Michael Showalter's THE BIG SICK (2017) - It took courage for Kumail Nanjiani and writer-wife Emily V. Gordon to put their love story on screen and they have been fittingly rewarded with an Oscar nomination. But what makes this such a watchable film is the way in which the duo reclaim a series of clichés about arranged marriages, family ties, terrorist-related racism and bedside vigils and breathe new life into them. Dodging mother Zenobia Shroff's efforts to marry him off to a nice Pakistani Muslim girl, part-time Uber driver Nanjiani hones his stand-up skills at the Chicago comedy club where he falls for heckler Zoe Kazan. By hiding the fact that he could never risk losing his family by dating outside his community, however, Nanjiani alienates Kazan, who dumps him right before being rushed to hospital with a mystery illness. Much to his surprise, Nanjiani finds himself being accepted by Kazan's North Carolinian parents, Holly Hunter and Ray Romano, Full of neatly observed secondary characters at the club and the hospital, as well as around the Nanjiani dinner table, this is impeccably played by a fine ensemble and deftly directed by Michael Showalter to ensure the tonal shifts don't jar too much. Kazan is particularly perky and it's a shame she has to spend so much of the time in an induced coma en route to a diagnosis of Stills' disease. But the affable Nanjiani remains eminently rootable for, even after his immaturity is brutally exposed by jilted singletoon Vella Lovell.

Philippe Falardeau's THE BLEEDER (2016) - Quebecois director Philippe Falardeau has struggled to make a convincing transition to English-language fare since being Oscar-nominated for Monsieur Lazhar (2011), but this biopic of heavyweight boxer Chuck Wepner is a step in the right direction. Best known for the 1975 showdown with Muhammad Ali that inspired Sylvester Stallone to write Rocky (1976), Wepner (Liev Schreiber) is hardly a sporting titan. But that is partly the point of this account of his life after he almost goes the distance with Ali (Pooch Hall) and allows his moment in the spotlight to go to his head and destroy his marriage to feisty New Jersey postal worker, Phyllis (Elisabeth Moss). The scenes of Wepner drinking, snorting and womanising are pretty formulaic, as is his rescue by no-nonsense barmaid Linda (Naomi Watts). But his exploitative encounter with Stallone (Morgan Spector) and his relationships with manager Al Braverman (Ron Perlman), best buddy John Stoehr (Jim Gaffigan) and estranged brother Don (Michael Rappaport) are more intriguing. Owing much to Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980) and David O. Russell's The Fighter (2010), this draws most effectively on Ralph Nelson's Requiem For a Heavyweight (1962) in limning the shabby reality facing a washed-up pug, whose next bout is against a tame bear.

 

Kinji Fukasaku's DOBERMAN COP (1977) - Adapted from gekika manga by Yoshiyuki `Buronson' Okamura, this may not be one of Kinji Fukasaku's most sophisticated offerings, but it will certainly keep Japanese genre fans happy. The ever-dependable Sonny Chiba stars as a hick cop arriving in Tokyo from Okinawa with a straw hat on his head and a squealing pig over his shoulder. He has been tipped off that a prostitute who has been brutalised and burned in the Kabuki-cho district is an Ishigaki neighbour. But the supposed victim's biker boyfriend, Koichi Iwaki, has his doubts and points Chiba in the direction of Hiroki Matsukata, a yakuza who is striving to turn drug-addled chanteuse Janet Hatta into a star. Riffing on a couple of Don Siegel collaborations with Clint Eastwood, Coogan's Bluff (1968) and Dirty Harry (1971), this is often as droll as it is hard-hitting, particularly when Chiba encounters dunder-headed club manager Takuzô Kawatani and lusty stripper Eiko Matsuda. But, with Chiba knowing karate as well as how to handle a gun, there is plenty of combustible action. He even gets to abseil down a tall building to rescue Hatta from a knife attacker.

