WAGES OF FEAR, THE (1953, b/w) If ever there were a challenger to Fritz Lang as the most downbeat director of all time, it would be Henri-Georges Clouzot, whose films are little masterpieces of misanthropy. Yves Montand plays one of a quartet of dislikeable European expats stranded in a Latin American village so sleazy and hellish that they leap at the chance of driving two nitroglycerine-laden trucks on a 300-mile trek over bumpy roads, resulting in one of the most nerve-racking white-knuckle rides of all time. Watch out for the cigarette-rolling scene - which is where my mum, bless her, decided to switch channels to see what was on the other side, thus depriving me of one of cinema's classic moments. Luckily, I've since caught up with the film in its entirety.
WAH-WAH (2006) Richard E Grant makes a quietly impressive writing-directing debut with this droll semi-autobiographical drama about growing up with an alcoholic dad (Gabriel Byrne, wonderful) who's Minister of Education in 1960s Swaziland. Emily Watson is delightful as the feisty American air-hostess who becomes young Ralph's stepmum after his real mother (Miranda Richardson) elopes with her lover. The likes of Celia Imrie and Julie Walters are on hand to flesh out the White Mischief-type caricatures of snobby, boozy, adulterous Brits being waited on by black servants or mounting an amateur production of Camelot for Princess Margaret, but there's a generosity of spirit towards everyone (except, notably, Richardson's character) that makes this slip down nicely, despite some awkward anachronistic dialogue and what appears to be a Swaziland screening of A Clockwork Orange several years prior to the film's 1971 premiere.
WAITRESS (2007) The death of Adrienne Shelly, whose kooky-looking face will be familiar to anyone who ever saw a Hal Hartley pic, inevitably overshadows this indie chickflick, her third movie as writer-director. Shelly also co-stars, but the central character is Jenna (Keri Russell); they're both waitresses at a hicksville diner somewhere in the South. Jenna's abusive husband (Jeremy Sisto) has got her pregnant, but her doctor (Nathan Fillion) is dishy and she finds solace in making pies with whimsical names such as "I Don't Want Earl's Baby Pie". Shelly completed it just before her murder, though one likes to think that, given the opportunity, she would have tightened up the editing, since it's awfully flabby in the middle. At least the treacly blue collar wisdom is offset by a welcome dash of emotional realism.
WAIT UNTIL DARK (1967) Three villains terrorising blind Audrey Hepburn add up to a classic thriller, albeit one that betrays its theatrical origins by rarely straying from the main set of the heroine's basement apartment, where she's unwittingly harbouring a doll stuffed with heroin. The 1998 Broadway revival of Frederick Knott's play was notable for the casting of Quentin Tarantino as the baddle-in-chief, but I'm told he couldn't hold a candle to Alan Arkin, chewing the scenery and intimidating his victim by wafting silk scarves across her face, though you do wonder why he bothers with his wacky disguises when she can't even see them. But never mind, because no-one can shriek, "Gasoline!" or trip over corpses quite as elegantly as our Audrey, the world's chic-est blind person.
WAKING LIFE (2001) Richard Linklater is one of those film-makers (Steven Soderbergh, who makes a "guest appearance" here, is another) who manages to alternate commercial pix, such as School of Rock, with more experimental stuff like this free-floating meditation on dreams, consciousness and the meaning of life. It was shot with real actors on digital film before being rotoscope-animated - a technique later used by the same director on his Philip K Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly. The effect's a bit like the constantly morphing doodlings of a myopic Rolf Harris suffering from the shakes and odd fits of surrealism as a young man drifts through a succession of dreams, meeting folk who rattle on endlessly about free will, existentialism and so forth. Terrific fun if you're stoned, I would imagine; everyone else will find the imagery thrilling, the speechifying indigestible.
WALK THE LINE (2005) Rare indeed is the showbiz biopic that isn't built from generic clichés such as The Rags-to-Riches Rise and The Struggle Against Personal Demons (generally some form of childhood tragedy, followed by drink and drugs), and James Mangold's Johnny Cash film never attempts to go against the grain. It is, however, exceptionally well-crafted, and features a brace of show-stopping performances from Joaquin Phoenix as the Man in Black and Oscar-winning Reese Witherspoon as the love of his life, the impossibly chirpy June Carter, making it as much romance as biopic. Both stars, amazingly, do their own singing, though I daresay Country is a lot easier to pull off than, say, Soul.
WALKABOUT (1970) It would be interesting to know how many men of my generation were reared on erotic fantasies of Jenny Agutter. Young Jenny, with her school prefect voice, is perfectly cast here as an ever-so-English teenager, stranded in the Australian outback with her little brother after their father commits suicide. David Gumpilil plays the adolescent Aborigine who interrupts his walkabout to look after them, only to be met with incomprehension when he embarks on a courtship ritual. Nicolas Roeg directs the clash between Nature and so-called Civilisation, and was also responsible for the dazzling desert camerawork with its creepy-crawlies and decomposing kangaroos.
WALKER, THE (2006) Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, may have fallen out of fashion lately, but he continues to write and direct intelligent films for grown-ups. This relatively low-budget affair (it takes place in Washington DC but was mostly shot on the Isle of Man) features a showstopping performance from Woody Harrelson as Carter Page III, a gay Southern gent who squires wealthy wives (Kristin Scott Thomas, Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin) whose powerful husbands are otherwise occupied. As in Schrader's American Gigolo, 28 years ago, a fetishistically detailed way of life (toupee! cufflinks!) is disrupted by murder. The story works better as character study than thriller, but what a character! Page is a witty, refreshingly principled amalgam of Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, which makes him excellent company amid the moral decay of modern America.
WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY (2007) John C Reilly, solid-gold supporting actor, finally gets to play the lead in this smashing spoof, which riffs on clichés from every music biopic from Ray to Walk the Line, as well as brilliantly pastiching every musical style of the past 50 years, from blues to rap. There's the obligatory early trauma (a tragic accident with a machete), handicap (Dewey loses his sense of smell), and the usual wives, drugs and crass miscasting, of which Jack Black as Paul McCartney is the most out-to-lunch example. Director and co-writer Jake Kasdan avoids the anything-goes policy of Scary Movie-style spoofs to keep it savvy as well as silly, while the hand (metaphorical if not actual) of co-writer, producer and comedy guru Judd Apatow can be seen in some gratuitous (and very funny) male nudity.
WALKING TALL (2004) I was looking forward to some mindless bone-crunching vigilante violence, but this tale of an army vet who cleans up his hometown is disappointingly PG-rated. Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock comes home to find the sawmill replaced by a casino where the dice are loaded, crack-cocaine is on sale to minors and his girlfriend is working as a (PG-rated) stripper. The bad guys attack the Rock with automatic weapons; he responds by clobbering them with lengths of wood and small trees, while his girlfriend strips down to an orange bra for the final shoot-out.
WALL STREET (1987) All together now – "Lunch is for wimps!" Or how about, "Greed is good?" Or, "If you need a friend, get a dog." Strange to think this rather schematic "exposé" of 1980s insider trading, written and directed by Oliver Stone, once tapped into the zeitgeist. Did we really take Charlie Sheen seriously as an actor? But Michael Douglas' Oscar-winning performance as Gordon Gekko, the tycoon who leads young Sheen astray, is as juicy as ever. And – red braces and striped shirts aside - you can't help reflecting that, when it comes to financial malpractice in high places, nothing much has changed.
WALLACE & GROMIT IN THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT (2005) I was looking forward to slagging off Nick Park's latest claymation romp to show how daringly iconoclastic I was, but no dice - Wallace and Gromit are as charming as ever in this affectionate horror movie send-up. The cheese-loving inventor and his dog (not just a loyal hound but business partner, housewife, fixer) try to catch the mutated rabbit that's threatening to devour the village's annual crop of giant vegetables. The painstaking stop-motion, Peter Sallis' Yorkshire accent, vicars and village fêtes all hark back to Watch with Mother, though kiddy TV was never this stuffed with puns, double entendres ("Call me Totty" says Helena Bonham Carter's lady of the manor) and so many pop culture references you'd need several viewings to catch them all. We all need a little Gromit in our lives.
WALTZ WITH BASHIR (2008) If anyone is still labouring under the misapprehension that cartoons are just for kids, Ari Folman's animated documentary ought to set them straight. This multinational production, with mostly Hebrew dialogue, examines the mindset of Israeli soldiers complicit in the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Folman (or his animated avatar) has no recollection of the atrocity, so travels around, talking to middle-aged former soldiers like himself, whose accounts are clouded by suppressed memory, dreams and what a psychiatrist calls "Protective Dissociation". More than a traditional documentary could ever do, it captures something of the subjective, almost hallucinatory experience of fighting in a war, and at times the animation is startlingly beautiful. But the ending, where animation gives way to real news footage, is devastating.
WANDERERS, THE (1979) The teenage members of the Bronx street gang of the title aren’t as tough as they look. They’re still anxious about incurring parental disapproval, overawed by strong women and scared witless by a gang called The Ducky Boys. Philip Kaufman’s rambling but amusing coming-of-age pic boasts a fine ensemble cast (whatever happened to pint-sized dynamo Linda Manz?) and a superb soundtrack. But this is 1963, President Kennedy is about to visit Dallas, and, according to a Dylan lookalike glimpsed singing in a folk club, "The Times They Are a-Changin’".
WANTED (2008) Timur Bekmambetov, who scored a hit in his native Russia with Night Watch, applies his kinetic film-making approach to this preposterous geek's fantasy in which a mild-mannered office worker (James McAvoy showing hitherto unsuspected muscle) learns his recently deceased father was a super-assassin and that a mysterious organization called The Fraternity now expects him to step into the breach and kill targets specially selected by (I kid you not) woven textiles. Angelina Jolie's the foxy mentor who shows him how to make bullets go round corners, Morgan Freeman's the dapper chap in charge. If you can get past an attitude to collateral damage that is cavalier, to say the least (at one point an entire trainful of passengers is casually dropped off a bridge) there's plenty of whizz-bang comic-book action.
WAR (2007) With Jason Statham and Jet Li sharing top-billing, you'd be forgiven for expecting a prime slice of lunkhead action, but alas, Philip G. Atwell can't resist ruining the fight scenes with all the annoying directing tics he picked up while making rap videos, and the plot is that deadly combo of complicated and uninteresting. Jason's a vengeful FBI agent, Jet's an assassin who pits Chinese Triads and Japanese Yakuza against each other, Yojimbo-style, on the streets of San Francisco (played, not very convincingly, by the streets of Vancouver). There's an entertaining if preposterous plot twist in the final reel, but it's too little, too late.
