The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: Soft at heart

John Ford always tried to put on a show as being a cantankerous old coot - his famous interview with Peter Bogdanovich, where he disputes the whole idea that anything he has done has an artistic merit at all, is an absolute gem of a performance, as good as anything he ever squeezed out of John Wayne.

But his films could also be achingly sentimental, and he just couldn't hide that behind his goddamn eyepatch.

Sometimes entire films of his, such as the Quiet Man, are nothing but pure sentiment, and all about the ache of the heart, and sometimes it's just a tiny moment in a wide and blasted landscape full of death and gross vengeance, like the moment  in The Searchers when Ethan finally catches up to his niece, and the Duke's voice actually cracks as he tells her that he's not there to do her harm, and that he's just taking her home.

There's a moment like that right at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a great film that has a lot of things to say about standing up to bullies, and the way the legends of the Wild West have been shaped from something messy and complicated into something that is more palatable for the masses. That's all well and good, but it's the cactus rose on the coffin at the end of he movie that cuts to the heart, and tells you what sort of director Ford really was.

All that myth-making never says anything about what's really in somebody's heart, and how they remember the ones they've loved and lost, not like the way a simple gesture like the cactus flower can. And it shows that John Ford had a soul after all, no matter how fucking grumpy he got.

Wild Rose: You can have it all

There's a terrible idea that you have to suffer for your art, or put everything into it, at the expense of anything and everything else. It's an idea that you see brought up in real life all the time, and it is the basis of a hell of a lot of stories about the process of creating all kinds of art.

Wild Rose is a movie about a Glaswegian lass with big country dreams, played with a massive amount of charm by Jessie Buckley, and for a long time it looks like it's going to be one of those stories. She dreams of getting to Nashville, but has two young kids to take care of and is trapped in her life.

And yet, while she does make it out of Scotland, and all the way to America, she finds that this isn't what she needs, and by the end finds a lovely balance, finding her voice in her own home, and in the love of her family.

She finds that the things you need to say in your art come from your life, not at the expense of it. It's not a matter of either/or, it's a beautiful collision of everything, and you don't have to suffer for it.

Stalag 17: Blood in the mud (and a few laughs too)

A lot of new movies get shit on for having a wayward tone that is all over the place, because apparently modern audiences can only handle one thing at a time, but plenty of classic films show that you don't have to be so monotone, even if they come in black and white.

Take Billy Wilder's Stalag 17, which tells the tale of a group of American POWs in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. It sometimes gets a bit Hogan Heroes - there's even a comedy German sergeant called Schulz - but it also has two men brutally machine-gunned down in the opening minutes, with their bodies left to rot in the mud.

And it carries on like that, all the way though, with silly pranks and prisoners trying to get glimpses of Russian women smashing up against a mob mentality that almost costs the life of William Holden's character, who is a little shady, but not an obvious traitor. The stakes remain extremely life or death, right to the end.

Yet it still feels like a complete piece, not a patchwork of different angles and perspectives. It might take a master like Wilder to show that you can be all over the place without losing focus, but at least he shows it can be done.

Domino: There's the De Palma we were looking for

It would be a slight tragedy if Domino turned out to be Brian De Palma's last film. His career has always been weirdly all over the place, and just when you think he's totally lost it, he'll hit you with a movie that is genuinely inspiring, but this particular film would be a disappointing way to finish.

It's got a genuinely incomprehensible script, with risible dialogue, weird plotting that is all over the fucking place and a fair amount of straight-up racism. It gives a bunch of great actors nothing to work with, is visually drab and has a music score that sounds like something from a Charles Band movie from the 1980s.

And yet, just when all hope is lost, it still has one moment that is very De Palma - a large, crazy set piece towards the end, involving a suicide bomber and a drone at a Spanish bullfight, that is ridiculously over the top and baroque and drawn out in all the best ways.

It's there, after more than an hour of almost unwatchable nonsense, that it becomes very watchable nonsense, and there's the De Palma we all know and love. If this is his last film - and with the increasing periods of time between films, it might very well be - at least it's not a total wash-out.

Color Out Of Space: Trying to film the unfilmable

Color Out Of Space is the only movie I've managed to see in a cinema this year, due to parenthood reasons. I managed to see it just before we all went into lockdown, and it was, if nothing else, a good reminder that as horrible and catastrophic as the coronavirus could be, there are worse things that can happen to the human body.

It certainly starts off with a decent dose of moody dread, and Nicholas Cage is actually pretty good in the first section, full of dad jokes and weird obsessions with alpacas ,but it doesn't take too long before you start saying things out loud like 'why the fuck are you climbing down that well?'.

