The Artist

What a magnificent film this is. The savviest, most elegant celebration of old-school cinema since Singin' In The Rain, it is also an impeccable fable about the transience of fame and fashion, harking back to the darker likes of All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard. Most impressively, the film is in dazzling black-and-white and (until the final scene) wordless.

Jean Dujardin is quite exceptional as George Valentin, the silent cinema star whose popularity wanes as sound arrives. A far cry from the histrionic "mugging" typical of silent films, Dujardin's performance is a masterclass in restraint, subtlety and fragile charm. Look at his face when he overhears starlet Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), in an interview, call for the silent stars to make way for newer, fresher faces: it begins with a sort of dazed dignity, then he hunches into his food, and then he can't help but confront her; look again as he loiters at the back of the room, head bowed, during the auction of all his possessions, perhaps the most poignant scene in the film. There is another wonderful moment where he bumps into Peppy on a studio stairwell: his smile, that matinée idol smile under the Clark Gable moustache, becomes a frail, parodic, half-rictus mask. Dujardin is compelling throughout the film (he can even dance), but he is particularly brilliant in the early, more inhibited stages of his internal collapse.

Bejo is perky and endearing, if slightly idealised, as George's protegée-cum-guardian angel. There's a fun early scene, a bit like the one in Singin' In The Rain when the microphones don't work, where the chemistry between George and Peppy ruins take after take. But she remains unwaveringly grateful to George, even once he has become a Miss Havisham-esque recluse surrounded by his former glories and nearly sets fire to himself. As much as anything else, this is a film about loyalty, which George commands not just from Peppy, but also from his driver Clifton (James Cromwell) and his lovely dog. The moment George tries to kill himself, with his dog howling at him not to, is heartbreaking, and a powerful throwback to the end of neorealist classic Umberto D., where Flike stops his master from standing in front of a train.

Before The Artist, Dujardin and director Michel Hazanavicius were best known for spy spoof series OSS 117, the French, even less funny equivalent of Johnny English. But they are now responsible for one of the most delightful, stylish and brave films in recent memory, and the best, warmest film about the cinema since Truffaut's La nuit américaine. It is not perfect: there are too many scenes with the dog (as sweet as he is), the gun joke is overflogged, the very early scenes are too hammy, and I know it was a cameo, but Malcolm McDowell could have been used more (the presence of McDowell, a sort of seventies George Valentin who went from Kubrickian iconoclast to B-movie trundler, is one of the film's many ironies). However, it is such an astonishing achievement, a modern-day cultural Fitzcarraldo, to make a black-and-white, silent film in 2011 as contemporary, funny and entrancing as this.

The Deep Blue Sea

Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea is a gouache of a film, with a watery visual pallette more powerful than its performances, which often bloat and sag. An adapatation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play, it follows Rachel Weisz' Hester, a melancholy judge's wife whose suicide attempt frames the film (Mr Clarkson will be pleased to hear she does it in the privacy of her own flat, well away from the Circle Line). Her attempt is unsuccessful, almost pathetically so, and the film goes on to colour in the act's motives and its immediate aftermath.

The two men in her life are diametric opposites. Hester's husband Sir William (Simon Russell Beale) is well-meaning and dull, a titan of his profession but an emotional titmouse, although, like Chekhov's Dr Dymov, his solidity is an increasingly reassuring lighthouse in a sea of troubles. The third in the triangle is Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), a roistering young Battle of Britain-survivor whose ale-swilling, golfclub-swirling insouciance doesn't hide the boyish temper and war-addled self-caricaturing.

This is Terence Davies' first fictional film since The House of Mirth (2000) and, regrettably, it already feels dated. Obviously it's a period piece and Tom Hiddleston's affected terms of endearment ('old fruit' etc) are excusable as a society-prescribed mask for a deeper void (just as the way the Made in Chelsea lot talk to each other will feel horribly of-its-time in fifty years). But the scenes between Hiddleston and Weisz, two eminently subtle actors, feel too stagey, even for a relationship which is self-consciously melodramatic, and there's far too much shouting, to the point that it often becomes comical (on one occasion in a gallery, this is intentional - "Where are you going?" "TO THE IMPRESSIONISTS!")

