IT'S BEEN BUILDING UP INSIDE OF ME FOR OH, I DON'T KNOW HOW LONG

Biopics are bad enough, but biopics about genius artists tend to be the worst, and biopics of genius artists who are particular icons to the Baby Boomer generation? You might as well try to survive a nuclear strike. So the simple fact that Love & Mercy, the story of Beach Boys songwriter, producer, and artistic guide Brian Wilson, is pretty damn good - not great, but pretty damn good - is beyond miraculous. And I haven't even mentioned yet that it drags two remarkable-unto-sublime performances out of Paul Dano and John Cusack, a pair of actors whose recent career choices would leave me unwilling to trust them with doing voiceover work for a McDonald's ad, let alone bringing to life one of the defining artists of 20th Century pop music.

Aye, they both play Brian; that's sort of the gimmick, you see. Love & Mercy splits itself into two parts that interweave, each covering a short, important window in Wilson's life. There's the period in the 1960s (the Dano half) during which he conceived and created Pet Sounds, the "Good Vibrations" single, and the increasingly deranged recording sessions for the unrealised Smile, at which time he transformed from "guy who has auditory hallucinations that he funnels into his daringly unconventional production of rock & pop music" into "guy who has auditory hallucinations that leave him unable to function at the most basic human level". And then, there is the period in the 1980s (the Cusack half), which finds him overmedicated and easily manipulated by the overreaching Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), and befriended by Cadillac salesperson Melinda Ledbettr (Elizabeth Banks), who figures out reasonably quickly that he's being horribly mistreated, but has no idea what to do to help him.

The most critical thing that Love & Mercy gets right, and it's apparently all on director Bill Pohlad (who is, by habit, a producer) that it got that way, is that it's not a story of how Brian Wilson was a genius who used his emotional torments to feed his genius and thus created the genius works that have made all our lives better for a half-century. Now, I happen to believe that Pet Sounds is one of the handful of perfect musical objects of the last 70 years, and that "Good Vibrations" puts in an enormously strong case for being the finest pop single ever recorded. And because I believe that, there are some in-jokes and one-off references in Love & Mercy that I get to enjoy more than other people. But in virtually every way that it effects the story or the treatment of the characters, the film doesn't reward me for having good taste. It matters, within the film's frame of reference, that Pet Sounds is generally regarded as a masterpiece with songs on it that a random person, e.g. a Cadillac salesperson, would immediately recognise, and have automatic enthusiasm for meeting the man who wrote them. It does not, however, matter what we think.

Given the crushing volume of biopics, and musical biopics especially, whose solitary hook is "because this person achieved great things and you love him/her for it, come bask in hero worship for two hours", the existence of a movie that takes an unbelievably famous man and prefers to place him in a character study that feels the need to make the case in reference to itself that he deserves to be studied is great enough. But then Love & Mercy goes even farther in the direction of the angels by focusing, rigidly, on just one aspect of its subject's personality and building its narrative around relatively concise stretches of his life that directly relate to that one aspect. This merciless focus serves the movie well as cinema, far better indeed than the macroscopic "childhood to the grave look of virtually every other biopic of recent vintage. Praise be to Pohlad for having the good sense to make those choices, and praise be to screenwriter Oren Moverman (who also co-wrote one of the only other mainstream biopics of the 21st Century that's worth keeping, the experimental Bob Dylan fantasia I'm Not There) for executing it so successfully. Even without recourse to its terrific cast and its occasional unconventional technique, the structure and narrowed scope would be enough by themselves to put in a play for this as the most original and insightful film biography in many, many years.

In the form of Dano and Cusack, it boasts two absolutely vital performances that are not any kind of mimicry - Cusack does not physically resemble Wilson at any stage of his life - and aren't interested in digging into the creative process. They are performing a man with a profound mental imbalance, in both cases putting more emphasis on his personhood than his disease. And, forbidden by Pohlad from meeting to build the character together, the actors approach that goal with sufficiently different strategies that the break in personality is shocking and even scary, hammering home the idea that the years between Smile and Lebdetter's arrival represented a profound, irrecoverable rupture in Wilson's life more eloquently than any piece of writing could. It's career-redefining work for both men; Cusack hasn't played so hard against his stock tricks and refrained from indulging in his standard persona in years and years, and it's the most daunting, accomplished performance that Dano has ever given in a movie.

And even given that, I'm not sure if I'd hand either of those men Best in Show honors over Banks, who emerges as the actual protagonist of the 1980s scenes, in a role that demands different things of her than I can recall having ever seen. There's little to no comedy in the movie, which hamstrings her from using her best-honed tools; but the quick-witted reaction times and disappearance into the needs of the individual moment that mark good improvisation translates remarkably well to the needs of a sober character drama.

Stylistically, Love & Mercy is a bit subtler; Pohlad and cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman aren't hellbent on putting together particularly striking images, and while the movie is unmistakably well-shot, it's in a very humble manner that only goes for broke in a couple sequences that try to mimic '60s film stock. Otherwise, it's all so many California afternoons with thinnish yellow and blue skies, well-used but hardly imaginative. Where Love & Mercy casually sidles into genius is in its sound design, led by Eugene Gearty, as befits a movie about a man driven towards crafting innovative overlays and harmonies in pop songs because it captured the world as he knew it, with its shifting, non-real sounds. The movie calls attention to audio first and foremost: it's opening is a black screen on top of which a formless sound montage rolls around over our heads and behind our ears and back and forth through our skulls. And this continues, if frequently in less aggressive forms, throughout the movie, sometimes for better (young Brian's fit in a swimming in a pool), sometimes not quite as much (a busy, noisy dinner that feels a little bit too "yes, we get the point, thank you"). It shades invisibly into Atticus Ross's astounding, perfect score, a sound collage using fragments of Beach Boys hits and incomplete session tracks that have been reassembled and tweaked so much as to sound like the movie having an auditory hallucination of its very own, one from which snatches of music can be pulled out only if we're paying attention constantly. It's a marriage of form and content of an unexpected sort, but it works perfectly to match our perception to the distressed leads'.

The question that at last presents itself: does all this add up to an actually great piece of cinema? Or am I simply bowled over by a semi-biopic that breaks every last one of the conventions that makes that my least favorite genre, and find myself anxious to overrate it? For all that I'm thoroughly impressed by Love & Mercy and have had it rolling around in my head much more stickily than I'd have ever assumed might happen, I can't quite bring myself to actually recommend it. Still, it's better than it has any right to be in virtually every capacity, and far be it from me to undersell that kind of achievement.

7+/10

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THE ART OF LYING

A review requested by Robert Lovejoy, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

In all the annals of unclassifiable films, I can't think of anything quite as unclassifiable as 1973's F for Fake, the penultimate completed feature of Orson Welles's directorial career (only Filming 'Othello' followed it). It's customarily identified as a documentary, and then customarily the hedging begins to the effect that, whatever the hell it is, "documentary" is a misleading word. It's part of the vaguely-defined tradition of the "essay film", movies which are ruminations on themes divorced from storytelling and intoxicated with using the medium itself to build an argument; but inherent to the notion of the essay film is that all of the best ones (and F for Fake is, I think, easily one of the best) don't resemble anything but themselves. They are sui generis.

The ingredients that go into F for Fake are, already, rather twisted up to the point that it's a matter of some controversy as to what existed at what point, and who's responsible for assembling it. But the basic shape of the thing is that French director François Reichenbach was preparing a documentary about Elmyr de Hory, an art forger who had just been the subject of a biography by Clifford Irving, published in 1969, with the monolithic title Fake. This was shaping up to be an intimate but stylistically conventional work of cinéma vérité, based on the footage that pops up in F for Fake, and that's when the bomb dropped: Irving's follow-up to Fake, an "as told to" autobiography of the legendary recluse Howard Hughes published in 1971, was discovered to be a complete fabrication. Around the time that this was discovered - one of the controversies concerns in exactly what order things happened - Reichenbach gave his de Hory footage to Welles, and signed on as cinematographer for the new project that the American filmmaker was going to build out of that foundation.

That new project was a treatise on the concept of fakery in multiple guises, including the act of making F for Fake itself; although Welles, narrating in full raconteur mode, promises us at the three-minute mark that everything we're told in the next sixty minutes of film is going to be the simple, pure truth, the editing and implications of his film are at the very least misleading, if not patently untrue. But then, by the two-minute mark, he's already freely owned up to being a charlatan. And that means laying claim to footage directed by others (Reichenbach and Oja Kodar, Welles's partner for the last quarter century of his life), re-assembling that and his own footage into mixtures whose implicit meaning is quite different from unadorned reality, and generally letting his subjects and himself spin a good story and worry about of the details lining up perfectly only as a tertiary concern.

Nor, really, does the film ever pretend otherwise. Welles clearly learned a lot from the Godardian Wing of the French New Wave that was still quite fresh in memory in the early '70s; by the third shot of F for Fake, in which we openly see the film crew making the movie we're watching, it's clear that this will be an enthusiastic participant in the trend of self-aware formalism by which a movie spends its entire running time reminding us that it's a movie, and that it was assembled by people with some kind of agenda. And still before that spurious "the next sixty minutes" claim, we've already heard Welles describe fakery, fraud, and lies under the affectionate umbrella of "hanky panky", the phrase cropping up at exactly the moment that the editing ramps up into a whirlwind of shortened attention and confusing jumps between unconnected images.