WAR GAME, THE (1965, b/w) Peter Watkins' film about a thermonuclear strike on Kent was produced by the BBC, which famously refused to broadcast it, though it did receive a limited cinema release, and won the Oscar for Best Documentary even though it's fiction. It still packs a punch. Making a virtue of a limited budget and pioneering faux documentary techniques, Watkins presents a picture that was the opposite of his government's refusal to acknowledge the realities of nuclear war. Mass evacuation, a blast that can melt eyeballs 27 miles away, firestorms, execution of looters and painful death from radiation sickness are brought home with an immediacy that has never since been equalled.
WAR LORD, THE (1965) Interesting mediaeval epic starring Charlton Heston as a Norman knight called Chrysagon De Lacrue whose mission to defend a coastal village from Frisian invaders gets sidetracked when he falls in love with a peasant maiden called Bronwyn (Rosemary Forsyth). Although shot in and around Hollywood, it has a strong European flavour; intimate relations, feudal family ties and ye olde druidic religion take precedence over stonking great battle scenes, though the climax doesn't stint on catapults, battering rams and barbarians at the gate.
WAR OF THE ROSES, THE (1989) Danny De Vito's second film as director reunites him with Michal Douglas and Kathleen Turner, the two stars of Romancing the Stone, but far from being a sweetly romantic follow-up, this is one of the blackest comedies ever to come out of Hollywood, as well as one of the bleakest portraits of a marriage since the heyday of Ingmar Bergman. De Vito's lawyer acts as an ineffectual referee as we watch the couple's relationship degenerating from petty point-scoring via mutual antagonism to all-out self-destruction. He runs over her cat! She locks him in the sauna! He saws the heels off her shoes! She feeds him paté made from his dog!
WAR OF THE WORLDS (2005) With its scenes of destruction rained down on a panicking populace, Steven Spielberg's version of the HG Wells classic often feels more in tune with the zeitgeist than the more obviously politically engaged Munich. The director steers clear of the gung-ho jingoism of, say, Independence Day and, other than shifting the setting from Woking to New York, stays fairly close to his source material. Though many of us would happily feed Dakota Fanning to the Martians, dockyard worker Tom Cruise sets about getting her and his teenage son to Boston without any of them being vaporised. But although cast in the hero role, Cruise is as powerless as everyone else when the alien invaders wreak havoc. The mob scenes are even more terrifying than the tripods from outer space, and if the action flags when Cruise and co take refuge in a cellar with a survivalist (Tim Robbins) these scenes nevertheless raise some pertinent points about everyman's response to the threat of annihilation.
WARGAMES (1983) Young Matthew Broderick stars in this fitfully amusing teenage Fail Safe made back in the days when domestic computers were still a novelty. Broderick uses his to boost his high-school grades, impress his girlfriend and hack into video-game companies to grab sneak previews of their coming attractions, but little does he know that Global Thermonuclear War is not just another variation of Space Invaders, and his gleeful decision to nuke Las Vegas precipitates a fullscale countdown to Armageddon. Though, personally, I prefer Quake.
WARLOCK (1959) Despite the title, this near-classic western with interesting homoerotic undercurrents has nothing to do with witchcraft. The frontier town of Warlock is being terrorised by a gang of outlaws behaving like binge-drinking yobs with revolvers, so the locals hire dapper gunslinger Henry Fonda and his devoted sidekick (Anthony Quinn) to clean up. Meanwhile, bandit Richard Widmark gets fed up with his colleagues’ unsporting habit of shooting opponents in the back and switches sides, while things are further complicated with the arrival of Dorothy Malone as Quinn’s vengeful old flame. Watch out for DeForest Kelley, better known as Star Trek’s McCoy, as a smiling outlaw called Curly.
WARLOCK (1989) Julian Sands flexed his evil muscle in this engaging supernatural romp scripted by David Twohy, who went on to write and direct the estimable Pitch Black. Julian plays a devil-worshipper pursued from 17th century Boston to 20th century Los Angeles by a witchfinder (pelt-wearing Richard E Grant, with Scottish accent) and has oodles of fun plucking the eyes from spiritualists' heads, whipping up flying potions from the boiled fat of unbaptised children and hexing Lori Singer so that - shock horror! - she ages 20 years in a single day. "Why didn't he just kill me? Nothing could be worse than this!"
WARLORDS, THE (2008) Hollywood's last big epic, 300, was more like a cartoon than a serious live action movie, so aficionados of historical spectaculars could do a lot worse than look east for their fix of big battle scenes. This magnificent 19th century Chinese war epic offers a well-judged balance of the personal and the political, and stars three of Asian cinema's best-known actors; Jet Li (whose delivery of his native Mandarin is in marked contrast to the woodenness of his English language excursions) plays a defeated general who falls in with some bandits led by Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro (both from House of Flying Daggers), but not before he has inadvertently fallen in love with Lau's wife. The three of them pull off an astonishing military triumph, but Li's ambitiousness increasingly alienates his companions, and tragedy looms. The story is based on the same historical events that also inspired Chang Cheh's 1973 kung-fu classic Blood Brothers.
WARRIOR KING (2005) Tony Jaa, Thailand's answer to Jackie Chan, travels to Sydney in search of the evil ladyboy and her henchmen who killed his father and kidnapped his elephants in this chop-socky yarn with at least three fight scenes (filmed without wirework or special effects) which make it worth tolerating the stupid plot and dialogue. One's a rumble with a whirling capoeira dancer, another's a bone-crunching demolition of about two zillion men in black, but the highlight is a four-minute Steadicam fighting ascent of a staircase in a vast brothel improbably topped by a restaurant serving endangered species to decadent Australians. If there's a message here, it's that you don't kidnap Tony Jaa's elephants if you know what's good for you.
WARRIOR, THE (2000) Asif Kapadia's debut feature, set in the unspecified past amid the plains and mountains of north-west India, is a historical epic that has more in common with samurai movies or spaghetti westerns than Bollywood. The title character is ordered by his lord to sack a village that has failed to pay tribute, but sees something that makes him throw away his sword and renounce violence, leading to a cycle of loss, revenge and redemption. Spare but spectacular landscapes, generic story elements and minimal dialogue combine in an elegant piece of myth-making.
WARRIORS, THE (1979) "The chicks are packed! The chicks are packed!" Walter Hill's grungy gang movie became notorious for allegedly inspiring real-life violence, but despite an ad campaign calculated to rattle the bourgeoisie ("These are the armies of the night!") it's more epic fantasy than gritty realism. Michael Beck (one of those "where is he now?" leading men) heads a bunch of New York street punks who are framed for the assassination of a gang leader at a big pow-wow in the Bronx and forced to make their way home to their Coney Island turf through enemy territory occupied by outlandishly-dressed rival gangs egged on by a silky-voiced radio announcer. Inspired by, of all things, Xenophon's Anabasis.
WATER DROPS ON BURNING ROCKS (1999) French enfant terrible François Ozon adapted this four-hander from an unperformed play by the brilliant German film-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It's set in an impeccably 1970s apartment – all orange sofas and shagpile – where the relationship between a middle-aged insurance salesman (a marvellously camp Bernard Giraudeau) and a pretty young boy he picked up has degenerated into petty power-playing. Eventually the men's respective girlfriends turn up, leading to everybody shaking his or her booty in a delightful samba number. Not for all tastes, but aficonados of Fassbinder's perverse sense of humour will be in seventh heaven.
WATERWORLD (1995) This watery sci-fi adventure is set in a future when the planet has been flooded by melting polar icecaps. Originally dismissed as a turkey, it's actually not a bad little B-movie. Problem is, the budget was $200 million. The preternaturally humourless Kevin Costner plays The Mariner, a samurai-like drifter with webbed feet who gets lumbered with a horrible child and a woman in a fish-skin Wonderbra. The perfunctory plot consists of everyone searching for a mythical place called Dryland while trying to avoid Dennis Hopper and his band of pirates, whose heavy nicotine habit has earned them the nickname The Smokers. Yes, but where do they find all those dry cigarettes?
WAY OF THE GUN, THE (2000) Any film-maker willing to place a pregnant woman in peril is dicing with bad taste. Christopher McQuarrie, who won an Oscar for his Usual Suspects screenplay, makes his directing debut with a self-consciously postmodern shoot-em-up that ends with a Caesarean section during a gun-battle in a Mexican whorehouse. Way to go, Christopher! Ryan Philippe and Benicio del Toro play a couple of sociopaths who kidnap a mother-to-be (Juliette Lewis) and hold her to ransom, only to find they're dealing with psychos even more ruthless than themselves. Luckily one of them is played by James Caan, who brings a welcome touch of class to the proceedings.
WAY OUT WEST (1937, b/w) This comic western is one of Laurel and Hardy's finest hours. Stan and Ollie trek out to the frontier town of Brushwood Gulch to hand over deeds to a goldmine to the orphan who's rightfully inherited them, only to fall victim to the wiles of a crooked bar owner played by James Finlayson, the duo's regular sparring partner. Among the highlights are Stan eating his hat and lighting his finger, an inspired soft-shoe shuffle and the duo's rendition of "Trail of the Lonesome Pine", which some 40 years later surprised everyone by becoming a UK Top 20 hit.
WAYNE’S WORLD (1991) Grown-up comedians Mike Myers and Dana Carvey put on ridiculous wigs to play Wayne and Garth, a couple of brain-dead teenagers who present a cable TV show from their Illinois basement. Viewers who fail to get the joke will be left scratching their heads at the starting-post, but anyone attuned to the comic bouillabaisse of pop culture references (Scooby-Doo!) coupled to a headbanging rock n roll soundtrack and a clutch of slangy catch-phrases will definitely want to catch the best movie since Citizen Kane - not!
WAZ (2007) Tom Shankland, who went on to direct the interesting horror movie The Children, made a striking low-budget feature debut with this dark (in both senses of the word) thriller set in New York but shot in the urban wastelands of Belfast. Stellan Skarsgård plays a hardboiled cop, Melissa George is his rookie partner, and they're on the trail of a serial killer who leaves horribly maimed corpses with 'W∆Z' carved into the flesh. There's some nasty torture-porny stuff near the end, but Clive Bradley's screenplay is as much concerned with knotty ethical considerations as gore. The sound quality's bad, but that might just be the version I caught, and you'd never guess there's only one genuine American (Selma Blair) in a cast which also includes hot up-and-comers like Tom Hardy (Bronson) and Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky).