 

Jakob M. Erwa's HOMESICK (2015) - A marked improvement on the mawkish Centre of My World (2016), this insinuating thriller proves that Austrian director Jakob Erwa can rein in the stylistics when required. All seems to be going swimmingly for twentysomething cellist Esther Maria Pietsch and boyfriend Matthias Lier when they move into a shabby chic apartment in a bohemian part of Berlin. But, just as Pietsch is selected to play at a prestigious music competition in Moscow, elderly upstairs neighbour Tatja Seibt takes against her. Yet, even though she is sure that Seibt is behind the disappearance of her kitten and the arrival on her doorstep of an undertaker, Pietsch can't prove anything and Liel puts her twitchiness down to artistic temperament. However, the tension mounts after Pietsch decides to confront her tormentor. Echoes of Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976) can be heard behind Cristofer Frank's modish cello score and creepy sound design. But the denouement owes more to Michael Haneke, as Erwa pulls off an audacious final twist. Cinematographer Christian Trieloff and production designer Stefanie Übelhör conspire to make the most of the claustrophobic interiors, while editor Wiebke Henrich ably judges the pace of Pietsch's enveloping nightmare.

 

J. Lee Thompson's ICE COLD IN ALEX (1958) - After 13 years of war movies celebrating British pluck and ingenuity in thwarting the Axis, J. Lee Thompson hoped to use Christopher Landon's fact-based novel to dispel a few myths. Most significantly, he wanted to present a hero with feet of clay, as Captain John Mills is a borderline alcoholic who is close to the edge because of the ferocity of the fighting in North Africa in 1942 and because of a fraught domestic situation on the home front. When asked to ferry nurses Sylvia Syms and Diane Clare from Tobruk to Alexandria, the mission is anything but straightforward, especially as his battered ambulance (nicknamed Katy) is as unreliable as Field Marshall Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps is ruthless. But the strain begins to tell after Mills and Sergeant Harry Andrews agree to give South African stray Anthony Quayle a lift and they run straight into a German patrol. The loss of Clare further saps morale and Mills is on the verge of cracking up by the time they reach journey's end and have to decide what to do with the shifty Quayle, whose true identity can't disguise the fact that the party would never have survived without him. The battle of wits between Quayle and Mills is much more interesting than the romance that develops between the latter and Syms. But Thompson is keen to stress the teamwork required to get the job done, whether it's hauling the vehicle across a minefield or over a dune or dragging Quayle out of some quicksand. Gilbert Taylor's photography, Richard Best's editing and Leighton Lucas's score are all first rate, as are the performances. Never in the field of human conflict have so few so deserved a cold lager.

 

JEAN-LUC GODARD + JEAN-PIERRE GORIN: FIVE FILMS, 1968-1971 - Following the release of Weekend (1967), Jean-Luc Godard lost faith in mainstream film's ability to convey his political and artistic ideas and formed the Dziga Vertov Group with critic Jean-Pierre Gorin. Seeking to reinvent the relationship between cinema and society, the duo abandoned all notions of authorship and worked in 16mm to create an immediacy to fire the imagination and indignation of their audience. The films have rarely been seen since and Arrow deserve great credit for rescuing half of the Groupe's output and one hopes that they also get round to releasing Pravda (1969), Tout va bien and Letter to Jane (both 1972), as well as Ici et ailleurs/Here and Everywhere (1974), which Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville made to critique the Gorin partnership following the abandonment of Jusqu'à la victoire/Palestine Will Win (1970) after the members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation they were filming were killed.

Un Film comme les autres/A Film Like Any Other (1968) - Striving to fashion a cinematic form compatible with his ideological stance, Godard (working without Gorin for his own Anouchka Films company) alternated monochrome footage of the May Days with low-angle colour scenes of some students from Vincennes and a couple of Renault workers having a frank exchange of views on revolution and resistance in an overgrown field on the outskirts of Paris. Superimposed over this chatter are the voices of a man and a woman quoting texts or citing examples of political repression or coercion. But the most potent sequence is a silent montage showing the brutal police response to the Soixante-Huitards. The result is more intriguing than compelling, as Godard tests the limits of his new form of Brechtian documentary. Apparently, he left it up to the projectionist to decide which reel to show first and invited audiences to vote on whether the second should be shown at all. However, he succeeds in exposing the didacticism of the students, whose intolerant refusal to consider opinions other than their own feels eerily (or is it amusingly) prescient.

