Pixie (2020)

She won’t just break you she’ll take a Kalashnikov to your heart. Sligo, Ireland. Wannabe photographer Pixie O’Brien (Olivia Cooke) uses her ex-boyfriends Fergus (Fra Fee) and Colin (Rory Fleck Byrne ) to stage an elaborate drug heist on gangster priests which winds up with the men of the cloth murdered, and Colin kills Fergus with a bullet to the head. Two smitten local boys Frank (Ben Hardy) and Harland (Daryl McCormack) join her on the run from the hit man Seamus (Ned Dennehy) her gangster stepfather (Colm Meaney) has set on them when they try to sell 15kg of MDMA back to the priest Father Hector McGrath (Alec Baldwin) who runs the drug scene on the west coast. It turns out Pixie has a very personal motivation beyond money – revenge for the death of her mother who was helped along by her psycho step brother Mickey (Turlough Convery) … These guns won’t shoot themselves. Father and son team Barnaby and Preston Thompson direct and write respectively and this road trip down Ireland’s west coast (rechristened the Wild Atlantic Way to attract tourists) is bloody and violent and very funny, played by a well cast ensemble who revel in the opportunity to get up to Tarntino-esque antics in a picturesque setting shot rather niftily by John de Borman. There are some zingers but they’re often let down by the sound which prioritises a crazily effective set of songs curated by David Holmes and punch lines get lost in the mix (which does not include any songs by Pixies …). Cooke is fantastic in what is likely her best role to date as the amoral (not manic) pixie dream girl but there is also effective characterisation by Meaney and Baldwin as well as her companions Hardy and McCormack whom she seduces into a homoerotic scene that definitely was not on their cards. It’s got references from all over the shop, it’s rackety and fun with a very spirited tone. Dylan Moran appears as a very nasty piece of work indeed. You’ll cheer when you see what Pixie does to him. Naturally there’s a shootout that features nuns with guns. A great bit of craic altogether. I’m sorry we didn’t fucking cover body disposal in our economics course

Me and You (2012)

Aka Io & Te. You have nine lives like a cat. Introverted Italian teenager Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) tells his parents he’s going on a skiing holiday but instead hides out for a week in the unused basement of their home, a conflict-free zone, spending part of the time with his 25-year old arty half-sister Olivia (Tea Falco) whose fragility and jitteriness are revealed to be the consequence of a drug addiction.  She starts to help him see the world differently … Me and you, if we didn’t have our own point of view, we’d be the same, right? Without a point of view, we’d stop fighting each other, and accept reality for what it is, without judging it. Undoubtedly Bertolucci’s ill-health contributed to his return to Italian-language cinema with this chamber piece.  It was his last film and bears his immense sympathy for the teenage condition, out of step with family and the wider world.  The relationship between brother and sister is nicely teased out, working out the best way to negotiate a way back into society. His relationships and exchanges with his mother (Sonia Bergamasco) and grandmother (Veronica Lazar) add mordant humour to the situation. It’s a small scale – even claustrophobic – drama of formal challenges, intimately reminding us of the great director’s concerns over the decades but pivoting to the psychological rather than the sexual. The screenplay is by Bertolucci with Niccolò Ammaniti, Francesca Marciano and Umberto Contarello, from the YA novel by Ammaniti. Nobody can hurt you when you’re high

Frieda (1947)