WE ARE MARSHALL (2006) Most sports films are about winning; this real-life drama is more about cobbling together enough players to get on the pitch in the first place. In 1970, the small West Virginia town of Marshall loses its entire university football team in a plane crash. Some townsfolk, Ian McShane among them, prefer not be reminded of their bereavement; others hire an outsider (Matthew McConaughey, in quirky character as opposed to matinee idol mode) to coach the raggle-taggle bunch of replacements with masses of pep-talk and homespun wisdom. But hey, we're talking about American football, so once the plane has gone down it's hard to care.
WE DIVE AT DAWN (1943, b/w) Spiffing British submarine movie set during WW2, with Captain John Mills taking time off from playing the field and cultivating his designer stubble to lead the crew of the Sea Tiger on a mission to track the German battleship Brandenburg into the Baltic and sink it. Exceptionally well-drawn characters and a credibly scruffy evocation of everyday life in cramped conditions make this a refreshing alternative to the Hollywood-style submarine pic, but the film's not without tense action scenes and machines that go "ping".
WE OWN THE NIGHT (2007) American auteur James Gray may be the darling of the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, but his films still lack that je ne sais quoi. Fab title, and great cast, mood and soundtrack, but his would-be Greek tragedy plots and characters - especially the women - are severely undernourished. This is set in late 1980s Brooklyn, where coke-sniffing Joaquin Phoenix runs a nightclub with Russian Mafia links while his father (Robert Duvall) and brother (Mark Wahlberg) are among the cops preparing to clamp down on drug-dealing. Conflict of interest there, then. Events reconciling the brothers are all too predictable and rife with period anachronism, though throw up incidental thrills such as a gripping car chase through torrential rain, and smokin' hot Eva Mendes' va-va-voom red strapless frock.
WEATHER MAN, THE (2005) As if to atone for the relentless rumbustiousness of his Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Gore Verbinksi goes in the opposite direction here and directs a family drama that starts off glum and just gets glummer. Nicolas Cage, so low-key he's almost bearable, plays a Chicago weather-man whose public hates him so much it keeps pelting him with fast food in the street - resulting in much double-edged product placement for well-known burger chains. He's estranged from his wife, his daughter is fat, his son is borderline delinquent and his father (Michael Caine underplaying nicely) is dying. Cage's problem, it seems, is that he needs to move on, though, atypically for a mainstream release, this is never addressed directly. Not exactly fun, but rather refreshing in its refusal to round everything off with a Hollywood hug.
WEIGHT OF WATER, THE (2000) Kathryn Bigelow directed this flawed but compelling thriller which intercuts between two different timelines. The first concerns the axe-murder of two women in 1873 on an island off the coast of New England, with Sarah Polley superb as a Norwegian immigrant who fingers the culprit. The second, set in the present-day, stars Catherine McCormack as a photographer who charters a yacht to research the crime and becomes obsessed with it, while her husband (Sean Penn) is ogling her brother's girlfriend. And who can blame him when she's played by a frequently topless Liz Hurley? Both tales are absorbing enough; the problem is they never really connect with each other.
WEIRD SCIENCE (1985) Everyone rubbished John Hughes' wayward teen fantasy when it came out, but it seems to have to acquired a devoted following all the same, probably made up of people who were impressionable eight-year-olds when they first saw it. Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith play a couple of nerds who use computers to create their ideal woman (Kelly LeBrock), with chaotic results. The best bits are the scenes involving a pre-Aliens Bill Paxton, altogether splendid as an obnoxious older brother called Chet, who leers and snarls things like, "How about a nice greasy pork sandwich served in a dirty ashtray?"
WELCOME HOME, ROSCOE JENKINS (2008) While Will Smith has gone from strength to strength since the Bad Boys movies, his erstwhile co-star Martin Lawrence has made less of a mark with a run of comedies that have failed dismally to engage either intellect or funny bone. This one, alas, is no exception, though I guess we should be thankful that it provides employment for fine Afro-American actors such as James Earl Jones and Margaret Avery. It's the latest variation on the Sweet Home Alabama formula, with the star playing a successful LA talk show host who reluctantly heads south for his parents' 50th wedding anniversary, gets taken down a peg or two, and learns the importance of family values. The usual yawn-making homilies are served up, while Lawrence's fiancée is sneered at for taking the sexual initiative and not wanting babies.
WELCOME TO COLLINWOOD (2002) George Clooney produced and steals the show in a smallish role as a wheelchair-bound safecracking expert covered in tattoos. For their debut feature, Anthony and Joe Russo chose to remake the classic Italian heist comedy, Big Deal on Madonna Street, with amiable if not particularly memorable results. An exceptionally strong cast (including Sam Rockwell, William H Macy and Patricia Clarkson) hams it up something rotten as a clutch of bungling crooks who plot to rob a pawnshop in the suburbs of Cleveland.
WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE (2003) As action stars go, The Rock (né Dwayne Johnson) is cooler and altogether more simpatico than Vin Diesel. "Have fun," says Arnold Schwarzenegger in a split-second cameo at the start of this Indiana Jones-style romp in which the former wrestling champ plays a "retrievals expert" dispatched to the Amazon jungle in search of his boss’s son - American Pie alumnus Seann William Scott providing dumb comic relief. The plot’s just an excuse for our hero to show off his WWE skills in a series of face-offs, but it’s done with good humour (he jots down recipes in between rumbles), spectacular if fanciful stunts (nary a scratch after tumbling down a mountain) and a heartwarming moral message as the mismatched buddies lead local rebels against ruthless American capitalist Christopher Walken.
WENT THE DAY WELL? (1942, b/w) Tarantino-esque violence is the last thing you'd expect from Ealing Studios, but just take a look at this nifty slice of wartime propaganda adapted from a story by Graham Greene. Bramley End may seem to be the sort of idyllic English village we've all seen in many a cheery comedy, but blow me if it isn't the target for an advance guard of German parachutists. Before you know it, one of them is bayonetting the postmistress, the Home Guard is being blasted off its bicycles and the local Squire turns out to be - horror of horrors - a sneaky German spy! So it's down to a shower of landgirls, poachers and evacuees to fight back against the dastardly Hun.
WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES, THE (2000) If you're looking for the ultimate art film experience Béla Tarr's wilfully abstruse adaptation of László Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance may well be it. Murky black and white photography? Agonisingly long takes in which nothing happens? German actors dubbed into Hungarian so it looks as though the film is badly synched? Check, check, check. There's a powerful scene in which a mob smashes up a hospital, but it's a long time coming, as is the Biggest Whale in the World, a fairground attraction that's the talk of the town for most of the film. Lulled by the sound of townsfolk tramping endlessly along streets, I drifted into a light coma, but at least I can now brag about having sat through it, and it's reassuring to know there are film-makers out there still willing to test an audience's limits.
WE'RE NO ANGELS (1989) Not so much a remake as a reworking of the 1955 Humphrey Bogart comedy about escaped convicts with hearts of gold, directed by Neil Jordan from a well-crafted screenplay by David Mamet. Sean Penn steals the show as a dimwitted lag who takes his priestly disguise too seriously, just about making up for some shameless mugging from Robert De Niro as his co-escapee. Demi Moore plays an unmarried mum, and the fine supporting cast includes the irreplaceable Ray McAnally. Nothing to write home about, but there are worse ways of frittering away 106 minutes.
WEST BEIRUT (1998) Impressive little first feature from Ziad Doueiri, who worked as Quentin Tarantino's second unit cameraman before returning to his Lebanese roots to make this lively tragicomic rites-of-passage story set during the civil war that devastated his homeland from 1975 to the end of the 1980s. The film-maker's brother Rami plays Tarek, a Muslim teenager who, with his friend, is overjoyed when their school closes and treats the war-torn city as an adventure playground until he falls for a Christian girl and things start to get complicated.
WEST SIDE STORY (1961) There are moments when this energetic film version of the hit broadway musical, set amid the slum gangs of New York in the 1950s, makes Baz Luhrmann's more recent teen update of Romeo and Juliet look almost arthritic. Jerome Robbins completed several numbers before his perfectionism got him sacked, but his contributions - which include the show-stopping America - figure among the highlights. Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer, both dubbed, are not the most convincing Maria and Tony, but George Chakiris is hot stuff as her brother Bernardo, leader of the Sharks, and Rita Moreno (also dubbed though not so as you’d complain) brings the house down with her "I wanna be in A-meh-ree-kah!" "I Feel Pretty" makes me break out in a rash, but I’ve always been more partial to "Gee, Officer Krupke."
WESTWORLD (1973) Many years before he reworked a similar idea into Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton wrote and directed this sci-fi cautionary tale set in a futuristic theme-park where holidaymakers can act out their heroic fantasies against realistic-looking androids. Of course, something goes horribly wrong and the robots start slaughtering their human opponents for real, leaving Richard Benjamin (an actor only slightly more animated than the robots surrounding him) running for his life from an unstoppable gunslinger played by a blank-faced Yul Brynner as the android-equivalent of Jurassic Park's velociraptors. Great fun, though I always fretted excessively about the plight of the poor technicians trapped in their control-room with a dwindling air supply.
WHALE RIDER (2003) Likeable if lightweight New Zealand movie about Pai, a 12-year-old Maori whose grumpy grandfather refuses to appoint her next-in-line for tribal chief because she's a girl, even though she's demonstrably better at stick-shaking, tiki-tiki chants and diving for whales' teeth than her chubby male counterparts. Keisha Castle-Hughes was Oscar-nominated for her sprightly performance, and there's plenty of whale action for those who like that sort of thing. I tasted whale sushi once when I was in Japan; it was delicious.
WHAT A GIRL WANTS (2003) What a perky New York teenager called Daphne wants is to fly to Blighty (to the obligatory soundtrack blast of "London Calling" by The Clash) and hook up with the dad she's never met. And what do you know? He's a fabulously wealthy peer living in a country mansion in the middle of London, and he's played by Colin Firth! This update of The Reluctant Debutante will make your jaw drop in disbelief at its preposterous portrait of England as a theme-park of snooty aristos and society balls. Will Daphne (played by the appealing Amanda Byne) show us stuffy Brits how to loosen up and shake our booty? Yes! She showed me, anyhow; I ended up enjoying every last stupid minute of it.
