THE HATEFUL EIGHT

(Quentin Tarantino, 2015)

Tarantino sells tickets. Meaning Tarantino - ever since his third film, Jackie Brown, at any rate - can do whatever the hell he wants. Self-indulgence wasn't exactly far away from projects like his double movie spaghetti-western-kung-fu-ninja revenge movie, Kill Bill (I & II) or his bizarro cinema-kills-the-nazis WW2 Mission movie, Inglorious Basterds.
With The Hateful Eight he's decided to make an Agatha Christie-style Murder mystery in a locked room. This despite the fact that he is shooting on epic 70mm. In a location set in a blizzard on a stunning Wyoming mountain. In a film that lasts three hours.
Like I said, Tarantino can do whatever the hell he wants.
The titular Eight are gathered together at Minnies Haberdashery, a stagecoach stop which is mysteriously lacking its owners. We first meet a stagecoach, carrying legendary bounty hunter John "the Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell rocking a John Wayne drawl) and the prisoner he is taking in chains to hang in Red Rock, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) as they pick up two passengers traveling through the snow on foot, Major Marquise Warren (Samuel L Jackson), who is another legendary bounty hunter, and Chris Mannix, an ex-Confederate Guerrilla and unrepentant racist, who is on his way to his post as new Sheriff of Red Rock.  In this opening chapter, the tone of the film is set. Westerns are meant to be slow, but Tarantino takes that to ridiculous extremes. Each conversation is filled with loquacious tangents and long, sometimes brilliant speeches. The actors are clearly loving it, and some fare very well indeed (Goggins, Roth and Jackson best of all), but it feels like another 2 or 3 drafts were needed to find the essential film within this great shaggy beast.
The length and copious dialogue (and a nice Morricone score taken partly from rejected portions of score from Carpenters The Thing) does create tension, but Tarantino partly breaks that with his usual structural playfulness, flashing back to ear lie run the day, showing an event from a different perspective...
Most of this happens after the stage arrives at the haberdashery and there encounters four men, waiting out the storm. Both Warren and Ruth believe at least one of them is an accomplice of Daisy's, set on freeing her, and of course, they are correct. But it takes two more hours of those long speeches and anecdotes for the whole thing to resolve itself in some hilariously graphic (and surprisingly uninspired) slo-mo and spluttery violence.
There are a bunch of great moments, a few big laughs, and lots of great acting (or at least great line delivery), but throughout I was thinking how Delmer Davies or Budd Boetticher would have told the whole story, better, in about 82 minutes.

JUPITER ASCENDING

(The Wachowskis, 2015)

Jupiter Ascending is gleefully ridiculous, and great fun in places. A bizarre mix of princess fairytale, epic space opera and palace court politics, spliced with some anti-corporate thematics, it fudges some of the material you would expect the Wachowskis to get right. The action scenes - from the directors of The Matrix, which contains some of the greatest action scenes in history - are generally incoherent, frequently boring (incoherence does breed boredom), and never all that rousing.
The story follows Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), a Russian Immigrant in modern Chicago, after she discovers that she is an exact genetic match for the former Intergalactic Queen, and therefore rightful owner of Earth. Of course she discovers this when various aliens come hunting her, and Cane (Channing Tatum), a half-wolf, half-human warrior rescues her. This is all tied up with the political/corporate maneuvering of the Abrassix clan (Eddie Redmayne, Tuppence Middleton and Douglas Booth), each of whom wants Earth to farm human beings for their cells, which are used to prolong life across the galaxy. Jupiter learns all this much as the audience does, in-between bouts of (an underwritten, undercharged) romance with Cane and being (repeatedly) rescued by him. His old bee-spliced comrade Stinger (Sean Bean) becomes involved too, battling lizard-men and hairless shape-shifters on earth and in space as they try to keep Jupiter alive.
The Wachowskis pull off some fine genre beats here despite the sluggish action film-making, and their world building is bold and ambitious; this is a cosmos filled with ravishingly beautiful worlds, references to Brazil (complete with Terry Gilliam cameo) and little flashes of wit (explanations for the extinction of the dinosaurs and crop circles). But there are repetitive plot-points - can Cane save Jupter before she marries Titus, sealing her doom? Can Cane save Jupiter before she signs away all rights to Earth, sealing everyone's doom? etc. The story may avoid the typical male power-fantasies so beloved of much sci-fi, replacing it with a girl asked to decide on the fate of her family versus that of the human race, but the mix of that with a hidden Princess archetype is an awkward one.
The English thesps ham everything up, which is possibly the right tone for this sort of material. Tatum and Kunis are both movie stars; beautiful, charismatic and eminently watchable, but neither of them feels quite right here. Kunis has the wrong sort of look and spiky tomboy presence for this role, while Tatum's character is largely a heroically brave blank. Their romance never convinces, robbing the movie of much last reel emotional weight (aside from the stuff about the Earth being farmed and all of humanity dying, of course).
But still, this is an interesting, imaginative, barking mad attempt at a sci-fi Epic, even if much of it doesn't remotely work. At least it tries.

