rpowell-4

I'm glad this film has been rescued from oblivion. It has many virtues. An excellent cast: Donald Murray, Valerie Hobson and Howard Keel are ideal in the three main roles, and they receive strong support from most of the minor characters. A strong, well-paced plot with frequent credible twists. Psychological depth and moral ambiguity. A satisfactory balance between thought and action. A certain oppressiveness in the interiors with some noir camera-work and sound track which add to the suspense. Idyllic landscapes. Plenty of period detail. It's a pity that the Welsh accents really don't come off, but one can't have everything, and this is one of the few films I've seen which I wished was much longer.

For those who don't know it, Viz is a comic for grown-ups (well, almost) based on traditional British comics for children. It is the repository of utterly stereotyped characters, absurd plots, unlimited innuendo, and of course fart jokes. It's a great way of staying in touch with your inner child.

This film marshals an extraordinary range of talent (the Wallace and Gromit and Shrek teams; the classic British sitcom-writing duo of Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais) to bring a Viz-type plot to the screen. The main characters are mice, frogs and toads, while slugs provide an appealing soundtrack. The plot contrasts the opulent but rather sterile life above ground in London's Royal Borough of Kensington with that in its sewers below. Sewer life is made to seem more attractive – less anal, shall we say.

The animation is of high quality, though it lacks some of the feel of the real plasticine used in earlier Aardman films. The voiceovers are exceptionally good. There are some wonderful details. And it makes you think about the obsession some people have with royalty. As the UK has stringent libel laws it's probably best not to try and speculate here if The Toad might have had a human model.

I sniggered and chortled most of the way through, and the plot didn't flag. Eight out of ten.

I saw this when it first came out, twenty years ago, during the fad for "Yuppies in peril" films. It hasn't stood the test of time very well.

The plot is strong, and not entirely incredible. There are good performances from Melanie Griffith and Ray Liotta. But I cannot see what the film is trying to do for its audience. Is it trying to make us laugh? To make satirical points? To make us feel that tragedy and danger are just a chance meeting away? Practically every character is dishonest to some degree. There is no-one to like here, and no-one to really fear, either – Liotta has his moments of menace, but really he's just a small-time crook.

There is physical as well as moral ugliness. Perhaps this is deliberate, but cinematically it is dull: Demme finds no delight in his surroundings, apart from some attractive shots of the New York skyline. (The views of the Twin Towers now lend a prelapsarian feel very much at odds with the film's content.) When you consider the magic that Demme wrought in Stop Making Sense two years earlier, this is an unaccountable failing.

The other failing is an excess of that American whimsy – of imposed rather than inherent eccentricity – that makes an entire genre in itself (True Stories. The Royal Tenenbaums). Too many of the characters seem to be saying: "Look at me, ain't I kooky?" Well they ain't – they've just been landed with a flawed screenplay.

The soundtrack – assembled by John Cale and Laurie Anderson – is probably the best thing about the film, but even that is competent rather than enthralling.

Four out of ten.

The impure city has probably been contrasted with the purer countryside since the walls of Jericho went up. And the contrast between the safe certainties of a settled relationship and the illicit temptations of a reckless but exciting fling must surely be older still. FW Murnau's Sunrise makes no secret of the universality of its themes. Indeed, for the first twenty minutes it is not even clear which century or which continent it is set in – I'm not going to give even that much away about a film which everyone with any real interest in cinema ought to see.

It's a beautiful film, which uses the full range of techniques open to a movie-maker of the nineteen-twenties to project a moving and convincing narrative. Yes, it is linear, in the same way as a tram ride is linear – it takes you from your starting-point to your destination but with some surprising turns on its way. The performances are superb, powerful with never a trace of hamming, dramatic but not melodramatic, with touches of pathos and humour which never strike a false note. It is a marvel that so much could be achieved with such limited technical resources.

My only very minor quibble is that the late-romantic score, which I think was not part of the original picture, eventually starts to grate. But that is not the fault of the film, which I give a full ten out of ten.

This film does what it sets out to do – make an audience laugh. They laughed here in Helsinki on the opening night – not uncontrollably, not immoderately, but they did laugh consistently and there was indeed a great deal to laugh at.

If there are targets for satire here, they are first and foremost the Americans that Borat meets, and secondarily western stereotypes of emerging nations such as Kazakhstan. It's perhaps a little hard on the Kazakhs that their homeland was chosen to give birth to Borat, and their government is reportedly up in arms about it. They might do well to reflect on the old adage that all publicity is good publicity, and on the fact that the treatment of them is affectionate in its way.

What did surprise a little is how well many of the targets emerged. Some elderly bigots were neatly and rightly skewered on their own prejudices. Various "experts" on this and that were shown up to be vacuous, as you would expect. I found one scene, set at a family guest house, unnecessarily cruel, and I'm knocking a point off for that. And some groups and individuals came out of it really well – such as the Pentecostalists and the driving instructor – and I'm putting a point back on for that, for taking the smooth with the rough.