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME (1998) The visionary New Zealand director Vincent Ward came a cropper with this update of the Orpheus legend, a must-see for aficionados of monumental cinematic folly. Robin Williams is at his most ingratiating as a dead paediatrician who finds heaven resembles one of his wife's Alpine landscape paintings. When she commits suicide, he sets out to save her from an underworld packed with dead souls and rotting brickwork. The result is kitsch on an awe-inspiring scale - an imbroglio of fine art, religion, mythology and New Age whimsy, co-starring Cuba Gooding Jr as an angel. Enough said.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (1972) Wooden acting, Ennio Morricone music, gratuituous shower scenes, sicko sex killings and a plot with more twists than a pretzel? Yes, it's giallo time as Massimo Dallamano puts a peculiarly Italian spin on an Edgar Wallace yarn photographed, rather prettily, in and around London and the banks of the Thames. Bearded smoothie Fabio Testi plays the frankly rather unpleasant hero, a gym teacher at an all-girl's school who's not only cheating on his wife with one of his pupils, but who seems more interested in getting his rocks off than in the brutal murder taking place only a few feet away. "Would you know him if you saw him again?" someone asks a witness right in front of a roomful of suspects, to which she replies, "Maybe". Hey, guess what happens to her.
WHAT LIES BENEATH (2000) I don't know about you, but I'm quite happy watching Michelle Pfeiffer wandering around and looking nervous in colour-coordinated knitwear, which is just as well since Robert Zemeckis' upmarket chiller consists of little else. With big-name stars, chic design and slick camerawork - this is the exact opposite of The Blair Witch Project. Michelle plays a highly-strung Vermont housewife who suspects her neighbour might have murdered his wife. Her husband (Harrison Ford in a pumped-up supporting role) is sceptical, but Michelle's curiosity - and her odd habit of jumping fully-clothed into the pond at the bottom of her garden - prises the lid off a can of supernatural worms and a last half-hour of deftly-orchestrated woman-in-peril tension. It's a ghost story so glossy that even the ghost is played by a supermodel (Amber Valletta).
WHAT WOMEN WANT (2000) If you've ever dreamed of seeing Mel Gibson prancing around in Wonderbra and pantyhose, this rather heavy-handed romantic comedy is for you. The onetime Mad Max plays a divorced Chicago ad executive who's passed over for promotion in favour of Helen Hunt but discovers, after an electric shock, that he can hear what women are thinking. (And what are they thinking? Not a lot, according to this screenplay.) Our man duly learns how to find Marisa Tomei's G-spot, bonds with his teenage daughter and tries to make life difficult for Hunt but - naturally - ends up falling in love with her.
WHATEVER (1999) The English title's snappier than the original French one: Extension du domaine de la lutte. Philippe Harel wrote, directed and took the central role in this adaptation of the drolly nihilistic novel by literary enfant terrible Michel Houllebecq. The main character's a computer progammer who goes through all the motions of life – cigarettes, supermarkets, porn movies, vomiting – while failing dismally to make any meaningful personal connections. A business trip lands him with a colleague (José Garcia, poignant and hilarious) even sadder than he is. A must-see movie for aficionados of deadpan humour, soulless provincial architecture, discos from hell and the Existential legacy of Albert Camus.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962, b/w) Robert Aldrich's classic slice of American Grotesque, starring two of cinema's greatest screen divas, started a trend for casting ageing actresses in campy Gothic horror movies. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis play reclusive sisters locked in an abusive relationship in their crumbling Hollywood mansion; Blanche (Crawford), an actress confined to a wheelchair following a car accident, is tormented by Davis as "Baby Jane Hudson", an increasingly unhinged former child star whose dreams of a comeback are encouraged by sleazy piano-player Victor Buono, scenting an opportunity for easy money. No-one can play the terrorised victim like our Joan, but it was Bette, who dresses up in ringlets and a little girl frock to sing, "I've Written a Letter to Daddy", who got the Oscar nomination.
WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (1987) Let's hear it for the showbiz biopic, a genre that positively thrives on its clichés. They're all present and correct in the rags-to-riches rise of Tina Turner - marriage to abusive Ike (Laurence Fishburne, oozing wolfish charm), solo breakaway and triumphant comeback as a rocking middle-aged housewife with shagpile wig and extra-capacity lungs. Angela Bassett mimes "River Deep, Mountain High" and nails the songstress's mannerisms to perfection, though the actress has such well-developed biceps that you can't help wondering why, when her husband hits her, she doesn't just thump him right back.
WHEN HARRY MET SALLY… (1989) I've never seen the point of that orgasm scene in the deli. What is Meg Ryan trying to prove to Billy Crystal, exactly? That she can fake a climax in a public place? But what really gets me is that it's totally out of character, since up until this point there's been absolutely nothing to suggest that Sally might be capable of such a wild and crazy extrovert act. Otherwise this is a serviceable romantic comedy, even if it does star two of my least favourite actors in the universe.
WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY (1996) Personally, I prefer the French title – Chacun cherche son chat (and try repeating that several times at top speed) – but either way Cédric Klapisch's film is a charming slice of Parisian life not a million miles from Eric Rohmer territory. Chloë is a wan-looking make-up artist who returns home from holiday to find that her cat, Gris-Gris, has gone missing. During the subsequent search Chloë makes new friends and sees how her newly fashionable quartier – the Bastille part of the 11th arrondissement – is gradually losing its traditional character thanks to an influx of trendy types and hip new cafes squeezing out the real people. I lived in this part of Paris for four years, by the way; at the beginning it seemed a bit like Islington, but by the time I left it felt more like Leicester Square on a Saturday night.
WHERE EAGLES DARE (1968) "Broadsword calling Danny Boy!" This WW2 action pic based on an Alistair MacLean book has been on telly so many times that you're probably au fait with every last gun battle, satisfyingly non-CGI explosion and anachronistic goof (that Nazi helicopter!). But it's a cracking yarn just the same. Major Smith and Lieutenant Shaffer (aka Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood) storm a Nazi-infested schloss in the Bavarian Alps to rescue the American general held prisoner there. The Germans fall like ninepins, there's a hair-raising tussle on top of a cable-car and everyone's a double agent - or pretends to be. It's the sort of straight-up Boy's Own yarn that, sadly, has since beensupplanted by the flashier Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies
WHERE THE MONEY IS (2000) Charming little heist movie that was unfairly overlooked when it came out, probably because one of its protagonists is unfashionably old. That may be so, but he's still Paul Newman, who is sexier at the age of 75 than most actors are in their prime. He plays a bank robber who gets himself transferred from jail into a nursing home by pretending to be senile. Hot tottie Linda Fiorentino plays the nurse who sees through the scam by giving him a lapdance and nags him into helping her beat her small-town blues by - yes! - robbing a bank.
WHERE THE RIVER BENDS (1952) James Stewart and the director Anthony Mann made some terrific westerns together and this is one of their best. Stewart is guiding a wagon-train of pioneers through Oregon while trying to hide his dodgy past as a Missouri border raider. Arthur Kennedy's another former outlaw whom Stewart saves from being hanged, and the two of them bond by fighting Native Americans together. But Kennedy has no truck with this redemption nonsense and tries to steal the settlers' provisions, forcing our hero to confront his own dark side in a life or death struggle.
WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS (1950, b/w) Otto Preminger reunited the two stars of Laura for this urban thriller. There’s always something deliciously shifty about Dana Andrews, and he’s perfectly cast here as Mark Dixon, a short-tempered cop who inadvertently kills a murder suspect and then finds himself in a typically film noir fix when his subsequent cover-up implicates the innocent cab-driver whose daughter is the dead man’s widow. As if things weren’t complicated enough, Dixon falls for her, and since she’s played by gorgeous Gene Tierney (a little too posh for the role, but we’re not complaining) you can’t really blame him.
WHERE THE SPIES ARE (1966) David Niven stars in this underrated but effective British spy yarn as Dr Jason Love, an English country doctor who’ll do anything for a vintage car - including reverting to his old job as a secret agent and hotfooting it to Beirut to try and foil an assassination attempt. During a stop-off in Rome, he bumps into the delectable Françoise Dorléac as Vicki, who may or may not be a double agent, but is clearly half the age of her leading man.
WHERE THE TRUTH LIES (2005) Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan makes films that are interesting but structurally flawed, and this showbiz mystery is no exception - it's all over the place, hopping between the 1950s and 1970s and switching narrators so often you're never sure where you are. Alison Lohman is badly miscast as a young journalist who gets involved with a couple of has-been comedians; they used to be a double-act but split up after a girl's corpse was found in their hotel suite. But Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth are splendid as the funnymen (apparently inspired by Martin and Lewis, though this isn't strictly a film à clef) with Mob connections, drug habits and sleazy sexual proclivities. Plus, both actors show their bottoms.
WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING (1995) Contrived but charming romantic comedy that gave Sandra Bullock (fresh from Speed) her first solo leading role. She pitches it just right, a perfect mix of self-deprecating humour and quiet desperation as Lucy, a ticket collector on the Chicago Transit System who one day saves the life of a tall, dark stranger played by Peter Gallagher, an actor who can crack me up even when he's in a coma - which is where he spends most of this film. So lonely is her life that when his boisterous family assumes she's his fiancée, she plays along with the charade - until she finds herself falling for his brother (Bill Pullman). Nice performances and a welcome streak of melancholy (Lucy's final confession is a real tear-jerker) make this superior date movie fodder.
WHIRLPOOL (1949, b/w) Gene Tierney gets caught shoplifting in this barmy slice of dime-store Freud noirishly directed by Otto Preminger. She gets off the hook thanks to the machinations of silky mesmerist José Ferrer, who murmurs things like, "Your soul can undress in front of me" before hypnotising her into taking the rap for the murder of his mistress. Tierney's husband (Richard Conte) is a celebrated psychoanalyst who has failed to notice his wife's unhappiness; will he help her beat the rap, or stomp off in a jealous huff?