FOXCATCHER

(Bennett Miller, 2014)

There is no air in Foxcatcher. That's mostly deliberate on the part of Bennett Miller, stretching out the tension in this quietly beautiful drama until we feel as if the movie itself might snap. As soon as John Du Pont (Steve Carrell) enters the story, we watch and wait for him to explode. He is a billionaire scion of an old American dynasty, and an obsession with Greco-Roman Wrestling leads him to establish his own training facility in the grounds of his huge estate. The first wrestler he recruits is Olympic Gold Medalist Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), and their relationship grows needy and complex even before DuPont recruits Dave (Mark Ruffalo), Mark's charismatic older brother and mentor. Eventually, the dynamic between the three becomes so difficult that somebody has to leave...or die...
For all the remarkable precision in Miller's filmmaking and the air of serious thematic import, Foxcatcher is a little silly in it's use of a fascinating true story to say some vague things about America, and its relationship with competitors and heroes. The good stuff is in the intimate close-up relationship material; the delicate familiarity of the relationship between the Schultz brothers, the way Du Pont never ever seems comfortable in his own skin and can barely have a normal conversation with another human being, the rush and complexities of wrestling and the athletes who live with it daily. The performances match the control of the direction. Ruffalo is brilliant, his body language alone a miraculous piece of acting. Tatum is a little more one-dimensional as the sulking ape, while Carrell does magnetic work as Du Pont. Magnetic but baffling - this film never once makes his actions explicable. Du Pont remains a mysterious enigma, bizarre and unknowable. Foxcatcher feels like it barely knows its subject.

22 JUMP STREET

(Phil Lord, Chris Miller, 2014)

Directors Lord and Miller's stock in trade is the hyperactive meta-fictional comedy, and here, seemingly emboldened by the success of 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie, they push that as far as it can go while remaining (just about) true to the action-comedy genre.
The self-referential story follows Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) as they begin another case, this time posing as College Freshmen, investigating the source of a new drug called WhyFy on a Californian campus. Jokes about the lameness of sequels, the pointless budgetary increases and the tweaking of formula inevitably follow, but the film nimbly allows all that to co-exist with a nice emotional narrative about the pairs relationship unravelling (explicitly compared to the break-up of a long-term couple), slapstick, some brilliant pop cultural references (the Benjamin Hill School of Film Studies flashes by during a chase scene) and loads of gags about both the college movie sub-genre and college age kids in general.
All that and there are action scenes too.
Jenko has never been to College and he finds himself the perfect specimen to become a frat-boy football player, enjoying a beautifully-played homo-erotic relationship with the College Quarterback while also embracing his Human Sexuality course, while Schmidt falls in with an artier crowd, performing slam poetry and being used by a girl (the repeated "walk of shame" gag works because of Hill's sour little mouth).
Ice Cube and his outraged scowl return and this time he is given much more to do; destroying a buffet being a particular highlight.
The oddity here is how hard it is to know just what to take seriously. When the film shifts to Mexico for a Spring Break-set climax, the establishing shots of high rise hotels and crashing breakers could come straight from a Michael Bay movie, and the temptation is to see even that as Miller & Lord teasing the industry in which they are thriving. They mock and skit at every opportunity, undercutting and satirising merrily, making the movie an almost exhilarating riot.
And yet, some of the best gags are the simplest - Jenko's use of the term "Cate Blanchett" is a joke for the ages. Just when you think it is over comes the closing credits, a brilliant in-joke on movie franchises which ends this on a perfect note.