The rest of the film blasts through fragments of the de Hory and Irving stories, blended with snippets of Welles sharing anecdotes about them, himself, and other people he's known, the director appearing as a garrulous spectre all in black with a bushy beard to dominate the foggy empty spaces where he talks directly to us or the fancy restaurant table where he entertains a group of hangers-on with his theatrically-scaled way of talking. From the opening, which finds Welles on a train platform dazzling a child with magic tricks - the editing working double-time to make sure we can't tell if the little boy is truly seeing the marvels Welles is playing, or if he's just an actor responding to the most boring kind of cinematic sleight-of-hand - the topic of the film is at least as much Welles as a showman, desperate to please and keep us off-balance with the twists and turns of his tale-telling. "Sorry, I've been jumping around like this because that's how it was", he apologises at one point, but of course that's a lie too. He's jumping around because it delights him to do so, and it gives the film the frenzied patter of a magician who lets himself appear to be sloppy and confusing because that's the actual way he keeps us from looking. For among all its other charms, F for Fake is, essentially, structured as a feature-length magic trick with a single punchline that has nothing to do with Elmyr de Hory or Clifford Irving.

It's a hellaciously daunting movie, throwing curveball after curveball at high speed throughout, bragging about the lies its tells and inviting us to enjoy being lied to; for that is, ultimately, the real theme of F for Fake. Not that liars exist because people like de Hory, Irving, Welles, or Oja Kodar's grandfather, another art forger, can monetise tricking people; liars exist because people like to be tricked. It is the amateur magician Welles who recognises that, not the world-class filmmaker Welles, which perhaps explains why this is so unlike anything else in his career. But it's the filmmaker who translates that observation into purely cinematic terms, using some of the canniest editing I've ever seen to misdirect and guide the viewer to exactly the responses that Welles wants, while telling such colorful true and somewhat less-true stories that it's a delight to be manipulated.

Everything about the film is densely packed and even a bit wearying; 89 minutes is as long as this could dare to be, though it has the decency to end with a nice cool-down to ease us out of it. The filmmaking throughout is giddy and self-infatuated, and I will concede that of all the movies I've ever firmly believed to rank among the very best ever made, F for Fake is one of the most absolutely frivolous; its demolition of filmmaking technique is intellectually stimulating but not, ultimately, very complex in the annals of self-aware cinema. But very great it nevertheless is: a bold, brazen movie that could only have been made because a top-notch talent decided to show off for a little bit. Sure, it's indulgent, but indulgence is rarely this captivating.

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THAT DIZZY FEELING

A review requested by Matthew Blackwell, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

One doesn't get too many chances to write about the reigning Best Movie Ever Made, as 1958's Vertigo was anointed by the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, the closest thing we have to the official definition of that title. And it's all the more daunting when one comes within a few notches of agreeing with that assessment. But we're all here now, so let's just dive right into the most complex film made by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the most terrifyingly gifted men to ever direct a movie.

Vertigo being the kind of film that plainly invites superlatives and hyperbole, let me give you some more of it: it is perhaps the single film in existence that most interestingly uses subjectivity. For it is a profoundly subjective movie, as it should be given its role in the auteur's career: this is closest that Hitchcock ever came to a personal confession of his sins on celluloid. Those sins being an obsession with blondes and a tyrannical disposition towards abusing them emotionally and, every so often, physically, in order to get them to be exactly what he demanded to make his movies as perfectly as possible (one of the cruelest of those abuses took place in the filming of this very movie: he forced lead actress Kim Novak to jump into the freezing San Francisco Bay for take after take, to no genuine purpose).

And it's not just that Vertigo is subjective; it uses that subjectivity to fuck with us. Which of course it would, being a Hitchcock picture - eight years earlier, he'd directed Stage Fright, a movie whose entire purpose in life was to smack the viewer around a little bit for daring to assume that movies always take place in the third person, and for much of the following decade, his films were all about finding ways to use the audience's expectations about how movies worked against us, causing us untold torments (this would, of course, culminate in his dauntingly modernist Psycho two years after Vertigo). Like a great many people, the first time I saw Vertigo, I was baffled by its odd decision to reveal its twist ending at the three-quarter mark, apparently robbing it of an entire act's worth of tricks and surprises (there are indications that Hitchcock himself had misgivings about including the reveal, and was overruled by producers). The director's famous image of a bomb exploding under a table in his interview with François Truffaut - shock is blowing up the bomb, suspense is showing the audience the bomb and then having people converse for ten minutes while they sit at the table - explains one reason for placing the reveal where it is, but it only leads to a deeper wrinkle. For the suspense we feel isn't on behalf of the protagonist we've been following for an hour and a half, but on the character hiding a secret from him, who has been totally deprived of any interiority for that same hour and a half. What's really unsettling about the Vertigo plot reveal isn't simply that it confounds our expectations for how thrillers should be structured, but that it spontaneously breaks the thread of absolute subjectivity that the film has, till that point, thrived on. From that point onward, in fact, Vertigo becomes a tug-of-war between two POVs, putting us inside the mind of the controlling erotically obsessed antihero while also letting us look at the dreadful impact of his obsession on the object of his desire. It's some of the most psychologically acute cinema I am aware of, and it's entirely situated within the realm of polished Hollywood genre fare. Not a bad trick.

But since there is a full three-quarters of a movie leading to that point, and not everybody has seen Vertigo, let me back up. The situation: Det. John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) has retired from the San Francisco police department following an unfortunate incident where a sudden flare-up of his previously unsuspected acrophobia leaves him incapacitated while another cop falls off a roof to his death. Looking to toss him some work, an old college friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) offers him a curious job: Gavin's wife Madeleine (Novak) has been wandering around town every day in an apparent trance, and Gavin is convinced that she's being possessed by a ghost. But he needs someone to track her movements before he can do anything to help her, either through parapsychological or psychiatric means. And so Scottie follows Madeleine, eventually discovering that she's grown obsessed with the portrait and legend of Carlotta Valdes, a woman who killed herself after her child was stolen away from her about a century prior. Scottie's urge to save Madeleine from the influence of the past quickly goes beyond professional courtesy; he's falling desperately in love with her, in fact, and it's doing a real number on his ability to do his job objectively.

It's a fine story - novelists Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac wrote their D'entre les morts primarily so that Hitchcock would be able to adapt it into a movie, after he lost the chance to make Les diaboliques to Henri-Georges Clouzot - but not in and of itself the stuff of Best Movie Ever Made territory. Really, what it is it but a paranormal riff on the film noir classic Laura? But on this fine, not tremendously unique story, Hitchcock and his immensely gifted crew hang some of the most portent visuals ever committed. Vertigo is, among other things, one of the cleverest color films ever made: the director, costume designer Edith Head, and art directors Henry Bumstead and Hal Pereira (with an enormous assist from cinematographer Robert Burks) rely on a controlled color palette to do a stunning amount of work for them. It's not as simple as color-coding the film, as Hitchcock would do six years later in Marnie (where, by all means, it works wonderfully). It's a much subtler way of using color in a relative way: what matters is not, inherently, that this scene is red and that scene is green, but that this scene is redder than the scene preceding it, that scene is greener. The film idles in a very plain, moderately saturated mode, with Scottie's world - especially the apartment of his best friend and solitary anchor, Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes) - decked out in calm browns and greys, with the colors that show up having that soft, pastel look of '50s color film stock. But when he first encounters Madeleine, she drags in a whole range of aggressive colors: lush red walls bright blue sky, harsh pink flowers, vibrant blonde hair, shiny green cars, and the orange grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Color, in Vertigo is clearly linked to dream states, whether they're actual, literal dreams (Scottie's nightmare at the three-quarter mark is triggered by garish filters bathing the whole image in solid sheets of color), or simply the dazed state that following Madeleine for the first time puts him in. Their first encounter is one of Vertigo's signature gestures for a lot of reasons, in fact: besides representing only the second time (following the blue-soaked opening scene) that the film has boasted rich, vividly saturated colors, it also does away with dialogue for almost ten straight minutes, in favor of Bernard Herrmann's gorgeous score, circle round and round on the soundtrack. It's mesmerising and dreamy itself, the most subjective sequence in the whole enormously subjective feature, keying us in to Scottie's dazzled mind by means of deliberately leeching all the realism from the filmmaking and replacing it with intense, heightened style.

And yet, through all of this, Madeleine herself is the most emphatically grey thing in the movie, thanks to the suit that Head provided for her, on the logic that it boasted a particular shade of grey that no blonde woman would ever wear. I can't speak to that, but there's no denying that centering all of the lavish, luscious color around a woman in grey feels distinctly "off", and the way Novak wears the uniform stiffly, moving in studied, inorganic lines ends up serving as the best kind of foreshadowing, since it doesn't feel like foreshadowing - it's easy to read the color and movement as signs of Madeleine's mental detachment, since our understanding is connected to Scottie's limited, obsessed appreciation of her.

