X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE, THE (2008) Always a pleasure to see David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson back in the saddle as everyone's favourite paranormal sleuths, but this second big screen spin-off, six years after the long-running TV series ended, is like a sub-par episode set in a British Columbia that appears to have given up any pretence of being somewhere south of the 49th parallel. Both Mulder and Scully have left the FBI, but team up again to work on a not-very-interesting case involving a missing agent, a paedophile priest (Billy Connolly) who keeps having visions, and Russian organ traffickers, all tenuously linked. Amanda Peet and rapper Xzibit play agents on the case. There's a lot of pointless running around in the snow, and only in the home stretch does the film come close to the weirdness of the series.
X-MEN (2000) It’s superheroes a-go-go as Marvel's mega-powered mutants slug it out among themselves over the fate of humanity. Patrick Stewart, as the wheelchair-bound telepath Professor Xavier, leads the good guys whose ranks include Hugh Jackman as hairy-faced, retractable-clawed Wolverine. Ian McKellen plays baddie-in-chief, metal-bending Magneto, while Rebecca Romijn-Stamos plays blue-skinned Mystique, whose special talent is being naked. Bryan Singer directs with admirable sincerity, though the sheer number of supercharacters sometimes makes it feel more like an episode in a long-running supersoap opera than a blockbuster movie.
X-MEN 2 (2003) Like the first X-Men, this special effects adventure inspired by the Marvel comic strip features so many mutants it feels more like an episode in a long-running saga than a self-contained story. But it also improves on the original in almost every way, with a story about good mutants (led by Patrick Stewart as Xavier) teaming up with evil mutants (led by Ian Mackellan as Magneto) against Brian Cox's plan to make the world a mutant-free environment. Hugh Jackman as adamantium-clawed Wolverine and Famke Janssen as telepathic Jean Grey are joined by Alan Cumming as a blue teleporter with a tail, but it's Rebecca Romajin-Stamos as Mystique, whose special talent is being naked, who gets the film's best moments.
X-MEN: THE LAST STAND (2006) Fanboys hit the roof when they saw how the third film in the superhero series had messed with comic-book gospel by, say, killing off characters who hadn't died in the books. Everyone else will find it adequate, if not as inspired as its predecessors; like them, it suffers from a surfeit of superheroes jammed into too short a time. Kitty Pryde (Hard Candy's Ellen Page) and Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones) join the overstuffed line-up, while Famke Janssen is back from the dead and running amok with enhanced Dark Phoenix capabilities. There's also something seriously skewed about a plot that requires the good guys to end up on the side of mutant repression, leaving the bad guys fighting for mutant rights. But it's best not to think too hard, and there's too much going on for it to be boring. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen lend their customary gravitas as the mutant leaders; the latter has a spectacular encounter with the Golden Gate Bridge.
xXx (2002) Vin Diesel seems to have been and gone already, doesn't he? Take a look at last year's Next Big Action Star in this big, noisy James Bond rip-off, in which he plays an extreme sports addict blackmailed by Samuel L Jackson and the US government into jetting over to eastern Europe and infiltrating an outfit called Anarchy 99, which mostly seems to hang out in rave parties. Italian starlet (and daughter of Dario) Asia Argento plays feisty female interest, and a silly but exciting finale launches Mr Diesel down the Danube in pursuit of a speeding biological probe.
XXX: THE NEXT LEVEL (2005) Before he was arrested for soliciting an undercover LA cop while wearing an off-the-shoulder dress, Lee Tamahori directed this bang-a-minute (that's explosions, not sex) action pic aimed at adolescent boys. Ice Cube, who can scowl all he wants but still seems too cuddly for an action hero, busts out of jail to help shouty Samuel Jackson save the free world amid so much animated mayhem that it looks a bit like an episode of Scooby-doo. Willem Dafoe plays the Secretary of Defense. Oooh, I wonder who the villain is.
Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN (2001) Terrific (and terrifically sexy) Mexican road movie directed and co-written by Alfonso Cuarón, who also directed the third Harry Potter film. Two teenage buddies (Diego Luna and the unbelievably cute Gael Garcia Bernal) borrow a car and set off in search of a mythical beach called "Heaven's Mouth". They're joined by an older woman - the Spanish wife of a cousin - who has tragic personal reasons of her own for going in search of sea, sand and zipless sex. What makes the film more than just another coming-of-age romp is the omniscient narration which deftly sketches in class differences, political context and reminders of mortality.