10 YEARS

(Jamie Linden, 2012)

Gathering together a genuinely impressive cast for his debut as writer-director, Linden tells a loose, modest, at times extremely charming story in the same vein as The Big Chill and The Return of The Secausus Seven and Beautiful Girls, returning a bunch of old friends to their hometown for a Highschool Reunion a decade on and observing the ensuing emotional revelations and collisions with a gentle, affectionate eye.
In doing so, he goes for broad types, and so we have Chris Pratt, stealing most of the laughs as the ex hellraiser and bully, now somewhat gone to seed as the suburban father of two, Justin Long and Max Minghella as the ex-Geeks still in love with the beauty queen (Lynn Collins), Brian Geraghty bringing his new wife who is shocked to discover that he acted like a black guy throughout Highschool, while most of the emotional ballast is carried by Oscar Isaac as the rock star still in love with the one who got away (Kate Mara) and Channing Tatum, who has not seen his first love (Rosario Dawson) since their traumatic split ten years before.
There are lovely moments here of universal humanity; a few big laughs and a couple of good musical sequences. But Linden always seems more comfortable with the romcom elements; and the film comes most vividly to life during the scenes between the excellent Isaac and Mara. The moment when he sings  his big hit single for karaoke at a late night dive bar (which she has never heard) and she realises it is about her is beautifully acted by Mara. The cast are the films real glory, lending it a classy finish which it perhaps does not deserve.

G.I. JOE: RETALIATION

(John M. Chu, 2013)

It can be tricky to define, the difference between stupidity and silliness. And while the G.I. Joe films both seem monumentally stupid, in reality they're merely silly. They don't aspire to intelligence, don't feature great, tight plotting, or acute characterisation or jaw-dropping cinematic invention. But then they don't have any pretences about themselves either. All they try to do is tell the sort of ripping yarn a 12 year old boy might like. The first G.I. Joe film, Stephen Sommers' G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, was an almost hallucinatory piece of pre-adolescent pulp delirium, based quite faithfully on the Marvel Comics inspired by the Hasbro toyline featuring a range of International soldiers who form a fighting force to oppose the vicious sci-fi terrorists of the Cobra organisation. Those comics mix science fiction technology, war story characterisation and plotting with a hint of soap and a fair portion of ninja action. Sommers copied all that, stuffing his movie with villainous masterminds, lots of groovy masked men, humungous explosions, tons of martial arts, a flashback to a characters origin every ten minutes or so, ultimatums delivered to world leaders, action scenes in exotic corners of the globe, crappy comedy, and hot bad girls in bondage gear who had good hearts underneath.
Chu isn't quite so gleeful in his range, telling a tighter, duller, more conventional story of the Joes double-crossed, mostly destroyed, then seeking revenge. He retains a few of the first films more successful elements, including the rival ninjas, raised and trained together, who formed the fan-favourite geekbait of the comics glory years (played by a charismatic Lee Byung-hun as Storm Shadow and Ray Park under a mask as the mute Snake Eyes). The best scene in the film - perhaps in both films - is the extended action sequence as Snake Eyes and new protege Jinx attempt to kidnap Storm Shadow from his Himalayan retreat, filled with thrillingly vertiginous shots of ninjas balletically battling on ropes hung from cliff-tops, all of it shot with a clear elegance and rhythm that serve as a reminder that Chu made his name as a director of musicals, of a sort.
The plot revolves around a good old-fashioned quest for global domination and is foiled through good old-fashioned firepower, with the biggest scenes in the film decorated with huge orange explosions and shouting, gurning figures in motion. Those characters have loose personalities but absolutely no depth or emotional weight - Dwayne Johnson's Roadblock seems to willingly abandon his family in his quest for revenge, Adrianne Palicki's Lady Jaye is saddled with ridiculously shallow daddy issues which are brought up through her spats with Bruce Willis' Colonel Joe Coulson, while the villains are just several shades of pure, insane evil. The story is formed by a series of escapes, attacks and scenes where people plan escapes and attacks, but it all looks slick and pretty when it needs to, and Chu keeps it rolling and making sense (for the most part).
If it lacks the sense of fun of the first film, its still somewhat refreshing to see a blockbuster so lacking in pomposity and so unafraid of seeming so utterly silly. This, after all, is a film unafraid of using RZA as the sensei of a ninja clan, depicting the destruction of London, having its heroes shoot remote control bullets, and giving Walton Goggins a scene-stealing cameo as the warden of a cryogenic prison deep underground in Germany. The G.I. Joe films are willing to try anything crazy in the hopes that something will work, and that's an endearing quality.

