Punch-Drunk Love

This beautiful indie flick from art house maestro Paul Thomas Anderson is a deliberately understated study of neurosis and first love. Light and playful in the most part, but with an undercurrent of ire directed at societal complacency, it is perhaps most notable for an excellent performance from Adam Sandler, certainly a diamond in the turgid rough of his career.

Sandler takes the central role as Barry Egan, a frustrated, possibly mildly autistic businessman whose life is ruined by both his own repressed psyche, and the meddling of his seven ghastly sisters. Indeed, all the women that Egan encounters in the film (including the woman he speaks to on a phone-sex hotline) are a source of nothing but trauma, save for one. As his relationship with the quiet Lena, pointedly underplayed by Emily Watson, blooms, Sandler nuances his performance with a surprising amount of depth.

Combining plot elements of comedy, romance and thriller, the film is pitched as a minimalist and artistic piece. The use of colour is bold but not overpowering, and there is striking use of the late Jeremy Blake's video artwork to break up the narrative. Yet the balance is maintained, as Philip Seymour Hoffman (enjoying himself) and his goons manage to cause a believable amount of mayhem.

Anderson's screenplay and direction are typically unpredictable, and repeat viewings will undoubtedly reveal a complex substructure to the playful narrative. Despite this, Punch-Drunk Love is a pleasure to watch on a first viewing, and proof that Anderson can churn out quirky, clever little indie gems in his sleep.
4/5

El Mariachi

This micro-budget Mexican thriller marked the feature-film debut of Robert Rodriguez, who's taste for superlative action and grungey horror has made him a Hollywood success story over the last decade or so, including two collaborations with Quentin Tarantino. It comes as something of a shock then, to re-visit this early exercise in style and suspense and see the restraint on view.

Carlos Gallardo plays the near-destitute mariachi who arrives in a strange city, guitar in hand, looking for work. Unfortunately for him, a recent breakout at a local prison (which forms the drily amusing opening of the film) has meant that a local crimelord has ordered his men to kill a man carrying a guitar case (in this case loaded with guns). A case of mistaken identity serves as the McGuffin to kick start a reasonably predictable but enjoyably twisted cat and mouse thriller.

Some may dismiss the low production values on offer as limitations, but in many ways they ring more true than the high-budget B-movie worship of later works such as From Dusk Till Dawn. Peter Marquardt makes for an hilariously unconvincing villain, and there are certainly continuity goofs that even the most casual viewer couldn't fail to spot.

Regardless, the film comes across as an effortless fusion of style and charm, and deservedly became something of an international hit.
4/5

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould

This experimentally-structured dissection of the life of reclusive Canadian pianist Glenn Gould is far more watchable than it has any right to be. The short films referred to in the title are spread across a range of styles and genres - from talking heads through dramatic reconstructions and including abstract pieces set to Gould's performances and compositions.

Gould himself, a child prodigy and concert pianist star at a young age, retired from performing in the 1960s at the tender age of 32 to concentrate on recorded performance (a trick the Beatles would pull two years later). In the majority of the films here he is played by Colm Feore, who captures the essence of an idiosyncratic - arguably obsessive-compulsive - personality.

Director Francois Girard follows a loose chronology though Gould's life, breaking the biographical sections up with a range of excellent - occasionally inspired - shorts centred around the man's music. These include snippets of cinematic expression similar to those found in Fantasia, enacted or genuine response to the music, abstract animation, and perhaps most memorably one astonishing sequence of X-ray video footage.

This is not a film for entertaining the family on a weekday afternoon, but - for those so inclined to watch - is is gripping, fascinating and beautiful. As an artistic exploration of one man's life and work, and a study of the music that engulfed it, the film is a triumph.
4/5

There Will Be Blood

This breathtaking masterpiece from director Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the best American films in decades. Uniquely innovative from start to finish - both in Anderson's excellent script and his unorthodox direction - it also contains a career-best performance from the finest actor of his generation.

Daniel Day Lewis has had a career notable for its consistent level of excellence, no doubt due in part to his highly selective choice of roles. Here, he portrays an entrepreneur and self-proclaimed "oil-man" on his rise to wealth and power in the first decades of the twentieth century. On screen for virtually the entirety of the near-three hours of There Will Be Blood, his complete, full-blooded, human and ultimately demonic portrayal of a man's spiralling collapse within his own soul deservedly won him a second Best Actor gong at this year's Oscars.

The rest of the cast is also excellent, especially the young Paul Dano (best known as the one who doesn't speak in Little Miss Sunshine) who excels in a difficult role as a proto-evangelist preacher. Religion is a core aspect of the areas examined by the film, but Anderson does not presume to pass comment for or against it. Instead, religion and the economics of oil exploration are fused into a complex exploration of a number of issues underlying the surface fabric of the film.

Many reviews have praised the depiction of the period setting, but it isn't hard to see through this to a modern America, being chewed up by oil and religion. Both are seen as blood, coursing respectively through earth and society, a blood which boils up in the veins and arteries of the central character and is unleashed as cholic hatred on all within range.

The power and brilliance of There Will Be Blood is almost overwhelming on a first viewing - due in no small part to Johnny Greenwood's astonishing experimental score - and the film demands a second viewing. Watching it is like having your guts pulled out through your stomach, and yet somehow you leave the cinema walking on air. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
5/5

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