Proof, as if it were really needed, that Terry Gilliam is not only one of the true visionaries of late-twentieth century cinema, but one of the finest visual directors of all-time. Brazil is a unique masterwork of style, ideas, darkness and humour, the product of a director who ever since has all too often been hampered by studio interference.

Gilliam, whether he would like the description or not, is a true auteur, as argued here. His films are fantasies, whether dystopian future visions or medieval romps, with a love for all things natural over the mechanical. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of Brazil: a nightmarish, if rather comical, world of paperwork, faceless bureaucracy and anonymous pen-pushers. Mention of this kind of dystopia immediately raises the spectre of those two pillars of twentieth-century British fiction, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Both are touchstones here; indeed the film’s working title was 1984½ (an allusion also to Fellini’s 8½, one of the film’s other key reference points). But the world that is created here is strictly Gilliam’s, bursting at the seams with absurdities and dark humour.

It is also one of his most visually striking films. The world we enter is a grey, lifeless metropolis, evoking that of Fritz Lang, as well as Godard’s future-noir Alphaville. Inside, the rooms within houses are filled with malfunctioning futuristic appliances, and filled with large, menacing looking ducts, presumably required to maintain these conveniences’ manfunctionality. These ducts are omnipresent; well hidden in the more well-to-do homes, but intrusively hanging and sticking out in the poorer homes. Elsewhere, a restaurant’s menu offers a wide variety of exotic foods, but they all arrive as gaudily-coloured blobs ungainly dolloped on a plate.

At the centre of it all is Sam Lowry, a low-level worker in the bureaucratic government machine, whose dreams of flight and romance are at odds with his drab, routine day-to-day life. When his well-connected mother procures him the offer of a promotion, he initially turns it down, contented not to work his way up the metaphorical greasy pole. However, a chance encounter with someone resembling the woman he sees in his dreams encourages him to take the offer, hoping it can lead him to her.

The bare bones of the setup perhaps seem to offer a love story, but the film fails to satisfactorily deliver on this; there is little real chemistry between Sam and Jill, the woman he pursues, and we are never entirely convinced of whether Sam is in love with the real Jill or his idealised dream image of her. There is real ambiguity to this side of the film, which makes the recut “Love Conquers All” version, discussed below, all the more bizarre.

As well as this ambiguity, it is also difficult to quantify where the real ‘evil’ in the film lies. There is no personification of a “baddie”; 1984 had its Big Brother, though more of an abstract concept rather than an actual person. The real evil present in the film is shown to be the indifference of ordinary people to each other, and their subservience to the bureaucratic machine. A torturer, a perfectly cast Michael Palin, is shown to be a respectable, affable family man; while he conducts his business, his receptionist casually transcribes the screams coming from the room, totally ambivalent to what she is listening to. At every level of bureacracy, there is at best indifference and at worst complete disregard to common humanity. In the background to this, there is also the spectre of an ongoing terrorist campaign against the government. Explosions kill and injure ordinary people, a seemingly futile act of protest against the system. This adds another level of moral ambiguity to the film, throwing further doubt on the ides of a struggle between good-versus-evil.

Roger Ebert, the prominent American critic, criticised the film for its “lack of discipline”, a charge often levelled at Gilliam’s films. Whilst it is true that the narrative structure is weak at times, and that Brazil is perhaps 15-20 minutes too long (again, something that can be charged at much of the director’s work), it is informative to consider the recut version that was released in the US. Known as the “Love Conquers All” version, it runs to 94 minutes, a full 48 minutes shorter than the European cut, with a heavily modified narrative structure and ending, cuts which Gilliam refused to make himself, fearing artistic compromise. The resulting cut is a travesty, akin to the butchering of Once Upon a Time in America, and if there is the choice between this or the perhaps overlong director’s vision, choosing the latter is a no-brainer.