SIDE EFFECTS

(Steven Soderbergh, 2013)

Side Effects begins as a seemingly earnest issue drama focused on the prescription of anti-depressants and the role played in this by the pharmaceutical industry. But midway through the film, there is a twist of the sort loved by writers of thrillers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and suddenly Soderbergh's film reveals itself to be something different entirely.
What that something is, appears to be a twisty-turny thriller of deceit and double-cross, and the silliness of the last act, in particular, may leave some viewers who enjoyed the more nuanced drama of the first half of the film feeling a little short-changed. But Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z Burns are clever and even witty in their use of thriller devices throughout, and the rug-pull at the centre of the film is managed with real skill and subtlety.
More than that, Side Effects is a lovely movie to watch for its beguiling visceral quality. This is not unusual for Soderbergh, who acts as his own cinematographer and editor (under pseudonyms), ensuring his control over every sensory aspect of his films. He gives Side Effects a sickly green palette for much of the first act, suggesting the druggy nausea experienced by one character, then swaps that for a colder world of greys and metallic shades after the twist, as another finds his world collapsing amidst bureaucratic issues. There are numerous beautiful shots here too, and none feels ostentatious. Instead Soderbergh uses abstract shapes and focus pulls to locate or dislocate these people within or from their environments, his camera taking in Dr Banks' (Jude Law) affluent lifestyle, for instance, with a few careful shots, and he is always sensitive to body language and dress.
Banks is the psychiatrist who finds himself a witness in a murder trial when one of his patients, Emily (Rooney Mara) the depressed young wife of a stockbroker recently released from prison for insider-trading (Channing Tatum) awakens in her apartment to find her husband stabbed to death and the knife bearing her fingerprints. The drug she had been prescribed by Banks is blamed, but after his reputation is destroyed he begins to poke around in her story and that of her old Shrink (Catherine Zeta-Jones), and finds a few things don't quite add up.
While that last act is undeniably silly, Soderbergh and Burns deliver it all with a straight face, and strong performances from Law and Mara ensure it largely works. It is nicely shot, sharply written and well acted, and remains a superior, nicely stylish slice of Hollywood entertainment.
Even so, it all feels somewhat slight for something that is supposed to be Soderbergh's "Last" film.

MAGIC MIKE

(Steven Soderbergh, 2012) Few directors make films so acute and intelligent about the way we live now as Steven Soderbergh. It's partly the way he shoots. And he does shoot, acting (under pseudonyms) as his own cinematographer and editor. The control this gives him over the visual character of his films means his interest in capturing something of the fleeting, instant beauty of the modern world is evident in much of his work. Magic Mike, which has discomforting elements reminiscent of the romantic comedy, is partly a lifestyle movie, dedicated to revealing the glamour of a life far removed from what most in the audience would consider normal. And Soderbergh is skilled at making that life look truly beautiful. His film follows a 30 year old stripper-entrepreneur (Channing Tatum, wholly winning here) over three months of summer in Tampa, Florida, as he introduces an unemployed, aimless hunk (Alex Pettyfer) to his particular form of showbiz, questions his own future, and becomes attracted to his new friend's sister (Cody Horn). The story is set in a sunkissed corner of the US, and these young strippers move in a world of designer apartments and beach houses, pounding nightclubs and parties on sandbanks, drive immense 4x4s and mix with beautiful women. Soderbergh gives all of that the allure it demands. Soderbergh also captures the time and place with a fluid vividness and attention to detail and texture that gives the story a resonance on an intimate, everyday level. Whereas many modern films set in glamourous worlds feel unreal, impossibly perfect and set-dressed, Soderbergh ensures this film feels like it's set in our world. And yet, while Magic Mike seems to celebrate it's protagonists lifestyle, Soderbergh instead critiques it. The scenes of the strippers performances are shot in a manner reminiscent of the fight scenes in his last film, Haywire; master-shot displays of virtuoso skill and athleticism. A couple of them are played for laughs, and the film never shies away from the darker side of the sex industry; the injuries, the drugs, the lonely lack of a future. Only the undeniable homo-eroticism is never acknowledged, though it may be utterly implicit in the numerous instances of muscled men dancing together. This is decidedly a film for the austerity era; Mike is stymied in his entrepreneurial ambitions by cold economic reality, and there is an ever-present hard-scrabble quality to his daily activities, carrying a wad of notes in his pocket, juggling his businesses. His journey to self-discovery and escape is compelling and beautifully played by Tatum, while his friend "The Kid" is on the opposite trajectory, more or less becoming Mike. Pettyfer plays his character with just the right amount of cockiness creeping into a slightly blank lack of definition. Both are outshone by Matthew McConaughey, stealing every scene he's in as Dallas, the owner of the strip-club and a natural showman and preacher, all oiled pecs and hyperbolic southern charm. The weakest element is the love story - partly because Horn is a little stiff (but then so is her character, it might be argued) - which comes to a disappointingly predictable, if familiarly satisfying, conclusion after a few interestingly and realistically ambiguous early exchanges between its mismatched pair. Overall, however, Magic Mike is an almost casually great piece of American movie-making; brilliantly made and stylishly gripping toughout.

