Big Eyes [12A]

Dir: Tim Burton

In recent years watching Tim Burton's films, especially his live action work, has been frustrating more often than it's been fun.  The quirky eye that was novel in his early films became a crutch, as did the frequent presence of his muses, his partner Helena Bonham-Carter and his friend and collaborator Johnny Depp.  Depp, in particular, did amazing work in his early collaborations with Burton, but what was quirksome stagnated and became simply irksome, approaching self-parody.

Big Eyes, then, is in many ways just what the doctor ordered for Burton's live action work.  It reunites him with Ed Wood writers and offbeat biopic specialists Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski and removes the twin crutches of Bonham-Carter and Depp.

The film tells the story of Margaret and Walter Keane.  Margaret was the artist behind the paintings of big eyed children which became fashionable in the 60's and were apparently some of the first paintings to be printed and sold to the masses as posters, rather than just to collectors.  Walter, by contrast, claimed to be a painter of landscapes, but was in reality a fraudster.  He convinced his wife to let him take credit for the big eyed children, manipulating her for years.

For the most part, Big Eyes is a sedately shot film, its visual identity coming less from the Burton playbook than it does from the pastel kitsch of the decade between the late 50's and late 60's.  There are, however, a few moments that fit more easily in to Burton's trademark look, be it the impossibly green rolling hills that recall Alice in Wonderland as Margaret drives past them, while leaving her first husband in the film's opening sequence or the surreal sequence of big eyed people staring at her in the supermarket.  However, here these excursions to Burtonville don't feel, as they have lately, like the director running out of ideas and resorting to self-plagarism.

Another thing that seems to refresh Burton somewhat is the presence of Amy Adams.  She's perfectly cast as Keane, looking remarkably like the archive pictures shown with the film's closing captions.  She gives Margaret a delicacy and naiveté that, without making her seem stupid, allow you to believe how she is taken in by the flamboyant Walter.  It's also an interesting quirk of casting that Adams has the sort of wide, open eyes that, as well as letting us see something of what her characters are thinking and feeling, suggest that - at least in the film's reality - Keane's art might have begun as an exaggerated self-portrait.

Adams' performance here is small; detailed but simple, but she has shown in films as varied as Junebug, Enchanted and American Hustle that she can also give big performances that nevertheless ring true.  This doesn't seem to be the case with Christoph Waltz, who plays Walter.  

Waltz came to prominence playing the cheerfully evil Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds.  That performance was a surprise, a breath of fresh air in a genre that can be rather po-faced and encourage nothing more nuanced than a straightforward officiousness.  Unfortunately, every time I've seen Waltz since he's given basically that same performance.  Waltz never stops seeming actorly.  As Walter he has an energy bordering on mania, delivered with the grinning hammery of a slimy, but very effective, salesman.  This may be appropriate to Walter Keane's real character and might work better if we felt it was Walter who is the one putting on this performance.  Unfortunately, because Waltz has played these beats before, because you can see Landa and Dr King Schultz in what he does here, that distinction falls down and it ends up being Christoph Waltz we see acting, not Walter Keane.

The supporting cast sometimes give Big Eyes more of the feel of a Coen Brothers than a Tim Burton film.  Many players drop in for one or two scenes, most of them at least slightly tongue in cheek.  Krysten Ritter (herself big eyed enough to be an anime character) has a slight part as a free spirited friend of Margaret's, but makes the best of limited screen time.  Erring more on the comic side are Jason Schwartzman; dry and droll as a pretentious gallery owner and Terrence Stamp as an art critic who dismisses Margaret's art as pure kitsch (he's got a point).  Stamp has a lot of fun as the purse-lipped and, the film would seem to suggest, over-serious critic, but he also gets stuck in one of the film's worst scenes as Waltz - hamming to high heaven - berates him for a bad review of 'his' latest painting.