One of Brazil‘s great strengths lies with the talented crew; Gilliam assembled a fantastic collection of actors, many of whom like Bob Hoskins, Robert De Niro, Jim Broadbent, Ian Lavender and Ian Holm were confined to brief cameo roles. In casting Jonathan Pryce and Kim Griest in the leads, avoiding big star names, he achieves a sense of intrigue and ambiguity in the characters. The set design is also a triumph, as is the superb music by Michael Kamen, who had also recently scored the superb David Cronenberg chiller The Dead Zone. The cinematography is at times stunning, a credit to Gilliam’s frequent collaborating DP Roger Pratt. We feel as if within an epic, faceless dystopia, with its endless corridors, spiralling skyscrapers and gargantuan torture chambers. But also on show is Gilliam’s mastery of deep-focus. The restaurant scene is a particularly magnificent example of this: observe the seemingly innocuous characters in the background, and witness the director’s microscopic attention to detail.

Another of the triumphs of the film is its many subtle references to some of the greats of cinema history, perhaps attempting to show the medium to be the antithesis of the stale, lifeless machinery of bureacracy. There are two major allusions; firstly to Akira Kurosawa’s great masterpiece of pathos, Ikiru, in which a dying bureaucrat tries to find meaning to his life by fighting the machinery of government to get a children’s playground built. The second is Fellini’s 8½; one of the opening shots of sky is almost identical to an early shot in that film, and Sams’ confusion of his dream world and reality is akin to the Marcello Mastroianni character, Guido, in the Fellini film. Littered about the film are countless other nods, some more subtle than others, to other great films; i can spot The Third Man, Battleship Potemkin, M, The Good The Bad and the Ugly, Casablanca, and The Trial. I’m sure there are many more. Gilliam is a cinephile, and i’m sure couldn’t resist paying homage to his spiritual ancestors in this, his masterwork.

Let’s get a few things out of the way first:

Is the film too long? Probably.
Does it owe a lot to Short Cuts? Yes.
What’s all that frog business about? I’m not entirely sure.
Is it a great film? Well.. i’d say yes.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s third feature is the kind of film that from the outset thinks it is a masterpiece. This can obviously go one of two ways: either it delivers on this promise, or it falls short. For me, it is in the former camp, a film that is a ‘stayer’, though one whose full meaning I am still not entirely sure of.

The recent trend for the use of interweaving storylines seems to have become a bit old hat now; Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s overlong snore-fest Babel and the recently released Robert Redford-directed Lions For Lambs seem to be the latest in an increasingly long line of such films which like to suggest how individuals’ actions have an affect on others. In many ways, the trend can be traced back all the way back to Pulp Fiction, though Paul Haggis’ Crash and Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic are perhaps more relevant comparisons. The Tarantino film aside, all of these films are clearly aimed at the heart, attempts to make the audience question their own actions and prejudices.

This is all very well, but there is a tendency for these films to be too preachy, and at times preposterous. Inarritu’s Amores Perros got the balance right, as did to a lesser extent his 21 Grams, and the Haggis and Soderbergh films. However, when it goes wrong, like in the case of Babel, the audience can feel at best bored and at worst utterly patronised. It would appear that, given the wide variance of critical opinion, Magnolia is a film that you either are prepared to go the distance with, or shut yourself off from at an early stage.

The granddaddy of all of these films is Robert Altman’s seminal 1993 film Short Cuts. In that film, snippets from the Raymond Carver short stories were cut together to form a three-hour picaresque view of Los Angeles, that just flies by effortlessly. To me, Magnolia feels more in this mould than that of the more recent films mentioned above. These people are not really living especially different lives; sure, their material and social circumstances are different, but they all have commonalities with each other, but not in a contrived sense, more in a sense that people living in a common geography will have similar life experiences and prejudices. The film’s consistent approach to mise en scene appears to suggest that continuity of tone is the director’s intention.