YAKUZA, THE (1975) Heavyweights Paul Schrader and Robert Towne were responsible for the screenplay of this interesting east-meets-west thriller in which Robert Mitchum goes to Tokyo and teams up with Japanese superstar Ken Takakura to rescue an American shipping magnate's daughter from local gangsters. There's a lot of double-crossing interwoven with high-toned samurai philosophising, but it all boils down to Takakura's supercool swordplay, while Big Bob crashes through paper screens with a shotgun and finally gets to grips with the ancient Yakuza custom of chopping off one's own pinky finger.
YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942, b/w) James Cagney is even scarier in musical comedy mode than he ever was as a gangster. According to Hollywood myth, he threw himself into the role of patriotic song and dance man George M Cohan, composer of "Over There", to counter accusations of leftiness (not that there's anything wrong with that), but the excessive flag-waving might also have had something to do with Pearl Harbor having been hit in mid-production. The vaudeville-trained Cagney pulls off some impressive stiff-legged hoofing, sings (as Cohan himself did) in a sort of sprechstimme patter, and won an Oscar. Compared to modern biopics there's a peculiar lack of conflict as he glides from triumph to triumph, though from a modern viewpoint it's almost refreshing to see a showbiz biopic without trauma, drugs or wife-beating.
YARDS, THE (2000) I found this rather underwhelming when I first saw it, but it's time to take a second look, mainly because a lot of French intellectuals have been beating me over the head with how nervously brilliant it is and I need to get my arguments straight so I can shout back at them. Mark Wahlberg, just out of jail, finds himself dragged off the straight and narrow by unstable chum Joaquim Phoenix and scary uncle James Caan, whose company has been using dodgy means to monopolise maintenance contracts in the subway yards of New York City. In fact, the story's all melodramatic twist and no psychological depth, but it's strong on mood (gloomy) and image (murky), and superbly bolstered by Howard Shore's classical romantic score.
YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, THE (1982) Peter Weir's sizzling romantic thriller set in Indonesia in 1965 during the last days of the Sukarno regime never quite pulls off its ambitious attempt to balance the political situation against more personal concerns, but it's still jolly exciting. The affair between chunky Aussie reporter Mel Gibson and lanky attache assistant Sigourney Weaver is such a scorcher you can almost feel the sexual heat coming off the screen, even if she is about a head taller than him. But even that pales next to Linda Hunt's amazing performance as a male Chinese-Australian photographer who's even shorter than Mel. No wonder they gave her an Oscar.
YEAR OF THE DOG (2007) The directing debut of quirky screenwriter Mike White (School of Rock, The Good Girl) is as off-kilter as you'd expect; it's a melancholy deadpan comedy that's more likely to make you cringe than chuckle, though there's no shortage of laugh-out-loud moments. Lugubrious Saturday Night Live alumna Molly Shannon plays an unmarried fortysomething secretary who goes a little nuts after the untimely death of her beloved beagle. She embezzles money from her employers to donate to animal shelters, sabotages the fur coats of her ghastly sister-in-law (a frighteningly funny Laura Dern), and annoys her next-door neighbour (John C Reilly) by filling her home with barking dogs. The scenes of office life are almost surreal and the canines are cute, but it's often sad and not always comfortable viewing.
YES MEN, THE (2004) Anti-globalisation activists Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum pose as WTO representatives to take the mickey out of free trade policies at international conferences. In Finland, textile executives look bemused as Bichibaum peels off his suit to expose a gold jumpsuit with giant penis attachment, but appear to give serious consideration to his quasi-fascist statements about slavery (or an "involuntarily imported workforce," as he puts it), while a gathering of students in New York State is outraged when he proposes to solve Third World hunger with hamburgers made from recycled excrement. It's not so much a documentary as a filmed diary of some very funny performance art, but we could have done with more of these set-pieces and less of the boys sniggering as they cook up their Chris Morris-style pranks.
YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000) It's taken me a few years to come to this conclusion, but I really do think Mark Ruffalo is sex on a stick. It was Kenneth Lonergan's low-budget study of a (non-incestuous) sibling relationship that put him on the Hollywood map. He plays a feckless drifter who turns up on the doorstep of his sister, a churchgoing single mother played by the marvellous Laura Linney, just in time to see her plunging into an adulterous affair with her boss (Matthew Broderick, hilariously uptight). Don't let the sentimental-sounding title put you off; this is not a hug-a-minute sobfest but a portrait of real human beings muddling through amid credible bickering, baffled affection and a few laughs.
YOU WERE NEVER LOVELIER (1942, b/w) The second partnership of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth is a likeable piece of fluff in which Fred plays a Broadway hoofer who gets stranded in Buenos Aires and falls for Rita, daughter of a local hotel-owner. The score by Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer features numbers such as "Dearly Beloved" and "I'm Old-Fashioned", though the studio drafted in Xavier Cugat and his Latin rhythms to add a token touch of authenticity.
YOU, ME AND DUPREE (2006) Owen Wilson, so laid back he's practically horizontal, plays a homeless slacker buddy who squats on the sofa of newly weds Matt Dillon and Kate Hudson. Hilarity ensues as he shows his bottom, makes the bathroom smelly and accidentally burns down the house, though of course he ends up saving their marriage by teaching Dillon how not to be workaholic. This is the kind of comedy in which guys are eternal adolescents who like hanging out in bars and watching sport, while girls are shrewish killjoys, though the central relationship (between Wilson and Dillon, natch, rather than man and wife) is thrown off-balance by an overstretched turn from Michael Douglas as Kate's dad.
YOU, THE LIVING (2007) The second feature from Swedish director Roy Andersson is filmed in the same deadpan tragicomic style as his first, Songs from the Second Floor, but feels more cohesive and builds up to a stunning apocalyptic final image. In a series of tenuously linked vignettes, a cross-section of characters go about their business in an unnamed city, complaining about their lives, recounting weird dreams, playing brass instruments during a thunderstorm or buying drinks in a bar where it always seems to be last orders. Filmed in washed-out pastels by a full-frontal camera that rarely moves, and with a psychotherapist remarking that all his patients are "egocentric, selfish and ungenerous," it's like Ingmar Bergman reimagined by Luis Buñuel, or maybe Monty Python, and stuffed with surreal and occasionally disturbing details.
YOU'LL NEVER GET RICH (1941, b/w) I should never have taken up tapdancing, because now all I do when I see a Fred Astaire film is stare at him and despair. Here he plays a Broadway choreographer who joins the army. Luckily the guardhouse provides its own blues band, leading to a couple of terrific solos when Fred ends up there. Rita Hayworth (23 years old and stunning) plays a chorus girl who becomes Fred's on/off love interest, and dances so beautifully in their duets you wish they could have made more than two movies together, while Robert Benchley plays the producer whose attempts to cheat on his wife set most of the absurd plot contrivances in motion.
YOUNG ADAM (2003) Ewan McGregor shovels coal on a barge, shows his willy and bonks everything in a skirt, particularly Tilda Swinton as his boss’s wife, in David Mackenzie’s adaptation of Alexander Trocchi’s cult novel. It’s set in gloomy 1950s Scotland, where McGregor and his boss (Peter Mullan) fish a corpse out of the canal; as flashbacks reveal, our anti-hero is more closely connected to the dead girl than he’s letting on. Things perk up with a kinky custard scene and the arrival of Therese Bradley in a splendidly vulgar turn as Swinton’s slutty sister, but the predominant tone is moody, broody and understated. It’s also beautifully shot and acted, though you may find yourself thinking "But Molesworth, what is the point of it all?"
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974, b/w) "Please, I beg you! For safety's sake don't humiliate him!" Mel Brooks’ affectionate pastiche of the old Universal horror movies is one of the most consistently funny of his films. Gene Wilder is the mad doc trying to play down his ancestry, Peter Boyle the monster with the zip in his neck (Brooks couldn't use the original bolts because Universal had copyright) and Marty Feldman the hunchback whose bump keeps swapping sides. Too many comic highlights to list here, but look out for the little girl on the see-saw and Gene Hackman as the blind hermit. And there's something sublime and heartstring-tugging about the mad doc and his monster's show-stopping version of "Puttin’ on the Ritz", not least because Boyle (like Feldman and Madeline Kahn) is no longer with us.