The first three-quarters of Vertigo do an extraordinary job of portraying that obsessive state through everything from Stewart's fearless performance - the most uncharacteristic of his career, full of sweat and dagger-like stares and feverish line deliveries - to its constantly limited camera angles to its unspoken emphasis on the titular state. The word "vertigo" is stated only once - acrophobia gives Scottie vertigo, and the vertigo is what makes hims cease to function, as he explains to Midge in the film's second scene - but a vertiginous state saturates the movie, right from its opening credits, with their iconic spiral shapes devised by John Whitney, Sr. Much of the aesthetic of Vertigo is centered on spirals, on going round and round in circles: Madeleine's characteristic whorl of hair, spiral staircases, the twists and turns and ups and downs of San Francisco itself. Herrmann's score keeps looping around into itself, presenting a swoony state that could be read as Romanticism - his music owes a clear debt to the "love and death" themes in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which the score openly quotes at points - but could just as easily identify the increasingly insular, mad mental state of the main character.

Everything that goes into making the first three-quarters of Vertigo such an excellent marriage of our perspective to that of the increasingly frazzled lead makes it that much more startling when it breaks from it: every time that Midge asserts herself and lets us see the inner life of the woman who could be all the stable, sane, pleasant things Scottie is willfully and needlessly rejecting (Bel Geddes is truly amazing with not much screentime, portraying a good friend and smart sparring partner who is aware of the hopelessness of her own erotic fixations and willing to give up on them when necessary, thus making her the healthy counterpoint to Scottie, while being an interesting character in her own right: her sadly upbeat reading of "I don't think Mozart's going to help at all", her final line, edges out Stewart's angry, self-lacerating "You shouldn't have been that sentimental" as my favorite line reading in the movie), for example, or of course when it enters its final quarter and becomes a totally different movie. There's an easy Vertigo to imagine, in which the blunt-talking brunette Judy Barton (Novak), with her clunky outfits and garish eyebrows, is just the accidental victim of Scottie's fixations, but the Vertigo we get is far more interesting, since it gives us a whole new film's worth of character details in Judy's relationship to her terrible, immoral behavior, and allows us a much more complex counterpoint to Scottie's descent into mad desire than the simply decent Midge. The enormous shift in focus precipitated by the unexpected twist pre-ending makes Vertigo not a film about one man going nuts from obsession; it makes it into a much more challenging, interesting film about different ways of being broken by desire, of trying to ignore one's mistakes or committing to them so fully that they no longer even register as behavior (Midge, who owns her mistakes, is indifferently ushered out of the movie - there's no room for decent people in Vertigo's final half-hour).

In short, there is a Vertigo that's a great psychological thriller about obsession, and for the most part, that's how we like to talk about the Vertigo that exists. But really, Vertigo is more complicated and slippery than that, demanding far more of us as viewers than any other Hitchcock film, more than any other Hollywood film broadly located in the realm of genre. This is, undoubtedly, why it limped through the box office in 1958 while receiving detached, unhappy reviews. He is a great and endlessly important filmmaker, but Hitchcock was still primarily an entertainer; Vertigo is less of a simple entertainment than anything else he directed. That's not the reason it's also his best film, but it's only because he was willing to do something challenging and upsetting that he could reach the depth and subtlety which does make Vertigo a masterpiece among masterpieces.

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NO HAY BANDA

A review requested by Gabe P, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Spoilers are going to be crawling up and down this post like ants. If you haven't seen Mulholland Dr., know that I'd give it a perfect 10/10, and if I were making a list of the films of the 21st Century that are essential viewing for anyone even moderately interested in the art form, this would be jockeying for very top spot.

There was a time when any discussion about David Lynch's magnificent Mulholland Dr. would automatically turn into an attempt to piece out exactly what the fuck is happening within it. Having been right in the thick of the film's original release in 2001, I took part in more than my fair share of such conversations, and I am pleased that, in the interevening 13 years and change, cinephile culture has arrived at two basic groups of theories that represent the consensus "solutions" of the movie's mysteries ("it's all a dream" and "it's two versions of the same story in alternate universes" - I much prefer the former, but the film mostly works the same either way), thus freeing us all to talk about anything else. For I cannot think of a film that more clearly demonstrates the truth of Roger Ebert's dictum that what a movie is about is less important than how it is about that thing. In fact, the how of Mulholland Dr. is almost totally inseparable from the what - it is a film that burns its artistic themes and believes about life deep into the bones of its story structure, its acting technique, its sound design, its editing. Unpack the gnarled narrative, and you find a potboiler about desperation among wannabe actresses. Unpack the aesthetic, and you find one of the best - no, fuck it, the best autocritique of cinema as a medium that has yet been made.

But just in the interest of having something to talk about, let's start with the plot. And I mean "plot" in its strictest sense: what events are depicted onscreen and in what order we see them. "Story" is a different matter. "Story", in Mulholland Dr., is puking its guts up behind the dumpster around back of a little coffee shop. What happens is that a woman (Laura Elena Herring, about as far as you can go on the Prestige-O-Meter from her 1990 feature debut, The Forbidden Dance - though not, actually, giving much better of a performance) survives a murder attempt that's interrupted by a car crash on Mulholland Dr., the cliff road overlooking Los Angeles from the north. She staggers away from the crash without her memory, and finds solace in an abandoned apartment; the next day, she's found by Betty (Naomi Watts, in her never-bettered starmaking role), who was coming to stay there at the invitation of her actress aunt, currently shooting a project in Canada. Betty herself wants to be an actress, but she finds herself dividing her time between job hunting and trying to help this mystery woman - who calls herself "Rita", after spotting the name on a Gilda poster - determine her own identity and figure out whether she's in any danger, as she clearly feels without being to articulate it. Meanwhile, a film director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), is being leaned on hard by a mysterious cabal to cast an unknown named Camilla Rhodes as the lead in his picture, The Sylvia North Story. There are scattered scenes throughout in which characters who seem momentarily important simply evaporate away, sometimes after interacting with one of the two main threads of the story and sometimes not. Eventually, Betty and Rita track Rita's past back to a place called Club Silencio, where notional reality is shown to be a fake, and the film restarts itself as the story of Diane Selwyn (Watts), who is having a very rough time dealing with the fact that her girlfriend, Camilla Rhodes (Herring) has gotten the lead role that Diane wanted herself, apparently by fucking the director, Adam Kesher (Theroux).

There are a lot of things that the movie can be about, depending on how hard you want to run it through an analytical wringer, but the one thing it's always about is that motions pictures and the industry that produces them are toxic shit-holes of lies. And nowhere is that more evident than in the famously insoluble mystery. It would be trivially easy to re-edit the film using all the footage it contains and only the footage it contains in its present form, basically just swapping the concluding fifth of the movie (where Watts plays Diane) to the beginning, and in the blink of an eye you've made thoroughly comprehensible story: a woman is thrown over by her lover, so she hires a hitman to murder her; the night after the job is done she has a fantastic dream dripping with symbolism, in which she and her now-dead girlfriend lived the exact happy life she wanted, and she is herself a promising, desirable young star, though hints and details of her guilt keep nudging in. Awakening, she is so horrified that she kills herself, and her last thoughts are flashes of that pleasant dream. Now, that does require ignoring the fact that Mulholland Dr. was born a TV pilot for ABC that the network passed on (aghast that they hired David Lynch to make a David Lynch show for them, upon which he did so), which included none of the Watts-as-Diane material. But the film has been re-worked from the material originally worked into that pilot enough to make them distinctly unique properties even in the places where they overlap, so writing off the story's past life seems fair. Even necessary, given the amount of its plot that's all about writing off personal history that gets in the way of a pleasing reality.

The point of Mulholland Dr., of course, is that it does not make this one simple shift, and that proves to be all the difference. Instead of an almost boringly straightforward Freudian psychodrama, the film turns into a morass of almost unnavigable narrative mysteries, breaking down the idea that films represent some kind of Thing That Actually Happened by inviting the viewer to bring together all sorts of details that seem like the must be Important Clews - I mean, if they weren't important, then why would Lynch have included them? - only to find that most of what happens in Mulholland Dr. is baffling nonsense. You can do what I just did, and mentally re-edit the movie, to make it relatively easy piece of dream analysis where we know that we're picking apart the details of a symbolic dream. Or you can catalogue all the places where Rita seems to take over or recede from reality, and use those as evidence for how it's a film she's dreaming into existence in real time. Or you can leave the movie entirely and discard all of the random effluvia as detritus that would have been explored in the full TV series, and Lynch left it in just because it was fun and stylish, in which case you will forgive me for accusing you of being kind of boringly literal.

But no matter how you try to square Mulholland Dr., you're ultimately trying to compensate for the fact that David Lynch has handed you a broken movie. And since we are accustomed to movies being things that aren't broken, but only appear to be in the interests of shocking us, we busily set ourselves to the task of fixing it. This is our habit as viewers trained by Hollywood to watch Hollywood film. But really, isn't Lynch only actually saying, "this thing is broken - I broke it on purpose". Five years later, he'd be more explicit in doing the same thing with Inland Empire, which not only breaks cinematic structure, but cinematic form,* recklessly chopping up hideous digital video footage into a frenzied slurry of anti-cinema. That film took place in Hollywood, too, which is one of the closest things Mulholland Dr. has to a tell. The other is its lynchpin scene at Club Silencio, in which sound and editing march right up and announce themselves: do you hear how a record soundtrack can lie to you, the film asks, and do you see how dissolves can be used to make you think that discontinuous motion is continuous? It is the equivalent of a magician who confidently states "I'm going to trick you now", and then does so.