There are clear overarching themes facing the film’s characters; there is, typical of this type of film, a sense of isolation, an alienation from family and friends surrounding them. But what makes Magnolia special is the central theme of forgiveness; not solely in a Judaeo-Christian sense, which is reflected by the god-fearing cop, but still a profoundly moral one. All of the main characters live their lives in the shadow of something, something they choose not to face up to. Many of them will, during the course of the film, have to face up to these, with differing consequences. Others, such as the aforementioned cop, played neatly by John C. Reilly, and the caregiver, a slightly underused Phillip Seymour Hoffman, seem to live lives of generosity and altruism, but still have to make decisions about their lives. We are also reminded, via a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not style prologue and epilogue, about the role that chance plays in such matters; Aubrey McFate, as Humbert Humbert refers to lady luck in Lolita, seems to have a hand in proceedings, offering an element of magical realism to the film.

The various plot strands play out nicely, if dragged out a little bit too much at times. There are numerous standout performances: Tom Cruise, for me, is a perhaps a little too over the top as the uber-alpha male self-help author, Philip Baker Hall is his usually great self as gameshow host Jimmy Gator, William H. Macy predictably reliable as down-on-his-luck ex-“quiz-kid” Donnie Smith, and Julianne Moore putting in a remarkable perfomance as the wife of a terminally ill older husband. But the part of the film I liked the most was the relationship between Officer Jim Curring, a deadpan John C. Reilly, and cocaine-addicted Claudia Gator, an affectingly vulnerable Melora Walters. They go on a date, and make a pact: to say the things they feel to each other, not to hide away things that might be embarrassing or shameful or difficult to confide to another. And the other characters in Magnolia, to a greater or lesser extent, learn to be able to do this, and face up to their situations and problems.

Most right-thinking film-goers of course eschew anything with the name “Adam Sandler” attached to it, which is why his turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s fourth film comes as such a surprise: not only can he avoid being annoying, but he is able to turn in a mature, complex performance full of pathos and depth.

Punch-Drunk Love centres on Barry Egan, owner of an apparently unsuccessful company which sells niche items such as ‘fungers’ – a sort of a novelty plunger, but with an indestructible handle. Barry seems to drift rather aimlessly through life, and appears to suffer a constant deluge of abuse from his seven rather overbearing sisters. We get brief glimpses into his lonely life; one night he calls a phone sex line, but seemingly not for sexual gratification, but for some sort of contact with another person, however anonymous. Even this seems to backfire on him though, and soon he is being extorted for money by the phone-line operator.

Things look up for him, however, with the arrival of Lena Leonard, a co-worker of one of his sisters’, who express a romantic interest in him. In rather mainstream Hollywood style, she appears to embody an escape for him from his dreary existence, some form of redemption for him; however, despite the rather conventional boy-meets-girl narrative, there is something more at play here. The film has a feeling of unease about it that I haven’t experienced since first watching Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998), a black comedy which never allows the viewer any sort of comfort zone or respite from its multiple challenging storylines. Watching Punch-Drunk Love, I frequently found myself instinctively laughing at events which would have been funny in a conventional film, but then questioning whether I should have been laughing at all.

This is the balance that Anderson’s film strikes so seemingly effortlessly: we can see that Sandler’s character is like the archetypal pathetic fall-guy, and this is clearly the view his sisters have of him. But his constant cries for help and occasional bursts of rage make us realise the depths of his despair, and we can see that beneath this rather comical exterior lies a troubled but essentially decent human being. For me, another of the film’s touchstones was Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, another film about how the way we conduct our modern lives isolates and alienates us from each other. Like the aesthetic of that film, there is something a little cartoon-like about Barry’s blue suit, and his social awkwardness is reminscent of Seymour, the Steve Buscemi character in that film. The incredible percussive score, composed by Anderson-regular Jon Brion, also seems to add a fantastical quality to the film.

