After intense thought on the subject, I have decided to cease publishing Into the Screen.

My latest essay, “Purgatory in Paradise,” will be my final essay for this publication and I will soon refund all subscribers the balance of their subscriptions.

I’m sorry for everyone who’s disappointed by my decision. I know there are those of you who have enjoyed reading my film criticism. Taking that joy away has been one of the heaviest considerations I have weighed in making this decision.

When I started Into the Screen, film criticism was not my primary writing interest. I wanted, and still do, to primarily be a novelist. Yet, I’ve come to love going to the cinema in the evenings, going to a nearby bar to hastily jot down my thoughts while the images’ impressions on my mind are still fresh, or doing so on the train ride home, and then assembling those impressionistic scribblings into an essay. I’ve also enjoyed and been very grateful for the likes and comments from my regular readers.

I started Into the Screen for multiple reasons. One was to make me sit down and write. Another was to potentially establish a stream of income that would allow me to live off my writing. I also hoped to change film criticism. I would read film reviews in the New Yorker, Empire, The Australian and other established publication ad, and I would think that the critics had not given me a taste of what it would be like to watch the film. Nor had they shared some new or interesting thoughts about what the film, or films more generally, mean. The criticism was as exciting as a cinder block. Many times, I did not think the critics even enjoyed watching movies. At Into the Screen, I hoped to create the sort of film criticism that I wanted to read (paraphrasing Toni Morrison).

I now want to sit down at my desk and write. I no longer need Into the Screen to make me do it. After several years, the income Into the Screen is creating is nowhere enough for me to live off. I don’t blame readers for that. I promised myself a tall order with that one. Anyone familiar with writing knows that it’s not something many people can live off.

As for making a change in film criticism, that was a tall order too. I’m a big believer in the principle that if you’re going to be good at something, you’ve got to commit to it 100%. Refining my film criticism to the point I was aiming for and eventually securing a job at a publication where I could reach a wide audience and change what readers expect from film criticism, is an enterprise I do not have the time or energy for without giving up on my dream to be a novelist. I cannot be half a novelist and half a film critic. I’ll end up being only half-decent at both if I do. I do not want to be half-decent at what I do. Whatever I do, I want to be great at it. I want to be a novelist more than I want to be a film critic. So, I’m choosing to give up being a film critic and focus on being a novelist.

I won’t give up writing about films completely. I will be writing about the films I watch on Letterboxd and I will share the news, via Substack Notes and my other social media, whenever I am fortunate enough to have any of my work published by another publication.

Thank you all for your support over the years. Goodbye.

Yours sincerely,

William J. Barker

Grade: A

A brochure sits in a travel agent’s window. It’s bathing in the Mediterranean sun and telling those who pass the agent’s window that “If you love life, you’ll love France.” There’s Southern French beaches, champagne, and “AAHHH!” An old lady’s ghastly scream cuts over the postcard images from a luxurious holiday and Alfred Hitchcock cuts the camera away from the travel agent’s shop to show the old lady frantically looking at her jewel cases emptied in her hotel suite. So begins Hitchcock’s 1955 tale of purgatory in paradise: To Catch A Thief.

Played by Cary Grant, John Robbie is an American living in a villa on the French Riviera. The police come to his villa one day and ask him to come with them to Nice. Robbie steps away from tending his flowers and asks them why. They think Robbie, a former French Resistance hero and before that notorious jewel thief called the Cat, can shed some light on some recent jewel thefts from the Riviera’s affluent guests and residents. “All right but would you mind if I put on something more formal?” Robbie asks nonchalantly and then uses the cops’ indulgence to escape out the window. Robbie’s agile and suave and just the man to, as his old friend’s daughter Daniele (Brigitte Auber) tells him, “steal a small fortune [one night]… and…[the next day] lie on the beach with an American beauty.” Ask any AI for an image of ‘gentleman thief’ and it’ll give you Robbie’s picture. There’s just one problem: Robbie isn’t the thief. “I haven’t stolen a piece of jewellery in fifteen years,” he keeps telling his old resistance friends. Not even they believe him. To remain free and keep the life he’s built for himself since leaving crime behind, Robbie sets out to catch the real thief and clear himself.

Hitchcock loved to take his audiences on holidays and To Catch A Thief was one of the best he ever provided. Unlike the protagonists of Hitchcock’s serial killer-centred films, Charlie Newton (Shadow of a Doubt), Marion Crane (Psycho) and Richard Blainey (Frenzy), Robbie doesn’t dwell amongst middle-class suburbs or cheap hotels. He pursues the Cat along the sunny beaches at Cannes and the five-star hotels of Nice with Mediterranean views and where the only ones wearing more bling than the guests are the chandeliers. Robbie moves amongst the guests who live to dine on lobster and truffles in the hotel’s restaurant, lose and win thousands upon thousands of francs in the casino, enjoy cocktails before going to bed in their suites and then sunbath on the beach the next day. Like Hitchcock, they’re there to have a gay old time. Amongst them are the Stevens, mother Jessie (Jessie Royce Landis) and daughter Frances (Grace Kelly), who Robbie predicts will be the Cat’s next victims. When he turns out to be right, Mrs Stevens takes it very well. “I’m a little tired of draping those things over me,” she says, referring to the jewels the Cat’s stolen that are worth over two-hundred thousand dollars. “It was exciting at first but you know now I think it’s more exciting to have them stolen.” Robbie and the Cat prowl around the playground of the rich.

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But in a Hitchcock film, you always have to wonder if the cocktails are poisoned. Disaster lurks around the corner of every manicured hedge. The idyllic images of the travel brochures in the opening scene are interrupted by the screams from the Cat’s victims. Robbie entertains Mr Hughson, the Stevens’ appropriately affable English insurance agent, at his villa. His housekeeper serves them a quiche Lorraine and Hughson remarks how “the pastry’s as light as air.” Robbie tells him his housekeeper has a very light touch. “She strangled a German general once,” Robbie says. Hughson’s delight in his meal suddenly drops right out of his face. You can’t enjoy a fine quiche with Hitchcock without him telling you the cook is experienced in homicide. Hitchcock relished terror and glamour in equal measure, and these seemingly contradictory yet beautifully complimentary appetites mix and congeal brilliantly in To Catch A Thief. Perhaps nowhere in the film more so than when Frances takes Robbie for a drive in her car through the mountains behind Nice for a picnic. Frances drives at an insane speed yet looks ahead with her mouth only slightly bending into a coy smile. She’s completely indifferent to the bus and the old lady she almost runs into or the drop down the mountain’s side she tempts every time she zooms around a corner. If anything, she seems tickled by the danger. She handles the wheel lightly as Robbie grips his knees, looking very much like the helpless lovebirds sitting on the floor of Melanie Daniels’ car in The Birds. His face looks ready to break as he anxiously strains it wondering if this beautiful lady will become his angel of death and her glittering automobile his hearse. In Hitchcock’s world, you often don’t get a choice between the lady or the tiger. You have to take both. Sometimes the lady even is the tiger.

