BABEL (2006) This is the third time Alejandro González Iñárritu has directed a film with three converging storylines. This ambitious smart-epic tries and fails to straddle the entire world and its problems, but if the separate yarns never click together properly, they unravel with a mounting sense of dread most horror movie-makers would kill to achieve. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett play American tourists whose Moroccan bus-trip goes horribly wrong; in Tokyo, a deaf-mute teenager reacts to the recent suicide of her mother with knickerless exhibitionism; in the absence of a baby-sitter in southern California, a Mexican nanny takes her two young blond Californian charges across the border to her son's wedding in Tijuana. This last storyline will have you biting your nails as misunderstandings, bad luck and sheer stupidity combine to nightmarish but all too plausible effect.
BABETTE'S FEAST (1987) Here's an Oscar-winning example of Le cinéma de cuisine – a film serving up such a mouth-watering array of tuck that you simply have to rush out to a restaurant as soon as the end credits start to roll. Stéphane Audran, Claude Chabrol's former muse, plays the mysterious French housekeeper whose flamboyant culinary skills blow wide apart the ascetic regime of the pious Jutland community of her employers. Written and directed by Gabriel Axel, who based his screenplay on a short story by the Danish writer Isak Dinesen. All I can say is yum, though the dish of baked songbirds, beaks and all, is maybe a little off-putting.
BABY, IT'S YOU (1982) Small but perfectly-formed slice of teen romance written and directed with his customary honesty and intelligence by John Sayles. It's set in 1960s New Jersey, where posh WASP schoolgirl Rosanna Arquette finds herself falling for Vincent Spano as a working-class streetkid whose ambition is to be the next Sinatra. I have a soft spot for this film, and only partly because I had to fly to New York to interview the cast and crew, and incidentally got to meet Madonna on the set of Desperately Seeking Susan. Ah, those were the days.
BABY MAMA (2008) Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impersonation was priceless, and her sitcom 30 Rock is sporadically amusing, so it's all the more disappointing that this comedy (written and directed by Michael McCullers) is not just unfunny, but hammers home its yummy mummy message so crassly that single women with no urge to procreate will find it reductive and insulting. Fey plays a successful thirtysomething career girl who feels an overwhelming need to have a baby and, finding she's practically infertile, pays poor white trash Amy Poehler to act as her surrogate womb, leading to lots of obvious odd couple humour when Fey invites Poehler to move in with her. There's a nice cameo from Sigourney Weaver (who should do comedy more often) as head of the surrogacy centre, and Steve Martin is barely recognisable as a New Agey businessman.
BACHELOR PARTY (1984) "Come on in! Drugs to the right, hookers to the left!" Tom Hanks wasn’t always a well-respected Oscar winner. In this rambunctious comedy, he plays a groom-to-be whose fiancée’s parents and ex think he’s a loser, even as his buddies are rustling up the stag party to end all stag parties, which involves a hotel suite full of excess alcohol, bare-breasted hookers and Max the Magical cocaine-sniffing Mule. Surprisingly rude, though Hanks is already showing his comic class amid the rollicking hi-jinx.
BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985) Time-travel, previously of interest only to science fiction fans, moved on to the mainstream menu with Robert Zemeckis' comic fantasy. Diminutive TV star Michael J Fox was an eleventh hour replacement for Eric Stoltz as young Marty McFly, who travels back to the 1950s in a DeLorean customised by mad scientist Christopher Lloyd, which not only leads to Oedipal complications with his future mother but places his own future existence in jeopardy. Can he convince his hopelessly nerdy father to ask his mom out on a date before he disappears entirely? And can he and the doc find a way of getting him back to 1985? A subplot involving middle-Eastern terrorists now seems a touch out of place in the meticulously worked-out plot, but compelling human interest turns this into an American sitcom version of The Terminator, stuffed full of delightful gags and taking full advantage of its small town setting to show how times have changed.
BACKBEAT (1993) Stuart Sutcliffe, sometimes known as "The Fifth Beatle", might have been better at painting than playing bass guitar, but it was he and his German girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr who were responsible for changing the Fab Four's look from Teddy Boy rockers to the loveable moptops of "Love Me Do". Iain Softley's film about what happened on that pre-Ringo trip to Hamburg is more than just a fascinating portrait of a band in embryo. Stephen Dorff and Sheryl Lee do well with the roles of Stu and Astrid, but it's Ian Hart's blistering portrayal of John Lennon, who you suspect fancies them both, that gives this unusual romantic triangle its considerable fizz.
BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, THE (1952, b/w) Kirk Douglas plays an Oscar-winning producer who’s planning a major comeback, so how come no-one wants to work with him? Lana Turner as the Actress, Dick Powell as the Writer and Barry Sullivan as the Director each have their reasons, and we learn about them in flashback in this irresistible slice of Hollywood-on-Hollywood directed by the ever-flamboyant Vincente Minnelli, with Kirk operating in first-class heel mode and Gloria Grahame on Oscar-winning form as Powell’s wife. My favourite bit is when Lana, clad in ballgown and furs, has a hysterical screaming fit at the wheel of her car.
BAD BOYS II (2003) I guess Michael Bay is an auteur, of sorts, since his films are full of recurring motifs. I’ve watched this one twice (twice! don’t ask me why) and still couldn’t tell you what the hell’s going on beyond Will Smith and Martin Lawrence being Miami cops. But who needs story when you’ve got big explosions, shattering glass, speeding cars, hurtling stuntmen, racist remarks (which are supposedly OK because the "heroes" are black), sexist remarks (they’re OK too, because the target audience is young, male and dumb) and a truckload of f-words substituting for genuine wit. In short, it’s the filmic equivalent of lobotomy, so it’s little wonder I have trouble recalling the finer details.
BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955) One-armed Spencer Tracy takes the train to a godforsaken desert town to present a medal to the Japanese-born father of the soldier who saved his life, only to find that the man was murdered during the war by "patriotic" townsfolk. Terrific modern western, stylishly directed by John Sturges and boasting a virtual Who's Who of menacing heavies including Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan and Ernest Borgnine. Keep your eyes peeled for the ahead-of-its-time moment when Tracy does one-armed kung-fu.
BAD EDUCATION (2004) He's the critic's darling, but I must confess I've found Pedro Almodóvar latterday films just the tiniest bit disappointing – fabulous visuals (the guy's a natural decorator), dazzling performances, but melodramatic stories that ultimately fail to cohere, and this multi-layered noir-esque imbroglio of murder and imposture is no exception, though there's so much to admire it seems ungrateful to complain that it doesn't quite come off. The dazzling performance here comes from Mexican hottie Gael García Bernal in a triple role. In one strand of the film, he presents an old boyhood pal with a short story in which a transsexual (also Bernal) blackmails the priest who sexually abused him as a boy. Bernal in drag is a formidable femme fatale, though he looks about as effeminate as a truck driver.
BAD GUY (2001) Compelling, haunting and (because of its dodgy sexual politics – be warned) rather disturbing Korean film written and directed by the talented Ki-duk Kim. A mute pimp engineers the downfall of a virginal student after she rejects his loutish advances by spitting in his face. She's framed for theft and ends up a prostitute, touting for trade from a window in the red-light district, while he watches through a two-way mirror. Naturally she falls in love with him (I told you it was dodgy). It’s a strange dance of dependence and desire, set in a world where women are hookers and men keep stabbing each other with pieces of broken glass. Sick male fantasy or slice of life? Either way, it’s another reminder that some of the world's most exciting cinema is currently coming out of Korea.
BAD LIEUTENANT (1992) Harvey Keitel gives what could well be a career-best performance in Abel Ferrara’s hardboiled study of a corrupt New York cop up to his eyeballs in drugs, debt and Catholic guilt. The case of a raped nun gives him one last shot at redemption, but not before the actor has bared himself, both metaphorically and figuratively, to our appalled gaze. Harvey with his kit off – not a pretty sight. And the scene with two girls in a car? Be warned, it’s the opposite of comfortable viewing.
BAD SANTA (2003) As far as Christmas films go, this one provides a refreshing antidote to the usual seasonal slop. Billy Bob Thornton plays a suicidal, misanthropic department store Santa who cusses, boozes, vomits, wets himself and sodomises shoppers in the changing room. He and his midget sidekick, who poses as an elf, also rob safes. The movie bottles out at the end, but Brett Kelly, as the gormless fat kid who triggers Santa's inevitable redemption, is so far from the usual cutesy Hollywood child star that you can't help but warm to him as he pesters Billy Bob with endless stupid questions about reindeer and the North Pole. Sensitive viewers beware: this movie features chain-smoking, non-stop f-words and graphic Santa abuse.
BAD SEED, THE (1956) Phooey to environment and upbringing – eight-year-old Rhoda (Oscar-nominated Patty McCormack) is descended from a multiple murderess, and blood will out! Maxwell Anderson's Broadway play about a homicidal child makes it to the screen with stage origins all too evident, but the results are entertaining enough in a kitsch sort of way as psycho-kid takes it out on little Claud, who won the coveted Gold Medal for Penmanship, and Leroy the retarded handyman. Warning: you may feel an irrestisitble urge to reenact the, "I hit him with my shoe!" scene in front of selected friends.
BAD TIMING (1980) Back in the 1970s, Nicolas Roeg could do no wrong. The British director's golden run of visually dazzling, provocative, grown-up films began with Performance and ended with this portrait of the doomed affair between Art Garfunkel (the lanky one from the singing duo) as an expat American shrink living in Vienna, and Theresa Russell, flashing her thighs as the free spirit on whom he gets unhealthily fixated. Harvey Keitel plays the cop whose interest in her subsequent overdose and Art's role in it goes beyond mere professional curiosity. In other hands, this would be a humdrum portrait of loved turned sour, but Roeg slices it up and rearranges it into a compelling collage of flashbacks, full-frontal bonking and in-your-face tracheotomy.
BADLANDS (1973) Mention the name Terence Malick to a film buff and it's liable to be greeted with the sort of awestruck reverence once reserved for Stanley Kubrick. His last couple of films have been patchy (his fans would disagree), but you won't get any argument from me about his debut, loosely based on the real-life Charles Starkweather case, which put both Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek on the map. Sheen's a James Dean lookalike garbage collector who murders Spacek's father before whisking her off on a cross-country killing spree across 1950s America, her breathless schoolgirl narration contrasting with the grim reality of their exploits. Just as influential as the film itself is the use of Carl Orff on the soundtrack; the music has since been recycled by everyone from Tony Scott to Gus Van Sant. Interesting to compare this to another killer-couple-on-the-run movie - Natural Born Killers, directed by Oliver Stone. Where Malick makes his points with subtle lyricism, Stone beats his to death with a sledgehammer.
BAISE-MOI (2000) This ultra-violent, sexually explicit variation on Thelma and Louise (the title translates as "Fuck Me") caused a bit of a scandal on its release, with French critics and film-makers hotly divided about its artistic worth. Former sex-shop assistant Virginie Despentes wrote the original novel, then teamed up with ex-porn actress Coralie Trinh to direct a couple of porn actresses in the story of two women who go on a rampage of sex and murder after one of them is gang-raped. In truth, it’s murkily filmed and not a lot of fun to watch, but is obviously a must-see for anyone who enjoys being shocked.
BALLETS RUSSES (2005) Even if you're not a ballet fan, be sure not to miss this fabulously entertaining documentary, which might almost have been called Ballet Wars. After the death of Diaghilev, his legacy ended up split between two different companies, which competed with each other over dancers and bookings as they toured America during and after World War Two. The archive footage is fascinating enough, but the best parts are the gossipy, colourful, anecdote-packed interviews with surviving dancers such as Tania Riabouchinska, Freddy Franklin or George Zoritch, who looks fitter than many men half his age. Like Buena Vista Social Club, this is one hell of an advertisement for old age; these octogenarians or nonagenarians are so spry you'll start asking yourself whether you're too old to start taking ballet lessons, since it's obviously the secret of eternal youth.
BAMBA, LA (1986) Poor old Ritchie Valens was one of the singers who had to settle for second billing in the 1959 obituary columns when the plane he was sharing with Buddy Holly crashed, but he was American’s first big Hispanic pop star, and this is the story of his meteoric rise from the poverty-stricken barrio. Lou Diamond Philips plays him as a squeaky-clean teen saint, but the all-round biopic blandness and hotblooded Hispanic clichés are given a shot in the arm by the insidiously catchy title number and a lively soundtrack featuring spot-on cover versions by Los Lobos.
BAMBOOZLED (2000) A black TV executive (Damon Wayans) tries to take a dig at his white boss by proposing a satirical minstrel show (Mantan) but is taken aback when it becomes a smash hit in Spike Lee's sloppy, angry polemic against racial stereotyping. As so often with this writer-director, it's not so much a movie, more a sermon with mouthpieces instead of characters, but there's some brilliant tapdancing, a few droll conceits (including an ad for "Timmi Hillnigger" sportswear) and enough passion to hammer the points home, even if Lee doesn't always seem sure what they are.
BAND WAGON, THE (1953) Glorious backstage musical, directed in typically flamboyant style by Vincente Minnelli , in which an Olivier-style actor-manager (Jack Buchanan camping it up something rotten) tries to turn Fred Astaire's comeback show into a pretentious version of Faust. There's no shortage of jokes about Fred being a "has-been", though of course he's anything but, as he goes on to prove in song and dance numbers such as "A Shine on Your Shoes" and the amazing "Girl Hunt" ballet, a film noir pastiche in which Cyd Charisse demonstrates once again that her legs reach up to her armpits.
BANGER SISTERS, THE (2002) Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn play ex-groupies, once dubbed "The Banger Sisters" by Frank Zappa, no less. Sarandon's new life of respectable domesticity is disrupted when her old chum Hawn, still a rollicking rock-chick, turns up on her doorstep to borrow money and ends up reintroducing a touch of joie de vivre into her humdrum existence. The two stars are great, but you can't help wishing the film had dug past the cheery sitcom surface into their sleazy past.
BANGKOK DANGEROUS (2000) Fans of The Eye might like to check out this earlier effort from the same film-making team, Danny and Oxide Pang, which may be a bit lacking in the substance department but makes up for it with lashings of ultra-cool Asiatic style - neon, nightclubs and Thai boxing alternating with splattery murder scenes. The plot's that hokey old chestnut about a hitherto ruthless hitman who loses his edge and develops a conscience when he falls in love - this time with a pharmacist's assistant. Here the killer's deaf and dumb, which at least ensures that zappy visuals take precedence over dialogue.
BANGKOK DANGEROUS (2008) Hong Kong-born twin brothers Danny and Oxide Pang give their own 1999 Thai thriller a Hollywood makeover, which mostly means adjusting the plot to accommodate Nicolas Cage as an international hitman with Severus Snape hair-do and voice-over so monotonously world-weary it's almost parodic. This miserable old codger arrives in Bangkok to execute the proverbial "one last job" and, breaking all his self-imposed rules, forms a bond with a local thief, makes lugubrious eyes at a deaf-mute girl and communes with some baby elephants in between shooting targets between the eyes. This is all so po-faced and déjà-vu (we've already seen similar scenarios in everything from Léon to Ghost Dog) it becomes almost funny, especially as Cage is one of those actors who takes himself so seriously you can't help but giggle.
BANGKOK HAUNTED (2001) Trio of ghostly tales, third of which is directed by Oxide Pang, one half of the team that brought you The Eye. Though this isn’t remotely in the same super-scary league and the narrative lacks coherence (why should being knocked down by a car turn you into an axe-murderer?), aficionados of the Asian supernatural might like to check it out for the occasional chill and the exotic setting. The first story’s about a haunted drum, the second about a lethal aphrodisiac (extracted from corpses) that makes its victims vomit pea-soup and the third’s about a young cop who becomes obsessed with a young woman found hanging in a warehouse.
BANK JOB, THE (2008) Jason Statham and his gang of small-time criminals get more than they bargain for when they rob a vault of safety deposit boxes and stumble across potentially scandalous documents implicating MPs, top coppers and Princess Margaret. Director Roger Donaldson keeps the action ticking over nicely in this entertaining heist movie in the tradition of The Italian Job; Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais' screenplay was inspired by a real robbery that took place in 1971. Saffron Burrows, as Statham's ex, knows more than she's letting on, and David Suchet is scary as a gang boss who'll stop at nothing (including Tarantino-esque torture) to get back an incriminating ledger. The tone veers from knockabout comedy to hardboiled thriller, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and the 1970s details are spot-on.
BARBARELLA (1968) Forget Hanoi Hannah, the fitness videos and the Oscar-winning serious acting in Klute; Jane Fonda’s finest hour was her weightless striptease as the sexy sci-fi comic-strip heroine from the 41st century. Director Roger Vadim takes it at a pace designed more to showcase his then wife’s charms than to hustle the narrative along, but what at the time looked a bit tacky has now evolved into classic sixties kitsch, complete with Anita Pallenberg as an evil intergalactic lesbian ("Hello, pretty-pretty!"), a spooky flesh-eating doll attack and Milo O’Shea as the villainous Durand Durand (the name was appropriated - and misspelled - by the 1980s pop group) whose orgasm machine is comprehensively out-orgasmed by the heroine’s libido.
BARBARIAN INVASIONS, THE (2003) Seventeen years after The Decline of the American Empire, Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand assembles the same characters (played by the same actors) at the bedside of one of their number, a history professor dying of cancer in a Montreal hospital, while the sick man's son enlists the help of a junkie to score pain-relieving heroin. What sounds like one of the most depressing films ever made turns out to be an optimistic, sometimes cynical but frequently droll study of the Big Themes - Life, Death and Françoise Hardy. Admittedly there's rather a lot of dialogue, but you really would have to be a barbarian to find it boring.
BAREFOOT CONTESSA, THE (1954) "What she's got you can't spell!" This would-be exposé of Hollywood mores takes itself far too seriously, but Ava Gardner at her sexiest, Jack Cardiff's magnificent colour photography and some classic one-liners from writer-director Joseph L Mankiewicz make it a trashy treat for fans of campy melodrama. Humphrey Bogart plays the cynical film director who recalls in flashback the lonely life of the Spanish dancer whom he moulded into a star, only to have to watch her waltz off with a preposterous Italian count (Rossano Brazzi unmanned by his tragic "war wound") and die in dodgy circumstances.
BAREFOOT IN THE PARK (1967) Jane Fonda and Robert Redford play newly-weds discovering married life isn't all honeymoon in this cute film version of Neil Simon's first smash-hit. Redford (yet to strike it big with 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) reprises his performance from the Broadway production, as does Mildred Natwick as Fonda's game-for-anything mother. I daresay it's a sign of the times that I was more taken by Jane's wardrobe and their compact but charming W10th Street apartment (fifth floor, no elevator, hole in skylight) than by their theatrical repartee - she's a free spirit, he's a stuffed shirt lawyer, the neighbours are eccentric. As a comic dispatch from a more innocent era, it slips down like Babycham - sparkling, though maybe a touch too sweet for modern tastes.
BARRY LYNDON (1975) If you’re one of the misguided millions who think Stanley Kubrick is a film-making genius, you’ll adore his adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel about the rise and fall of an 18th century Irish rogue (Ryan O’Neal) who deserts from the army and marries a wealthy English countess. Every frame is an exquisite feast for the eye, but it’s the very opposite of a rollicking yarn, with Michael Horden’s endless voice-over narration filling the yawning void left by the director’s utter lack of interest in his characters. Some of the music (I think it’s Handel) was used in the running-through-walls jeans advert. (ETA: I do need to take another look at this, preferably on an enormous screen. I reserve the right to change my mind.)
BART GOT A ROOM (2008) Steven Kaplan plays a nerdy Florida high-school student whose plans to ask a hottie - any hottie - to the prom go horribly wrong, but it's hard to root for him when he so wilfully insults his best gal-pal, played by Arrested Development's Ali Shawcat, by refusing even to consider inviting her. A classy supporting cast (William H Macy as Kaplan's dad, Curb Your Enthusiasm's Cheryl Hines as his mom) leads you to expect more than Brian Hecker's writing-directing debut delivers, and the would-be Graduate-style larks seem laborious and superannuated, not helped by a soundtrack that leans more heavily towards Louis Prima and Tommy Dorsey than to anything contemporary. The Florida light, colour schemes and framing make for some lovely compositions, though I'm not sure that's enough to recommend it.
BARTON FINK (1991) John Turturro, sporting an extraordinary Eraserhead hair-do, plays a self-important East Coast playwright who's summoned to 1940s Hollywood to script a Wallace Beery wrestling picture in this weird and wonderful allegory from the Coen brothers. He ends up suffering from writer's block in the world's creepiest hotel, his only links with the outside world being John Goodman as the sweaty insurance salesman in the adjacent room and Judy Davis, the notorious Billson impersonator, as the "secretary" of an alcoholic writer not a million miles from William Faulkner. It would be a shame to spoil it for you by giving away too much of the plot; suffice to say it takes a twisty route into total nightmare territory.
