MikePadgett.com

• Director: Robert De Niro
• United States, 2006
• 

Matt Damon’s got a tough job here. On the one hand he needs to play the absolute stoic, for whom life-changing decisions are met wordlessly with little more than a glassy stare. On the other, he needs us to empathise with him as his personal life falls apart because he puts his country first.

Damon’s a pretty capable stoic, even if he’s pretty doubtful at everything else. His Tom Ripley was unfathomable, inscrutable. His Will Hunting was frustratingly brittle. And he’s got great support on paper: John Turturro (a wonderfully understated turn), Angelina Jolie (unforgivably miscast in a skeletal role), Michael Gambon, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt. Even Joe Pesci pops up briefly to lend a hand.

Trouble is, it doesn’t quite work. Though The Good Shepherd is a period piece, second time director De Niro can’t rely on nostalgia to warm our cockles as he did in A Bronx Tale. As a facsimile Cold War political thriller, it’s agreeably chilly, but the human story that acts as power generator struggles to get going and we’re left freezing outside.

• Director: John Frankenheimer
• United States, 1998
• 

Ronin is the sort of movie whose mere suggestion would provoke a Pavlov’s Dog reaction amongst most serious moviegoers. Beautifully shot on location in Paris and France Sud and featuring a multinational cast, it was a juicy prospect on its release. But while John Frankenheimer’s direction captures that certain je ne sais quoi of Gallic style and dazzles us with dizzying car chase camerawork, the film feels peculiarly empty.

Frankenheimer was a trailblazer whose career spanned fifty years before his death in 2002. His treatment of action sequences was renowned and in Ronin, a twisting tale of the twilight world shared by mercenary ex-spies, action is everything.

But it could have been so much more. The mix of talent on display here is exciting as it is eclectic: Sean Bean, Natasha McElhone, Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgård, Jonathan Pryce. De Niro and Reno rub along nicely together but occupy too much screen time, Bean is edgy and authentic but underused, McElhone simmers but is never allowed to boil and Pryce and Skarsgård have to disguise their scant and unappealing dialogue with impeccable accents.

• Director: Martin Brest
• United States, 1988
• 

This is a buddy-road movie, but it’s sharp enough and clever enough to outrun just about all of the chasers in what is a horribly overpopulated subgenre.

Bounty hunter ex-cop De Niro has to deliver mob accountant Grodin to the bailbondsman within five days to pick up an hundred thousand dollars and thereby fulfill his slightly dubious dream of opening a coffee shop, but the FBI wants the accountant as a witness and the mob wants him dead. When you can summarise a movie as easily as that, you know it’s got to be pretty straightforward.

There are some charming moments along the way though and these are what lift Midnight Run out of the pit of mediocrity: the bounty hunter’s reunion with his ex-wife and daughter after nine years because he’s strapped for cash is wonderfully played.

• Director: Martin Scorsese
• United States, 1983
• 

Along with After Hours, The King of Comedy is one of Scorsese’s ‘forgotten movies’ and it’s his lowest grosser. That status alone adds a certain piquancy to what is certainly a unique and shadowy addition to the Scorsese oeuvre.

Robert De Niro plays Rupert Pupkin, a severely deluded but ostensibly harmless nut who’s desperate to hit the big time as a guest comedian on the talk show of his idol Jerry Langford, played with superb restraint by Jerry Lewis.

The King of Comedy is like those shrunken heads in the Pitt Rivers Museum: your curiosity draws you in, but the thing itself is toothless. Not funny enough for a comedy, not dark enough for a psycho-thriller - it’s precisely this imbalance that gives the movie its uneasy charm.

• Director: Martin Scorsese
• United States, 1973
• 

It’s only his third feature film, yet Mean Streets is a surprisingly mature work from Scorsese. The machine gun dialogue, the inquisitive camera, the guilt and redemption themes: it’s all there.

As with the first time I saw it years ago, I couldn’t shake off a subtle sense of the comical about the film and Scorsese certainly hasn’t pursued that side of things over the years, except perhaps in The King of Comedy (1983). The fight scene in the pool hall is golden.

And you’ll never see De Niro as animated as in Mean Streets. The youthful electricity prickling him here is extraordinary.