“We’re all in our private traps,” Norman Bates told Marion Crane in Hitchcock’s Psycho. “Clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and claw but only at the air…we never budge an inch.” Like so many of Hitchcock’s heroes (Scottie in Vertigo and Roger Thornton in North By Northwest especially), Robbie is stuck in a kind of private Hell, even if it is on the French Riviera. He’s innocent but no one believe him. He thought he left crime behind but now his past crimes have made him a fugitive. “There’s just one more thing I need to do,” Scottie told Judy in Vertigo, “and then I’ll finally be free of the past.” Robbie’s also trying to free himself of his past. Like all the souls stewing away down in purgatory, whom Hitchcock likely heard about in his Jesuit education, Robbie must overcome the sins of his past to escape the trap he’s landed in and save his reformed life. Ironically, the Cat doesn’t turn out to be his strongest adversary in this quest. Daniele meets him on the beach one day and tries to tempt him into running away to South America with her. She thinks Robbie really has returned to crime and suggests they live together off his stolen loot away from the dangers of the police and his old comrades who want him dead to take the heat off themselves. “It would be so much better to be killed by love no?” she asks him, lying reclined on a float in a figure-hugging white bathing suit, her pose only accenting her curved figure, and her auburn short hair as glistening wet as a siren’s. Frances makes her own offer after finding out Robbie’s true identity.

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She’s positively thrilled to have met a jewel thief and invites Robbie for dinner and cocktails in her suite during a fireworks display. She glides around the room in a pure white dress. Her arms are bare and her skin catches the light from the fireworks outside as do the diamonds on the necklace around her neck. Her skin glows and her necklace sparkles, and her voice is tipsy with childish excitement as she teases Robbie by talking about all the jewels lying in her room that she says he can’t resist but can’t touch. “Like an alcoholic outside of a bar on election day,” she says. Frances proposes they pull off his next robbery together. “Ever had a better offer your whole life?” A thrilling heist, a fortune in jewels and a beautiful woman as an accomplice. From your seat in the audience, it’ll likely look like a very good offer, but is it, or Daniele’s, enough to make Robbie relapse into a life of crime? The female leads in To Catch A Thief appear as temptresses seeking to lure Robbie away from redeeming himself and to entice him into diving headfirst back into crime. The film’s about nothing less than the salvation or damnation of Robbie’s soul.

You’re unlikely to hear To Catch A Thief included amongst the ranks of Hitchcock’s best films with Vertigo and Psycho. Google lists of Hitchcock’s best films and in most of them To Catch A Thief just gets over the line into the top ten. It’s number nine on Indie Wire and IMBd’s lists and number fifteen on Rotten Tomatoes’. On my list, it sits at number four just below Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window in ascending order. This diamond-studded story of a man trying to escape the sins of his past is one of Hitchcock’s very best.

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I’ve been sick and my illness has kept me from writing.

I will however publish my essay about Alfred Hitchcock’s underrated classic To Catch A Thief on July 13.

My apologies. Computer trouble has wiped my review of The Christophers, that I planned to publish on June 22, from my hard drive. I won’t be able to deliver it to you as promised.

I’ll be taking a week’s hiatus from Into the Screen due to work commitments, so I won’t be publishing my usual weekly review on June 29.

Yours sincerely,

William Barker

Grade: A

Hitchcock once called thrillers more entertaining than whodunnits. In an American Film Institute seminar in 1970, he contrasted ‘mystery’ with ‘suspense’. “The two things are absolutely miles apart,” Hitchcock said. Mystery is when the audience doesn’t know what happened until the end. You don’t know who murdered Roger Ackroyd until Poirot tells you. Suspense is when the audience knows what has, will or could happen. To use Hitchcock’s classic example, you know there’s a bomb under the table, that it’ll go off soon and that it could blow the two men chatting at the table sky high. Mystery, Hitchcock said, creates only intellectual curiosity in an audience. Suspense by contrast, grabs you and refuses to let you go until the story’s over.

In that same seminar, Hitchcock was asked if he’d ever made a mystery film. He said he had not, except once. You may think that’s not true by looking at his filmography. There’s mystery in To Catch A Thief, North By Northwest and Psycho. Who is the Cat? What is the insidious spy plot Roger Thornhill has stepped into? Who murdered Marion Crane?

Dial M for Murder looks a lot like whodunnit. It’s a complexly plotted crime story set in an affluent London neighbourhood. The whole film takes place inside the townhouse flat of socialite Margot Wendice, played by Grace Kelly, and her husband Tony, played by Ray Milland. Margot’s been having an affair with American crime writer Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings). Tony knows and blackmails petty crook Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson) to murder Margot. Milland gets the most screentime of all the cast as he explains his meticulously crafted plan to Swann and all with a crisp and straightforward manner, like that you’d see in a highly competent bank teller or stockbroker. He tells Swann the exact time he must arrive, where he’s hidden the key for Swann to use to gain entry to flat, where Swann’s to put it when he leaves, and the exact time Tony will call, thus bringing Margot to the phone where Swann will kill her. Tony’s planned the whole crime so well your tempted to admire his thorough craftsmanship…but then you remember he’s plotting to murder his wife. Tony’s plot is as meticulous as anything Christie ever devised.

Yet, the film’s a thriller rather than a whodunnit because the protagonist is the criminal rather than the detective. The detective, Chief Inspector Hubbard played by John Williams, comes late to the party. Hitchcock doesn’t orientate the film towards Hubbard solving the crime but towards Tony carrying it out. You’re not waiting for Hubbard to reveal what happened. You know what happened. You’re waiting to see if Tony gets away with it. The film’s entertaining because of what you know rather than what you don’t know.

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You can see Hitchcock turn an apparent mystery into a thriller in many of his other films in much the same way. In Psycho, you know Marion Crane’s been murdered but you keep watching to see if everyone looking for her finds it out. In To Catch A Thief and North By Northwest, Hitchcock adjust the dramatic irony in a slightly different angle. You know Cary Grant’s gentlemen heroes John Robbie and Roger Thornhill are innocent because you’ve seen them act out their innocent lives before becoming fugitives. So, you ask yourself: when, where and how are they going to prove their innocence? Your mind looks ahead to the climax that drifts on the horizon like a ship in the fog that’s not clear but there and in your path nonetheless.

Dial M for Murder is a good case example of how Hitchcock arranged the balance of knowledge between characters and audience in a way that turned what could otherwise be a mystery into a suspense story and thus made a story that could be another curiosity-provoking whodunnit into a gripping thriller.

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Franz Kafka’s work grants any film about him an iron-clad excuse to not make sense. Agnieszka Holland, director of the new Kafka biopic Franz, makes full use of that excuse. Holland sets her Kafka, played by Idan Weiss, on a meandering trek from Kafka’s boyhood to his death from tuberculosis in 1924. Franz is a cinematic sermon in which Holland and screenwriter Marek Epstein are preaching to the converted. It does little if anything to convince Kafka sceptics that Kafka deserves his status as a great writer. Simultaneously, it’s a Kafka trivia game for those already familiar with his biography executed in the style of his fiction for those who already worship it.

Franz is a scrapbook biopic. It’s very similar to this year’s Michael Jackson biopic Michael, as strange as it might sound to compare Kafka to the King of Pop. Like Michael, Franz is yet another biopic that seems it was made not to tell a story but to let a fan stage all their favourite episodes from the life of an artist they love. Holland shows you Kafka’s mistreatment by his overbearing father Hermann Kafka, played by Peter Kurth, Kafka’s boring job in an insurance office, Kafka reading his short story “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka visiting brothels, his engagement, his breakup with his fiancé, etc, etc. One instance follows another with no thread connecting them but Kafka’s presence. The Kafka of Franz is a protagonist without a story.