In the film’s third act, we see the effect that finding Lena has had on Barry, and we see what he can be capable of, if he has a focus and belief in himself. He may be still the same Barry Egan, and he may not have changed the world, but he triumphs in a much more profound way. Punch-Drunk Love is a tough watch, and is clearly not a film for everyone. But I found it genuinely touching, a film that reminds us, in the face of despair, of the redemptive power of love.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky’s birth, which is being marked with a brief retrospective of the late director’s works in London. The website features this quote from Ingmar Bergman:

“My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly I found myself standing at the door of a room the key of which had, until then, never been given to me. Tarkovsky for me is the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream”.

High praise, indeed, from the late Swedish auteur. But is his work really meritous of such high praise? He is certainly one of the most difficult directors for modern audiences to get to grips with, and beyond his two magnum opi, Solyaris and Andrei Rublev, his works are not generally well known or easily commercially available. His output was hardly prodigious: only seven feature films in a career spanning 24 years puts him closer to Terence Malick than Woody Allen.

The difficulties with watching a Tarkovsky film are no better illustrated than with a viewing of Solyaris. Mark Kermode a couple of weeks ago, rightly praising Steven Soderbergh’s excellent reimagining of Solaris (2002), described the original as ‘boring’. It is certainly true that the pacing is practically snail-like, and comparing the running time of 165 minutes with the details of the narrative structure does tell you that there are huge chunks of the film where very little happens. Tarkovsky is also famous for his long shot-lengths; The Sacrifice apparently has an average shot length of 72 seconds. When one compares that with Michael Bay’s famously jumpy Armageddon, which weighs in with an ASL of less than 2 seconds, we can see the contrast. ASLs of over 10 are generally considered to be high, so 72 really appears almost excessive.

With his deliberately slow pacing, and rather dreamlike shooting, it is easy to understand why many find Tarkovsky inaccessible. It doesn’t help that Solyaris also features other rather baffling elements, in particular a bizarrely long five-minute sequence of a car journey through a Japanese metropolis which seems out of place and completely unneccesary. This, apparently, was inserted to give Soviet viewers a feeling of futuristicness, though to the foreign viewer it is plain irritating.

A little about the story. Solyaris is technically an adaptation of a wonderful novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, though the screenplay takes great artistic licence with the source material. Occupants of a research station orbiting the planet Solaris have been sending rather erratic mesages back to Earth, so scientist Kris Kelvin is sent there to investigate. When he arrives, he discovers that it has descended into disarray, that one of the crew has committed suicide, and that the other crew members are behaving very strangely. It emerges that strange visitors from the crew’s past have been appearing, and soon enough this happens to Kelvin in the form of his dead ex-wife, Hari.

The film does not satisfy on a purely science fiction level: although the space station is fairly believably created, there are very little special effects, and those there are pale in comparison to those found in Stanley Kubrick’s earlier epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. These are very different films, though, although Tarkovsky’s apparent desire to completely diverge from the Kubrick film is not entirely satisfied. The core of the film is not the protagonist Kelvin but ultimately Hari, his dead wife, superbly played by Natalya Bondarchuk. She is not stricly real, but a composite of Kelvin’s memories and feelings about his ex-wife. Details are not completely fleshed out, gaps are not satistactorily filled, and she cannot exist without his presence.

The film, therefore, is looking at human relationships, and our ideas and feelings towards other people, even people we feel completely intimate with. That Steven Soderbergh managed to also satisfactorily film this in 99 minutes does not mean that Tarkovsky’s adaptation is too long-winded; it merely means he is giving the ideas, themes and persepectives of the film enough time to breathe. For me, Solyaris is a truly great film not for its technical perfection, but for its ability to make us think about what other people really mean to us, and in that sense it is true to Lem’s extraordinary novel.

Sergio Leone’s final film is a tangle of contradictions; at once both unflinchingly violent and wistfully nostalgic, a sweeping epic that is intensely personal. It is perhaps unfortunate that it is often referred to as a poor relative of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, given that although the settings of the two films may be similar, they are radically different in thematic content and ambitions. Once Upon A Time in America deserves to be recognised as a classic in its own right, and on its own merits, rather than in the shade of that other gangster epic.

