A strange spike on Caine's eighties career- showing why he has been and probably will always be a favourite with any film's audience- ABACAB!

There are few British films that attempt, let alone achieve, such a wide scope and ambition as If..... Lindsay Anderson's admonition to the crass, backward complacence of the English establishment of the 1960's, is an allegory set in a traditional public school (the British version of a private, 'prep' school-very confoundedly English, I know!) which caught the zeitgeist of the heady, radical days of 1968, the year of mass student protest.

But If.... does not glamorise, and thus vulgarise, youth rebellion the way films about student revolt seem to do (then again, a male single-sex, rural boarding school is a subject that would be hard to glamorise).

It is through the adolescent eyes of Mick Travis and a small band of his fellows that we experience the loneliness, tedium, casual cruelty, claustrophobia, philistinism, and jingoism exhibited by his very conservative boarding school, and see him reacting to his desolate prison with a dark, disturbing sense of fantasy.

If.... is made beautifully, and clearly with great passion. Anderson handles with a stark realism the reality of traditional public school life, no doubt a development of his 'free cinema' days as an early social realist documentary filmmaker, and informed by his own experience of public school at Cheltenham College (where the film was rather cheekily made). And he moves forward and back with such seamless ease from realism to fantasy that is ironically full of life. In this, he was no doubt helped by his, at the time young first AD- a certain Stephen Frears.

Still, it is the central performance, by Malcolm McDowell, one of the greatest in film, in what was his first leading role (arguably, he has never quite stopped playing Mick Travis) which stands out in this already outstanding film. His Mick Travis, with his arresting, adolescent eyes, is a callow youth who, at the same time, is also a startling and ominous rebel.

The first film I have watched in a cinema for a long time that should only really be seen in a cinema for maximum effect. A genuine emotional experience- I was close to tears through much of it, as it is about an ordinary man trying to just get through the day in a world gone mad in the near-future.

This really shouldn't be in my favourite films, though at one point it was one of my top films. It now seems a little schoolboy swottish- like most Coen films, although there is something about it that enables some retention in my affection for it, perhaps John Goodman's seemingly normal but actual psychotic travelling salesman- and also in Carter Burwell's wonderfully haunting score

Funny how a 1940's film resonates so much today in our conspiracytheory-ridden world!

Best taken in the spirit with which Screenwriter Greene envisioned it- ie an 'entertainment', which is where cinema is at its best- a low art but an art that is like no ther!

A cruel, brutal, and also hillarious take on office politics

Stone's Gonzo Road Movie In a Warzone- Surprisingly Enlightening As Well As Entertaining

In 1986, Oliver Stone was nominated twice for an Oscar (in the category of best original screenplay) for Platoon, and his earlier film, Salvador.

Platoon is a grand, epic, conventional war movie that sets out to perform the monumental feat of single-handedly engaging the American public with the United States' culpability in Vietnam. Salvador has the same aim, only this time having as its topic the small Central American state of El Salvador. However, in Salvador, Stone approaches the movie in a radically different way that bears the hallmarks of a cult movie.

Salvador is a fictionalised account by photojournalist Robert Boyle (a suitably louche James Woods) about his own experiences in El Salvador at the beginning of the 1980's. Boyle is a down-and-out, a has-been who owes money to his friend, Dr. Rock, a drugged up bum (played almost too convincingly by the surviving Belushi). As a way of making some money, Boyle drives with Dr. Rock to El Salvador, which is in the grip of a repressive, bloody military Junta, to find a story and cash in on the snaps.

What follows is an uproariously farcical tale full of bars, brothels, dirt, peasant rebellion, and horrific repression. This mix of farce and horror sits uncomfortably. Then again, at the same time, there is the interesting sense of one kind of madness juxtaposed with another. In this respect, the film continues in the spirit of Joseph Heller's famous novel, Catch 22.

Unfortunately, Stone's characterisation is at times poor. He gives the 'good guys' depth and subtlety, but the 'bad guys' are unsophisticated, almost as if they are out of a comic book. This only serves to undermine the movie. On a related point, Stone's sense of history is imbalanced by his love of story, as he characteristically stretches his artistic license, though fortunately not past breaking point, as he does in his later movie, JFK.

But sometimes it takes a hammer to crack a particularly hard nut. Stone, in this way, using in a sub-Hemingway approach, breaks open and sheds light on a dark episode in American foreign policy by creating a convincingly brutal world, in which his protagonist Boyle finds his humanity, and starts to act bravely, coming close to Hemingway's ideal of having grace under pressure.

Stone succeeds in making a kind of gonzo road movie in a war zone, which is surprisingly enlightening as well as entertaining.

Powell and Pressburger's wartime fantasy is so natural and effortless, a tribute to the transcendental power of love, of friendship as well as the erotic kind, and an allegory of geopolitical relations between Britain and the United States. I have never seen a better view of heaven, a sort of celestial bureaucracy.

Ripley's Game so easily looks like a take-the-money-and-run sequel, a cheap European production, riding on the back of Minghella's Talented Mr Ripley. It was in this low, desultory mood that I started watching it late at night on channel 4. I couldn't have been so off- Ripley's Game is an antidote to the generic crime thriller, as it captures the best of crime writing from the likes of Simenon and of course Highsmith, who wrote the novel the film is based on.

In the form of the perfectly-cast Malkovich, Ripley's Game focuses on the con man to illustrate the many clashing facets (or should that be masks and disguises?) humanity adopts in its constant war between confusing notions of civilisation and barbarism.

Characteristic of Cavani's output, Ripley's game is willing to flirt with dangerous, darkly comic revisions of archetypal characters such as 'criminal' and 'victim'.

But unlike her earlier films, such as The Night Porter, Ripley's Game manages to strike the perfect balance between comedy, violence, sex and intellectual enquiry- it seems to me to have the richness and depth of a novel, and at the same time also the suspense, force and dark beauty of film noir.

No doubt that Malkovich is the main reason for the success of the film, no other 'marquee' actor could have been the conduit in bringing such a complex character to the screen. But the supporting cast is also brilliant- Dougray Scott is wonderful as the English stooge gone wrong and Lena Headey and Ray Winstone are strong too.