Recently, to celebrate a decade of this blogging nonsense, I posted a list of my 100 favourite films.
So, as an obvious sequel, here’s the same format but for television. Again, I’ve been guided by the word ‘favourite’, rather than ‘best’. They’re just the shows I like the most. (I’ve also cheated a few times, in order to bundle sequels together with their antecedents, so there are actually more than 100 choices here. Live with it.)
100-51
The list is too unwieldy for a full ranking, so let’s start with the shows that fill the bottom half of the hundred, listed alphabetically, then we’ll dive into a top 50…
24 (2001-2010), Agent Carter (2015-2016), Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995), The Big Bang Theory (2007-2019), Births, Marriages and Deaths (1999), A Bit of a Do (1989), Blackadder (1983-1999), Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013-2021; above), Callan (1967-1981), Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-1968)…
Coogan’s Run (1995), Coronation Street (1960-current), Dark Season (1991), Dracula (2020), Family at War (1970-1972), Foyle’s War (2002-2015), Game of Thrones (2011-2019; above), G.B.H. (1991), Gotham (2014-2019), Green Wing (2004-2007)…
Have I Got News For You (1990-current), In Plain Sight (2008-2013), Knightmare (1987-1994), Life on Earth (1979) and its sequels such as The Living Planet and Life in the Freezer, Longitude (2000), Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (1989-1994), Man About the House (1973-1976), M*A*S*H (1972-1983), Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-1974), Moondial (1988; above)…
The Newsreader (2021-current; above), The Newsroom (2012-2014), NCIS (2003-current), QI (2003-current), Pennyworth (2019-2022), Peter Kay’s Car Share (2015-2020), Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights (2001-2002), Scrapheap Challenge (1998-2009), Sherlock (2010-2017), Sports Night (1998-2000)…
Star Trek (1966-1969), Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), State of Play (2003), Strictly Come Dancing (2004-current), Three Men in a Boat (2006) and its sequels such as Three Men in Another Boat, UFO (1970-1971; above), Whitechapel (2009-2013), Wonders of the Solar System (2010) and its sequels such as Wonders of the Universe, Would I Lie to You? (2007-current), The Young Ones (1982-1984)…
To celebrate a decade of this blogging nonsense – my first review was published on 2 April 2014 – here is a list of my 100 favourite films.
The lengthy process to whittle down several hundred contenders was obviously a flawed exercise – totally subjective, unashamedly biased, occasionally based on transitory whims, and somewhat narrow (most movies are American, almost every director is male). I should also point out that these choices are guided by the word ‘favourite’, rather than me worrying about any ‘objective’ greatness or a cinematic canon. They’re just the films I like the most.
So for better or worse, agreement or ridicule, here is what I’ve chosen…
100-51
The list is too unwieldy for a full ranking, so let’s start with the movies that fill the bottom half of the hundred, listed alphabetically, then we’ll dive into a top 50…
The Abyss (1989, James Cameron; above), The Aeronauts (2019, Tom Harper), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg), Alien (1979, Ridley Scott), Alien Resurrection (1997, Jean-Pierre Jeunet), All the President’s Men (1976, Alan J Pakula), Batman (1989, Tim Burton), Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott), The Breakfast Club (1985, John Hughes), Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)…
A Christmas Story (1983, Bob Clark; above), Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles), Clear and Present Danger (1994, Phillip Noyce), Commando (1985, Mark L Lester), The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Wes Anderson), The Devil’s Advocate (1997, Taylor Hackford), Election (1999, Alexander Payne), Enemy of the State (1998, Tony Scott), Fargo (1996, Joel Coen), Ghostbusters (1984, Ivan Reitman)…
Ghost World (2001, Terry Zwigoff; above), Gladiator (2000, Ridley Scott), The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola), The Godfather Part II (1974, Francis Ford Coppola), GoldenEye (1995, Martin Campbell), Goodfellas (1990, Martin Scorsese),A Hard Day’s Night(1964, Richard Lester), Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg), The Living Daylights (1987, John Glen), Magnolia (1999, Paul Thomas Anderson)…
Memento (2000, Christopher Nolan; above), Moonrise Kingdom (2012, Wes Anderson), The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992, Brian Henson), The Omen (1976, Richard Donner), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, Quentin Tarantino), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969, Peter Hunt), Patriot Games (1992, Phillip Noyce), Robin Hood (2010, Ridley Scott), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, Jim Sharman)…
Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock; above), Shaun of the Dead (2004, Edgar Wright), Short Cuts (1993, Robert Altman), The Sting (1973, George Roy Hill), Superbad (2007, Greg Mottola), The Terminator (1984, James Cameron), Timecode (2000, Mike Figgis), Titanic (1997, James Cameron), Trainspotting (1996, Danny Boyle), True Romance(1993, Tony Scott)
TOP FIFTY
50 – Frog Dreaming (1986, Brian Trenchard-Smith; above)
Here’s my ranking of all the new films I saw in 2023. Let me know in the comments below if I’ve missed out your favourite…
29 Cocaine Bear. The silly central gimmick – a bear eats some cocaine and goes nuts – becomes boring very quickly. Characters feel like they’ve wandered in from different shit comedy films. Jokes fall flat, the tone zips all over the place, and the violence and CGI are amateur hour.
28 Ghosted. This action comedy is like watching a dreadful Saturday Night Live sketch for two hours. The cast seem like they only read the script for the first time earlier that day. There are cheap celebrity cameos, lazy gags, TV-movie special effects and desultory plotting. Stars Ana de Armas and Chris Evans generate no chemistry whatsoever. Ghosted is ghastly.
27 Babylon. A sprawling, ill-disciplined epic set in the hedonistic world of 1920s Hollywood. The characters are mostly insufferable arseholes drunk on their own smugness. Combined with lots of overacting and a three-hour runtime, that just makes it exhausting.
26 Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. A light-hearted spy thriller that attempts to merge the short-term quests of a Mission: Impossible with the globetrotting glamour of James Bond. Sadly, Guy Ritchie is the director. So therefore it’s all juvenile, shallow and smug (and edited like a trailer). Jason Statham, Aubrey Plaza and Hugh Grant are good value in the lead roles.
25 Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. This MCU sequel swaps Ant-Man’s underdog quality and charm for bombast and portentous nonsense. The plot is meaningless, the cast often seem lost, the villain is tedious, guest characters are forgettable, and swathes of the movie take place in a world of boring greenscreen and placeholder CGI.
24 Barbie. It’s quite an achievement for a film to make a billion dollars when it’s just one joke spun out to two hours. Margot Robbie is reliably awesome as a sentient Barbie who is confronted by prosaic prejudice and patriarchal power. There’s a cast crammed with “Oh look who it is!”es and lots of Lego Movie-style tomfoolery. But the anti-misogyny theme is hammered home so heavy-handedly, so repetitively and so patronisingly, you’d swear the filmmakers think they’ve invented feminism.
23 Totally Killer. Not containing a single original idea, this comedy horror steals the format of Back to the Future, but swaps the bully Biff with a Michael Myers-like serial killer. Kiernan Shipka plays a teenager who travels in time from 2023 to 1987 and attempts to prevent her mother’s friends being murdered. The 1980s are a razzle-dazzle of Bananarama, shell-suits, cigarettes, John Hughes references, and old-fashioned attitudes that cause Gen-Z outrage. It’s all pretty facile, but harmless fun.
22 Fast X. An utterly insane, ragged and ridiculous film, full of sugar-rush storytelling, plotting that would embarrass an episode of Teletubbies, stunts that mock the laws of physics, and some truly dire performances… And yet… These films are my guilty pleasure and, by switching off my brain, I really enjoyed spending a couple of hours with all of its giddy, gleeful madness.
21 Shotgun Wedding. A contrived, one-joke film that sees a wedding party taken hostage by pirates. The loose script is staged with little invention, but it’s worth watching for two cast members called Jennifer. As the bride-to-be, Lopez brings an A-game of charisma, comic timing and sex appeal (soooo much sex appeal), while Coolidge is reliably hilarious as the groom’s mother.
20 The Marvels. The plot is total codswallop – something about an assembly-line villain opening magic portals in space – but this superhero flick entertains due to its trio of lead actresses. Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers (from the film Captain Marvel), Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan (from the TV show Ms Marvel) and Teyonah Parris’s Monica Rambeau (from the TV show WandaVision) team up, bond, swap jokes and keep things daftly diverting.
19 Oppenheimer. This stately movie has exceptional scale and scope and visuals – I saw it in IMAX, which was a treat – and deals with some weighty moral issues. The development of a weapon that could potentially destroy the whole world is a compelling story idea, and the film moves at a real lick for a 180-minuter. But ultimately the script is a magic trick, playing around with flashbacks to try to force a narrative structure that doesn’t really convince, while we never get under the skin of anyone other than central character J Robert Oppenheimer.
18 Renfield. Nicolas Cage as Count Dracula is an appealing prospect, and he hams the role up entertainingly. Elsewhere, as Dracula seeks victims in modern-day New Orleans, his acolyte Renfield (a decent Nicholas Hoult) is having a crisis of faith and attending a victim-support group. A wild, off-kilter mix of violence, silliness, repurposed clips from the 1931 Dracula movie, and just enough pathos to keep us caring.
17 Lola. Two sisters in 1940 invent a steampunk machine that can intercept TV and radio transmissions from the future. Lots of fun is had as they learn about Bowie and the Kinks, then they realise they can use the technology to help the war effort. However, before you can say ‘butterfly effect’, things take a dark turn… This low-budget movie’s found-footage format restricts some of the drama – you catch yourself thinking, ‘Why are the characters filming this?!’ – but the special effects are impressive and the cast good.
16 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Riffing on the same kind of vibrant energy as the Spider-Verse films, this animated reboot retells the Turtles’ origin story. But this time, the focus is on the fact the characters are *teenagers* – so they battle lust, FOMO and a search for identity just as much as comic-book villains and henchmen. There’s a skuzzy, punky aesthetic, great incidental music, lots of action, and CGI that honours the fingerprint-smudged look of stop-motion. The best Turtles film yet (hashtag damning with faint praise).
15. Napoleon. Ridley Scott knows exactly how to mount this kind of historical behemoth, and his biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte is staged with an extraordinary sense of visceral violence and period detail. The storytelling covers a large stretch of Boney’s career – 1793 to 1815 – and at times it feels like we’re racing through a highlights reel rather than following a story. But Joaquin Phoenix holds the film together, playing Napoleon as a petty man-child who at one point needs his mother to sort out his sex life.
14 No Hard Feelings. A 32-year-old woman who’s struggling financially answers an advert from a couple who want someone to ‘date’ their socially awkward teenage son (ie, pop his cherry). The gimmick is oddball and, let’s face it, potentially icky. But Jennifer Lawrence is full of moxie and sass, there are some funny moments, and the story becomes more heartfelt as it goes along, kinda like an 80s John Hughes movie. (Apt casting: Ferris Bueller plays the lad’s father.)
13 Quiz Lady. A by-the-numbers comedy about a lonely thirtysomething who’s coerced into competing on her favourite TV game show. The fantastic leads – Awkwafina as the singleton, Sandra Oh as her flighty sister – really lift the material and you enjoy spending time with them both. A few silly secondary characters don’t work, but the central storyline is amusing and ultimately moving.
12 Sharper. Fans of con-artist stories will spot every twist coming, but I liked this film’s icy coolness and cynicism. The cinematography and music help set the tone, but it’s the cast – especially Julianne Moore – who bring things to life and keep us caring (even about reprehensible people). Also, with its switches of POV, episodic structure, out-of-order chronology and even scenes of characters discussing their favourite movies and planning a con in a diner, the spirit of Quentin Tarantino lurks in the shadows.
11 The Flash. This one was a nice surprise. Most of the previous DC superhero flicks have been lamentably awful. But The Flash is likeable escapism. There’s humour that doesn’t jar, zippy action, smart references to Back to the Future, the return of the best ever Batman, and most importantly a story based on a character going through an emotional journey. (Unbelievably shonky CGI at times, though.)
10 Pearl. A prequel to the 2022 horror film X, set in 1918 and telling the backstory of X’s villain. The extraordinary Mia Goth stars as Pearl, a young rural woman whose dreams of a life in the movies lead to violence. There are echoes of The Wizard of Oz and – by using the flu pandemic, misogyny and the perils of celebrity – eerie parallels with today. Daring and nicely perverse.
9 Empire of Light. It’s directed by Sam Mendes and shot by Roger Deakins, so of course this has great performances and looks utterly gorgeous. In a seaside town they forgot to close down (in reality Margate), Olivia Colman wows as a lonely middle-aged woman working in a cinema. Her life is enlivened by a young colleague, but then her mental health takes a turn for the worse. A few clunks in the script – a bird with a broken wing as a metaphor?! – don’t dent the charm and poignancy too much.
8 A Haunting in Venice. Kenneth Branagh’s third time playing-and-directing Hercule Poirot is his most successful so far. Although misleadingly touted as an adaptation of the novel Hallowe’en Party, there’s an original storyline and a fresh setting, which pushes the cosiness of Agatha Christie into something approaching a horror movie. The atmosphere – claustrophobic, knife’s-edge, jump scares – is excellent, while Branagh is as endearing as ever and Tina Fey impresses as Poirot’s old pal Ariadne Oliver.
7 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. The Marvel Cinematic Universe series has been really struggling lately, with lots of sub-par films and give-up-after-one-episode TV shows. This sequel is the easily the best of 2023’s output, featuring lots of fun and lots of feels. The gang are back for one final space-spanning adventure, but this time the fizzy flamboyance is complemented by a dark subplot about vivisection. While the rest of the MCU has been tying itself up in multiversal knots, GOTG3 is enjoyably old-school – popcorn cinema with heart.
6 The Fabelmans. A charming film by Steven Spielberg, who based the story on his own childhood experiences. Sammy Fabelman is a young boy in the 1950s who dreams of making movies, but there’s trouble in his parents’ marriage. Beautifully shot and scored, with a decent cast, The Fabelmans might tend towards melodrama – but in Spielberg’s hands it still socks home. The final act also contains at least two howl-out-loud gags.
5 Tár. This is a fascinating *text* of a movie – meaning is a moveable feast depending on perspective and context. On the surface it’s an unsettling drama about a conductor (Cate Blanchett) whose successful, structured life begins to fracture after an accusation of abuse. But the script, direction and performances keep everything ambiguous and complex. Cancel culture, perception and power dynamics are all explored and deconstructed. Majestic.