Alexander and Karaszewski's screenplay is played straighter than their Ed Wood or People Vs Larry Flynt work, it's also pretty straightforward biopic box ticking at times, especially in the very minor acknowledgement it gives Margaret's apparently short lived issues with alcohol.  That said, both Margaret and Walter are well drawn (the problems when it comes to Walter are with the performance and with Burton's direction of it) and the dialogue is good, often quite funny.

Big Eyes finds Tim Burton closer to top form than he has been in live action for two decades.  It's certainly not perfect, and the fact that one of the central performances is the film's biggest issue means I can't quite wholeheartedly recommend it, but it's often fun, well played by most of the cast and Amy Adams elevates even its weakest moments.  Hopefully Burton can build on this and deliver something truly great again.
★★★

Top 20 Films I discovered in 2014: Part 2

Come Drink With Me

As a martial arts fan, Shaw Brothers films have long been a conspicuous gap in my viewing and I decided to catch up with a few of them in 2014.

This is perhaps one of the more prestigious films in the Shaw catalogue, having been directed by King Hu, whose A Touch of Zen is considered a martial arts classic and a cornerstone of the wuxia genre.  Come Drink With Me is a somewhat more down to earth take on wuxia, predating Hu's epic. 

It has a fairly typical plot about a female martial artist (the legendary Cheng Pei Pei) training in order to go up against an evil abbot who has allied himself with a group of bandits, but like most martial arts films it hinges not on the plot but on the action.  The style is less frenetic than what Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung would start to do in the late 70's, but still hugely impressive and excitingly choreographed and shot.

Come Drink With Me has another great asset in its star, Cheng Pei Pei, here just 19, and in her first major film role.  As well as being skilled in the film's martial arts sequences, Cheng is a striking presence, not just beautiful (though she is, to a degree that makes the fact she's disguised as a man for much of the film very funny) but charismatic, able to effortlessly hold a camera with one steely gaze.

Come Drink With Me is an ideal gateway film, an introduction to a different style of martial arts cinema and to one of its greatest stars.

Super Inframan

Super Inframan is rubbish.  It is brilliant, brilliant rubbish.

It's basically Shaw Brothers does Power Rangers, only with one Inframan in place of the five rangers.  It's an incredibly cheap and nonsensical piece of work, full of gloriously silly translations for the dialogue, guys in ropey rubber outfits playing the monsters and some wonderfully cheesy effects.

Two things keep Super Inframan from simply being rubbish; first is the fact that it has some legitimately cool action.  Silly as they may be, the big fight sequences trump Power Rangers because, while the suits could have been knocked up on the director's mum's kitchen table, it's clearly people in them fighting.  The main reason the big battles in Power Rangers were never much fun was that it was always obvious they were using slightly upscale toys to shoot them.

The other thing that saves Super Inframan is its sense of its own silliness.  It's not a parody, but there is certain glee about it that suggests the filmmakers were well aware of what they were doing.  I can't recommend it highly enough as a beer and pizza movie.

Commando

Okay, I'd seen bits of Commando before this year but, for some unfathomable reason, I had never got round to sitting through the entire, magnificent, thing.

This is perhaps the best of Arnold Schwarzenegger's straight up action movies.  It doesn't have the sci-fi trappings (or the ideas) of the Terminator films, the tension of Predator or the parodic tone of True Lies.  Commando is an exercise in simplicity: Arnie's daughter is kidnapped, he wisecracks and murders his way to discovering where she is, then steals a shitload of weapons and kills half the population of an island to get her back.

Simple this may be, easy to get right it is not.  Schwarzenegger may not be the most gifted actor, but he can deliver a wisecrack and kick ass with best of them.  Commando knows how to deliver on both fronts.  Director Mark L. Lester keeps the action just the right side of absurd; it's clear that most people shouldn't be able to live through this movie, but equally clear that it's operating slightly beyond the rules of the real world (call it action movie physics) and that Arnie's not most people.