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“Your film makes no sense.” Say this to anyone who makes a film about Kafka and they can reply “It’s appropriate for the subject matter.” You won’t be able to rebut that. Kafka’s work makes no sense. His protagonists are tried for crimes they’re never told about (The Trial), suddenly turn into bugs for no reason (The Metamorphosis) and try to gain entry to places where the rules for gaining entry are never clear (The Castle). His work is dogged by a persistent absence of any logic or purpose. Thus, any filmmaker casting his life up on the screen is granted an artistic plausible deniability. They can make a film in a Kafkaesque style because it’s a film about Kafka.

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You’ll be scratching your head all through this film. When you’re not scratching it over what the film’s about, you’ll be scratching it over if even Holland herself knows what it’s about. The film shapeshifts from scene to scene. One minute, Kafka’s friends and relatives are talking to the camera like Holland’s interviewing them for a documentary. The next minute, Holland’s yanked Kafka from his native early 20^th century Prague to Prague today where there are Kafka tours, the Kafka museum and even Kafka burger shops. Is this a straight, traditional biopic? Is it a fictionalised documentary? Is it some trippy, time-bending genre mashup? The answer eludes you and Kafka fans will tell you “Of course it does. It’s Kafkaesque.”

Idan Weiss makes the film semi-tolerable. He plays Kafka in all his moods and forms with complete yet understated conviction. He is Kafka the absurdist clown laughing at a leaking roof. He is Kafka the bullied son casting his eyes down to the floor when his father shouts at him. He welcomes motion and stillness into his face while ensuring neither looks like a stranger. Weiss’s adorable chameleon talents will remind you of silent film actors like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton who behaved like are flesh and blood versions of C-3PO: animatronic but not rusted or dead and able to become angry and sad – CLICK - like that, as if on the turn of a gear, but to do so without it appearing fake.

Does Weiss justify the $25 ticket and the approximately two hours you sit watching him plod from scene to scene, while Holland slowly saps you of any hope that the next scene will be more interesting? Unfortunately not.

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Grade: F+

“God is dead! Satan lives!”…okay. Roman Polanski’s 1968 adaption of Ira Levin’s psychological horror novel Rosemary’s Baby has no shortage of schlocky melodrama. Polanski’s suffusing the film with camp seems purposely designed to suffocate the metaphysical apprehension in Levin’s novel that made the novel such a gripping read.

The film follows the novel’s plot perfectly. Young couple Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow, and Guy Woodhouse, played by John Cassavetes, move into the Bramford apartments in New York. They begin making the Gothic apartment into a lovely home to start a family. Rosemary becomes pregnant after they move in. However, she comes to suspect Guy has made a pact with a Satanic Covent of witches, led by their neighbours Minnie and Roman Castevet, played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer, to give the witches her baby in return for the witches magically inducing Guy’s recent big break that could elevate him from a struggling actor to a star.

However, unlike in the novel, you feel no apprehension when you watch this film. No suspense grabs your wrist or even brushes against it. You will feel no goosebumps, only a desire to slap every character whenever they open their mouths. You’ll also ponder “What is this thing Polanski seems to have for naked witches?”

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Those naked witches appear in the dream sequence in which Rosemary dreams she is being raped by a horned monster. It’s actually not a dream. The monster is in fact the Devil and the rape has been arranged by the witches to sire the Devil’s child who will become the Anti-Christ and “overthrow the mighty and lay waste their temples.” Whatever, but the rape scene is one of the novel’s most horrifying scenes:

He lay forward upon her…his broad chest crushing her breasts…She opened her eyes and looked into yellow furnace-eyes, smelled sulphur and tannis root, felt wet breath on her mouth, heard lust-grunts and the breathing of onlookers…The hugeness kept driving in her, the leathery body banging itself against her again and again and again.

By telling the scene from Rosemary’s POV, focusing on all the demonic stimuli assaulting her every senses, he uses touch, sight, and smell, Levin makes you feel as if you too are being violated. In Polanski’s film however, the scene is just weird. Rosemary flits in and out of a dream where she dilly dallies like an imbecile about a yacht. The surreal violence is gone. When she does drift into consciousness, she sees the witches gathered around her bed. They are not garbed in black robes like they are in Levin’s novel. They’re nude, like the witches in his MacBeth. It’s like Polanski is swinging between being deliberately Dada and needlessly naughty, alternating between cinematic impressions of Dali and of a pornographer, to avoid dramatizing the horror in Levin’s novel: an innocent woman being raped by what appears to be the Devil, feeling it’s real and not knowing if it is real or not.

That was the crux of Levin’s novel: uncertainty. Rosemary has evidence of Guy’s deal with the devil, but all her ‘evidence’ could have innocent explanations. Rosemary could just be paranoid, exacerbated by hormones…but she may not be. Polanski may have picked a Sisyphean task to start with. Everything to love about Levin’s story is lost if you know the ending. You won’t share Rosemary’s epistemological crisis, her crisis of faith in everything from her husband to if she can trust other people, and so won’t be waiting gripped by both eagerness and terror for the answer that may step out of the shadows at the end of the next scene.

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But even those who come to the film without reading the novel are likely going to be turned off feeling any sort of investment in the story that is a necessary precondition for apprehension. All the characters are such simpering and meandering twits that you don’t care what weird Satanist shit they’re in to or what happens to their babies. Furrow was likely not an air-headed simpleton when Polanski made this film, but she gave a very good impression of one. She acts like a rabbit that’s been released from some government laboratory. Her voice is simultaneously jittery and airy and all her moods seem exaggerated, like she’s veering between chemically enhanced states of glee and despair, and her eyes move with the same junkie-awkward lack of coordination. You believe she’s not right in the head even before she starts talking about there being witches in 60’s New York. The rest of the cast ape her simultaneous and corny lack of emotional regulation and authenticity but they’re not playing paranoid mothers-to-be. They’re playing the stereotypical boisterous husbands and nosy neighbours. So, they come off as moth-eaten yet horribly glammed and hammed up impersonations of cliches.

Watching Polanski’s film, you’d think his source material was a cartoon from MAD Magazine, not Ira Levin whom Stephen King called the Swiss-watchmaker of suspense writers.

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Grade: C+

Let me say this straight up: I’m not going to write about the child sexual abuse accusations against Michael Jackson. Those allegations aren’t included in Antoine Fuqua’s new biopic about Jackson, Michael, but I don’t totally agree with Spike Lee that a film shouldn’t be criticised for what it omits. A Hitler biopic that never mentioned Auschwitz would be a rubbish biopic. I am less confidant that Jackson sexually abused children than I am that Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust or that those allegations, true or false, were the defining feature of Jackson’s life as the Holocaust was of Hitler’s. When I went to watch Michael, I knew next to nothing about Jackson’s life and the allegations against him. I only knew he had been accused, tried and acquitted but some people still believed he was guilty. I suppose that if Michael is propaganda concocted by the Jackson family, many of whom produced the film, that makes me their ideal sucker. But I refuse to be a sucker for anyone who may have a stake in the controversy over Michael Jackson one way or the other. A critic who writes an opinion they can’t defend is an idiot, so I won’t write one on if Michael handles the allegations against Jackson right.

What I will write about is that I didn’t love the film or hate it much either way. It was one of those films that isn’t torture but isn’t worth re-watching either.

