Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (1957)

In the 1860s Japan is in a turbulent period of transition as the Americans' gunboat diplomacy forces the country to interact with a broader world. In a Tokyo brothel a grifter named Saheji (Frankie Sakai) overstays with no money, and is forced to work off his debt over the winter.

Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (released by Eureka's Masters of Cinema label under its Japanese title Bakumatsu Taiyoden) is a 1957 comedy directed by Yuzo Kawashima. In its own country it has been regarded as an all-time classic for many decades. A 2009 survey in the prestigious film journal Kinema Junpo ranked it as Japan's fourth-greatest film of all time, for example. Despite its local acclaim it has only recently become widely available to English-speaking audiences: better late than never.

This is a great movie comedy. While it does take a little while to build up steam, it is a beautifully performed farce with a nicely political edge, and a wonderful central performance by the stand-up comedian and actor Frankie Sakai.

Gods of Egypt (2016)

Set (Gerard Butler), the god of the desert, betrays his own family at the coronation of his brother Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). He kills his own parents, blinds Horus, and assumes control over all of Egypt. A year later, a thief named Bek (Brenton Thwaites) sets out on a quest to save Horus and save all of Egypt from Set's rule.

Gods of Egypt was released about a year ago to some mild controversy over casting Caucasian actors as Egyptian gods and people, and to a wave of fiercely negative reviews by critics around the world. The film's director, Alex Proyas, took a great amount of offence at the critical response, calling the entire profession a pack of 'diseased vultures' and generally carrying on in a deeply embarrassing manner. His primary accusation was that most critics published negative reviews because most critics wanted to ensure they sided with the popular consensus: that critics basically all tow the same party line instead of judging individual films on their merits.

Whether that's true or not (spoiler: it isn't) I can at least attest to being a regular holder of minority opinions. When other critics thought John Carter was a terrible film, I said - and continue to maintain - it was great. When most critics hailed La La Land as one of 2016's best films, I found it rather mediocre. Alien 3 remains my favourite Alien film. So with my fiercely independent hat on, with a love for ambition in big-budget effects pictures over how much they actually succeed, I can say this: Gods of Egypt is a terrible film.

Risen (2016)

In AD 33 Jerusalem, a Roman tribune named Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) is assigned by Pontius Pilate (Peter Firth) to supervise the execution by cruxifiction of a Jewish agitant named Yeshua (Cliff Curtis). When Yeshua's dead body disappears - appearing to fulfil predictions of his resurrection - Clavius is dispatched to rediscover the body and hunt down the disciples who spread rumours of Yeshua's return.

Risen is based on what strikes me as a remarkably inventive premise. It tells the Biblical story of Christ's death and resurrection, which has been adapted to the screen many times, but it does so from the perspective of a Roman soldier and investigator. The result is an odd little film suck somewhere between religious propaganda and a period crime movie.

I suspect for a lot of non-Christian viewers the film's religious nature will be a severe turn-off. For those comfortable with that aspect of the film or who, like me, have no problem enjoying it purely as fiction, there is a lot here to recommend. It is an imperfect but interesting historical drama with decent performances, some great moments and a nice visual aesthetic.

Calvary (2014)

Father James (Brendan Gleeson) is a Catholic priest serving a small Irish coastal community. One day a man enters the confession booth and warns Father James that he is going to shoot him dead the following Sunday. Over the remainder of the week, James grows increasingly confronted as the people of the town seems to uniformly goad and mock him, and he suffers unexpected attacks on his life and those closest to him.

Calvary is an independent British/Irish drama by writer/director John Michael McDonagh, following in the footsteps of his highly regarded playwright and screenwriter brother Martin McDonagh (In Bruges). It has a deeply idiosyncratic, bleakly comic tone to much of the film, and brings together an excellent cast to bring the odd, troublesome town to life. The film centres upon a career-best performance by Brendan Gleeson, but sadly it is weakened considerably by a deeply uneven and occasionally flat-out ridiculous screenplay. Gleeson's performance and some excellent cinematography by Larry Smith pulls the viewer through, but in more than a few moments it is a bit of a rough ride.