4 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Raiders of the Lost Ark 5 beautifully balances familiar Indy tropes – derring-do, Nazis, a mystical MacGuffin, punchy sidekicks, Harrison Ford’s world-class charisma – with a key new element. This is a geriatric Indiana Jones film, the story of a man at the end of his life, full of regret and pathos. Drawn into ‘one last adventure’, Dr Jones teams up with his goddaughter Helena (a sparkling Phoebe Waller-Bridge) to hunt down a magical dial. What follows is joyfully energetic and – in its final act – gloriously bonkers.
3 Killers of the Flower Moon. Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio teaming up for a 210-minute crime epic that explores the venal underbelly of American history? Count me in. Based on a nonfiction book about the exploitation of the oil-rich Osage Nation, there’s a dazzling sense of storytelling, always retaining a keen eye on psychology, while the cinematography and art direction are exceptional. (I pity the fools who dodged the cinema to watch this on Apple TV+.) De Niro and DiCaprio give fantastic performances of nuance and insidious power, but even more impressive is Lily Gladstone as an Osage woman cynically wooed for her wealth.
2 The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan and The Three Musketeers: Milady. This two-part French adaptation of the 1980s cartoon series Dogtanian has everything you’d want from a swashbuckling historical epic – a fantastic cast, loveable characters, terrific action, intrigue, romance, humour, great sets and locations, and a phenomenal widescreen panache. There are shades of Ridley Scott films such as Gladiator and the energy of an Indiana Jones adventure; the period texture is vivid and creates a 360-degree world; and there are heroes to root for and villains to boo. C’est magnifique!
1 Asteroid City. A meta maze of modernism, existentialism, performance, duality, grief, art, romance, science and politics, Wes Anderson’s masterpiece follows two parallel and connected realities. In the ‘real world’, shot in arch black-and-white, we follow a New York theatre company as they write, rehearse and put on a play. We also see the resulting production – a tale of disparate characters quarantined in a desert town after a bizarre incident – which is surrealistically presented as a widescreen, in-colour, shot-on-location movie. The ways each continuity reflects, informs and affects the other are endlessly engrossing, resulting in layer upon layer of meaning and subtext, while a bravura moment that sees one actor cross the divide leads to dialogue as affecting and insightful as any example in modern cinema. On top of all that, the cast is quite extraordinary in both its quality and quantity: Bob Balaban, Adrien Brody, Steve Carell, Jarvis Cocker, Bryan Cranston, Willem Dafoe, Hope Davis, Matt Dillon, Rupert Friend, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Hanks, Maya Hawke, Scarlett Johansson, Edward Norton, Margot Robbie, Liev Schreiber, Jason Schwartzman, Fisher Stevens, Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright… A profound and poetic meditation. The best film of the 2020s so far.
Today (Thursday 23 November 2023) is the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, a TV show that has been a big part of my life for a long time. So, just for fun, I thought I’d list my favourite Doctor Who episodes. I’ve gone for a top five for each of the Doctors who appeared in more than one or two stories – which therefore, aptly, means 60 picks in total! (I’ve also cited a worst one for each, because being a fan is sometimes about *not* liking things too.)
First Doctor (1963-1966)
Played by William Hartnell 1 – The War Machines (1966) 2 – The Romans (1965) 3 – Marco Polo (1964) 4 – The Aztecs (1964) 5 – The Gunfighters (1966) Worst – The Celestial Toymaker (1966)
Second Doctor (1966-1969)
Played by Patrick Troughton 1 – The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967) 2 – Fury from the Deep (1968) 3 – The Faceless Ones (1967) 4 – The Enemy of the World (1967/68) 5 – The Mind Robber (1968) Worst – The Space Pirates (1969)
Third Doctor (1970-1974)
Played by Jon Pertwee 1 – Inferno (1970) 2 – The Green Death (1973) 3 – Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970) 4 – Spearhead from Space (1970) 5 – Day of the Daleks (1972) Worst – Death to the Daleks (1974)
Fourth Doctor (1974-1981)
Played by Tom Baker 1 – Horror of Fang Rock (1977) 2 – City of Death (1979) 3 – The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977) 4 – The Robots of Death (1977) 5 – The Seeds of Doom (1976) Worst – The Horns of Nimon (1979/80)
Fifth Doctor (1981-1984)
Played by Peter Davison 1 – The Caves of Androzani (1984) 2 – The Visitation (1982) 3 – Mawdryn Undead (1983) 4 – Kinda (1982) 5 – Earthshock (1982) Worst – Time-Flight (1982)
Sixth Doctor (1984-1986)
Played by Colin Baker 1 – The Two Doctors (1985) 2 – Revelation of the Daleks (1985) 3 – Vengeance on Varos (1985) 4 – Mindwarp aka The Trial of a Time Lord Parts 5-8 (1986) 5 – Attack of the Cybermen (1985) Worst – The Twin Dilemma (1984)
Seventh Doctor (1987-1996)
Played by Sylvester McCoy 1 – The Curse of Fenric (1989) 2 – Remembrance of the Daleks (1988) 3 – Survival (1989) 4 – Ghost Light (1989) 5 – The Happiness Patrol (1988) Worst – Time and the Rani (1987)
Ninth Doctor (2005)
Played by Christopher Eccleston 1 – The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances (2005) 2 – Father’s Day (2005) 3 – Dalek (2005) 4 – Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways (2005) 5 – The End of the World (2005) Worst – The Long Game (2005)
Tenth Doctor (2005-2010)
Played by David Tennant 1 – The Girl in the Fireplace (2006) 2 – Blink (2007) 3 – Tooth and Claw (2006) 4 – Human Nature/The Family of Blood (2007) 5 – Midnight (2008) Worst – Turn Left (2008)
Eleventh Doctor (2010-2013)
Played by Matt Smith 1 – Vincent and the Doctor (2010) 2 – The Snowmen (2012) 3 – The Doctor’s Wife (2011) 4 – The Eleventh Hour (2010) 5 – The Crimson Horror (2013) Worst – Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS (2013)
Twelfth Doctor (2013-2017)
Played by Peter Capaldi 1 – Deep Breath (2014) 2 – Mummy on the Orient Express (2014) 3 – Flatline (2014) 4 – World Enough and Time (2017) 5 – In the Forest of the Night (2014) Worst – Kill the Moon (2014)
Thirteenth Doctor (2018-2022)
Played by Jodie Whittaker 1 – Fugitive of the Judoon (2020) 2 – Eve of the Daleks (2022) 3 – Rosa (2018) 4 – The Ghost Monument (2018) 5 – The Haunting of Villa Diodati (2020) Worst – Legend of the Sea Devils (2022)
I’m sure these choices would be slightly different if I did it again another time, but let me know what you think in the comments section below…
American writer Jeff Rice (1944-2015) initially struggled to find a publisher for his novel The Kolchak Papers, a lurid tale about a journalist encountering a vampire in Las Vegas. But he was given a new avenue for the material when an agent realised the story would make a great TV movie. Dan Curtis, hot from overseeing Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, came on board as producer while the screenplay was written by genre legend Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, The Twilight Zone, Duel). Broadcast in 1972, The Night Stalker was a big hit – and introduced American audiences to both a thrillingly fresh format and a charismatic new type of hero.
Carl Kolchak is a lone-wolf reporter, an old-school newspaper man with a nose for a good story and plenty of pushy tactics to uncover the truth. He dresses iconoclastically in a cheap suit and raffia hat, a camera hanging from a strap over his shoulder, a Dictaphone often to hand, and he combines a keen journalistic eye with a happy-go-lucky charm. (There’s a definite echo of Lieutenant Columbo, the seemingly slovenly but actually perceptive detective who had debuted on American TV in 1968.) The Night Stalker sees the character investigating a string of murders in Las Vegas which share a grisly detail – all the victims have been drained of blood – and this would set the tone for all the stories to come. Kolchak’s adventures merge crime-drama conventions with horror tropes, setting macabre, outlandish plots in an everyday world.
Cast as the ramshackle Kolchak was Darren McGavin. Then 49 years old, McGavin had a fine stage, film and TV career behind him and would later become well known for his lugubrious yet compassionate turn in the 1983 movie A Christmas Story. As Kolchak, the actor is exceedingly watchable and brings a huge amount of fun to the role. His gorgeously fruity voice, cheeky smirk, brazen chutzpah and occasional indignation make for a very special combination. (The original TV movie also hints at a melancholic private life, as per the gumshoe cliche, but this would be ignored later on.)
As a one-off TV special, The Night Stalker was so successful that a sequel followed 12 months later – The Night Strangler, written by Matheson and directed by Curtis – then the character was given a series of hour-long adventures. Weekly show Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which ran during the 1974/75 TV season without any involvement from Matheson or Curtis, sees our hero work for news agency INS and stumble across many bizarre, spooky and paranormal happenings in Chicago. In a cornucopia of craziness, Carl encounters several big icons of horror and genre storytelling – vampires, witches, werewolves, aliens, ghosts, even a robot.
The series also established a few other recurring characters. Kolchak’s harried and short-tempered boss, Tony Vincenzo played by Psycho‘s Simon Oakland, had already appeared in the TV movies; he was now joined by smarmy reporter Ron Updyke (Jack Grinnage), INS’s elderly columnist Emily Cowles (Ruth McDevitt), coroner Gordon Spangler (John Fiedler) who enjoys betting on the details of the deceased, and an inexperienced journalist, Monique Marmelstein (Carol Ann Susi), who got her job due to nepotism. However, most of these oddballs only appear sparingly, usually as comic relief, and are rarely involved in the cases. The focus very much remains on Kolchak himself and the ‘monster of the week’.
Due to the conventions of the era, you see, the show has no plot threads crossing over from episode to episode. This unfortunately results in a sense of repetition, as each and every supernatural threat is treated as if it’s unique. We also learn virtually nothing about Kolchak’s past, family, social life or relationships. To a modern viewer, this feels like huge story potential is being left untapped – why are there so many supernatural threats in one city? Why is Carl so good at cracking the story every time? What do the authorities think about what’s happening? Who does Kolchak go home to? How do his bizarre experiences affect him? Later genre shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer would take Kolchak’s lead but delve so much deeper into the subtext of the situations and the inner lives of the characters.
Kolchak: The Night Stalker only lasted for one season. McGavin soon grew tired of filming a weekly series, and was also unhappy with the quality of the writing, so declined to re-sign his contract. At the same time, network ABC was struggling for ratings and needed to shake up their schedules. Commissioned as a 26-episode run, the show ended after just 20.
And then, for a long while, it seemed like Carl Kolchak would only live on in reruns…
But in the early 1990s, writer/producer Chris Carter – who’d been a huge fan of Kolchak when he was a teenager – started to cite the show as a major inspiration for his mammoth TV hit, The X-Files. The debt was immediately obvious. Like Kolchak’s TV stories, The X-Files married the paranormal with the procedural as it followed a pair of FBI agents who investigate all manner of weird and wonderful cases in a recognisably normal, modern-day America. As well as these tonal similarities, there were more specific homages too: an early episode called Squeeze was a spiritual remake of The Night Strangler, while much later a 2016 story featured a character dressed in Kolchak’s suit and hat.
Carter was also an avowed fan of Darren McGavin and tried to cast him in The X-Files more than once. A request that he appear *as Kolchak* – what a crossover that would have been! – was sadly a non-starter, because McGavin had no interest in revisiting the character. The star also turned down a significant, recurring role – the father of main character Fox Mulder. Eventually, in 1998, Carter managed to persuade him to play a retired FBI agent called Arthur Dales, who in the 1950s had been responsible for kick-starting the whole X-Files programme in the first place. McGavin appeared in two episodes and had begun work on a third when he had to pull out due to ill health. He died in 2006.
Kolchak himself returned to screens in 2005 when a new version of Jeff Rice’s creation, Night Stalker, aired on ABC – it was produced by Frank Spotnitz, who had been one of the key creative forces behind The X-Files. Irish actor Stuart Townsend was cast in the lead (McGavin had a cameo in episode one, thanks to some repurposed footage from the 1970s), but the show was not well received and was cancelled after just six episodes. Over the years the character has also appeared in novels, anthologies and comic books, while a potential movie directed by Edgar Wright was mooted for a while.
But despite all these attempts to resurrect Carl and his natty hat, the two TV movies and the hour-long adventures starring Darren McGavin remain the character’s essential canon. So, just for fun, I recently decided to rewatch the 70s output, and tweet some quick-fire reviews.