WHISKY (2004) If you have to see one Uruguayan film this year, you might as well make it this award-winning low budget gem about Jacobo, lugubrious sexaganarian owner of a small sock factory, and Marta, the loyal assistant who agrees to pretend to be his wife for a few days when his more successful brother comes visiting from Brazil. The mismatched threesome spends a weekend at a hotel by the seaside, which is where the film's title is explained - Uruguayans, apparently, say "whisky" instead of "cheese" when they pose for photos. Like Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, writer-directors Jean Pablo Rebella (who inexplicably killed himself in 2006, at the age of 32) and Pablo Stoll make capital out of lived-in faces, minimalist tableaux and deadpan verbal exchanges. It's hardly laugh-out-loud funny, but it is droll and touching.
WHISPER OF THE HEART (1995) Yoshifumi Kondo was being groomed as the successor to anime genius Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli when he suffered a fatal aneurysm at the age of 47. His one feature as director gives us an idea of what treasures his death has deprived us of; it's an enchanting tale of a 14-year-old schoolgirl whose encounter with a mysterious cat on the Tokyo metro leads to her discovery of true love and a talent for storytelling. Don't expect fireworks, but do expect a lovely, delicate teen romance, all blushing cheeks and blurted sentiment, as well as an adorable Japanese version of John Denver's "Country Roads" and the most beautiful evocation of everyday life in the suburbs of Tokyo that I've ever seen.
WHISPERS IN THE DARK (1992) Annabella Sciorra stars in this absurd thriller as a New York psychiatrist who gets turned on by a female patient relating her S&M experiences. When the patient ends up dead, Annabella starts suspecting every male she meets of being the murderer. Is it that bloke from Without a Trace? Or whatsisname from Law & Order? Happily, this tosh is up (or down) there with such meisterwerks as The Color of Night, Final Analysis and Basic Instinct 2 as a shrink-in-distress movie so stupid one can't help but warm to its absurd plot, deathless one-liners ("A bright psychopath can fool anybody") and a last reel revelation so preposterous it almost elevates the whole thing into essential viewing.
WHITE HEAT (1949, b/w) "Made it ma! Top of the world!" The last great Warner Brothers gangster film, directed by Raoul Walsh, builds up to one of the most deranged climaxes in film history. It also features my favourite James Cagney performance as Cody Jarrett, the gang-leader and textbook psycho who suffers from crippling headaches and a mother fixation. Yet Cagney, whether having his brow soothed in ma's lap, or wigging out in jail when he hears of her death, makes him more than just a caricature, and he's certainly more sympathetic than Edmond O'Brien as the undercover cop who wins Jarrett's trust before betraying him.
WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP (1992) Writer-director Ron Shelton is a wizard at comedy-dramas with sporty settings, so even people who loathe ballgames should enjoy this amiable buddy movie in which Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes play Venice Beach basketball hustlers. Rosie Perez, who looked all set to be the next big Latino thing until Jennifer Lopez came along, gets one of her best roles here as Harrelson's girlfriend, swotting up on trivia in the hope of landing a spot on a TV quiz show.
WHITE MISCHIEF (1987) Sex, death and toffs – James Fox’s book about a real-life case of murder among the champagne-swilling expats in Kenya’s Happy Valley during the Second World War has all the ingredients for a steamy Somerset Maugham-style melodrama. Greta Scacchi, at that point in her career when she seemed to be forever taking her clothes off, marries wealthy old codger Joss Ackland but can’t resist rogering Charles Dance on the side. Alas, it’s not as much fun as it should be, perhaps because there’s never any question as to who killed who or why, and the characters are so shallow it’s difficult to care. But the scenery’s pretty and so are the frocks, especially Greta’s shiny gold one.
WHITE NOISE 2: THE LIGHT (2007) Serenity's Nathan Fillion stars in a sequel that's both trashier and more fun than its predecessor. Fillion's wife and son are shot dead, and his failed attempt to join them in the hereafter leaves him with the ability to see auras around people fated to die soon. Should he try and save them, or would that simply result in an even bigger body count? Despite the spectral figures pointlessly leaping out at us every couple of minutes, this isn't very scary, but Flllion is a likeable protagonist and the inevitable quasi-religious subtext is so garbled it's not too off-putting.
WHITE OF THE EYE (1987) Donald Cammell killed himself in 1996 after his last movie (Wild Side) was recut against his wishes, but prior to that the co-director of the legendary Performance made a fleeting comeback with this disturbing little thriller set in a small copper-mining town in Arizona. A detective investigating a series of mutilated corpses homes in an eccentric hippy TV installer (David Keith) and his wife (Cathy Moriarty) whose lives are further complicated by multiple mystical flashbacks and the unexpected return of a pistol-packing ex. You'll never be able to look at plastic sheeting in the same way again.
WHITE OLEANDER (2003) Like Mermaids, this is one of those chick flicks about the trials of growing up with a wacky mother, only in this case mom (Michelle Pfeiffer) is an artist in jail for the murder of her two-timing boyfriend while her daughter (Alison Lohman) is shuttled between foster parents (one tries to kill her, another commits suicide) and children’s homes. Pfeiffer looks unfeasibly glam but gives a chilling performance as the jailbird who calmly continues to mess with her daughter’s head by offering pragmatic but emotionally devastating advice. Inevitably there’s some "Everything’s always been about you, never about me" dialogue, but it’s not as slushy as you’d expect.
WHITE SANDS (1992) Sheriff Willem Dafoe's murder investigation gets waylaid by psychotic lesbians, double-dealing feds and Mickey Rourke with a wild and crazy hair-do. Not as much fun as it sounds.
WHITE SQUALL (1996) Before he bounced back with Gladiator, Ridley Scott was going through a fallow period when he directed this watery drama, based on the true story of a brigantine (called The Albatross, which is just asking for trouble) which in 1961 was hit by freak weather in the Gulf of Mexico and sank with the loss of six lives. Jeff Bridges is his usual sturdy self as the crusty skipper who schools privileged preppy kids in boatcraft, the seascapes are as handsome as you’d expect and the sinking of the ship is a heart-stopper, but the rites-of-passage scenario is a yawn, and the film ends with one of the ghastliest cases of Hollywood Hug ever committed to celluloid.
WHO DARES WINS (1982) Oh for the days when terrorist attacks could be foiled by abseiling blokes in black balaclavas. This gloriously politically incorrect recruiting poster for the SAS was inspired by the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege and fingers a CND splinter-group called The People's Lobby as a front for international terrorism. Collins is assigned to infiltrate the evil pacifists and thwart their plans, which somewhat illogically involve launching a nuclear attack on Scotland. Like any movie terrorist cell worth its salt, this one includes a couple of glam chicks: Ingrid Pitt as an East German weapons specialist and Judy Davis, who accessorises her evening dress with an Uzi to crash an American Embassy dinner party. Truly awful... yet weirdly compelling, with 1980s-tastic theme music by Roy Budd.
WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988) If you can get past the punctuation-challenged title (see also What's Love Got to Do With It and Two Weeks Notice) Robert Zemeckis' groundbreaking blend of live action and animation is a pretty dark 1940s film noir disguised as a family blockbuster, with a Chinatown-type plot so clever it almost makes you forget the dazzling technical achievement. Bob Hoskins plays alcoholic gumshoe Eddie Valiant, whose client is framed for dropping a safe on the head of his wife's pat-a-cake partner, but sit back and enjoy the Who's Who of cartoon favourites such as Dumbo, Betty Boop and Daffy Duck, and newcomers such as curvaceous Jessica Rabbit, unforgettably voiced by Kathleen Turner (and sung by Amy Irving). "I'm not bad - I'm just drawn that way."
WHOLE TEN YARDS, THE (2004) You would think film-makers might have realised The Sopranos had made hitman comedies redundant, but no. Even by sequel standards, this follow-up to the one about the loveable contract-killer (Bruce Willis) and his dentist neighbour (Matthew Perry) is dismal. Perry's wife allows herself to be kidnapped by a Hungarian mobster so Bruce can collect a big pay-off; Perry, not privy to the set-up, runs around like a headless chicken, bumping into things. The lame climax features the sort of omigod-he's-dead-no-he's-not charade introduced by The Sting and since recycled by 30 years of con-man movies. There, I've spoilt it for you.
WHOLE WIDE WORLD, THE (1996, TVM) When Renée Zellweger won her Oscar, among the people she thanked was Vincent d'Onofrio, her co-star ten years earlier in this superior telefilm. Set in a small Texas town in the 1930s, it's the sad but true story based on the memoirs of Novalyne Price, a spunky schoolteacher, and her ill-fated romance with the very strange writer Robert E Howard, creator of Conan the barbarian. You'll probably need a hanky or two for the home stretch.
WHY DOES HERR R RUN AMOK? (1970) Now we've grown accustomed to Dogme 95, Mike Leigh and reality TV, Rainer Werner Fasbinder's subversive, quasi-verité, semi-improvisational film-making style seems less radical than it once did. Nothing much seems to happen in the life of Kurt Raab (the name of both the actor and the character he plays). But watch him closely as wife, in-laws and neighbours witter on endlessly, or as he fails miserably to bond with colleagues from the architectural office where he works – this man is even more of a loser than David Brent, and he's further burdened by ghastly late-1960s German fashions and furnishing. Little wonder he cracks (and viewers with ADD may well be so bored that they'll crack too). Oh yes, it's always the quiet ones.
WHY WE FIGHT (2005) Eugene Jarecki’s scrupulously-researched documentary takes as its point of departure Frank Capra’s anti-Nazi 1942 propaganda film of the same name, and examines the rise of what Dwight Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" in the 50 years since then. Jarecki’s approach couldn’t be more different from that of Michael Moore, maintaining a heroically non-partisan stance with an assembly of historical footage and comments from politicians and ordinary people (such as a cop who lost his son in 9/11), and poses some pertinent questions about the real reasons behind the war in Iraq. Not a lot of laughs, then, but obligatory viewing for armchair pundits.
WICKER MAN, THE (1973) Anthony Shaffer penned the screenplay for this uniquely unsettling cult horror movie which begins in low-key fashion with Edward Woodward, as a prim Calvinist policeman called Sergeant Howie, arriving on Summerisle, a remote island off the west coast of Scotland, to investigate the disappearance of a local schoolgirl. Among the terrors he encounters there are Britt Ekland's body double dancing naked, Christopher Lee wearing women's clothing (and take it from me - it's the one of the creepiest drag acts in film history) and the dreaded Wicker Man of the title. Ooh, those nutty pagans. Never again will you be able to listen to "Summer is Icumen In" without shuddering. Not that you listen to it anyway, but you know what I mean.
