Blood Simple

This hugely impressive debut feature from Joel and Ethan Coen is a brilliantly cast, highly stylised modern noir. Immediately showing its hand, the film opens with a beautiful scene, with two characters talking in a dark car at night, viewed from behind. We glimpse their faces only as headlights approach and pass. It sets the tone for a film that is built around the characters never quite seeing the full picture.

M. Emmet Walsh is the sleazy private eye hired to kill a debutante Frances McDormand, the cheating wife of bar owner Dan Hedaya, and her lover John Getz. A spate of twists and excellently scripted misunderstandings follows, as the body count mounts, and the characters are each pushed through their own private hell.

The acting is excellent throughout, especially the vivid, droll performance from Walsh, who is truly disgusting and yet mesmerising in his own way. McDormand's character emerges from the wreckage in the state described in the title - that of a childish simplicity into which those immersed in violence slip.

Indeed the central premise of the original script appears to be the emotional and psychological chaos that is formed in violence. The Coens' juxtaposition of this tumultuous idea with the calm, almost stately direction is intoxicating, and the film intelligently builds to a deeply satisfying, subversive and highly original conclusion.
4/5

A Zed & Two Noughts

This 1985 surrealistic analysis of the notions of decay, evolution and the trappings of flesh is one of the most vivid films of the decade. Peter Greenaway's film concerns twin brothers, whose wives are killed in a freak swan accident outside the zoo (the title spells out the central location in a pun) at which they work. As they struggle to cope with the notion of their loved ones' decomposition, they form a bond with the only survivor of the accident, a French woman who is to lose her leg.

In parts extremely disturbing, the film contains much footage of plants and animals (and eventually worse) decaying, using time lapse photography that the brothers use as an experimental means to consider the notion of death. There is also much screen time spent watching characters watching a series of David Attenborough-narrated nature documentaries. The central postulate of the first act seems to be the futility of any evolution which can climax only in death.

As with all of Greenaway's films, there is a glorious mix of lush cinematography, full of rich colours and steady tracking shots, and the propelling force of Michael Nyman's pre-Baroque score. As well as the virtuoso use of the time-lapse photography, there are many visual tricks, such as the twins' appearances gradually converging, and this being mirrored in an increasing symmetry in the shot framing, culminating in the most perverse and profound of finales.

The real joy here is the sensual overload that coils around the increasingly surreal plot. The doctor obsessed with amputation, the stranded amputees, the decaying fabric of society compared with decomposed flesh, the resurgence of animalism over humanism, the sexual frustration of losing a partner, the association of animals with nursery rhymes (and the repeated use of the "Teddy Bear's Picnic"); all these ideas and more combine in a visual, sonic and intellectual smorgusboard of decay and despair in modern society.
5/5

Hard Eight

This 1996 debut by rising talent Paul Thomas Anderson is an underplayed, rewarding drama about gambling and crime. Philip Baker Hall is brilliant as Sydney (the film's working title), a professional gambler who takes a young John C. Reilly under his wing after finding him penniless outside a diner. The pair go to Las Vegas, where the protégé is taught a few clever tricks to earn himself a bed for the night in a luxury casino hotel. Without warning, the films shifts forwards two years, and the pair are still working together. Reilly's character is mixed up with Samuel L. Jackson, unusually in villainous mode, and Gwyneth Paltrow is the hooker who is the object of his affections.

Pleasingly moving along an unpredictable plot at a stately pace, the film rewards in a style that Anderson would later perfect in Magnolia. Philip Baker Hall gives a magnetic performance, lending a mixture of gravitas and humanity to a role that could easily have been pantomimic. Reilly and Jackson are as excellent as ever, and Paltrow is believable as the confused prostitute whose actions catalyse the violence of the second act. There is also a small appearance by Philip Seymour Hoffman as an impertinent gambler.

Anderson is an extremely talented writer and director, both in terms of his visual style and how well he coaxes interesting performances from characters often typecast. Hard Eight is not his best picture, but it is an interesting and under-rated debut from a director who would go on to great things. For a film concerning gambling and crime, there is pleasingly little of either on show here, and instead he bravely focuses on the human drama surrounding the idiosyncratic plot.
3/5

My Neighbour Totoro

For true appreciation of Miyazaki's genius, his films must be watched with children. Because they are Japanese films its easy to forget that they're not art house cinema; they are cartoons written with children in mind. For my money, My Neighbour Totoro is perhaps the most wonderful expression of childhood ever found in a film that can be enjoyed by children.