Here are my endeavours…
The Night Stalker (TV movie, 1972) Darren McGavin’s debut as the ace journalist who keeps stumbling across supernatural stories. Superb genre script, mixing film noir, police procedural, humour and horror. Inventively shot. Terrific stuff. Threat: Vampire. Score: 9/10
The Night Strangler (TV movie, 1973) This sequel is close to a remake, so similar are the story beats. But the mix of seedy mystery plot and wry, charismatic lead is very winning. (The central idea was reused in X Files ep Squeeze.) Threat: Immortal killer. Score: 8/10
The Ripper (ep 1, 1974) After two movies, a full-blown series. Episode one has *another* paranormal man killing young women, but it’s still compelling TV – and now has historical context. A shame Carl’s gf/sidekick has been dropped. Threat: Jack the Ripper. Score: 8/10
The Zombie (ep 2, 1974) Despite a Live and Let Die-echoing plot about mobsters and voodoo, two new characters – a naive young reporter played by Howard’s mum from Big Bang Theory and a coroner who likes a flutter – are light comedy. Good fun. Threat: Zombie. Score: 7/10
They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be… (ep 3, 1974) Rather than an urban-Gothic vibe, this one is often set in bright sunshine. There’s some dry comedy but a dull plot (about an invisible alien) and it lacks interesting guest characters. Threat: Alien. Score: 5/10
The Vampire (ep 4, 1974) This sequel to the original TV movie focuses on a female vampire. A very enjoyable episode, it features vivid horror iconography, yet lots of wit, a quick pace and some fun guest characters mean it’s never grim. Threat: Vampire. Score: 9/10
The Werewolf (ep 5, 1974) While on a cruise, Carl encounters a crummy-looking werewolf. The action is badly directed, but Nita Talbot is fun as a movie fan who becomes this week’s ally. (Kolchak really should have a regular sidekick.) Threat: Werewolf. Score: 7/10
Firefall (ep 6, 1974) A plot about spontaneous combustion and astral projection centred on an orchestra maestro fails to sing. Six eps into the series and Carl’s home life hasn’t featured at all: a real shame; it’d add a dimension. Threat: Psychic arsonist. Score: 6/10
The Devil’s Platform (ep 7, 1974) In an enjoyably hammy story, Tom Skerritt is an effective villain: a murderous political candidate who can morph into a demonic dog. Meanwhile, Carl’s witty, hard-boiled voiceovers continue to delight. Threat: Satanic dog. Score: 8/10
Bad Medicine (ep 8, 1974) The second ep in a row about a shapeshifter. The 7’2″ Richard Kiel (James Bond‘s Jaws) plays a murderous Native American who morphs into crows and coyotes. The story is hokum but moves relatively quickly. Threat: Shaman spirit. Score: 7/10
The Spanish Moss Murders (ep 9, 1974) A proper gumshoe plot with horror, humour (incl a policeman with anger issues) and dialogue scenes shot in developing single takes. Superb. Threat: A cajun boogeyman (Richard Kiel as the bad guy for 2nd week running). Score: 9/10
The Energy Eater (ep 10, 1974) A bland plot about a hospital mysteriously falling apart. There’s a Native American subtext for the 2nd ep in three but no punch to the story. Darren McGavin’s still v watchable, tho. Threat: A spirit that feeds on electricity. Score: 5/10
Horror in the Heights (ep 11, 1974) A story built on the provenance and later distortion of the swastika. There’s some atmosphere, but also some naive racism. Bland characters, too – aside from a guest turn from comedian Phil Silvers. Threat: Hindu demon. Score: 7/10
Mr R.I.N.G. (ep 12, 1975) The supernatural is sidelined for sci-fi as Carl cracks the case of a rampant robot! There are shades of Frankenstein and proto-AI, while Creature from the Black Lagoon’s Julie Adams guests. Pacey, smart and fun. Threat: A robot. Score: 8/10
Primal Scream (ep 13, 1975) There have been too many ‘man in a monster suit’ stories now for this to feel fresh. A creature is unleashed after Arctic core samples are defrosted but the episode feels hollow. Klinger off of MASH guest stars. Threat: Ape-man. Score: 5/10
The Trevi Collection (ep 14, 1975) Really enjoyable ep about a witch and the Chicago fashion industry. There’s a compelling villain, a few gags, inventive sequences (mannequins come to life!) and Dark Shadows’ Lara Parker being fabulous. Threat: A witch. Score: 8/10
Chopper (ep 15, 1975) There’s class in the credits – Back to the Future writers Zemeckis & Gale, MASH star Larry Linville (as a police detective) – but a stuntman with his jacket pulled up over his head is a laughable villain. Threat: Headless motorcyclist. Score: 6/10
Demon in Lace (ep 16, 1975) There’s a welcome return for Keenan Wynn as a cop who hates Carl, and Carolyn Jones (Addams Family) has a fun cameo. It’s a generally enjoyable, never-boring episode about dead women being possessed. Threat: Mesopotamian spirit. Score: 8/10
Legacy of Terror (ep 17, 1975) Yet another episode about the avenging supernatural agent of an oppressed people. Yet another episode about a creature who only appears every X number of years. But it’s made with some fun and some style. Threat: Aztec mummy. Score: 6/10
The Knightly Murders (ep 18, 1975) Yet another episode about a murderous avenging spirit, but there’s humour and kook to keep it fun. Guest star John Dehner is terrific, playing his verbose police captain with a deadpan sincerity. Threat: Medieval knight. Score: 8/10
The Youth Killer (ep 19, 1975) Humdrum ep about people drained of youth. It’s such a shame this show has no ongoing continuity: this is the *21st* time journo Carl has cracked a supernatural case but it’s played like that’s unusual. Threat: Helen of Troy. Score: 5/10
The Sentry (ep 20, 1975) A good mystery and plenty of fun for Carl, who flirts/butts-heads with a feisty cop (played by Darren McGavin’s wife Kathie Browne). Only the episode’s *appalling* man-in-rubber-suit monster disappoints. Threat: Humanoid lizard. Score: 8/10
Wes Anderson is one of the most distinctive, inventive and astonishingly precise film directors around. Ever since his debut movie, comedy crime thriller Bottle Rocket in 1996, his stories have been dominated by fractured families and flawed father figures, misunderstood misfits and misguided heroes, selfish idealists, pure romantics and lost souls looking for some sense in a chaotic world. Anderson’s films are often funny and sometime pointedly absurd, and they are not afraid to go off on wildly outlandish tangents. But it’s his directorial style that is most notable: he is unique and idiosyncratic to such a degree that he has essentially become his own genre.
Anderson films feature deadpan acting with lines delivered in specific rhythms; quirky and theatrical art design; vibrant colour palettes; metronomic movement of both camera and characters; and contrived compositions that reach for tableau vivant. On-screen captions, chapter headings, droll voiceovers and fourth-wall breaks all add to a sense of playfulness (as well as constantly reminding you that you’re watching a film). The result can be utterly charming and amusing… or sometimes infuriatingly smug and hollow.
His filmography is about to be expanded by two more movies later in 2023, but before Asteroid City and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar are unleashed – and to celebrate Anderson’s 54th birthday – here’s my ranking of all his feature films to date (as well as a few shorts).
13 The French Dispatch (2021)
This anthology features three tales loosely linked via journalists researching articles for the last ever issue of an American magazine. Every shot is an archly choreographed exercise, with actors moving rhythmically within the frame and the camera gliding in, out or sideways as if driven by clockwork. It’s like watching a pretentious music video for 90 minutes, and all this self-aware, self-indulgent artifice blocks any chance for the storytelling to develop. All the characters – Léa Seydoux’s prison guard, Benicio del Toro’s inmate artist, Timothée Chalamet and Lyna Khoudri’s revolutionaries, journalists played by Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright and Bill Murray, several dozen others – are puppets being shuffled around the antiseptic sets, never in danger of encountering a genuine emotion. Anderson also uses different aspect ratios and switches from colour to black-and-white, sometimes in the same scene; actors pretend to be frozen in time as a camera tracks past them; and one sequence is presented as an animation. So Andersonian that it’s practically self-pastiche, but sadly never compelling.
12 The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
A dreary and aimless story about a Jacques Cousteau-type underwater explorer. (The character was going to be called Steve Cousteau before some legal issues.) There are clear sonar echoes of Moby Dick in the story of a hunt for a sea creature who earlier killed Steve’s friend, but the film rather bobs along on the surface without ever diving into any dangerous depths. The comic-strip colours in the sets and costumes – as well as a metatextual sequence where we see Steve’s ship as if it were a doll’s house, all the rooms open on one side – means there’s always a barrier between us and the drama. Wes Anderson regular Bill Murray leads the cast as the vainglorious Steve and is especially impassive and inscrutable, while his associates, sidekicks and family members are played by the likes of Michael Gambon, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum and Willem Defoe. Owen Wilson is Steve’s long-lost son; Cate Blanchett, whose real pregnancy was written into the script, is a journalist covering the chase for the ‘jaguar shark’.
11 Hotel Chevalier (2007)
This started out as a self-contained short – a French New Wave pastiche about an estranged couple reconnecting in Paris – but then Anderson had a rethink. He enjoyed the central character played by his old pal Jason Schwartzman so much that he decided to work Jack into his next feature film, The Darjeeling Limited. (Co-star Natalie Portman cameoed in the main movie too.) As a prologue to a larger story, Hotel Chevalier is far from essential, but there’s a Euro-cool ambition and a likeable, languid pace.
10 Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)
The first of two stop-motion animations Anderson has directed, this adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s book gives its anthropomorphic characters modern-day, ordinary attitudes and dialogue. There’s a middle-class, middle-management vibe to the storytelling – money worries, family issues, house prices, civic pride – so the storytelling lacks the perverse, fairy-tale-ish-ness of Dahl’s original. The craft on show is excellent, with beautiful sets and fingerprint-smudged models, but the story about a fightback against big business never catches fire. (The voice cast is rather extraordinary, testament to Anderson’s clout and the respect in which he’s held: Adrien Brody, George Clooney, Brian Cox, Willem Dafoe, Michael Gambon, Helen McCrory, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Meryl Streep, Owen Wilson, even Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker as a singer.)
9 The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Even by Anderson’s standards, this is a frivolous plaything of a film: a mechanical chocolate box, where automaton characters and sickly treats are wheeled out on cue. Buried beneath flashbacks within flashbacks – and you really sense the director chuckling at so many time jumps – is a 1930s-set farce. A young man called Zero (Tony Revolori) begins working as a bellhop at a prestigious hotel in a fictional European country. His boss is the snooty, demanding and seemingly soulless Monsieur Gustave, who has a habit of seducing elderly guests so he can con them out of their inheritance. The death of Tilda Swinton’s grand dame soon kicks off a bonkers plot encompassing a stolen art work, outraged relatives, an invasion, a prison, the girl who works at the local bakery and a secretive network of hoteliers who come to each other’s aid when the alarm is raised. This ‘story’, however, is simply a vehicle for the director’s fascination with precise movement, symmetry and surreal situations. It’s all visually impressive and often entertaining on a facile level, but the lack of any sincerity soon produces tedium. A very watchable Ralph Fiennes brings equal doses of smarm and charm to Gustave and almost saves the whole film singlehandedly.
8 Castello Cavalcanti (2013)
Another short film, paid for by product placement from Prada. In the 1950s, Jason Schwartzman’s racing driver crashes in an Italian village and is surprised to encounter long-lost relatives. It’s fluff, but it looks good and doesn’t outstay its welcome.
7 Isle of Dogs (2018)
Anderson’s second stop-motion animation takes inspiration from Japanese directors such as Akira Kurosawa and the Studio Ghibli legend Hayao Miyazaki. In Japan in the near future, all dogs have been banished to an uninhabited island due to an outbreak of canine flu. But the mayor’s young nephew, Atari (voiced by Koyu Rankin), secretly breaks the quarantine to find his missing pet and encounters a group of dogs trying to survive in the harsh conditions of Trash Island. As with Fantastic Mr Fox, the voice cast is large and dominated by big names – Bryan Cranston, Greta Gerwig, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Harvey Keitel, Frances McDormand, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Tilda Swinton, Ken Watanabe, even Yoko Ono – but there are key differences here. Isle of Dogs has a keener sense of drama and character relationships, while the heightened world of talking dogs and corrupt politics in a near-future Japan is used to explore themes of power, privilege, abandonment and hope. (Fun fact: Anderson took the film’s title from a road sign he spotted in East London.)
6 Come Together: A Fashion Picture in Motion (2016)
A delightfully sweet and poignant short film (actually, to be more prosaic, it’s a commercial made for H&M). Set aboard a train on Christmas Day, the story sees Adrien Brody’s conductor organise a surprise for a lonely child. The tone stays *just* the right side of schmaltz, while Anderson’s geometric camera moves brilliantly suit the environment of a passenger train. They glide laterally past windows or down corridors with glee.
5 Bottle Rocket (1996)
Wes’s debut came during the mid-90s vogue for indie-tinged crime films with ironic twists: Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction had had such a seismic influence. But while many of his contemporaries missed the point of those Tarantino opuses and pushed the levels of machismo and sub-Mafia posturing up to 11, Anderson populated his crime film with men out of their depth. Co-written with Anderson’s friend and regular star Owen Wilson, Bottle Rocket is a feature-length remake of an earlier short film. Both tell the story of Dignan (Wilson) and Anthony (Wilson’s brother Luke), who embark on a 75-year plan to become master criminals. They start low-key and rob a bookshop with an associate. (The scene is charmingly comedic, with Dignan being told off by staff members for being rude.) Then, hiding from the law at a motel, Anthony starts to fall for Paraguayanmaid Inez (Lumi Cavazos) and this drives a wedge between the male-only gang… The romance subplot is sweet and effective so it’s a slight shame when the movie drifts away towards a silly final act featuring a gangster played by James Caan. But with plenty of heart and invention, and shot much looser than Anderson’s later style, Bottle Rocket has a loveable, underdog charisma.
4 The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
This is really where the trademark Wes Anderson style of right-angle cinematography, vivid art design, middle-gear line readings and amplified reality was defined. In some ways, The Royal Tenenbaums is a conventional story about a family riven with emotional turmoil, rivalries, bitterness and regret; this plot could be done as a straight drama. However, Anderson injects several elements that raise the film above its soap-opera format and produces something magical. Selfish patriarch Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman, who sadly clashed with the director on set, scuppering any further appearances in the Anderson Cinematic Universe) is kicked out of the hotel he can no long afford. So he concocts a thoughtless story about being terminally ill and attempts to reconnect with his estranged wife (Anjelica Huston) and their three grown-up children (Luke Wilson, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Stiller). Various quirky subplots bounce around each other, but the film always retains a fascination for the characters’ psychology: unlike in some later Anderson movies, you *feel* for these people. Powered by both introspection and hope, and helped by some smart musical choices, The Royal Tenenbaums is just wonderful.
3 Rushmore (1998)
For his second movie Anderson cast Bill Murray for the first time – the star then became Robert De Niro to his Martin Scorsese, appearing in his next eight films – and this was something of a bold move. By 1998, Murray was starting to slide away from the big time, damaged by some underwhelming and underperforming comedies. (Does anyone now remember The Man Who Knew Too Little?!) Yet Wes knew Murray’s personality – smart, cynical, irascible – would be perfect for this tale of lost characters trying to find some new meaning. The film centres on 15-year-old student Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman, making his Anderson debut) who is at the exclusive Rushmore Academy in Texas on a scholarship. Despite having eloquence and brazen chutzpah, Max is not intellectually gifted – so his confidence is rocked when he is threatened with expulsion. At the same time, two adults come into his life, which forces him to question his previously cast-iron destiny as a great man. Max meets and becomes a protégé for Murray’s disillusioned rich guy Herman Blume, and he also becomes infatuated with a local teacher and widow, the Englishwoman Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams). However, these twin lights of hope are dimmed when Herman and Rosemary’s paths cross, leaving Max feeling like the third wheel… Anderson co-wrote the script with Owen Wilson and has admitted that Max is partly autobiographical. But whereas the film is full of specifics – the Ivy League school, the ages of the characters, the kooky secondary characters – it succeeds because this is a universal story about dealing with life when it’s not going to plan.