BASIC (2003) John McTiernan (Die Hard) directed this slick thriller which stars John Travolta and Connie Nielsen as military investigators trying to find out what happened to Sergeant Samuel L Jackson and his trainees, all but two of whom are missing-presumed-dead in the Panamanian jungle. Who killed whom? And who gives a fig? You certainly won’t once the film has finished slapping you in the face with red herrings, but I was much taken by Nielsen’s military-chic haircut.
BASIC INSTINCT (1992) Mad Dutch director Paul Verhoeven and his screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas, concocted this shamefully enjoyable piece of misogynous trash in which all the female characters are bisexual homicidal maniacs. Michael Douglas plays the cop who becomes sexually obsessed with his number one murder suspect. And who can blame him when she's played by Sharon Stone, whose portrayal of Catherine Tramell, the bestselling novelist with PhDs in literature, psychology and ice-pick wielding, provided us with the ultimate bad-girl role model for the 1990s. As Grace Kelly's knickerless evil id, she transforms the screenplay's sleazy macho posturing into an unparalleled display of fem-dom firepower. And Douglas' idea of suitable attire for a San Francisco disco is a grotty V-neck jumper! But this is a guy whose idea of lovemaking is to mash his partner against the wall and rip off her knickers before hurling her head-down on the sofa, so what do you expect? The one time someone ripped my knickers I insisted on a full set of Christian Dior silk lingerie as compensation. Men, let that be a lesson to you.
BASIC INSTINCT 2 (2006) Critics were so busy sneering and cattily remarking that Sharon Stone hadn't aged well (give the woman a break - she's 48 and looks fine) most of them forgot to point out that this sequel to Paul Verhoeven's prime slice of glossy trash is so preposterously entertaining it could almost be a send-up of the "erotic thriller" genre. In the director's chair this time is competent but uninspired Michael Caton-Jones, and it's as though a Hollywood femme fatale has landed at Heathrow by mistake and found herself trapped in an X-rated episode of Morse. Sharon struts around in backless catsuits or draped in dead animals, having orgasms all over the place and snarling aggressively sexy one-liners, while Brit character actors like David Morrissey (shrink with office in the Gherkin) and David Thewlis (cop) try manfully to appear obsessed by this clearly deranged trollop. Stan Collymore drowns in a Ferrari before the opening credits have finished rolling, Charlotte Rampling gives Shazza a lesson in older-woman allure and London tries hard to look as glam as San Francisco did in the original film. But just ends up looking faintly tacky.
BATMAN (1966) Biff! Ker-plop! For years it was trendy to sneer at the camp 1960s version of Bob Kane's crime-fighting superhero, but after unsmiling Christian Bale, it's now almost a relief to watch a Batman movie that doesn't take itself seriously. Adam West displays a fine sense of self-deprecating humour as he and earnest Robin (Burt Ward) battle a quartet of supervillains plotting to dehydrate the United World Security Council. Lee Meriwether's Catwoman may not as purr-fect as Newmar or Kitt in the TV show, but Cesar Romero as The Joker, Burgess Meredith as The Penguin and Frank Gorshin as The Riddler are memorable grotesques and arguably rather more disturbing than their later, more po-faced incarnations. The action's cheesy, but the dialogue is very funny and Nelson Riddle's theme tune is, of course, the business.
BATMAN (1989) Tim Burton must be the weirdest film director ever to have had a blockbuster hit. Action scenes are not really his forte, but his version of Bob Kane's comic-strip is a world away from the camp 1960s TV series and altogether too kinky to be classed as a family film. Michael Keaton is pretty good as the tormented millionaire who moonlights as a vigilante hero who dresses in skintight black rubber, Kim Basinger squeals a lot as the reporter Vicki Vale, and Michael Gough is the perfect British butler, but they and everyone else are upstaged by Jack Nicholson as the cackling Joker, and even Jacko is upstaged by Anton Furst's brooding Gothic production design.
BATMAN BEGINS (2005) Christopher Nolan's reboot restored the dignity of DC Comics' caped crusader after the camp debacle of Batman and Robin, though some might say he takes it too far in the other direction, injecting a lot of po-faced Sturm und Drang into what is essentially just a comic book yarn about a guy who dresses in a batsuit to fight crime. It's exciting vigilante action all the same, with Christian Bale unsmiling and ultra-buff as millionaire Bruce Wayne, who goes wandering off to the Himalayas to learn ninja tips from Liam Neeson before returning to Gotham to face assorted villains, creepiest of which is Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow. Michael Caine as Alfred the butler and Morgan Freeman as gadget genius Lucius Fox add gravitas, while Katie Holmes plays Bruce's childhood sweetheart, whose chief function is to get kidnapped.
BATMAN RETURNS (1992) Tim Burton's very dark Batman sequel is less a comic-book romp than a study of deranged sickos who get a kick out of dressing up in kinky costumes. Michael Keaton reprises his role as the millionaire with the batty alias, Danny De Vito is astonishingly vicious as the Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer is a revelation as the downtrodden secretary whose brain injury transforms her into Catwoman, a kick-boxing feminist in skin-tight black vinyl. But they're all upstaged by Christopher Walken, playing a corrupt businessman called Max Schreck, who even without a wacky alias manages to be weirder than all the others put together. Not so much a family film – more a pop-culture Götterdämmerung.
BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980) Spiffing sci-fi version of The Magnificent Seven, scripted by John Sayles and executive-produced by that genius of the low-budget rip-off, Roger Corman. Richard Thomas (aka John Boy from The Waltons) plays young Shad, who goes in search of intergalactic mercenaries to help save his home planet from evil John Saxon. Robert Vaughan reprises his role from the original western as a melancholy black-clad gunslinger; among the exotica fighting alongside him are a lizard man, five white clones and the voluptuous Sybil Danning as a space Valkyrie who gets to deliver the immortal line, "Have you never seen a Valkyrie go down?"
BATTLE OF ALGIERS, THE (1966) Nowadays Gillo Pontecorvo is better known for his stint as Director of the Venice Film Festival than as a film maker, but back in the 1960s he made this grim but gripping documentary-style drama about the Algerian struggle for independence against the French. It’s essential viewing for anyone wanting to know exactly how a urban guerilla system operates – a subject now more relevant to our daily lives than ever. Despite being an Algerian co-production it’s surprisingly balanced, neither glamorising the Algerians nor demonising their opponents, though the actor playing Colonel Mathieu is so good-looking and charismatic I found it tough maintaining an impeccably politically correct stance. But that’s Frenchmen for you.
BATTLE OF BRITAIN (1969) Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine and Ralph Richardson are among the famous names jostling for screen time in this all-star dramatisation of the battle above Blighty in 1940, but the real stars are the Spitfires and Messerschmitts in the spectacular aerial footage. The ground-based material is little more than filler of varying degrees of banality, such as the unintentionally hilarious marital spats between Christopher Plummer and Susannah York, but the planes, pyrotechnics and Goering's hissy fit when he sees when he sees what's left of his precious Luftwaffe more than make up for it.
BATTLE ROYALE (2000) Veteran Japanese director Kinji Fukasuku went out in style with a last completed film so controversial that irate Japanese politicians called for it to be banned. Never hampered by anything remotely resembling good taste, it's set in the near future when the authorities' response to a surge in delinquency is to dump classfuls of schoolchildren on a remote island, equip them with weapons and announce that the last one standing wins. The results, as petty classroom grudges escalate into murder, are extremely bloody, and If you want to see girls in school uniform going Sam Peckinpah on each other (and we're talking Wild Bunch rather than Convoy here), look no further. Cult director Takeshi Kitano plays a disgruntled teacher; Giuseppe Verdi provides the soundtrack. Exploitation cinema at its provocative best.
BATTLEFIELD EARTH (2000) Turkey alert! John Travolta’s career, revived so spectacularly by Pulp Fiction, all but sank again with this screamingly awful adaptation of a sci-fi novel by Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard, which the actor (like Tom Cruise, a keen Scientologist) co-produced. He also gives a thigh-slappingly ridiculous performance as the chief of the "Psychlos" – big-haired alien invaders who in the year 3000 stomp around in platform boots and use surviving humans as slave labour until, one day, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (earnestly played by Barry Pepper) decides to knit his fellow earthlings into a fighting unit. Could pass muster as a guilty pleasure, if you’re in a stupid enough mood.
BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925, b/w) No serious film buff can afford to ignore this seminal silent classic by Sergei Eisenstein, who pioneered many of the cinematic techniques (montage, superimposition etc) we nowadays take for granted. The story of sailors rebelling against the maggoty meat of Tzarist oppression was intended as Soviet propaganda rather than entertainment, and isn't nearly as much fun as the same director's Alexander Nevsky or Ivan the Terrible. But you absolutely must see - at least once in your life - the famous Odessa Steps Massacre, since parodied or referenced a zillion times, notably by Brian De Palma in The Untouchables.
BE COOL (2005) John Travolta reprises his role as Elmore Leonard's Chili Palmer in this laboured sequel to Get Shorty. Whereas the earlier film lampooned the film industry, here the former gangster tackles the music biz, with results that are only cool if you share the film-makers' view that Aerosmith is as rad as it gets; there's not a hint of irony when even the supposedly hip black characters go into raptures over Chili's "discovery", naff chanteuse Christina Milian. Amid the celebrity cameos and in-jokes, Uma Thurman, Harvey Keitel and Cedric the Entertainer all seem to be having more fun than we are, though the hyperactive Vince Vaughn has his moments, and The Rock is endearing as a bodyguard with acting ambitions.
BE KIND REWIND (2008) A little of Jack Black goes a long way, I find, but it's hard to resist the premise of this sloppy, whimsical film in which he inadvertently becomes magnetized and erases the contents of all the videos in his local rental store in a run-down New Jersey neighbourhood. To keep the business going, he and Mos Def use a camcorder to cobble together their own home-made versions of blockbuster hits like Ghostbusters, Robocop and Driving Miss Daisy. Of course, the customers can't get enough of their amateurish efforts, but copyright lawyers come a-calling. None of this makes much sense (when did you last see a VHS rental store?) but writer-director Michel Gondry seems more interested in the DIY film aesthetic than in narrative rigour. You have only to browse YouTube to see his principles in action.
BEACHES (1988) Garry Marshall might almost be an honorary woman, the way he directs chick-flicks that are so man-repelling they might almost be parodies of the genre. Two 11-year-old girls meet on a beach, and even though one's a Jewish show-off from the Bronx and the other's a blue-blooded WASP from San Francisco and they have nothing in common, they grow up to be bosom buddies Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey (already showing herself to be a pioneer in the use of collagen lip injections). Over the years, there are rows over boyfriends (including a young, slim John Heard), tears, hugs and - this isn't a spoiler, since the whole story is told in flashback - terminal disease. This contrived friendship didn't convince me for a second, but I've known grown women who blub fit to bust over it, so don't let me put you off.
BEAN (1997) Audiences around the world adore Mr Bean the way they adore, say, Charlie Chaplin, but it's a curious fact that I have yet to meet a Briton who didn't by far prefer Rowan Atkinson as Blackadder to the gurning malice of his rubber-faced man-child. In Bean's first feature-length outing, he's a London museum guard who travels to LA, where he's mistaken for an art scholar and sneezes phlegm all over Whistler's Mother, though it didn't so much make me laugh as feel acute anxiety on behalf of the poor curator (Peter McNicol) whose job and marriage are threatened by the ensuing shenanigans.
BEAST, THE (1975) This strange, disturbing story of a young American heiress who arrives at a French chateau and finds there's more to her fiancé than meets the eye was banned for years by the British censor, and you can see why. Brace yourselves for nudity, erect organs and bestiality in this hardcore fairytale by Walerian Borowczyk, who explores the erotic possibilities of everyday objects (roses, snails, bedposts) like no other director, though here he shows us a lot of very un-everyday objects as well, including a rampant bear-like beast who chases young women through the woods before having its way with them, accompanied by a lot of jaunty Scarlatti. Too classy and interesting to be dismissed as pornography, it's one of a kind, and definitely not for the prudish.
BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED, THE (2005) Hollywood is forever remaking French films, so it's nice to find the traffic going in the opposite direction as director and co-writer Jacques Audiard frenchifies a vicious old Harvey Keitel vehicle called Fingers to satisfying effect. Romain Duris demonstrates he's one of the most electrifying young actors in French cinema with his fidgety performance as a dodgy real estate worker who's torn between following in the footsteps of his scumbag father or emulating his dead mother, who was a classical pianist. He starts brushing up technique with a Chinese music teacher who doesn't speak a word of French. It's intense, edgy stuff, though not without humour, and Duris, looking slightly unwashed in his sleazy leather jacket, is sensational.
BEAU TRAVAIL (1999) There's a wisp of a story here about a Sergeant-Major whose unreasonable resentment of a good-looking new recruit gets him drummed out of the French Foreign Legion. But for the most part Claire Denis' extremely free adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd consists of scene after scene of shaven-headed young legionnaires flexing their muscles on assault courses, practising tai-chi, or ironing shirts against a stark but beautiful background of sunbleached desert or blue water, underscored by a soundtrack ranging from Benjamin Britten to Neil Young. I found this so mesmerising I recommended it to all my friends. And did they like it? Hell no, they were bored to tears.
BEAUTIFUL GIRLS (1996) Low-key but charming ensemble piece with a great cast. Timothy Hutton plays a pianist who returns to his snowy home town to think about getting a proper job and settling down with a nice girl. Matt Dillon and Michael Rapaport are the old school buddies who help him reflect on the vast difference between fantasy chicks (eg Uma Thurman) and real women (Mira Sorvino), but it's Natalie Portman who steals the show as a precocious 13-year-old with a crush on Hutton. Alas, it's the kind of sensitive film about guys baring their souls that real guys probably wouldn't want to touch with a barge-pole since there's not enough killing in it.
BEAUTIFUL MIND, A (2001) Oh dear. Cast an actor as someone with mental problems and he starts gurning like an idiot. Even Russell Crowe succumbs to twitchy mannerisms in the role of the mathematician John Nash, who battled paranoid schizophrenia to win the Nobel prize. Ron Howard's biopic, which neatly sidesteps such issues as the real-life Nash's homosexuality by suggesting the love of a good wife (Jennifer Connelly) is better than any medication, absurdly won the Oscar for Best Picture, though the appeal to Academy voters is clear - "serious" theme, leading character with a disability, heaps of sappy sentiment and so on. But it is entertaining, and there is a dynamite twist midway through.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1944, b/w) See La belle et la bête.
BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD DO AMERICA (1996) In their MTV spots, the sniggering spotty adolescents Beavis and Butthead rarely shifted off their living-room sofa, but in Mike Judge's full-length animated film they're forced to get up and go in search of their stolen television. When a dodgy character with the voice of Bruce Willis hires them to "do" his wife (voiced by Demi Moore) they naturally think "do" means having sex and willingly accept the assignment. On the subsequent jaunt from Las Vegas to Washington DC, they destroy the Hoover Dam, take peyote and meet President Clinton. (Ah, those were the days.) A little B & B goes a long way, but it's worth tuning in just to hear Englebert Humperdinck singing a song called "Lesbian Seagull" over the closing credits.
BECAUSE I SAID SO (2007) Normally I adore Diane Keaton, one of the few Hollywood actresses who've managed to age gracefully without reconfiguring her face into that of a clown in a wind tunnel, but she's unbearable in this tiresome romantic comedy populated by relentlessly chirpy women who you wish would take valium to calm themselves down. Keaton plays an interfering 59-year-old mother who tries to find a partner for her youngest daughter by placing a personal ad; she's a shrill caricature who gets into a tizzy over modern technology, falls over a lot (particularly when carrying large cream cakes) and has never had an orgasm - though you can be sure she'll be having one, very loudly, before the film is over. Daughter (played by corn-fed Mandy Moore) is torn between a dull architect (who, unbeknownst to her, has been hand-picked by mom) and an equally dull single-parent guitarist with conveniently eligible father. Cute canine reaction shots, ensemble singalongs and public declarations of affection add to the air of desperation.
BECOMING JANE (2007) What do you do when the market is already saturated with Pride and Prejudice adaptations? You apply the Elizabeth-Darcy principal to Jane Austen's own life in this somewhat reductive account of an early pash that supposedly supplied her with the emtional insight to be a genius. Anne Hathaway is too strikingly modern in the title role, though her English accent is acceptable; ubiquitous James McAvoy plays the object of her affection. Jane-ites will loathe it, but romance addicts suffering from P & P withdrawal symptoms ought to lap it up.
BEDAZZLED (1967) "Julie Andrews!" How can you resist Peter Cook as the Devil in red socks? Suicidal Wimpy chef Dudley Moore sells his soul for seven wishes in this Faustian romp set in swinging London and featuring the Post Office Tower, Barry Humphries as Envy and Raquel Welch in a crimson push-up bra as Lust. Dud tries to win Eleanor Bron (who's at her blue-stocking sexiest) by becoming a pop star, an intellectual, a bluebottle and so on, only to be tricked at every turn by Beelzebub's cunning. It's droll rather than laugh-out-loud funny, but a welcome reminder of how astonishingly good-looking both comedians were in their heyday. Not least of the film's pleasures are Moore's soundtrack and Cook's showstopping turn as Drimble Wedge and the Vegetation ("You fill me with inertia") on Top of the Pops.
BEDAZZLED (2000) Elizabeth Hurley plays the Devil as a jolly hockey-sticks school prefect in a skin-tight red catsuit in this remake of an old Peter Cook and Dudley Moore vehicle, a comic spin on the Faust legend. Brendan Fraser co-stars as a computer nerd to whom she grants seven wishes - but each wish goes horribly wrong. This is basically an episodic excuse for our Liz to flash her designer knickers while Fraser flexes his comic talents as a Colombian drug baron, a literary poseur or a brawny basketball player. In short, no-brain entertainment with two stars who are exceptionally easy on the eye.
BEDROOM WINDOW, THE (1987) Curtis Hanson, who would later hit the bullseye with LA Confidential, write and directed this crafty Hitchcockian thriller. Steve Guttenberg (remember him?) plays an average Joe who's been having an affair with his boss's wife (Isabelle Huppert, icily seductive) and pretends it was he who witnessed a violent assault that, in fact, she saw from his bedroom window while he was otherwise engaged in the bathroom. Naturally, things go horribly wrong and our man ends up a murder suspect. Elizabeth McGovern is adorable as the perky lass who's willing to dress up as a tart to bait the real killer. Hmm, let's just say plausibility comes unstuck in the home stretch.
BEDTIME STORIES (2008) Adam Sandler, whose humour has always been on the adolescent side, makes a Disney family film, where childish whimsy such as farting horses, booger monsters and a bug-eyed guinea-pig rubs up against realities such as work and divorce. He plays a hotel handyman obliged to babysit his nephew and niece; the yarns he spins to entertain them incorporate elements from his everyday life. Guy Pearce, who plays an unctious hotel undermanager, turns up in a mediaeval story as "Sir Buttkiss". Russell Brand is quite funny as a laid-back fellow worker; Courteney Cox plays Sandler's politically correct big sister, who forces her kids to eat wheatgerm; Sandler's pal Rob Schneider adds to his repertoire of dodgy ethnic impersonations as "Chief Running Mouth". It's messy, but pleasingly unpredictable.
BEE SEASON (2005) What starts off like a fictional variation on the documentary Spellbound unfolds as a drama about a Californian family falling apart at the seams. Richard Gere plays dad, who's so busy teaching the kabbala that he fails to notice his wife is a kleptomaniac burglar (well, she is played by Juliette Binoche, so I guess they had to give her something interesting to do) and his son is being seduced by a Hare Krishna houri. And when his 11-year-old daughter starts winning spelling bees by tuning out and "seeing" the correct orthography dancing around in front of her, dad's main interest is that he can train her to go into a kabbalistic trance. Which is a little creepy. Thank God for little Flora Cross, who practically carries this po-faced guff on her small shoulders. And we do learn how to spell words like "cotyledon".
BEETLE JUICE (1988) Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin play a nice young couple who die in a car accident and come back as ghosts, only to have to watch their beloved New England house being "done up" by ghastly New Yorkers and their gloomy Goth daughter (Winona Ryder). Tim Burton's second film is a wildly imaginative black comedy packed with elaborate visual gags, cheesy special effects and a bureaucratic afterlife staffed by suicides. Michael Keaton gives a career-best performance as the seedy "bio-exorcist" hired to help Davis and Baldwin drive the living intruders out of their new home. Despite the morbid subject matter, it's such good natured fun you'll almost end up wishing that you too were a ghost.