British Sounds (1969) - Produced for London Weekend Television (but never transmitted), this mid-length exercise in slogan-strewing agit-prop marks the debut of the Dziga Vertov initiative. Despite prioritising the audio over the visual, the opening travelling shot recalls the ending of Weekend and is of particular local interest, as it was filmed on the MG assembly line at the British Motor Car Company plant in Cowley. A later segment centres on staff at the Ford factory in Dagenham. Expressed in plain terms against the cacophonous din of the shop floor, their discussion of workplace conditions hits home harder than the preening opinions spouted by a group of Essex University students, as they make posters and attempt to politicise Beatle lyrics (`You say US/ I say Mao'). Yet, while it's possible to see the origins of punk in the images of fists ripping through paper Union Jacks (after we have seen a bloodied hand gripping a red flag in the snow), the sequence involving a naked woman wandering around a house and chatting on the phone strains to generate sufficient dialectical tension with the accompanying feminist texts on the soundtrack. Much more potent is the bulletin delivered by a rabidly right-wing news anchor, whose loathesome rhetotic (which is juxtaposed with scenes of pastoral tranquility) packs a Trumpian punch half a century on.

Vent d'est/Wind From the East (1970) - Godard and Gorin continued their search for the best way to present complex ideas in this teasing treatise on repression and representation. Much of the early part of the film deals with a strike and the opinions of those entrenched on opposite sides. However, the visuals accompanying these heated exchanges bear little relation to their content, as though Godard was warning viewers against taking cinema at face value. Much of the invective is aimed at the tropes employed by the Hollywood genres, with the Western coming in for particular scrutiny. But Godard is honest enough to admit that he doesn't have the answers, either, and neither do films like Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966), even though their heart is in the right place. At one point, Godard seems to contrast his new experimental style with Impressionism. But the idyllic images are juxtaposed with bomb-making tutorials and justifications of the crimes of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong in pursuing progressive agendas. As is often the case with Godard in this period, one suspects his political stance is somewhat compromised by his wry sense of humour and his frustration that the medium he adored could prove so treacherous and intransigent in its resistance to his reconfigured aims.

Lotte in Italia/Struggles in Italy (1970) - Akin to a progress report on Godard's artistic transformation, this is a tricky film to navigate. Ostensibly, it seems to chronicle the epiphany of a young Italian woman, Cristiana Tulio-Altan, who realises that her attempts to live up to her radical ideals are somewhat conventional and half-hearted. She might read all the right texts and emblazon their key points on posters, but she struggles to convey her thoughts either to her lover or to the worker she is supposed to be mentoring. In order to convey her confusion, Godard presents us with a rambling mélange of ideas and images that are punctuated with lengths of black film leader, as though he is stumbling around for inspiration. Once Tulio-Altan takes a factory job and begins to put theory in practice, however, Godard is able to fill in the blanks and challenge viewers to make audiovisual associations between the links in his cinematic chain, in much the same way that Soviet audiences were coaxed into seeking meaning in the montage masterpieces of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. Partly filmed in the Paris apartment that Godard shared with cameoing wife Anne Wiazemsky, this seems to draw parallels with Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy (1954), in which Ingrid Bergman similarly clarified her thinking. But this is a much bumpier ride.