The script isn't smart, but it is a lot of fun (my personal highlight?  Bill Duke and Arnie's "Fuck you asshole.   Fuck YOU asshole." in the middle of their brilliant fight).  This also goes for the performances.  Schwarzenegger was always a slightly ridiculous presence, and it seems there's a contest here to see who can match him.  Dan Heydaya's accent, as the dictator of Valverde, takes an early lead, but it's Vernon Wells' villain and the unintentionally (?) homoerotic way he talks to Arnie that eventually wins.

Commando may not be a landmark of artistic achievement, but holy crap it's fun.

Jeux Interdits

My abiding memory of Jeux Interdits is its last scene, with Brigitte Fossey's Paulette crying out "Michel, Michel" and me sitting in my seat dissolving into tears. 

This is an incredibly sensitively written and played film about how the innocence of childhood can continue even in the midst of something terrible.  When Paulette's parents are killed in an air raid, she wanders off, eventually ending up meeting Michel and being taken in by his family at their farmhouse.

The events of the film are small; a rivalry between Michel's family and their neighbours; Michel's older brother and the girl next door having a secret relationship; Paulette and Michel building a secret pet cemetery, their way of coping with the detah and destruction around them.  This is all engaging, but at its heart Jeux Interdits is about the growing brother/sister relationship between Michel and Paulette, and how it's a comfort after Paulette's loss and as Michel's brother is dying.  That's why the ending is so crushing.

This is a beautiful film, visually and in other ways.  It's rare that something hits me so hard emotionally.

Flickan

International distribution is broken.  How else to explain the fact that this gorgeously shot, exceptionally well acted, moving coming of age film has still not had a UK release despite being released in 2009 in its native Sweden?

Flickan [The Girl]  is about a nine and a half year old girl (Blanca Engström) who is left behind when her parents and older brother travel to Africa to spend the summer doing charity work.  Her aunt comes to look after her, but the Girl soon contrives a way to get her to leave, spending the summer alone.

That's pretty much the entire film.  It zooms in closely on her day to day life, showcasing an extraordinary performance from Engstrom (who will finally have another film out in 2015).

The film's other standout aspect is its photography, by Hoyt Van Hoytema, better know for his work on Let The Right One In and Interstellar.  He gives Flickan a sort of magical realism that seems to capture very well the feeling of possibility open to the Girl while she's on her own, but also some of the scarier aspects of her situation.

Flickan isn't easy to describe, rather it's a film you just have to sit down with and immerse yourself in the character's world for 90 minutes.  Trust me, it will be rewarding.

Eight Diagram Pole Fighter

Today in 'things that do exactly what they say on the tin...'  

This is the last of my discoveries of 2014 to come from the famed Shaw Brothers studio, a late example and a contemporary of the likes of Jackie Chan's Project A.  In some ways you can see the effect of the changing style; this is a faster moving film than, say, Come Drink With Me, but it still conforms to many of the old tropes of martial arts cinema.

The story is another of those old tales of revenge, in this case General Yeung Yip and five of his seven sons are murdered by a rival in a single attack.  One of the surviving sons returns home, deeply traumatised.  The other (Gordon Liu) goes to a monastery where, after finally proving that he wishes to be a monk, he trains in pole fighting.  When the man who killed his father and brothers kidnaps his sister (Lily Li) he leaves the monastery for vengeance.

As ever, the story and performances (though both are perfectly solid) are not our first concern here, the action is.  On that front Eight Diagram Pole Fighter more than delivers.  It's a great combination of the classical Shaw style with, thanks to Liu and director Lau Kar Leung, a little extra speed and intricacy, reflective of the newer style over at Golden Harvest.

The opening ambush scene is about ten minutes long, and seems impossible to top, but the film manages it over and over again, especially with the scene in which Liu uses a cart full of improvised bamboo spears.  There's little to analyse here, which means you can just sit back and gawp at the non-stop action scenes.  Never a bad thing in a kung fu movie. 