BEFORE I HANG (1940, b/w) Benevolent scientist Boris Karloff is sentenced to death for a mercy killing. While in prison, he manages to turn himself into a younger man thanks to his own invention of a plasma serum rejuvenation technique. Fortunately, he’s granted a pardon. Unfortunately, the blood with which he injected himself came out of a convicted murderer, and pretty soon Boris’s fingers are itching to wrap themselves around other people’s windpipes and squeeze. Luckily for us we have Botox, which means that nowadays we can avoid this sort of disastrous medical error.
BEFORE NIGHT FALLS (2000) Not so much a biopic, more a series of poetic scenes from the life, persecution and eventual death (by Aids) of the gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. It's shuffled into impressionistic if not always coherent shape by artist-turned-director Julian Schnabel (who did a similar job on the Afro-American painter Basquiat) but held together by a magnificent performance from sexy Spanish actor Javier Bardem. Johnny Depp has not one but two scene-stealing cameos - as a homophobic military man, and as a transvestite prisoner called Bon-Bon who smuggles Arenas's latest novel out of jail by hiding it in his rectum. Well, thank God it wasn't Proust.
BEFORE SUNRISE (1995) Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke meet cute on a trans-European train journey and agree to spend one night together in Vienna before he has to catch a plane in the morning. For the next 14 hours, they wander around the city, confessing their hopes and fears and laying bare their feelings with an honesty and realism that rom-coms achieve all too rarely, with the actors clearly exposing more of themselves than actors ususally do. There's a little light snogging, but Richard Linklater's beguiling crash-course in boy-girl relationships concentrates on emotion rather than physical desire, and incidentally offers a fabulous tourist's eye view of Austria's capital. This could well be one of the most romantic films ever made, but you'll need to slow your pulse-rate down to strolling speed in order to appreciate it.
BEFORE SUNSET (2004) Richard Linklater's follow-up to Before Sunrise could well be the most welcome sequel ever. Back in 1995 we left Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, strangers who struck up a fleeting but intense rapport in Vienna, agreeing to meet up in six months' time. Only now, ten years later, do we learn that he turned up at the rendez-vous, she didn't. He has since transformed their encounter into a roman à clef, she turns up at his signing session in a Parisian bookshop and before you can say Shakespeare & Son they're off again, yakking away as they stroll around the Left Bank (though unaccountably managing to pop into an 11th arrondissement café), baring their souls with a candour that leaves you unsure where the characters stop and the actors begin. Yes, it's a gabfest, but not without narrative tension. Can they drop their defences before he has to leave to catch his flight back to New York? Will she finally sing that song she's been threatening to sing? Will Delpy, Hawke and their director, Richard Linklater, drop the ball? The answer is no: anyone who has ever been in love will recognise this bittersweet two-hander as one of the most honest romances ever committed to celluloid. Two people in love in the City of Light, and dialogue straight from the heart - that's all you really need, isn't it?
BEGUILED, THE (1971) Wounded Yankee soldier Clint Eastwood discovers to his cost that taking refuge in a girls' boarding school during the Civil War is a very bad idea. Don Siegel directed this very weird and frankly rather unnerving Gothic Western.
BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999) Mere words can only begin to describe the barking mad debut from the director (Spike Jonze) and writer (Charlies Kaufman) of the recently released Adaptation. John Cusack plays a disgruntled street puppeteer who gets a job in an office (with a ceiling so low that everyone working there has to stoop) where he discovers a secret portal enabling those who pass through it to occupy the mind of the actor John Malkovich for 15 minutes. His wife (Cameron Diaz in a fright wig) uses her sessions in Malky's body to embark on a lesbian affair with Cusack's co-worker (Catherine Keener, cool as ice). Then things start to get complicated. If weird isn't your cup of tea, you're advised to steer clear, but Jonzes' masterstroke is to film all this so matter-of-factly that you accept it. What's more, you'll never look at John Malkovich in quite the same way again.
BEING JULIA (2004) Annette Bening chews the scenery in this adaptation of a Somerset Maugham story, set just before WW2, which could well be retitled Being Bening as she's playing a middle-aged actress. She throws actressy tantrums, has an affair with a chap half her age and – in a coup de théatre we're evidently meant to find admirable though it comes across as rather cruel - publicly humiliates the starlet who's been sleeping with her husband. Bening talks affected English; Juliet Stevenson talks working-class as her devoted servant. Istvàn Szabó directs in time-honoured House of Elliott-style - flouncy frocks, vintage cars and luvvies being luvverly.
BEING THERE (1979) As Forrest Gump and certain politicians have demonstrated, there’s nothing America likes better than a half-witted hero. Here’s another fable about a holy innocent, adapted from Jerzy Kosinski’s novel about a simple-minded gardener (Peter Sellers) who winds up the toast of Capitol Hill, where his bland horticultural comments ("There will be growth in the spring") are interpreted as profound observations. The film’s as skin-deep as its central character, but worth seeing for Sellers’ last decent performance, and there’s nice support from Melvyn Douglas and Shirley MacLaine as the couple who take him under their wing.
BELIEVER, THE (2001) The directing debut of screenwriter Henry Bean (Internal Affairs) is a grim polemic-laden study, allegedly based on a true story, of a young Jewish New Yorker so terminally confused that he grows up to be an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi who plants bombs in synagogues. Any sort of ideological fanaticism involving bombs is always a raw subject, though for all Ryan Gosling's excellence (and, let's face it, yumminess) in the central role, the character never really comes to life, and the film's most effective moments reside in uneasy everyday confrontations such as the one in which a gang of skinheads orders pork in a kosher restaurant.
BELLE ET LA BÊTE, LA (1946, b/w) Who needs computerised special effects when you've got the poetic imagination of Jean Cocteau? His film of Beauty and the Beast is pure magic and - like all the best fairytales - just a little bit spooky. Josette Day is the classically lovely Belle, whose father's ill-advised rose-plucking consigns her to the Beast's castle, an enchanted labyrinth of smoke-breathing statues and disembodied arms. As the Beast, Jean Marais gives such a noble, tragic performance beneath his fanged teddy-bear make-up that it's hard not to sympathise with Greta Garbo who, when she saw his final transformation into a handsome fairytale prince in frilly breeches, is said to have sighed, "Give me back my Beast".
BELLES OF ST TRINIAN'S, THE (1954, b/w) First and best of five films based on Ronald Searle's cartoons about the type of girls' school that would undoubtedly be struck off today's league tables; the pupils are delinquent nymphets played by busty actresses in gymslips, the staff drunken reprobates and the headmistress is a man in drag. Actually it's the great Alastair Sim in a double role as "Miss Frinton" and her brother, backed up by George Cole as "Flash Harry", Joyce Grenfell as WPC Ruby Gates and Beryl Reid as a dipso chemistry teacher. The usual suspects, in other words, and all the better for it.
BELLEVILLE RENDEZVOUS (2003) Don't miss this terrific animated feature co-produced by a clutch of French, Canadian and Belgian companies as well as our own BBC. The accent here, though, is definitely French, with a club-footed grandmother discovering her orphaned grandson's secret passion for cycling and nurturing his ambitions to enter the Tour de France. He and two other cyclists are kidnapped by the Mafia and end up enslaved in Belleville (a big city not a million miles from New York), and it's up to granny, her dog and les triplettes, three ex-vaudeville artistes who live on a diet of frogs, to come to the rescue. The result's an intoxicating mixture of old-style Parisian charm, black humour and a pleasing streak of melancholy.
BELOW (2002) This low-budget chiller set on an American submarine in World War Two never got a UK cinema release, probably because Ghost Ship had just flopped and it was decided audiences could take only so much supernatural-at-sea shenanigans. But anyone who likes ghost stories that favour atmosphere over special effects should check it out, since it's a creepy little number which exploits its claustrophobic setting to the full. Olivia Williams plays a British nurse who's one of only three survivors rescued from a torpedoed hospital ship by the USS Tigershark, after which gramophones start up by themselves and mirrors reflect things that aren't there. As if depth charges and mariners going stir-crazy six hundred feet beneath the ocean's surface weren't already enough. Genre specialist David Twohy directed and collaborated on the screenplay with Darren Aronofsky of Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler fame.
BENCHWARMERS, THE (2006) In this lowest-common-denominator comedy co-produced (though not starring) Adam Sandler, three of the geekiest actors in Hollywood (Rob Schneider, David Spade and Jon Heder) play losers who form a three-man baseball team to make up for having been bulied at school. Adults will have a hard time staying the course, but 12-year-old boys will probably appreciate the jokes about farting, puking and nose-picking, and there's a commendable anti-bullying theme. The hair-dos are quite amusing.
BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM (2002) Crowd-pleasing hit in the Billy Elliott mould about a Hounslow teenager (Parminder Nagra) whose dream of becoming a professional footballer is hampered by the attitude of her strict Punjabi family. Nice Sikh girls don't expose their legs, and they certainly don't kick balls. Keira Knightley (dubbed "sexiest tomboy beanpole on the planet" by one critic) makes an unfeasibly glamorous fellow footballer, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays the team coach and romantic interest. Our heroine's obstacles melt away with insulting ease, but a dash of Bollywood glitz jiffs up the formulaic plot.
BEND OF THE RIVER (1952) You can always rely on a western directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart, and this is one of their best. Stewart plays Glyn McLyntock, guiding a wagon-train of pioneers through the spectacular scenery of Oregon while trying to hide his dodgy past as a Missouri border raider. Arthur Kennedy plays another ex-outlaw whom Stewart saves from being hanged, and the two of them bond by fighting Indians together. But Kennedy has no truck with this redemption nonsense and tries to steal the settlers' provisions, forcing our hero to confront his dark side in a life or death struggle.
BEN-HUR (1959) Charlton Heston is at his mightiest in this grand epic in which his old boyhood chum Messala (Stephen Boyd) turns vicious and sentences him to life as a Roman galley slave. There is female romantic interest in William Wyler's blockbuster, and plenty of religious feeling as our awestruck hero witnesses the crucifixion, but the movie's real theme is male bonding gone sour. It all comes to a head in the justly celebrated chariot race, even scarier than the M25 in the rush hour. If you ask me, Messala really should have been shown the red card for that nasty business with the spiked wheels. Chariot race aside, my favourite bit is when Ben-Hur's girlfriend and her mother hide behind a rock and bleat, "We are lepers," a scene I myself have been known to perform rather well after a couple of sherries.
BEOWULF (2007) Ye ancient Anglo-Saxon poem gets a Hollywood makeover in Robert Zemeckis' action-packed fantasy epic. Ray Winstone is transformed by performance-capture technology (which makes the characters look like figures in a computer game) into a dashing Geat warrior with a six-pack, which he shows off when he strips naked to battle Grendel, the swamp creature who has been rending locals limb from limb. Screenwriters Neil Gaiman and Rogery Avary have inserted some intriguing twists into the narrative, with results that are cleverer than you might expect. You might not be able to spot Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovich, but you'll certainly recognise their voices, and there's no mistaking the actress playing Grendel's monstrous mother - it's none other than Angelina Jolie in gold body-paint and stilettos.
BESIEGED (1998) The delectable Thandie Newton plays a refugee from an African dictatorship who earns her keep as cleaning woman for a slightly batty English pianist (David Thewlis) living in a shabby-chic house right next to the Spanish Steps in Rome. Bernardo Bertolucci directed this virtual two-hander in which the Englishman expresses his unrequited love by selling off objets d'art to raise money for the one thing the woman desires - her husband's freedom. Not a lot of plot, then, but an accumulation of exquisite detail that, unusually, encourages us to indentify with the Third-World female rather than the Anglo-Saxon male. It's far from vintage Bertolucci, but not without its quiet pleasures.
BEST IN SHOW (2000) Christopher Guest wrote and directed this slight but endearing mock-doc about pedigree dog owners preparing for the Mayflower Kennel Club Show in Philadelphia, but like his other mock-docs (Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind), it’s really a team effort featuring the usual comic repertory company in improvisational mode. Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy play owners of a Norwich Terrier, indie queen Parker Posey plays a yuppie whose Weimeraner has been traumatised by seeing its owners in flagrante, and Guest himself plays a fly-fishing shop owner who’s started to look just like his bloodhound. The humour's broad and sometimes sloppy, but it's all good fun and even works up genuine tension in the final stages of the battle to carry off the blue ribbon.
BEST SELLER (1987) Smashing B-movie thriller (scripted by maverick film-maker Larry Cohen) which provides a showcase for two of Hollywood's great scene stealers. Brian Dennehy (watchful, bearlike) plays a burnt-out cop who writes fact-based crime novels on the side. James Woods (sleazy, amoral) plays a hitman who's willing to dish the dirt on a former employer in return for being written up as the hero of the exposé. This odd partnership never quite realises its full dramatic potential, but there's ample compensation in the hardboiled dialogue and never-a-dull-moment plot.
BETTY BLUE (1986) While Hollywood starlets are all quasi-anorexics with uniform noses and orthodontic alignment, French directors know it’s the peculiarities that count. Béatrice Dalle would never have been allowed out of the Hollywood starting-gate with those womanly curves and gappy teeth, but they’re what give her that je-ne-sais-quoi. It was Jean-Jacques Beineix’s free-wheeling love story that launched Dalle on to an unsuspecting public and she responded with a full-blooded portrait of amour fou: sticking forks into people, setting fire to buildings and getting naked with her lover (Jean-Hugues Anglade) as often as possible though, needless to say, it all ends in tears.
BETTY FISHER (1999) No shortage of great roles for women in Claude Miller’s dry but compelling adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s Tree of Hands (already filmed for British TV in 1988) transposed to Paris. Sandrine Kiberlain, one of those actresses who’s not particularly beautiful but whose minutely shifting expressions you could watch all day, plays a successful novelist whose young son dies in an accident. Her nutty mother (played by actress-turned-director Nicole Garcia) blithely kidnaps the son of a blowsy barmaid (Mathilde Seigner) as a "replacement", setting in motion a morally complex drama of contrasting lives, though the ending wraps it up a little too neatly.
BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA (2008) I won't hear a bad word against this daft live-action talking-pooch yarn from Disney, since a friend made me watch it when I was down in the dumps, and it cheered me up enormously. Drew Barrymore provides the voice of a pampered pedigree pet called Chloe, who, thanks to dogsitter carelessness, finds herself lost in deepest Mexico, land of evil dognappers and many a Hispanic stereotype. Chloe is spoilt rotten, but Barrymore lends her just the right amount of naïvete to make her tolerable, and I grew emotionally attached to the Alsatian (voiced by Andy Garcia) who escorts her on their incredible journey. (A CGI rat and iguana also tag along for the ride.) Highlight, for me, was when Chloe stumbles across an entire tribe of proud Chihuahuas, led by a dog with the larynx of Placido Domingo.
BEWITCHED (2005) Rom-com "expert" Nora Ephron directed and co-wrote this misguided homage-cum-remake, saddling it with a cumbersome plot about a Hollywood actor who inadvertently casts a real witch in his remake of the classic-but-not-terribly-funny TV show. Will Ferrell provides a few chucklesome moments as the egocentric thesp, but Nicole Kidman, all fey mannerism and breathy little-girl voice, is at her most slappable as his co-star, though she's not exactly helped by her character's having been conceived as a naïve ingenue who wants to give up spell-casting and be "normal" (yeah right, so she moves to LA). Next to this wilting ninny, the original Samantha seems like a radical feminist.
BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT (1956, b/w) In his last Hollywood movie, Fritz Lang proved yet again he was one of the most uncompromising directors who ever walked the earth. Dana Andrews plays a writer who decides to discredit the death penalty by getting himself arrested for a murder he didn't commit. Unfortunately, the scheme goes horribly wrong when the one man who can testify to his innocence is killed in a traffic accident that also destroys the exonerating evidence, leaving our hero trapped on Death Row. Joan Fontaine plays the fiancée who has to race against the clock to get her boyfriend off the hook. Nail-biting film noir with a zinger of an ending.
BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970) Twentieth Century Fox, belatedly trying to tap into the swinging 1960s zeitgeist, hired softcore porn auteur Russ Meyer, "King of the Nudies", to direct a sequel to Jacqueline Susann's showbiz exposé. The result (disowned by Susann) is an orgy of kinky sex and violence, psychedelic drugs and po-faced bad acting that flummoxed reviewers ("As funny as a burning orphanage," sniped Variety) but not aficionados of camp trash, who immediately clutched it to their collective bosom as a kitsch classic. Film critic Roger Ebert, who wrote the screenplay about an all-girl pop trio trying to make it big in Hollywood, claims the character of hermaphrodite rock tycoon Ronnie "Z-Man" Barzell, who at the film's climax goes on a murderous rampage, was presciently inspired by Phil Spector. With music from the Strawberry Alarm Clock and lashings of kitsch dialogue ("You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance!") that has since been sampled in everything from trendy techno albums to Austin Powers films. "This is my happening and it freaks me out!" Oh yes, indeed.
BICYCLE THIEVES (1948, b/w) Vittorio De Sica's celebrated slice of neo-realism is a fascinating glimpse of post-war Rome and packs a powerful emotional wallop. A man finds work sticking up posters around town, but disaster strikes when his bicycle is stolen, thus depriving him of the means of making a living. With his small son (one of the most peculiar-looking child actors you'll ever see), he combs the streets, but the authorities are indifferent to his plight, and even when he catches the thief, he's unable to prove the man's guilt. Frankly, I daren't watch this again – last time I saw it, I wept so much I thought my contact lenses would get washed away.
BIG (1988) Normally I would advise you to steer well clear of Hollywood movies involving the inner child, but this magical fable about a 12-year-old boy who wishes himself into a 35-year-old body stands head and shoulders above a rash of other body-swapping movies that came out at around the same time. That it works so well is almost entirely due to a faultless performance by Tom Hanks as the seeming adult whose childlike innocence wins him a high-powered job in a toy company and kindles romantic feelings in a stressed-out fellow executive played by the rather wonderful Elizabeth Perkins. When she arrives for a sleepover and he suggests "I get to be on top," he is, of course, referring to bunk-beds.
BIG BLUE, THE (1988) Luc Besson directed this rather adolescent cult movie, a visually splendid but emotionally shallow slice of cosmically macho waffle starring Jean Reno and Jean-Marc Barr as two free divers who roam the world's oceans, plunging to enormous depths without breathing apparatus, cavorting with dolphins and generally being taciturn and New Agey. Rosanne Arquette goes along for the ride, just to show there's nothing gay about their affectionate rivalry. I have met grown men who confessed to having wept at the ending. The fools.
BIG BOUNCE, THE (2003) I once spent a week in Hawaii and it was just like this film: gorgeous scenery and lots of attractive people ambling around, doing nothing in particular. This adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s first crime novel is so laid-back it’s almost asleep, but there are worse ways of passing 88 minutes than in the company of surfer dude and petty criminal Owen Wilson who gets a crush on the mistress of the local Mr Big (Gary Sinise) and starts fixing up chalets for Morgan Freeman. The only cloud on the horizon is ex-model Sara Foster, who was evidently cast as the femme fatale for her hot bod rather than for her acting chops.
BIG CLOCK, THE (1948, b/w) John Farrow (Mia's dad) directed this cracking noir thriller adapted from Kenneth Fearing's novel. Crime journalist Ray Milland, assigned to track down a mystery man implicated in the murder of his ex-boss's mistress, is the only person aware that he himself is the quarry. Can he slow down the hunt enough to prove his innocence? If the plot rings a bell, it's probably because it was recycled for the Kevin Costner thriller No Way Out, but even Gene Hackman in that version can't hold to a candle to Charles Laughton's masterclass in hammy genius as a megalomaniac publishing magnate. Laughton's wife, Elsa Lanchester, contributes a welcome cameo as a batty artist.
BIG COMBO, THE (1955, b/w) Punchy film noir directed by B-movie maestro Joseph H Lewis, and featuring more sex and violence (suggested rather than explicit, of course - look at that date) in its 89 minutes than most of today's thrillers laid end to end. Cornel Wilde plays Leonard Diamond, a cop obsessed with not just bringing down the local Mr Big (a superbly oily Richard Conte) but with stealing his posh totty (Jean Wallace), who's in kinky thrall to the slimeball. Memorable highlights include use of a hearing-aid as a torture device.
BIG EASY, THE (1987) Prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was usually typecast as a picturesque, morally relaxed city weaving a voodoo spell on the straitlaced sensibilities of outsiders. Such is the case in this colourful cop thriller directed by Jim McBride, whose promising career seems to have subsequently petered out. Ellen Barkin, decked out in strict hair and businesswoman wear, plays an uptight prosecutor investigating police corruption who falls for the raffish charms of local lieutenant Dennis Quaid even as she is horrified by his casual attitude to kickbacks. The thriller plot is no great shakes, but the corpse-count and exploding warehouses provide a lively backdrop to the developing romance between the two likeable leads, which culminates in one of the most disarming sex scenes ever. The Zydeco soundtrack is a bonus.