Lake Placid (1999)

On a large lake in Maine, a marine fine and game warden is killed in the water by an unseen predator. An investigation is mounted by a team including the local sheriff Hank Keough (Brendan Gleeson), fish and game officer Jack Wells (Bill Pullman), palaeontologist Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda) and eccentric millionaire and crocodile enthusiast Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt). They soon discover that the lake is home to a 30 foot long saltwater crocodile, which leads to the question on how to track, capture or kill such an animal.

Lake Placid is the sort of film one would describe as a 'guilty pleasure', where there ever a need to feel guilty about enjoying a film. It is a deliberate B-movie, pitting four humans against a giant, hungry and fiercely territorial monster. It has the requisite scenes of people in peril, supporting players getting bitten and murdered, and hushed theories about its origins and purpose. Where the film excels is that director Steve Miner has cast a calibre of lead actor way above what is expected for this kind of a film, and the screenplay comes from television writer/producer David E. Kelley who brings with him the self-awareness and snark that typified his popular creations like Ally McBeal, Picket Fences and Boston Legal. The result is like watching a tricked-out Holden Torana: it should be something cheap and forgettable, yet it unexpectedly - and absurdly - out-performs its expectations.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

An environmental catastrophe sends the Klingon Empire spinning towards total collapse. Taking advantage of the crisis, the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner) arranges with Starfleet's Captain Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to begin immediate peace negotiations with the United Federation of Planets. Captain Kirk (William Shatner) is sent to escort the Chancellor to Earth onboard the USS Enterprise, but when Gorkon is assassinated and the Enterprise's crew implicated, Kirk and McCoy (DeForest Kelley) are sentenced to a Klingon prison while Spock plays detective in the attempt to find the real culprits.

A lot Star Trek fans debate which series was best: the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager or Enterprise? The smug side-answer is actually none of those. I think there's a strong argument to be made that the best Star Trek ever got was the four-film extended narrative formed by The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, The Voyage Home and The Undiscovered Country. They combine humour with drama, action with intrigue, and they actually seem to mean something to their characters. They may initially seem to be about space battles, rescuing whales and assassinating Klingons, but really they're ultimately about what it means to grow old.

Railroad Tigers (2016)

In December 1941 a group of Chinese railroad workers, led by the station porter Ma Yuan (Jackie Chan) engage in carefully staged raids of Japanese train shipments to disrupt Japan's military efforts to occupy China and invade other Asian nations to the south. When an injured soldier tells the group of a failed mission to blow up a strategically vital bridge, they take it upon themselves to complete the mission on the Chinese army's behalf.

Railroad Tigers is a hugely enjoyable slice of populist action-comedy, headlined by Jackie Chan in one of his most entertaining films in years. While the film has problems - in fact it has quite a few of them - none of them manage to fully obstruct what is ultimately a hell of a lot of fun. This is his third collaboration with director Ding Sheng, following Little Big Soldier in 2010 and Police Story 2013. To my mind this is the strongest of the three. It has plenty of action, a strong line in slapstick comedy, and makes the best use of its ageing star that I can remember.

Ikiru (1952)

A disaffected civil servant in late middle-age (Takashi Shimura) learns that he has terminal cancer and a few months left to live. After the initial shock and panic wears off, he sets out in a last-ditch attempt to find a proper purpose and meaning to his life.

Ikiru is Akira Kurosawa's 13th feature film as director, and was his first film after his disastrous experience making The Idiot - which his studio sliced down in post-production and arguably badly weakened in the process. I have no idea if the bruising gauntlet had to run with The Idiot affected his ability to direct Ikiru, but it strikes me as a fairly messy and inconsistent film - and a fair drop down in quality from his widely regarded classics Rashomon and Stray Dog.