Actress

Actress (also known as Center Stage) isn't an easy film to see, especially in its complete version, which runs roughly 150 minutes.  This was what we thought we were getting when I saw it at BFI, but the print turned out to be a 130 minute cut.  Exactly what this version was prepared for is hard to tell, as none of the four cuts listed on imdb runs at 130 minutes.  That said, whatever was cut I am dying to see it and whatever version you see this film in I imagine it will be well worth it.

Stanley Kwan's biopic of Chinese silent star Ruan Lingyu, who killed herself aged 24 is ambitious thing.  Most of it focuses on her complicated private life, in which she was having affairs with two men.  Other sections recreate her performances in films both lost and extant, and this bleeds into what could be called behind the scenes segments, showing Kwan and Maggie Cheung, who plays Ruan, discussing the performance and Kwan directing her.

Through this mix of techniques, Kwan and Cheung give us a good idea of why Ruan is still such a fascinating figure, and the glimpses of her films bear both this and the absolute eeriness of Cheung's performance out.  Maggie Cheung has always been a striking screen presence, but this is the best performance I've seen from her, she seems to embody Ruan in the on screen moments, which helps give the more typical biopic stuff that forms the bulk of the film real credibility.

Cheung is especially wonderful in a party scene late in the film.  We're aware at this point that this is Ruan's last day, and it's made all the more tragic because Cheung is full of vivacity in the scenes leading up to her quiet and sad death.

Actress is an unusual film in many ways, but perhaps mostly because it can be seen as an exploration of two fascinating actresses; Ruan Yuling and Maggie Cheung both, at some level, playing the same role. 

Mouchette

There seems to be a trend in European and Scandinavian coming of age films in that the young actors who play the leading roles often go on to do little or no subsequent screen acting.  It's a pity that this is true of Nadine Nortier, whose expressive performance here remains her sole screen appearance.

Mouchette divides roughly in half, with the first part showing Nortier's home life with a dying mother and controlling father and the second seeing her venture into the woods at night where she encounters a poacher who tries to get her to be an alibi for the fact he has just killed someone.  

In between these sequences is one beautiful glimmer of light.  At one point Mouchette goes to a fairground that has come to town and as she rides the dodgems we see her first moment of pure escapism in the film as she plays and innocently flirts with a boy in one of the other cars, sadly the moment is quickly shut down by her father.

The film turns on Nortier's performance, and specifically on her face, which Robert Bresson often focuses his camera on.  So much of the effectiveness of the film comes through the various little calculations we see Mouchette make, especially in the increasingly tense second half.

In just two films (The Trial of Joan of Arc being the other) I've come to appreciate Bresson as a great humanist filmmaker.  I hope the rest of his films are as acutely observed.

The Third Man

I'm often wary of films described as being among the best ever made, because there seems to be very little chance of them living up to their hype.  That's probably why I had skipped The Third Man, often named as one of the greatest British films ever made, for such a long time.  I'm not certain it earns that lofty a title, but I can certainly see the argument.

As with a lot of classic films, even though I hadn't seen it, I knew much of the plot going in and that as Joseph Cotten searched for Harry Lime I knew that, eventually, he would find Orson Welles.  For a film to work as a thriller under those circumstances is quite something, and a testament to both the performances and Carol Reed's direction.

Visually the film is iconic and its last few sequences, with Lime on the run through the sewers of Vienna, are especially stunning.  The noirish visuals play out the story, including the final choice made by Cotten's Holly Martins in regard to his friend Harry, in starkly expressive visual terms.  Gripping as the story is, The Third Man would be exciting purely as a series of images, and that surely is as highly as one can praise a film. 

Intolerance

Watching DW Griffith's groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation is essential for any real film lover, as it's like watching someone spend three hours inventing modern cinema.  It's also quite uncomfortable, because it's racist.  Really racist.  The KKK are the heroes, that's how racist.  The following year, some have said as a reaction to the criticism that Birth of a Nation's racism attracted, Griffith made this; an epic scale four part parable about intolerance.  Subtle he wasn't.