YOUNG GUNS II: BLAZE OF GLORY (1990) Everyone sneered at this Brat Pack western because it featured the eminently sneerworthy trio of Emilio Estevez, Lou Diamond Phillips and Kiefer Sutherland prancing around in duster coats as Billy the Kid and pardners. But Kiefer has since gained Hard Man credibility, and there's no sneering at co-stars William Petersen (as Pat Garratt) and James Coburn (as John Chisum) in what turns out to be a fairly decent oater, directed by New Zealander Geoff Murphy with a keen eye for landscape and minimal MTV effects, though we do get Jon Bon Jovi over the closing credits. Noteworthy props include a tobacco-pouch made from buffalo scrotum.
YOUNG POISONER'S HANDBOOK, THE (1995) The best British real-life murder movies tend to be those that aim for black comedy rather than realism. This wicked little gem, directed by Benjamin Ross, was inspired by the case of Graham Young, the so-called "St Albans Poisoner" who in the 1960s systematically spiked sandwiches or cups of tea with antimony, served them to family and workmates and then jotted down the results of these "experiments" in his diaries. Hugh O'Conor plays him as a spooky little swot who runs rings around his credulous therapist (Anony Sher). The off-kilter production design makes Neasden look weirder than anything from Twin Peaks, though the sufferings of the poor victims are never forgotten. Brace yourself for scenes of vomiting.
YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES (1985) This ripping adventure used to be known as Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear - appropriate since it feels more like Indiana Jones than Conan Doyle. Barry Levinson directed, but it's more in the style of one of its producers, Steven Spielberg. A schoolboy Sherlock and bun-loving Watson look like ancestors of Harry Potter and Ron Weasley as they confront bald loonies whose drugged darts trigger violent attacks of special effects, though it's more fun spotting Holmes' incipient pipe and violin habits, the explanation for his later lack of interest in the opposite sex and a first encounter with Moriarty.
YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS (1998) Up until relatively recently, when he went off-piste with The Wicker Man remake, Neil LaBute wrote and directed films about modern relationships so vicious and nasty it was enough to put you off sex for life. This one's an ensemble piece about two couples and their chums, captured in claustrophobic close-up as they go about their business in bars, at the gym or in bedrooms. Jason Patric is a contender for meanest sonofabitch of all time as a gynaecologist who hates women. Ben Stiller and Nastassja Kinski are among the other characters who can't seem to open their mouths without saying something hurtful, with results that are both brutal and wince-makingly funny.
YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (2007) Francis Coppola's first film in a decade is a Franco-Italian-Romanian co-production adapted from a novella by Mircea Eliade. It's a mish-mash of Nazis, doppelgangers, lost love, reincarnation and Heroes-type superpowers, which unfortunately is not as much fun as it sounds, since it's also talky, plodding and undermined by a failure to settle down into any particular genre. Coppola probably identifies with the character played by Tim Roth, a 70-year-old linguistics professor struck by lightning in pre-war Bucharest. He finds himself miraculously rejuvenated and able to read books without opening them, though still frets he won't have time to complete his life's work. Alexandra Maria Lara (from Downfall) plays two women in his life, one of whom is found in a cave, singing, "Om, shanti".
ZABRISKIE POINT (1970) Michelangelo Antonioni's second film in English failed to repeat the success of Blow-Up, and its laughable view of revolutionary politics would probably have sounded less silly in Italian, with subtitles. Daria Halprin is driving a Buick through the desert towards a meeting with her boss; Mark Frechette kills a cop (maybe) and buzzes her in a stolen plane. They make love in an extraordinary lunar-like landscape, where lots of other couples suddenly materialise and roll around in one big dusty orgy. There's nice billboard photography, and a creepy scene with some feral children, but what makes this obligatory viewing for any self-respecting cinephile is the ending, set to Pink Floyd, in which the trappings of materialism are blown to smithereens, repeatedly, from lots of different angles, and in slo-mo. It's the best movie explosion ever.