21 JUMP STREET

(Phil Lord & Chris Miller, 2012)

Using the seldom-mentioned 1980s tv show, most notable for being Johnny Depps breakthrough, as a platform for a messily energetic action-comedy sounded a little lame from a distance. But upon closer inspection, 21 Jump Street proves to be a simultaneously crude and witty mash-up of various genres. Crucially, it's extremely funny.
The concept is the same as in the tv version (and allows the movie to function as a sequel thanks to a couple of late guest stars): a special
Undercover unit is established within the Police Department, sending youthful-looking Cops into High Schools to find drug dealers and suppliers. Recent Police Academy graduates Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill, who co-wrote) disastrously mess up their first bust and find themselves undercover in a modern High School, seeking out a drug ring, six years after they graduated.
Only the rules have changed completely. Jenko, once a popular jock, finds that in the new world of teens; tolerance, intelligence and environmental awareness count more than his macho attributes and an approach to high school he summarises as "never try at anything, ever, and make fun of people who do try". That makes geeky Schmidt one of the coolest guys in school, and the reversed roles test their relationship as they stumble towards solving their case.
The comedy elements are quintessentially modern, taking much from sketch comedy in continually changing tone and topic, working in slapstick, parody, satire, some screwball rom-com dialogue, and some surreal visual humour over the course of a slightly overlong running time, all of it shot through with the quirky deadpan irony common in American movie comedy since Wes Anderson perfected it. Hill and Tatum both excel and have real comedic chemistry, each reaching a sort of peak with the scene where they sabotage various classes under the influence of the synthetic drug they are investigating.
The action scenes are less convincing, but the gleeful edge brought to them by the lead character's approach - they celebrate explosions with the awe of pre-teens - makes them work. This is the real subject of the film, and its a common theme in the influential work of Judd Apatow, from whose stable Hill emerged: both the main characters here are boy-men, stuck somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. Returning to High School only throws that into sharper relief, allowing them to relive different mistakes.
What is refreshing here is that they remain in that state at the end of the film, having grown and changed in other ways - Jenko by embracing his inner nerd, Schmidt by seeing the reality of being cool.
Backing them up is a frequently inspired supporting cast, featuring an angry Ice Cube as a walking, acknowledged stereotype, Rob Wriggle as a pumped-up gym teacher, Ellie Kemper hilariously losing the ability to speak coherently due to her lust for Tatum and Brie Larson as Hill's high school love interest.