Multiple times while I watched it, I thought “Where have I seen this before?” The opening shot: a tracking shot following Jackson, played by Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson, from behind as he walks out onto the stage in dramatic slow motion, the editing effect slowing his stride to a meditative march, and his face is hidden and you’re waiting until he turns to face you. In multiple performance scenes, the camera’s cutting back and forth between Jackson and his legions of adoring, cheering and screaming fans. Early on in the film, Jackson is a young unknown, played by Juliano Krue Valdi, who can’t help moving the first time he’s in a recording studio, like his music must course through every fibre inside him to be fully released. Is he going to quote Elvis next? “If I can’t move, I can’t sing” Austin Butler said playing Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley biopic. You’d be forgiven if, while watching Michael, you thought you were watching a collection of scenes lifted from previous pop-star biopics, like Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody directed by Bryan Singer. This will likely account for how your eyes may start slowly glazing over after Act I. You’ll feel a yawn gestating but not reaching the critical mass needed to burst forth from your throat. You may lean against your chair’s arm and just let the film dribble down into your eyes and then rise as vapours out of your ears. If you’re really rude, you’ll take out your phone and start checking your social media. “I’ve seen this all before,” you’ll moan to yourself.

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It’s not just the repetitiveness of the cinematography and the script. You might as well watch a Michael Jackson documentary for all the drama screenwriter John Logan has produced. With his screenplay for Michael, Logan has perpetuated the seemingly endless cycle of pop star biopics that just roll their subject’s life out like one large, long and knotted rug. What this produces is an episodic boor fest where every scene is one more day in the life of a pop star. In Michael, you see Michael Jackson rehearsing with his brothers as a kid, Michael Jackson adopting his pet chimp Bubbles, Michael Jakson lying in bed after his hair catches fire. Michael Jackson does this and then he does that.

Logan does try to turn the film into the story of Jackson growing up. He spends many scenes and words establishing the tyrannical grip Jackson’s father Joseph, played by Colman Domingo, holds over him and how Jackson wants to break free and “do [his] own thing.” Except the duel between father and son is one of the most peaceful I’ve ever witnessed. After Michael fires Joseph as his manager, Jospeh goes stomping and fuming to his wife, Michael’s mother Katherine, played by Nia Long, and declares the he will beat Michael with his belt when Michael gets home…only to then drop the idea when his wife tells him he can’t. This is the same wife whose objections have never stopped him from mercilessly beating his youngest son before. Joseph Jackson admits defeat easier than any domestic tyrant who ever lived. Logan’s made him a dully un-persistent antagonist. You also keep waiting for the moment when Michael will tell Joseph to his face “You’re fired,” yet this moment never seems to come. You’ll constantly be looking at your watch to calculate how much longer the film’s got to make that scene happen. Michael, as Logan’s written him, is a protagonist who keeps dodging his own climax.

The script’s dullness remains despite the outstanding performances of Domingo and Jaafar. Domingo talks with a perfect growl in every scene whether Jospeh’s meant to be happy or angry. He combines this with a masterfully restrained energy. It’s not overt. You only see it fully on show when Joseph blows up at Michael. The fury Domingo spews forth from his moth and eyes is eviscerating. But you’re never surprised by the explosion because you could hear it rumbling. It’s not just latent in Domingo’s heavy and muscular inflections. It’s also in the whip-quick way he shoots his eyes from one target to another or sweeps his hand from one corner of the room to the other. You see Joseph’s got a temper and the energy to lash out and vent it on anyone at a moment’s notice with all his strength.

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Jaafar makes Michael look especially vulnerable to Joseph. He plays Michael with a divine and innocent delicacy. There’s an unbridled yet furtive twinkle in his eye when he sits in the garden, his chimp Bubbles sitting on his lap, and looks around and waits for inspiration to flutter into his head. It’s a dazzling light but one that seems like it could be snuffed out by someone big enough. Jaafar looks like a sprite: this ephemeral being perpetually frozen in the form of a happy-go-lucky youth who flies about but never touches the ground. This image of Michael as Peter Pan makes Jaafar’s recreation of his uncle’s performances astounding. Michael is not cute and fragile on the stage. Jaafar replicates his uncle’s lightning-bolt dance moves. He shoots his arms and legs out this way and that in a flash-bang-zap rhythm in tune with the hard and fast, hip-hop beats of Jackson’s music. It’s like a butterfly has transformed into a dragon in a flash of lightning.

These injections of razzmatazz make Michael bearable at worst and at best great, foot-stomping musical fun. Fuqua can offer some flashes of musical awesome that are like lone landmarks amidst the film’s flat and dull dessert.

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Grade: B+

13 Days, 13 Nights (original French title 13 Jours, 13 Nuits) is French director Martin Bourboulon’s first contemporary-set action film after his thrilling, two-part adaption of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers in 2023. You could therefore excuse Bourboulon’s clumsiness as he steps, stumbling more than once and quite badly, into filming a contemporary tale rather than a historical one. This clumsiness at times obscures your view of the very real, heroic story Bourboulon takes an honest if uneven stab at turning into a film as gripping his Three Musketeers films.

A wise man once said that “Heroes are only people who have run out of choices.”[1] 13 Days, 13 Nights takes place during the Fall of Kabul in 2021. The Afghan capital is in chaos. The victorious Taliban have overrun the city and foreign governments are scrambling to evacuate their personnel and citizens. Commandant Mohamed ‘Mo’ Bida, played by Roschdy Zem, of the DGSE (Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure - Directorate General for External Security – France’s MI6), supervises the evacuation of French staff and citizens from Kabul’s French embassy. He allows Afghan civilians to seek shelter in the embassy. Amongst them is Franco-Afghan humanitarian worker Eva, played by Lyna Khoudri (who played Constance in Bourboulon’s Three Musketeer films), her mother Amina (Fatima Adoum), and a British journalist named Kate (Sidse Babett Knudsen). Mo and his team are offered a ride out of Kabul but they stay to evacuate everyone inside the embassy. With Eva’s help, Mo enters delicate negotiations with the Taliban to permit him to evacuate everyone. One wrong move on either side, and they could all die. Mo could leave and save himself but that would involve abandoning the civilians to the Taliban. With the benefit of history, you know what that means. Since 2021, Afghans, particularly women and girls, have lost their rights to freedom of speech, assembly and religion, endured torture and extra-judicial killings. Eva, unlike Mo, isn’t a soldier or a spy, but if she doesn’t get out, she and her mother will be left trapped in the hellscape the Taliban will bring to Afghanistan. Mo and Eva have both run out of options and they must take increasingly dangerous, and therefore brave, actions to save themselves and others from the Taliban. They have run out of choices, so they become heroes.

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When you look deeper into Mo and Eva however, their characterisations become thinner and almost narrow into oblivion. Bourboulon wrote the film’s script, based on the real Mo’s memoir, with Alexandre Smia and Trân-Minh Nam. The three script writers don’t develop Mo and Eva’s motives beyond a flat, auto-pilot humanitarianism. They never stop Mo or Eva amidst the action, tap them on the shoulder, look them in the eye and ask “Why are you doing this?” They haven’t successfully combined high-stakes action with in-depth characterisation like Christopher Nolan, Michael Mann or David Fincher. There are scenes of Mo saving an old contact from the Taliban and calling his wife and telling her he loves her. There’s a scene where Eva hugs her mother because they can’t go home to get Amina’s wedding ring. Presumably, from these heart-warming snippets Bourbolon, Smia and Nam expect us to conclude that Mo and Eva are just nice people and nice people will, of course, stare down the barrel of an army of trigger-happy, homicidal jihadists for complete strangers.

