So what did it really feel like to go to the flicks in 2014?

A master Scandinavian absurdist took the gold Lion in Venice while, back in February, a similarly metalled Bear took an unexpected trip from Berlin to China. Boyhood was the bookies favourite for that particular gong, and it now looks odds on for Oscar glory too, but if March 2015 turns out to be the story of Linklater's 12 Year's a Boy, this year's razzle dazzle was all Steve McQueen and his 12 Years a Slave. Indeed, while somewhat unexpected turns were taken elsewere, the BIG, "important"- and truly quite brilliant- American thing still won the Academy Award while out on the French coast, the long, difficult European thing (Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep) still won the Palme d'Or.

It was a year when the dream factory churned out the sequels, remakes and prequels at an oddly interim level as the green beads of sweat began to form for its endlessly lucrative 2015. And yet despite all that talk of Justice leagues, expanded universes and Michael Bay, the real story of the multiplexes came, quite bizarrely, from the left of field. Guardians of the Galaxy (Decent), 22 Jump Street (Good) and The LEGO Movie (Great) let Hollywood show us that it was in on the joke, but a Tom Cruise Sci-fi styled Groundhog Day and a stupid-smart thrill ride from Luc Besson offered even greater escape than these. For the most part though it all seemed quite familiar and, far too often, tediously self aware. But then, like a great big gravitational shift, along came Christopher Nolan, Hans Zimmer and their mighty Interstellar to pummel us into our seats. To paraphrase the great David Thomson, cinema simply says: Look at this, isn't it amazing? Isn't it beautiful? Nothing else this year seemed to ask these questions so loud (and I mean LOUD) and clear.

It was a year when reality often offered more urgency and thrills than fiction. Documentary land introduced us to the defiant nationalism of Viacheslav Fetisov, the courage and charm of the American Samoan football team, the staggering integrity of Edward Snowden and what lies behind the curtain of Johannes Vermeer. Great twists were taken in Wes Anderson and Kelly Reichhardt's careers while It Felt Like Love, The Guest, Blue Ruin, Nightcrawler and Coherence proved that there's still fresh blood in American indie too. In other lands a young Polish woman named Ida listened to John Coltrane; a Russian man named Nikolay experienced the book of job; but then a rumble rumble rumble and a dook dook dook for something or other called the Babadook. We reeled with David Cronenberg and rallied with the Dardennes before Alice Rohrwacher, and her quiet Tuscan farm, gently let us reminisce on childhood and life. 

It was a year of North Korean hacking and Nymphomania; of Foxcatcher Farms and Budapest Hotels. Edward Snowden broke rank; Spike Jonze broke hearts; Jack O'Connell broke heads; Miles Teller broke sticks. Jonze, Besson and Glazer helped Scarjo rise from the ashes while Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Williams and Lauren Becall tragically returned to theirs...

So another year of the unexpected and the business-as-usual. And yet, like a fool, what struck me more than anything was just 8 quick shots and 90 seconds long. A scurrying little droid, a dessert plain, and the greatest opening chord in cinema history. 

Happy New year y'all, and thanks for all the reads. x 

2015 is coming, those twin suns loom...

An Autumn Afternoon

Yasujiro Ozu (1962)

The swansong of the great director's career, An Autumn Afternoon is yet another exercise in cinematic beauty and artistic precision. Like many of the 53 features which came before it, this is a film about family, marriage, mortality and booze. The beauty of the everyday, the warmth of Chisu Ryu's smile.

The story is as neat and distilled as any in Ozu's career, perhaps even more so, with Ryu once again playing a father seeking a husband for his daughter, an act which will leave him a lonely widower. A patient, ponderous and simple tale, but oh what colour, what symmetry, what sincerity. I watched it with a blood transfusion gripping my right arm, both knackered and alone in a Berlin hospital ward. I visited his grave less than two weeks later, in a shrine on the outskirts of Tokyo, close to nine thousand kilometers away, with regret and endless gratitude in my heart.

Stray Dog
Akira Kurosawa (1949)

In 1949 Akira Kurosawa offered his own twist on American film noir with this hot-n-humid buddy cop thriller set, and largely shot, in the seedy underbelly of post war Tokyo.

Toshiro Mifune, in the third of his 16 collaborations with the director, plays Murakami, a desperate, obsessive DI on the trail of the killer who bought his stolen gun on the black market. We're told there are 7 rounds in the misplaced Colt 1908, so as the days go by and the bodies pile up, we slowly count them down. Buddying up with an old-pro detective named Sato (played by fellow Kurosawa favourite Takashi Shimura), Murakami sets out into the brothels and motels of a bombed out city to earn his redemption.

Noir was a genre born of America's post war existentialism. Kurosawa took the genre to a country, and city, which lost bad in WWII, and used it to examine the relative nature of morality. Both copper and criminal are veterans of the war and the film ponders why they now find themselves, psychologically, on differing sides. At one point Sato says that "Dirt breeds evil"- to which Murakami responds: "there are no bad people, only bad environments". Tokyo was floored by America's firebombs in 1944; and such men, having lost so much, choose what to make of the rubble. The humanist, and surprisingly beautiful climax to this film is surely testament to that.

Johnny Guitar
Nicholas Ray (1954) 

Joan Crawford gives a dominant lead performance in this strange, subversive, much discussed Western from 1954. 

