MikePadgett.com

• 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: Michael Curtiz
• United States, 1942
• 

Casablanca needs no introduction, except maybe the first few bars of As Time Goes By. It’s a masterfully told, elliptical yarn about a difficult period and after so many decades, it’s too easy to overlook the fact that it was contemporary to those times.

Bogart’s world weary ex-pat Rick Blaine runs an upmarket club frequented by a microcosm of affluent refugees, shysters and officials. A past lover who jilted Rick in Paris arrives with her Resistance leader husband of whom Rick was hitherto unaware. Should Rick help them escape Europe or try to regain her love and elope?

A relatively small cast ensures that character development is evenly spread and the plotting is detailed without being overly elaborate. Every aspect of the production is consistently excellent. As such, we can think of Casablanca as a self-contained capsule of cinematic perfection whose longevity has stretched far beyond the era of propaganda movies.