BIG FISH (2003) This shaggy dog story was hailed as a return to form for Tim Burton after Planet of the Apes, but I’m not convinced. It's a rambling shaggy-dog yarn in which sceptical Billy Crudup seeks the truth about his sick father's colourful past; Albert Finney is the twinkly old codger, Ewan McGregor plays him in flashbacks. Will Crudup discover that his dad's tall stories about witches, circus freaks and saintly women were inspired by real people? They're certainly not inspired by real emotions in this lazy, sentimental whimsy. It's as though Forrest Gump had been rewritten by John Irving, which is my idea of hell, though maybe not yours. It’s an awful long way from Mars Attacks!
BIG HEAT, THE (1953, b/w) Powerful film noir from the great Fritz Lang, with a gritty performance from Glenn Ford as Dave Bannion, an upright police sergeant investigating the suicide of a colleague. When a mobster’s attempt to kill him goes horribly wrong, Bannion’s war on crime turns into a remorseless personal vendetta. There’s a notorious scene in which Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee into the face of his girlfriend (the very wonderful Gloria Grahame). Maybe the violence doesn’t seem as shocking nowadays as it once did, but as always, Lang’s view of the world is so downbeat it makes most modern film-makers seem like sentimental wusses.
BIG KNIFE, THE (1955, b/w) Robert Aldrich's film of the stage play by Clifford Odets (whom I haven't been able to take seriously since he was guyed in the Coen brothers' Barton Fink) is a stagey piece of work which barely steps outside the Belair mansion of Charles Castle (Jack Palance), a film star who balks at signing a seven year contract which will mean the end of his artistic integrity. But the studio (headed by Rod Steiger doing an absurd Brando impersonation) is blackmailing him over an old hit-and-run offence. Ida Lupino's the wife who's threatening to leave unless he grows a pair; Shelley Winters does her doomed floosie act. Students of Hollywood on Hollywood will be fascinated by allusions to old scandals and personalities, but the film's finally sunk by clunky dialogue like, "I am the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope." Pfff.
BIG LEBOWSKI, THE (1998) Jeff Bridges breaks out the baggy shorts as Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski, a stoned hippy and bowling freak who inadvertently becomes embroiled in the kidnapping of a crippled millionaire's trophy wife in this shaggy-dog comedy. But the plot, which might almost be a Big Sleep for the slacker generation, is basically just an excuse for a droll drip-feed of cuss-laden dialogue and outrageous characters such as John Goodman's belligerent Nam veteran, John Turturro's purple-suited Mexican child molester and Julianne Moore as a feminist action-painter with a wacky accent. Bridges is wonderful, and there are many priceless moments, so I always feel a bit churlish for not liking this Coen brothers comedy more than I do. But the more the film goes on, the more I can hear the writer-directors sniggering behind the camera at their own cleverness. When they toss German nihilists into the mix, I finally lose patience.
BIG NIGHT (1996) Small but perfectly formed slice of low-budget foodie film-making co-written, co-produced and (with fellow actor Campbell Scott) co-directed by Stanley Tucci, who takes the leading role of Secondo, an Italian immigrant who with his brother Primo (Tony Shalhoub) has set up a restaurant in New Jersey during the 1950s. Business is bad and the brothers scrape together their last dollars to prepare a sumptuous feast in honour of a visiting celebrity, the singer Louis Prima. The culinary offerings, which include an entire glazed pig, may make your mouth water, but even more impressive is a wordless five-minute take in which Tucci prepares an omelette.
BIG NOTHING (2006) French-born Jean-Baptiste Andrea made a promising co-directing debut with the low-budget chiller Dead End but comes unstuck with this would-be black comic caper supposedly set in Oregon, but filmed in Vancouver, Wales and the Isle of Man. (Memo to directors: if Stanley Kubrick can't make the UK look like the US in Lolita or Eyes Wide Shut, then neither can you.) Friends alumnus David Schwimmer plays a struggling writer who drifts into blackmail on the pathetic pretext that he doesn't want his daughter having to make do with second-hand toys. He's surrounded mainly by British thesps pretending to be American, including Simon Pegg as the scheme's mastermind, and Alice Eve as a pushy girlfriend who wants in. Naturally, things go horribly wrong (corpses, serial killers, double-crossing) but since neither plot nor characters rings true, you're unlikely to care.
BIG PICTURE, THE (1989) The directing debut from Spinal Tap star Christopher Guest is a quirky but thoroughly likeable satire on Hollywood, starring Kevin Bacon as an idealistic film graduate whose cherished Ingmar Bergman-esque project is transformed into a crass teenpic before his very eyes. Nothing quite matches up to the opening with its hilarious pastiche of student films, but keep your eyes peeled for the ever-changing executive office decor, John Cleese as a fatherly bartender and Martin Short’s screamingly funny cameo as a camp agent.
BIG RED ONE, THE (1980) Young critics who blathered on about Saving Private Ryan being the best war movie ever made had obviously never seen Samuel Fuller's superb semi-autobiographical account of the picaresque adventures of Sergeant Lee Marvin and his special rifle squad in WW2, a project that took its writer-director 20 years to realise. The episodic structure takes in Panzer attacks in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily and the Normandy landings, but the soldiers also find time to deliver a baby and liberate a concentration camp. As one character puts it, "Surviving is the only glory in war," and Fuller should know – he was there.
BIG SLEEP, THE (1946, b/w) He says, "You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how you'd do over a stretch of ground," to which she replies, "A lot depends who's in the saddle." Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall trade risqué double entendres in Howard Hawks' fun film noir, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler. Marlowe (Bogart) has to find out who's blackmailing General Sternwood, gives the old man's nympho daughter the brush-off and chats up a comely bookshop assistant (Dorothy Malone). The plot has more holes than a pair of fishnets, and even Hawks couldn't work out who killed who, but you'll be enjoying it too much to care.
BIG STAN (2007) Rob Schneider is so unfunny he makes his pal Adam Sandler look like Buster Keaton; he has his fans, though if I'm anything to go by they don't so much laugh as gawp in disbelief at his unfunniness. In his directing debut, Schneider plays a puny conman sentenced to three years in jail. David Carradine (in one of 30 films he made in the two years prior to his death) gives him a crash course in martial arts so he can ward off rapists, resulting in our Rob turning the prison into a warm, fuzzy boys' club. Expect jokes about sphincters, masturbation and, especially, male rape (a recurring obsession in fratboy comedies), but also amusing performances from Carradine as the chainsmoking god of cool, M Emmet Walsh as a sleazy lawyer and House's Jennifer Morrison, almost unrecognisable as Schneider's wife Mindy.
BIG STEAL, THE (1949, b/w) Film noir characters are always heading for Mexico, only to be shot and killed before they get there, but this lighthearted variation on the genre is already set south of the border. Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer team up again with Daniel Mainwaring, writer of their classic Out of the Past, for a more playful romantic caper, pacily directed by Don Siegel. Mitchum (sexiest man in film history?) plays an army sergeant on the trail of a suitcase full of money, but that's just a fine old excuse for thrilling chases, witty romance and plenty of quips.
BIG TROUBLE (2002) This frenetic black farce, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld of Men in Black fame, was pulled from the 2001 release schedules when it was decided that jokes about poor airport security and bombs on planes probably wouldn't do down too well in the aftermath of 9/11. Tim Allen, Rene Russo and Stanley Tucci are among a sprawling cast of vaguely familiar faces in an imbroglio of hitmen, bored teens, unhappy spouses, tree-hugging hippies and stupid cops whose paths intersect one night in Miami, with hilarious results. Actually, it's one of those films where cast and crew seem to be having more fun than the audience, but smart plotting ensures there's never a dull moment.
BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986) John Carpenter cottoned on the appeal of kung-fu wire-work 13 years before The Matrix, and although the director's personal blend of magical martial arts and lunkhead cowboy antics falls apart in its later stages when everyone starts running around in tunnels, it's still good fun. Kurt Russell (the thinking woman's Action Man) has fun sending up his own beefcake image as a dumb trucker called Jack Burton who becomes embroiled in a Chinese gang war. Sex and the City's Kim Cattrall plays a green-eyed lady lawyer who's kidnapped by weather-controlling demons, while veteran Chinese-American actor James Hong does supervillain duties.
BIG WEDNESDAY (1978) Hollywood maverick John Milius directed this semi-autobiographical epic spanning the 1960s and early 1970s. Jan-Michael Vincent, Gary Busey and William Katt play a trio of Californian surfing dudes who watch the world change and lose touch with each another but are finally reunited in their quest for the perfect wave. Milius directs it as an absurdly overblown homage to heroic ideals, but oddly enough it hits the spot, and so it's lump-in-throat alert as the former golden boys stride out into the surf for their for one last date with The Great Swell of 1974.
BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956) Ahead-of-its-time melodrama, directed by cult favourite Nicholas Ray, about the perils of taking too much cortisone, with a barnstorming performance by James Mason as a mild-mannered schoolteacher and family man who undergoes a shocking personality change after he's prescribed the wonder drug for inflammation of the arteries. His perfect suburban American lifestyle doesn't seem so perfect any more, and before you know it, he's yelling, "We're dull! We're all dull!", attacking his wife (Barbara Bel Geddes) with a pair of scissors, and starts imagining he's Abraham and his son is Isaac. Uh-oh.
BILL AND TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY (1991) "How's it hanging, Death?" In this madly inventive sequel to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter reprise their roles as the Californian air-guitarist slackers whose distinctive teenspeak incorporates words like "egregious". Joss Ackland plays an evil dude from the future who sends robot doubles back through time to kill our heroes, after which their ghosts challenge the Grim Reaper to a game of Cluedo and end up in hell, where they're tormented by the Easter Bunny and an infernal gym sergeant who barks, "Get down and give me infinity!" It's all very educational; tune in to find out what a "full-on robot chubby" is.
BILLY ELLIOT (2000) So rare are genuine British crowd-pleasers that Stephen Daldry's film directing debut was inevitably overpraised when it came out, but it remains a heartwarming variation on the Full Monty formula, in which music and movement provide escape from the grim industrial north of England. It's set in County Durham during the 1984 miners' strike. Young Jamie Bell shows talent to burn as the 11 year-old who, much to his father's disgust, starts taking ballet lessons from Julie Walters. Bell is a real discovery, and his outbursts of foot-tapping frustration are exhilarating, but his dad softens up a little too easily, and I can't help thinking it would have been more fun if the film had followed him to the Royal Ballet School and shown his toffee-nosed classmates being beastly to him because of his humble origins. But maybe that's just because I'm a sucker for ballet school stories.
BIRD (1988) Clint Eastwood, always a big jazz fan, directed this impressionistic biopic about Charlie "Bird" Parker, who turned music on its head by inventing bebop, but who so abused his body with drink and drugs that the doctor at his deathbed assumed he was nearly twice as old as his 34 years. Forest Whitaker grabs this role of a lifetime and makes you believe he's actually playing the sax, while Diane Venora provides solid backup as one of the many women in his life. The film bops back and forth, just like the music, and that's the man himself on the soundtrack, though his backings have been redubbed.
BIRD ON A WIRE (1990) Ostensibly this is about Mel Gibson as an old hippie and Goldie Hawn as a high-powered lawyer who go on the run together, pursued by drug-dealers led by David Carradine. But really it's the battle of the buns! Mel gets two gratuitous shower scenes, plus an enormous great close-up of his naked rump, while Goldie (dressing like a typical high-powered lawyer) wears an off-the-shoulder frock with a skirt that wraps itself around her head at the slightest breeze. And while the two stars are busy flashing their gaskins at each other, Carradine is quietly stealing what's left of the movie.
BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, THE (1969) "Bring in the perverts!" After an excruciating performance as a street hustler opposite Frank Sinatra in The Detective, Tony Musante went to Europe to take the lead in Dario Argento's directing debut, a now-classic "giallo" (the Italian word for "yellow", used to denote a pulp detective yarn). Musante plays an American writer in Rome who witnesses an attempted murder, finds himself and his girlfriend (Suzy Kendall) at risk from a black-gloved serial killer and has the feeling he saw a vital clue, but can't quite put his finger on what it was... It's really just a slasher movie, but an exceptionally stylish one, enhanced by the director's inventive mise en scène, Vittorio Storaro's cool cinematography and Ennio Morricone's sinister la-la-la music.
BIRDS, THE (1963) An immaculately groomed Tippi Hedren arrives in the picturesque Californian coastal town of Bodega Bay, hoping to get it on with Rod Taylor, but instead gets her hair mussed by divebombing seagulls and a sadistic director at the top of his game. Alfred Hitchcock’s blueprint for the When Animals Attack genre is still a cut above the rest, and genuinely frightening in its refusal to provide easy explanations for its avian assaults on farmers, schoolchildren and – in the film’s pièce de resistance – a petrol station in the centre of town. Camille Paglia's BFI classic monograph on The Birds, is a hoot, by the way; recommended reading.
BITTER MOON (1992) Critics didn't care for this pitch-black comedy directed by Roman Polanski because they couldn't tell whether or not they were supposed to laugh. But the line between humour and horror has always been a fine one in Polanksi's work, so best just to go with the flow as Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott-Thomas, playing a repressed British couple celebrating their seventh wedding anniversary on a Mediterranean cruise, stray into the decadent orbit of a paraplegic American writer (Peter Coyote) and his pneumatic wife (pouting continental sexpuss Emmanuelle Seigner aka Mrs Polanski), and Coyote recounts in overripe flashback how romance gave way to cruelty and despair. I found it funny, but then I'm warped.
BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, THE (1932, b/w) Before Frank Capra went on to direct the populist American fairytales for which he is now best known, he made this sublime slice of pre-Hays Code exotica in which Barbara Stanwyck arrives in strife-torn Shanghai to marry an American missionary, but ends up the captive of General Yen, a Chinese warlord who has the hots for her, though she, of course, thinks he's a scary yellow savage. Don’t let the fact that he's played by a Swede, Nils Asther, put you off; this tackles such verboten subjects as miscegenation, racist assumptions and cultural imperialism, stirs in an extraordinary Freudian dream sequence and generally conjures an atmosphere of feverish eroticism a long way from It's a Wonderful Life. It made me cry a lot as well.
BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, THE (1972) In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's adaptation of his own stage play, the camera never ventures outside the title character's apartment, but the German film maker's unflinching view of human relations, his sense of Hollywood style and Michael Ballhaus' stunning cinematography make this a fascinating experience for viewers who can summon the requisite patience. The extraordinary Margit Carstensen, an actress so skinny she almost disappears when viewed from the side, plays the egotistical Petra, a lesbian fashion designer, who poses around in a lot of wigs and becomes obsessed an ambitious young model (Hanna Schygulla) while her downtrodden maidservant looks on mutely.
BLACK BOOK (2006) After a couple of Hollywood flops, Paul Verhoeven returned to his native Netherlands to co-write and direct this account of a Jewish chanteuse's hair-raising adventures during the German occupation of Holland. The result's a big, bold, glossy melodrama in traditional Hollywood style, though without any of the concomitant prudery. Carice van Houten, centre-stage in nearly every scene, is terrific as the daring and resourceful heroine, who joins the Dutch Resistance after her family is massacred and is assigned to seduce a high-ranking German officer played by Sebastian Koch (the playwright from The Lives of Others), a mission that requires her to dye her pubic hair so she can pass for a shiksa, conceal a microphone in her stocking-top and expose her breasts, frequently. There's also some nifty subversion of WW2 movie clichés - Resistance fighters are not always trustworthy, Dutch liberators can be just as sadistic as German occupiers, and one of the Nazis is such a nice guy you actually end up rooting for him.
BLACK CAT, WHITE CAT (1998) For me, the films of Emir Kustirica are the cinematic equivalent of having teeth pulled, but a lot of people disagree. The plot, such as it is, involves one gypsy gangster trying to swindle another gypsy gangster and marry off his vertically-challeneged sister to the other's son, but the overall impression is of two hours of Serbian gypsies firing handguns into the air on the banks of the Danube. Highlights include a singer who uses her buttocks to extract nails form a piece of wood, and a Serbian techno-thrash number called "Pitbull". Exuberant, I think, is the word.
BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974) The success of Halloween may have kick-started the slasher movie boom in 1978, but four years earlier this Canadian pic by Bob Clark, director of Porky's, had already established the cliché of the lurking killer's point of view represented by subjective camerawork. A houseful of sorority girls gets slaughtered by a maniac who announces his murderous intentions in obscene phone calls (warning! C-word alert!) to which the stupid bints listen open-mouthed instead of immediately hanging up. It's spare but tense, with some hilarious period hair-dos and spunky performances from Margot Kidder and Olivia Hussey. And like every other halfway-decent horror pic of the era, it has been the subject of a pointless remake.
BLACK DAHLIA, THE (2006) James Ellroy's fictional account of Los Angeles' most notorious unsolved murder case, that of an aspiring actress whose bisected corpse was discovered in 1947, should have been perfect material for Brian De Palma, but it's sunk by stupid casting. Of the principals, only Aaron Eckhart is convincing as one of two tough-guy cops obsessed by the mystery; as his partner, Josh Hartnett tries hard but is too boyish. Hilary Swank, as the femme fatale, looks like a schoolgirl modelling the contents of grandma's wardrobe, and Scarlett Johansson, as Eckhart's gal-pal, is just featherweight fluff. The plot never comes into focus, but compensations include De Palma's flair for showy set-pieces, an hysterically nutty performance from Fiona Shaw and a welcome glimpse of k.d. Lang crooning in a lesbian club. But it just goes to show how smart Curtis Hanson was in casting a couple of unknown antipodeans in L.A. Confidential.
BLACK DEATH (1992, tvm) There have been bigger budget killer virus movies, such as Outbreak, but hypochondriacs are liable to find this humble made-for-TV thriller much more disturbing, since it forgoes film star heroics, helicopter stunts and Dustin Hoffmann in favour of mounting paranoia and a race against time to find everyone who came within spluttering distance of the first casualty. Kate Jackson of Charlie's Angels plays the New York doctor who watches helplessly as her patients keel over and expire. And the moral is - hold your breath after anyone sneezes in your air space. I know I do.
BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001) Ridley Scott’s punishing recreation of "The Battle of Mogadishu" - in which survivors of a American helicopter crash in the strife-torn Somali capital have to hold out under fire from all sides - not only emphasises that war is hell, but is also a reminder that even the best-planned military action is chaos waiting to happen. It ditches most of the background context provided by its source material – the book by Mark Bowden – and reduces the Somalis (whose final body count was 50 times higher than that of the Americans) to a faceless mob, but you can’t really condemn it as jingoistic propaganda when the Americans take such a colossal thrashing. An ensemble cast of vaguely familiar faces – Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom – is largely indistinguishable under the blood and grime, though there’s no mistaking the unfeasibly cute Josh Hartnett.
BLACK KNIGHT (2001) In terms of brain-dead comedy, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything stupider than this variation of A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court. Martin Lawrence plays a worker in a mediaeval theme park who gets bumped on the head and wakes up in 14th century England, where he calls himself "Skywalker", introduces the castlefolk to Sly and the Family Stone and, naturally, leads a revolt against the tyrannical ruler. Brace yourself for all the usual gags about mediaeval hygiene and deflowering the king's daughter.
BLACK RAIN (1989) Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia play New York cops on the trail of an escaped Yakuza in this hyper-stylish east-meets-west thriller directed by Ridley Scott, but the real star of the film is the city of Osaka, where the Americans blunder around, pursuing their quarry through fish markets, pachinko parlours and kendo matches, watched by venerable Japanese star Ken Takakura as a bemused local detective. The screenplay's a little on the skimpy side (there was a writers' strike in the offing at the time), but see it for the neon, Garcia's leather jacket and a sequinned frock that turns bar hostess Kate Capshaw (aka Mrs Steven Spielberg) into a walking cleavage.
BLACK SHEEP (2006) There are few creatures more placid than sheep, which adds a semi-surreal streak of incongruity when they turn into bloodthirsty killers in Jonathan King's New Zealand horror-comedy in the tradition of early Peter Jackson splatter-fests such as Braindead. An animal rights activist is savaged by the mutated sheep's foetus he's just liberated from a lab, and all hell breaks loose on the farm where the mad brother of the ovinophobe hero is conducting genetic experiments. Sheep start biting humans, bitten humans turn into weresheep, an assembly of businessfolk is ripped to pieces and the hero has to disguise himself as a sheepskin car-seat cover. It's a one-joke movie, but its makers know their limits and the joke's a jolly good one. All you really need is a flock on the horizon, sinister music and... baaaaaa!