Zem and Khoudri play their parts well. Zem plays Bida with a clean, action-hero decisiveness. It’s not loudly rugged like John Wayne but the more laconic dynamism of Steve MacQueen in Bullitt and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible. He just does what he has to do. Khoudri acts with a beautiful delicacy that makes her terror seem very real and therefore her bravery too. The difference in their ages throws Mo’s seasoned strength into greater relief while simultaneously doing the same for Eva’s young vulnerability. But their poorly elaborated characters mean that they look like automated heroes, like what you’d see in cliched action movies. The type of movie heroes who just do what the writers need the hero to do because they need a hero for their script not because the characters have some motive of their own driving them to be heroic. Mo and Eva are ultimately hollow knights: all armour but nothing inside.

Nicolas Bolduc did the cinematography for the film and he deploys his stark and beautifully harsh, Ridley Scott-esque cinematography, which he used for Bourboulon’s Three Musketeers films and The Count of Monte Cristo. Like on those films, Bolduc used Panavision cameras. He says these cameras give the film “plenty of sharpness, but skin tones retain a certain softness.” Bolduc brings a granular clarity to the texture of the people and the place in the film. He captures Kabul in 2021 as a city built of hot and dusty stone walls.

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He gets a bright and raw starkness from the colours of the buildings and the sunlight that’s reminiscent of the harshly scorching glow in Lawrence of Arabia and Denis Villeneuze’s Dune films. The city is searingly monochromic, yet also rich in gradients of visual detail in everything from the cracks in the buildings to the threads in peoples’ clothing and even the wrinkles in their faces. You feel you could reach out and touch this city but then be burned by it. Bolduc shoots Kabul as both historical inferno and human tapestry.

13 Days, 13 Nights manages to be thrilling, but this is down to the acting, Zem and Khoudri’s in particular, and Bolduc’s cinematography more than the writing. Bourbolon, Smia and Nam may have thought history could do much of the work in establishing their story’s stakes. They may have thought that our knowledge about what the Taliban have done to Afghanistan since 2021 would be enough to make a gripping, historical action thriller and that they could get away with superficial characterisation. They were wrong, and they are fortunate that Zam and Khoudri know how to sweat, grimace, smile and cry with every ounce of themselves and that Bolduc knows how to film it all in visceral detail. They do the heavy lifting the film’s director and writers left to history but that history isn’t able to bear.

[1] Chiaki Sekiguchi, quoted by Jake Adelstein in his memoir Tokyo Vice.

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Grade: A-

There are a few exciting films about what happens when worlds collide. There’s a 1950s sci-fi film with that exact title. There are others that are less on the nose: ET, Lilo & Stitch, and War of the Worlds.

Except, when I say ‘worlds,’ I don’t mean literal planets. I mean the world as we expect it to be. You think it will look a certain way and not another, you’ll meet people like this there but not people like that, and there are some things you can expect to happen there and some things you can expect will never happen because, to quote the Joker, it’s not “part of the plan.”

Good films are often about what happens when that plan, your agenda for reality, goes wrong. The black swan can, however, take more subtle forms than an alien landing in your backyard and that make it more compelling, formidable and terrifying. These unexpected events are more the domain of Noir and thrillers than sci-fi. In The Third Man, Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotton, visits his best friend in Vienna but finds his friend is dead. On top of that, a policeman tells Holly that his vaunted friend Harry Lime was “the worst racketeer who ever made a living in this city.” Martins sets out to prove the truth and expects, like in the pulp novels he writes, he’ll clear his friend’s good name. Oh brother, he gets a nasty shock.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 thriller Shadow of a Doubt, Cotton plays the shocker rather than the shocked. He is the one who upsets the plan rather than the one who’s plan is blown to pieces. Cotton stars as Charles Oakley who pays a visit to his reverential niece Charlotte “Charlie” Newotn, played by Teresa Wright, in Santa Rosa, California, but following him are the police chasing him because they suspect he’s a serial killer. Charlie’s admiration for her ‘Uncle Charlie’ is shattered into despair and then twisted into fear and hatred after she discovers his identity as the ‘Merry Widow Murderer.’

Shadow of a Doubt is less a collision of worlds than a contamination. Charles’s world quietly invades and gradually seeps into Charlie’s until the barrier between the two disappears and darkness intermingles with light. The devils are sitting at the dinner table with the angles but you can’t tell who is which.

Charles’s world is grim. Hitchcock starts the film in Charles’s world with a wide shot as the camera pans slowly over a grimy and debilitated New Jersey neighbourhood where Charles is hold up in a cheap hotel. It’s not a very pretty scene. Charles lies on his bed smoking, looking like a more sombre version of the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. Cotton clenches his jaw and eyes in a way that doesn’t look forced, and therefore faked, but makes you think that Charles is in a lot of pain, and you think the pain is coming from inside him. He seems otherwise healthy. It’s as if, like Harry Lime in The Third Man, he’s being gnawed away at by corrosive acids from the inside out. The only other inhabitants you see apart from Charles are his nagging landlady, the kids playing in the street outside his hotel and the cops who tail him when he leaves the hotel. Except for a few secondary characters, this world is populated by police and the crooks they chase. Charles shakes the cops and then makes a call to the telegraph office. He instructs them to send a telegram to Charlie and her family telling them that he’ll be coming to stay. Over his shoulder, you see men playing pool amidst a fog of cigarette smoke. It looks like Charles has stepped into a scene from some gritty, street-wise film filled with crooks, cops and killers, like On the Waterfront or Pickup on South Street. It’s the world where you’ll find crooks like Skip McCoy, murderers like Al Capone, or even monsters like Norman Bates.

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Hitchcock travels far when he shifts the film from New Jersey to California before Charles arrives. The grim and claustrophobic mis en scene of Charles’s Jersey falls away and is replaced by the bright and spacious city and suburban streets of Santa Rosa. Here, there are no cops, except the rotund one who smiles cheerfully as he directs the traffic. There are bankers, telegraph office ladies, librarians, housewives and priests. All the players in a peaceful, happy and honest life are here, and Charlie knows them all by name and they know her and her whole family. At home, the Newtons (Charlie’s mother Emma played by Patricia Collinge, her father Joe played by Henry Travers, her little sister Ann played by Edna May Wonacott and her little brother Roger played by Charles Bates (now there’s an irony!)) chatter like a family in a sitcom. The film’s second scene is a chorus of one Newton trying to tell the other something important, while the other talks over them trying to tell them something they think is important, even though none of it seems very important at all when they’ve got a murderer arriving soon.