She runs a bar called Vienna on the outskirts of a frontier town. A train-line is set to run past which she knows will bring business and prosperity but the locals are desperate to run her out. Crawford's character made her wealth through unladylike ways and we quickly learn that the locals despise her for it. The mob, led by a fire and brimstone wielding Mercedes McCambridge, demand to see her hanged and so quickly set to work to do just that.

After a less than thrilling American opening, the film- like many great melodramas of the time- was soon championed by Truffaut and his mates in Cahiers du Cinema, causing many to take a second look. It's seen as a strange sort of classic today and it's no doubt worthy of it. McCambridge's mob runs in clear parallel to McCarthy's communist witch hunts; Crawford is as dominant a female character as the Western genre had seen; and the repressed, emotional showdown between her character and her foe suggests all sorts of erotic, perhaps even homosexual, currents running underneath. 

As strange as it is subversive, Truffaut wrote that those who reject it should basically throw in the towel. What more do you need to hear?

The Hidden Fortress
Akira Kurosawa

Toshiro Mifune plays a general tasked with getting his princess home safe when a war between the clans leaves them stranded behind enemy lines. Disguised as peasants, weighed down by gold, the duo enlist two hapless, greedy farmers to guide them.

One of the more populist films of the great director's career, Akira Kurosawa agreed to take it on so that Toho studios would fund his more artistic efforts. Fair enough. Upon release, it became, at the time, the director's most successful film. The story is top shelf action-adventure stuff with things to say about camaraderie and greed, but it's the boldness of the imagery which still sets it apart. The first film shot on TOHO studios' answer to Hollywood widescreen, Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Yamasaki take to the format with absolute ease, capturing the Mt Fuji vistas of their location shoot with dramatic sweep and scale. 

As great an influence on Star Wars as John Ford or The Seven Samurai, our lowly guides would become the blueprint for R2D2 and C3PO. Vadar mentions the rebel's "Hidden Fortress" in episode IV. The headstrong princess, well, you get the picture...

Bringing up Baby
Howard Hawks (1938)

Cary Grant spent an entire career balancing the suave with the silly- arguably better than any actor, at any time- but that scale was surely never tipped more to the latter than in this quintessential screwball comedy from the great Howard Hawks. Cary plays a soon-to-be-married zoologist on the hunt for some funding. Katherine Hepburn plays the niece of the wealthy trustee. The titular baby, you might have guessed, is Hepburn's pet leopard. Madness, of course, ensues. 

Despite their undeniable chemistry, it must be said, Hepburn's shrill British delivery hasn't aged quite as well as the daft brilliance of her great co-star. The pair somehow keep it lean as the story flies all over the shop but it's surely down to Hawks' deft hand that our concentration doesn't wane. 

If the rule-book of the Screwball comedy does indeed today state that the more two characters drive each other up the wall, the more they are in love; then in 1938 Howard Hawks was surely holding the pen.

Roman Holiday
William Wyler (1953)

Audrey Hepburn plays a want-away Princess Anne on a tour of the Italian capitol. She chooses to shake her royal responsibilities for one day in order to take in the sights with a dashing American reporter. Both have their own reasons for the shady rendezvous, but of course, they fall in love.

Gregory Peck, as usual, has charm to burn, but despite the postcard moments, his costar, in what is now seen as an almost mythical Oscar winning debut, is simply irresistible. Hepburn survived WWII, by holding up in a rat infested Arnhem cellar, just 8 years before; a fact which seems to make her lightness of touch here even more revelatory.

Rainy day fodder of the highest order; director William Wyler's final shot is a true gem.

Solar flares still burst across the screen in J.J. Abrams’ second Star Fleet excursion but- lest we forget we’re in sequel territory- the Enterprise has lost much of its gleam. If the title hasn’t given it away yet, things are getting darker. Our heroes must struggle with themselves and one another while a new foe, more deadly and unpredictable than the last, threatens some sort of almighty destruction.
                We hit the ground running and after a thunderous opening sequence we find our heroes roughly where we left off. Despite their friendship, Spock and Kirk (Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine) remain at odds with one another with the Vulcan’s cold logic still grating on the captain’s human instincts. We learn that Star Fleet is on the verge of war with the Klingons and a deadly fugitive
(An underused but mighty Benedict Cumberbatch) is hiding out on their home planet. Revenge is in the air and the crew must ponder what Star Fleet is really for, with Scotty (a wonderfully overused Simon Pegg) proclaiming in a moment of great tenderness: "This looks like a military operation, I thought we were meant to be explorers..."

                Abrams employs 3D here for the first time and for the opening sequence he pulls it off with aplomb- Arrows unashamedly flying from the screen in a fashion you might expect from the wide eyed director- but as the film progresses it all gets a little stuffy. Overall it does lack that lean feeling of the first film- which managed to seem neat and compact despite having a plotline containing black holes, time travel and alternate realities- but Into Darkness is still razor sharp blockbuster cinema; a finely delivered thrill-ride blasted home with Michael Giacchino’s enormous score. Sadly it looks like J.J.’s last stint in the Enterprise’s director’s chair (for the time being at least) as his eyes- and everybody else’s- turn to Lucasfilm, Lightsabers and that other great space opera.