Vladimir et Rosa/Vladimir and Rosa (1971) - Titled after Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, this agit-fantasy on the trial of the Chicago Eight is more messily accessible than some of the other DVG offerings. Amusingly, Godard and Gorin crop up as Lenin and Karl Rosa (presumably named after Luxemburg and fellow Spartacist Karl Liebknecht) debating the aesthetic and political problems of producing an honest account of the proceedings. Cursing the imprecision of language and the filmic image, the pair participate in comic interludes that see them stalking around a tennis court in the middle of a game and dressing up as cops and judges to critique the tactics of the establishment. Judge Julius Hoffman is also mocked in the courtroom reconstruction, as Ernest Menzer portrays him as a fascistic bigot in presiding over the prosecution of the activists who had attempted to disrupt the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968. Rather than refer directly to Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner and Black Panther Bobby Seale, Godard and Gorin recast them as 60s archetypes, with Juliet Berto playing a hippie commune dweller, Anne Wiazemsky a Women's Libber, Yves Afonso a student revolutionary and Larry Martin a proponent of individualism. As is often the case with polemical cinema, the symbolism isn't always subtle (Judge Hoffman, for example, becomes Himmler). But, while this is occasionally self-conscious and self-righteous, it's also bold and abrasive in its discussion of radicalism, race, class, gender and the core rottenness of the liberal capitalist system.

 

Christopher Speeth's MALATESTA'S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD (1973) - Long believed lost, the sole picture produced by its enigmatic director can best be described as an oddity. The plot is muddled, the dialogue garbled and the acting is often inept. But Christopher Eric Speeth (who died last April at the age of 78) manages to generate a disconcerting atmosphere that raises this low-budget labour of love above outings by such other Z listers as Edward D. Wood, Jr. and Coleman Francis. Intent on finding the brother who disappeared while visiting the rundown carnival owned by Dr Blood (Jerome Dempsey) and Mr Malatesta (Daniel Dietrich), Vena Norris (Janine Carazo) and her parents (Betsy Henn and Paul Hostetler) soon discover that the workforce have peculiar appetites, thanks to the cannibalistic tutelage of Mr Bean (Tom Markus). Roustabout Kit (Chris Thomas) tries to alert Vena after another family vanishes in the Tunnel of Love, but the Norrises foolishly decide to return after dark, when cross-dressing fortune teller Sonja (Lenny Baker), ghoulish caretaker Sticker (William Preston) and ravenous dwarf Bobo (Hervé Villachaize) are at their most menacing. Photographed after hours by Norman Gaines at a real funfair, this gleefully deranged curio bears the influence of Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962). But Speeth follows his own surreal vision to defy his budgetary limitations and confound audience expectations at every turn.

 

Sean Foley's MINDHORN (2016) - While fans of The Mighty Boosh will undoubtedly revel in stage director Sean Foley's screen bow, those baffled by the cult BBC comedy will be equally non-plussed by this scattershot romp scripted by Boosh alumni Julian Barratt and Simon Farnaby. Twenty-five years after playing a detective with a bionic eye that enabled him to see the truth, Barratt is still regretting a bid for Hollywood fame that left him washed up and separated from beloved Essie Davis. She is now a TV reporter on the Isle of Man and when crazed criminal Russell Tovey asks Barratt to help him prove his innocence, he jumps at the opportunity to raise his profile and prise Davis away from her South African husband (Farnaby), who used to be Barratt's stunt double. With Kenneth Branagh cameoing as himself and Steve Coogan, Andrea Riseborough and Harriet Walter wasted in minor support, this is a genial, but ultimately smug homage to classic shamus series like Shoestring and Bergerac. It starts promisingly and makes wry use of its Manx settings. But the plot is thin and winds up being reliant on the kind of small-screen tropes it seeks to parody.