The Newtons’ ignorance is at first the film’s thrill but becomes a nagging flaw in the film. Hitchcock often generated suspense by carefully calibrating the knowledge gap between audience and characters. Rear Window and North By Northwest were the best examples. The Newtons don’t know the monster they’re waiting to receive into their home but you know (or at least you suspect). You can sit there thinking, anticipating, how awful it will be when the Merry Widow murderer descends on this loveable and innocent family. At the end of the second scene where he introduces the Newtons, Hitchcock cuts to a shot of Charles’s train thundering ahead towards Santa Rosa. The relentless and hard clatter of the wheels and pistons is violent and terrifying. When Charles’s train arrives in Santa Rosa, it comes towards Roger, who stands alone on the platform, spewing black smoke, like a dragon approaching its prey. These visual augers are Hitchcock’s way of milking the dramatic irony he creates and that propel the film forward until Charles arrives. After that however, the Newtons become insufferable. There’s no longer the suspense of waiting for what’ll happen when Charles arrives. Charles arrives and nothing much changes for the Newtons, except Charlie. She is the only one who finds out Charles’s secret. The other Newtons continue their lives largely the same, except their small town suburban affectations, so charming in the first scene, grow even more pronounced. Mrs Newton seems to lose the ability to answer a single question without launching into monologues about furniture and baking. That the Newtons seem to become even more like a middle-class American family in a hammy sitcom while they’ve got a killer under their roof only makes them look more ridiculous.

The suspense is replaced by terror as Charlie slowly learns her uncle’s true identity. At first, Theresa Wright is hopelessly inept at transitioning from her girl-next-door routine to the role of terrified, Last Girl in a horror movie. One of the cops chasing Charles, Jack Graham played by Macdonald Carey, tells her his suspicions. “I don’t believe you,” Wright spits the words out like a dummy. Her outrage and disbelief are too forced. However, Wright improves. In later scenes, she hardens her eyes and mouth to the point they become unrecognisable as the sweetly gleaming button eyes and lips of the sweet little girl you knew a few scenes ago. She looks and sounds soulless with rage when she tells Charles “Go away or I’ll kill you myself.” Sweet little Charlie is contemplating murder. That’s not part of the plan. That doesn’t happen in Santa Rosa. It happens in Charles’s Jersey. Charles’s presence knocks Charlies out of her comfortable little world and into his nastier, darker one.

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Charlie’s katabasis is dramatized when Charles drags her to a seedy bar and confronts her about what she knows about him. “How could you do such things?” Charlie asks Charles “You live in a dream,” he tells her:

You’re a sleepwalker – blind! How do you know what the world is like? Do you know that the world is a foul stye? Do you know that if you ripped the rooves off houses you’d find swine?

Earlier, Charles is sitting next to Charlie at dinner when he slides into a monologue about how despicable he finds rich widows. Hitchcock pans around him, moving into a closeup and as he does and he gradually darkens the space around Charles to blackness. Charles has brought his world’s darkness unopposed into the Newtons’ world. The demons cross over from Hell into Earth as easily as you’d walk across the street. Or is this real, horrible world intruding on a “silly, inexpert little lie” as Charles’s calls the Newtons’ peaceful and Edenic existence where the only crimes are the ones Joe reads about in his detective books. Charles provokes this question in you as he provokes it in Charlie. Hitchcock provokes it too in how he dramatizes Charles’s silent and easy invasion of Charlie’s happy and clean life.

What Shadow of A Doubt loses in suspense it gains in thematic terror as it contemplates, through a slow and pensive thriller, how the fences we erect around ‘our’ worlds and ‘theirs’ can be so easily leapt over by anyone on either side. As the murderer told Keira Knightleey in the Boston Strangler, “your safe little world is just an illusion.” Is he right? Is Uncle Charlie right?

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I’m sorry to you all.

I will publish my review on May 4th.

Grade: A+

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” Albert Camus, French philosopher and novelist, wrote that in 1942. It’s the opening sentence of his nonfiction book The Myth of Sisyphus and Camus isn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant the one true philosophical problem is suicide, and by suicide he meant if your life is worth living or not. Should you see the sun rise tomorrow or swallow some pills tonight?

The answer may seem obvious: see the sun rise. Don’t bloody kill yourself! “Why?” Camus asked us all to consider. “What will you do if you live?” You may answer: have breakfast, go to work, come home, have dinner, read a book, go to bed and then do it all again. “Yes I know,” Camus presses on, “but why?” What is the point of any of this? What’s the point of anything any of us do? You go to work, but you don’t enjoy your job. Even if you do, what difference will anything you do at work make? Will anything you do matter one hundred years from now when you’re dead and buried, at work or anywhere else?

Camus asked the same question Shakespeare did in the graveyard scene in Hamlet, albeit in a far less theatrical fashion. In the graveyard, surrounded by just graves and gravediggers, Hamlet stares into the face of Yorick, his father’s old jester, who brought Hamlet immense joy and awe when he was a boy. Hamlet gazes on his beloved childhood figure. His once grinning face has decayed into just the bare skull. Hamlet reflects that such a fate awaits us all and everything we may create. He reflects that even Alexander the Great “died…was buried…[and] returneth into dust.”

What is the point to living if all eventually turns to dust?

Camus explored his question in fiction in his novella The Stranger. Published in 1942 (the same year as The Myth of Sisyphus), The Stranger is about a young Frenchman named Meursault living in Algiers and who one day shoots and kills a man for no apparent reason. Meursault is Camus’ expression of a man who lives without meaning. He has no reason to kill his victim, but he has no reason not to either. He doesn’t believe in reasons.

Luchino Visconti adapted Camu’s novel in Italian in 1967, but now French director Francois Ozon has adapted it in French. Ozon’s adaption is a gorgeous yet pensive film where the ideas suffusing the words and grammar of Camus’ text become the texture of the film as it washes over your eyes and seeps into your mind.

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Ozon starts the film with a montage that announces the film’s authentic recreation of the novel’s setting and its transplantation of Camus’ philosophy to visual terms, and it does so with stark bluntness. The montage is executed in the style of a 1950s newsreel. You may think it’s a genuine artefact. It’s a reel of glamorous black and white footage of French Algiers. A hokey newsreader speaks about the city’s many great strides under French occupation and hams up his voice like he’s selling the place as both political propaganda and holiday destination. The charming sales pitch is punctured by shots of miserable Arabs, the occupied and colonised natives, covered in dirt, sitting on the streets and staring at the camera with glum fury. Some hold up a banner. The banner reads “FLN.” The FLN, Front de libération nationale, National Liberation Front in English, was the political party that in 1954, twelve years after Camus wrote The Stranger, would launch the war in which they would kick the French out of Algeria. The Algerian War lasted for seven years. The FLN waged guerilla war against the French and there tactis at times crossed from resistance into terrorism through indiscriminate killings and bombings that didn’t distinguish between soldiers and civilians, while the French used brutal tactics, including torture, forced displacement and killing of protestors to the suppress the FLN. Death estimates for the war range from the thousands to the millions. Camus believed that we manufacture meanings, beliefs and causes, political or otherwise, to live, but that like everything else they eventually give way under reality’s inherent meaninglessness. Ozon’s opening establishes the very setting of French Algiers as one such mortal fiction. It is a lie that will soon be torn down.

Walking amongst this world soon to be blown to pieces, strolls French actor Benjamin Voisin playing Camus’ protagonist Meursault. You may think Voisin is flat. Meurault is meant to be an ever indifferent character, so Voisin is required to be cold and expressionless…but he is not flat. His performance is not blank. It isn’t empty. Try looking in the mirror and looking like you don’t care about anything. Try doing it without it looking forced or ridiculous. It’s very difficult, but Voisin does it. There’s a subtle yet heavy droop in his mouth and a this layer of fatigued sobriety over his eyes. Voision maintains this delicate misery so consistently that on the few occasions when Meursault does smile or grimace, his expressions of emotion don’t look totally real. They look like knee jerk diversions from his baseline indifference to everyone and everything. Voison’s great feat here is to look perfectly like Meursault, so thoroughly, existentially indifferent, without looking like an idiot or an actor.