There are tonal problems with the film, which swings from bleak satire to uplifting melodrama and back to satire. It is very possible that these shifts in tone were wholly intentional; if so, they strike me as a failed experiment. By trying to make two sorts of film in one there is an extent to which Kurosawa fails to deliver with both. General critical opinion seems to disagree with me entirely, as Ikiru is regularly held up as the 'lost classic' of Kurosawa's career. Personally - and in the end all film reviews are personal ones - Ikiru simply failed to fully impress me. Kurosawa had done better, and would go on to do much better, in the future.

Spotlight (2015)

In 2001 the Boston Globe gains a new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Shreiber), who directs the paper's dedicated "Spotlight" team to investigate claims that the city's Catholic Cardinal Bernard Law knew that one of the city's priests was sexually abusing children, but relocated the priest rather than remove him from the Church or report him to the police. As the team - led by Walter "Robby" Robinson (Michael Keaton) - investigates, they uncover a larger story than they could ever have imagined.

Spotlight is based on a true story: the above-mentioned investigation into the Catholic Church's unofficial policy of relocating and hiding abusive priests to avoid scandal. The real-life story won its writers a 2003 Pulitzer Prize, and had enormous repercussions for the Church worldwide. Tom McCarthy's 2015 film adaptation is a phenomenal piece of work that was appropriately rewarded with the Academy Award for Best Picture. It is an intelligent, provocative and powerful work of filmmaking.

Deadpool (2016)

Deadpool is a film that several Hollywood studios have been attempting to make for about a decade and a half, and it has taken until 2016 for it to finally gets its chance to impress. For most of that time actor Ryan Reynolds has been attached to star as well, so before any kind of actual review begins I feel it's worth pausing to both applaud 20th Century Fox for finally giving the project a chance and to congratulate Reynolds for his stamina and persistence, if nothing else.

Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is a terminally ill mercenary given a second chance at life through an experimental process to activate mutant genes in his body. Ruthlessly betrayed, he sets out on a quest for revenge against the villain who transformed him into a hideously scarred psychopath with Wolverine-like healing powers.

To be honest there is not much in the way of story to Deadpool. It essentially has a couple of extended action scenes that frame extended flashbacks. It is basically a loose skeleton upon which the film can hang a lot of rude gags, extreme violence, knowing pop culture references and comic book in-jokes. That does not just work as a description of Deadpool the film; it can also work as a description of the comic book franchise upon which it is based.

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's The Island of Dr Moreau (2014)

In the mid-1990s cult director Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devils) went to Hollywood with a dream of making a stylish film adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The Island of Dr Moreau. That dream was pretty much shattered immediately, and the resulting film - ultimately directed by Hollywood career helmer John Frankenheimer - went down as one of the most unpopular and critically derided films of 1996.

Lost Soul, a 2014 documentary by David Gregory, recounts the troubled development and production of The Island of Dr Moreau, interviewing key members of the film's cast and crew and putting together the most comprehensive account available on precisely what happened to the film and what occurred to make such a promising project crash and burn in such a spectacular fashion. It is not the best documentary of its kind - that remains Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's spectacular Lost in La Mancha - but it is a fascinating and regularly entertaining account of one of modern Hollywood's most legendarily disastrous movie shoots.

Top 10 films of 2016

This is a top 10 list with a pretty big caveat. I simply do not get the time to go to the cinema with anywhere near the kind of frequency with which I used to manage. In total I have managed to see just 27 films first released in 2016, and that really is not any kind of list from which to assemble a legitimate top 10. That said, the 10 I enjoyed the most are all films that I would enthusiastically recommend to others. My recommendation is to view this not as a proper "Top 10" - there are almost certainly films I have not yet seen that would supplant others on this list - but simply as a list of 10 films released last year that I think are well worth viewing.

The list got delayed by about a week because I took a while to successfully see Moana, and given my opinions on other Walt Disney animated features, it seemed a likely bet for a top 10 slot. Let's count them down from #10 to #1, and see if it made the list.