The two most important developments in the plot - Betty and Rita's sexual encounter, and the unlocking of the blue box that collapses the Betty/Rita plot, by eliminating Betty completely and consuming Rita - are both preceded by moments where the film openly breaks itself, in fact. Club Silencio leads directly into the latter; the former is shortly preceded by a moment in which Rita's panic causes the film image to double and overlap itself, a rupture of reality as intense as any in the 35 years separating Mulholland Dr. from Ingmar Bergman's Persona. And then, in the cheekiest movie reference in a film saturated with them, their lovemaking is followed by a variation of the classic "Persona shot". So it's not like all this is an accident.

Like Persona, Mulholland Dr. isn't just a breakdown of the sacred rule of narrative filmmaking, that the viewer should never realise that they're watching constructed reality. It's a breakdown of form that mirrors the breakdown of personality that its plot - in whatever interpretation or lack of interpretation we want to describe that plot - depicts. The film itself is having a psychotic split from reality, in effect. Whatever that reality might be: there are at least three "realities" in Mulholland Dr., leading off with the banal, cheery reality of Betty's plotline, with the corny dialogue and campy acting that dominate it, the shiny, sparkly clothes she wears, the sexualised parody of the stock "some nobody gives a dynamo reading, is discovered and made famous" scenario, and the fact that her fucking name is "Betty". We know Lynch; we've seen Blue Velvet; we get that he likes travestying '50s tropes by exaggerating them and filling them full of rot and perversity. So the "Betty" third of Mulholland Dr. is easy to read as a joke. But it's maybe not so easy to read the "Adam" plot the same way, with its menacing lighting and quavering Angelo Badalamenti score, its terrifying dwarf puppetmaster played by Michael J. Anderson, whom Lynch employed in Twin Peaks to let us know in the most disturbing way possible that the gum we like was going to come back in style. Since we know that we're watching a Lynch film, we're ready for the darkness, the screeching horror injected into banal spaces, the migraine-inducing flickering light. And Mulholland Dr. comes along and wipes it away just like it does the corny scenes with Betty. And what does that leave us with? The plain style and grit (I gather that the new footage used to complete the pilot was on a different stock for practical reasons, but the texture of the newer material is certainly less polished than the rest, whatever the cause) of the "Diane" sequence, the "real" sequence, the "explanation". Which Mulholland Dr. also includes in its collapse of signifiers and narrative clarity near the end.

The idea behind Mulholland Dr. isn't that some movies are realer than others; it's that movies are constructs designed by liars. Ever since he smashed in a TV to kick off Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch's movies have all been some kind of commentary on the unreliability of classic cinematic forms - yes, even the sedate The Straight Story, which depicts all the moments that most movies cover in a dissolve or montage, and barely cares about its nominal dramatic stakes - it's just that Mulholland Dr. is the one where he actually did it in the context of movie stars and movie-making. The film's slantwise namesake, Sunset Blvd., made waves in 1950 by reveling in the fact that the people who made movies were selfish, greedy, arrogant pricks; a half-century later, that baton had been picked up by many people in many places, but virtually nobody had ever done a better job than Lynch and his note-perfect crew of extending that bilious observation to the movies themselves, which are here supposed to be nothing but the natural extension of the broken minds involved in making them. It's there in the soundtrack, full of misleading and confused audio cues; it's there in Peter Deming's intense cinematography that's all shadows and sugary sunlight, pushing our mood in directions not determined by the script; it's there in Mary Sweeney's elusive editing, stitching together moments with the illusion of connectivity; it's there in Jack Fisk's romanticised and patently artificial production design.

In Mulholland Dr., a movie can be a comforting and optimistic lie; it can be a horrifying and upsetting lie; it can be a sad lie; it can be a confrontational lie designed to make us furious at the pretentious dick who made it just to mess with our heads. But it cannot not be a lie. That is its essential nature. And the film's beauty, its intellectually gripping complexity, its slippery and unpredictable performances, all make it a pleasure to have it lie to us, to calmly assert how much more intelligent it knows itself to be than we are.

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IF YOU ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU'VE ALWAYS DONE

Talking about Predestination without confidently, fearlessly giving away plot points that shouldn't be given away is enormously hard. The best thing would be to go in totally cold, not even knowing what short story it's based on (having read the story - it is not at all obscure, though calling it "well-known" might be a stretch - I was unfortunately able to get ahead of the movie pretty early on when I recognised it, which was kind of disappointing), so if you trust me, please go find it; it's crawling across the U.S. right now, and also can be found VOD. If you only trust me a little, how about this to sweeten the pot: no matter what you end up thinking about it, it's worth seeing because in it, you will find Sarah Snook giving an immaculate, wholly-formed Star Is Born performance of the first order. Gimmickry, raging sentiment, immensely subtleties of facial expression and gesture, showy vocal work; whatever you thinking Great Acting is, she's got some of it for you. The role won the Australian Academy Award for Best Actress against some weighty contenders, and boy, it's not the half of what she deserved.

So I'll assume you either have seen the movie, or don't care (but no worries, I'll keep spoilers firmly limited to the first third). Predestination is, to begin with, a film by Australian filmmaking brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, whose last film, 2009's "what if?" vampire story Daybreakers, felt like a peerless example of a once-in-a-lifetime concept that simply didn't have enough done with it in the execution. No such hedging applies to Predestination, which has an equally hearty concept, but sees it through to its conclusion in a way the previous film didn't. That's partially because it's an adaptation of Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies-", one of those mid-century science fiction short stories that seems to exist primarily so that the author could show all his steps in solving a problem and disingenuously calling it a narrative; all the Spierigs had to do was minutely copy the story and just like that, full-realised narrative. And that is, in fact, mostly what they've done, even when it leaves their movie snagged on ideas that work as asides in a short story and feel like conspicuous dropped threads in a movie. The biggest change is to add a bit of a "stop the terrorist" thriller spine that extends the plot far enough beyond the "taa-daa, I've revealed everything" gesture that it feels like an actual story with actual stakes and themes. Which makes it, whatever else it is, one of the too-rare movies to have thoroughly improved upon its source material in the act of adaptation.

The plot, meanwhile, is designed with a few confusing fake-outs along the way (it opens with the kind of in medias res scenes that annoyingly telegraphs that we'll see bits of it again later, and then it will make sense; a gimmick that I have long grown tired of), but in its basic for, it goes like this: a man (Ethan Hawke, the lead in Daybreakers), who has just received a new face after being badly burned, has for uncertain reasons set himself up as a bartender in New York in the early 1970s. One night, another man comes in, and after some fencing that could be seen as basic bartender chitchat but feels like goading, this second man offers to tell the most amazing story that the bartender has ever heard, betting a fresh bottle of booze that it will knock his ass off. And then begins his story, of the time when he was a young woman named Jane (Snook), who grew up an orphan with a distinct sense of being Not Like Other Girls; at a certain point, to make ends meet while traveling into space, she attempts to get a job as one of the space-courtesans serving the astronauts growing lonely and horny on year-long missions (it's details like these where scrupulous fidelity trips up the movie a bit). This doesn't pan out, she gets involved with a man who leaves her pregnant, and the birth results in a shocking discovery: Jane is of biologically indeterminate gender, and to save her life after this turns out to have made giving birth a near-fatal ordeal, the doctors have elected to turn her into a man.

It's right about then that it all clicked for me: not that Jane was the man in the bar (that's made clear so early that it's unfair to call it a twist), but that Snook had been playing him all along. Prior to that, the odd vocal cadences and carriage that went into the performance seemed just like part of the pile-up of mysteries that Predestination was indulging in during its opening act; it literally didn't occur to me that it was a woman playing a man until the slow progression of make-up joining the two end points (the film boasts some stellare make-up effects) made it impossible to miss. Snook is that good at playing the chameleon, figuring how the personality of a depressed man in 1970 is different from a brittle, whip-smart woman in the early 1960s, and exploring those registers so fully that it seems like she's playing two entirely different characters; and yet, the evolution between the two of them feels totally natural and correct.

And that's just at the level of the central gimmick: at all points in her performance of both iterations of Jane/John, Snook's carefulness in letting the right emotions slip out at the right time is so flawless in such a sustained way that even if this was the most sedate, genre-free kind of story, her performance would be hardly any less exemplary. There's nothing about any moment she's onscreen that isn't mesmerising; even Hawke seems dumbfounded, happily handing her each and every scene they share together - and it goes into some place where they share some really weird scenes together - without compromising his own rather nuanced and tricky performance, but also without showboating.

The two leads are so faultless in their performances, and Snook is so commanding in every scene, whether as a worn-out man or a fierce woman, that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Predestination isn't actually a character study at heart; it's a carefully laid-out exercise in narrative mechanics, which asks multiple times, to varying degrees of explicitness, "are our actions the result of choice, or are they (wait for it) predestined? And if a certain choice is immoral, does the fact that it is predestined obviate our need to resist making it?" A bit dry and theoretical, sure; this does have its roots in '50s literary sci-fi, and dry theory never found a genre and a period that suited it better.

And, indeed, the dryness of it does tend to diminish the film's impact as more than a precisely-described puzzle with really urgent thematic questions that are more fun to think about then they are to apply to one's own life. The Spierigs do yeoman's work keeping the film's narrative clear and visually connected to itself, and the confidence of the filmmaking helps to keep things purring along any time the more logically-inclined viewers might start to feel the need to tug at the film's central impossibility. But it's very arid, in a lot of ways: impeccable but sterile, and only the fact that Snook and Hawke are in there, insisting on the warm, sloppy humanity of their characters allows Predestination to feel like a relatable story and not just an extraordinarily well-framed exercise.