WICKER MAN, THE (2006) Stupid remake of the 1973 cult horror movie, relocated by writer-director Neil LaBute (specialist in dramatic misogyny) to a remote island matriarchy off the coast of Washington State. Nicolas Cage, at his absolute worst, plays a Californian cop summoned by an ex-girlfriend to search for her missing daughter; he runs around the island punching women and yelling at small girls while Angelo Badalamenti's music works overtime to pump up the non-existent tension. If you want to see the funniest bits, follow this link. Otherwise, stick to the original.
WICKER PARK (2004) American remake of the French romantic thriller L'appartement, though the edginess of the original has been flattened out into vanilla romance between cute but dim Josh Hartnett and Diane Kruger, who like Uma Thurman isn't terribly interesting outside the films of Quentin Tarantino. The film, transposed from Paris to wintry Chicago, juggles flashbacks and viewpoints in an attempt to add pep, but frankly we don't give a fig whether or not these dull specimens end up together. Much more intriguing are Matthew Lillard and Rose Byrne as the flawed but interesting also-rans who get trampled over in the leading couple's sprint towards their obligatory happy ending. Pity the film's not about them.
WILD AT HEART (1990) There's masses of sex and violence in David Lynch's Southern Gothic road movie, adapted from Barry Gifford's novel, but none of the dreamlike quality or mounting dread with which the film-maker invests his best work. Nicolas Cage, in snakeskin jacket, and Laura Dern are at their most mannered and annoying as the amorous young couple on the run from her witchy mother (Dern's real-life mom Diane Ladd) who sends a series of killers after them, including Willem Defoe as pimpy Bobby Peru and a blonde-wigged Isabella Rossellini as the mono-browed Perdita Durango. And enough already with the hokey southern accents! Lynch, trying too hard to be weird, piles on references to The Wizard of Oz, throws in a bunch of naked fat ladies or blows someone’s head off in a geyser of gore, and just ends up parodying himself. But it's a fabulous-looking farrago, and the director's ear is as sharp as ever; the soundtrack, which ranges from Richard Strauss to Chris Isaak, is first-rate.
WEDDING CRASHERS (2005) Likeable but fatally lazy frat pack comedy starring laid-back Owen Wilson and motormouth Vince Vaughn as guys who gatecrash weddings so they can take advantage of the free food, booze and bridesmaids. I could happily have watched them freeloading for hours, but alas, the fun grinds to a halt when Wilson falls for a posh girl with an Ivy League boyfriend, while Vaughn finds himself pursued by – quelle horreur! - a predatory female. Things perk up when Will Farrell cameos as a former wedding crasher who has graduated to funerals, but in terms of my laughs-per-hour meter I'd rank it some way below Anchorman or Dodgeball.
WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS (2008) Just-dumped workaholic Cameron Diaz and just-fired slacker Ashton Kutcher meet drunk in Las Vegas and get hitched; next morning, after agreeing to a divorce and before going their separate ways, he wins a $3million jackpot with her quarter. Back in New York, a judge forbids the wildly mismatched couple access to the disputed dosh unless they can stick together for six months. Naturally, each tries to sabotage the other's committment to the marriage, with predictable rom-com results accompanied by obligatory wisecracking best pals - Rob Corddry for him, Lake Bell for her. Whether or not you'll find it funny will depend on your opinion of the leading players, but I like Diaz's game-for-anything approach and there are worse ordeals than spending 99 minutes watching Kutchner being cute.
WILD, THE (2006) You may experience déjà-vu during this dismal Disney cartoon about a bunch of zoo animals crossing the ocean to rescue a lion-cub that's inadvertently been shipped to a volcanic island - it's virtually the same plot as that of the marginally superior Madagascar. Kiefer Sutherland, Eddie Izzard and William Shatner provide voices for, respectively, papa lion, koala bear and evil wildebeest with ideas above his station. It's not fit to shine the boots of The Lion King, let alone classics like The Jungle Book. Three things I ask of American animators: 1) Quit using the voices of famous actors. 2) Enough with the talking animals already. 3) Watch some Hayao Miyazaki.
WILD BUNCH, THE (1969) Imagine the changes that would be required if Sam Peckinpah's classic western were to be remade today. Animal Rights activists would carp at the treatment of scorpions and horses, feminists would fret about the women being duplicitous bitches (major spoilers in this link) who have to gunned down and Hispanic groups would condemn the way the Mexicans all have rotten teeth and snarl, "Hey, greengo!" But there's no place for political correctness in this curiously moving tale of ageing gunslingers with manly names like "Pike" and "Deke", and William Holden saying, "Let's go" before he and his partners amble off on that last walk down the dusty road to slo-mo death.
WILD CHILD (2008) Like What a Girl Wants, this springs from that odd mini-genre catering to American girls' secret yearning for the stuffy traditions of ye olde Europe. Emma Roberts (Julia's niece) plays Poppy, a spoilt Malibu teen whose exasperated dad packs her off to English boarding school where the headmistress (Natasha Richardson in her last role) is strict but fair, and it's ho for lax, plaid skirts and shared dorms, but with a noticeable lack of classrooms or prep. To begin with, Poppy is horrid and tries to get expelled, but gradually, she makes chums and licks the lacrosse team into shape by teaching them a Maori wardance (though it's a mystery how she knew it in the first place). Like Poppy herself, the film starts off obnoxious, but gets more endearing as it goes on. It's not Malory Towers, but it'll do for now.
WILD HOGS (2007) Think City Slickers, with motorbikes. John Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy confront their respective midlife crises by taking to the open road on their choppers in this lame comedy, which reckons there's nothing more hilarious than nudge-nudge references to Deliverance and our heroes being terrified by a friendly gay cop. By the time they prove their manliness by meeting Ray Liotta and his biker gang in a tediously protracted punch-up, you'll be screaming for a little squeal-piggy-squeal action.
WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957, b/w) Just after The Seventh Seal but before his most famously gloomy films, Ingmar Bergman directed this beautiful Swedish road movie about an ageing professor (played by veteran director Victor Sjöström) driving with his daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin) to Lund, where the university is to honour his life's work. On the way there, he confronts his mortality via dreams, flashbacks and a trio of jolly teenagers who come along for the ride, and realises he has been a cold-hearted bastard. Amazingly, this meditation on old age, loneliness and memory is more wistful than depressing, packs in a fair bit of gentle humour and ends, without an ounce of bogus sentimentality, on an uplifting note.
WILD THINGS (1998) Denise Richards (rich, pouty) and Neve Campbell (trailer-trash, slutty) play hot high-school chicks who accuse their school counsellor (Matt Dillon) of sexual assault, but detective Kevin Bacon smells a rat, and so do we. We're not just in Florida here, we're in preposterous thriller territory – a glossy, unreal place where the only law is that of the Barking Mad Plot Development. This film has more twists than a cocktail bar full of Martinis, steamy sex scenes and – hurrah! – Bill Murray in a neck brace as the only lawyer sleazy enough to take Dillon's case. Don't miss the closing credits, which fill in vital missing plot details.
WILD, WILD WEST (1999) Barry Sonnenfeld and his Men in Black star, Will Smith, came a cropper with this big screen version of a 1960s TV spoof western. Smith and Kevin Kline play secret agents in the employ of Ulysses S Grant, are pitted against legless (and implicitly sexless) Kenneth Branagh and his phallic substitute, a giant mechanical tarantula, while Salma Hayek shows her bottom quite prettily. But this is just about worth watching for the bizarre scene in which the heroes use a severed head as a slide projector, working from the theory that the last image the dead man saw will be imprinted on his eyes. Even turkeys can sometimes yield choice morsels of tasty meat.
WILLARD (2003) I'm not saying I want rats infesting my home or anything, but I do think they're cute, particularly the smart ones that do tricks. Crispin Glover, one of the nuttier actors of our time, is well cast as the reclusive mama's boy who trains an army of rodents to do his bidding in remake of the 1971 creature feature. The early stages, in which the critters engage in low-level vandalism such as shredding car tyres, are mildly diverting, but R Lee Ermey, as Willard's boss, is one-note nasty (guess what happens to him) and it all gets out of hand as CGI takes over.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO + JULIET (1996) Campy Australian director Baz Luhrmann updates Shakespeare for a new generation with a barrage of razzle-dazzle MTV visuals, spaghetti western showdowns and loud pop music. Original dialogue is preserved but the mise en scène is so vivid that even bard-phobic adolescents with ADD should be able to follow the action. While rival teenage gangs are busy turning "Verona Beach" into a war zone, Leonardo DiCaprio sets hearts aswoon as rebellious Romeo, Claire Danes is adorable as shy Juliet, Mercutio makes his entrance in silver afro wig and sequins and Father Laurence entrusts his vital letter to "Post Haste" messenger service. The poetry gets a little swamped, it's true, but it just goes to show; if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be a highly paid Hollywood screenwriter.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (2004) Phew. Not Jeffrey Archer's The Merchant of Venice, then. When I was at school we all found this play problematic, not because of Shylock's Jewishness, but because whoever read the role of Portia had to say the embarrassing word "bosom" several times. Despite a bit of a gay thing between her unsufferable suitor Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes) and his mate Antonio (Jeremy Irons) while many a prozzie bares her bosoms in the background, Michael Radford's film comes down squarely on the side of respectful with its painterly Venetian locations and Al Pacino demanding his pound of flesh in a solid star turn. In the end, though, it's all a little… dare one say it? Dull.
WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (1971) After The Producers, Gene Wilder's finest hour was playing the sinister Willy Wonka, who escorts poor but honest Charlie Bucket, Charlie's grandpa and four other not-so-honest children around his choccy factory in this trippy, nightmarish Roald Dahl fantasy festooned with even trippier and more nightmarish musical numbers ("oompah loompah doopity do!"). Ghastly fates await the kiddies - one is turned into a giant blueberry, another falls into a chocolate river and gets wedged in a pipe. Truly the stuff of nightmares, so it's hardly surprising to learn that it's Marilyn Manson's favourite movie.