A good evening's entertainment, and Sacha Baron Cohen is surely one of the world's greatest comic actors and I hope he will continue to find outlets for his immense talents. But overall there were too few surprises and too many jokes with only one dimension for it to become a classic – though the dinner party and the nude wrestling will linger in my mind for a long time to come.

Seven out of ten.

The title means, roughly, "Whose side are you on?"

Finland in the 1970s was home to one of the stranger political phenomena of that era. A significant proportion of the country's youth became infatuated with the Soviet Union, in an uncritical, often absurd and sometimes sinister way. This infatuation took a number of forms; this watchable documentary concentrates on its musical manifestations, though without going deeply into the motivations of the people involved. One has to admit that the musical vanguard of this revolution which never happened could sing: but how smug they looked, and what songs they sang! Was there anywhere else in the world where people freely sang songs denouncing a free trade agreement with the Common Market (as the predecessor to the EU was known)?

Finland has hit the headlines earlier this year with its stunning Eurovision victory; back in 1972 or thereabouts it might well have ended up represented by Agitprop. In their way they were perhaps as scary as Lordi, and not half as funny. Six out of ten.

There is an old Soviet joke where the punch line is that all is quiet on the Finnish-Chinese border. That is where, psychologically at least, this film is set. It is a pioneering Finnish- Estonian-Chinese co-production, which takes the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, as its starting point.

It was clearly made on a limited budget, without much provision for travel. The result is that, in effect, we have two films with parallel plots and casts, one set in ancient China and one in a sort of modern Finland, where most of the action is divided between a junk shop, a museum and a subterranean forge. Only Tommi Eronen, who plays both protagonists, Kai and Sintai, appears in both parts. The dialogue is split roughly 50:50 between Finnish and Chinese. In style it is much more Asian than Finno-Ugric - swords-and-sorcery with mysterious sacred items, along with the aerial acrobatics and severed heads that have long characterised Asian martial arts flicks.

I found it intriguing rather than gripping or exciting, and had to work quite hard at times to follow it. Some of the symbolism was mystifying. Why was a yellow plastic duck floating in a barrel in the forge? What is the significance of the fly on the face of a dumb, or at least silent middle-aged woman? Still, trying to work out what is happening brings pleasures of its own. And much about the film deserves praise – the acting is generally good, the special effects work, and the costumes and settings looked good, though without a real wow factor. The musical score fitted the film until the very end, when an English-language rock theme tune rapidly dispelled illusions which had taken nearly two hours to build.

Six out of ten.

Over a decade has passed since I saw this little stinker in Tokyo and I still resent the time I wasted on it, but not as much as I resent the praise with which it has been garlanded.

It's dreadful. The Piano is rescued from a shipwreck, in perfect tune, and Holly Hunter plays Michael Nyman numbers on it. She can't be bothered to talk for some reason. She inspects Harvey Keitel's bottom. Some Maori girls appear in Victorian costume to show how oppressive the colonisers were. That's most of what I remember and it's too much. It's presumably meant to mean something but it fails. The landscapes were nice, though.

All in all, a model of all that is worst about art cinema and an argument for going to see blockbusters or reading a book or tapping out some hymns on a tinny piano, which is what the Holly Hunter character would have played had this film attempted to connect with reality on any level.

Nyrki Tapiovaara is the great lost genius of Finnish cinema - he died in action in 1940, aged 29, having completed only five films, of which two can be accounted mature works.

There was some talk about ten years ago that Varastettu Kuolema - Stolen Death - would be part of a British National Film Theatre Project to make available a central corpus of important cinema. I don't know what became of that; the film does not appear to be available in the UK, and when I saw it in Finland recently it was in a print of mediocre quality, with poor sound quality and no subtitles. So I saw a silent film with snatches of dialogue.

But then that is a big test of a film - does it work visually? Varastettu Kuolema undoubtedly does. You can see who is on what side at a time when being on the right side is a matter of more than loyalty, it is a matter of life and death. The characters are rounded and realistic. The use of outside locations is bold - and many of those locations are the same now as they were in 1918, when the film was set, in 1938, when it was made, and today. (It's strange and moving to see the city where you live in this way.) The set pieces all work.

The overall effect is of Nordic noir, not to be repeated until nearly fifty years later, when the Kaurismaki brothers started to take up where Tapiovaara had been tragically forced to leave off.

This is a real period piece (circa 1960) which hasn't aged as well as some of its contemporaries (eg its companion pieces Too Many Crooks and The Naked Truth).

It has a splendid cast (the "gang" are all female apart from Terry-Thomas at his peak) and they act their socks off. But their immense and varied talent - both Hattie Jacques and Billie Whitelaw have major roles - have to contend with a script which must have seemed a little too contrived even at the time, and which now looks as if it came from another planet. It's of course practically a given these days that Ealing and its counterparts were mildly subversive of the established order. But for a group of down-at-heel members of the upper-middle class to fund orphanages by stealing fur coats? Is there a satirical subtext here? Did the jokes seem funny at the time?