2 The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
Combining several elements that fascinated Wes Anderson – train journeys, the culture of India, estranged families, one of the characters from his most recent short film (see Hotel Chevalier, above) – The Darjeeling Limited is a beautiful study in melancholy and redemption. Three brothers who haven’t spoken to each other since their father’s funeral several years ago reunite for a train ride across India, the idea being that they can reconnect while they explore a spiritual landscape. Elder brother Francis (Owen Wilson) is the instigator of the trip and pedantically insists on a strict itinerary. This irritates his siblings, Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman, who co-wrote the script), as neither is convinced by the plan and have their own shit going on. The first act focuses on semi-comedic bickering over timetables and passports, but then the boys witness a genuine tragedy and start to question both their individual issues and their relationship. Almost imperceptibly, the movie becomes more and more heartfelt and effective – after an hour or so, you love the characters utterly and are devastated by some revelations about their past. As with Tenenbaums, some eclectic songs are utilised wisely to enhance various scenes – but it’s the trio of central performances and the moving drama that linger in the memory the most.
1 Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
Magical, whimsical and romantic, Moonrise Kingdom is set on a New England island in the 1960s. Two 12-year-old children, Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), meet, fall for each other, become pen pals… and decide to run away together. For Sam, this means fleeing his Scout camp; Suzy leaves behind her peculiar, emotionless family. The film then splits focus. At times, we follow the attempts of various adults – Edward Norton’s Scout leader, Bruce Willis’s police officer, Tilda Swinton’s social-services agent who’s surrealistically always referred to as ‘Social Services’ as if that’s her name, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand as Suzy’s lawyer parents – to track down the missing kids. At others, we’re with Sam and Suzy on their cross-island trek as they evade danger, gain allies and share a first kiss… There are clear influences here, such as the 1959 French film The 400 Blows, the 1971 British film Melody, and the surface-perfect sheen of Norman Rockwell’s Americana artwork. But the movie has a spirit and life all of its own. Framed by Bob Balaban’s narrator who appears on screen to explain context and geography, and scored by Alexandre Desplat with light-touch music that creates an atmosphere of fantasy and wonder, Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson’s masterpiece. An utterly charming film that explores identity, individuality and romance from an innocent but never naive point of view.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments section below…
Steven Spielberg once said, ‘Every time I go to a movie, it’s magic, no matter what the movie’s about.’ And he knows his stuff. From the early days of his career – an episode of Columbo, the TV movie Duel, the blockbuster-defining Jaws – right up to 2022’s charming, autobiographical drama The Fabelmans, the director has done more than anyone to generate cinematic magic. His films balance craft and technique with wonder and emotion, creating profoundly beautiful entertainment. When The Fabelmans was released a few weeks ago, its publicity material quoted a critic who’d called the movie ‘Spielberg’s masterpiece’. I had to chuckle: he’d already made about eight of those.
I’ve been a fan of Spielberg for as long as I can remember. You see, the first time I ever went to a cinema was to see his film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. This 1982 drama was an enormous hit and a critical smash, so you probably don’t need me to waste the rest of this paragraph telling you that it’s about a young American boy called Elliott (played by a superb Henry Thomas) who encounters a lost, lonely alien and helps save the creature from rapacious authority figures who wish him harm.
I was very young when I first saw E.T., and only vaguely recall the event (my chief memory has always been more about the seat and the seemingly enormous screen, rather than the film itself). But I’ve always been very proud that such a classy and well-regarded movie was my ‘first’. So as I approached the 40th anniversary of E.T.’s release, I set myself a challenge: could I work out where and when I’d first gone to the pictures? These days, I keep an anal record of every cinema trip, so thought it would be fun to know where it all started. And I soon found that the details *could* be reconstructed – via a combination of hazy memories, family anecdotes and a bit of online research…
In the early 1980s, my parents owned a folding trailer tent like the one pictured above. When I was about three or four years old, we used it for a holiday to the Lake District in northern England, which was only a couple of hours’ drive from our home in West Lancashire. And on one of the days it rained. Constantly. So, looking for something to entertain two adults and a small child, my mum and dad took me for my first-ever trip to the cinema.
And the film that happened to be showing that day was the recently released E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
This much, I’ve always known. But could I find out more? When I asked her about the day, my mother told me the cinema was probably in the town of Keswick. Or perhaps Kendal. One of the Ks, anyway. That was a start. A bit of Googling soon narrowed down my options to one likely contender: the Alhambra, an independent cinema that opened in Keswick on 22 January 1914 and has (mostly) been open ever since. The cinema’s opening-night offering was the Italian drama Quo Vadis – though due to a technical hitch, the screening had to be abandoned and remounted the following day. In the next decade, there was also a charming piece of British make-do-ism. At a showing of the first feature-length talkie, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the cinema overcame the lack of sound equipment by employing, in the words of the local newspaper, ‘Mr Fred Bucknall, the popular Yorkshire baritone, who will render the full and necessary vocal accompaniment for this wonderful film.’ Keswick, meanwhile, on the shore of Derwentwater, was once home to the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, and in part because of their efforts in promoting the natural beauty and serenity of the area, today the town is a tourist hub during summer.
I showed a photograph of the Alhambra’s beautiful facade to my mother and she immediately said it looked familiar – yes, *this* was where we went that rainy afternoon. Success! But *when* did we go? E.T. had been released in the United States in June 1982. However, in those dim and distant days films took several months to reach Europe. So the UK didn’t start screening Spielberg’s latest opus until December. This presented a slight problem – surely my parents wouldn’t have gone on holiday to the Lake District around Christmas? My mother didn’t remember specifically but said no, it wasn’t likely.
Then I did a bit more research… By the late 1970s, the Alhambra had ceased Saturday houses and just showed films four nights a week. When I went there, the cinema had become a ‘second run’ establishment, taking on films that had been playing up the road the week before. (That changed a year or so after my visit, when some ‘first run’ showings of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – another Spielberg film, fittingly – quickly sold out and gave the cinema a financial boost.)
So given that, I contacted the people who now run the Keswick Alhambra and asked about their schedules for both 1982 and 1983. I was told that those screening records are no longer extant, but a very kind man called Tom Rennie was able to look back through some old issues of the local newspaper, the Keswick Reminder, and he got back in touch with interesting news. The Alhambra had shown E.T. a couple of months after its UK debut. They’d run the film for two weeks, at 7.30pm each day from 3 to 15 March 1983 (except Wednesdays).
So it seems near-certain that my debut cinema trip was on a family holiday in March 1983 – the month I turned four years old and, at the time of writing, 40 years ago. That’s quite an anniversary; one surely worth celebrating with a self-indulgent blog post.
E.T. has always been very precious to me, not just because it was my ‘first’ but also due to subsequent viewings. The next time I watched the film was in late 1988, when it was finally released as a rental VHS. (The unusually long delay was reportedly because Spielberg disliked his films going to video, fearing the practice would result in a dip in cinema-going.) By that point, I was a VHS-obsessed nine-year-old who rented tapes every week, usually the same gems of the period over and over again – Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid and so on. I had even got into the habit of acquiring my local video shop’s old, unwanted posters for my bedroom. One of the A1 beauties that was stuck to my wall with Blu Tack for several months was for E.T.
Over the years, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial has been one of those movies that keeps coming back into my life. And each time I’m seduced anew by its childlike wonder, Melissa Mathison’s script, the great characters, the amazing cast, the tension and drama, the whimsy and jokes, Allen Daviau’s all-star cinematography, John Williams’s masterpiece of a score and Spielberg’s astonishing command of storytelling. I’ve rewatched the film on video, on television, on DVD, and I’ve always loved rediscovering its charm and beauty.
The only minor blight was a well-intentioned but clumsy re-edit that Spielberg instigated for the 20th anniversary in 2002. Extra scenes were added, CGI was used to modify certain shots of the title character, some dialogue considered offensive was trimmed out, and – most egregiously – shots of government agents were digitally tweaked to replace their guns with walkie-talkies. Spielberg later said the project had been a mistake, and he now urges everyone to seek out the 1982 cut. So do I.
As for the Alhambra, the cinema is still going strong with an excitingly eclectic weekly programme of both new releases and classics. (I live 250 miles away, so unfortunately have never made a return visit, but off the back of researching this blog post I now love getting their weekly listings via email.) There are two screens – a main room that sits 159, a smaller space for 29 – and since the year 2000 the Alhambra has run the annual Keswick Film Festival, which spotlights interesting and offbeat movies. The festival takes place every February and March. I’m smitten that it’s at that time of year. Feels special somehow, like they’re unknowingly marking my anniversary for me.
Do you know when and where your first cinema trip was – and what the film was? Let me know your stories in the comments section below…
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Enormous thanks to Carol Rennie and Tom Rennie of the Keswick Alhambra for help researching the dates the cinema showed E.T. in 1983.
Here’s my ranking of all the new films I saw in 2022. Let me know in the comments below if I’ve missed out your favourite…
26. Thor: Love and Thunder. I was angered by how appalling this MCU sequel is. Two hours of smugness, pointless cameos, in-jokes and incessant undercutting of any drama. Nothing is treated seriously and patience wears thin almost immediately.
25. Morbius. Superhero drivel with a terrible plot, laughable dialogue, blank characters, cheesy CGI, illogical rules and a stuffy sense of self-importance – the latter typified by Jared Leto’s tedious lead performance.
24. Mad God. A 90-minute stop-motion horror film, made by special-effects genius Phil Tippett (Star Wars, Jurassic Park). The dystopian, dieselpunk modelwork is an old-school treat, but it *really* needs a proper storyline. Gets dull very quickly.
23. The Northman. This retelling of the ur-myth that inspired Hamlet features some impressive visuals and a bonkers cameo from Willem Defoe. But while it grasps for mythology and ritual, the film is drab and pretentious. Characters proclaim things, rather than talking to each other.
22. The Invitation. A lonely New York singleton learns she has a posh English cousin, so attends a family wedding at “New Carfax Abbey in Whitby”. The name and location should tip most viewers off where things are heading… A boring, rote, hollow horror where a handsome lord turns out to be Count Dracula and the lead character doesn’t run a mile when weird shit keeps happening. Forgettable nonsense.
21. Jurassic World Dominion. The return of original cast members Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum is fun as it goes, but everything else in this sequel is so lacklustre. The storytelling is really hackneyed, the cast is dotted with weak performances and the action is derivative.
20. Uncharted. One of those films where you start to forget the details while you’re still watching it, this is badly written, quest-based nonsense with a few laughs and some decent action. Tom Holland’s good fun as the hero, but no one else impresses. (Like in Morbius, the female lead is so cursory she’s not even needed for the final act.)
19. Amsterdam. A star-studded yet meandering conspiracy caper, set in the 1930s, about a doctor and a lawyer accused of murder. The arch, mannered tone is reminiscent of a Wes Anderson film, though it lacks either the zip or the heart that would make things sing. Christian Bale and Margot Robbie are watchable, and the score and cinematography are tremendous, but overall the film is significantly weaker than the sum of its parts.
18. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Engaging in parts but sloppy in others, this gonzo superhero flick was directed by Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead) and it’s a shame he wasn’t allowed to go full-blown horror – the flashes of creepiness and zombie stuff work well. But the OTT plot is a mess and you have to squint for recurring character Wanda’s storyline to make any sense.
17. Bullet Train. An action comedy with eccentric characters, lots of silliness, plenty of violence, some Family Guy-style cutaways, a few cameos, some oddball music choices and a general sense of glee. Not everything works, and at least one actor is poor, but it’s often funny. Brad Pitt is fantastic as the (relatively) normal centre of the chaos.
16. The Batman. Batman is now a myth that gets retold in various ways, like Dracula or Robin Hood, and this take has a *dark*, emo, grungy vibe, which pitches the superhero as a detective (honouring the source comics). There’s a terrifically expressionistic car chase in the rain and a sweeping sense of grandeur. However, Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne has no charm, and there’s a big sense of seen-it-all-before.
15. Catherine Called Birdy. Likeable medieval comedy about a smart, spirited teenager (played by that little girl who was better than you think she’s going to be in Game of Thrones). It’s refreshing to have a coming-of-age story from a female point of view (periods are part of the storytelling), but the plot is too episodic to justify 110 minutes and scenes are occasionally too frivolous.
14. Hellraiser. The 47th film in the horror series (approx) is a reboot, and like all good horror films it makes you care about characters – especially Odessa A’zion’s Riley, a recovering addict who stumbles across the familiar puzzle box. There are flashes of surrealism and expressionism alongside the usual sadism and gore, while the art direction is excellent.
13. Elvis. A breakneck-fast biopic summary of the King of Rock’n’roll – from fresh, young talent to Biff-from-Back-to-the-Future-Part-II decline – and especially his toxic relationship with manager Colonel Tom Parker (a superb Tom Hanks). The film zips through countless entertaining sequences, yet barely pausing for breath, so a varied pace would help.
12. X. As if Quentin Tarantino made a slasher movie, this low-budget horror is set in 1979 – a small film crew attempt to make a porn flick at a secluded rural house, but obviously things don’t go well and there are soon murders. A film where the characters really pop, this taps cleverly into the 70s/80s slasher boom while there’s also some sly metatextual mirroring of the porno with the movie you’re watching.
11. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Really enjoyed this one – it deals with the death of lead actor Chadwick Boseman very smartly and sensitivity, holds its (long) runtime fine, contains lots of shades-of-grey moral discussion, and has plenty of feels. Occasionally shoddy CGI, though, and sometimes lacks a sense of fun where one would help.
10. Death on the Nile. Better than Kenneth Branagh’s first go at playing Hercules Poirot – 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express – by virtue of having a livelier storyline and some nice new elements. The look of the film is an eclectic mix of gorgeous 70mm cinematography, exquisite period production design and, sadly, some naff greenscreens. A few casting choices fall flat, but this is one of Agatha Christie’s best plots and Branagh the director spins all the plates admirably.
9. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. With a sense of humour that flicks between parched-dry and outrageously absurd, this comedy about the 80s comedy pop star is a real treat. Yankovic’s career is used as a way of spoofing the entire genre of biopics: the rags-to-riches story is told with faux-Spielbergian wonder; there are celebrity cameos and implausible fudges of real history. The movie is consistently funny as well as gloriously bonkers, while Daniel Radcliffe is super as Yankovic.
8. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. This comedy murder-mystery sequel is a delightful puzzle box of misdirection, revelations, ingenuity and comedy. There are top performances too, especially from Daniel Craig, Janelle Monáe and Kate Hudson, as well as playful flashbacks and celebrity cameos. Not as tightly constructed as the original Knives Out, perhaps, but still enormously entertaining.