This is the End (2013)

A group of narcissistic actors get together for a raucous party - only for the world to end at the same time. Trapped inside James Franco's Hollywood mansion, they must contend with a post-apocalyptic world of fire and demons while not turning upon one another at the same time.

This is the End, directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, feels like a genuinely inventive Hollywood comedy. It takes the assembled cast of a whole generation of recent comedies, including Rogen, Franco, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, and others, and gets them to play ridiculous parodies of themselves in a disastrous situation. On the one level it's the ultimate in 'inside baseball' comedies, since so much of the humour depends on familiarity with the various and actors and their films. On the other it's a really fresh idea that is played out to wonderful extremes.

Obviously comedy is particularly subjective, and if you do not enjoy the sorts of comedy films usually produced by the likes of Franco, Rogen or McBride you are unlikely to see much appeal here. If you're a fan, however, this is absolutely one of their best works.

Heartbeat Detector (2007)

Simon Kessler (Mathieu Almaric) is a workplace psychologist working in Paris for a German corporation. One day he is approached by the company's vice-president with a problem: the CEO, Mathias Jüst (Michael Lonsdale), has been behaving erratically. He sits in his company car listening to music instead of coming into the office. He goes off in strange trails of thought. He has been caught quietly sobbing at his desk. When Kessler begins to investigate Jüst, he also winds up discovering more than he expected about the company for which he works - and its appalling past.

Heartbeat Detector is a 2007 French drama with an extraordinary sense of menace and atmosphere but also a central accusation with which it is almost impossible to fully engage. At the least, however, it is a powerful and provocative work with strong performances and a nicely ambivalent screenplay. The central performance by Mathieu Almaric alone is worth the price of admission. On the other hand if you are easily triggered by imagery from or discussion of the Holocaust, it's best turning away now.

Moana (2016)

Moana Waialiki is the young heir to the Polynesian island of Motonui. When a spreading sickness begins to affect the island, she sets off alone on a quest to find the demi-god Maui and force him to return a stolen gemstone to the island goddess Te Fiti. It is a perilous quest, packed with dangers including an army of coconut warriors, an avaricious giant crab, and the fearsome lava demon Te Ka.

The Walt Disney Animation Studios owe a hell of a lot to Ron Clements and John Musker, the directors who arguably more than any others came to define the tone and style of the studio's feature film output from the mid-1980s. Their directorial debut The Great Mouse Detective was something of a warm-up, but with their second feature The Little Mermaid they knocked Disney's animated films into a commercial and critical stratosphere. The film kicked off what is widely referred to as 'the Disney Renaissance', an unparalleled string of high quality and hugely successful films that ran from The Little Mermaid in 1989 through to Tarzan in 1999. During that period Clements and Musker also directed Aladdin and Hercules, and subsequently they also delivered the underrated Treasure Planet and the excellent The Princess and the Frog. To a large extent Moana may be seen as the culmination of their directorial careers.

The Fog (1980)

Just as the Californian town of Antonio Bay prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary a supernatural fog envelops the town, bringing with it the ghosts of those murdered a century ago by Antonio Bay's founders. The ghosts are out for revenge: their murderers are long dead, but it seems their descendants will do just as well.

The Fog is a 1980 horror film directed by John Carpenter from a script by Carpenter and producer Debra Hill. It was Carpenter's first film following the release of his successful and groundbreaking slasher movie Halloween. While The Fog is also a horror movie, it is made in a distinctly different style. It is a much more old-fashioned, gothic sort of film. While far from Carpenter at his best, it nonetheless has a modest sort of charm to it. At 89 minutes including credits it is a pretty breezy watch, and has enough scares and clever ideas to sustain its fairly short running time.

Bill (2014)

Bill Shakespeare (Matthew Boynton) is an unsuccessful musician in 16th century England who decides to travel to London and try his hand at playwriting. His arrival coincides with a secret operation by King Philip II of Spain (Ben Willbond) to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I (Helen McCrory) during a special peace summit. Will Bill uncover the plot in time to save the Queen and his career?