 

Park Hoon-jung's NEW WORLD - There's nothing new, but much to commend in this sophomore feature from the writer of Kim Jee-woon's I Saw the Devil and Ryoo Seung-wan's The Unjust (both 2010). Park Hoon-jung's The Showdown (2011) was little seen, but it's a surprise that this hard-boiled policier failed to make it to UK screens. Opening with a shot of a stool pigeon being pulverised and force-fed cement, Park plunges into the dark heart of the action, as Lee Jeong-gu (Park Seong-ung) and Jeong Cheong (Hwang Jeong-min) compete for control of the Goldmoon syndicate after the sinister death of its boss, Chairman Seok (Lee Geung-young). However, police captain Kang (Choi Min-sik) seeks to influence matters through Lee Jeong-jae (Lee Ja-seng), who has become Jeong's trusted aide during an eight-year undercover mission. But, with his (far from trustworthy) wife Han (Park Seo-yeon) expecting a child, Lee is close to frazzling and wants out. Forbiddingly designed by Jo Hwa-seong and photographed by Chung Chung-hoon to convey the claustrophobia and paranoia of a powder keg world, this wrings the last ounce of suspense out of a formulaic scenario, thanks to the excellence of the acting. Hwang stands out as the sharp-suited psychotic, but Choi's egotistical chief and Lee's world-weary cop prove durable foils.

Mike Hodges's PULP (1972) - Following an auspicious debut like Get Carter (1971) was always going to be a challenge and Mike Hodges sensibly opted for a reunion with Michael Caine in this reverential, if only fitfully engrossing noir parody. Playing a crime novelist hired by Hollywood actor Mickey Rooney to ghost write his autobiography, Caine gets to deliver some amusing lines in the teasingly unreliable voiceover. But, on arriving in a Meditteranean paradise, he quickly finds himself out of this depth when he almost stumbles into the chasm separating grim reality from his romanticised hard-boiled version. Gnawing cheerfully on the scenery, Rooney has a ball as the fading star keen to sing about his mob connections before succumbing to cancer. Genre veterans Lionel Stander and Lizabeth Scott provide knowing support as a blacklist victim and a fascistic princess, as do Dennis Price (in his last film) and Al Lettieri, as a Lewis Carroll-spouting ham and a gun-wielding academic. Yet, while Hodges keeps his tongue firmly in his cheek in pastiching the patented Mickey Spillane blend of graft and sleaze, he struggles to ensnare the audience in the rather self-satisfied scenario. Nevertheless, the typing pool scene and the slapstick car chase are fun, while Beatles producer George Martin contributes an atmospheric score.

Ritesh Batra's THE SENSE OF AN ENDING (2017) - Having made a strong impression with The Lunchbox (2013), Ritesh Batra moves into English-language terrain with playwright Nick Payne's adaptation of Julian Barnes's Booker Prize-winning novel. The story flashes back to the 1960s after irascible London camera shop owner Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent) learns that he has been included in the will of an old girlfriend's mother. He only remembers meeting Sarah Ford (Emily Mortimer) briefly before her daughter, Veronica (Freya Mavor), dumped him for his best friend, Adrian Finn (Joe Alwyn). But, as he confides in ex-wife Margaret (Harriet Walter) and pregnant daughter Susie (Michelle Dockery), Tony comes to realise that he has edited the past in a self-preservatory effort to suit himself. Rather fussily switching between time zones, this convolutedly sombre saga reaches a cornily unsatisfactory conclusion after Tony meets up with Veronica (Charlotte Rampling) for the first time in decades. The performances are commendable and Batra laces the action with a teasing vein of homoeroticism. But Tony remains an eminently resistible character, despite the efforts of Payne and composer Max Richter to turn his epiphany into a feel-good tale of reclamation and redemption.

 

Mike Figgis's STORMY MONDAY (1988) - Debuting as writer, director and composer, Mike Figgis places more emphasis on atmosphere than storyline in this Newcastle noir. Set during American Week, the action centres on drifter Sean Bean, who gets a job at the Key Club on the Tyneside waterfront. However, he overhears a plot to drive owner Sting off the premises and gradually comes to realise that businessman Tommy Lee Jones is not only behind the scheme, but also the presence in the North-East of waitress-cum-escort Melanie Griffith. Evocatively photographed by Roger Deakins, this smoothes off the rough edges of Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971), which presented an unflinchingly bleak impression of the region. But Figgis weaves in references to the mid-70s corruption scandal involving architect John Poulson and former council leader T. Dan Smith and also makes splendid use of the Krakow Jazz Ensemble, who provide some light relief in a simmeringly solemn and occasionally combustible thriller.