7. Prey. The best Predator film since Predator, this elegant action thriller is set in 18th-century North America. The theme of hunting (always key in this series) is used well for a story about a member of the Comanche who must take on an alien invader. Terrific cinematography and incidental music mixes with gnarly violence, moments of real tension and a lead character you care about.
6. Clerks III. Kevin Smith’s latest comedy certainly won’t be for everyone – but I was bowled over. A self-indulgent celebration of characters I’ve known for nearly 30 years (the original Clerks came out in 1994), but also a moving, melancholic study of middle-age concerns such as loss, regret, friendship and hope. Silly and superb in equal measure. (Quite why a comedy drama about men in their 40s who realise their better days are probably behind them hit home so hard with me is a TOTAL MYSTERY.)
5. See How They Run. With strong echoes of Clue and Knives Out, this murder-mystery satire/spoof/pastiche/celebration is enormous fun. Agatha Christie tropes, clichés and references swim about in a whirlpool of comedy, intrigue and meta awareness. Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan are extremely entertaining as the detectives investigating a death behind the scenes at The Mousetrap, while everything is lightly directed with real wit.
4. Downton Abbey: A New Era. The first Downton movie had been disappointing – muddled, undercooked, overstuffed, with a TV season’s worth of material squeezed into 120 minutes. The sequel is a vast improvement. Focusing on two parallel plots, the film makes sure that every character gets a chance to shine and is brimming with charm, comic energy, period detail, effecting emotion and an undimmable sense of joy. There’s a mystery involving the Dowager Countess’s past, which involves a sun-kissed sojourn to the South of France, while the house is overtaken by a 1920s film crew. Wonderful.
3. Top Gun: Maverick. *Immaculate* blockbuster filmmaking, full of heart and passion and popcorn thrills. The producers and star Tom Cruise delayed the film’s debut until after COVID had faded because they knew this widescreen epic had to be seen HUGE, and they were right to be patient. This sequel is wonderfully old-fashioned in its use of a high-concept plot, vivid characters, spectacularly ‘real’ special effects and a perfect balance of plot, emotion, humour and action. Imbued with wonder, a sense of humour, awareness of cliche and some of the most thrilling aerial sequences ever filmed, Top Gun: Maverick is pure cheese – but expensive, matured, cultured cheese. The best 80s film since the 80s.
2. Licorice Pizza. A magnificent romantic movie, set in 1973 LA. Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman (both making their film debuts) are *superb* as an aimless twenty-something woman and her charismatic teenage suitor, while secondary roles really pop (especially Bradley Cooper in a grandstanding cameo). Written with verve and featuring some wonderful uses of source music, this is Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film since Magnolia. Heart, attitude and whimsy abound.
1 Everything Everywhere All at Once. Dazzlingly inventive, gleefully surreal, outrageously hilarious and magnificently flamboyant, EEAAO is the kind of movie that reminds you why you love cinema. Michelle Yeoh stars as a middle-aged laundrette owner who’s undergoing a tax audit. But her life is up-ended when a version of her husband (Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) from an alternative universe arrives to tell her that only she can save the multiverse from destruction. That summary barely scratches the surface of a story that encompasses romance, comedy, action, genre spoofing, family drama, existential crises and people with hot dogs for fingers. To be seen to be believed.
Spoiler warning: a few minor plot points are revealed below
For nearly 30 years, American writer/director Kevin Smith has ploughed an idiosyncratic furrow. From his indie-classic debut, Clerks, right through to its 2022 sequel, Smith does not toe a line or clip his own wings to fit in. Whether it be potty-mouthed comedies, near-the-edge horrors or self-celebratory mash-up movies that reprise old characters, his work could not be mistaken for someone else – his fingerprints are smudged over every frame.
Not all his movies have been successful. Some have flopped financially, while many have bewildered and frustrated critics. But he’s acquired a large and dedicated fanbase, who he regularly connects with directly through numerous podcasts and blogs, and he has built himself into a brand: a film director who essentially moonlights as a stand-up comedian. Smith is clearly an extremely smart and savvy guy, very aware of the movie industry’s pitfalls and able to huckster his way through three decades of funding and releases.
If anything, he sometimes seems too self-aware for his own good. Watch just a few random interviews and you soon think that Kevin Smith hangs off every word ever written about him – by a critic, by a colleague or by a fan in a tweet. But if you keep watching those interviews and reading those blogs and listening to his many podcasts and DVD commentaries – and I have done recently – you can’t help but like him. With his working-class chumminess (he loves setting films in his beloved New Jersey; he has a habit of calling friends by their surnames), and his clear love of actors (having got their breaks in Kevin Smith films, stars Ben Affleck and Jason Lee keep showing up for small roles), Smith comes off as fun to hang around with – in person or via his movies.
He’s also a classic underdog. Not as cinematically talented as his peers Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, nor as insightful as his hero Richard Linklater, Smith has nevertheless carved a stellar career by most people’s standards. Fourteen films in 28 years is an astonishing record, even if – as we’ll see below – quite a few are misfires.
To celebrate the fascinating CV of Kevin Smith, I set myself the challenge of watching his films and recording my thoughts. I’d seen about half of them before (I was a huge fan of Clerks and Mallrats at the time, then drifted away after being disappointed by Dogma), but others were new to me…
Clerks (1994)
Kevin Smith’s debut film is a low-fi gem – a vividly written comedy drama with an am-dram cast, set on one day in mostly one location, made in black-and-white on a über-indie budget of $27,000. (Smith raised the dough by selling his comic-book collection and maxing out several credit cards.) The crew was tiny, production corners were cut, some actors are pretty poor, and cinematographer Dave Klein has since admitted he didn’t know what he was doing. But while Clerks lacks professional polish, the rough-and-tumble aesthetic perfectly suits its drifting-through-life characters. The story takes place in a working-class convenience store. Stuck-in-a-rut twenty-something Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran, nicely sympathetic) has been coerced into doing a shift at short notice (‘I’m not even supposed to be here today!’ becomes his mantra). His slacker buddy Randal (Jeff Anderson, incredibly watchable) nominally runs the video shop next door but spends most of his time hanging out with Dante – and the rest deliberately insulting customers. Dante is also juggling a love triangle with current girlfriend Marilyn (Veronica Loughran) and ex Caitlin (Lisa Spoonauer), while a pair of dopeheads (played by Smith and his sometimes-drunk-on-camera pal Jason Mewes) loiter outside selling drugs. The film brims with comic energy, electric dialogue, ramshackle charisma and angry wit, even if some gags have dated badly (especially a bad-taste incident with a dead body). It’s easy to see why this film was such a critical darling and financial hit – and why Kevin Smith was soon being courted by Hollywood players Miramax. Nine Death Star contractors out of 10
Mallrats (1995)
For Smith’s follow-up to Clerks the studio asked for a ‘smart Porkies’ – on the basis that there was a gap in the market for risqué teen comedies – but what they ended up with is more like a ‘childish John Hughes film’. As with Clerks this is a comedy set on one day, and sees friends TS (Jeremy London) and Brodie (a star-making turn from My Name Is Earl’s Jason Lee) hanging out in their local shopping mall. The loosely woven plot has several threads: both boys have problems in their love life and become involved in a scheme to sabotage a game show, Brodie gets into a feud with a bully played by Ben Affleck (in his first of many Kevin Smith roles), comic-book legend Stan Lee cameos as himself, the comedic drug-dealers Jay and Silent Bob return from Clerks, a Magic Eye picture causes confusion and a schoolgirl keeps a diary of her sex experiences with grown men. (Jay and Silent Bob’s role in the story establishes Mallrats and Clerks as part of a shared universe – the ‘View Askewniverse’, named after Kevin Smith’s production company. Mallrats is actually a prequel, taking place the day before Dante was called into work.) The film’s silliness grates a few times, especially as we follow Jay and Silent Bob’s slapstick subplot, while the naive misogyny on show is risible. The movie is also photographed appallingly at times – static cameras, ugly angles, bad pacing. (Smith has often been criticised for a lack of visual style: his early films are typified by a plonk-the-camera-down-anywhere vibe.) But Mallrats still has much going for it – the dialogue is terrific and reeled off at a clip, the humour has bite, while the Generation-X mood from Clerks is given a pump of immature enthusiasm that’s hard to dislike. Eight schooners out of 10
Chasing Amy (1997)
Smith’s third movie – a romcom – is the first that feels like a proper Hollywood effort. Here, the leads have star quality, the camera moves, actors are well lit, the cutting is in sync with the storytelling, and scenes have dramatic beats – things that were previously in short supply. Ben Affleck and Jason Lee return from Mallrats, this time playing comic-book artists Holden McNeil and Banky Edwards. When Holden falls for a women he meets at a convention, he’s perplexed to realise that she’s gay. Despite this, Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams, who was dating Kevin Smith at the time) finds herself drawn to him anyway, while Banky suffers from jealousy as his friend’s attention drifts away from their partnership… The movie was criticised at the time for being an example of the ‘straight man turns a sexy lesbian’ cliché, but it actually plays better now in an era where fluid identities are more accepted; the drama concerns characters who are struggling with society’s idea of who they should be, whether that be an alpha male or a lesbian. Having said that, some of the sexual politics have aged very badly – or, rather, were already stale in 1997. Is it really plausible that a grown man wouldn’t know what lesbian sex involves? Overall Chasing Amy is decent, watchable and engaging. It also helps that Jay and Silent Bob – by now prerequisites in a Kevin Smith movie – are wisely restricted to just one key scene, in which they act as a sounding board for Holden as well as a burst of comic relief. Seven figments of your fucking imagination out of 10
Dogma (1999)
Dogma starts with an on-screen disclaimer, imploring viewers to remember that it’s a comedy. The text was added to offset some controversy generated by the religious subject matter, but it turned out to be a wise move – because you’d never tell otherwise. Laughs are virtually nonexistent… Following several characters in a storyline about two fallen angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) attempting to get back into heaven, Dogma is a disjointed and jittery work, seemingly made by people with short attention spans. Ideas and jokes are introduced, bounced around erratically, and often dropped. The dialogue, so strong in Smith’s earlier scripts, is lumpen, leaden and largely made up of exposition (Chris Rock seems to do little but explain and make fun of Christian mythology). And the religious satire itself – which somehow managed to raise the hackles of a few thin-skinned believers – feels like it’s been written by sixth-formers who think they’re the first people to ever spot that Christianity contains some contradictions. The movie’s de facto lead character is played by Linda Fiorentino, who flounders as a terribly written character who is either angry or blasé depending on what the scene needs. (Actress and director clashed, and at times weren’t speaking to each other during filming.) Affleck and Damon, meanwhile, who were cast here soon after their Oscar-winning time with Good Will Hunting, come off as complacently smug. Jay and Silent Bob are involved again for no real reason, Salma Hayek pops up as a pointless character, Janeane Garofalo is wasted in a one-scene part and Alanis Morissette cameos (mutely) as God. No one can save the film: things are so tawdry that even the great Alan Rickman, who plays a bitter, sarcastic angel, is annoying. Three consequences schmonsequences out of 10
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)
Both Chasing Amy and Dogma had been very profitable for Miramax, who then gave Smith more or less free rein on his next picture. Sadly, the result was an abject lesson of what happens when a director with no willpower is allowed to just amuse himself and his mates. Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back, which puts the stoner sidekicks front and centre, is ninety minutes of self-indulgent in-jokes, pop-culture references, appearances by characters from previous Kevin Smith films, actors playing multiple roles and nonsensical storytelling, all propped up by gross-out, misogynistic and ‘gay is funny’ humour. When the druggie double act realise that a Hollywood movie is being made about them – an idea spun off a detail in Chasing Amy – they begin a cross-country trip to stop the production… and get entangled in any number of tiresome diversions. The comedy often aims for the goofiness of Austin Powers but fatally lacks that movie’s self-deprecation, so ends up closer in tone to one of those latter-day National Lampoon films that desperately wants to be American Pie. Given by far the biggest role of his career, Jason Mewes (Jay) almost gets by on chutzpah alone – you *can* see why Smith has always been so enamoured with his troubled pal – but the rest of the cast is a hotchpotch of good actors dropping down a division (Ben Affleck, Eliza Dushku, Jason Lee), celebrities demeaning themselves in small roles (Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Will Ferrell, Judd Nelson, George Carlin, many more) and Smith’s rep company being wheeled out (Jeff Anderson and Brian O’Halloran have pointless cameos). A kind, sympathetic view of this movie would be think of it as the flamboyant celebration of a film director’s personality, a one-man Avengers Assemble that collects elements and characters from his first decade of moviemaking for a blow-out party. In the cold light of 20 years later, though, it’s just a ghastly, hubristic experience. Two communication tools used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another out of 10
Jersey Girl (2004)
The slump continues. After Kevin Smith’s slide into more and more self-indulgence with the previous two films, Jersey Girl was supposed to be his mainstream breakout – a large-budget Hollywood romcom with bankable stars. Sadly, by toning down his inherent Smithism and stepping away from his View Askewniverse continuity (in part because he didn’t want to work with his muse Mewes until the latter dealt with his addiction issues), the writer/director ended up making a mawkish and moribund flop. The script features characters photocopied from a thousand other films: a sad, lonely but matinee-idol-handsome man (Ben Affleck), who’s widowed after the death of his angelic wife (Jennifer Lopez); their cutesy, cheeky young daughter (Raquel Castro); a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Liv Tyler) who comes into his life and gives him a new happiness; and his frustrated but kindly father (George Carlin). Before release, the movie was adversely affected by poor test screenings, studio interference, and the negative publicity generated by Affleck and Lopez’s previous film, the lambasted Gigli. But none of that explains away the factory-line plotting, bland characters and rote acting (Liv Tyler does nothing with her blank character). Smith later more or less disowned the movie, even adding an apologetic gag in his credits of his next film, thanking Jersey Girl ‘for taking it so hard in the ass and never complaining.’ Five boobies out of 10
Clerks II (2006)