Voison’s Meursault becomes the bar against which all the other characters are measured. He is in every scene and is consistently the focus of the camera. The other charcters, who unlike Meurault have their own respective meanings, stand out as more distinctive by virtue of Voison’s perfect indifference. Rebecca Marder playing Meursault’s girflriend Marie Cardona, is quitley vivacious and beautifully innocent in her persistent love for Meursault that he doesn’t return, albeit he doesn’t reject it either. Pierre Lottin plays Mersault’s frined Raymond Sintès and is playfully brutish in how he performs the role of this swaggering pimp who looks so unapologetically brutal and full of himself that his appearance varies between charming in a criminal sort of way, to ludicrous and then to delusional. You constantly ask: who is better off? These people or Meurault?

The Strange ris a very quiet film but for its ever present diegetic sound. The beating waves of the Mediterranean on Algiers’ shores feature very prominently. They’re not oppressive like the relentless and crushing grind of Victorian industrial machinery in David Lynch’s Elephant Man. The sound in The Stranger doesn’t sound cruel but indifferent, like thunder or rain. They don’t go bang or drop-drop-drop to scare you or drive you mad. They’re just doing their thing. That’s just what they are. The world Meursault inhabits, the world as Camus saw and wrote about and that Ozon translates to audible terms, is a wave beating against the shore forever. The ocean just keeps washing over everything. Eventually, it’ll wash everything away. All the sandcastles we build will be washed away.

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The Stranger is a black and white film. This is its greatest feature. Black and white used to be a technical limitation. With the advent of colour films, it became a deliberate choice. The choice is often economic or artistic, or both. Hitchcock chose to shoot Psycho in black and white due to his budget, but also to stop the film’s famous shower scene being too gory. Ford shot The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in black and white due to budget, to hide John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart’s ages that were far greater than their characters, or because he preferred black and white. It depends on who you ask. Modern filmmakers have used it mainly for artistic purposes. Nostalgia is a part of it, like how I write in American Typewriter. It makes me feel like Hemingway or Dashiell Hammett. Scorsese and Bradley Cooper have used black and white to give a sense of the texture of the early to mid 20^th century settings of their movies. Christopher Nolan and Cooper have used it to distinguish acts and narratives within their films. In The Stranger, nostalgia is part of it. Ozon and his cinematographer Manu Dacosse studied films from the time when conceiving the film and felt black and white was right for the film. But their use of black and white also brings Camus’ philosophy into the very look of the film. When asked why he murdered the man, Meursault replies: it was because of the sun. Which in a way is true. The murdered man reflects an intense beam of light in Meursault’s face off his knife. The glare is the same as that he sees in a lightbulb while sitting by his mother’s grave and in the sun that hangs over the sky and reflects off every surface: a harsh and bleaching, burning white, made even more powerful by its contrast to the very deep blacks. The Stranger is a world that oscillates between scorching heat and pitch darkness. It is one of extremes that vaporize the meaning that Camus wrote did not exist and that Meursault believes does not exist. The chiaroscuro is where the film is most faithful to Camus’ novel.

For if you accept Camus’ philosophy, the world is just black and white. You will see it forever through chiaroscuro.

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Grade: A-

Watching Battleship Potemkin is more an intellectual experience than an emotional one. Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 historical epic suffers much the same fate as other silent films in the eyes of the 21^st century cinephile who has come to ‘know’ the film extensively through scholarship before even watching it and who has become conditioned to experience films primarily if not exclusively as talkies. It is experienced more as an artefact than a pulsating, visceral alternate reality inside the screen. Yet, today’s film scholars can still derive excitement if they concentrate very hard on observing the film and looking for what they have already read it contains.

If you’re watching Battleship Potemkin, you’ve likely already read about it. You’re likely watching it because you read about it in film school and how Eisenstein pioneered the art of the cut. Eisenstein made the film as propaganda for the new Soviet government in Russia. The film chronicles a mutiny aboard the Battleship Potemkin, a battleship in the Imperial Russian Navy, during the 1905 Russian Revolution. However, Eisenstein also made it to test the theories of montage that he and other Russian filmmakers and theorists had been developing. One was Lev Kuloshov. Kuloshov found that shots could create meaning through how they’re put together, which shot you put after another, in film editing that’s called cutting, not just through what’s inside each individual shot. Shot of man staring at the camera - cut – shot of woman in coffin = the man looks like a sad widower in mourning. However: shot of man staring at the camera – cut – bikini-clad blonde sunbathing by the pool = the man is a lecherous creep. You get the idea. In Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein put Kuloshov’s theory into practice, and his application would influence filmmakers from Hitchcock to Kubrick. Battleship Potemkin is famous as the film that showed filmmakers that film could be a sequential art, where meaning is created by the images’ sequence, rather than just pictorial art, where meaning comes through the image itself.

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The film suffers from the artifice most silent films do when viewed over a hundred years since talkies were invented. That the characters don’t speak creates an affective barrier between you and the reality the film is trying to create. The characters do not look completely real because they do not speak. In true Marxist fashion, Eisenstein’s characters are defined entirely by their role in the political drama. Despite the names attached to them by the title cards that substituted for dialogue in the silent film era, the heroic mutiny leader Grigory Vakulinchuk has no wife or friends or mortal enemies, only his proletariat brothers and his ruling-class antagonists in the class war. He is just the soldier who dies for a loaf of bread. There is no why he died for a loaf of bread or little ones he may have given said loaf of bread to.

Yet, despite this, some of the characters leap out at you. It’s more to do with Eisenstein’s choice of shocking and unique imagery rather than the writing or the acting. The acting is average silent film pantomime-type acting where all the actors had to do was gesture at emotions with extreme mannerisms, at time appearing like androids performing kabuki. The old woman with her face slashed open by a Cossack’s sabre, her glasses eschew and her mouth gapping open in agony and horror. The child whose hand is crushed under a trooper’s boot. The baby carriage rolling down the Odessa steps as gunfire pierces the stone steps around it. All these will remain burnt into your mind due to their sheer dramatic power.

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You will get the most enjoyment out of Battleship Potemkin if you focus on the shots. Do not just sit back and try and sink into the film. You can’t enjoy Battleship Potemkin like that. You must be turned on. You must be analytical. That’s ironic. Much Marxist art, like Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre, aimed to make the audience focus on the art intellectually rather than be soothed and lulled into passive enjoyment by an exciting and believable story. Although, the purpose was to stimulate political consciousness rather than scholarly interest. Watch Battleship Potemkin and think about what happens when Eisenstein shows you one shot after another. Lion statue asleep – cut – lion statue rising startled = what? Watch the shots collide like cannonballs and then fuse together in your minds to synthesise one new thought after another and hear the intellectual cascade unfurl note by note like a symphony.

Battleship Potemkin is hard to enjoy as pure film, but it can be enjoyed as film history.

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Grade: E+

You likely won’t be surprised that Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights includes a few sex scenes, but what about one where a horse bridle is used?

Do you need to know more?

Do you want to?

Either way, you will.