Epic is indeed the word to describe the film in terms of length; the original cut shown at Cannes runs to 229 minutes, just shy of four hours. While this is still short of something like Bernardo Bertolucci’s ridiculously long Novecento (1976), which weighs in at five-and-a-quarter hours, this is still in the realms of a very long piece of work. Far too long, it was deemed, for an American audience, who were instead presented with a butchered 139 minute cut which destroyed the non-chronological order of the original film, a cut which Roger Ebert quite rightly described as ‘a travesty’ on its release. The structure of the film is absolutely crucial to the film’s integrity.

In describing this structure, it must first be emphasized that this is by no means a film which can be understood by conventional analysis, since the viewer’s reference timeframe is frequently changed. The film presents three separate timeframes: the protagonists’ childhood of the 1920s, their adulthood in Prohibition-era 1930s, and a much later late-1960s setting. Leone was always a director keen to subvert audience expectations, and what he does here is play with the viewer’s perception of which of these three is effectively the ‘here and now’. While a conventional drama would have the later of the timeframes as the reference, thus rendering the other two as flashbacks, there are times when the middle frame feels like the reference, making the last frame a kind of a ‘flash-forward’.

The idea of a ‘flash-forward’ raises serious problems, and has generated wildly differing interpretations of the film’s closing scene, some believing that the 1960s timeframe is merely a construct of Noodles’ opium-stoned imagination. For me, there are too many signposts which can discredit this theory: anachronisms such as the use of Paul McCartney’s Yesterday, and the presence of televisions, jet aircraft and even frisbees cannot, for me, be explained as a psychic prediction of the future by a pot-smoking Noodles in the 1930s. Nevertheless, it is a debate that will certainly rage on, much like the endless bickering between Shadean and Kinbotean readers of Vladimir Nabokov’s similarly enigmatic Pale Fire.

The purpose of this construction is more than just Leone mind-games; one of the key themes of the film is the passing of time, and its effects on relationships, friendships and the way society changes. Regardless of one’s own interpretation of the film’s structure, the core of the film is ultimately centred on an old friendship which is betrayed out of one character’s love for the other, despite the life-changing consequences of his actions, and also how friendships, partnerships and politics are affected by power, greed and corruption. What we don’t get, however, is catharsis or any happy endings, instead the film leaving a more melancholy sense of change and loss.

Accompanying these personal changes is one of the true stars of the film: the city of New York. Whilst the Vito Corleone segments of The Godfather, Part 2 wonderfully evoked the city’s Little Italy, Once Upon a Time in America does a similarly brilliant job with the Jewish ghetto in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. The costumes, music, cars and buildings of 1920s and 1930s America are superbly reproduced; it has often been called the greatest film reproduction of the Prohibition era, a not unimpressive feat.

A word about the music: it may seem heathen to even suggest it, but on first viewing I found the Ennio Morricone score a little too sentimental at times, perhaps more befitting the saccharine dewy-eyed romanticism of a film such as Cinema Paradiso. However, on later watches I came to understand why it is considered his best work, and in fact how crucial it is to framing the structure of the film.

Leone’s choice of aspect ratio is also noteworthy: the Spaghetti Westerns for which he is so synonymous with were shot in 2.35:1, giving them their sparse, epic feel. With America, he shot 1.85:1, making the film feel a touch less dynamic, but more personal. His camerawork is also much more restrained here, there is not much of the mesmeric style he had cultivated in his prior films, up to and including the peerless C’era Una Volta Il West.

Once Upon a Time in America took up seventeen years of Sergio Leone’s life in its creation, during which time he turned down the opportunity to direct The Godfather. It would be his final film, and in many ways it is an exception to the films he had directed up until then, but it is also a wonderful culmination of his filmmaking talents. Sometimes, directors end up making too many films, ending their careers long after making their great works; others, perhaps, never reach a satifactory conclusion. Leone, though, managed to finish his career with a defining work: a meditation on life and loss, on the importance of friendships, and the interchangeabilty of past, present and future.