Dante and Randal, the two friends at the centre of Kevin Smith’s first film, have been a recurring presence in the director’s career. This is not surprising, given that they were inspired by his pre-fame days working in a convenience store. He even planned on playing Randal himself, before he realised how busy he’d be directing. The pair made a brief appearance in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, while actors Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson had various other roles in Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma. But in 2006, Smith made a full-blown Clerks sequel which shone a new spotlight on Dante and Randal – and the result was one of his very best movies. It actually took some cajoling to get Anderson to return. Clearly someone with no time for celebrity bullshit, the actor has seemed to struggle with the legacy of Clerks and at one point fell out with Smith over money. But having enjoyed reminiscing with the old gang while working on a Clerks DVD box set, he agreed to Clerks II on the strength of the script… As we catch up with Randal and Dante a decade after that chaotic day at the Quick Stop, they’re now working at a fast-food joint with Rosario Dawson’s branch manager Becky and Trevor Fehrman’s dopey burger-flipper Elias. The four bicker and discuss life, talk to eccentric customers, and get involved in an extreme and illegal piece of live theatre. O’Halloran and Anderson are terrific, instantly reigniting their old chemistry and perfectly capturing how their characters would be 10 years later. Dawson is absolutely *radiant* – she oozes smarts, sex appeal and star quality – while Fehrman is both endearingly sweet and very funny. Just like in the first movie, the humour is near-the-knuckle and adolescent, but often hits home. More importantly, there’s now genuine emotion that drives several character stories – will Dante turn his back on the boring middle-class life ahead of him? Will he admit that he’s in love with Becky? What will Randal do if his best pal leaves him behind? One reviewer said Clerks II has a ‘dirty mouth but a pure heart’ and that’s spot on. We also get the best cinematography yet in a Kevin Smith film, shot in colour unlike the 1994 original. Returning DOP Dave Klein (who’d missed the previous three Smith films for backstage political reasons) makes Clerks II simultaneously movie-beautiful and yet real; heightened and yet still connected to the makeshift Clerks. A theatrically staged musical sequence set to The Jackson 5’s ABC is also an infectious expression of pure joy. A wonderful film. Nine donkey shows out of 10
Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)
When twenty-something housemates Miri (Elizabeth Banks) and Zack (Seth Rogan) can’t make ends meet, they decide to, um, make their own ends meet by starring in a self-made porn film – the theory being that all their former school pals will pay top dollar to watch them screw. The idea then mushrooms, with adult-industry actors hired and sexy spoofs of Star Wars planned. After the brief return with Clerks II, Smith again eschewed the View Askewniverse and instead attempted to tag himself into the then-current fad for frat-pack comedies about childish adults struggling with the real world. This genre, led by writer/director Judd Apatow and stars such as Seth Rogan, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, had been partly influenced by Clerks and Mallrats, of course, so in theory the move should have worked. But while the puerile sex gags in earlier Smith films hit home because they came from characters who were essentially teenagers (whatever their actual age), Zack and Miri are grown-ups with bills to pay and who attend a high-school reunion. The humour therefore tends towards crude and passé; then when actual sex is involved it’s relatively tame or played for embarrassed laughs. (Well, aside from one scatological gag that caused protracted aggro with the censors.) The romcom subplot, meanwhile, feels limp, while too much Apatow-esque improv has been allowed – Smith is usually renowned for insisting on actors sticking to the script – meaning that several scenes slide away into nothing. Poor. Five all-male casts (like Glengarry Glen Ross? Like that?) out of 10
Cop Out (2010)
Smith’s only gig as a director for hire, working with someone else’s script, is a dispiritingly empty comedy thriller. It’s like if Lethal Weapon were remade by a particularly poor Saturday Night Live line-up: the staples are there – the sarcastic cops who bend the rules, the outlandish humour, the absurd violence – but everything feels like it’s been thrown together with barely a thought. There’s no class, no finesse, no wit, no oomph. The leads are actors with good track records – Bruce Willis, who is obviously (and at one point explicitly) trading on his Die Hard persona, and Tracy Morgan, who was then one of the stars of sitcom 30 Rock. A few years earlier, Kevin Smith had made two approaches to Willis when he wanted him for a cameo in Jersey Girl – and Willis had ignored him both times. Yet after the pair enjoyed working together on Die Hard 4.0, in which Smith took an acting role, a collaboration on Cop Out seemed a good idea. Things did not go well. Willis was unhappy about Smith’s habit of smoking pot on set and Smith later publicly harangued the star for being difficult and moody. (To his credit, Smith apologised years later when Willis revealed he was suffering from dementia.) But whatever the backstage ructions, on screen Willis is lazy, lethargic and boring, showing none of that stellar spark that lit up his best movies. Tracy Morgan tries gamely to make the scenes between lead cops Monroe and Hodges fly, though he’s got nothing to work with; Rashida Jones and Smith regular Jason Lee are also half-decent in secondary roles. But this is an horrifically flippant and charmless movie – there’s no heart or pizzazz at all. Three knock-knock jokes out of 10
Red State (2011)
Smith’s career was now in a drift, his reputation damaged by a box-office bombs and bad reviews. Loyal fans remained, but the wider world was starting to define him as the guy who never topped Clerks. He needed a radical about-turn – and the welcome jolt came from this enjoyably grimy, grungy, grindhouse-flavoured horror film. It feels like a director flexing muscles he’d previously ignored. As with a lot of American horror, Red State is wrapped up with sexuality – the plot is kicked off when three horny teenage boys seek out a MILF they’ve seen advertised online. Their quest into the backwoods, however, leads to them being captured by an extreme Christian cult who punish them for their seedy urges. The cult is led by Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks, absolutely mesmerising), a Westboro Baptist Church-inspired hate preacher, and this isolated, family-based community are violently homophobic and puritanically regressive. But Red State is also, as Smith once said, a ‘weird parlour trick of a movie’: the story then evolves into a shooty-shooty action thriller when a Waco-style siege begins. Using lots of handheld and shaky camerawork to keep everyone on edge – and an absence of any Hollywood glamour – Smith creates a terrific tone and maintains it throughout. The director is less surefooted when experienced actors such as John Goodman, Kevin Pollak and Stephen Root need attention as law-enforcement officers and he can’t find a satisfying ending, resorting instead to oddball humour. But for good or bad, this is a film with drive and energy and an authorial voice, which certainly couldn’t be said about Cop Out. Six single-note trumpet blasts they pulled off the Internet out of 10
Tusk (2014)
Next, Smith surprised cinema fans by making another horror film – although Tusk has a much more absurdist slant than Red State. The idea for the movie was improvised by Smith and his long-time friend and producer Scott Mosier during an episode of their podcast. They had been tickled by a British newspaper advert offering a room to let for free if the tenant was willing to periodically dress up as a walrus. (The ad was later revealed to be a prank.) Enthused by the Blue Velvet-ish perversion, Smith quickly wrote the notion up into a twisted horror script and was filming within six months. Justin Long plays a mean-spirited podcaster, Wallace, who heads off to track down a Canadian nerd who accidentally sliced off his own leg with a Kill Bill sword. Getting sidetracked, Wallace then meets an old sailor (Red State’s Michael Parks bringing his unique brand of studied lugubriousness to another Kevin Smith flick) who has a treasure chest of spooky stories to spill. But the old man soon reveals a macabre and terrifying plan… With Wallace missing, his girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) and pal Teddy (Haley Joel Osment) fly up to Canada to look for him. So far, so good – we won’t specify it here, but what’s happening to Wallace is gleefully surreal, while Parks and Long commit to their scenes brilliantly. Then, sadly, after an hour, Johnny Depp crops up as a French Canadian detective on a serial killer’s trail… His desultory, self-centred, sketch-show performance – dodgy accent, wig and beret – is so out of step with the established tone that he almost completely derails the movie. (The role was written for Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino, a pal of Smith’s, but he got confused and thought he was being offered Long’s part so turned the project down.) Away from Depp, Tusk – with its central plot like something from a kooky episode of The X Files – is an entertainingly weird body-horror flick, and the bizarre storyline is played with admirable conviction. The movie is also a world away from the point-the-camera-at-the-actors cinematography of Smith’s early films. Tusk tells its story via visuals, blocking, edits and music (yes, the titular Fleetwood Mac song does appear) just as much as dialogue. Good fun. Apart from Johnny Depp. Seven eons of oceanic adventure out of 10
Yoga Hosers (2016)
While technically a spin-off from Tusk, watching this film is closer to sitting through a stranger’s home movie of a family Christmas – you get the sense that the people involved all had a marvellous time, but why the rest of us should be interested is a mystery. Two minor, unlikeable characters in Tusk were a pair of 15-year-olds working in a convenience store. Both were called Colleen, and they were played by Harley Quinn Smith and Lily-Rose Depp, respectively the daughters of Kevin Smith and Johnny Depp. Precisely no one outside the Smith household was asking for an entire movie to built around them, yet here we are… The setting obviously echoes Clerks (Colleen McKenzie even quotes Clerks’ Dante at one point: ‘I’m not even supposed to be here today!’) but rather than nihilist Gen-X-ers, these characters are Generation Zs who spend half their time on their phones and the other half rehearsing their earnestly awful music group. Along the way, there are fragments of a plot about Canadian Nazis, Satanists, sausage monsters and the joys of hating critics, but none of it lands. Neither does any of the intended comedy, which largely consists of mocking Canadian accents. (Characters saying ‘aboot’ rather than ‘about’ is the level.) Alongside the Colleens, Johnny Depp returns as his Tusk character, mispronouncing random words like he’s Peter Sellers in a Pink Panther film and being just as intensely irritating as before. A few other Tusk alumni return in new roles (Justin Long, Genesis Rodriguez, Haley Joel Osment), while future Elvis star Austin Butler and Lily-Rose Depp’s mother, Vanessa Paradis, appear too. Kevin Smith presumably meant Yoga Hosers to be a showcase for his daughter and her best friend – who, admittedly, have some chemistry – but the film is instead a phenomenally underwhelming, tediously undisciplined and wholly pointless endeavour. The most embarrassing and deplorable entry on Smith’s CV. One douche out of 10
Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)
Kevin Smith’s health was never the best. Weight came and went – he fluctuated up to 28 stone at one point – and he was a smoker until 2008. Then in February 2018, at the age of 47, the director suffered a heart attack after performing a stand-up comedy show. The news sent a shiver through those of us old enough to have loved Clerks first time round. Thankfully, Smith recovered and, now on a vegan diet, lost a vast amount of weight. The incident also gave him a desire to revisit his past. It had been more than a decade since his last View Askewniverse picture, more than a decade since he and pal Jason Mewes had played Jay and Silent Bob… More or less a remake of 2001’s Jay and Silent Strike Back, this film follows the characters as they head across country to stop a movie based on them being completed. But this intensely vague plot gets forgotten about for long stretches in favour of “comedic” diversions. Everything is just as idiotic and navel-gazing as in Strike Back, though now there are also facile jokes about the intellectual vacuity of reboots. The meta-twaddle even extends to Kevin Smith playing himself (the guy who made “that walrus shit”) because in this story he’s directing the new movie about Jay and Silent Bob. As their usual characters, Smith and Mewes gurn and eye-pop their way through a succession of laugh-free scenes, while there’s a conveyor belt of View Askewniverse characters, View Askewniverse actors playing new characters, View Askewniverse actors playing themselves (the film’s best gag: the cast of Clerks appear in black and white), Justin Long reprising his Zack and Miri character (retroactively defining that film as part of the View Askewniverse), Matt Damon back as his Dogma character (who jokingly claims he’s really Jason Bourne), Ben Affleck referencing lots of his own films, and Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn as Jay’s daughter Millennium ‘Milly’ Faulken, who like her dad is a gobby prick with a mute mate. Yet, despite the film’s relentless lack of hilarity, Reboot actually betters Strike Back. The first film had been utterly charmless, vain and smug. But this remake has a nostalgic bent that is at least understandable, while every now and again an actual emotion peeks through the foggy haze of weed jokes. Five multi-movie universes that breed brand-loyal customers from cradle to grave out of 10
Clerks III (2022)
And we end where we began, with a visit to the Quick Stop convenience store and clerks Dante and Randal. The way in which Kevin Smith has periodically dropped in on this pair has been unquestionably the highlight of his filmography; the characters have been his ‘control’, the heart around which all the other chaos can swirl. Over nearly 30 years Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson’s creations have become modern-day versions of Vladimir and Estragon, but rather than waiting for Godot, these guys are killing time while they wait for their lives to get going… Tragedy has struck since 2006’s Clerks II, while both men are still working in the same shop as in 1994. Jay and Silent Bob have taken over the old video store next door and now run a legal marijuana business, while old colleague Elias is dabbling in NFTs. But all their lives are shaken when Randal – who’s approaching 50 – suffers a heart attack. (The storyline was obviously inspired by Smith’s experiences.) Realising that he needs to seize the day, a recovering Randal then decides to make a movie about his life. Dante feels pressured into helping his best friend, while Silent Bob takes on the task of being a one-man film crew. Of course, you soon realise that the script Randal has written is essentially the original Clerks. We therefore (again) enter some *very* metatextual material as classic scenes are restaged shot for shot and self-aware jokes are cracked about the virtues of using black-and-white film stock. But do you know what? Despite being roughly the 17th movie in which Kevin Smith has recycled his own career, Clerks III handles all this in an endearing and character-specific way. The storyline makes perfect sense, speaking to that strain of nostalgia and the yearning for youthful happiness that strikes many men in their 40s. After the young-adult ennui seen in film one, and the existential panic of hitting your 30s that powered the first sequel, Clerks III is a midlife-crisis movie – and specifically a male midlife-crisis movie. Dante and Randal are looking back to former glories because they don’t see many new ones on the horizon, and that’s a deeply affecting basis for a comedy drama. As a celebration of characters I’ve known for 30 years, as well as a moving, melancholic study of middle-age concerns – loss, regret, friendship, hope – Clerks III might very well be Smith’s best work yet. Ten kites out of 10
Agree with these scores? Disagree? Let me know in the comments below…
Film director Tony Scott, who died on 19 August 2012, loved pace and momentum and movement. His 16 feature films are not quiet or sober, slow or mediative – they’re in-your-face and unashamedly hyperactive and veer away from anything that might be boring. These movies celebrate cinema as pure, uncomplicated entertainment, rather than having a political or subtextual purpose. Scott was also a believer in ‘freshness’ rather than originality. He once said that originality is a myth – everything’s already been done – so instead he emphasised carefree pleasures such as action and comedy and energy and movie stars.
Born and raised in the north-east of England, his first toe was dipped into the filmmaking waters in 1962, when he was 18. His older brother, Ridley, was making a semi-autobiographical short called Boy and Bicycle, and hired Tony as both the lead actor and a general behind-the-scenes gofer. ‘It was two brothers together all day for six weeks, and you could see it sinking in,’ Ridley said later. ‘It was an education for Tony. Suddenly, he had a direction in life.’ A few years later, Tony followed his brother into the world of commercials: both men directed thousands of TV ads, built up good reputations and made a lot of money.
