MikePadgett.com

• Director: Paul Haggis
• United States, 2004
• 

Paul Haggis is one of those people who was obviously born to make movies. Already a decorated screenwriter of note, his mainstream directorial debut landed Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Editing at the Oscars.

Choosing Los Angeles to tell a series of interrelated stories (see also: Magnolia, Short Cuts), Haggis’ defining theme is the cause and effect of racial prejudice.

Some characters and their stories are less effective than others: Chris Bridges’ Anthony is rather too glib, Brendan Fraser’s Rick Cabot is simply there to glue a couple of stories together and his wife (Sandra Bullock) leaves it very late to make a useful contribution to the narrative. On the whole though, Crash is an emotionally powerful ensemble drama and hopefully a precedent for Paul Haggis as a director.

• Director: Stephen Frears
• United Kingdom, 2006
• 

If before seeing The Queen you caught the two-part television drama Elizabeth I, then you probably admired Helen Mirren’s preface to her glorious turn as our current monarch.

The Queen paints an intimate portrait of Elizabeth II during the aftermath of Diana’s death in 1997. Any portrayal of the private activities of the Royal Family is mere conjecture, of course, but there’s something direct and sympathetic about Mirren’s stoical, wise and occasionally vulnerable figure. It’s a performance well deserving of a 2007 Oscar and the same might be said of Michael Sheen’s Tony Blair, which wasn’t nominated.

Even if its audience disdains the monarchy or our present joke of a government, The Queen somehow manages to transcend all that and deliver something truly sympathetic and humanistic in its characters.

• Director: Martin Scorsese
• United States, 2006
• 

Scorsese has finally won a Best Director Oscar for The Departed. What a shame he didn’t win for one of his earlier and better efforts, because this one just doesn’t compare.

Look past Michael Ballhaus’ superb cinematography and Scorsese’s rich scenemaking and the big problem is the generation gap. The elders in support - Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Ray Winstone - are excellent; it’s the youthful leads that don’t cut it: Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg. And sadly the movie is all about them.

Wahlberg is foulmouthed but irrelevant and Damon is one-dimensional (Will Hunting being a much better Southie specimen), but I’m still sitting on the fence about Di Caprio. His performances exhibit occasional flashes of magnificence, but there’s still something of that awkward youth in him and The Departed is supposed to be a movie for grown-ups.

• Director: Joel Coen
• United States, 1996
• 

Despite the Coen Brothers’ claim as the movie opens, Fargo is not a true story. That’s just as well, because this savage, bleak and ugly little tale is surely far too clever, funny and heartwarming to be true.

Jerry Lundergaard (William H Macy) can’t keep his debts secret for much longer, so he arranges to have his wife kidnapped and returned for a ransom paid by his father-in-law, which he intends to split with the kidnappers. Unfortunately, the plan goes horribly wrong and police officer Marge Gunderson (an Oscar-winning Frances McDormand) steadily tracks down the culprits.

For me, this movie is the Coens’ best to date. Their scripts are often sharp (another Oscar here), the direction is usually tight and the acting is always good, but on Fargo it all dovetails nicely.

• Director: Sam Mendes
• United States, 1999
• 

In a year of superb films, American Beauty was one of the very best of 1999: the auspicious film début of Donmar Warehouse director Sam Mendes, the consolidation of Kevin Spacey’s position as a distinguished lead actor and a reminder that Hollywood could still turn out very great movies.

Still surprising today are the potentially massive difficulties of representing the material and how screenwriter Alan Ball and subsequently the company of filmmakers and actors overcame it. After all, it’s got paedophilia, voyeurism, out-in-the-open homosexuality and drug use.

Somehow they’ve managed to take all of these elements, place them carefully in front of a backdrop describing the bitter loneliness of a suburban existence and create a sad, funny and emotionally involving picture.

• Director: Stephen Gaghan
• United States, 2005
• 

Syriana is a literate and highly engaging story of cause and effect in the global oil industry. It has a self-propelling pace similar to the one that moved Michael Mann’s The Insider.

Clooney here is magnetic in his downbeat role as the ex-CIA agent Bob Barnes, whose life has been spent in the perpetual twilight of serving his country’s interests in the Middle East and now struggles with changes he can no longer control. Barnes’ story is one of several, the others being connected directly to the oil business, but each influencing the others.

Syriana is a portentous statement that’s already strikingly relevant given the Western foreign policy of our current era, but the film’s wider message should spread well beyond that.

The composer Ennio Morricone is not just a hero of cinema, he’s also a hero of mine.

I can’t remember how I made the discovery that he’d be conducting the Rome Symphony Orchestra at the Hammersmith Apollo this weekend, but I do appreciate how lucky I am to have learned of this rare event, given that it was mostly down to a cancellation back in July.

More after the jump…

• Director: James Mangold
• United States, 2005
• 

Mangold has coaxed out an Oscar®-worthy acting performance before. Angelina Jolie won Best Supporting Actress for Girl, Interrupted in 1999. But just as then, I felt that the splendid cast in Walk the Line papered over dull cinematography.

Johnny Cash lived a rollercoaster life. The performer overcame a difficult childhood to attain star status, before falling prey to drug and alcohol addiction more than once. His enduring fame was secured by his popular and often pioneering work as a musician. The film, however, tends to focus on the personal - and obviously more dramatic - aspects of Cash’s life.

Mangold’s images were only occasionally memorable. Fortunately the accounts given by leads Phoenix and Witherspoon balanced the books, perhaps heralding the newfound maturity of this particular generation of actors.

• Director: Pedro Almodóvar
• Spain, 1988
• 

This is a decorated film - five Goyas and an Oscar nomination - and an international breakthrough for the director, but it didn’t sit too well with me.

Almodóvar’s screwball comedy cocktail has all of the lurid colour but lacks the bitter edge that adds bite to his more emotive works. After a promising start, the pace suddenly feels rather rushed, with too much plot crammed into 90 minutes.

Nevertheless, there are some outstanding features. When protagonist Pepa, a dubbing actor, shows up at work she must dub Joan Crawford in the key scene in Johnny Guitar, her deserting lover (and colleague) having already done the Sterling Hayden part. It’s a rare soulful moment, masterfully delivered by Carmen Maura leading another solid cast: Banderas would make a great post-pubescent, oversexed Adrian Mole and Julieta Serrano is delightfully insane as Lucía.