As I say, the performances are to be admired, as is the hidden or even subconscious feminist agenda, but I found it mildly bewildering - and this is the world I was born into. Perhaps we need a radical remake.

Some friends took me to see this film in Helsinki. I really had no idea what to expect. The evening started, as evenings at the cinema do, with a series of trailers. There came what seemed to be a trailer for a French film featuring an ageing chanteuse (shades of a Gallic Madonna perhaps) performing in front of a young, hysterical audience. I thought that there was a film I would not go and see…

… and then it turned out it wasn't a trailer, but the start of the evening's main entertainment. The first five minutes set a scene, and a plot line appeared to be established. Not a particularly enthralling plot, perhaps, but something which might carry us along.

How wrong we were. The plot got stuck in a Paris hotel suite, and the characterisation wasn't even skin deep. The chanteuse – Lauren, or Sylvia – was a diva with problems. But not interesting problems, or dramatic problems; just time-consuming ones. She had some sort of artistic block. She sent a star-struck fan who had implausibly joined her entourage, Lucie, not to buy drugs, but to buy tampons. She was mobbed by fans, a strange and unconvincing mixture, who mostly looked like thirty-something resting actors told to wear something red and plastic. She had family problems of some sort. It was immensely boring. For all I know it perked up in its last forty minutes. But by then we were already in a nearby restaurant wondering why this film should have been made, let alone marketed, or rated by the critics.

There was one good line, when the diva's agent or boyfriend or whatever said that "she likes to appear wild, but underneath she's as dead as her stuffed deer" - a major feature of the hotel suite, which did indeed give a livelier performance than most of the cast. Let that be the epitaph for this exceptionally disappointing movie.

This film is in many ways puerile. And it is over the top. And I did snigger and indeed laugh for the full 75 minutes. It's a great deal of fun and, despite the physical injuries the Dudesons regularly sustain, rather life-enhancing – they simply enjoy everything they do so much. It is an intensely physical film, and – for different reasons, unsuitable for male teenagers, the squeamish, or Britney Spears fans. (Presumably some people fall in all three categories.)

Although the dialogue is in English throughout and the film clearly hopes to find an American audience it is many ways quite a Finnish experience. The emphasis on landscapes and the changing seasons is part of that. So is the un-self-consciousness about bodily functions, taken perhaps to an extreme that an Anglo-Celtic audience may find surprising. I doubt that there are many cultures where people who perform stunts might be trainee teachers – but perhaps that's one of the lesser-known strengths of the Finnish education system?

Seven out of ten.

In this film Woody Allen does for present day London roughly what Dick van Dyke did for cockney chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins - that is, strike an almost unending series of false notes. Jonathan Rhys Myers plays Chris Wilton, a tennis pro whose every gesture suggests privilege; we are asked to believe he comes from a poor Irish background. The Hewitts, the family with whom he becomes involved, do not work as individuals, and do not work as a family. So many little things aren't right. Mrs H dresses like a woman a couple of social classes below her, for example. The portrayal of business life is also a travesty. Mr H has the general demeanour of an antiques dealer, but the plot has him run a string of companies (called Hewitt Inc, though of course British firms are plcs) where he has no problems installing his son-in-law and giving him the sort of car and chauffeur that would not normally go to anyone below board level in a FTSE-100 firm - if then. Daughter Chloe simply sets up an art gallery in one of the smartest parts of London - Emily Mortimer who plays her and comes from this sort of milieu really should have known better.

As for the plot, others have commented on its shortcomings. Still, however hard to believe, it did carry me through to the end. And some of the cast and settings were nice to look at, and the sound track wasn't unpleasant - though I couldn't really work out the justification for it. I can imagine at least two levels of awfulness worse than this, so I'll give it three out of ten. (Why, incidentally, is there no zero ranking?)

This film's a thriller, a detective story, a ghost story; it has romantic and comic sub-plots, a striking array of sets, some of the first convincing special effects ever used, echoes of other films; and it is not hard to find in it political relevance to today. It's a lot to cram into two hours, and one has to work to follow every twist of the plot, but it is both a rewarding and entertaining experience.

The film draws on an exceptionally wide variety of cinematic styles. There are expressionist moments, and these are particularly striking, but they account for only two or three minutes out of a running time of 120. There are moments when one could almost be in a screwball comedy. And there are moments which come close to social realism – it would be interesting to know whether the patients at the mental hospital played themselves. The dominant mode, though, is an anticipation of film noir.

I would, though, counsel against investing too much historical hindsight in this film – yes, Fritz Lang did go into exile from the Nazis – but it is more the shadow of Weimar than the shadow of Hitler that hovers in the background here.

Not perfect; not an absolute masterpiece: but an occasionally stunning and always stimulating film, which deserves 9 out of 10.