Ridley then shifted into making movies such as Alien and Blade Runner. Tony soon bagged a Hollywood career too, which kicked off in the 1980s. He found his groove directing gleeful, showy films that were often huge box-office hits… even if they disappointed sniffy critics. His canon is typified by crafted visuals – Scott loved his backlighting, long lenses, smoky interiors and sunsets – which create a massive impact on a cinema screen. But there is always heart underneath the razzmatazz. As much as he focussed on ‘surface’, Scott prided himself on his research into any given story or situation. He often found real-life equivalents of his major characters – ‘role models’, he called them – so he and his actors could ask them about small details and add layers of verisimilitude.
Scott took detours into the horror and sci-fi genres, but the backbone of his career was thrillers. And he returned to some subject matters more than once: the US navy (Top Gun, Revenge, Crimson Tide), sports (Days of Thunder, The Last Boy Scout, The Fan), the CIA (Enemy of the State, Spy Game), trains (The Taking of Pelham 123, Unstoppable), surveillance technology (Enemy of the State, Déjà Vu)…
The director also hired several stars multiple times – most notably his muse Denzel Washington, but also Val Kilmer, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, Christopher Walken and others. As that list demonstrates, his films were undoubtedly male-dominated, with only two (The Hunger and Domino) having women as lead characters. But in the plus column the director worked with POC actors with a frequency that shamed many of his peers: he gave starring roles to Washington, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Halle Berry, Damon Wayans, Paula Patton, Wesley Snipes, Rosario Dawson…
To celebrate the incredible CV of Tony Scott – a populist, a showman, someone who’s long been one of my favourite filmmakers – I set myself the challenge of rewatching his 16 feature films, and coming up with a personal ranking…
16. Days of Thunder (1990)
Tony Scott made four films for the Hollywood producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson between 1986 and 1995; he did as much as anyone to define their signature mode of flashy popcorn movie. But this third effort, a motor-racing story starring Tom Cruise, was a troubled endeavour from lights out to chequered flag. Director and producers argued incessantly on set, causing huge delays to filming; writer Robert Towne was forced into hasty script changes; and the editing process was rushed to meet a release date. All this messiness is very evident in the finished film, which is the only truly bad movie of Tony Scott’s career. Cruise stars as an up-and-coming driver who blags a seat on the top-level NASCAR circuit. Robert Duvall is his grouchy team boss, while Nicole Kidman, Cruise’s then-girlfriend, plays a cursory love interest. Some of the races are shot excitingly enough, and the grease-and-garage world of the sport is captured well, but the soap-opera storyline never grabs your attention.
15. Revenge (1990)
For its first hour, this is a low-energy, bland drama about retired pilot Jay Cochran who moves to Mexico to hang out with his wealthy friend Tibey Mendez. Jay falls in love with Mendez’s young wife, Miryea, and they begin an affair – but this is an unwise move, given that Mendez is a powerful crime kingpin. Then, halfway through, there’s a scene of brutal violence. This takes the story into unsettlingly dark areas, and the film becomes terser and tougher, more like a cheap exploitation flick… Anthony Quinn is appropriately menacing as Mendez, while Madeleine Stowe, who coincidentally later starred in an unrelated TV show called Revenge, is decent too as Miryea. But Kevin Costner – who stars as Jay, was one of the producers and even considered directing the movie himself – is miscast. With his carefree, Hollywood swagger, we never quite understand why this Top Gun-style fighter pilot hooks up with a man who’s clearly a dangerous criminal. Tony Scott would retell a similar story 14 years later with Man on Fire, which coincidentally is also set in Mexico, and sell the emotional undercurrents much more strongly than here.
14. Domino (2005)
In 2004, Scott was hired to make a short film for Amazon.com. Agent Orange was about two lost souls connecting at a train station, and it gave the director the freedom to experiment with form. So he shot his footage with hand-cranked cameras, which produced jerky, unpredictable images of varied frame rates, and he added double exposures to create a trippy, dreamy effect. These techniques… and *so much more*… then fed into 2005 feature Domino, a based-on-real-life tale of an Englishwoman working as a bounty hunter in modern-day LA. The whole film is a panic attack of cinematic excess; a pill-popping fever dream of manipulated footage, hyperactive editing, jump cuts, crazy camerawork, montages, a sickly green colour palette, on-screen captions, needle-drops, flashbacks, cross-cutting, brutal violence and even a Jerry Springer cameo. Keira Knightley plays Domino Harvey with tomboy coolness as she escapes her boring rich-girl life to chase after criminals for a living, while Lucy Liu, Christopher Walken, Delroy Lindo, Mena Suvari and Mickey Rourke have supporting roles. In truth, the aggressive directing style swamps a needlessly complicated storyline, the characters are little more than mannequins being moved around the shop window, and on a first viewing the film will simply be too irritating for most people. But you’ve got to admire the balls in using Hollywood money to make something so fucking *weird*.
13. Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)
The original Beverly Hills Cop, directed by Martin Brest and released in 1984, was such a monster hit that a sequel was inevitable – so producers Simpson and Bruckheimer turned to Tony Scott, who’d just made them a fortune with Top Gun. Like the first film, this follow-up is ostensibly a crime thriller. A storyline about a gang pulling off elaborate heists is played out with R-rated violence and colourful language in a familiar format. However, all this is window dressing. Really the film is a delivery system for the comic energy of star Eddie Murphy, who reprises his role as Detroit detective Axel Foley. It’s easy to forget now, after 30 years of kids films and flops, but Murphy was a huge box-office draw in the 1980s, hitting big with 48 Hrs, Trading Places and Coming to America. And he is this movie’s star attraction. The crime story never convinces, the emotion is hackneyed and the new characters are all very dull. (Brigitte Nielsen’s Karla Fry, a statuesque baddie who shoots a police chief and wears a succession of sci-fi sunglasses, is at least memorable. But it’s a dreadful performance.) The fun instead comes from Murphy’s episodic improvs – Foley blagging his way into a country club by pretending to carry nuclear weapons; Foley tricking some builders into letting him live in a mansion; Foley taking his cop friends from the first film, Judge Reinhold’s Detective Billy Rosewood and John Ashton’s Sergeant John Taggart, to a nightclub and telling everyone that the latter is really President Gerald Ford. All in all, it’s nonsense. But an amiable, inoffensive 90 minutes of nonsense.
12. The Fan (1996)
Gil Renard (Robert De Niro) is a down-on-his-luck salesman whose biggest passion in life is baseball – specifically the San Francisco Giants, who have just signed a new star player called Bobby Rayburn. But when Rayburn’s season fails to ignite, Gil believes he can step in to help the batter… A splashy, flashy, energetic film, The Fan more or less passed people by in 1996. The box office was poor, as were reviews. But viewed now, a quarter of a century later, it works well as both a whip-fast thriller and a commentary on insidious male obsession. At first Gil seems like an everyman who takes baseball a bit too seriously, the way many men treat sport, but increasingly we come to realise that he’s a man-child living in a delusion. As he focuses his stalker-like gaze on Rayburn (an impressive Wesley Snipes), who is simultaneously going through his own personal issues, Gil neglects his son and his job and takes drastic actions… A character teetering on the edge of intense behaviour is, of course, prime Robert De Niro territory and we sense something of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle and Cape Fear’s Max Cady in this character. The script – based on a 1995 novel and written by former Cheers staffer Phoef Sutton – does a good job of balancing the dark subject matter with moments of dry humour, but Tony Scott’s pyrotechnical camerawork maybe gets in the way of any genuine understanding of Gil’s psychology. The final sequence also tips over into outlandish.
11. The Hunger (1983)
Scott’s first feature film was this art-house horror with few characters and little action – very atypical when compared to the rest of his filmography. In 1980s New York, a 3,000-year-old vampire played by Catherine Deneuve (‘untouchable and surreal’ said Scott of her performance; Charlotte Rampling turned the role down) fears being lonely after her long-time consort (David Bowie) begins to rapidly age, so she ensnares a new lover (Susan Sarandon, who later joked that the lesbian subplot changed her fanbase somewhat). The Hunger is certainly a beautiful piece of work, often looking like a high-end rock video. There’s an ethereal quality, stately music, dark sexuality, monochromatic visuals, lots of billowing curtains and even an appearance by Goth band Bauhaus, but the story lacks an emotional punch. Scott was influenced by Stanley Kubrick, especially his candle-lit period film Barry Lyndon, and The Hunger has some of that same icy detachment. There are also echoes of Blade Runner, recently made by Tony’s brother Ridley, especially in the use of film-noir Venetian blinds, Art Deco locations and smoky rooms. Slow, languid and overtly stylish, The Hunger’s hypnotic, esoteric power builds with repeated viewings.
10. Spy Game (2001)
We’re in 1991. Rogue CIA operative Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) is captured while attempting to lift a prisoner from a Chinese jail. Back in Washington, his former mentor, Nathan Muir (Robert Redford), is about to retire when he’s called into a meeting. Should the CIA help their man, who will be executed the following day? Or should they appease the Chinese and let him die? As the bigwigs discuss the dilemma, Muir explains how he met, recruited and trained Bishop, so there are lengthy flashbacks set in war-torn Vietnam, Cold War Berlin and bomb-shelled Beirut – each one shot with a different colour palette. All this results in a bizarre concept for an action thriller: a race-against-time story where most of the characters spend *hours* sitting around talking. But for those paying attention, the script seeds plenty of information that will be important during the third-act rescue plan – sometimes smartly, sometimes not – and the movie zips along with real drive. Tony Scott took over this project after another director was deemed too inexperienced, so his lead actors were on board before he was – and initially Robert Redford was unsure of Scott’s kinetic shooting style. Redford is typically watchable, though, while the cat-and-mouse intrigue keeps the attention and the ending socks home emotionally.
9. Top Gun (1986)
In the four years since the financial failure of The Hunger, Scott had gone back to making adverts – and more or less given up on the idea of being a features director. However, an ad campaign he shot with a Saab car racing a jet fighter caught the attentions of Bruckheimer and Simpson when they were prepping an aviation action film… Scott initially wanted to make a darker, murkier movie. He described his first pitch to the producers as ‘Apocalypse Now on an aircraft carrier’. But when pushed towards a more commercial tone he decided to treat the script’s hotshot Navy pilots as if they were rock’n’roll stars. The resulting film is a none-more-80s roller-coaster ride – dazzling charisma from lead actor Tom Cruise, era-defining music, outrageous flying stunts, sun-kissed cinematography, alpha-male posturing, a volleyball scene filmed like it’s from a soft-porn flick, big hair, sunglasses, bomber jackets, motorbikes, sweaty faces and endearingly corny dialogue. It ain’t subtle, and viewers wanting decent female characters will be very disappointed, but it’s huge escapist fun. Scott later spent many years trying to get a sequel off the runway, but the project hadn’t become airborne by the time he died. When the superb Top Gun: Maverick came along a whopping 36 years after its predecessor, Scott was acknowledged with a dedication title card.
8. The Last Boy Scout
There were notorious arguments on set during the production of this attitude-driven neo-noir – director Tony Scott, producer Joel Silver and the two lead actors all squared off in macho power games. Unlike the troubles behind the scenes of Days of Thunder, however, this acrimony was well hidden. The resulting film sings with panache and feels like it was made by a team in complete simpatico. Updating a Maltese Falcon-style story for the brash 1990s, The Last Boy Scout stars Bruce Willis, who is perfect casting as a grizzled gumshoe. The actor takes his wisecracking persona from Moonlighting and Die Hard but significantly turns down the joy – PI Joe Hallenbeck is a dishevelled man with a languid cigarette in his mouth, who sleeps in his car and has a marriage in the toilet, but is also perceptive and smart and tough. After rumbling his wife having an affair, he’s given a case that seems straightforward. A waitress/dancer (Halle Berry) needs protection after being threatened. But when she’s killed on his watch, Hallenbeck starts to uncover a conspiracy in the world of professional sports. American football’s top league – due to rights issues the term NFL is never used – is on the decline, with falling attendances and poor TV ratings, and a betting syndicate is blackmailing players to fix matches. Aiding Hallenbeck in his investigation is Corey’s boyfriend, Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans), who was a star quarterback but has been suspended on gambling charges. The pair make for a classic odd-couple double act – they hate each other (as the actors did, it seems) but work well as a team and eventually form a friendship. Like all classic noirs, this plot is both seedy and intricate, and keeps opening up new avenues of interest. But there’s also the kind of wildness that the best films written by Shane Black always have: caustic humour, plot twists, reversals of fortune, lots of exploding cars, and subversive shocks such as a sports star who murders an opponent during a televised game. (Black would go full throttle with spoofing genre conventions two years later with Last Action Hero.) The project was a perfect fit for Tony Scott, who was able to let loose with his visual flamboyance while always retaining an awareness of the film’s inherent silliness.
