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The Tender Bar (2021)   George continues to flog his dead horse of a directorial career. It has to be admitted, however, that he goes less astray here than with anything he’s called the shots on in a decade (Suburbicon may be a better movie overall, but the parts that grind metal are all ones Clooney grafted onto the Coen Brothers’ screenplay). For starters, he gives Batfleck a role where he can shine, and I’d given up on that being possible. Some of the other casting stretches credulity, but by setting his sights modestly, he makes The Tender Bar passably slight for the

Red Planet  (2000)   At the time, out of 2000’s pair of unloved, duelling Martian meanders, Red Planet found my greater favour, striving less for unreachable philosophical weight and focussing its attention more on the nuts and bolts of action/survival dramatics. Revisiting both successively, while there still isn’t a great deal between them – I don’t think either is remotely a disaster, but neither is much of what you’d call a great success either – it’s Mission to Mars that inches ahead, with ad man turned first time feature director Antony Hoffman unable to elevate the rather functional screenplay from Chuck Pfarrer (Navy SEALs, The

The X-Files 4.14: Memento Mori   If ponderous, turgid, self-inflated rumination is your bag, Memento Mori is doubtless an X-Files classic. It seems to be held up as one of the mythology arc’s finest (Frank Spotnitz certainly believed so) as Scully gets all introspective – cue the interminable voiceovers comprising the level of content alluded to in my first sentence – over her cancer and Mulder refuses to accept her fate. In some respects, then, there’s a mirroring of the kind of philosophy-action approach of the Scully-focussed One Breath two seasons earlier, and like that one, it’s in the “do, don’t talk” arena that the episode

The Name of the Rose (1986)   Umberto Eco wasn’t awfully impressed by Jean Jacques-Annaud’s adaptation of his novel – or “palimpsest of Umberto Eco’s novel” as the opening titles announce – to the extent that he nixed further movie versions of his work. Later, he amended that view, calling it “a nice movie”. He also, for balance, labelled The Name of the Rose his worst novel – “I hate this book and I hope you hate it too”. Essentially, he was begrudging its renown at the expense of his later “superior” novels. I didn’t hate the novel, although I do prefer the movie, probably because

Youth (2015)   I greatly enjoyed Paolo Sorrentino’s last feature, The Great Beauty (or, La grande bellezza), in spite of its overt debt to Fellini, a director I’ve never really gotten on with. That same devotion is also evident in Youth, marked as it is by a series of surreal interludes, culminating in moviemaker Harvey Keitel surveying a field of starlets (all very 8½). It also exhibits the kind of beautified, musically sumptuous, existential sogginess of recent Terence Malicks, however; there’s a desire to grasp at the flighty meaning of it all, whatever that all may be, and thus all it ends up revealing is

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)   It’s a Wonderful Life is an unassailable classic, held up as an embodiment of true spirit of Christmas and a testament to all that is good and decent and indomitable in humanity. It deserves its status, even awash with unabashed sentimentality that, for once, actually seems fitting. But, with the reams of plaudits aimed at Frank Capra’s most enduring film, it is also worth playing devil’s advocate for a moment or two. One can construe a number of not nearly so life-affirming undercurrents lurking within it, both intentional and unintentional on the part of its