“I am sick of this grotesque performance,” Nelly Dean, played by Hong Chau, screams at Catherine Earnshaw, played by Margot Robbie, in Fennell’s new adaption of Emily Bronte’s novel. By the time Nelly utters those words, you may want to tell Fennell the same. Her film is a grotesque and dumbed-down pantomime of a far more thrilling and complex text.

Emily’s Bronte’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights is the tragic love story of Catherine Earnshaw and her adopted brother Heathcliff. Catherine’s father finds Heathcliff as a street urchin on Liverpool’s streets and, out of charity, the kindly old man brings Heathcliff home to the family’s estate of Wuthering Heights and adopts him. Catherine and Heathcliff grow extremely close while Heathcliff and Catherine’s older brother Hindley grow to viciously hate one another. As adults, Catherine marries the Earnshaws’ neighbour Edgar Linton. A spurned Heathcliff runs away but then returns years later a wealthy man, uses Hindley’s rising debts to steal Wuthering Heights from Hindley, and begins taking his revenge on Catherine for choosing Edgar over him.

Fennell is a filmmaker unafraid to provoke and disturb you. Her plots and mise en scene are often decadent and hardcore. They’re often feverishly baroque, like Gothic wet dreams. Her characters can be terrifying and repulsive yet simultaneously pitiful and sympathetic. They occupy an ambiguous space between hero and villain, good and evil, and lover and persecutor.

Yet for all Fennell’s previous artistic boldness, her Wuthering Heights is a castrated shadow of Bronte’s original novel. It’s a gaggle of carnivalesque oddities and reprobates who don’t move you to tears, laughter or horror like Bronte’s original iterations. Your reaction to them, and Fennell’s execution of their mutated, semi-aborted and brain-damaged clone of Bronte’s story, will never rise beyond the shock you may experience when gazing at your roommate’s porn collection.

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Fennell has said she’s wanted to adapt Wuthering Heights for years. You can see traces of Bronte’s novel in Fennell’s work in film and TV. Like Heathcliff, Fennell’s protagonists are outsiders who infiltrate secure spaces and tear them apart. Villanelle, the psychopathic assassin in Killing Eve (Fennell was showrunner for the show’s second and best season), used psychological and sexual manipulation to worm her way into the mind of the show’s protagonist, MI6 agent Eve Polastri. By the time Fennell was done, Villanelle had destroyed Eve’s career, friendships, marriage and almost her sanity. Cassie, the protagonist of Fennell’s directorial debut Promising Young Woman, spends her free evenings going to bars, pretending she’s “too drunk to stand,” and waits for some man to come along, take her back to his house, and just as he’s about to take advantage of her perceived drunken stupor to rape her, she reveals to the terrified, lecherous creep that she’s really sober. Oli, the protagonist of Fennell’s second film Saltburn, is invited to an aristocratic family’s estate for the summer, but he gradually kills off the whole family to become master of the house. Oli’s quiet butchery culminates in the film’s final scene where he dances through the house nude to “Murder on the Dance Floor.” That song could be the title for an artistic study of Fennell. Fennell seems to have a thing for cuckoos who metamorphize into homewreckers.

Given how aligned Fennell’s artistic sensibilities seem to be with Bronte’s, it’s amazing how she messed this film up so horribly.

Fennell makes one mistake previous adapters have done. She makes Catherine and Heathcliffe’s relationship overtly sexual. A little past her film’s midway point, Catherine and Heathcliff reconcile and begin an affair. Fennell then unfurls a montage (accompanied by Charlie XCX’s ravishing electric score) in which Catherine and Heathcliffe have sex in Cathy’s bedroom, garden, and carriage. In the novel, Catherine and Heathcliff only kiss once and it’s on Catherine’s deathbed. Fennell is right to call Wuthering Heights a love story, but it is not the love story she seems to think it is. It’s not a straightforward, steamy romance. It’s something far more complex. Catherine and Heathcliffe can seem like lovers, best friends and brother and sister. Some have speculated that Heathcliff is Catherine’s illegitimate half-brother. Their relationship defies categorisation. Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are made of the same stuff, Catherine confesses to Nelly in Bronte’s novel. “I am Heathcliff.” This isn’t your standard girl-meets-boy scenario. Two people who are one? Who may be brother and sister but also lovers and maybe even both at the same time? It’s mystical in its mercurial evasion of precise and limiting definitions. It’s also damaging in the immense cruelty it inspires both Catherine and Heathcliff to inflict upon each other throughout the novel. Catherine and Heathcliff’s love is a demonic force that cannot be contained, physically or conceptual, and that tears everything it touches apart. Fennell sacrifices this satanic ambiguity for a straightforward steamy romance that any smutty romance author could write.

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Bronte’s novel has often provoked strong reactions. One reviewer upon the book’s publication wondered how anyone could write Wuthering Heights and not kill themselves. Almost all the characters are needlessly and extremely cruel to each other and enthusiastically breach early 19^th century social norms. Heathcliff alone hangs his wife’s dog and later digs up Catherine’s grave to lie beside her corpse in its coffin. Fennell has said there is a lot of sadomasochism in the novel. She’s right, but at times she is too literal. It is not the sadomasochism involving horse bridles. It is the sensual joy you can find in the colourful violence that Bronte brought alive with her bewitching prose. It’s the pleasure of having your senses constantly assailed by sharp and fast stimuli of new formations and designs. Bronte’s novel is a delightful gallery of shocks and terrors. Camille Paglia was right to call it a catalogue of cthonic horrors.

Despite her failures at the plot level, Fennell has still succeeded in translating Bronte’s literary inferno to the screen. She communicates in images what Bronte did in words. Her version of the Wuthering Heights estate is a foreboding, obsidian manor that thrusts itself out from the moors like the menacing crags that surround it. Its architecture resembles the spikes that may surround a fearsome fairytale queen’s crown. Meanwhile, the Lintons’ home Thrushcross Grange looks as though it were designed by someone with lots of money and little restraint. It boasts ornamental garden pots made of glass that house fish and rooms with walls decked in silver sequins. The hallway Heathcliffe walks down to kneel by Catherine’s death bed is dark red, like a dimly lit yet well-used slaughter house where the meagre light casts the blood’s dark scarlet onto the walls. Even the Lintons’ fireplace is white and made of human hands. Fennell throws one outrageous sight at you after another. As Bronte did prosaically, she attacks your senses. The conflagration of sights that are simultaneously Gothic, Decadent and Baroque is feverishly overpowering.

It can’t however make up for Fennell’s castration of Bronte’s original story that reduces it to a straight-forward and dull period romance. Fennell’s luxuriant visual excess just makes it a neon-studded straight-forward and dull period romance, and eventually the stun the images leave in your eyes will cool. By the film’s midpoint, the extremity of what you see will only serve as a point of contradistinction to how little you are thinking and feeling about the film itself, due to how Fennell has hacked Bronte’s story down to the point of a smutty paperback. Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a visual success. She has succeeded where perhaps no filmmaker who has adapted Wuthering Heights before has, yet she has simultaneously failed more miserably than any other in adapting the actual story to the screen.

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Grade: C+

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Grade: B-

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Three good scenes and no bad ones. That was what Howard Hawks thought made a good movie. You may be tempted to assume his simplicity equalled lazy craftsmanship. You’d be wrong.

Between 1926 and 1970, Hawks made 40 …

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