The scope of the ambition on display here would be jawdropping even now.  There are four thematically linked stories, the contemporary story of a young woman (Mae Marsh) forced into the slums whose husband is wrongly convicted of murder; the story of the St Bartholomew's Day massacre in 16th century France; the story of Christ's conviction and crucifixion and no less than the story of the fall of Babylon.  Griffith cuts between the stories throughout, mixing them at an ever greater pace and with ever greater parallels drawn as the film runs through its 167 minute duration, building to a crescendo that juxtaposes the final fall of Babylon with a race to save a man from the gallows.  Again, Griffith isn't subtle, but he's effective.

The sets and the cast are both gigantic, the apparent scale of the task obvious in every frame of the Babylonian story, which still startles with some of its violence and nudity.  Silent film acting is something that takes some adjustment for modern audiences as the style is so different.  Most of the cast acquit themselves well, but Mae Marsh and Constance Talmadge particularly impress, Marsh as the put upon 'Dear One', who seems to age shot by shot in the modern story and Talmadge as the tough and funny 'Mountain Girl' in the Babylonian section.

As visceral and thrilling now as it must have been 99 years ago, Intolerance may not be as significant a film as Birth of a Nation, but it may well be better.

Top 20 Films I discovered in 2014: Part 1

For me, 2014 was a weak year for new movies.  That's not to say there weren't highlights, by my Top 10 was tough to draw up this year, and not because there was an abundance of choice.  

On the other hand, I've also seen a lot of films this year that were new to me, but which weren't released in 2014.  Here, across two parts, are the 20 best, listed in the order I watched them in over the year.

The Vampire Lovers

I hadn't seen many Hammer Horror films before this year, and The Vampire Lovers was the film that set me off to explore a few more of their productions, in particular the Karnstein films; a loose trilogy of then quite daring, now slightly quaint, but still sexy, lesbian vampire films based on Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla.

The Vampire Lovers is the most entertaining of the series (Twins of Evil and Lust For A Vampire would follow it), thanks largely to the performances which, though they are very much of a type, work well with the tone of the film.  Madeline Smith is all doll like cuteness and naivete as Emma Morton, while Ingrid Pitt's Carmilla oozes overblown sexuality.  Their scenes together are both sexy and creepy as you feel Emma being drawn ever deeper under Carmilla's spell, first through a naively trusting nature, then through Carmilla's mesmerising influence.

This is not the deepest of horror films, but director Roy Ward Baker fashions some memorable images and today the bits that might look a little silly or the occasional cheap looking set have a creaky charm to them.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

This film is about to hit its 40th birthday, but in many ways it couldn't feel more timely.  Angela Winkler gives an outstanding performance as Katharina Blum, who is arrested, treated with suspicion and humiliated by both the police and the press after she is found to have spent the night with (and fallen for) Ludwig, a wanted anarchist terrorist.

The film is gripping and thrilling on its own terms, with Winkler's performance matched by Jurgen Prochnow as Ludwig and Dieter Laser as a journalist who sells fabricated stories about Katharina.  However, what's remarkable, and rather sad, is that it could easily be a film about the tabloid press of today.  The fact that the ITV drama about the 'odd' landlord vilified in the press in the wake of the murder of Joanna Yeates was titled The Lost Honour of Christopher Jeffries must surely have been a nod to this film.

A riveting, intelligent and exceptionally well acted thriller, this would deserve to be sought out even if it weren't disturbingly relevant in the light of contemporary media.

Cria Cuervos

A project on coming of age movies (which is continuing into 2015) led me to see a lot of great performances by children and young people in 2014, but few, if any were as remarkable as Ana Torrent.  Torrent is just eight here, but she exhibits a remarkable maturity as an actress, allowing her to give a chillingly and sadly detached performance as a young girl who seems to be trying to understand and come to terms with the death of her Father, which happens in the film's first scene.

There are touches of surrealism - with Geraldine Chaplin's dual roles, one of which is dubbed, adding to that feeling - but what really grips about Cria Cuervos is how believable Torrent's performance is and how articulately she engages with the difficult subject matter.