BLACK SNAKE MOAN (2006) The Deep South. When Christina Ricci's boyfriend goes off to be a soldier, she turns into a nymphomaniac. Godfearing Samuel L Jackson finds her bruised and bloodied after a near-rape; rather than call an ambulance, he decides to cure her by chaining her half-naked to a radiator in his shack. But will this help him get over his divorce and take up the blues guitar again? If you're aiming to make tasteless exploitation you might as well go the whole hog, but Craig Brewer (whose Hustle & Flow, about a pimp-turned-rapper, was a similiarly soft-centred yarn) keeps pulling his punches; any hint of sexual tension between the two leads is rigorously avoided, which effectively castrates the film. Ricci, though, goes for broke in the slutty writhing stakes.
BLACK SUNDAY (1977) Black September terrorists target the American Superbowl football game in Miami in this gripping thriller adapted from a pre-Hannibal Lecter novel by Thomas Harris. Bruce Dern plays an embittered Vietnam veteran and Goodyear blimp pilot who is planning to help the Palestinians, not forgetting Marthe Keller as the glam chick without which no Hollywood terrorist cell is complete. The good guys are led by Robert Shaw as an Israeli commando. But it's probably best not to worry about politics - just relish Dern's abiding nuttiness and director John Frankenheimer's flair for action set pieces.
BLACK WIDOW (1987) In real life, female serial killers look like Aileen Wuornos. In movies like this latterday flm noir, they look like Theresa Russell, a mistress of glamorous disguise who travels around America, marrying millionaires and then bumping them off, less for their money than out of pathological compulsion. Even more intriguing is Debra Winger as a dowdy federal agent on her trail, secretly hoping that some of her quarry's Jezebel magnetism will rub off on her. It's a smart set-up and the two actresses are terrific, but then everyone goes to Hawaii and the action gets bogged down in scenic scuba diving, swapping swimsuits and dallying with Eurotrash like Sami Frey. Ah well, nice try, and at least Conrad Hall's glossy cinematography is a pleasure to watch.
BLACK WATER (2007) This Australian nature-bites-back thriller is probably the cheapest of a recent spate of killer-crocodile movies, but makes the most of its rock-bottom budget by opting for the minimalist but effective and discomfortingly realistic Open Water approach. After a brisk 15-minute set-up, a guy, his girlfriend and her sister are attacked by the croc while they're on a fishing trip and spend the rest of the film marooned up a mangrove tree while the beast snaps at their heels or lurks, Jaws-like, in the deceptively tranquil-looking waters of the swamp. The characters behave credibly rather than action-movie heroically, and there's a nicely understated subtext that the croc is avenging relatives turned into handbags, but let's face it, 75 minutes is an awful long time for any film to be stuck up a tree.
BLACKBOARD JUNGLE (1955) Glenn Ford plays an English teacher trying to impose order on an inner-city classroom. Evan Hunter's book was based on his own teaching experiences, and it shows in Richard Brooks' film. Nowadays, of course, we would have to call this The Chalkboard Jungle, but other than that and the mildness of the slang (the worst word anyone uses is "stinking") I daresay many of today's teachers will find it all too familiar: insolence, racial slurs, knife fights. Anne Francis plays Ford's annoying wife in the sappy domestic scenes; Sidney Poitier plays his smartest pupil; Vic Morrow is the baddest of the bad boys whose rather endearing idea of robbery is to steal a newspaper truck and sell the newspapers. And the message is: don't even think of bringing your prized jazz record collection to school to show your class.
BLADE (1998) Violent, fast-paced and bloody Marvel comic-book entertainment. A buffed-up Wesley Snipes plays Blade, a half-vampire superhero who struts around in black leather dungarees, killing vampires. Stephen Dorff, as vampire villain Deacon Frost, makes up with attitude what he lacks in height, and does creative things with sunblock. Lots and lots of lopped-off vampire limbs, vampire kung-fu, exploding vampires and vampires vomiting up their skeletons as part of Stephen Dorff's evil ritual to summon the blood god Malibu (or something). Blade's real name, by the way, is Eric.
BLADE II (2002) It's Marvel Comics time again as Wesley Snipes reprises his role as the sword-wielding, leather-wearing, non-smiling suckhead-hunting superhero. In this sequel, set in Prague, he strikes an uneasy truce with his vampire opponents, who are being menaced by bald, veiny mutants whose faces split open to let out Alien-style blood-sucking proboscises. There's rather too much running around in tunnels, but Guillermo del Toro directs with verve, and there's enough vampire-fu, exploding vampires and swishy, squishy, crunchy, yucky sound effects to keep a ghoul happy.
BLADE OF FURY (1993) Cracking martial arts movie in which a humble kung-fu teacher and an idealistic man of letters team up in pursuit of political reform, only to be thwarted by a two-faced official and his cohorts. But we're not watching this for the plot - we're watching it for the superb fight sequences choreographed by Sammo Hung. It's the sort of movie in which characters can't move from A to B without half-a-dozen mid-air somersaults, gravity-defying wirework, lopped-off limbs and sheer balletic madness, all taken at the speed of light and topped off with some really zingy sword sound effects.
BLADE: TRINITY (2004) Third part of the comic-book trilogy stars Wesley Snipes as half-man, half-bloodsucker, all humourless vampire-scourge in gay-looking black leather. The film-makers compensate for Wes's lack of charm by giving him wisecracking sidekicks led by dishy Ryan Reynolds and buff Jessica Biel as Whistler's Daughter (such a pity it wasn't his mother), while the baddies include a vampire Pomeranium and Parker Posey, gloriously eccentric as a fanged fashion victim. Personally I never tire of seeing those vamps getting dusted, though the movie founders on what has to be the lamest Dracula ever committed to celluloid, more Bondi Beach lifeguard than king vampire.
BLADES OF GLORY (2007) Will Ferrell and Jon Heder (of Napoleon Dynamite fame) team up for this affectionate spoof of competitive ice-skating that, in my house at least, was voted best comedy of 2007. Ferrell ("skating's leather-clad Lothario") and Heder ("skating's little orphan awesome") are forced to pair up after having been banned for life from men's solo competition following an unseemly brawl during a medal ceremony. What could have been a one-joke movie develops into a glorious cocktail of gags both crass and sophisticated, insulting puns ("Cirque de So Lame"), overwrought TV commentary, richly drawn characters (there's heroic work from Craig T. Nelson as the duo's trainer, and droll turns from Will Arnett and Amy Poehler as Ferrell and Heder's chief rivals) and inspired choreography (watch out for the dreaded "Iron Lotus"). It's Ferrell's funniest film so far, and if I had my way it would have won a zillion Oscars.
BLAST FROM THE PAST (1999) Endearing if silly comedy about a sweet-natured young man (yummy Brendan Fraser) born and bred in the underground bunker where his parents (a cherishable double-act from Sissy Spacek and Christopher Walken) have spent the past 35 years in hiding from what they assumed was World War Three. Naturally, when he emerges into the late 1990s to seek provisions, he's a fish out of water, but his good manners and clean-cut looks act like catnip on groovy modern chick Alicia Silverstone. In short, he's every girl's dream date.
BLAZING SADDLES (1974) Wildly undisciplined but occasionally inspired western spoof directed by Mel Brooks between career highlights The Producers and Young Frankenstein. Cleavon Little plays the black sheriff who takes himself hostage and teams up with Gene Wilder as an alcoholic gunslinger called The Waco Kid. Madeline Kahn does a marvellous Marlene Dietrich impersonation as saloon singer Lili von Shtupp ("Is that a ten-gallon hat or are you just enjoying the show?"). Not forgetting the famous scene around the campfire as the cowboys demonstrate the inevitable consequences of a diet of baked beans.
BLIND BEAST (1969) Yasuzo Masumura's kinky and frankly rather disturbing erotic masterpiece, based on a story by Edogawa Rampo (a writer whose pseudonym is based on the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe) is your everyday story of sadomasochistic obsession filmed in a way that's far from ordinary. A blind sculptor kidnaps a beautiful model and imprisons her in a vast studio that's like something out of Salvador Dali's worst nightmare, with walls and floor covered by huge casts of ears, noses and female body parts. Gradually her resistance is broken down, the couple starts craving increasingly extreme sensation and anyone who has seen Ai no corrida will have a rough idea of what's coming. While the obsession here is the human body, it might just as well be alcohol, drugs or any other self-destructive dependancy given this startling non-realist treatment.
BLIND DATE (1987) What is it about drunks that makes their behaviour so tiresome in real life, yet so thigh-slappingly hilarious in the movies? Here’s a screwball farce that entirely consists of one drunk scene after another. Bruce Willis plays a rising young executive who takes gorgeous brown-haired Kim Basinger out on a date, only to realise - too late - that she careens wildly out of control under the influence of alcohol. Cue for wrecked careers, social embarrassment-a-go-go, and - since this is a Blake Edwards film - people falling fully-clothed into swimming-pools. Well, I found it funny.
BLIND FURY (1989) Rutger Hauer plays a vision-impaired Vietnam veteran whose blindness doesn't prevent him from using his samurai-type skills to rescue an obnoxious small boy from the Mob. Hauer's character is an Americanized version of Zatoichi, the blind swordsman from a 1960s Japanese film series, so there's lots of snicker-snacker action as well as a nice line in deadpan humour, as when Hauer shears off a villain's forelock with his blade and quips, "I also do circumcisions".
BLIND SHAFT (2003) If I were to recommend a documentary about Chinese coal-mining, you wouldn't be very keen, would you? Li Yang has hit upon an ingenious way of slipping this unappetising prospect past your defences; his film starts off like dreary social realism but rapidly turns into a crime movie when two itinerant miners kill a co-worker and blackmail the pit-bosses into giving them compensation. Their next fall guy, however, is only 16 years old, and one of the men begins to have doubts. Li treats his two murderous conmen with compassion, leavens his sociological observation with dry humour and the result, banned in his native China, tells you all you need to know about an industry in which the atrocious working conditions are rationalized with a reminder that, "China is short of everything but people."
BLINK (1994) There's nothing like a thriller with a barking mad premise, and this one's a doozy. Madeleine Stowe plays a blind fiddler whose cornea transplant gives her "retroactive hallucinations", which means she "sees" the face of a serial killer the day after the murder (and yes, and the other one's got bells on it). Aidan Quinn is the cop who's understandably sceptical about her usefulness as a witness, but they shout at each other so loudly you just know they'll end up in bed together. Stowe spends the rest of her time wandering around underground carparks, deserted subway stations and all those other places most of us try to avoid even when no-one is trying to kill us.
BLOOD BEAST TERROR, THE (1967) Moths put the fear of God into me because I'm afraid they'll eat holes in my pashmina, but I suppose it could be worse - they could be after my blood, like the monster in this entomological horror tale with a premise based on bonkers evolutionary theories similar to those in the 1997 film Mimic. Wanda Ventham plays the daughter of a Victorian scientist who is not what she seems. Actually she's a giant bloodsucking death's-head moth. And her father is trying to create a mate for her. But hurrah, Peter Cushing's on the case!
BLOOD DIAMOND (2006) The impressive Djimon Hounsou plays a fisherman who escapes from enforced labour in a diamond mine and attempts to reunite his family in this well-meaning political action-thriller about diamond smuggling, smartly directed by Edward Zwick, who pulls off some truly terrifying massacre scenes. But as ever in big budget Hollywood productions set in Africa, Caucasian audiences are not trusted to empathise with a black character, so Leonardo Di Caprio gets drafted in as a cocky diamond smuggler who develops a conscience. He seems barely old enough to be a rugged adventurer in the Bogart mould, but gives a typically committed performance; Jennifer Connelly provides female interest as a crusading reporter. An awareness that the body count seen here is based on real life sits uncomfortably with the scenes of derring-do, though I guess we should be thankful that a few million clueless Di Caprio fans who wouldn't normally know their Sierra Leone from their Sergio Leone will at least be getting a geography lesson.
BLOOD: THE LAST VAMPIRE (2009) This live action Hong Kong-Franco-Chinese co-production recycles a Japanese mythos already aired in manga, TV series and 48-minute anime. Despite the title, it's more about ninja demons than vampires, though Saya, who looks like a teenager but is really an ancient demon-killer, must drink blood to survive. She goes undercover at the high school of an American Airforce base and, natch, kills gazillions of demons. Chris Nahon, who directed the Jet Li vehicle Kiss of the Dragon, attacks the combat scenes with lots of herky-jerky editing and CGI blood. The story's fuzzy, not all of the multinational cast are at ease with the English dialogue and rules of engagement are never established, but Japanese school uniform fetishists may enjoy watching the heroine leaping around in her short skirt.
BLOOD WORK (2002) Once again Clint Eastwood directs himself, with minimal fuss and vanity, in an enjoyable crime thriller that acknowledges the advanced age and attendant vulnerabilities of its somewhat wrinkly protagonist. Here he's an FBI agent who has a heart attack in the film's opening scenes, undergoes a transplant, and two years later, bored by enforced retirement, starts getting chummy with the sister of his donor, whose unsolved murder he sets out to solve. The plot may well surprise fans of Michael Connelly, on whose novel it was based, since Brian Helgeland's screenplay takes major if not unwelcome liberties with the original story. Eastwood, as usual, eschews razzle-dazzle action in favour of character and likeable supporting turns from Anjelica Huston as his cardiologist and Jeff Daniels as a comic relief neighbour.
BLOW (2001) Johnny Depp’s hair so runs the gamut of awful 1970s and 1980s styles that this should have been called Blow Dry. It’s a biopic of nice guy George Jung, who starts off dabbling in pot and ends up introducing the west coast of America to cocaine. The rewards include a luxurious lifestyle, Penélope Cruz and, ultimately, a life sentence in jail. It’s a bit like the Goodfellas drugs montage stretched out to two hours, though fun to watch from a fashion point of view. Ironically, 30-year-old director Ted Demme died of a "cocaine-induced thrombotic heart attack" one year later. Let that be a lesson to you.
BLOW OUT (1981) Brian De Palma adds a dash of Antonioni to his usual Hitchcock homages in this cruel, clever thriller, one of his best. John Travolta plays a Phildelphia technician who's recording some "wild sound" for a schlocky exploitation pic when he accidentally stumbles across aural evidence that a Chappaquiddick-style car accident involving a politician was in fact murder. Nancy Allen (then the director's wife) plays a hooker who survives the accident and John Lithgow is suitably deranged as the right-wing psychopath on her trail.
BLOWN AWAY (1994) Jeff Bridges plays the symbolically named Jimmy Dove, hero of the Boston Bomb Disposal Squad, whose friends and relatives are getting blown up by Tommy Lee Jones as Ryan Gaerity, a barking mad Irish bomber ("You mean the IRA?" "No, he was too crazy for that.") Whenever Bridges sprints towards someone to warn them of an impending explosion, he goes into slo-mo and arrives too late. Expect plenty of thrills of the "red wire or blue wire?" variety, blarney accents, dodgy-looking Guinness, and a great scene in which Tommy Lee capers drunkenly to U2 as he constructs a bomb out of an old bicycle lamp and a couple of bottle tops.
BLOW-UP (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni's arty-farty inquiry into the nature of image and subjective reality is the quintessential swinging London movie. A young and heartbreakingly beautiful David Hemmings stars as a David Bailey-ish photographer who zooms around swinging London in his two-way-radio-equipped Rolls, canoodles with supermodels like gangly Veruschka (looking almost elephantine compared to today's anorexic twiglets) and finds he has inadvertently snapped a murder in the park. Or has he? But forget the plot (which will have you scratching your head anyway) and get a load of Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills as catfighting nymphets, a hilariously static pop music gig erupting into a riot and Vanessa Redgrave as the mystery chick who takes her top off in a bid to get her hands on the possibly incriminating negatives. The soundtrack, which includes Herbie Hancock and The Yardbirds, is incontestably groovy.
BLUE DAHLIA, THE (1946, b/w) Little Alan Ladd gets back from serving his country in the South Pacific to find his wife has been tarting around and killed their son in a drunk driving accident in this bleak film noir. When she gets herself murdered, he naturally becomes Suspect Number One and has to team up with Veronica Lake to prove his innocence. William Bendix is a gas as Ladd's amnesiac buddy, clutching his head and groaning each time he hears jazzy music. Raymond Chandler wrote the screenplay, but was forced by the studio to change the original ending, in which the guilty party turned out to be a war veteran. Which is not a spoiler, by the way.
BLUE JEAN COP (1988) Awful title (it was known in the US as Shakedown) for a not-bad slice of action-exploitation set on the mean streets and in the sleazy nightclubs and cinemas of New York City. There's a needlessly convoluted plot involving drug dealers and crooked cops, but it's all held together by relaxed, likeable performances from the two leads: Peter Weller as a Hendrix-loving attorney with terrible taste in ties, and Sam Elliott as his scruffy detective buddy.
BLUE MAX, THE (1966) Back when George Peppard was better known as a film star than as the leader of The A-Team, he starred in this World War One pic as an ambitious German pilot, a coldhearted sonofabitch who cares more about the number of planes he's shot down than the lives of his fellow fliers, leading to an interesting face-off between honest plebeian ruthlessness and hypocritical officer-class chivalry. The dogfights (featuring Tiger Moths disguised as German fighters) are beezer, the love scenes (featuring Ursula Undress, as we wags used to call her) amusing, and it's always a pleasure to see James Mason and Jeremy Kemp in German uniform. Nice Jerry Goldsmith score, too.
BLUE MURDER AT ST TRINIAN’S (1957) Long gone are the days when you could innocently depict schoolgirls as curvaceous sexpots busting out of their gymslips and flashing their stocking-tops (ETA I wrote this before the St Trinian's remake, which proved me wrong), but nostalgia freaks can get their fix of School Dinners hi-jinks with this British comedy caper from a bygone era. Flash Harry (George Cole, complete with cockney ponce's walk) hatches a scheme that looks suspiciously like pimping the girls to an Italian prince during a school trip to Europe, while Lionel Jeffries plays a jewel thief who escapes capture by dressing up as the headmistress. Not the best of the series, but there are sterling contributions from Joyce Grenfell as Sgt Ruby Gates and (all too briefly) the great Alastair Sim in drag.
BLUE STEEL (1990) A very different kind of chick-flick, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Jamie Lee Curtis in one of her best performances. She plays a rookie New York cop who is suspended after she shoots an armed robber, but no-one can find his gun at the scene. In fact, it’s been stolen by loony commodities broker Ron Silver, who starts dating the unwitting Curtis. She, poor lamb, thinks he’s a jolly nice eligible bachelor, when in fact he’s a psychotic murderer who goes on to make life hell for her and her loved ones. Yes, it’s tough being a woman in the NYPD.
BLUE VELVET (1986) Kyle MacLachlan plays Jeffrey, a clean-cut teen whose discovery of a severed ear lures him over to the dark side of Lumberton (a town obviously twinned with Twin Peaks), where he finds himself embroiled with Isabella Rossellini as a masochistic chanteuse in thrall to a psychopath. After the marvels of Mulholland Drive, this earlier David Lynch effort now seems kind of hokey with its stilted dialogue and self-consciously kinky sex. But Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth, a man who uses the f-word as naturally as the rest of us use a word like "the", is still the stuff of nightmares. The scene in which his weird pal Dean Stockwell mimes to Roy Orbison has to be one of the freakiest, most unsettling set-pieces ever filmed.
BLUES BROTHERS, THE (1980) "It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses. Hit it!" John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd reunite their old band in an effort to save the orphanage where they were raised. Director John Landis throws in everything but the kitchen sink and trashes most of Chicago in the process, but the best bits are cameo performances from R& B greats such as Elmore James and John Lee Hooker.
BOAT THAT ROCKED, THE (2009) The story of pirate radio could have made a terrific film, but writer-director Richard Curtis settles for the lazy option, with Kenneth Branagh heading the government meanies determined to stifle the rebel sound of rock 'n' roll issuing (legally) from a boat in the North Sea in 1966. Personable actors playing DJs (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rhys Ifans, Bill Nighy etc) are hobbled by witless dialogue and a flaccid storyline about a teenage boy searching for his dad. It's a hotchpotch of shoddy anachronism, sloppy montages set to a stream of golden oldies and cutaways to people listening to unfeasibly well-tuned transistors, all cobbled together with no sense of rhythm or structure. All the women are sluts and there's a character called Twatt, which as you can imagine makes for laughs aplenty.
BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1955, b/w) Jean-Pierre Melville’s first dip into the French underworld is as much an affectionate homage to Pigalle after dark as the story of an ageing gambler who plans to fund his retirement by robbing the casino at Deauville. Of course it all goes horribly wrong, as these things tend to do, but the director keeps it light as a souffle, never sinking into the existential gloom of some of his later pics, and Roger Duchesne is marvellously world-weary as the silver-haired, trenchcoat-wearing Bob, an old-fashioned gent to his fingertips. If only Pigalle were still like this, we'd all be there, drinking coffee and chain-smoking Gauloises alongside him. Unfortunately, it's now an overpriced sleaze-ridden dump.