An early high watermark from Studio Ghibli (indeed the film that gave them their icon, the titular "Totoro"), the story is astonishingly simple, and is perhaps unique in featuring no antagonist whatsoever. A frequent device in Miyazaki's films is to undermine the simplistic notion of villainy, but here there is no villain of which to speak. We follow the story of two sisters, the school-age Satsuki and her younger sister Mei, as they move into a new house and explore the surrounding area.

With a small crop of wonderfully realised characters (academic dad, the helpful old lady who asks them to call her "granny", and a mother sick in hospital, possibly from tuberculosis) the true joy in the film is the children's giddy excitement at such simple acts as collecting acorns. When Mei discovers a series of increasingly large squashy rabbit-trolls, the adventure begins. Despite there being no antagonist, the latter half of them film is still extremely tense, and had my young cousins biting their nails at the thought that young Mei had become lost in the woods.

The animation here is obviously done on a smaller budget then later works such as Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away, but is alive, and the rural landscape breathes and moves unbelievably. The film is wonderful fun, and very funny for both adults and children. The score by the ever-excellent Joe Hisaishi is superb, although the English-language title song is cringingly terrible (but then you were going to watch it subtitled anyway, weren't you?).

The Totoro himself is a wonderful, comic creature that has a deliriously idiosyncratic character (try to stop yourself giggling with glee at the effect an umbrella has on him). If nothing else, the film is worth watching for the two appearances of the Catbus, perhaps the single greatest piece of animation ever seen in cinema.
5/5

Barton Fink

This 1991 surrealist drama swept the board at Cannes that year, winning the Palme d'Or as well as awards for best director and best actor. Despite this, it remains one of the Coen Brothers less known pictures, as indeed do all of their films before Fargo.

The chameleonic (and impossibly faceless) John Turturro is brilliant as the titular playwright who (perhaps literally) sells his soul to Hollywood in 1941. After achieving critical success in his native New York with a social realist play about fishmongers, he moves to Hollywood and is immediately set to work on a demeaning B-movie about wrestling. Nonetheless, writer's block sets in, and as he imprisons himself in a run-down hotel and attempts to connect with "the common man", the only people he encounters are the twitchy "Chet" (Steve Buscemi), the receptionist, and his unnerving neighbour, played with disturbing amiability by John Goodman.

Stylistically owing a huge debt to David Lynch's Eraserhead (from the industrial drone of the hotel down to John Turturro's hairstyle), the film can be read in any number of ways - vitriolic satire on Hollywood; character study of writer's block; blackly comic analysis of Nazi influence in the 1940s; even a twisted take on the biblical (or perhaps Satanic) epic. Crammed full of inventive and frequently nightmarish ideas - the wallpaper in Fink's room slowly peeling down to reveal a worrying flesh underneath - the film bravely moves into less familiar territory in its second act, and provides one of the most stunning, if perplexing, finales I have seen in some time.
4/5

The Host

This Korean monster flick (literally translated as "Monster") was a box-office smash back home, and has received critical adoration the world over. In addition to this, it has been wilfully rejected by horror aficionados, who fail to realise that it was never really aimed at them in the first place.

Concerning the story of a giant mutant tadpole/fish born in the Han River, filled with toxic formaldehyde, its a tremendously entertaining and riveting blend of teen-horror flick gore, human drama and black comedy, with a cunning line in political satire too. Kang-ho Song is terrific as the simple-minded father of Hyun-seo, the little girl kidnapped by the monster and kept in his sewer lair for food. The plot follows him and his family as they attempt to rescue the child, but uniquely the main obstacle in their path is not the monster itself, but the paranoia and bureaucracy that its arrival prompts.

Indeed, the film refuses to conform to any genre stereotypes on a number of levels. Firstly, the monster is not hidden, waiting to be revealed from darkness at the climax (as in virtually all horror films post-Alien and Jaws). Instead, it is shown in broad daylight in full shot right from the start; this does not diminish its impact. Secondly the characters are all deeply flawed, making stupid mistakes (such as miscounting the number of bullets in a gun) that frequently have tragic costs. The film also subverts the notion of 'form a plan, preparation, enactment' by repeatedly throwing in innovative and unexpected plot twists.

As an entire film, The Host in fact feels much more like one of George A. Romero's Living Dead films than other monster flicks from Jaws to Ringu. Nonetheless, it plunders what it wants from these, and creates a truly original and hugely entertaining piece of subversive blockbuster entertainment.
4/5