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The Green Man (1956)   The Green movie from Launder and Gilliat starring Alastair Sim that isn’t Green for Danger. Which is to say, The Green Man can’t quite scale the heady heights of that decade-earlier murder mystery triumph, but neither is it any slouch. Sim is the antagonist this time – albeit a very affable, Sim-ish one – and his sometime protégée, a young George Cole, the hero. If the plot is entirely absurd, Robert Day’s movie wastes no time probing such insufficiencies, ensuring it is very funny, lively and beautifully performed. Hawkins: In fact, I was wondering, that after that perfect andantino, I might offer u a

Psycho (1960)   One of cinema’s most feted and most studied texts, and for good reason. Even if the worthier and more literate psycho movie of that year is Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. One effectively ended a prolific director’s career and the other made its maker more in demand than ever, even if he too would discover he had peaked with his populist fear flick. Pretty much all the criticism and praise of Psycho is entirely valid. It remains a marvellously effective low-budget shocker, one peppered with superb performances and masterful staging. It’s also fairly rudimentary in tone, character and psychology. But those

Joker (2019)   So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you

Kill Bill: Vol. 2  (2004)   I’m not sure I can really conclude whether one Kill Bill is better than the other, since I’m essentially with Quentin in his assertion that they’re one film, just cut into two for the purposes of a selling point. I do think Kill Bill: Vol. 2 has the movie’s one actually interesting character, though, and I’m not talking David Carradine’s title role. There’s likely a degree to which Tarantino’s reasons for failing to avail himself of Warren Beatty for Bill are bombast (“We decided this movie shouldn’t be our first marriage” – there won’t be one at all now). He

Heathers (1988)   Michael Lehmann’s opening trio of movies – Heathers, Meet the Applegates, and, yes, Hudson Hawk – marked him out as a bright talent in the realm of absurdist humour, one to rival Joe Dante and Tim Burton. And then what became of him? A retreat from the mauling Bruno’s vanity vehicle received, into likeable but indifferent fare, and now a jobbing career on TV. It seems so unfair. As for his collaborator in Heathers’ pitch-black comedy, Daniel Waters, the man who wrote the screenplay with Kubrick in mind as director, no less, he’s the classic example of starting on a giddy high

Split (2016)   M Night Shyamalan went from the toast of twist-based filmmaking to a one-trick pony to the object of abject ridicule in the space of only a couple of pictures: quite a feat. Along the way, I’ve managed to miss several of his pictures, including his last, The Visit, regarded as something of a re-locating of his footing in the low-budget horror arena. Split continues that genre readjustment, another Blumhouse production, one that also manages to bridge the gap with the fare that made him famous. But it’s a thematically uneasy film, marrying shlock and serious subject matter in ways that

The Krays (1990)   There might be a superior Krays movie to be made by distilling the best elements of The Krays and Legend into one new picture, but it would still be lacking when it comes to what made them infamous; their criminal enterprise itself. Peter Medak’s film of Philip Ridley’s screenplay has no time for the glossy vision of ’60s London Brian Helgeland pursues, and makes great capital from emphasising the twins’ relationship with their mother (Billie Whitelaw). It also has more of a sense of “what led to this”, rudimentary as it is, rather than introducing us to the brothers fully

Mad Max (1979)   It’s most common for movie series to peak begin on a high, before anyone had an inkling there would be further chapters, and then inexorably decline. A few notables buck the trend, however. Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn is one, where the comic energy makes its predecessor look threadbare by comparison. Mad Max 2 (or The Road Warrior) is another, a movie that fully embraces propulsive, kinetic action and the mythic potential of its protagonist. While both these elements are in nascent form in Mad Max, it’s really by reflection of what came after, and Mel Gibson’s star-in-waiting status, that George Miller’s

Nightcrawler (2014)   A meticulously constructed thriller, at first glance Nightcrawler appears to position itself as a media satire in the vein of Network; only with a 21st century makeover. Yet, as biting as the chunks it takes out of the TV business are, it becomes ever clearer as the film progresses that the target is really the unfeeling soulless executive and the corporate mentality that will screw anyone over without a second thought in the name of profit and getting ahead. At the centre of the Dan Gilroy’s movie, one of the best and most unsettling of the year, is a startling, mesmerising

Miami Blues (1990)   If the ’90s crime movie formally set out its stall in 1992 with Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, another movie very quietly got in there first at the beginning of the decade. Miami Blues picked up admiring reviews but went otherwise unnoticed on release, and even now remains under-recognised. The tale of “blithe psychopath” Federick J. Frenger, Jr., the girl whose heart he breaks and the detective sergeant on his trail, director George Armitage’s adaptation of Charles Willeford’s novel wears a pitch-black sense of humour and manages the difficult juggling act of being genuinely touching with it. It’s a little

Stoker (2013)   I didn’t much care for Oldboy. I should qualify that. I thought it had an arresting premise, and Park Chan-wook worked wonders during the early stages. But, once his protagonist had escaped his prison (and that incredible fight scene), the structure gradually fell apart for me. It careened into a hysterical (not as in funny) and overwrought conclusion, both in terms of story and the director’s OTT staging. I’m sure many would argue for its brilliance for that very reason, but I felt that I’d been promised something intricate and was then served a rather daft and cod-operatic denouement. I

Seven Psychopaths (2012)   Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges is one of my favourite films of the past decade, hilarious and profound in equal measure. His follow-up may lack Bruges’ emotional through line, and thus its resonance, but in its own way Seven Psychopaths is just as perfectly formed. Anyone who has seen the trailer for the film would be forgiven that this is the sub-Tarantino knock-off that some critics have dismissed it as. It features Christopher Walken, after all. It’s very funny little preview, and the use of the track Rocket Scientist suggests a whacky tone not so far from a more wired version of Elmore Leonard’s Get

Saturn 3 (1980)   Generally dismissed as a post-Star Wars cash-in, Saturn 3 is best known for its unanimously negative reviews and a psychopathic robot with a fancy for Farrah Fawcett’s fanny (with due credit to Time-Out’s review for that alliterative turn of phrase). To males of a certain age, this predilection was entirely understandable… It’s undoubtedly a mess off a film, visibly wearing the evidence of its troubled production. But it remains a curiosity rather than the complete write-off its reputation suggests (there is even a dedicated website, illustrating that, for some, it captured the imagination of what might have been, rather than merely