It's strikingly shot too, with images of an impassive Torrent having her hair combed, or carrying a gun she's found, sticking in the mind.  The use of music is also memorable, with the film finding three different registers in which to use the same cheesy, but hypnotic, pop record.  By the end both Porque te Vas and Ana Torrent will be stuck in your head.

Prime Cut

Prime Cut was a film I had always wanted to see, had owned for quite some time, but for some reason had never got around to watching.  When I finally did sit down to Michael Ritchie's film I found something you tend not to see these days; a dirty little exploitation movie with a great cast, a smart script and a tendency to take itself seriously.

This was also my first Lee Marvin film, but it won't be my last; he's impressive as a morally ambiguous anti-hero who, despite being a ruthless mob enforcer, has a distinct moral code.  Gene Hackman is odious in a relatively early role as a cattle rancher who also sells young women on the side, and grinds his enemies up to make sausage (I told you it was an exploitation movie).  The film's real find is Sissy Spacek, here just 23 and at the height of her willowy beauty.  She's excellent as one of the girls Hackman is trying to sell, who is then rescued by Marvin.

Prime Cut has plenty of memorable sequences. An extended chase through a corn field, with Marvin and Spacek in danger of being cut to pieces by a combine harvester, stands out.  It's a terrifically paced sequence, with the danger approaching slowly at first but coming frighteningly closer every second.

Criminally, Prime Cut still has no UK disc release, but I promise you, for any exploitation fan this one's worth importing. 

The General

This wasn't, historically speaking, my most belated first watch of 2014 (that's in part 2), but I'm still a little ashamed that it took me so long to see my first Buster Keaton film.

In many ways The General was familiar, my whole movie watching life I'd seen images, clips, references and films and comedians who have been influenced both by this movie and by Keaton , and yet, The General still surprised and delighted me.

There is no more surefire way to murder comedy than to explain it (except perhaps casting Rebel Wilson), but with Keaton I did find that famous stoneface, combined with the dexterity and invention of his physical comedy to be hilarious.  This I expected, what I was less ready for was how The General managed to be thrilling and funny in the same moment.  I saw it the same day as Jack Ryan, and Keaton's was by far the better action film.

The timing as Keaton uses one sleeper to bounce another off the tracks and the many remarkable stunts, especially the bridge explosion, achieve a visceral charge, through being real, that today's CGI 'action' can't match.  It's no wonder Jackie Chan cites Keaton as a key influence.

I've still got a lot of silent film to catch up on, but Keaton is a high priority after this.

Les Diables

Like most British movie fans, if they know her at all, I first saw Adele Haenel in Celine Sciamma's Water Lilies.  It was only when doing research into coming of age films that I heard of Les Diables.  

Haenel and Vincent Rottiers play a brother and sister, abandoned by their parents to the care of the state, perhaps largely because Chloe is severely autistic.  Her brother Joseph is severely protective of Chloe, and when he feel that their latest children's home is pulling them apart, they go on the run to try to find their parents.

Typically of European coming of age films, Les Diables is hard edged.  It doesn't shy way from the harsh realities of Joseph and Chloe's lives either when they are abandoned, when they are in the children's home or when they are out in the streets.  The closeness of their relationship is another thing you just wouldn't see in an American or British film, as it goes to some uncomfortable and explicit places.

Rottiers is excellent; all bottled up rage, but it is Haenel, just 13 here, who runs away with the film, giving an extraordinary performance as a severely autistic young woman.  I've worked with people like Chloe, and Haenel gets them exactly right.

Les Diables is brutal, but it's also provocative and moving, and shows off two extraordinary performances from its young stars.  Seek it out, because there's almost no chance, thanks to Haenel's nudity, it will ever get released here.

The Spirit of the Beehive

I did tell you that Ana Torrent was something special, as far as child actors go.  Aged just six here she gives a remarkably rich, mature performance in her first film.  After seeing Frankenstein at a mobile cinema that sets up in her village young Ana begins to believe in monsters, insisting the one lives in an old abandoned house.  In that house she finds a wounded soldier, who she begins to care for, bringing him food and clothing.