ZARDOZ (1974) Delightfully nutty sci-fi fable set in a post-apocalyptic world of 2293. The primitive Brutals live like dogs in the bleak Outlands and worship a huge flying stone head that dishes out life and death. Sean Connery wears a nappy and shows his chest hair as Zed, a super-virile Brutal who stows away in the head and is whisked into the luxuriant Vortex, where hippy-ish intellectuals called Eternals pass their time in cosmic philosophical debates. John Boorman's cult film is beautifully shot pre-New Age psychobabble featuring magic leaves, crystals and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. The title, incidentally, is lifted from The WiZARD of OZ.
ZATOICHI (2003) Takeshi Kitano directs himself as Zatoichi, who in the 1960s and 1970s was the protagonist in a popular film series about a blind masseur who roams 19th century Japan, righting wrongs with his expert swordsmanship. Kitano’s remake is his most relaxed and exhilarating film in years, with our enigmatic hero confronted by multiple subplots involving rival gangs, a transvestite geisha and musical peasants en route to a glorious tap-dancing finale that has to be seen to be believed. The weak of stomach should be warned there’s an inordinate amount of computer-generated blood in the fight scenes, but fans of exotic action-comedy-drama are in for a treat.
ZERO EFFECT (1998) Quirky writing-directing debut feature from Jake Kasdan (son of Lawrence). The ever reliable Bill Pullman gives one of his most likeable performances as the addled genius Daryl Zero, a sort of slacker Sherlock Holmes who leads a Howard Hughes-type existence in an LA penthouse, solving most of his cases without budging from his desk and dealing with clients via Ben Stiller, his resentful front-man. Ryan O'Neal plays a stressed-out tycoon who's being blackmailed, and Kim Dickens is the femme fatale who steals our hero's heart, but the standard private eye plot takes second place to the character, who's so odd and endearing you find yourself wishing there were a sequel.
ZODIAC (2007) In terms of serial-killer movies, you could hardly get more of a contrast to the so-called "torture porn" subgenre than David Fincher's engrossing account of the hunt for the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized San Francisco in the 1970s, a decade recreated here impeccably and without cliché. There's a horrible murder and some grim moments, to remind us we're not watching The Sound of Music, but it's a long way from the Grand Guignol of Fincher's own Se7en, and mostly the film concentrates on the effect of the long-running, unresolved case on the lives of the investigators: Robert Downey Jr as a dandyish reporter, Jake Gyllenhaal as an earnest cartoonist who decipers the psycho's coded messages and Mark Ruffalo, somehow managing to transcend his tragic 1970s sideburns and barnet as the cop who was the inspiration for Dirty Harry. The film sticks with these guys long after other, more sensationalist movies would have given up and gone home.
ZOOLANDER (2001) One of those comedies that's passably amusing when seen in the cinema, but increasingly addictive when watched repeatedly in the privacy of one's own home. Ben Stiller co-wrote, directs and sucks in his cheeks as dimwitted male model Derek Zoolander, brainwashed (by poodle-eared Will Ferrell) into trying to assassinate the Malaysian prime-minister. Taking the mickey out of New York's fashion scene should be like shooting fish in a barrel, yet Stiller manages to miss most of his targets. He makes up for it, though, with his "walk off" against rival model Owen Wilson, the gas station scene, Ferrell's brainwashing video or the part where which Ben and Owen try to get files out of a computer. Worth a second look.
ZOOM (2006) Tim Allen plays a washed-up superhero called Zoom who's obliged to train a bunch of misfit kids with super powers so they can save the world. Courteney Cox plays a lady scientist who falls over a lot. This isn't anywhere as smart or funny as Sky High, and I guarantee you'll want to murder the six-year-old brat with superstrength long before the insultingly lame climax, but I laughed when Allen whipped up a smoothie with his super-fast vibrating finger. Critics were vitriolic, but it's for kids, for heaven's sake. Undemanding kids, at that.
ZULU (1964) Cy Endfield's epic recreation of the Siege of Rorke's Drift in 1879, when 139 mostly Welsh troops held off 4000 Zulu warriors, is still one of the most rousing battle movies ever filmed, and John Prebble's intelligent screenplay avoids most of the usual jingoistic pitfalls. Stanley Baker leads the British contingent, which includes Michael Caine in his first leading role, improbably cast as an upper-class lieutenant. My favourite bit is the thunderous sound of the approaching Zulu hordes – once heard, never forgotten.
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