WIMBLEDON (2004) Romantic comedies aren't best known for their credibility, but this one's more fanciful than most since we're asked to believe that a 31-year-old British tennis-player ranked 119th in the world can sufficiently raise his game to be in with a shout at the title. If you can swallow that, you'll have no trouble swallowing his unlikely love match with the rising young American wondergirl. Richard Curtis had nothing to do with it, yet his shadow looms large over the shabby-chic milieu populated by loveable English eccentrics. Yes, it's Notting Hill with tennis balls! That this formulaic nonsense remains watchable is due to the amiable Paul Bettany, who saunters through the proceedings like the winner of the Hugh Grant Prize for Self-Deprecation, though his love interest is less happily incarnated by Kirsten Dunst, an actress who to me always looks vaguely constipated.
WINCHESTER '73 (1950, b/w) In the first of several magnificent westerns he made with the director Anthony Mann, James Stewart wins a rifle in a shooting contest and then spends the rest of the film tracking it down after it's stolen by his brother. The weapon is lost in a poker game, pounced on by Sioux chief Rock Hudson and generally passed from hand to hand on its way to a cathartic shoot-out on a boulder-strewn mountain top. Not only did Stewart show his darker side in these films, he must have been pretty tough offscreen as well; this was filmed around the time he became the first Hollywood star to negotiate a cut of a film's profits.
WIND CHILL (2007) Critics were predictably sniffy about this modest little chiller, but you can be sure they watched it at a convivial daytime screening, as opposed to individually at home in the wee small hours, where its creepy minimalism is more likely to generate goose pimples. Despite the B-movie set-up, it's the best showcase yet for the talented Emily Blunt, speaking with an American accent as a not-particularly-nice student who accepts the offer of a ride to Delaware for the Christmas holidays. But there's something a bit iffy about her driver (Ashton Holmes, Viggo's son from A History of Violence), and things go horribly wrong when they take a shortcut and their car ends up wedged in a snowdrift. And if that's not bad enough, they're not alone! Ghosts? Hallucinations? Either way, it's pretty spooky.
WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY, THE (2006) Ken Loach's historical drama about the 1920s Irish rebellion against the British won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, but it's the only film in which I got so bored that I actually started trying to read a magazine in the cinema. In the dark! That was when I wasn't getting the giggles at the crudely improvised dialogue as the thuggy Black and Tans roll up, swear like troopers (well that's what they are, I suppose), turn poor old Irish crones out of their cottages and beat peaceable Irish folk to death; the Brits are even more caricatured here than English villains in Hollywood movies like Braveheart or The Patriot. I have no problems with the message (Irish super, English horrid - well, we all knew that anyway), and Cillian Murphy is his usual mesmerising self as the chap who abandons a medical career to join the Republicans but ends up fighting his own brother (oh, the horrors of civil war) but this is all message, scant characterisation, and speechifying instead of proper dialogue. The scenery's quite nice, though.
WIND WILL CARRY US, THE (1999) I have yet to encounter an Iranian film I didn't fall asleep in. But I managed to stay awake just long enough during this one by Abbas Kiarostami to realise it's a modern classic. A film-maker posing as an engineer arrives at an isolated village in Kurdistan, where he hangs around waiting for an old lady to die. Each time his mobile phone rings he has to drive to a hilltop cemetery to get a proper signal. If you can take nearly two hours of slow pacing, repetitive action and endless shots of people driving around in cars, this is deadpan comedy of the highest order. Well, I found it funny.
WINDTALKERS (2002) Everyone's agreed that John Woo's Hollywood films aren't a patch to the delirious shoot-em-ups he made in Hong Kong, and this war isn’t like to change anyone's mind, since it wastes an intriguing historical fact – Navajo Indian language was used by Americans as an unbreakable radio code during WW2. Nicolas Cage plays a sergeant who's expected to kill his Navajo "windtalker" should it seem likely he may fall into Japanese hands. But forget that – the film-makers certainly do – sit back and and get a load of the big explosions, which are cool.
WINGED MIGRATION (2001) Twitchers, nature lovers and indeed anyone who likes gawping at big close-ups of birds flapping their wings should flock to this stunning French documentary. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll help yourself to more turkey.
WINGS OF THE DOVE (1997) After The Innocents, this Edwardian ménage-à-trois is my favourite Henry James adaptation, and a world away from the mummified heritage-fests of the Merchant-Ivory films. Helena Bonham-Carter is terrific as a liberated London gal whose scheme for her penniless lover (Linus Roache) to seduce a terminally ill heiress (Alison Elliott) goes horribly wrong, but not before we've been treated to a superabundance of Fortuny-type frocks, picturesque Venetian palazzi and a couple of sizzling sex scenes in which our Helena shows what she's made of. Hossein Amini's screenplay updates the action and cuts back on the excessive verbiage, leaving director Iain Softley to fill in the meaning via purely cinematic means. Which he does brilliantly.
WINTER KILLS (1979) Like The Manchurian Candidate, this weird and wonderful conspiracy movie was adapted from a novel by Richard Condon and features a starry cast in a plot that occasionally bears intriguing parallels to the assassination of JFK, and is best viewed as a cynical, slightly surreal black comedy rather than as a thriller. Jeff Bridges, as the son of a wealthy tycoon (John Huston in Noah Cross-meets-Joe Kennedy mode) sets out to find the truth about the death of his brother, a US president, and finds himself up to his eyeballs in wacky cameos from the likes of Elizabeth Taylor as a Hollywood madam and Eli Wallach as a gay hitman.
WITCHES OF EASTWICK, THE (1987) George Miller, of Mad Max fame, always seemed an odd choice to direct this overproduced film version of John Updike's novel, in which three bored and frustrated housewives inadvertently summon a ponytailed Lucifer-cum-Lothario to their small New England town. The tone wavers uncertainly between black farce and special effects comedy, complete with grotesque vomiting scenes. The biggest special effect of all, though, is Jack Nicholson as "just your average, horny little devil", soaring so far over the top it makes his performance from The Shining look like a masterclas in underplaying. Incredibly, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer and Cher just about manage to hold their own.
WITCHES, THE (1980) Let's face it: what children really want is scary horrible stuff, and they get it in spades in this adaptation of a typically wicked story by Roald Dahl . Angelica Huston seems nice enough as she prepares to chair a convention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children at an English seaside hotel not a million miles from Fawlty Towers. But nine-year-old Luke knows the truth – that she's really the Grand High Witch, and hatching a plot to turn children into mice.
WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) This grim revenge "western" set during the English Civil War is the third and best of the three films directed by British whizz-kid Michael Reeves before he died at the age of 24. Vincent Price plays Matthew Hopkins, a religious hypocrite who roams the land, torturing suspected witches for profit and pleasure. Legend has it that Price wasn't happy with Reeves' refusal to let him chew the scenery in his customary fashion and said, ''I've made 84 films. What have you done?" to which the young director replied, "I've made three good ones." His use of the English landscape is stunning, and it's also one of the best films ever made about the Civil War (admittedly not a lot of competition there) and the dehumanising effects of violence.
WITHNAIL & I (1986) Sometimes I suspect I'm the only person in the world who doesn't think Withnail and I is a work of staggering genius. I like the early scenes in the sordid Camden Town flat - it reminds me of my student days. The scrag end of the 1960s is nicely depicted, and Danny the dealer (Ralph Brown) is the sort of character you wish had his own film. But when Richard E Grant and Paul McGann arrive at the cottage in Cumbria, the comedy gets lazy and desperate; British cinephiles invariably sneer at Hollywood comedies featuring elements such as randy bulls and predatory gay uncles, but somehow these things are deemed acceptable here. Long before the film returns to Camden, I've lost patience. But hey, don't let me put you off. Most people think this is the Funniest Film Ever Made and even I have to admit there are some fabulous one-liners. "We want the finest wines available to humanity," for one.
WITHOUT A CLUE (1988) Michael Caine bumbles around in a deerstalker as a dimwitted actor hired by Dr Watson (Ben Kingsley) to pose as the doc’s fictional creation - Sherlock Holmes – in a bid to stop Moriarty from flooding the economy with forged fivers. It’s a one-joke movie in which even the one-joke isn’t that funny (and surely the main attraction in Sherlock Holmes stories has always been the character of Holmes himself), but the two leads are game, and it’s fun watching a smart actor like Caine posing as a stupid actor posing as a genius.
WITNESS (1985) Harrison Ford plays a big city cop who takes refuge from corrupt colleagues in Pennsylvania's Amish farming community, but what starts out as a violent thriller takes an unexpected turn into erotic territory, even though Ford and the lovely young Amish widow (Kelly McGillis) do little more than gaze yearningly at each other. Peter Weir directs it with such loving attention to the improbably idyllic Amish lifestyle - bonnets, communal barn-raising and so on - that it almost makes you want to swap your laptop for a herd of dairy cows.
WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (1957, b/w) When people talk about Agatha Christie movies they generally forget about one of the most illustrious examples of the subgenre - this courtroom drama's adapted from one of her plays and directed by Billy Wilder, who wisely stands back and allows Charles Laughton to give one of his gloriously hammy performances as a barrister hired to defend Tyrone Power on a murder charge. Marlene Dietrich plays the accused's wife. Though the narrative reversals are unlikely to startle today's twist-savvy audiences, there's always pleasure to be had in watching the well-oiled tumblers falling into place.
WITTGENSTEIN (1993) "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," and all that. Derek Jarman, with customary stylish visuals on a chewing-gum budget, strings a series of disconnected tableaux into a sort of Bluffer's Guide to the philosopher's life and Tractatus, complete with one-armed pianist brother (for whom Ravel composed his Concerto for the Left Hand), years at Cambridge with Bertrand Russell, and imagined conversations with a Martian. Karl Johnson plays the endearingly batty thinker, whose intellect was so tortured he regarded his military stint in WW1 as light relief. It's surprisingly watchable, though Ludwig's own taste in film was anything featuring Carmen Miranda or Betty Hutton, so he would probably have loathed this one.
WIZ, THE (1978) One of Sidney Lumet's more aypical directing gigs, this overblown film version of the all-black Broadway reworking of The Wizard of Oz is pretty much a catastrophe, but nowadays packs a certain curiosity value for its cast and as a showcase for hard-working Afro-American thesps such as Ted Ross and Nipsey Russell. Diana Ross is a couple of decades too old to play Dorothy, a shy Harlem schoolteacher transported by a tornado into a magically transformed Manhattan, where the cowardly lion is found lurking outside New York Public Library, and the original story's poppy-field has been turned into an alley full of drug addicts. Michael Jackson pulls off some nifty dance moves as the Scarecrow, Richard Pryor plays the Wizard and Lena Horne is Glinda the Good. Maybe it's time for a gritty rap remake, directed by Spike Lee.