Pretty much the best sketch comedy series of the past 15 to 20 years has been, somewhat surprisingly, the BBC's children's series Horrible Histories. Based on the hugely popular non-fiction books by Terry Deary, the series featured a stunning ensemble cast of actors: Boynton, Willbond, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard. The cast remained with the series for five seasons before quitting together to develop other comedy projects, including the fantasy comedy Yonderland and this Shakespeare-centric period satire.

The Majestic (2001)

Screenwriter Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey) is a up-and-coming Hollywood screenwriter in 1951. His first film is in cinemas and his second is on the cusp of going into production. When he is named in an anti-communist Congressional investigation, he is immediately disgraced and blacklisted. Drunkenly driving into a storm on night he crashes his car and wakes up on a beach with near-total amnesia. In the small town of Lawson he is immediately adopted by cinema owner Harry Trimble (Martin Landau) - who mistakenly believes Peter to be his son Luke, last seen missing in action during World War II.

The Majestic is director Frank Darabont's heartfelt ode to old-time Hollywood cinema. Channeling his best Frank Capra, he presents an uplifting and deliberately sentimental slice of Americana: the patriotism of World War II, the paranoia of the Red Scares, and the unifying, healing power of Hollywood movies to cure all ills and bring all people together. I suspect how one responds to the film depends on their threshold for that sentimentality. If you like to wallow in these kinds of cloyingly sweet romantic and family-based dramas, then The Majestic is a pretty entertaining movie. If the merest hint of sweetness turns your nose up, then this movie is going to stink like a garbage heap. As for me, I think my feelings are somewhere in the middle: The Majestic has a lot of good material in it, but it's a hell of a mess.

Lockout (2012)

In 2079 the United States government has successfully launched MS One, a massive top security prison built inside an orbiting space station. When the President's daughter Emilie (Maggie Grace) arrives on a humanitarian mission, a catastrophic failure sees the prisoners released and Emilie and her co-workers taken hostage. In a last-ditch attempt to save her life, disgraced CIA agent Snow (Guy Pearce) is dispatched as a one-man army to rescue her before she is killed.

Or, in other words, Escape from New York in Space. That is not simply me claiming there's a similarity: Escape writer/director John Carpenter successfully sued Lockout's writer/producer Luc Besson for plagiarism in a French court. It should be noted that not only does Lockout steal Escape's premise, it does a vastly inferior job of it. This is a ridiculously stupid movie, featuring bad science, a bucket-load of cliches, and a protagonist who communicates not via dialogue so much as random catty lines and witty quips. It is by most sensible standards a fairly terrible film. It is also, if I am to be completely honest, a fairly hilarious one. Sometimes a bad B-movie is just the ticket, and in this case the ticket is pretty entertaining.

The Merry Gentleman (2009)

Kate (Kelly Macdonald) flees from her abusive husband to a new life in Chicago, only to witness a murderer on the roof across from her workplace. Soon afterwards she meets Frank (Michael Keaton), a withdrawn and secretive tailor, not knowing that he is the killer that she saw.

The Merry Gentleman is a small and slightly unusual drama about a brief and precarious friendship between a wounded woman trying to form a new life and a tired hit man edging towards ending his own. It also marks the directorial debut of Michael Keaton, who stepped in after the film's original director (and screenwriter) Ron Lazeretti suffered a ruptured appendix shortly before production commenced. Even disregarding the last-minute circumstances in which Keaton took the reins, it remains an assured and confident piece of work.

Sadly the film's own merits got overlooked by mainstream audiences, with this $5 million dollar production grossing just north of $300,000 in American cinemas. It was also subsequently overshadowed by a spurious lawsuit launched by the film's producers against Keaton, claiming he did not do enough in terms of directing and promoting to guarantee the film's success. That is all a terrible shame, because The Merry Gentleman is a rock-solid small-scale drama that deserved a lot more attention and success than it received.