But then, this is a movie, and movies do have actors, and maybe that was the point all along: take Heinlein's clinical chilliness, and make it into a rich human story by throwing some rich humans at it. I'm not sure it's quite enough to make Predestination an actual great piece of cinema, but it's absolutely enough to make it terrifically compelling viewing: a film with ideas and feelings that are inseparable from each other is nothing to discard lightly, even when it feels like it might be, at some level, a giant put-on.

8/10

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EVERYONE POOPS

It is easy to first focus on how Goodbye to Language is yet another film in Jean-Luc Godard's late career collection of essay films describing morality, culture, the state of modern Europe, how cinematic images produce and limit meaning, because that's what it is. It's not at all unlike a remake of his last feature, Film socialisme, in fact, only with a different form of moviemaking technology being turned inside and broken (prosumer cameras there, prosumer cameras and 3-D here), and less of a focus on audience-punishing impenetrability. And even that's not saying much, given that Film socialisme is about as impenetrable as anything Godard has made since the beginning of the 1980s.

The danger of over-emphasising that, though, is that it pulls attention for how disorientingly fun and funny Goodbye to Language can be, though I concede that one has to meet the film much more than halfway for that to be true, and even then it's a kind of fun that's certainly only for a very self-selecting audience. Although it has fart jokes, and not even, like, heavily abstract, theoretical fart jokes. Jokes wherein the punchline is, if a person is saying something very serious and philosophically impenetrable, it is funny to show them talking while gaudily foleyed-in wet farts play on the soundtrack.

While I think that the film has a plot - in fact, I think it even has a twist ending - trying to go back over it is grounds for nothing but a headache. Like most of Godard's "narrative" films in the last couple of decades (as opposed to his pure essay films), it's made up a series of vaguely united vignettes, during which complicated, self-referential conversations about theory play out between people who may or may not be capable of acting in other contexts, but really only serve as props here. The academics in the audience might be horrified by what I'm about to say, but I think the trick with most late Godard is to let the dialogue happen and catch what one can, but not really worry about working it all out. Not, at least, the first time, and while I look forward to spending many long years with Goodbye to Language, I've only seen it but the once, at this point. So if this is a bit of a thinnish review - well it will be, there's little doubt of that. But hopefully enthusiasm will count for the lack of depth.

The chief charm of Goodbye to Language is its interrogation of how cinema works in the age of digital media production, movies shot on phones and screened in tiny windows over the internet, and of course, 3-D. This overlaps a bit with Film socialisme, but where that was an angry work, trying to break the new medium, Goodbye to Language is a good deal more playful, trying to push the new technologies into extreme corners to find out what happens there. Even the politically and morally laden dialogues have a certain self-aware winking quality that makes this, at any rate, much more watchable than much of the director's recent work. It's still fairly pessimistic - that title didn't just come along out of nowhere, and it has exactly the implication of "goodbye to language, because pop culture has murdered you and the possibility of meaning along with you" that it seems to - but Godard's pessimism has been married to exhilarating cinematic experimentation at least as far back as Week End.

Not everyone would sign of on the word "exhilarating", I am sure - it's an inherently divisive movie - but for myself, I was delighted by Goodbye to Language fare more often than not, certainly more than I expected to be. Aye, delighted; with the giddy amazement of a baby looking at a Christmas tree. There are too many different things happening in the construction of the film's images for it to be pinned down to "the main idea", but one of the strongest ideas is to challenge digital 3-D as a medium and meaning-creating element, finding out what happens in its extremes. The most celebrated moment involves a long shot during which the two cameras capturing the image are split off the rig holding them in the correct relationship to capture a realistic 3-D image, each going one direction to record entirely different actions before being reunited. It's a spectacular moment, as viscerally dumbfounding as anything in the glossiest effects extravaganza, with different goals, of course - it's a basic Godardian gesture in reminding the viewer that movies are made because of cameras, that cinematic images are inherently fictitious constructions which are reconstructed in our minds as movement - and it's an experiment whose time had long since come. It's hardly pleasant, trying to reconcile the fact that your two eyes are seeing completely incompatible images, but it is pleasurable in its way, and makes stronger claims to seriously investigating how movies work than anything else in the year, or the decade, or probably the century.

But just because it's the film's most famous moment, doesn't mean it's the only great gesture in that direction. Later on - I wonder if this even deserves a spoiler warning, since I was surely excited to see it unawares - two static shots of still lifes are overlaid in much the same way, with each eye receiving totally different information, and a few moments later, the same two shots are combined using normal editing techniques, so both eyes receive the same flat double exposure. Comparing and contrasting the way that the two experiences work in the eye and in the brain is at least as telling as that first amazing break when the 3-D image splits.

Mostly, the film's struggle with imagery is of a much simpler sort: exaggerated moments of objects poking way the hell into the audience's space, making it impossible to look at the screen without your eyes watering slightly; nude bodies positioned in space to be as distracting as possible; hoary gags about objects interrupting three-dimensional space to interrupt what we want to be looking at, which are frequently nude bodies. Without being so angry about it as to turn into a provocation, the film invites us to consider how meaning can be swallowed by visuals, how words can be turned into buzzing noise that doesn't connect to image - goodbye to language, and goodbye to film language, in effect. With its nods towards YouTube culture in the preponderance of cute animal footage and low-res images breaking into digital blocks, and its implicit demonstration of how easily we can be distracted by a barrage of disconnected stimuli, it's an indictment of the shortened attention span of the 21st Century that also panders to that attention span, and not, apparently, in an ironic way.

It is a self-contained contradiction: it wants us to have constant fun while demanding at every step that we think about how terribly shallow it is to want to have fun constantly; it's a critique of dehumanising politics and culture that openly finds the dog to be the most interesting character. It's capital-A Art made by an angry old man, driven by a constant bro-ish fascination with "wouldn't it be cool if...?" moments. Most importantly, it's the single film I have seen from 2014 that most actively tries to find a new language for filmmakers to inhabit, and honestly, it might be the most consistently captivating one as well.

10/10

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GO EAST, OLD MAN

The Homesman is a film with an unimaginably specific and small ideal audience. It is, to begin with, a Western; a Western lover's Western, drunk on the iconography of the genre and steeped in an awareness of the kind of myths told in Western cinema and more than that, the particular language and tenor of those myths. It expects its viewer to know Westerns very well. Not a winning strategy in the 2010s. Meanwhile, it is also a film that holds the morality and conventions of the very same genre in open contempt: it regards the mythologising and wiry masculinity of the traditional Western with extreme distrust. That leaves basically nobody left to be fan of the thing, which is maybe why this terribly excellent film hit the ground stumbling at Cannes and has been greeted with muted positive reviews ever since. That, and the fact that it is unrelentingly bold in its experiments, and some of them don't land, and some of them only land if you're willing to buy into the film's ultimate thematic conclusion that basically sums up as: "fuck it, everything is hopeless". Which cuts into its target audience even more.

The second theatrical feature directed by Tommy Lee Jones (adapting the screenplay from Glendon Swarthout's novel alongside Kieran Fitzgerald & Wesley A. Oliver), and cementing him as an enormously interesting complicator of Western imagery, after his marvelous and horribly underrated The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Homesman is a film about madness. A specifically female variant of madness: once upon a time in the West, three women were broken down by the sheer oppressive agony of life in the Nebraska Territory, and the male-dominated culture that has managed to take root there. Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer) lost her children to diphtheria, Gro Svendson (Sonja Richter) was badly raped, and Theoline Belknap (Miranda Otto) just up and snapped from the sheer desolation of it all, and killed her child. All three of them have been left incapable of functioning in the merciless, survivalist world of the untamed West, and the community where they live has collectively decided to send them back East to Iowa, where a religious charity will tend to them. Only none of the men in the community can be bothered, and it falls to spinster Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) to escort them all back to civilisation. Crossing paths with a pathetic claim jumper, George Briggs (Jones), Cuddy saves him from a lynching if and only if he'll act as guide and bodyguard.

That takes us around halfway through, which is before things get really peculiar, including a two-thirds twist that completely redirects the film's focus and energies, and is another reason why it's easy to hate the film; if you've been reading it as feminist up till that point (and there's no clear reason why you shouldn't), the twist comes as even more disruptive as a shock, since the film that happens afterwards can't be meaningfully defended as feminist on any level I'm familiar with. Except insofar as it goes to extreme lengths to look with dismay on the performance of masculinity in the context of the American West. Briggs, when we meet him, is a loathsome sad-sack, wheedling and messy and begging; over the course of his exposure to Cuddy, he tries very hard to become a better and more noble soul, and this ends up going nowhere at all. In its last scenes, the film adopts the perspective of late John Ford, the notion that the kind of unapologetic maledom that makes space for European civilisation to enter untamed wild spaces is itself totally unsuited for civilised people, and had better be regarded with cautious, pitying disgust than admiration. There is certainly nothing admirable about Briggs, except for little patches in the back half, and Jones's enthusiastic portrayal of all the character's faults is impressively free of any pride whatsoever.