BOBBY (2006) Emilio Estevez wrote and directed this ensemble piece about events leading up to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy at a Los Angeles hotel in 1968. But this is not so much JFK nor Nashville (and one can only dream of what Robert Altman would have done with such a set-up) as Airport '68, with an all-star cast enacting lame soap-opera scenarios in various parts of the hotel before the tragic denouement links them together in the film's final moments. William H Macy is the hotel manager, Sharon Stone is his wife, Demi Moore's an alcoholic lounge singer, Lindsay Lohan's marrying Elijah Wood so he won't have to go to Nam etc. For a while, the sheer starriness of the cast is its own diversion, but Estevez never rises above lazy nostalgia and soggy hero-worship, and the only character who really holds the interest is Freddy Rodriguez as a busboy.
BOBBY DEERFIELD (1977) Rather a guilty pleasure, this. Al Pacino plays an obsessive-compulsive Formula 1 racing champion who falls for free-spirited Florentine heiress Marthe Keller and finds himself loosening up, only to discover that she's suffering from one of those wasting diseases to which movie heroines are strangely prone. The European locations and multinational cast seem to have suckered director Sydney Pollack into thinking that he's making high art, but it's actually a prime slice of seventies kitsch, and none the worse for that.
BODY DOUBLE (1984) One of Brian De Palma’s most barking mad films merges the plots of Vertigo and Rear Window and then throws in death by pneumatic drill and a Frankie Goes to Hollywood number for good measure. The rather colourless Craig Wasson plays a claustrophobic actor who takes a housesitting job in the Hollywood Hills and starts peeking through a telescope at the woman doing a nightly striptease in the house opposite. Next thing you know, he’s witnessing her murder and being drawn ever deeper into an increasingly preposterous plot in which the most beguiling element is a perky porn actress, played by Melanie Griffith back in the days when she was young, gifted and frequently naked.
BODY HEAT (1981) "You're not too smart, are you? I like that in a man." Kathleen Turner makes a sensational screen debut as Matty Walker, the femme fatale who lures Ned Racine, a none-too-bright lawyer brilliantly played by William Hurt, into a tangled web of sex, murder, sex, money and yet more sex during a sweltering Florida heatwave. Lawrence Kasdan's first film as writer-director owes much to 1940s film noir, but ultimately carves out its own territory with razor-sharp plotting and the revelation of the extent of Matty's machinations. There's also superb back-up from Ted Danson as Ned's ballroom-dancing DA chum, and Mickey Rourke in an extended cameo as a helpful pyromaniac.
BODY OF EVIDENCE (1992) You can just imagine Madonna watching Basic Instinct and vowing to net herself a killer-blonde role just like Sharon Stone's. The result's this trashy erotic thriller that's so bad it's almost entertaining. Madge plays a bimbo-fatale in a beret who's accused of rogering her rich old boyfriend to death. Willem Dafoe is the defending lawyer who gets drawn into sadomasochistic games-playing with the Material Girl, but since most of Western civilisation has already seen pics of her naked, it's all a bit been there, done that. Most intriguing detail is that whereas Sharon famously went knickerless, Madonna wears the sort of big panties that wouldn't seem out of place on your granny.
BODY SHOTS (1999) Slick ensemble piece that follows the exploits of eight irredeemably shallow twentysomethings whose night on the town (Los Angeles) goes horribly wrong when an excess of liquor and casual rumpy-pumpy leads to date-rape. Or does it? The parties in question were so plastered they can't be sure. Despite all the lewd talk and frenzied partying this is a curiously puritanical affair (see what happens when you drink and wear skimpy designer clothes!), made palatable only by its line-up of hot young faces (and bodies) such as Amanda Peet and Ron Livingston.
BODY SNATCHER, THE (1945, b/w) Val Lewton, the RKO producer who encouraged his directors to concentrate on spooky atmosphere rather than men in monster suits, presided over this striking adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Burke and Hare story, conjuring a shadowy Edinburgh out of the usual rock-bottom B-movie budget. Boris Karloff plays the cabman who keeps Doctor Henry Daniell supplied with fresh corpses for his medical research, and the blood-curdling climax on a runaway coach has yet to be equalled.
BOILING POINT (1993) Remember when Wesley Snipes was the next Denzel Washington instead of a straight-to-video action star with a sense of humour bypass? This is one of those films that failed to shoot him into the big league, though it offers some welcome twists on the standard urban crime plot and a classy supporting cast that includes Viggo Mortensen. Wesley plays a Los Angeles cop whose partner gets killed on a funny money bust, but poor old Snipes gets wiped off the screen by Dennis Hopper, overacting as usual as the rather endearing conman whose henchman pulled the trigger.
BOLT (2008) Yet another dispatch form the Golden Age of Animation, this may not be a stone-cold classic like Up, but is a lively enough action-adventure which doesn't insult the intelligence of either children or adults. John Travolta provides the voice of the title character, a canine TV star who believes he actually does save his young mistress (voiced by Miley Cyrus) from villains on a weekly basis. Accidentally cast out into the real world, he has to make his way home from New York City to Hollywood with the help of a stray cat and a scene-stealing hamster. It's a diverting kiddy variation on comedies like Tropic Thunder and Galaxy Quest, in which actors find themselves in genuine life-or-death situations, with our mutt having to face the fact that he doesn't really possess powers such as heat vision or a super-bark.
BOMBON EL PERRO (2004) Man meets dog. Man loses dog. Man gets dog back and hardened film critic disolves into tears. Carlos Sorin's lovely film is set in Patagonia. The main character, an unemployed 52-year-old, is played by the guy who used to park the director's car, and there's something about his resigned yet ever hopeful face that gets you on his side from the very first scene, as he tries and fails to make a living selling knives. In return for a good deed, someone gives him a big white pedigree Dogo Argentino, and he finds there's money to be made from dog shows and hiring the pooch out for stud duties. More realist than Disney, more upbeat than Amores Perros – it's funny, simple and touching, though parents wondering if it's suitable for their children should be aware it contains scenes of doggy bonking.
BON VOYAGE (2003) The Nazi occupation is still a raw subject in France, but you’d never guess it from Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s frothy romp set in 1940, when panicked Parisians fled to the safe haven of Bordeaux. Topping a cast of thousands milling around meticulously detailed period trains and hotels are the unfeasibly wrinkle-free Isabelle Adjani as an actress who lets her childhood sweetheart take the rap for her own crime passionel; Gérard Depardieu as her latest lover; Virginie Ledoyen as a brainy student smuggling "heavy water" out of the country; and Peter Coyote as a slick German spy. Don’t go looking for tortured self-analysis; it’s a soufflé, palatable enough while it lasts.
BONE COLLECTOR, THE (1999) Serial-killer thriller in which the been-there-seen-that plot (murderer leaves clues all over New York, cops fail dismally to catch him) justifiably takes second place to its stars. Denzel Washington, always a class act, plays a paraplegic ex-detective who applies his brain to the problem, while squishy-lipped Angelina Jolie, apparently a graduate of the Calvin Klein Police Academy, acts as his eyes and ears at the crime scenes, where she's duly menaced by scary music and camera angles. The climax includes a smashing example of the loony killer rant that inevitably prefixes the final scuffle in films such as this.
BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, THE (1990) Tom Wolfe's New York novel really needed a mini-series to do justice to its sprawling dystopian vision, but although Brian De Palma's film version is botched, it's a fascinating turkey. Tom Hanks, then known as a lightweight comic actor, was a controversial choice to play Sherman McCoy, the Wall Street bond trader whose life unravels after he and his mistress (Melanie Griffith at her most irritating) take the wrong exit off the freeway and knock down a young black mugger. But it was a bad move to cast Bruce Willis as the alcoholic British journalist Peter Fallow (in fact the British bit was dropped altogether), and the film-makers are constantly trying to water down the novel's spleen. For the inside story about the production, read Julie Salamon's excellent The Devil's Candy.
BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967) Arthur Penn borrowed a few tricks from the French New Wave and dragged the Hollywood gangster movie into the 1960s with this groundbreaking blend of nostalgia, sexual dysfunction and slapstick comedy that veers into shocking violence at the drop of a dime. Unlike their real-life counterparts, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are unfeasibly glamorous as the outlaws who rob their way through the Deep South in Depression-era America, and there's a stonking great early performance from Gene Hackman as Clyde's brother Buck. I was too young to see the film when it came out but I still pestered my mum into buying me a Bonnie beret.
BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997) Paul Thomas Anderson's breakthrough movie is a brilliantly entertaining and surprisingly sweet-natured portrait of the American hardcore porn industry at the end of the 1970s. Mark Wahlberg (who wears a prosthetic willy in his one full-frontal scene) plays the dim but prodigiously endowed "Dirk Diggler" who becomes a hardcore superstar. Burt Reynolds is the "adult" film-maker who gives him his big break, and there are fantastic performances from Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle and John C Reilly as members of their surrogate family. Despite the sleazy subject it's a very moral film - Dirk snorts too much coke and gets too big for his boots, but sees the error of his ways in a nerve-frazzling episode featuring Alfred Molina as a crazed drug dealer. It’s easy to laugh at these people with their absurd dreams and ghastly taste in décor and clothes, but Anderson presents them with such affection it’s impossible not to care.
BOOT, DAS (1982) Creaking hulls? Sweaty close-ups of men with beards? Machines that go ping? It can only be a submarine movie, and this epic-length WW2 German U-boat saga, originally conceived as a TV mini-series, is one of the best, with the director, Wolfgang Petersen, milking his Steadicam travelling shots through the claustrophobic interiors for all they're worth. They may be Germans (though only one of them's an avowed Nazi) but it's impossible not to root for Jürgen Prochnow and his crew as they comb the stormy seas of the Northern Atlantic, looking for Allied freighters to sink. The rotters.
BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION KAZAKHSTAN (2006) I never cared for Ali G, but Sacha Baron Cohen's "mockumentary" about a Kazakh TV reporter's odyssey across America is one of the funniest, rudest films you'll ever see. When he's not grappling in the nude with his obese producer, or offending feminists, Jews and gypsies, or making jokes about rape or incest, he's innocently offering a baggie of excrement to a posh dinner party hostess, or declaring his support for America's "war of terror" at a redneck rodeo. Honestly, if you're not offended by something in this film, you must be dead. There's a slender narrative thread in Borat's quest to meet and marry former Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson, but this is mostly just a string of sketches in which unsuspecting Americans are given enough rope with which they can duly hang themselves by blithely expressing support for slavery or genocide. After about 40 minutes, the joke starts to wear thin, but Cohen's performance is formidable by any standards. Could he be the Peter Sellers de nos jours?
BORN ROMANTIC (2000) David Kane tries and fails to do a Richard Curtis in this messy British rom-com revolving around a salsa club and chock-full of lukewarm British acting talent. Liverpudlian guitarist David Morrissey tries to track down the girl he jilted (Jane Horrocks), bungling mugger Jimi Mistry is drawn to introverted Catherine McCormack and smoothie Craig Ferguson becomes infatuated with snooty Olivia Williams, who (not for the first time) is the only one who manages to emerge from a bad Brit-movie with dignity intact, though I did enjoy Sally Phillips' cameo as a mobile-phone addict. Pity the film wasn't about her.
BORN TO BE BAD (1950) Joan Fontaine, usually cast as a goody-goody, finally gets to unsheath her claws in this campy melodrama directed by Nicholas Ray. Joanie plays a simpering society girl called Christabel (the name alone should tip off poetry fans) who only pretends to be a goody-goody; actually she's a manipulative schemer who'll stop at nothing to steal the wealthy fiancé of the career woman who's been kind to her. Joan Leslie is good value in this secondary female role, Robert Ryan is the only guy who can see our anti-heroine for the two-faced bitch she is, and Mel Ferrer essays an early study in Hollywood gay.
BORN YESTERDAY (1950, b/w) Judy Holliday sets the standard by which all subsequent dumb blondes must be judged by recreating her Broadway triumph as Billie Dawn in George Cukor's film version of Garson Kanin's comedy. Broderick Crawford plays the junkyard tycoon (shades of Tony Soprano) who hires bespectacled William Holden to give his girlfriend an education, only to get more than he bargained for. Holliday's performance won an Oscar (and she was up against Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard and Bette Davis for All About Eve) but I've never really warmed to it - it's technically brilliant, but seems to me to lack soul.
BORROWERS, THE (1997) Ever wondered where your lost socks/pens/keys disappear to? Odds are they've been "borrowed" by the tiny people who live under the floorboards. Mary Norton's children's classic is brought to the screen in delightfully retro 1950s-style detail. Jim Broadbent and Celia Imrie play the weensy, ever-so-British Mr and Mrs Clock who, with their even weensier offspring, find themselves pitted against a full-size American property developer (John Goodman). But frankly, the plot takes second place to the ingenious costume and set designs, in which a single pea can feed a family of four and cup-hooks are pressed into service as moutanineering grapples.
BOSSU, LE (1998) Swashbuckling French actors in floppy shirts? Now this is my kind of film, the sort of costume romp that's a hundred times more thrilling than its English counterpart. Daniel Auteuil learns a secret sword-thrust from the dashing Duc de Nevers (Vincent Perez at his most endearing) and disguises himself as a lucky hunchback in a cunning plot to avenge his friend's death. Meanwhile, Fabrice Luchini gives a masterclass in the art of skulking as the Duc's treacherous cousin. The plot involves Woody Allen-style surrogate parenthood (ie you see no problem at all with shacking up with the girl you've raised from babyhood), stupendous swordfights and (this being a French film) gratuitous bosom-baring.
BOSTON STRANGLER, THE (1968) Tony Curtis gives a fearless performance as Albert DeSalvo, arrested in 1964 for the murder of 13 women, but the psychiatric diagnoses are baloney (the real DeSalvo was not schizophrenic) and it’s the first half of the film, before you get a good look at the murderer’s face, that makes this worth seeing. Director Richard Fleischer goes to town on the fancy split-screen effects as the cops, headed by George Kennedy and Henry Fonda, haul in every sleazeball they can find in a desperate attempt to catch the killer, and even summon the famous psychic Peter Hurkos to help out. The message? If a strange man offers to fix your plumbing, for heaven’s sake don’t let him in.
BOTTLE ROCKET (1996) Wes Anderson (of Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaums fame) made his feature directing debut with this offbeat comedy co-written with Owen Wilson, who also stars in it with his brother Luke. They play a couple of losers who embark upon a life of bungled crime: robbing Luke's parents' house and a bookstore before making a complete hash of a raid on a cold storage facility. ("Freeze!" shouts a cop as he corners one of the miscreants in a walk-in fridge.) In between they lie low in a motel, where Luke falls for a Paraguayan chambermaid. The narrative's so relaxed you'd be forgiven for nodding off, but it's worth staying awake for the quirky humour and a droll performance from James Caan as Owen's ex-boss.
BOTTLE SHOCK (2008) In 1976, at a blind tasting just outside Paris, two Californian wines beat their French rivals in a judgment that transformed the world of viniculture and paved the way for all those iffy Chardonnays now to be found on our supermarket shelves. This dramatisation of the historic event is rambling and unfocussed, hopping as it does between Paris, where English caviste Alan Rickman is snubbed by the snobby locals, and Napa Valley, where Bill Pullman's vineyard is struggling and his son (Star Trek's Chris Pine with tragic hippy haircut) has got a crush on an attractive new intern. But the scenes between Rickman and Dennis Farina, as a Chicago tough guy with a sensitive palette, are smashing; the scenery is pretty and if you fancy seeing French snobs taken down a few pegs, look no further.
BOUCHER, LE (1969) French director Claude Chabrol was at the peak of his powers when he directed this thriller about a killer on the loose in the sort of fabulous little French village that, killer or no killer, makes you want to spend your holidays quaffing wine and devouring saucisson, just like the characters. (There’s invariably a lot of grub in Chabrol’s films.) The director’s wife, the angular Stéphane Audran, plays the bottled-up schoolmistress who suspects her suitor, the local butcher, of being the guilty party. There’s a memorably horrible moment when a murder victim’s blood starts dripping on to a pupil's brioche at a school picnic.
BOUND (1996) Before The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers made their writing-directing debut with this pastiche film noir in which Gina Gershon plays a plumber (yeah, right) called Corky who falls for the tattooed cleavage and purple-lipsticked mouth of gangster's moll Jennifer Tilly. Joe Pantoliano (weaselly Ralph from The Sopranos) plays her boyfriend, and whoever wins the ensuing game of double-cross gets clean away with $2 million. The pacing is ponderous, the directing self-conscious and the lesbian love scenes look like cheesy FHM centre-spreads, but the actors are game and the film has its fair share of pimply male adolescent admirers.
BOURNE IDENTITY, THE (2002) Slick, hugely enjoyable action thriller, adapted from a Robert Ludlum novel, about an amnesiac CIA assassin (Matt Damon) trying to piece together his identity while being chased through Europe by police and non-amnesiac assassins. Run Lola Run's Franke Potente is several cuts above the usual female lead as a bewildered German boho who becomes our hero's only ally; she's likeable and attractive without being Hollywood glam and brings out Matt's non-hitman side (he dyes her hair for her, which is sweet). There are thrilling car chases, Matt using a Biro as a deadly weapon, a gloriously silly shootout in a Parisian stairwell punctuated by understandably outraged residents yelling, "Mais qu'est-ce qui se passe?" and a nicely understated turn from Clive Owen as a studious-looking hitman known as "The Professor".
BOURNE SUPREMACY, THE (2004) Thanks to crunchy directing from Paul Greengrass, hitherto best known for the gritty realism of Bloody Sunday, this sequel to The Bourne Identity is even more thrilling than its predecessor. Amnesiac ex-hitman Matt Damon is framed for an assassination and comes gunning for Joan Allen and the rest of the CIA desk-jockeys he holds responsible. In effect, the film is one long chase scene which hops from Berlin to Goa to Moscow, but the locations are brilliantly filmed, while a fight to the death in a suburban house and a car chase through chilly Moscow are killer-diller set-pieces with such in-your-face editing that sensitive viewers may be obliged to take a seasickness pill.
BOURNE ULTIMATUM, THE (2007) Once again, Matt Damon straps on the amnesiac hitman persona of Jason Bourne, the kind of bloke you'd like to have on your side in a crisis. Dodging CIA assassins at every turn, he globe-trots from London to Madrid to New York in the continuing quest to learn his true identity. Third film in the trilogy that makes other spy-thrillers look arthritic is one crunchy set-piece after another, most memorably a showdown in Waterloo Station and a chase through Tangier, culminating in an astonishingly vicious mano a mano in a tiny bathroom. Paul Greengrass again directs in docu-drama style with lots of shakicam, though the gritty realist approach is undermined each time Bourne emerges unscathed from a car crash that would have mangled a lesser being.
BOWFINGER (1998) Neither Steve Martin nor Eddie Murphy is as funny as they used to be, but this comedy is probably the closest they’ve come to recapturing some of their former glory. Martin (who wrote the screenplay) plays Bowfinger, a Grade-Z film-maker who, when action star Kit Ramsey (Murphy) refuses to act in his latest project, goes ahead and films him anyway, leading to laughs-a-plenty as the paranoid actor assumes the bad acting and special effects are part of an alien conspiracy. Murphy also plays the star’s stunt-double, a nerd so credulous that he’s prepares to scoot across a busy freeway in the mistaken belief the speeding cars are all manned by stuntmen.
BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE (2002) Fat slob Michael Moore tackles America's obsession with firearms, and the resulting award-winning documentary is every bit as infuriating, undisciplined, entertaining and thought-provoking as you'd expect (and a lot more focused than Fahrenheit 9/11). Highlights include Moore's baiting of a near-senile Charlton Heston (president of the NRA), goth-rocker Marilyn Manson as the Voice of Reason and the film-maker picketing Wal-Mart with a wheelchair-bound survivor of the Columbine High School massacre in a bid to make the store remove bullets from its shelves.
BRADY BUNCH MOVIE, THE (1995) Big screen spin-off of an old TV sitcom with a title that's become a watchword for American wholesomeness. Shelley Long and Gary Cole (both familiar TV faces) play Mom and Pop, two squeaky-clean single parents who unite their respective broods into one big bubbly family. The film's rather droll gimmick is to dump this quintessentially 1970s crew into the middle of 1990s Los Angeles, and watch the baffled reactions. "One bathroom for nine people – and I never did see a toilet," observes a bemused onlooker.
BRAINDEAD (1992) Before Heavenly Creatures and Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson was best known as the director of cheap and cheerful antipodean splatter movies that once had eminent critics storming out of the screening room mid-film, muttering "This is the end of civilisation as we know it" (true story). Mild-mannered Lionel's courtship of a lovely young Spanish shopkeeper gets sidetracked when his mother gets bitten by a Sumatran rat-monkey and turns into a putrescent flesh-eating zombie, with hilarious results. These include a rotting ear falling unremarked into a bowl of custard and getting eaten, and a climax, hot contender for title of Goriest Scene Ever Filmed, in which Lionel slices up two million or so zombies with a rotary-action lawnmower.