WIZARD OF OZ, THE (1939) Did you know that if you watch this while listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, there’s an eerie synchronicity between music and image? Bells start going off when the witch rides into frame on her bicycle, the black and white portion of the movie is the same length as Side One of the album, and so on. Internauts have been theorising about this for years, so I put it to the test, and what do you know – it’s uncanny! The downside is that you have to listen to Dark Side of the Moon three times on the trot, and I daresay you’d encounter similar "uncanny" coincidences if you were to watch Jaws while listening to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
WOLF CREEK (2005) If you just can't get enough of the grim new wave of "Torture Porn", here's another film in which young travellers (two British, one Australian) meet gruesome fates, though this one's "based on actual events" - at least two well-publicised cases in which backpackers were murdered in the Australian outback. Unlike the makers of Hostel, first-time writer-director Greg McLean lavishes time and care on his characters, which makes it even more unpleasant when their car breaks down and they fall into the hands of a Crocodile Dundee from Hell. (He even quotes Paul Hogan's "That's not a knife" gag.) It's elegantly filmed with hand-held camera, and the mounting sense of dread is expertly handled, but unless nihilism is a novelty for you, you're unlikely to find it much fun.
WOMEN, THE (1939) Gossipy Rosalind Russell can't wait to tell saintly Norma Shearer that her husband is sleeping with perfume salesgirl Joan Crawford in this classic George Cukor bitch-fest adapted by Anita Loos from Clare Boothe Luce's play. The men are kept offscreen, but the world still revolves around them while their wives do the round of health spas, fashion shows and beauty salons, their idle existences propped up by a full complement of dogsbodies beavering away in the background. Shearer does a cartwheel, Russell and Paulette Goddard have a catfight and it's bags more fun than the recent Meg Ryan remake, but these ladies' moneyed lives do seem awfully arid and airless. The narrative dice may be stacked against brazen hussy Crawford, but you can't help wishing her luck as she tries to claw her way up the social ladder.
WOMEN IN LOVE (1969) DH Lawrence seems to have slipped out of fashion, but his free-spirited sexual politics were all the rage back in the 1960s, when Ken Russell directed this po-faced slice of Eng Lit about two sisters (Glenda Jackson and Jennie Linden) testing the limits of love in their stormy relationships. Highlights include the future honourable member for Hampstead & Highgate frolicking with cows in a field and, of course, the infamous nude wrestling match between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates, which will probably now seem rather poignant now that both actors have passed away.
WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (1988) Pedro Almodòvar's breakthrough movie was this kitsch screwball comedy which elevated the Spanish director from minor cult to international art-house flavour of the month. Carmen Maura plays Pepa, who wakes up in the Madrid penthouse she shares with her lover and finds an answer machine message telling her to pack her bags. She flips out. A never-ending stream of callers, a vengeful ex-wife, Antonio Banderas at his cutest, gazpacho spiked with tranquilisers and (the sort of thing that wouldn't seem remotely amusing nowadays) a terrorist threat to blow up an airplane jostle for position on the frenzied farce-o-meter. And the interior décor! Was there ever a director with such an expert eye for cushions?
WONDER BOYS (2000) Curtis Hanson’s follow-up to the glorious LA Confidential was this not-so-glorious but still likeable character-driven titbit, an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s campus story about an increasingly farcical winter weekend in the life of Grady Tripp, a fiftysomething university professor who, seven years after his acclaimed debut novel, is suffering from writer’s block. Michael Douglas has a ball shambling around in a grotty purple dressing-gown, stoned and unshaven, as his life goes into freefall, watched by Robert Downey Jr as his manic agent, Frances McDormand as his pregnant mistress and Tobey Maguire as a troubled rich kid.
WONDERLAND (2003) This effective if not terribly likeable exercise in Hollywood Sleaze is like a film noir version of Boogie Nights. Val Kilmer plays legendary porn star John Holmes, referred to here as "The King" but better known in my house as "Tripod" thanks to the gargantuan size of his member (not seen, alas). By 1981, Holmes was a washed up cokehead enbroiled in the brutal bludgeoning to death of four people; James Cox's film dances around the investigation without drawing any conclusions in particular. Lisa Kudrow and Kate Bosworth play the long-suffering women in Holmes' life; lots of hyperactive actors pretend to snort truckfuls of drugs and act debauched; Eric Bogosian fills the obligatory role of the Kingpin in the Dressing-Gown, while 1970s music and hip camera trickery fail to paper over the depressing void at the centre of this kind of existence.
WOODSMAN, THE (2004) Never one to turn his back on a controversial role, Kevin Bacon outdoes himself in this low-key drama about an ex-con, released after serving a 12-year sentence for child molesting, who gets a job in a lumber yard, a flat overlooking (uh-oh) a school playground and a girlfriend in the shape of the actor's real-life wife Kyra Sedgwick. But that doesn't stop him befriending a young girl he spots on the bus, leading to much tension of the will he-won't he variety. Nicole Kassell's writing-directing debut encourages audiences to try and see that protagonist as a messed-up human being, rather than as the evil bogeyman of tabloid lore, but it still doesn't make comfortable viewing.
WORKING GIRL (1988) "I have a head for business and a bod for sin," announces Melanie Griffith in this very 1980s corporate fairytale about a secretary who gets her own back on the female boss who stole her ideas by posing as an executive in her absence. Sigourney Weaver is huge fun as the evil bitch boss-lady, Harrison Ford plays love interest and Joan Cusack steals scenes in a supporting role. Griffith's subsequent career has been so disastrous that it's easy to forget how appealing she used to be with her not so dumb blonde attitude and disarming streak of Monroe-like vulnerability, though Carly Simon's Oscar-winning theme tune makes me want to throw up.
WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, THE (1999) I feel sorry for Pierce Brosnan - as much as one can feel sorry for any millionaire film star. He's actor enough to have pulled off the rough, tough Bond reboot that Daniel Craig got to play in Casino Royale, but instead he was saddled with having to channel Roger Moore's jokey 007. Brosnan does show signs of trying to add a bit of depth to the role, though the franchise is looking a little drab here as he jet-sets between Azerbaijan and the Millennium Dome, goes mano a mano against small-but-perfectly-formed Robert Carlyle and canoodles with Sophie Marceau and Denise Richards, who plays a pouty nuclear physicist called Dr Christmas Jones, just so that the screenwriters can bung in a gag about Christmas coming more than once a year.
WORLD TRADE CENTER (2006) I suppose it was asking too much of Hollywood film-makers to cut through the mawkishness surrounding 9/11, though it's disappointing to see the normally provocative Oliver Stone toeing the party-line with this ingratiating ode to New York heroism, capped by a dishonest attempt to link the atrocity directly to Iraq. The ubiquitous Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena play Port Authority cops trapped beneath rubble. Meanwhile, on the outside, Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal wring their hands as the wives waiting for news as searchers comb Ground Zero for survivors. The film evokes the claustrophobia of being buried beneath tons of debris for 14 hours effectively enough, though for obvious reasons it's not a barrel of laughs. New Yorkers deserve better than this.
WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN, THE (2006) Anthony Hopkins seems to have been cruising in campy villain mode of late, so it's a pleasure to watch him turning on that old pre-Hannibal magic in this corny but likeable biopic, a labour of love for Australian writer-director Roger Donaldson, who already made a documentary on the same subject. Hopkins plays Burt Monro, an eccentric old codger who spends his days tinkering with his 1920 Indian Scout motorbike in the yard of his New Zealand shack. Until, one day, he cobbles together the funds to set off for the salt flats of Bonneville, Utah, where he plans to show the world what he and his bike can do. On the way there, he disarms everybody - including us, the viewers - with his down-to-earth Kiwi charm.
WRESTLER, THE (2008) "I'm an old, broken-down piece of meat." It was a travesty that the 2009 Academy Award for Best Actor went to Sean Penn for Milk instead of Mickey Rourke, who put his body, heart and soul into the story of a washed-up professional wrestler who ignores his doctor's advice and tries to make a comeback. Marisa Tomei gives a fearless performance as the pragmatic stripper with whom he forms an emotional bond; the normally unbearable Evan Rachel Wood is fine as his estranged daughter. Darren Aronofsky picked himself up after the flop of The Fountain to direct a gripping, moving portrait of a has-been, sometimes agonising to watch, but with lovely scenes of behind-the-scenes cameraderie between rival wrestlers. Rourke's face might be ruined, but he's lost none of the charisma he had as a young actor; he is quite simply magnificent.
WRONG MAN, THE (1956, b/w) Alfred Hitchcock revisits one of his favourite themes – the innocent man falsely accused – but this times cuts out all the jokes in this dark-hued, Kafka-esque nightmare based on a true story. Henry Fonda plays Manny Balestrero, a New York bass player whose ordered existence is plunged into chaos after he's wrongly identified and arrested for an armed robbery he didn't commit. Despite his lawyer's belief in his innocence, Manny's alibi falls apart, he goes to trial, and his wife (Vera Miles) suffers a nervous breakdown. Extremely sobering.
WRONG TURN (2003) There's nothing original about this latterday blend of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, but it's competently directed by Rob Schmidt and an encouraging sign that slasher movies are being taken seriously again after post-modern pastiches such as Scream. Desmond Harrington and Eliza Dushku head the gaggle of nubile urban cannon fodder who make the mistake of venturing into the wild woods of West Virginia ("Let me remind you of a little movie called Deliverance") where they find a house full of human body parts. Cue for mutant hillbillies, severed heads and a chase through the treetops, though Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon this is not.
WRONG TURN 2: DEAD END (2007) If slasher movies are to be believed, rural parts of the United States are positively heaving with inbred cannibal hillbillies. Here we have another bunch of superfical young people unwittingly putting themselves on the menu of a family of lumpy-faced speech-impaired psychos by taking part in a Survival-type reality TV show. They're supposed to live off nuts and berries in the forest, but instead find themselves facing the business end of axes, arrows, flying razor-wire and the sort of chompy, crushy machines last seen in Galaxy Quest. Par for the slasher movie course, in other words, perked up by a couple of narrative surprises (the survivors aren't necessarily the ones you'd predict) and Henry Rollins, who injects a note of Rambo-esque fun as a military veteran who fights back.
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