HAYWIRE

(Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

Steven Soderbergh is such a professional, so technically gifted, so intelligent, and so interested in cinema. It seems at times he can do anything. His career has spanned genres and styles, and he more or less excels in each of them. But I think the intellectual in Soderbergh sometimes sabotages the commercial filmmaker. Instead of a classic "one for them, one for me" strategy, he combines the two, crafting big studio-funded genre entertainments with their own hidden agendas and themes. Oceans 12 is perhaps the best example. A sequel to Soderbergh's purest entertainment (and biggest hit) filled with megastars and at massive expense, Soderbergh turns out an utterly post-modern compendium of sketches and set-pieces loosely linked by a baffling, almost mockingly complex plot in which the cast get to mug, enjoy Europe, and play themselves, while Soderbergh indulges in some beautiful stylistic experiments.
Haywire is another Soderbergh experiment. Driven here to put MMA fighter Gina Carano in a movie, he fills the cast with male stars for her to batter, then has old collaborator Lem Dobbs write a non-linear espionage tale to link the fight and chase sequences.
His interest is plainly in those action sequences, and they are correspondingly terrific. Avoiding the immediacy of the handheld-and-fastcutting style (best seen in the Bourne films) Soderbergh instead displays Carano's acumen by shooting mid-shots and editing only when necessary. We see her pull off these flips and kicks and Soderbergh's shot choices let us know instantly that its real as we see her execute moves only a real expert would even attempt. That those moves are integrated into fights which are brutal, plausible and thrilling is one of the joys of the movie. These fight scenes have real impact - when Soderbergh does cut during hand-to-hand combat, he does it either for a purely narrative reason (so we can tell exactly what is going on) or for maximum visceral effect. When Carano kicks Michael Fassbender straight through a door in the middle of the most viscious of these fights, Soderbergh shoots that in two set-ups, wih one quick cut between them. And we feel that door go. Furniture and bones break, and Carano has to earn every victory.
There are a few adrenalinised chase sequences here too, but it is in the dialogue scenes in-between that the intellectual in Soderbergh - and in Dobbs - is most evident. There's something a little too arch and removed about all the exposition and the way the generic characters are established, something secretly arty in the absence of establishing shots and off-hand loingo, something a bit reminiscent of Anton Corbjin's The American, something a little ashamed of fully embracing the pulp world this tale belongs in.
That is no problem for me; I love movies that sit firmly where the art house meets the pulp genres, but I can see it preventing Haywire from being any sort of hit.
Who cares, though? There are numerous other pleasures here. If Carano is a little stiff in some of her scenes, she is thrillingly, obviously utterly convincing in motion. That cast of hunks are all solid - Tatum and McGregor get the most to do, and both do it very well - the locations are atmospherically sketched in (though it was odd for this Dublin boy to see the banal familiarity of his hometown become the venue for SWAT pursuits and rooftop chases), Soderbergh's photography (under his pseudonym Peter Andrews) is stylish and lovely throughout, and David Holmes' update of a Lalo Schifrin score is magnificent.

THE EAGLE

(Kevin MacDonald, 2011)

This is Boys Own material done right; sober, intelligent and full of action, but with enough emotional weight to give its last act showdowns and reversals real sting. A handsome, rousingly old-fashioned sword & sandal Epic, MacDonald's film follows a Roman Centurion and his Briton slave over Hadrians Wall and out of the known world into Scotland in search of the Standard of the infamous "lost" Ninth Legion.
It plays much like a Cavalry Western, with the Painted Warriors of the "Seal People" standing in for American Indians, and indulges in much relatively subtle point-making on Colonial Imperialism and Occupation.
Based on Rosemary Sutcliffe's classic Childrens Novel, The Eagle manages to be both epic - in the sense that Anthony Mann would have understood - and intimate. MacDonald avoids the b-movie carnage of recent similar material (Centurion or Ironclad, for instance) and focuses instead on immersion, meaning that his film, which also eschews any modishly ostentatious production design, is full of interesting and vivid textures which suggest what life in Roman times might actually have felt like. In that sensuality the Epic it most reminded me of is Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans.
There are also buddy movie moments here in the somewhat homo-erotic relationship between the principles played by Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell, both of whom acquit themselves reasonably well. The real star however is Anthony Dod Mantle, whose cinematography is stunning; evocative, lovely and raggedly gritty when it needs to be. Director MacDonald is becoming something of a high-quality craftsman; after the early documentary triumphs he experienced with One Day In September and the transcendent Touching the Void, nowadays you can expect an entertaining and beautifully-made film from him on each occasion, whatever the genre.