BRAINSTORM (1983) Douglas Trumbull, the man responsible for special photographic effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed this dotty sci-fi drama that manages to be both ahead of its time and agreeably old-fashioned. Louise Fletcher is brilliant as the chain-smoking scientist who develops a machine for recording emotions and then gets to record her own death by heart attack. Christopher Walker plays the assistant who becomes obsessed with reliving her last moments, while government lackeys are trying to hi-jack the project for nefarious purposes. Nathalie Wood, who plays Walken's wife, died in a mysterious drowning accident during filming, leaving their on-screen relationship a little threadbare, but the film's visualisation of love and death is delightfully kitsch.
BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA (1992) Can big-budget horror films with all-star casts and A-list directors ever be truly frightening? Not on the evidence of Francis Coppola's vampire movie, which splashes gallons of designer blood around but ends up more camp than scary. The stylised costumes and special effects may be extraordinary but they distance the viewer, while the depiction of the Count as a pining lover robs him of his force - he'd be more at home in an Anne Rice novel, or Mills & Boon. Everyone sneers at Keanu Reeves' absurd English accent, but it's no worse than the all-purpose mittel European diction of Gary Oldman's Drac or Anthony Hopkins' Van Helsing. The best performances come from Tom Waits as Renfield and (and it's not often you'll hear me say this) Sadie Frost as Lucy.
BRASSED OFF (1996) A film about a colliery brass band set in a Yorkshire mining community at the time of the 1992 pit closures may not sound promising, but Mark Herman's social-realist tragicomedy is more than equal to The Full Monty even if it never found the audiences it deserved. Instead of male strippers, it has Pete Postlethwaite as a bandleader dying of lung disease, Ewan MacGregor tootling on his cornet and Tara Fitzgerald managing to look comely even while playing the flugelhorn. Plus lots of lovely brass band music.
BRAVE ONE, THE (2007) Jodie Foster and her fiancé (Lost's Naveen Andrews, probably cast so we don't think she's being racist when she starts killing black guys later on) ill-advisedly walk their dog after dark in Central Park, where they get roughed up by nogoodniks; she wakes from a coma three weeks later to find he hasn't survived. Cue for Jodie to act traumatised, adopt the hoodie look and go out of her way to run into muggers and rapists she can gun them down in between getting chummy with the cop on the case (Terrence Howard, probably cast so we don't think she's being racist when she etc etc). Foster and her director, Neil Jordan, are not names you'd normally find attached to a Death Wish scenario; they try hard to make it meaningful, but it ends up being just another lunkhead vigilante movie with a few improbable twists.
BRAVEHEART (1995) Mel Gibson directs and stars in this rousing load of old tosh about the life, loves and ultimate disembowelling of 13th century Scottish freedom fighter Sir William Wallace. (Note to sensitive Scots: I’m not belittling Wallace - just the movie.) Historical accuracy isn’t on the agenda here – instead, we have blue woad war-paint (yee-haw!), the brave and noble Tartan Army lifting their kilts and baring their bottoms at the dastardly Sassenachs (whoo-hoo!) and the hint that all subsequent English royalty was a result of Mel playing hide the salami with the poofy king's hot French totty Sophie Marceau (whey-hey!). But the battle scenes are terrific, and Mel is living proof a bloke can wear a skirt without looking like Jean-Paul Gaultier.
BRAZIL (1985) A world bogged down in inept bureaucracy? Obsession with cosmetic surgery? Terrorist outrages? Torture and wrongful arrest a part of state policy? Terry Gilliam's vision of a surreal retro-fitted future now seems even more alarmingly prescient than 1984, with which it shares many similarities, though Orwell's futureworld was never this funny. But the humour only adds to the air of hopelessness as Jonathan Pryce attempts to correct a clerical error and gets sucked into an imbroglio of red tape and mistaken identity in which the only escape is romantic fantasy. It's all too close for comfort. Robert De Niro plays Harry Tuttle, a plumber-cum-terrorist who wears a cagoule so often that you can't help wondering how much of his role was performed by a stand-in. Amongst the glittering line-up of great British scene-stealers (Ian Holm, Ian Richardson et al), the stand-out is cuddly Michael Palin as a friendly torturer; though none of his handiwork is explicit, it still manages to be more disturbing than anything in Hostel.
BREACH (2007) Billy Ray, writer-director of Shattered Glass, tackles another real-life case of professional duplicity with this account of the worst breach in the history of US intelligence. Ryan Philippe plays a young FBI agent ordered to investigate the alleged sexual deviancy of embittered Soviet analyst Robert Hanssen, to whom he has been assigned as clerk. In fact, Hanssen's transgressions are far more serious - for 15 years this devout Catholic family man has been selling secrets to the Russians, leading to the deaths of several agents. It's a Donnie Brasco scenario of a younger man getting emotionally close to the mentor he knows he will have to betray. Despite the lack of crowd-pleasing physical action, it's gripping stuff - thanks to Chris Cooper's utterly mesmerising performance in the central role.
BREAKDOWN (1997) Kurt Russell, the thinking woman’s action man, and Kathleen Quinlan play a nice married couple whose road trip through the American South-west goes horribly wrong when their red Cherokee jeep does what it says on the tin, as it were, and breaks down in the middle of nowhere. When his wife disappears after hitching a lift, Russell has to run the gamut of inbred locals, ruthless yokels and and picturesque but unfamiliar terrain in a quest to find her. It’s a simple but gripping thriller in the tradition of Duel, with a plot that’s all too credible for we townies, who know only too well that life outside the urban comfort zone is just packed with such perils.
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO (2005) Sooner or later, every actor who wants to be taken seriously has to dress up as a woman. In Neil Jordan's adaptation of the novel by Patrick McCabe (author of The Butcher Boy, also filmed by Jordan) it's the turn of Cillian Murphy. He plays Patrick "Kitten" Braden (in the book he calls himself "Pussy"), a foundling tranvestite who ruffles feathers in a small Irish town in the early 1970s. It's not so much a narrative as a series of semi-whimsical vignettes, but what distinguishes it from other men-in-frock films is the turbulent background; Kitten refuses to take the Troubles seriously, but inadvertently gets caught up in IRA gun-running and bombings, even after travelling to England in search of his mother. I've always found Murphy's prettiness a bit sinister, but Kitten is so passive and faux-naif he becomes slightly tiresome. On the plus side, Bryan Ferry contributes a marvellously creepy cameo, and the soundtrack (this must surely be the only film ever to feature both "Wig Wam Bam" and "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep") is a caution.
BREAKING AND ENTERING (2006) Anthony Minghella's final theatrical feature before his untimely death was this disappointing drama which conveys little of the local colour or intoxicating social mix of its setting in London's King's Cross. Jude Law plays an architect whose newly established offices in the quartier are burgled by the teenage son of a Bosnian refugee played by Juliette Binoche. Jude ends up having an affair with her, probably because she's marginally more fun than his depressive Swedish wife (Robin Wright Penn) and anorexic, insomniac daughter. It's all very po-faced, contrived and dramatically inert - the characters never come alive, and neither does dialogue like, "I wish I could take your laughter and put it in a box."
BREAKING THE WAVES (1996) Don’t forget to take a seasickness pill before Lars Von Trier's intense tale of amour fou and religious martyrdom in the Scottish Highlands during the 1970s (cue for Deep Purple and Python Lee Jackson). The violent whip-pan camera movements take some getting used to, but if you're prepared to surrender to the experience they place you bang in the emotional heart of the drama, which is likely to exercise the tear ducts of all but the most determinedly cynical audiences. Emily Watson makes a stunning film debut as Bess, a simple-minded Scottish lass who marries an oil-rig worker (Stellan Skarsgård) and then, after he's paralysed in an accident, becomes convinced he'll only get better if she sleeps around. But who's that on a sinister-looking boat in the harbour? Uh-oh, it's Udo Kier.
BREAK-UP, THE (2006) If you go into this expecting the usual happy-ever-after rom-com formula you'll be disappointed, but Peyton Reed makes a fair fist of directing a reverse-romantic comedy in which Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn start off as an item but don't stroll off into the sunset together. In fact, "comedy" is probably the wrong word - this is more like emotional drama with a few droll moments. Jen and Vince play a couple who decide to split up but continue to share their swanky Chicago apartment, leading to acrimony, oneupmanship and doomed attempts to rekindle that missing spark. He becomes a sports-watching sofa-bound slob, she gets a "Telly Savalas" wax and strolls around in a state of 12A-rated undress. It's a brave stab, but all a bit depressing, as break-ups are wont to be, and reminds us why fans of the genre prefer their romance rose-tinted, as opposed to realistic.
BREATHLESS See À bout de souffle.
BREED, THE (2006) Lost's Michelle Rodriguez and a bunch of other actors on the wrong side of 30 pretend to be college kids stranded on an island with a pack of Alsatians posing as genetically engineered killer-dogs. No matter how much they growl and bare their fangs, they still look cute (and that's just the actors) failing dismally to generate even a tenth of the menace of that silent dog-in-the-river from No Country for Old Men.
BRICK (2005) We've had high-school versions of Shakespeare, De Laclos and Austen, so it was inevitable that, sooner or later, we'd get high-school Dashiell Hammett. The great thing about Rian Johnson's writing-directing debut is that he plays it straight; we're a long way from the cutesiness of Bugsy Malone. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Brendon, a bespectacled loner investigating the death of his ex-girlfriend; like Spade or Marlowe, he gets beaten and bloodied but refuses to buckle. The film noir archetypes - bruiser, femme fatale, Mr Big - mesh surprisingly well with the contempo California school setting; the dialogue's riddled with slang so archaic it ends up sounding fresh and hip. But it might have been little more than a mildly diverting exercise in style were it not for Gordon-Levitt, shaping up to be one of the finest actors of his generation, who hints at reserves of melancholy that are almost indecent in one so young.
BRICK LANE (2007) Indian actress Tannishtha Chatterjee plays a young Muslim woman sent from her native Bangladesh (which looks like a Kenzo perfume ad) to London's East End for an arranged marriage to a man twice her age. Sixteen years later, they have two daughters, Chatterjee embarks on an affair with a young garment worker, and fundamentalism and racial tension are on the rise after 9/11. There was a fair bit of controversy regarding the portrayal of London's Bangladeshi community in this adaptation of Monica Ali's Booker-nominated novel, but the results are bland, plodding and insight-free. I found it easier to empathise with the Candide-like, self-deluding husband than with the submissive heroine, who, in one of the few intriguing cultural touches, meekly trims her spouse's corns. Though she does wear some nice saris.
BRIDE AND PREJUDICE (2004) It's hard not to be swayed by the sheer exuberance of Gurinder Chadha's Bollywood take on Jane Austen. The story's relocated to Goa, London and Los Angeles, though I was too busy ogling the exquisite Bingleys - Lost's Naveen Andrews and Rome's Indira Varma - to pay much attention to the Elizabeth and Darcy equivalents.
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE (1935, b/w) Directed, like its predecessor, by eccentric genius James Whale, this tragicomic sequel takes up where the original Frankenstein left off, and even surpasses it in weirdness. Boris Karloff's creature is more poignant than ever as he tries to make friends but only succeeds in wreaking havoc. Ernest Thesiger joins the cast as nutty Dr Pretorius, camp as a row of tents with his collection of miniature people, who talks the Baron into rustling up a girlfriend for his lonely monster. Elsa Lanchester plays the shock-headed mate, but am I the only one to find her scarier as Mary Shelley in the film's witty literary prologue? Those eyes! Those teeth!
BRIDE WARS (2008) Chick-flicks sink to their absolute nadir (ETA: not so! I hated Mamma Mia! even more) with this contrived comedy which is also an ode to conspicuous consumption. Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway play best friends getting married on the same day - not to each other, unfortunately, though since their fiancés seem like afterthoughts it might as well have been. But each has set her heart on a wedding at New York's Plaza Hotel, and there's only one free slot. Cue for a film-long catfight which escalates into sabotage (a spray-on mishap at the tanning salon, blue streaks at the hairdresser's salon), product placement and tulle-clad tussling in the aisle. Both women are obnoxious idiots who would have solved all their problems with a double wedding, but chick-flick fixtures Kristen Johnston and Candice Bergen have some droll moments in supporting roles.
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED (2008) I must be one of the few in my generation who didn't see Granada's near-legendary 1980s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel, but I trust it was better than this stuffy slice of Eng Lit which ticks all the boxes of yawn-making heritage cinema. Everyone concerned (including Andrew Davies, who co-wrote the screenplay) seems overawed yet uninspired by the material, resulting in talky tedium which never takes flight in cinematic terms. The central trio all seem miscast: Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) falls in with fey Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) at Oxford and becomes obsessed with his swanky lifestyle, stately pile and sister (Hayley Atwell). Emma Thompson is fine as Lady Marchmain, but the only scenes that really come to life are those with Patrick Malahide, who's very funny as Ryder's dad.
BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, THE (1957) David Lean's wartime epic was adapted from a novel by Pierre Boulle, who also wrote the novel on which Planet of the Apes was based. Alec Guinness is determined to show his Japanese captors that Colonel Bogey-whistling British POWs are capable of building a better class of bridge. Meanwhile, William Holden and Trevor Howard are trekking through the Burmese jungle in order to blow it up. At times, the film almost tips over into being a satire on British phlegmatism, but there's no mistaking the sustained excitement of the climax, which has the British doctor (James Donald) shaking his head and muttering, "Madness! Madness!"
BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, THE (1995) Clint Eastwood gets in touch with his inner woman by directing and starring in this romantic weepie, adapted from (but reportedly much better than) Robert James Waller's bestseller. Meryl Streep plays a housewife left to her own devices in her isolated Iowa farmhouse for a few days in 1965 while husband and children attend an agricultural fair. Clint plays a peripatetic photographer who's driving around, snapping quaint covered bridges for National Geographic. They hit it off and have a passionate affair, leaving Meryl with an agonising decision. Eastwood wisely leaves most of the emoting to his co-star, who rises to the occasion, wears the hell out of those frumpy cotton frocks and makes a compelling transition from dutiful resignation to blooming sensuality. The only misstep is a clumsy framing device in which Meryl's grown-up children find out about the affair after her death, but this is trumped by the novelty of seeing two agreeably mature performers engaged in such tastefully shot nooky.
BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON (2004) It's neither funny nor clever, but it is that rare bird – a rom-com in which the female protagonist has "wobbly bits". All hail to Texas-born Renée Zellweger and her perfect Brit accent as - plump, pink and accident-prone - she fails to sabotage her own romantic idyll despite jealous outbursts, inferiority complex and a cringe-making stint in a Thai jail, where she teaches the native hookers how to singalonga Madonna. With Hugh Grant and Colin Firth once again playing caricatures of Mr Naughty and Mr Nice, and Britain's best comediennes (Shirley Henderson, Sally Phillips, Jessica Stevenson) relegated to the sidelines as Bridget's chums, it's left to Zellweger to retain the interest, fearlessly letting it all hang out in the world's most unflattering wardrobe as the antithesis of the sort of soignée stick-insects who pass for women in Hollywood these days.
BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY (2001) This adaptation of Helen Fielding's zeitgeist-capturing novel was one of 2001's more agreeable surprises, thanks to a fearless central performance from American actress Renée Zellweger, who put on weight and acquired a credible English accent to play the thirtysomething "singleton". The character constantly teeters on the edge of being a pain in the neck but just avoids actually being one, though her klutzy romantic adventures, in which she finds herself forced to choose between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth - as if - are stuck firmly in fantasyland.
BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945, b/w) David Lean's peerless Great British love story, directed with a precision and economy that were inevitably sacrificed when he moved on to sprawling epics, is set against a background of those long-gone days when the trains ran on time, Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard point their stiff upper lips at each other quite beautifully, and Noel Coward's screenplay is a wicked evocation of middle-class Englishness dipping its big toe into the murky pond of Continental misbehaviour - and then withdrawing it, pronto.
BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS (2003) Stephen Fry’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies will probably play better on the small screen than it did on the big, though without Waugh’s tart prose the proceedings seem more whimsical than satirical. Stephen Campbell Moore plays the would-be novelist whose on-off engagement to party animal Nina (Emily Mortimer) provides a semblance of narrative thread linking a series of unfunny sketches populated by an endless parade of shrieking 1930s socialites. It all gets a bit mushy in a decidedly unWaughlike way, but there are some witty Noel Coward songs and a nice line in 1930s slang that includes interesting pre-Bill & Ted use of the word "bogus".
BRING IT ON (2000) "That's all right! That's ok! You're gonna pump our gas some day!" How come American high-schools always seem so much more fun than the ones we went to in the UK? This lively girl-centric teen movie stars Kirsten Dunst as the peppy blonde leader of an all-white Californian cheerleading squad that comes a cropper when it transpires that its previous captain stole their winning moves from an all-black inner-city team. Eliza Dushku plays the new girl in town and Jesse Bradford's her brother, whose Clash T-shirt earns the comment, "How vintage!"
BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974) "Sixteen people are dead because of you, and one was a damn good friend of mine." In the pantheon of Cinema's Greatest Severed Heads, this slowly-paced but rather wonderful Mexican Gothic road movie directed by the great Sam Peckinpah would surely top the list. The eponymous noggin (mercifully wrapped in a sack) spends most of the film attracting flies on the backseat of Warren Oates' car as he heads towards his dusty appointment with fate. Oates plays Bennie, a seedy piano-player promised a reward of $10,000 if he can track down the bloke who impregnated a Mexican millionaire's daughter, a doomed quest that leads inexorably to grave-robbing, rape and lashings of the director's trademark slo-mo violence. If, as is sometimes proposed, the severed head is a castartiuon symbol, then it's tempting to look on this as the director's personal atonement for the shoddy treatment meted out to female characters in his oeuvre. On the other hand, it does feature one of his strongest and most sympathetic women, even if she also happens to be (surprise) a prostitute, with a typically Peckipah ambiguous attitude to rape.
BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE (2003) It's a sad irony that while Steve Martin starred in some of the cleverest comedies of the 1980s, he now gets bigger audiences - and presumably bigger fees - for appearing in crass commercial fodder like this, a would-be anti-racist comedy which in fact stereotypes the races as effectively as any bigoted propaganda. Martin plays a stuffy tax attorney whose life is turned upside-down when his date, arranged over the internet, turns out to be not the expected skinny blonde chick, but big, black and bouncy Queen Latifah as blue-collar jailbird Charlene. Cue for white outrage as she invades his country club and posh offices and beats up his sister-in-law (who we're supposed to think deserves it) but of course it ends in multicultural hugs all round. Highlights, if you can call them that, include Martin disguised as a homeboy and Dame Joan Plowright smoking a joint.
BRINGING OUT THE DEAD (1999) If I were in need of urgent medical treatment, the last person I’d want driving me to hospital would be a manic Nicolas Cage, chronically sleep-deprived and haunted by the ghosts of the people he couldn’t save. The director Martin Scorsese teams up again with his Taxi Driver screenwriter, Paul Schrader, for an overwrought study of a New York ambulance driver at the end of his tether on the graveyard shift. John Goodman and Tom Sizemore are among his crazy partners and, apart from the scenes featuring Patricia Arquette as crushingly dull love interest, it’s a wild and wacky ride, with the camera jitterbugging all over the place.
BRINGING UP BABY (1938, b/w) In terms of unfortunate double-meanings, the title of this Howard Hawks screwball classic is up there with Five Go Off in a Caravan, but then people tell me I’ve a sick mind. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy Cary Grant’s peerless comic timing as a stuffy zoologist whose life is thrown into chaos by dizzy socialite Katharine Hepburn and her pet leopard. That is, if you can block out the leading lady’s painfully shrill performance (I realise it's much loved, and that I'm in a minority for disliking it). But it’s a small price to pay for seeing Cary dressed in a woman's negligee and yelling, "I just went gay all of sudden!"
BROADCAST NEWS (1987) James L Brooks' smart but dated romantic comedy takes a few gentle potshots at the world of national TV networks. Holly Hunter's the control-freak producer torn who fancies handsome but shallow anchorman (William Hurt in a hilarious portrait of nice-but-dimness). Albert Brooks (no relation to the film's writer-director) plays the charisma-free reporter who fancies Hunter. Now that we know how craven American TV news networks can be, it would be interesting to see a remake/update.
BROADWAY DANNY ROSE (1984, b/w) One of Woody Allen’s most charming and poignant mid-period films, this is a small but perfectly formed comedy about a theatrical agent whose clients include a stuttering ventriloquist, a one-legged tap dancer and a blind xylophonist. Allen himself plays Danny, a born loser who falls for a brassy Mafia widow (Mia Farrow triumphantly cast against type) and ends up on the run from one of her jealous Mob suitors. Danny celebrating Thanksgiving with his clients is one of the most affecting scenes Allen has ever filmed.