You can’t treat a human being as less then human without becoming less than human yourself. RAF pilot Robert Dawson (David Farrar) returns home to Middle England from World War II with his new bride, Frieda Mansfeld (Mai Zetterling), the German nurse who helped him escape from a prisoner-of-war camp and whom he has married in Germany during an air raid. Because she is Catholic and they married in a Protestant church they are to marry in his village. In the meantime, Frieda has to deal with the  bigotry of people, including Robert’s family, and his aunt Nell (Flora Robson) whose political career is threatened and who is forced to denounce her future sister-in-law on the hustings. His late brother Alan’s wife Judy (Glynis Johns) is conflicted over her feelings for Robert.  Robert gives up his teaching job when boys drop out of school because of their families’ objections to his associating with the enemy. Six months later and just when the small town’s prejudice against her begins to subside and she agrees to marry Robert in a local Catholic church, Frieda’s brother Richard (Albert Lieven), a closet Nazi sympathiser, arrives for a visit, causing even Robert’s faith in his wife to be tested and leading to a standoff in a local pub when a victim from the camps recognises his tormentor and declares he wouldn’t forget the man who scarred his face in a thousand years.  Robert takes Richard’s word over Frieda’s …  The Germans look so ordinary we forget they’re not like the rest of us. Vividly written, performed and directed (by Basil Dearden), this is an enervating treatise from the house of Ealing on post-war Britain and attitudes to Germans, Germany and Nazism. With the piquant presence of Farrar, whose hyper-masculinity is well used (as it was by Powell and Pressburger) even if the film doesn’t fulfill the role’s promise, this is balanced by the sorrowful acting of a luminous Zetterling and the pivotal role played by Robson, who is not delighted to be proven correct in her suspicions, just gravely pleased that the British are so accepting of foreigners but aware of the price they must pay as a result. She is the force field about whom this revolves. The eloquent screenplay is written by Angus MacPhail and Ronald Millar. Scored by John Greenwood.  Then it does not matter what I am myself. I am German. That is all that counts 

The Spiral Staircase (1945)

Murderer, you killed them. You killed them all. It’s 1906. Helen is a young mute woman (Dorothy McGuire) working in a New England mansion as a domestic to bedridden Mrs Warren (Ethel Barrymore) who lives with her professor stepson Albert (gorgeous George Brent), a secretary Blanche (Rhonda Fleming) who used to be his girlfriend and is now romancing her newly returned son Steven (Gordon Oliver), verbally abused Nurse Barker (Sara Allgood), drunken housekeeper Mrs Oates (Elsa Lanchester) and her husband (Rhys Williams).  A maniac is killing off people with disabilities. After Mrs Warren warns her of the danger to her personal safety she makes plans to leave the dark old house with her boyfriend Dr Parry (Kent Smith), but it is too late. The maniac is in the house, and she is his prey… Mel Dinelli made his screenwriting debut with this adaptation of Ethel Lina White’s 1933 novel Some Must Watch – the  idea for the staircase came from a Mary Roberts Rinehart novel.  It’s a beautifully mounted gripping Gothic suspenser with an ideal setting, atmosphere and occasional flashes of director Robert Siodmak’s Expressionist roots by DoP Nicholas Musuraca, underscoring the murderousness at its core. Spinechilling from start to finish. 

Lady of Deceit (1947)

Aka Born to Kill. Stop that phony intellectual patter you climbing faker! A cult item this, a film noir with a distinctly nasty undertow of viciousness and some droll lines. Helen Brent (Claire Trevor) is freshly divorced in Reno and finds the body of another woman and her boyfriend in her boarding house. Returning on the train to her wealthy foster sister’s home in San Francisco she’s accompanied by the ambitious thuggish drifter Sam Wilde (Lawrence Tierney) who murdered the couple. Their attraction is obvious but he marries her sister Georgia Staples (Audrey Long) and introduces his sidekick Marty (Elisha Cook Jr) to the mix. When philosophical private eye (Walter Slezak) turns up to investigate the Reno murders it transpires he was hired by the victim’s landlady Mrs Kraft (Esther Howard, always a joy) whose alcoholic inclinations won’t stop her from doing a Miss Marple. Helen inadvertently leads the older woman into a murderous situation engineered by Marty. Trevor’s byplay with Tierney is really something and the awfulness of everyone concerned is heightened in their verbal interactions. What this lacks in pace it makes up for in sheer psychopathy. A thoroughly febrile post-war film directed by former editor Robert Wise. It was adapted by Eve Greene and Richard Macaulay from the 1943 novel Deadlier Than the Male, written by that fascinating screenwriter, novelist and producer James Gunn, who specialised in the hard-boiled pulps so familiar from the period.

Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998)

The post-feminist take on Cinderella, or how you can get your man and still retain your dignity and read Utopia without feeling guilty. Susannah Grant is a sassy screenwriter and this fairytale is plonked right into history as the Queen of France (Jeanne Moreau) regales the Brothers Grimm the story of Danielle, the unfortunate girl whose father has married a right cow (Anjelica Huston) with two daughters (Megan Dodds and Melanie Lynskey) and then he goes and dies and leaves her in their terrible hands. Drew Barrymore is the girl who loses her shoe after making it to the ball, Dougray Scott is the well-read but out of control prince who doesn’t want to settle down in organised matrimony to the dismay of his parents. This is smart and witty without the pantomime that usually accompanies the story and Barrymore is just about perfect as you’d expect in a gorgeous looking outing shot on location in France.  The final twist is but well deserved! Great fun. Directed by Andy Tennant.

A Howling in the Woods (1971) (TVM)

This adaptation of Gothic romance queen Velda Johnston’s novel heralded the reunion of I Dream of Jeannie‘s Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman. In truth, Hagman has a glorified cameo as her husband whom she’s divorcing. Her arrival in Lake Tahoe is not welcomed – the police follow her when she hits town and stepmom Vera Miles cannot conceal her annoyance when she walks in the door of her former home. New stepbrother John Rubinstein sees her as seducible fodder but something is up since Pop never seems to be around. She takes up residence in a cabin and soon gets the distinct impression she’s in danger and there’s that dog howling in the woods  …This NBC TVM has pedigree – adapted by Richard De Roy, directed by Daniel Petrie, scored by Dave Grusin, whose work would be so significant to so many big screen features in the coming years. It operates almost completely in the suspense mode and is all the better for it, with little relief coming from the welcome arrival of Tyne Daly down the cast. Eden does very well as the woman in jeopardy. Just a shame it’s not properly available in a decent format, like a lot of early 70s TV movies.

Cruel Intentions (1999)

Back in the day this contemporary uptown teen reworking of Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses (of course made into the great Dangerous Liaisons after Christopher Hampton’s acclaimed English-language stage adaptation) seemed pretty rad. Turning Sarah Michelle Gellar into a high school version of Madame Merteuil in a quasi-incestuous relationship with stepbrother Ryan Phillippe as Sebastian Valmont was, uh, even creepy. What happened to us? bleats the coke-addled one when she sees he’s fallen for the virtuous Annette (Reese Witherspoon) and their bet has gone hopelessly wrong. A Lesbo kiss between Gellar and the horny Cecile (Selma Blair), interracial sex they both have with Sean Patrick Thomas, and a great backup adult cast of Swoosie Kurtz, Christine Baranski and Louise Fletcher, with some more gay antics between Joshua Jackson and Eric Mabius, make this a viciously corrupt and sexy walk on the wild side of Central Park West, paving the way for the much-missed Gossip Girl. XOXO! Written and directed by Roger Kumble.

Clueless (1995)

It started as a proposal for a TV pilot, then became a hit movie, then became a TV series. The 1995 film written and directed by Amy Heckerling is a work of such unadulterated charm as to be a rare animal in the Hollywood genus. A Beverly Hills high school reworking of Jane Austen’s Emma, that well-meaning if slightly gormless (but innately intelligent) do-gooder heroine, reinvented as Cher Horowitz, this sweet comedy became an unexpected crowd-pleaser and its dialect entered the modern language.  Alicia Silverstone was a lucky find as Cher:  she is a sheer delight in the role which is silly and sincere and serious in equal measure. It was 20 years ago that it first hit our screens.  It has never left our hearts. As if.