 

THREE FILMS BY JIA ZHANGKE - This Arrow triptych showcasing recent works by the Sixth Generation auteur includes Mountains May Depart (2015), which we shall shortly be examining in depth. This chronicle of China's rapid socio-economic transformation is more conventional than 24 City (2008), which sees Jia merge documentary and realist reconstruction to assess the impact on ordinary people of the imminent closure of a munitions factory in Chengdu. As onetime security chief Guan Fengjiu reveals, Factory 420 used to be a classified secret, as it was built following China's split with the Soviet Union in 1956 to defend the state against American imperialism. Among the others reminiscing about a bleak past are retired machinist Xiao He, who remembers the lesson in wastefulness he learned from foreman Master Wang, and the prodigal Su Na, who reflects on the conditions in which her parents once toiled, But Jia and poet co-writer Zhai Yongming also include fictional vignettes that see personal shopper Zhao Tao and TV newsreader Chen Jianbin extolling the virtues of the Second Leap Forward, while Joan Chen laments her section's role in the death of a dashing young pilot and Lu Liping recalls the management ordering her to abandon the search for her kidnapped child in order to meet her quotas.

Jia continued to denounce the corruption, neglect, exploitation, avarice, violence and ethical abnegation that have accompanied the supposed economic miracle in A Touch of Sin (2013). In the first of the four vignettes, Jiang Wu seeks revenge on those who closed down a once-thriving coal mine in Shanxi province, while Wang Baoqiang is driven to violence on returning for his mother's 70th birthday to the south-western city of Chongqing, which has been changed beyond all recognition by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Elsewhere, jilted other woman Zhao Tao lashes out when she is assaulted in the Hubei province sauna where she works as a receptionist, while former factory worker Lou Lanshan is driven to suicidal despair after falling for a prostitute at a Guangdong brothel specialising in uniform fetishes. Using brutality to reinforce the linking theme of lost control, Jia sets out to shock in condemning the silence that has accompanied China's moral bankruptcy. Yet he roots the dramas in real locations for cinematographer Yu Lik-wai to pick up the tell-tale details in Liu Weixin's mise-en-scène.

A tempting bonus on the Limited Edition is Walter Salles's documentary, Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang (2014). In addition to tracing his screen achievement between Xiaoshan Going Home (1995) and A Touch of Sin (2013), Salles also quizzes Jia about a range of professional, personal and political topics and includes contributions from such regular collaborators as actors Wang Hongwei and Han Sanming, cinematographer Yu Lik-wai and Jia's wife and muse, Zhao Tao.

Matt Cimber's THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA (1976) - Written by Robert Thom for soon to be ex-wife Millie Perkins, this will disturb those who remember this undervalued actress debuting in the title role of George Stevens's The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). However, it won't surprise those who recognise the name of Jayne Mansfield's widower and the director of those early porn hits Man & Wife: An Educational Film for Married Adults (1969) and Africanus Sexualis (Black Is Beautiful) (1970), as well as the Pia Zadora duo of Butterfly and Fake-Out (both 1982). On first sight, Perkins appears to be a doting auntie telling her nephews about the deeds of her heroic sea captain father. But the sight of some bodybuilders further along the beach sends Perkins into a misty-eyed reverie that can only spell trouble. Her crushes on a pair of American football players, a has-been actor and the star of a razor blade commercial also end badly (if not to say bloodily). But sister Vanessa Brown and bartender boss Lonny Chapman refuse to give up on Perkins, as they know the truth about the old salt who abused her. Short on genuine psychological insight, but stylishly photographed by Dean Cundey and played with a lethal sense of vulnerability by Perkins, this may be more polished than most genre fodder. But it also helps explain where the term `exploitation cinema' came from.