7. Crimson Tide (1995)
Another film based on the US Navy and produced by Simpson and Bruckheimer, Crimson Tide is a very different beast from the extrovert, immature Top Gun. Whereas that had been big and silly and flamboyant, this is a taut, machine-tooled thriller – slick, sharp and focused. When his first officer is taken sick, nuclear-submarine captain Frank Ramsey (Gene Hackman) hires a replacement in the form of the cool, calm Lieutenant Commander Ron Hunter (Denzel Washington in his first film for Tony Scott). With a despotic Russian leader threatening world peace (just imagine…), Ramsey’s ballistic missile submarine, the USS Alabama, is sent into the Pacific. However, confusion reigns when two messages are sent from fleet HQ – Ramsey thinks the orders say to launch a nuclear strike against Russia, but Hunter has his doubts and wants to double-check… The foundation of the whole film is this clash between captain and second-in-command. At first a relationship of guarded civility and rote-respect, the two men begin to disagree and butt heads even before the fever-pitch argument about the orders – and seeing heavyweight film actors Hackman and Washington slug it out verbally is an absolute joy. These masters know how to make every moment feel alive and important and full of telling details. Quentin Tarantino did some uncredited work on the dialogue and his contribution is usually assumed to be the addition of some pop-culture references (previous submarine movies, comic books), but perhaps he helped punch up the central relationship too. And the stage for the theatrics is excellently set by Tony Scott and his team: the Alabama is all claustrophobic corridors, smoky stairwells and sweaty faces lit with coloured spotlights like they’re in a Dario Argento horror film. Those faces are played by actors who know how to make secondary characters vivid and memorable – Viggo Mortensen, James Gandolfini, Rocky Carroll, George Dzundza and others – while the anamorphic cinematography is terrific, enhancing drama and danger all the time. Fantastic entertainment. (A side note: as some of the images in this blog post suggest, Tony Scott had a fondness for baseball caps. He took to wearing them himself once baldness struck in early middle age, and a notable number of his actors use them too: see Hackman and Washington in Crimson Tide, Robert Duvall in Days of Thunder, Brad Pitt in Spy Game, Kelly McGillis in Top Gun, multiple characters in baseball drama The Fan…)
6. Déjà Vu (2006)
Tony Scott’s only science-fiction flick is set in a post-9/11, post-Katrina New Orleans, and sees Denzel Washington play ATF agent Doug Carlin. Soon after a bomb rips through a ferry, killing hundreds, Doug is introduced to a radical new technology by Val Kilmer’s FBI boss. This machine allows them to look into the past – but only on a strict four-day time delay – and watch anyone in the city. Can Doug solve the crime before it happens, and possibly even save a key victim called Claire (Paula Patton)? We’re in the kind of surveillance genre Scott had used in Enemy of the State (see below), but the process now also becomes a twisted satire of filmmaking as Doug orders up different angles and close-ups and assembles his bad guy’s narrative. This is a wildly inventive time-travel idea and opens up plenty of fascinating questions for both us and Doug. Repeated viewings of the film reveal subtle details which suggest a circular storyline has been playing out countless times, with cause and effect churned up in a blender, but we still invest in *our* version of Doug and his chances of stopping the explosion. ‘You can be wrong a million times, you only have to be right once,’ he says. This intricately plotted movie was written by Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio, who had issues with some of the changes Scott made. One amendment was a new car-chase sequence with Doug driving in the present… and the bad guy driving in the past. (Doug has goggles that allows him to see, in real time, what was on the road 100 hours previously.) Scott argued, a bit dubiously, that he was moving the film’s concepts from science fiction to science fact – but either way the scene is a brilliantly bonkers piece of cinema. Elsewhere, alongside all the Star Trek tech, the film has a downbeat mood. Doug isn’t a dour man – that devilish Denzel charisma is often dialled up – but he’s still a film-noir loner detective, and he also takes part in one of the oddest romances in cinema. Doug first meets victim Claire after the explosion – when she’s dead on the coroner’s slab. He holds her hand, looks into her blank eyes and comments on how she was beautiful. He then becomes fascinated with her as he spies on her in the past (even watching her shower at one point), hoping that she will lead him to the bomber. A director with a more ghoulish or macabre intent might have twisted this into a form of cinematic necrophilia, but Tony Scott goes for the noble and the sincere – and we therefore care about both characters. Enormous fun.
5. Man on Fire (2004)
Tony Scott had tried to get an adaptation of the novel Man on Fire made in the early 80s, but ultimately he wasn’t involved with a version released in 1987. So when time came for a remake, he attacked the material with blood-and-guts intensity. This is essentially the kind of vigilante plot that Charles Bronson would have once starred in. But what lifts 2004’s Man on Fire above such tawdry fare is a combination of Denzel Washington’s soulful presence and Tony Scott’s visual brilliance… John Creasy (Washington) is an alcoholic loner with a shady past in the US special forces – ‘Do you think God will forgive us for what we’ve done?’ he asks a friend in an early scene. He’s looking for work in Mexico, where kidnapping people for the ransom money is rife, and soon bags a job as a bodyguard for a rich couple’s young daughter – the wise-beyond-her-years Pita (Dakota Fanning, fantastic). At first Creasy finds it difficult to spend time with a child – he finds her irritating and tiresome. But slowly, of course, a strong bond forms between the two. Creasy becomes as much a father figure as a security expert, coaching Pita to swim and teaching her some espionage tricks. There’s a genuine, believable warmth between the characters – all the better for setting up the plot development that’s coming with dreaded predictability. When Pita is snatched off the street by a gang, Scott films the sequence with thrilling innovation. Hand-cranked cameras and ramped editing emphasise the danger and create an expressionistic mood; the world is off-kilter and chaotic, Creasy’s distress is savagely dramatised. After recovering from a gunshot wound, Creasy then goes after the gang and what follows are scenes of brutal retribution that anticipate Washington’s Equalizer films by a decade. But the groundwork done in the movie’s opening 50 minutes saves all this from being gratuitous torture porn; we understand Creasy’s obsession. Man on Fire was Washington’s first film for Tony Scott in nine years (Robert De Niro had turned the part down) and he brings a monumental weight to the role. Creasy is a stock character – the suicidal loner with personal demons – and he’s involved in a stock relationship: the cynical, damaged man softened by an idealistic child. But in the hands of Scott, Washington and writer Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential), Creasy is so much more. Whether he’s quoting the Bible with a sadness in his eyes or buying a Linda Ronstadt CD to cheer himself up, we often infer a painful backstory and feel for Creasy straightaway… All this missed the mark for some viewers, however. The film was not a critical success, with American reviewer AO Scott – another ‘Anthony Scott’, coincidentally – saying some especially egregious things about his namesake. Others took against the film’s vigilantist politics or its unflattering portrayal of Mexico City. But while often labelled as a movie about revenge, Man on Fire is actually a mythical story of redemption. It absolutely *soars*.
4. The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)
This film was originally going to be called simply Pelham 123, to distinguish it from the 1974 adaptation of John Godey’s novel. As in the 1970s movie, a group of terrorists seize a New York City subway train and hold the passengers ransom for a huge amount of money (Scott’s version ups the fee from $1 million to $10 million). Leading the bad guys this time is John Travolta, snarling his way Pacino-like through the role of Ryder – an aggressive man with a prison tat, a Fu Manchu moustache and a fondness for theatrical speechmaking. Meanwhile, the transit coordinator attempting to talk him down is Denzel Washington’s calm, personable Walter Garber, who just happens to be on duty when the incident takes place. Tony Scott had to work hard to convince Washington to take the role, eventually succeeding by pitching the character as ‘Mr Everyman’ – a contrast from the powerful military and law-enforcement men of their previous collaborations. Not that the movie is down-to-earth or mundane. Knowing that his action thriller is built around a phone call between two men who stay sat in their seats, Scott compensates by amping up the energy at every opportunity. We get hyper-quick cutting, more use of variable frame-rates, and – for scenes in the head offices of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority – an almost permanently moving camera, which arcs and spins dizzyingly around Garber’s desk. The result is an exciting popcorn movie with no fat on the bone. (These days, however, there is a sad subtext to The Taking of Pelham 123. The story’s climax is set on the Manhattan Bridge and features a character pleading for someone to end his life. Just three years after the film’s release, Tony Scott jumped to his death from a bridge in Los Angeles. At the time, rumours circulated that he was overwhelmed by a bad cancer diagnosis – perhaps a terminal one. The family soon denied this, as did the official coroner’s report, though Ridley Scott later talked of his brother dealing with a long-term cancer battle. Tony Scott was 68.)
3. Unstoppable (2010)
An example of pure cinema, this exhilarating disaster movie is built around a single, 90-minute action sequence. The plot begins when a moving freight train is allowed to leave a depot with no driver aboard – a potential disaster because it’s pulling explosive cargo. (The idea was gleamed from a real-life incident in 2001.) This one small mistake soon snowballs into a 100mph epic, as various plans are attempted to stop the ever-accelerating train before it careers through populated areas… Our leads are two bickering railroad workers who realise they are best placed to solve the crisis. Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) is an old stager about to lose his job; Will Colson (Chris Pine) is a young buck whose heart isn’t in it; but they must work together to stop the runaway train. There’s just enough drama – Frank’s grief/loneliness, Will’s legal problems with his wife – to flesh out the muscles and make us care about these popcorn characters caught in the maelstrom of danger and action. Elsewhere, the cast is filled with actors able to make instant impressions, whether it be Lew Temple’s cowboy-ish railway worker or Rosario Dawson’s yardmaster Connie Hooper, both of whom deserve their own spin-offs. These people are deliberately unglamorous and blue-collar, because Tony Scott knew that all the ‘Hollywood’ is in the intensity and thrill of the high-speed chase. Making his final film before taking his own life in 2012, Scott shows a *masterful* control of visual storytelling. He knows exactly how to create, sustain and ratchet up tension – from a sedate start to a fever-pitch finale – while the physical movement of characters and vehicles always has the kind of clarity that’s often missing from CG-heavy blockbusters. This is a film of visceral physicality, with enormous stunts and crashes and near-misses done for real. Scenes in the train cabs, meanwhile, are sometimes shot in real moving trains, sometimes faked in a studio, but never feel anything less than vibrant and vital. Stripped down and unpretentious, Unstoppable is a cinematic masterpiece of dynamic movement, pulsating speed and widescreen panache. Both Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan have raved about this film. There are also echoes of Spielberg’s Duel in the way that huge, hulking, heavy vehicles are shot like they’re mythical creatures – massive dragons thundering through the Pennsylvania countryside.
The complex genesis of True Romance started with a script written by Quentin Tarantino‘s pal Roger Avery in the mid 1980s. Tarantino redrafted the idea, cutting out a significant B-plot that later became the basis for the movie Natural Born Killers, and intended to direct the movie himself. However, he then met Tony Scott through a mutual friend at Scott’s birthday party. Tarantino was an avowed fan – he’d loved Revenge, for example, and later affectionately mocked Top Gun in a cameo acting role in 1994 film Sleep with Me – so gave his blessing to Scott taking over the True Romance project. The result is a scintillating marriage of the two men’s energies. Christian Slater stars as Clarence, an optimistic slacker who likes comic books, obscure movies and Elvis Presley. After hooker-with-a-heart Alabama (a terrific Patricia Arquette) falls for him, they accidentally end up with a suitcase full of cocaine and head to LA to sell it. However, while they negotiate with a maniacal movie producer, the mob who own the drugs are on their tail… In some ways, the movie is a series of set-pieces, such as the opening 17 minutes in which Clarence and Alabama meet, fall in love and get married; Clarence’s tough-guy impression when he visits (and kills) her despicable pimp; the deliciously OTT gunfight in a hotel suite that climaxes the film; and most famously a confrontation between Clarence’s father and a gangster, which is an extraordinary, 10-minute scene of brutality, one-upmanship and acidic dialogue played with grit and guts by Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken. But to focus on these individually is to miss the film’s overall sweep, which is constantly imbued with whimsy, sincerity and hope. This film is a wish-fulfilment writ large, packing in sex and drugs and violence and melancholic music and cool quips and the thirst for a better life. Clarence is essentially an urban superhero; Alabama is a wet dream come to life. But that’s the point: this film is a *fantasy*; everything is naively romantic rather than boringly realistic. The hugely impressive cast is stacked full of class and talent – Slater, Arquette, Hopper, Walken, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Bronson Pinchot, Samuel L Jackson, Michael Rapaport, Saul Rubinek, Conchata Ferrell, James Gandolfini, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Ed Lauter – and Tony Scott shows an astonishing command of his plot and his characters, directing everything with so much pace and panache. Unlike the acrimony when Oliver Stone made a butchered version of Natural Born Killers, Tarantino enjoyed what Scott did with his material, which is semi-autobiographical and his most personal script to date. The story was inspired by his time working at VHS rental shop Video Archives, a mythologised part of Quentin’s pre-fame narrative, with the lead character’s workplace shifted to a comic-book store. ‘I didn’t get a suitcase full of cocaine, and I didn’t know any gangsters,’ Tarantino has said. ‘But even though all that stuff was movie shit, the people at Video Archives felt like it was this big-budget, Tony Scott-directed version of their childhood memories. It captured our aesthetic. It captured our je ne sais quoi.’
1. Enemy of the State (1998)
Enemy of the State is a 1,000-horsepower muscle car. When the accelerator is pushed and the engine revs, the road is eaten up and corners are taken at speed… The story is the kind of ‘innocent man caught up in a conspiracy he doesn’t understand’ plot that Alfred Hitchcock once revelled in, but updated for the ostentatious, energetic 1990s. Will Smith, deploying his major-league star quality, plays labour lawyer Robert Dean, who unwittingly acquires the videotape of a murder. When the killer, a corrupt spymaster played by Jon Voight, comes after him, Robert’s life is upturned. His house is ransacked, his wife doubts his innocence, and he loses his job. With the help of a shadowy ally called Brill (Gene Hackman), Robert must find out why he’s been targeted… Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) and Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Identity) both worked on the script, which harkens back to 70s paranoia thrillers like The Conversation, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men with its tale of unchecked, state-sanctioned surveillance and the corrupting power of American politics. (In fact, Enemy of the State positions itself as a spiritual sequel to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation by using a photograph of Gene Hackman from that earlier movie.) The tightly packed plot sees a thematic use of videos and camera and technology – the murder of an anti-surveillance politician is accidentally caught on a trap camera; Robert’s day job involves a conflict with the Mob over a videotape; the bad guys can call on CCTV feeds and live satellite imagery to hunt down fugitives (including some fantasy “zoom and enhance” that puts Blade Runner to shame). This Big Brother-riffing motif is just as topical now as it was in 1998, and means the movie hasn’t dated in any significant way. As for the cast, Smith, Voight and Hackman are the highlights but the film is populated with talented, watchable actors in supporting roles: Regina King as Robert’s wife; Lisa Bonet as his fixer and former girlfriend; Ian Hart, Jake Busey, Barry Pepper and Scott Caan as covert agents; Jason Lee as the geek who accidentally films the murder; Gabriel Byrne in a showy, two-scene cameo; Jack Black and Seth Green as tech boffins; Stuart Wilson as a politician; Tom Sizemore as a mob boss; Philip Baker Hall as Robert’s boss; and Jason Roberts as the congressman who’s assassinated because he won’t allow some fascist legislation to pass… Tony Scott, meanwhile, marshals all aspects of his filmmaking craft – cinematography, editing, mise en scene, music, choice of locations – to create a fluid yet pulsating beat that powers the 120 minutes of runtime. Extensive use of long lenses keeps every scene feeling claustrophobic and intense, even if staged on a grand scale, while the main plot is embellished with comedy asides and flamboyant action. This film is fast but never feels rushed; funny but never silly; compelling and exciting and gripping. The textbook example of the techno-thriller genre.
Agree with this ranking? Disagree? Let me know in the comments section below…
Ian Farrington 