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005) Ang Lee's beautiful adaptation of Annie Proulx's short story is forever fated to be known as The Gay Cowboy Movie, but don't let that put you off - this is elegant, subtle and grown-up film-making that should have won an Oscar for Best Picture but somehow lost out to the inferior Crash. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal play a couple of taciturn types who bond, in a big way, while herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain one summer in 1963. (This is the first time I've found the sight of two men having sex erotic, though I guess if the actors had been, say, Steve Buscemi and Philip Seymour Hoffman it might have been less of a turn-on.) Both men subsequently try to deny their true natures by leading outwardly orthodox lives, but Lee and his screenwriters never shirk from revealing the emotional cost of the imposture not just to the lovers, but to their wives and families. I swear, if the ending doesn't make you weep buckets, you're not human.
BROKEN ARROW (1950) Delmer Daves's western was one of the first to treat Native Americans with respect, even if the legendary chief Cochise is played by the not-very-ethnic Jeff Chandler. James Stewart plays a Cavalry scout who tries to keep the peace and marries an Apache maiden played by the not-very-ethnic Debra Paget. But Hollywood in the early 1950s couldn't allow an interracial romance without giving it some kind of tragic twist, hence Stewart's gut-wrenching cry of, "There are some things a man cannot bear!"
BROKEN ARROW (1996) The first big Hollywood hit from John Woo is an excuse for John Travolta to go into acting overdrive as a US pilot who crash-lands a Stealth bomber (and its nuclear payload) somewhere in Arizona so he can hold his nation to ransom. Christian Slater is the fellow pilot and Samantha Mathis the plucky park ranger who must try to stop him. And did you know it's perfectly safe to set off a nuclear bomb in a copper mine as the melted copper will form a seal around the radioactivity? As if. But with Travolta on outrageous show-stopping form and helicopters exploding every few minutes, who's picking nits?
BROKEN FLOWERS (2005) I prefer Bill Murray in comedies like Quick Change, before he became the darling of hipper-than-thou directors like Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola and Jim Jarmusch. The latter's films have an annoying tendency to be hipper-than-thou, but this one's a breezy, disarming ride, with its leading man giving a typically deadpan performance. He plays an ageing Lothario who embarks on a cross-country drive to visit ex-girlfriends, trying to guess which is the anonymous writer who claimes to have borne him a child. And what do you know, each gal is played by a familiar face (Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton) though Murray's most treasurable relationship is with the neighbour and amateur detective (Jeffrey Wright) who eggs him on in his quest. Don't expect conventional narrative and a tidy resolution; do expect droll cameos, much footage of Murray driving around (I loved these bits, though realise it's not everyone's idea of fun) and a soundtrack so cool it almost hurts to hear it.
BRONSON (2008) The term tour de force doesn't begin to do justice to Tom Hardy's astonishing performance in this arty, violent portrait of Britain's most notorious prisoner from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. Charles Bronson (born Michael Petersen, no relation to the actor) was originally sentenced to seven years for armed robbery before deciding his real talent lay in wreaking havoc, leading to a total of 30 years in solitary, interspersed with odd periods of freedom (reminding him that, on the outside, he's a nobody) and theatrical interludes in which he addresses the camera in whiteface, like an Edwardian music hall act. Hardy is so mesmerising it takes you a while to twig that there isn't much of a narrative here, but so long as he's being so funny, scary and flat-out bonkers it's seems churlish to complain.
BROTHER (2000) This may be the first of Takeshi Kitano's films to be set outside his native Japan, but that doesn't mean he stints on his trademark violence. The writer-director, his habitual deadpan expression undercut by an annoying facial tic, plays a Japanese gangster forced to relocate to Los Angeles, where he muscles in on the local drug operation by the infallible method of shooting everyone in sight. The film's title may suggest it's about the relationship between him and his brother, but for my money it's more about brains splattered against walls, chopsticks shoved up nostrils, spilled entrails and hard men chopping off their little fingers. These Japanese directors, eh? Not for the faint of heart.
BROTHERHOOD (2004) This blockbuster war movie is essentially Korea's answer to Saving Private Ryan, the main difference being that the conflict between North and South Korea isn't as clear-cut as the Second World War; here it's brother against brother, literally and metaphorically. In 1950, two siblings are drafted into the South Korean army. The older, a shoemaker, learns that if he can win a medal, his younger brother, a student, will be sent home, and turns into a reckless killing machine while the young man he's trying to protect looks on aghast. Shameless sentimentality alternates with extremely bloody battle scenes, but it's family ties that count, not ideology, and the ending packs a hefty emotional wallop.
BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF (2001) There's not an original bone in its body, but this costume-romp-cum-monster-movie-with-added-kung-fu is a lot of fun, provided you don't let yourself get too annoyed by the constant echoes of other, better films such as Jaws. It's set in 1766 in the south of France, where women and children are being slaughtered by a mysterious beast. Samuel Le Bihan plays Grégoire de Fronsac, a naturalist with a Native American sidekick, whose investigation leads him into an imbroglio of strange cults, Vincent Cassel as a nob with a withered arm and Monica Bellucci as super-hot totty with secret fan skills.
BROTHERS GRIMM, THE (2005) After the debacle of his abandoned Don Quixote film, Terry Gilliam aims to prove he's still a bankable director with this noisy blockbuster fantasy in which the story seems dictated by the special effects. Matt Damon and Heath Ledger play charlatans who travel around 19th century Europe, conning superstitious villagers with their fake exorcisms, until finally confronted by a case in which children have gone missing in a genuine enchanted forest. Monica Bellucci plays an evil queen, Peter Stormare drums up some droll moments as a sadistic Italian, but Lena Headey is wooden as feisty love interest, and the messy narrative is so busy with redundant fairtytale references that viewer fatigue sets in. Monty Python and the Holy Grail had more magic in its low-budget little finger.
BRUCE ALMIGHTY (2003) The idea of an ordinary bloke enjoying all the powers of God while the deity takes a holiday holds much comic potential, but this Jim Carrey vehicle cops out, probably for fear of offending the moral majority, and ends up drowning in slushy moral messages. Carrey plays a disgruntled TV news reporter who is fired and beaten up on the same day, so when a mystic janitor (white-clad Morgan Freeman in twinkly mode) offers him omnipotence, he uses it to settle scores, teach his dog to use the bathroom and part tomato soup like the Red Sea. Jennifer Aniston is wasted as his inexplicably devoted girlfriend.
BRÜNO (2009) Sacha Baron Cohen pretends to be Brüno, a fashion presenter on Austrian TV, who's ejected from the Milan catwalk shows for causing havoc in a Velcro suit before flaunting his camp behaviour and flamboyant outfits all over middle-America, where he tries to provoke bigoted reactions from unwitting hillbillies, soldiers and rednecks. This is essentially Borat 2, with the Kazakhstani caricature replaced by a gay one, and is inevitably less of a novelty this time around. There are passably droll moments - providing you haven't heard all about them in advance - but the character of Brüno himself got on my nerves so much that I actually found myself siding with the outraged chatshow audience which starts heckling him for swapping a baby for an iPod. Zoolander's male model satire may be flabbier and sillier, but it's also funnier.
BUCKET LIST, THE (2007) Multi-millionaire Jack Nicholson and blue-collar mechanic Morgan Freeman are both diagnosed with terminal cancer and, through an unconvincing twist of plot, find themselves sharing a hospital room. Naturally, after a spot of perfunctory friction, they become best mates and determine to spend their remission ticking off all the things on Freeman's Things to Do Before I Die list. Which means skydiving, motor-racing and generating lots of carbon footprints while visiting the world's tourist hotspots (seen mostly in back-projection) all of which is made possible by Jack's fabulous fortune. Both actors deserve our respect - but not for this. The word "bucket" is all too appropriate, as this mendacious, family-friendly, sentimental view of terminal illness really is a load of old slop.
BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB (1999) You've probably heard the album so often you're sick to death of it, but that's no excuse not to watch the documentary, in which German director Wim Wenders intercuts concert footage with recording sessions and veteran Cuban musicians such as Rubén Gonzáles or Compay Segundo crusing past old Havana haunts or reminiscing about the past while Ry Cooder, who brought them together for their million-selling disc, tries manfully to fade into the background. In these youth-fixated times, it's a pleasure to watch so many septuagenarians, octogenarians and nonagenarians having a ball.
BUFFALO '66 (1998) Vincent Gallo reportedly once called me a "lesbian witch", so I have to be careful what I say about his writing-directing debut. The scruffy, slightly creepy actor also stars in it, as a loser ex-con whose aim in life is to shoot the ex-football player responsible for the missed kick which lost our man a bet and landed him in jail. En route to the showdown, he kidnaps teenage tap-dancer Christina Ricci, who proceeds to fall in love with her abductor. As you do. It's all rather arty and self-indulgent, but also peculiar and charming, with droll contributions from Ben Gazzara and Anjelica Huston as Gallo's parents, an offbeat soundtrack that includes King Crimson, and a climax featuring pioneering use of "bullet-time" freeze-frame effects one year before The Matrix brought them to everyone's attention.
BUFFALO SOLDIERS (2001) This would-be M*A*S*H-like satire set on a US army base in Germany at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall was completed just prior to 9/11 and its suggestion that "War is hell, but peace is fucking boring" couldn't have come at a less appropriate time, though its cynical, anarchic portrait of American soldiers behaving badly on foreign soil may well confirm the worst fears of many European viewers. Joaquin Phoenix plays the resourceful private whose comfy living from drugs and arms dealing is threatened by the arrival of Sergeant Scott Glenn. Phoenix chats up Glenn's daughter (Anna Paquin); Glenn retaliates by using Phoenix's Merc as target practice, and so on to a pyrotechnic showdown. It's a bit like Bilko with the quips and watertight plotting replaced by big explosions.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992) Who would have thought such a tacky-looking movie could spawn one of the best-loved cult TV shows of all time? Kristy Swanson plays the bouncy blonde Californian cheerleader who discovers she’s the only person who can stop vampires from taking over Los Angeles. Donald Sutherland is her Watcher, Rutger Hauer the rather anaemic vampire-in-chief. Joss Whedon’s much-vaunted dialogue now seems rather feeble and the action scenes are botched, and whereas the TV series struck a perfect balance between genres, here it seems as though no-one could decide whether they were making a horror film or a teen comedy. Still, it’s required viewing for Buffy aficionados curious about the Slayer’s back-story.
BUG'S LIFE, A (1998) Kevin Spacey lends his voice to the leader of a gang of grasshoppers who, in a neat twist on La Fontaine, annually extort food from the hardworking ants in this super computer animated feature by the people who brought you Toy Story. It's a sort of entomological variation on The Seven Samurai, with comedian David Foley providing vocals for the ant who goes in search of warriors for hire but ends up with a raggle-taggle band of circus performers, including a stick-insect with the larynx of Frasier's David Hyde Pierce. Don't miss the "out-takes" in the closing credits.
BUILD MY GALLOWS HIGH (1947, b/w) Also known as Out of the Past, this fatalistic thriller directed by Jacques Tourneur is the quintessential film noir, with its doomed hero inexorably lured by a femme fatale into a shadowy web of desire and death amid a riot of flashbacks. Robert Mitchum gets one of his best roles as Jeff Bailey, whose peaceful life running a gas station in a sleepy Californian town is disrupted when his past catches up with him in the form of Jane Greer, runaway girlfriend of racketeer Kirk Douglas. Mitchum's eyes have never looked more heavy-lidded and world-weary.
BULLETS OVER BROADWAY (1994) In one of Woody Allen's more amusing divertissements from the 1990s, John Cusack (effectively a younger, better-looking stand-in for the nasal whingeing one) plays an aspiring young playwright forced to give a role in his latest play to the shrill-voiced moll (Jennifer Tilly) of the mobster who's backing him. Chazz Palmintieri plays the minder who becomes increasingly involved in the production, and there are hysterical turns from Dianne Wiest as a Martini-swilling diva ("Don't speak!") and Jim Broadbent as the bulimic leading man.
BULLITT (1968) At first glance, this is a fairly conventional police procedural starring Steve McQueen as a loner cop at odds with Robert Vaughn’s publicity-seeking assistant DA. But forget the plot, and get a load of that famous car chase over those San Francisco bumps, still stomach-churning after all these years. McQueen, who did his own high-speed driving, is the essence of action cool. Add Lalo Shiffrin’s jazzy score and a girlfriend played by Jacqueline Bisset and you’ve got a 1960s classic.
BULLY (2001) Larry Clark seems to have made a career out of depicting (in somewhat prurient fashion) the shocking daily lives of good-looking but brainless teenagers. Down in sunny Florida, half a dozen spoilt white rich teens decide - in between screwing and taking drugs - to murder one of their friends, seemingly because his behaviour is marginally worse than theirs. "Man, that's cool," says one girl on hearing the plan. There's no shortage of the 58-year-old director's speciality - adolescent nudity and gratuitous crotch-shots - but it's also a useful showcase for up-and-coming talent such as Nick Stahl, who plays the victim, and Michael Pitt in a droll turn as an addled pothead.
BURMESE HARP, THE (1956, b/w) This masterpiece about the horrors of the Second World War is related from a Japanese point of view. It's the story of a young soldier who's so upset by his failure to persuade his countrymen to surrender that he steals a Buddhist monk's robes, forswears violence and stays in Burma after the Armistice to bury the dead. Which, of course, is a task with no foreseeable end, though don't go looking for references to the suffering of Allied POWs, because there aren't any. Unlike The Pianist, Kon Ichikawa's elegaic film dives headlong into sentimentality, but I defy you not to start blubbing at the sound of those male voice choirs. The director was so smitten with the story that he remade it 30 years later, but to lesser effect.
BURN AFTER READING (2008) Brad Pitt may be the worst thing in Inglourious Basterds, but his endearing comic turn is the best thing in this disappointing comedy from the Coen brothers. Demoted CIA agent John Malkovich's carelessness with a computer disc triggers a farcical confluence of greed, paranoia and cross-purposes, but to only sporadically amusing effect. Too many of the characters are unpleasant caricatures; dimwitted gym bunny Pitt is also a caricature, but at least he's more fun to spend time with than George Clooney as a federal marshal who's having an affair with Malkovich's wife (Tilda Swinton) or Frances McDormand as Pitt's shrill fellow employee who, desperate for money to fund cosmetic surgery, hatches a misconceived blackmail scheme. It's beautifully filmed, but the heartlessness exhausts the patience.
BUS 174 (2002) In 2000, a homeless drug addict hijacked a bus in the centre of Rio de Janeiro and held its passengers hostage for five hours as the police blundered (surely a sniper could have disarmed the guy?) and news crews turned the event into a media circus. Jose Padilha's sobering documentary intercuts on-the-spot footage with witness interviews and testaments to the appalling childhood of the perp, a survivor of the 1993 Candelaria massacre in which homeless children were gunned down by vigilantes - an action applauded by many Brazilians. It's a sad, frightening look of what happens when society turns a blind eye to the plight of its underclass, and though it does go on a bit, the message is universal and the ending is as shocking as it's inevitable.
BUS STOP (1956) Whoops. In my first draft I typed Bust Stop by mistake. Freudian slip or what ? Marilyn Monroe plays Cherie, a honky-tonk singer in a Phoenix clip-joint whose ambition is to find a man who respects her. Don Murray is the hick cowboy who decides the way to woo a gal is with his lassoo, and when that doesn’t win her over, kidnapping. This all makes for rather uncomfortable viewing in these stalker-savvy, politically-correct times, and both characters, frankly, are so annoying you want to slap them, but it’s worth checking out just to watch Marilyn singing "That Old Black Magic" in grungy fishnets.
BUSINESS AFFAIR, A (1994) A film as bad as this comes along once in a blue moon. And then it goes away again, fast. But aficionados of squawking turkeys are advised to set their videos for this Anglo-French-German-Spanish Europudding set in the "glamorous" world of London publishing. Carole Bouquet is married to boring intellectual Jonathan Pryce, who suffers from writer's block (nudge nudge). Hardly surprising, then, that she falls for a brash American publisher played by the one-and-only Christopher Walken, who's described as "the Nijinsky of cunnilingus", though it's never specified whether we're talking about the dancer or the horse.
BUSINESS OF STRANGERS, THE (2001) God bless Stockard Channing, who lends a touch of class to everything she appears in. Patrick Stettner's bleak but accomplished debut feature, a virtual three-hander set in anonymous-looking hotels and airport lounges, gives her a role worthy of her talents as a jaded businesswoman who gets drawn into a drunken night of manipulative mind games with the former assistant (an impressive Julia Stiles) whom she's just had sacked. Stiles fingers one of Channing's acquaintances as the man who once raped her college friend, and the fun begins. Nice to see a film in which women behave every bit as appallingly as men.
BUSINESS, THE (2005) What De Niro used to be for Scorsese, Danny Dyer now seems to be for Nick Love, but the writer-director's third collaboration with his acteur fétiche is yet another case of a young British film-maker having watched Goodfellas too many times. Like Sexy Beast, it's set on the Costa del Crime, and while its characters, rhyming slang and redundant narration are drearily familiar from the fin de siècle school of Bad British Gangster Movies, Love triumphantly nails the conspicuous consumption, chavvy leisure wear and casual misogyny of 1980s drug-dealers on the lam from Thatcher's Britain, papering over his standard rise-and-fall plot with non-stop Buggles, Blondie and Flock of Seagulls.
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) George Roy Hill's comedy-western about the adventures of the Hole in the Wall gang (who actually existed, though nowhere near as glamorously as this) may have fallen out of favour with serious film critics, but it remains such splendid entertainment for all the family that we can forgive that bicycle interlude set to Sacha Distel. William Goldman's screenplay was a then-innovatory mix of historical elements, modern-sounding dialogue, a classic freeze-frame ending and a male buddy relationship in which the token female character (Katharine Eoss) is little more than a beard, with the real romance being the one between Paul Newman and Robert Redford, playing off each other perfectly as the funny, handsome rogues who romp through the old west, blowing up trains, fleeing from the implacable posse ("Who are those guys?") and finally meeting their destiny in Bolivia.
BUTTERFLY EFFECT, THE (2004) With cute Ashton Kutcher topping the bill, you'd be forgiven for expecting a lighthearted teen movie, but this time-travel yarn is surprisingly dark, packing things like paedophilia, suicide and cruelty to dogs into an intricate Moebius Strip of a film. Kutcher, a college student whose childhood was plagued by mysterious blackouts, stumbles across a remarkably low-tech, almost Proustian method of travelling back in time – he reads his old diaries. The kicker is that, each time he fiddles with the past to try and make the present turn out OK for him and his pals, he succeeds only in making things worse. Much worse. The director's cut by Eric Bress and J Mackye Gruber (screenwriters of Final Destination 2) ends in an astonishing coup de grace that makes the already downbeat original ending seem positively feelgood by comparison. Kudos to the film-makers for not copping out.
BUTTERFLY EFFECT 3: REVELATIONS, THE (2009) Second sequels are usually make-or-break time for a movie franchise; this follow-up to the surprisingly dark Ashton Kutcher time travelling fantasy is much better than the first sequel, with an uncompromising ending that gives the original's downer a run for its money. Square-jawed Chris Carmack is able to travel back in time to witness murders, after which he cobbles together a living int he present by identifying the killers to cops. But when he succumbs to the temptation to stop his own girlfriend's murder before it happens, not only does this make things worse in both past and present, it also somehow unleashes a serial killer. Wooden acting, cheapo production design and dashes of gratuitous nudity and gore hitched to a decent story add up to a tense little B-movie.
BUTTERFLY ON A WHEEL (2007) Pierce Brosnan kidnaps the daughter of smarmy advertising exec Gerard Butler and wife Maria Bello, then manipulates the terrified parents into haring around town, delivering mysterious packages, balancing on high ledges or (in Bello's case, though one rather would like to have seen Butler doing it) putting on a red satin frock. Back in the days of double-bills, this modest straight-to-DVD thriller might have been a serviceable supporting feature, but despite the actors' best efforts the characters are subservient to a complicated but hardly pulse-quickening plot which relies too heavily on some late-breaking and barely feasible twists. Brosnan uses his native Irish accent, and though the setting's Chicago, it was filmed mostly in Vancouver, which might explain why there's no real sense of place.
BY THE SWORD (1991) A bit of a guilty pleasure, this, which offers flashing blades and clashing egos set to a 1980s-style disco beat. F Murray Abraham plays Max Suba, an ex-convict with a secret in his past, who finds work as a janitor at the New York fencing academy he used to run. Will Villard, the despotic new maestro played by the reliably hammy Eric Roberts, guess Suba's true identity? Probably - the way he lunges with his mop is a dead giveaway. And will these two end up crossing swords in a deadly showdown? What do you think?
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