It just gets too dumb. Watching it, there is a desperate urge to tell people to just walk the fuck away - a brief attempt to paint this as impossible because reality is bending around the family is scuppered by a horse who shows more smarts than the human victims and just gets the fuck outta there.

And ultimately, it fails in the same way almost every cinematic attempt at Lovecraft does - it tries to put the impossible on screen, and there is literally no way to capture on film the unbearable sights and sensations that Lovecraft subjected his unfortunate protagonists to. For a moment, it looks like you're never going to see the most extreme example of body horror in the film, but then it slithers into plain sight and while it's certainly gross, it's not mind-bendingly awful

And that impossibility is there in the color itself, with a shade that is impossible to describe on paper turns out to be a pinkish/purple haze. It's certainly pretty, but ignores everything that is really intriguing about Lovecraftian horror (once you get past the racism and general misanthropy) - you just can't film his impossible.

Sunset Boulevard: Not that old

It's a deadset cinematic classic, so I must have seen Sunset Boulevard half a dozen times, but I only just realised that poor crazy old Norma Desmond is only supposed to be in her early fifties.

To be fair, Gloria Swanson was actually about that age at the time the movie was filmed, but was definitely made up further to appear as a decrepit old hag. And it suggests its only been a relatively short time between her heyday as a Hollywood star and her later gloomy and gothic madness.

It's also a bit rough to suggest she would be so marginalised at such an early age. Hollywood hasn't got much better at treating female film stars well, and there are many fine woman actors who are put out to the pasture at a painfully young age, but Norma is meant to be a legend, and it would be like saying Nicole Kidman has nothing further to add, because she's a similar age.

Sunset Boulevard is a fable about fame and fortune, but to be forgotten like that after such a short period of time and marginalized is the harshest lesson of all.

Brightburn: When super bad becomes super predictable

Brightburn is one of those movies that seems to have a great idea that you can build a whole film on, but then does absolutely nothing new or interesting in it. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen the whole movie.

Maybe it's because there have just been so many comic books versions of the 'what if Superman, but evil?', usually done with a bit more style, and often with a lot more gore (especially when a company like Avatar gets into the action). Superhero movies have always been decades behind their comic book counterparts - the whole Marvel Universe thing is still telling the sort of stories that were commonplace in the comics in the 1970s - and Brightburn keeps up that tradition.

But it also has literally nothing new to add to this weird little sub-genre of superheroes gone bad, other than doing it with a bit of Hollywood gloss. It also has the usual irritating habit of promising to take things further with a sequel that will never happen, leaving behind nothing more than another pointless movie about another pointless supervillain.

The Man Who Haunted Himself: That's not the Bond I know

The Man Who Haunted Himself was one of those films that every video store in the early-1980s had, because they only had 20 films, but there was always something creepy and off-putting about the cover with an overlapping Roger Moore.

Having finally seen it recently, it's not quite as upsetting as that video cover ever promised, and plays out like a typical psychological horror of the 70s, as Moore's Harold Pelham gradually cracks under the pressure of a doppelganger that is taking over his life.

But there is something genuinely thrilling in seeing Sir Roger Moore completely lose his shit in the film. Even when his Bond was facing certain death at the hands of Scaramanga or Baron Samedi or Max Zorin, it never got more than an arched eyebrow out of him, but he's all confused and sweaty throughout this film.

Moore was always such a stiff-upper-lip actor, but when that lip was given the chance to tremble a bit, it's not disappointing to see Moore get stuck into it.

Human Nature: Don't ham it up

There's really only one way to put a Charlie Kaufman script up on the screen and get a maximum result, and that's to play it absolutely straight. Which is why Human Nature is arguably the weakest attempt to get inside his head.

The first film to come out after the enormous artistic success of Being John Malkovich, Human Nature is full of great actors who have all done powerful work, but they're mugging the shit out of the story of a man raised as an ape and the hairy woman who loves him, and they're playing up the absurdity, instead of doing the proper thing and just pretending it doesn't even exist.

Although it is Michel Gondry's first feature film, it is still soaked in the whimsy that would be a feature of all his movies, but Gondry doesn't yet have the courage to take it completely seriously, and goes for the wacky, which piles on top of the silliness of the script.

It's arguable that it's just a weak script from Kaufman, and that it's overcooked and trying way too hard to say something profound about the human condition (which doesn't add up to much more than that human beings really like to have sex). But the way it's presented does it few favours, and leaves it with all the substance of a cheap can of over-sugared soda.