But where Briggs is the prism through which the film refracts its ideas about morality and behavior in the West and thus, implicitly, in America itself (for what does the West function as in Westerns, if not a symbolic version of the country that rolled in after it?), The Homesman is not his movie. It's maybe not even Cuddy's movie, though you'd be forgiven for thinking that given the excellent precision of the writing and Swank's performance, which combine to make her one of the most singularly well-etched figures in English-language cinema in 2014. The film is really about those three madwomen, barely given lines of dialogue or individualising characteristics outside of the flashbacks that clarify what, exactly, drove them mad. Through all five of its central characters, the film is a pessimistic study of personally identity: how easily it can be broken, in the case of the three ill women; how conditional it is and subject to torment by the offhand cruelty of others, in the case of Cuddy; how powerless we can be to change it despite our best intentions, in the case of Briggs.

In short, it is a study of human, and especially feminine strength in the face of the bleakest hell of life imaginable. The West, as depicted in The Homesman, is a nasty and cruel place: Rodrigo Prieto's gorgeously severe cinematography, framing the horizon as prison that keeps the images pinned down, makes the New Mexican landscapes of the film shoot look beautiful and merciless; Marco Beltrami's score taps into traditional Western-style musical cues while bleaching them of all sentiment. It's a dry, bony film, always grappling in new and ever more eccentric ways with the limits and possibilities of human fortitude in the face of both physical and social cruelty.

Absolutely none of which successfully implies how captivating the whole of it is: impeccably acted, sharply written, and directed with a keen sense of both the power of visuals and the nuances of human behavior. It's not always free from being derivative - Ford's The Searchers and 7 Women are never far from mind, and its desire to probe its characters ends up leading it to some, odd, lumpy places (the last 15 minutes, in particular, are just damned confusing in the way they're assembled). But while it is a flawed film, they are glorious flaws; the flaws that come of trying to be as complicated and challenging as possible, to bend genre rules to one's own will, and to make an experience that genuinely interrogates itself and its audience. It's not always a totally satisfying experience, but it's one of the most engaging and rewarding films of the year even so.

9/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: THE HARDYMOBILE

No-one likes a prescriptivist, but I’m going to put on that hat for a moment anyway. It is preferable, I think, that movies should be movies first and foremost - that whatever it is they’re doing, it’s something that couldn’t be done in any other medium or art form. And this, I think further, is not a minimal requirement met by Locke, a fairly terrific exercise in writing psychologically revelatory dialogue to be delivered by a solitary actor giving everything he has to digging into that psychology. Except that as exercises go, this one is particularly exercisey never quite managing to make the character it depicts and his shifting perspective more important than the show-off hook that underpins the whole game. And even if it did, I don’t honestly know that Locke the one-man show in a black box theater would be even slightly less effective than Locke the one-man movie in a single tightly confined set.

Of course, there’s always the argument that Locke the movie is responsible for capturing the Tom Hardy performance without which it would surely not be so effective as it is, and for that, I am glad that the film exists as a film. Even if Hardy’s performance, however spectacularly difficult it must have been to do the heavy lifting in a film where his face and only his face is the focal point of something like 95% of the shots, is not without its limitations. Certainly, it’s not the all-time career peak some have noticed (I’d take his work in Bronson any day of the week), and if nothing else, he’d need to have some points taken away for the inexplicable accent he’s elected to sport for the 85-minute duration of the film, an effortful attempt at Welsh by way of Austria. Compounding things is that there’s no obvious reasons for the character to be Welsh in the first place: the name Ivan Locke certainly doesn’t suggest that, and when we hear his children speak on the phone, they sound nothing like him.

It’s a bizarre, off-putting misstep in a film that, relying completely on the strength of its central performance, can’t afford a single one, but if you can get over that hump (which took me fully 15 minutes), Hardy’s performance is an impressive display of carefully choosing a subtle range of expressions and weighted lines to give a perfectly-modulated performance of what amounts to a monologue for the intimacy of the movie camera. It’s quintessentially the kind of acting that works only if you fluently speak the language in which it was delivered, and can catch the interplay of vocal cadence with the movements of his face (since you are reading this English-language review of the English-language film, I take it this won’t be a problem), and like the film containing it, it always feels just a little bit like an experiment for the sake of it. But it’s a terribly impressive display of what film acting in 2013/2014 is capable of from a purely technical standpoint even so.

Ivan Locke, for the record, is driving a care late at night. For the first 10 or 15 minutes, we get to play at being detectives while he makes a number of organically cryptic phone calls to his family explaining that he has a work crisis and his work explaining that he has a family crisis. Both of which are true, as it turns out, though a bit of sleight-of-hand is involved. For he does indeed have a problem with his job as a construction manager, finding that the enormous delivery of cement he had planned for the morning has been hobbled by political and practical mistakes, and his second-in-command is by no means ready to deal with those issues. And he does indeed have a family problem, though it has nothing to do with his wife and sons, but with the baby about to be born as a result of an ill-advised affair with a middle-aged colleague. She's gone into premature labor, and things aren't looking great; Locke's current jog down the M1 is taking him to by with her out of a sense of grim duty. And as we learn during the downtimes when Locke isn't busily calling this person or that trying to keep his life from splitting off in a million directions, that sense of duty is directly related to his feelings of resentment to his deceased father, an alcoholic who abandoned his son in childhood.

Setting aside issues of taste (I think the movie arrives at the reveal that Locke is having a bastard child, by a woman he has no deep affection for and regrets sleeping with, far too early), this is all pretty crafty writing exploring a man's difficult battle with his demons, and other than the comedy sketch Welsh accent, Hardy does sterling work in evoking the shifting balance of self-loathing, pride in doing the right thing by everybody (and his astonishment that his wife might not be willing to play by his script for how they're going to rebuild), and the fatigued but iron-willed behavior of a professional who really doesn't want to deal with this shit right now, but the shit must be dealt with regardless. As an exercise in pure character building, it's a great one.

As an exercise in cinema, though, it's a little whiffy. Steven Knight writes a hell of a screenplay, giving the voice-only characters on the phone just enough distinct personality that it doesn't feel like we're trapped inside one man's head, while simultaneously making the exploration of that same man ring with authenticity and subtle touches. But his directing isn't up to the same level: he and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos come up with a pretty limited repertoire of shots from various angles inside Locke's car, and the switch from one image to the next speaks less to editor Justine Wright's desire (or the flexibility of the footage she was given, more likely) to create a pulsing rhythm or using the visuals to punctuate the emotional beats of the story, than to the filmmakers' hope that if they cut often enough, the audience won't get bored. This ain't Buried, the last big "confined space on a phone" movie, where the camera was used to shape and intensify the space. It's just a film that takes place in a car, shot with little versatility or poetry. Obviously, that's not the be-all and end-all of art: the writing and acting are the reasons Locke exists, and they are just things. But they're not enough to help the film make the jump from a worthy experiment if you're in the mood for such things, to a great piece of cinema that's absolutely worth seeing.

7/10

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THIS FELLOW KEATON SEEMS TO BE THE WHOLE SHOW

It's worth admitting right in front that Birdman is nowhere near the best version of itself. Setting aside every other issue that someone could possibly have with it, it has been kneecapped by a story problem that would have been so easy to keep away from, and in fact the four screenwriters - Nicolás Giacobo, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, the last of whom also directs - pretty much had to go out of their way to specifically introduce that problem. Basically, Birdman is a stream-of-consciousness narrative, put over in the most vividly cinematic language that such a particularly literary genre could possibly hope for, and there are many, many moments in the film that are only sensible if we allow that they don't represent any kind of objective third-person reality, but only the bent perceptions of the protagonist's very fragile mind. The film banks a lot on this intense subjectivity. And then, for absolutely no practical reason other than to spell out some story development that might have been achieved a dozen other ways, there are at least four reasonably lengthy scenes that take place completely outside of the protagonist's vision or knowledge. They're not bad scenes; they're crisply-written, smartly-acted, and handsomely-lit. But they completely violate the aesthetic continuity of the film, and it is a film which privileges that continuity above all else.

And yet, despite that absolute, deadly flaw, Birdman - to just once give its messy, beautiful, strangely-punctuated title in full, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) - is one of the absolute keepers of 2014, for even if its execution ends up betraying its concept, that concept is so terrific that there could have been far more individual mistakes than there are, with the result still turning out to be one of the most audacious and satisfying experiences of the movie year. It's a simple little story: Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), is a faded movie star whose career hasn't recovered since his decision, 20 years ago, not to play the title character in Birdman 4, feeling that after three-successive go-rounds in the superhero's beak and wings, he was ready to move on to rich pastures. That has, after all this time, brought him to the world of Legitimate Theater, where so many former movie stars before him got to grab hold of a little bit of dignity near the end. He's the writer, director, and star of an adaptation of Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love", produced by his friend and lawyer Jake (Zach Galifianakis), co-starring his girlfriend Laura (Andrea Riseborough), and taking as his assistant his fresh-from-rehab daughter Sam (Emma Stone). The situation is rife with cause for emotional trauma and self-doubt, and that's before an accident forces him to re-cast the other male role, three days before the premiere, with Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), genius stage actor, arrogant prick, and boyfriend of the other actress, Lesley (Naomi Watts), making her Broadway debut. The pressure of having a superstar performer stealing his oxygen and having to drive himself to the cusp of bankruptcy to get there forces Riggan beyond the breaking point, not that he needed to go very far. The very first image of the movie, and the very first line of dialogue, already do a fine job of dramatising Riggan's present inability to separate reality and fantasy.