Throughout, the juxtaposition between Ana's real world and her fantasy world, where the soldier is a monster and she's the equivalent to the little girl by the pond in Frankenstein, becomes ever more blurred and, as in Cria Cuervos, leads to some unsettling moments.  Most notable is a moment when, during a game, Ana's older sister appears to be seriously hurt, if not dead.  The way that we see Ana process this, and the way that Torrent and director Victor Erice let us wonder, to unsettling effect, just how much she understands in this moment, is remarkable on several levels.

Ultimately The Spirit of the Beehive is an emotional and even elegiac film about childhood innocence in troubled times.  It's one of the best of its kind.

Mauvaises Frequentations

Another European coming of age movie from my research, and another that is tougher and more downbeat than most coming out of the English speaking world.  Theis one sees 14 year old Maud Forget brought out of her shell when she becomes friends with Lou Doillon, but that's a mixed blessing, as it becomes clear that the boyfriends who say they want them to run away from France with therm are in fact using the girls, especially the naive Forget.

Mauvaises Frequentations falls into quite distinct halves, with Forget's friendship with Doillon making up a sunny opening,  which then leads into a real gut punch of a final hour, which goes further than most films in digging into how awful people, even kids, can be to each other.  Throughout, Forget is outstanding, her physical delicacy and the character's trusting nature lending her real sympathy.

On the sidelines is another moving story about the earnest, movie loving, boy next door who wants nothing more than to take Forget on a date.  Yeah, I can't imagine why I identified with that either, particularly when his heart gets stomped on.

This is another film that never appears to have had a sniff of a UK release, and that's a great pity. 

Totally True Love

I maintain that Little Manhattan, which is basically Annie Hall with ten year olds, is one of the most underrated and underseen films of recent years.  Totally True Love feels like a slightly more down to earth take on the same themes of the very first time that a kid has romantic feelings.

In this case the kid is Anne (Maria Annette Tanderød Berglyd), who falls for the new boy in school, Jorgen (Otto Garli), the second she sets eyes on him.  However, she has a rival for his affections in the most popular girl in their class.

The film is brilliant on the politics of the playground, with friendships made and broken over the tiniest things and an innate understanding of both the earnestness and the pettiness that little kids are capable of.  It feels like the film was written by people who still remember enough of what being a kid was like to understand it from their perspective, rather than comment on that perspective as adults.

There's terrific energy to the film, set down in the first moments by Anne's voiceover (which is very funny) and by Maria Annette Tanderød Berglyd's performance and that's also key to the feeling that this film is talking to the kids its about in a way that's intelligent and not talking down either to them or to adult viewers.

From the outside, Totally True Love might look like a rather slight kids film, but it's smarter and more insightful than that, as well as being masses of fun.

Singin' in the Rain

As soon as I read the title I'm humming that tune, which is probably as good a recommendation as any musical can get.

Singin' In The Rain sometimes seems less like a film and more like an experiment in bottling joy.  It's largely successful.  There is a plot, set around Hollywood as the silent era ends and talkies begin, but for me the film exists more as a series of comic and musical set pieces.

I thought that The General would provide the ultimate masterclass, at least during my 2014 viewing, in physical comedy, but I had reckoned without the incredibly energetic yet graceful clowning of Donald O'Connor in this film, especially during his spectacular slapstick showcase in Make 'em Laugh.

O'Connor very nearly steals the film, but Debbie Reynolds is charming and funny and Gene Kelly, even outside the iconic title song - whose brilliance is undimmed even after being exploited in that advert a few years back - has a great many memorable song and dance sequences of his own.  The standout for me was the dance he has with Cyd Charisse, who is breathtaking in that green dress.

This is another film I can't believe I managed not to see until so recently, but it certainly won't be long before I revisit it.  Any time I'm having a bad day would seem to be an opportune moment.