Film

At the end of the credits of Napoleon , there is a brief dedication for Lulu, Ridley Scott’s dog. My guess is that the poor mutt died of shame after watching this pile of dross. It is difficult to think of anything positive to say about Napoleon . That is surprising, given Scott’s previous offerings include Blade Runner , Thelma and Louise , and Gladiator . The French Revolution is portrayed as only an orgy of ritualised sadistic murder. Napoleon’s victory at the battle of Toulon is said to have fixed his military reputation, although his much greater success in the Italian campaign (ignored...

Days of Heaven (1978) was Terence Malick’s second film as director. Bill (Richard Gere) is a steelworker in Chicago who kills his boss, unintentionally, in a fight. Along with his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and his young sister Linda, he flees to Texas, where they become seasonal workers on a large farm. To avoid complications Bill and Abby pose as siblings. Bill overhears a conversation where, it is said, the farmer has only a year to live. He persuades Abby to pretend to fall in love with the farmer and marry him. She will then inherit the farm when he dies. A neat scheme, but the farmer...

Probably best known for the TV drama Leeds United! (1974) which features a women’s textile workers’ strike (and was discussed in Solidarity 584 ), Roy Battersby had a highly productive and varied career as a writer and director of mainly TV dramas. He started off as part of that generation of left-inclined writers and directors (such as Ken Loach, Alan Bleasdale, Jim Allen, Dennis Potter, David Hare) who worked at the BBC on the Play for Today and then branched out into writing Cracker , Between the Lines , Morse , and many other dramas. As one of his last works he directed the film Red...

Colman Domingo has just been nominated to win an Oscar for best actor. I hope he wins — and not just because he did an excellent job playing American civil rights leader Bayard Rustin in the recent film made about his life. I hope he wins and uses his platform, when the eyes of America and much of the world will be on him, to speak about who Bayard Rustin was, and his legacy. Anyone making a film about the life of Rustin, or any other prominent individual, is forced to make choices. Not everything can go into a movie lasting at most a couple of hours. Choices are made. In the case of Rustin...

One of the great films of all time, Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai put Japanese cinema “on the map”, though equally talented directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi were unjustly sidelined. The basic story is well-known: a destitute group of villagers, plagued by bandits who steal their harvest, turn in desperation to a group of Samurai warriors, one of whom, Kikuchiyo (popular Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune) lies about being part of this elite body. They are paid (in rice!) to protect the village, but the arrangement is not without its tensions. Contrary to the enduring popular image, the...

I haven’t yet seen the new Napoleon, but this much earlier (1927) film by French director Abel Gance is well worth taking the trouble to visit.

Given the complexities of J Robert Oppenheimer’s life even the three hours of Christopher Nolan’s epic film probably aren’t enough.

Emmanuel Macron said Depardieu was the target of a "manhunt" and was "a great actor" who "makes France proud"

There are many films about the anti-fascist resistance to the Nazis in occupied Europe. This, I think, is one of the best. Released in Denmark in 2008, Flame and Citron tells the story of two resistance fighters, based on real life figures, in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Flame (real name Bent Fuarschou Hviid) and Citron (Jorgem Hogen Schmith) are part of the famous Holger Danske resistance group. They operate as a kind of “hit squad”, assassinating collaborators. Initially they are reluctant to kill any Nazis, fearful that this may mean retaliatory killings meted out to the Danish population. They...

Ikram Nurmehmet, aged 32, studied cinema at the University of Marmara in Turkey and then returned to China. In 2019 he directed Elephant in the Car (which I haven’t seen) — a story of two young Uyghur men, a Chinese woman, Xiao, and a taxi driver. The taxi driver picks up all three and he soon hits it off with the two Uyghurs who enjoy some music together on the taxi’s stereo system. Xiao becomes uneasy in the presence of the two Uyghurs and eventually tells the driver to stop the taxi and she gets out. It appears that this film — and maybe others that he has directed – have angered the...