So, for that matter, does the movie itself. A stream-of-consciousness narrative I called it, and that's just what it is, in the most appallingly exciting way. González Iñárritu, working with fellow Mexican expatriate and all-around cinematography superstar Emmanuel Lubezki, has fashioned Birdman to look like it takes place mostly in a single shot, seamlessly stitched together (one can notice the joins solely because of spurious camera movements that exist to hide them, not because there's ever a spot where the digital trickery is apparent; editors Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione, major names in their own right, have done some exquisite work that goes out of its way not to call attention to itself). Lubezki knowing a thing or two about shooting breathtakingly beautiful, wonderful long takes, it's not surprising that Birdman looks gorgeous and has camera movement that's so organic and three-dimensional that the film ends up being as much of a go-for-broke visual spectacle as anything with elaborate world-building CGI; it's great as well that the artifice of theater frees him up to play with sculpted and colored lighting in ways he hasn't done in years, without giving up the skills he's picked up in using only visible light sources. The result isn't his most groundbreaking work of cinematography, though in individual shots - a cherry red exit sign surrounded by blue, an elevated shot of Broadway at dusk - it ranks with his most purely beautiful.

But anyway, storytelling. Which, in Birdman's case, is indistinguishable from the goings-on of Riggan Thomson's frenzied mind, and that's where the single-take illusion works so well: for of course, the movie taking place over many days, it's not mimicking real time at all, the way long takes do. It is a strictly anti-realist gesture, in fact, suggesting the breakdown going on in the head of the panicky artist for whom there's never enough time, the aging man who has a terrified awareness of how quickly deadlines of every sort are blasting towards him. The visual structure of the film puts us squarely in Riggan's position, as time and space compress and blur together in patently impossible ways (the usual suspects have bitched a little about how the film misrepresents actual Manhattan geography, ignoring that it also inserts continuity errors into its own internally-established geography, and failing to wonder why that might be the case). It is, I honestly think, a way of exploring psychology through visuals that I have never seen done, not in this way; but I have not seen everything.

Anyway, it's all in service to a great, unflagging character study. It can be argued that we need no more movies about aging white guys and their privileged woes; but since we have Birdman anyway, it's great that it treats that subject (the perpetual core of Raymond Carver's writing, making the film's reliance on "What We Talk About..." doubly meaningful) so fucking well. Keaton's performance is absolutely dynamite, for one thing, the best of his career by far, even without so much as nodding in the direction of the meta-casting involved in showcasing him as a guy who hasn't done much of note since appearing in a major franchise at the dawn of the superhero movie epoch. There's unlovely misery and self-loathing plastered across every inch of his performance, in his expressions and his caustic line readings, and the way that he seems to age five years over the course of the movie. The whole cast is good (the men more than the women), but it's Keaton in the hot seat, Keaton who has to create a sufficiently believable well-into-midlife crisis for the rest of the film spinning around him to feel honest and meaningful.

Despite this heavy, pathetic center, the film is giddily watchable, a chain of firecrackers driven by González Iñárritu's surprising and heretofore entirely untapped facility with comedy, and Antonio Sánchez's irreplaceable drum score, adding a relentless tension that does almost as much to suggest the disorienting momentum of these days for Riggan as the sinewy cinematography does. It's a thriller, a sitcom, a merciless drama, and a highly expressionistic depiction of paranoia and panic that is, when it's working, one of the most jaw-dropping, exciting, totally effective films I've seen in ages. Now, again, there are parts where it's not merely failing to work, it's bragging about how much it's not working. But far more often than that, it's one fire: surprising even as it feels inevitable, heartbreaking and sympathetic even as it relishes in showing off its protagonist's most awful characteristics. It's not nearly perfect, but it's as essential as cinema gets.

9/10

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THERE IS NO DOG BUT DOG

Bias time: I was barely prepared to like John Wick at all, and the possibility of loving it seemed so laughably remote that it hadn't even occurred to me. And yet here we are, and I kind of loved John Wick. It's a silly world.

On paper, the film is generic as generic gets: John Wick's (Keanu Reeves) wife dies of an unnamed disease (Bridget Moynahan plays the role, such as it is), and her final act on this world is to arrange for a beagle puppy to be sent to him. This is a beautiful, lifesaving act, and it lasts for two days, until a vile, bro-ish Russian named Iosef (Alfie Allen) wants to buy Wick's beautiful muscle car, and Wick isn't selling. So Iosef and his thug buddies break into Wick's home, steal his car, beat him bloody, and in a moment of pique, kill the dog. And it is this, which he later describes as the theft of the last hope he had in the whole world, that pushes him into a blood rage. John Wick, you see, is a retired assassin. And Iosef is the son of Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist), the Russian mobster who used to be Wick's employer. And that is all the ingredients we need for a film long revenge quest & war against the Russian mafia.

The beauty of John Wick - and I don't use "beauty" in some rhetorical sense, but in the sense that John Wick is, in fact, an absolutely breathtakingly beautiful movies in places - is that it is, in every possible way, essentialist. What do we need to know? That John's wife died and he he loved her, and his beagle died, and he loved her too. We need nothing else, and the filmmakers (writer Derek Kolstad; directing team Chad Stahelski & David Leitch, the latter uncredited for contractual reasons) do not provide it. The Wick marriage is depicted in a montage whose clarity and efficiency rival the one in Up for communicating the whole span of a relationship in wordless, tragic imagery, and the visual shorthand and elliptical editing throughout the opening 10 minutes usher us all the way into the film's second act so quickly and with such limited energy spent on anything that isn't directly related to the most stripped-down version of the scenario that the film resembles an impressionistic ballet more than an action movie.

An action movie it is, though; the best American action movie in a few years, I almost want to say, except that there are certain expectations about both "action movie" and "American" that the multinational production doesn't entirely satisfy. That it is a well-choreographed series of fight scenes with crackling editing (by Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir) is not all that surprising: Stahelski and Leitch are both veteran stuntmen, and they presumably know a thing or two about the ways that human bodies can be battered and thrown around onscreen, and the ways to move a camera to capture that from its most interesting angles. But John Wick isn't really an action film that works as a combination of "wow, that was amazing!" moments in the fashion of The Raid 2, the only 2014 action movie that belongs in the same conversation.* Which is especially odd, given that it consists of very little outside of "that was amazing!" moments.

What's marvelous about John Wick is that it filters it amazingness through chilly storytelling and aesthetics, working something as a psychological portrait of its title character that is rather knocked off track in the first moments by discovering that, well, he actually doesn't have any psychological depth, and instead of regrouping, digs in deeper to become the cinematic expression of a man who has replaced every element of his personality with a brutal desire for revenge. Hence the film's breathtaking efficiency, and its refusal to indulge in any sort of detail or world-building that isn't directly related to the story at hand. There are many, many places where John Wick could go off on that kind of tangent: the world in which it takes place has a robust subculture of assassins, using their own currency and operating according to a code of behavior that suggests great depths and complexities, and the film is populated by a host of terrific character actors who, one would expect, are all going to get their big showcase moment: Willem Dafoe, Lance Reddick, John Leguizamo, Ian McShane. And they're not. The film isn't just withholding, it's being conspicuous about it, presenting a full, living, colorful world and yoking itself to a man barreling through it with single-minded fury.

It doesn't sound like it, but I take this to be an absolutely great thing. The coldness and cleanness of John Wick is its most unique and easily its best feature, even above the drop-dead gorgeous way all of this is shot by cinematographer Jonathan Sela, with frequent recourse to florid, artificial coloring, and a film-long fascination with the way that physical texture, shadow, and color interact with each other and with moving objects (people, mostly, but not exclusively). Between the film's tone, its narrative sparsity, and its visual style, it feels something like Only God Forgives as directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, or Michael Mann's Point Blank. Lord knows where any of this comes from: Sela has never shot anything like this at all, and it's become increasingly rare for first-time American directors to go this far overboard on style and elusive narrative structure.

But I'm glad it did: John Wick is pretty terrific, with an action scene in a bathhouse that I would stack against anything else from English-language cinema in the last decade for its visual elegance, the skillful and appropriate employment of brutal violence, and the energy and complexity of the fighting itself. The other setpieces aren't quite so good (and the first, the second time that Wick's home is invaded, left me feeling rather dubious about the whole film, I will confess, though this turned around quickly), but it is, after all, not a film about setpieces: it is a film about hopelessness expressing itself through violence (and being redeemed, in a final scene that really ought to have pissed me off, but which just barely manages to work by employing just about the only specific chain of details I can imagine working in that moment), a film about implacable anger beautifully channeled through Reeves in the role that best employs his non-presence since The Matrix 15 years ago. It has poetry in its soul: formally elegant and cold poetry, but poetry nonetheless. And it left me feeling more exhilarated and pleased than a bare-bones revenge movie has in a whole hell of a lot of years.

8/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1973: In which fresh cinematic modernism is used for rampant nostalgia, and all the New Hollywood kids are pals with each other

The posters and trailers for the 1973 release American Graffiti, one of the first (if not the first) American movie marketed almost solely on the basis of pandering to its target audience's nostalgia, challenged that audience to remember, "Where were you in '62?" For the film's director and co-writer, George Lucas, the answer to that question is that in 1962 he was involved in a terrible racing accident at the age of 18, which short-circuited his professional interest in cars and sent him on an alternate path that eventually went through film school. This was important for the obvious reason that Lucas's subsequent career in cinema redefined the commercial realities of the film industry more than any other individual filmmaker before or since, and while I suppose that somebody in the late '70s would have made a movie with the impact of Star Wars, that person probably wouldn't also have seen the wisdom in retaining the merchandising rights to that theoretically blockbuster. So calling Lucas irreplaceable in film history is perhaps rather more literally true than for most other people who might get tagged with that irresistible bit of hyperbole.

This is not, though, the moment to talk about the much-rehashed story of how Star Wars and its waterlogged buddy Jaws ruined everything glorious and artistic about the '70s (which, like most much-rehashed stories is a skyscraper-sized pile of bullshit, but it's not the moment to talk about that, either). We are here now for American Graffiti, which was the other important outgrowth of Lucas's '62 accident. It is a film about the car culture of California teenagers, and it does one of those things that all movies about young people want to do and only a couple have ever really done very successfully, which is to be about one extremely specific time and place that only existed for a fraction of a moment, and through the sheer force of that specificity, manages to be about something much more universal (using that definition of "universal" common in cultural criticism, viz. middle-class, white, and male. But like any other subject, there's nothing wrong with making movies about middle-class white males if you make them very well, and Lucas did that here). It is one of cinema's greatest high school coming-of-age movies, in which the idiot fun of driving around listening to music and doing a piss-poor job of trying to hook up with members of the opposite sex at some point has to give way to becoming a Grown Up. It is a conservative film in this respect, particularly compared to its most obvious descendant, Richard Linklater's shaggy and rebellious Dazed and Confused from 20 years later; in fact, with its unambiguously conformist, "real men go to college or start families" message, it might be the single most conservative great American film of the 1970s.* This has earned it some backlash here and there, and it's really quite an odd standout in the context of the essentially counter-cultural New Hollywood Cinema, but there's so much obvious, unmistakable honesty to it that I frankly don't think its ideology matters. And that honesty comes from Lucas's own life experience, I think, where the culture that his film praises, eulogises, and abandons, in that order, was very nearly responsible for killing him. If any experience is going to make it okay for an artist to say, "you know what, kids, you actually should turn into your parents", that's the one that will do it.

It's a very nice, non-confrontational film, both of which tend to sound like insults rather than terms of praise; but Lucas, compared to virtually every one of his significant peers, was a nice, non-confrontational man. And American Graffiti is a film practically born out of niceness: it was conceived when Lucas, off the cool performance of the acerbic sci-fi parable THX-1138, decided to make his sophomore feature a movie that would give normal people pleasure to watch. It exists because of a kindness: Francis Ford Coppola, the icon of all the film school brats of the late '60s and early '70s but a particular mentor to Lucas, used his enormous post-Godfather clout to do a favor to the young director. Lucas, and his married co-writers Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, treat the characters - whom they obviously like very much - nicely as well, gently nodding at their mistakes without a molecule of judgment. The only thing that's not nice is the final moment, a cold bucket of water that reminds the audience that the film's lovingly depicted Kennedy-era sweetness (sometimes called "innocence", but the film is too salty and sexed-up for that word to make any sense at all) led directly into Vietnam. And I think the casual coldness of that last gesture - unquestionably the most aggressively New Hollywood detail in the whole thing - does a lot to counterbalance the film's apparently rosy, uncomplicated view of a more optimistic time (Katz and Huyck, incidentally, found it tasteless that Lucas only told us the fates of his male characters, not his women; but it's really hard to imagine how the pacing could possibly be maintained if they were added, and it would be disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that this movie ever cares about its girls as much as its boys).

American Graffiti depicts the end of summer: it's the last night in town for teenagers Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) and Steve Bolander (Ron Howard), who are set to go out east for college in the morning. Meeting up with their friends Terry "The Toad" Fields (Charles Martin Smith) and the older guy John Milner (Paul Le Mat), they start dinner at dusk at a drive-in restaurant before parting ways to spend the evening soaking up the sounds and atmosphere of an unnamed Modesto, California, engaging in the local custom of "cruising", tooling around aimlessly through the commercial district in cars bantering with other similar auto enthusiasts. John ends up saddled with the much younger Carol (Mackenzie Phillips), who humiliates him and cramps his style, but also ends up proving a pleasant conversation partner; Terry lies his way into impressing a gearhead blonde, Debbie Dunham (Candy Clark), and continues having to prove his masculinity despite being a fearful nerd; Steve keeps picking fights with his girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams), behaving rather bullying and chauvinistic and superior; and Curt experiences a full-on Long Night of the Soul, trying to decide whether or not he's ready to move on to whatever the hell happens when you go to college. Throughout, the trappings of 1962 are depicted with intense sociological focus mixed with real enthusiasm for the place, the songs, the attitudes, and oh, so much the cars (which Lucas's camera caresses with the same rapt awe that he'd later use for Star Destroyers); and the characters themselves, especially the morbidly backward-looking John and the deeply unsettled Curt, engage in mini-nostalgia of their own, trying to remember back to when things were simpler and more beautiful. The film's way, perhaps of admitting that it knows it's presenting an admiringly whitewashed depiction of the past, for reasons of emotional truth rather than historical mercilessness.

That all being said, I will confess that my love for American Graffiti - which I think to be Lucas's clear pinnacle as a director and maybe the best film about teenagers ever made - isn't entirely about it's mixture of romantic nostalgia and pensive awareness of what that nostalgia might be clouding up about the presence, nor its tragicomic insight about what happens when adolescent boys start to realise that adolescence is speeding towards its close. It's actually about its fucking gorgeous impressionistic soundtrack: this is one of the most audio-driven films ever made. The sounds and music don't merely create a very precise, living, lived-in, organic world for the movie's story to take place in (say whatever we will about any of Lucas's films as director: every one of his movies takes place in a magnificently well-build world), but also providing the emotional spine for a film whose script purposefully keeps away from clean, flowing structure as it shifts from plot to plot and frequently abandons all of them for a shot or two of life in Modesto just spilling out. At which point I might well mention the names of Walter Murch, the sound editor, and Verna Fields and Marcia Lucas, the film editors, all of them critical collaborators in shaping the movie's texture and rhythms.

Famously, American Graffiti includes no fewer than 41 pop singles on its soundtrack, virtually all of them appearing diegetically: performed by a band at a school dance, blasted out of car radios. The way the are placed into the film, warping and fading up and down as cars move around the camera's physical location, is perfect, basically: it suggests with strident realism the exact way that the music would sound if we were actually in the place the movie positions us: echoing off buildings, sliding towards us from a distance, bellowing right in our ear. Nothing in the movie creates its tangible sense of place more effectively or immediately: within seconds of first stepping outside to hear the music coruscating around us, American Graffiti has defined its reality and never for the rest of the movie lets it go. It then falls to the sound effects to create atmosphere and mood, rather than create a sense of realism: an exact reversal of how these things usually work that gives the film a startling originality even four decades later.

The music also does function in the more conventional sense of commenting on the action, sometimes directly and ironically. In the latter category, we have things like the wonderful moment of Laurie and Steve, temporarily reconciled, dancing slowly while around them kids are hectically bobbing to a live cover of "Louie Louie". In the former, we have songs like "The Great Pretender" coming on just in time to drive home Curt's feelings of dislocation. And some songs are just songs, just the thing that happens to be on the radio. As part of its general sense of things getting more ragged and vague as the night moves on - it is a film where the draggy fatigue of being out all night having fun hits hard and ends up giving its half-mythic dawn climax a downright hallucinatory feel - the moments where the songs openly describe the action start to come more and more, neatly suggesting the way that a trivial pop song can seem really perfect and emotionally correct for the moment you're hearing it, the more suggestible and defenseless you become. For that is very much the arc the film describes: growing more frazzled and confused as the long night of the soul keeps marching on.

It's never subtle, not really, but it's so effectively executed that "subtle" wouldn't be a merit and "unsubtle" plainly isn't a flaw (there's nothing remotely subtle about being a teenager, after all). The film is an unabashed crowd-pleaser from the mind of a man who would spend literally the entire rest of his career chasing audience dollars rather than feeding his artistic muse, and it rewards the idealised viewer's love of being a teenager in 1962 with outright shameless pandering. But married to the sloppy authenticity of the high-grain cinematography, the docu-realist setting, and the flickering awareness that, for all the fun they're having, these kids are still going to have to change and become different people, either because they're ready to, or because the shattering cultural upheavals of the next decade will do it for them. Friendly and ebullient and romantic, but never, as a result of all those things, blindly stupid, American Graffiti is pretty much terrific all around: one of the most formally adventurous movies of a bold age, one of the most accurate depictions of teen psychology put to film, and a remarkable snapshot of a culture that existed, as such things go, for hardly the blink of an eye. It's by no means one of the most "important" New Hollywood films, but it's unstintingly great cinema, or I don't know what.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1973
-The Exorcist explodes at the box office, setting of a new trend in religious-themed horror
-The failure of Columbia's Lost Horizon finally kills off the mega-musical as a genre
-Terrence Malick makes his debut film, the poetic nature tribute/crime thriller Badlands

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1973
-A collection of Czech refugees working in France create the animated political parable Fantastic Planet
-European-style realism and native African cinematic traditions are combined in the Senegalese Touki Bouki, by Djibril Diop Mambéty
-The anti-prolific Spanish director Victor Erice makes his debut with the fantasy-tinged drama of childhood Spirit of the Beehive

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