Simon Russell Beale, on the other hand, is a marvel. The boring cuckold is never an easy part to play, and even less easy to make sympathetic (my own portrayal of The Husband in the Trinity Players' 2007 production of Lorca's Blood Wedding is a particular nadir), but Russell Beale is somehow simultaneously sweet, tragic, irritating, emasculated, dignified and overly mothered. Ironically, the only scene with all three actors is a mismatch between Hiddleston's shouty faux-menace and Russell Beale's heartbreaking stoicism. This is such a shame, as I love Tom Hiddleston and he is so good in Joanna Hogg's two films, and he's not even bad in this. But there's neither the dangerous swagger nor the tortured vulnerability he displays in Unrelated and Archipelago respectively, and he could have done considerably more here by doing less. Rachel Weisz, who I think is in every scene, is fine, but it is difficult to pity her character (apart from a superb showdown with her mother-in-law) when she has such confused notions of love and tries to kill herself because her birthday was forgotten (compared to heroic landlady Mrs Elton, for whom love is "wiping someone's arse and changing the sheets when they wet the bed").

The film looks beautiful, like all Davies' work. It is sometimes a little too stately for its own good and the pacing is slow, often to the point of stagnation (Hester and Freddie feeling sorry for themselves; all that bloody singing in the pub). But at other points, it is mesmerising (the first time we see Freddie, for instance). The finest scene in the whole film, a long-take flashback sequence to Aldwych tube station during an air raid, is vintage Davies, the Davies of Distant Voices, Still Lives, and a two-minute sonata to the spirit of the Blitz: it made me cry, but it also made me sad that it was like a scene from the film The Deep Blue Sea could have been, one with a present tense. Instead, it is, to borrow Hemingway's critique of the Waterloo sequence in Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, a wonderful, accidental piece in a film that has much dullness.

This is a fickle, frustrating film, one that has pools of greatness but ultimately drowns in its own plodding earnestness. It is surprising that the marriage of these two Terence's, both poets of the repressed, isn't more harmonious.

Midnight in Paris

My love affair with Woody Allen started in France. I was working and living in a school in Lyon, and happened across a whole shelf of his films in a municipal library (in France, slightly confusingly, films are ordered by director rather than title). The "early, funny" likes of Sleeper and Bananas are a bit zany for me, but there are eight works that have dated particularly well: Love and Death (1975) is a glorious, visually ravishing double-parody of Russian literature and stark Scandinavian cinema; Annie Hall (1977) is the Ulysses of romantic comedy; Manhattan (1979) is a strange, artful, fraught poem about New York with one of the most moving break-up scenes of all time; Stardust Memories (1980) is a Fellini-esque disquisition on the beauty and hypocrisy of cinema; Hannah and her Sisters (1984) is a terrific ensemble dramedy lifted by a Richard Yatesian understanding of womanhood; Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) is an operatic, Schubert-infused anti-parable in which the purest comedy and the purest tragedy seep into each other, and is probably the best film he's made; Husbands and Wives (1992), which he made during his much-publicised split from Mia Farrow, is a harsh, Cassavetesian, emotionally dense study of middle-aged stasis and the temptations that surround it; and Sweet and Lowdown (1999) is a masterful ballad about male solitude, featuring a peach of a performance from Sean Penn, and remains Allen's last great film.

Some would say Allen lost his magic touch before then, some would say he re-discovered it with Match Point or Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Both are perfectly decent films, neither as dire nor as triumphant as most critics claimed. Some of the English characters' dialogue in Match Point is woefully, laughably off-the-mark, and much of Vicky Cristina Barcelona is left in the oven a little too long (it still baffles me that Penelope Cruz' performance was more acclaimed than Rebecca Hall's). But as critical doyen Peter Bradshaw once observed, Woody Allen's recent films only disappoint if you compare them to other Woody Allen films: compared to contemporary romantic thrillers or dramas, they actually stand up rather well.

And so to Midnight in Paris. Owen Wilson plays a very successful Hollywood scriptwriter who visits Paris with his fiancée, Rachel McAdams, in the hope the city will enrich the novel he is attempting to write. While she flirts with bearded Francophile know-it-all Michael Sheen, Wilson wanders the rain-washed streets and, on the stroke of midnight one evening, catches a chance lift with a group of dapper revellers. All of a sudden, he is transported to the literary jetset of the Twenties and is soon swilling champagne with F. Scott Fitzgerald, receiving life advice from Hemingway, and hobnobbing with Picasso, Dali, Bunuel, Gertrude Stein and a rather sexy muse, played by Marion Cotillard. She and Wilson are kindred nostalgic spirits, and she more than anyone tempts him away from his life in the present day.

It is a sweet, optimistic, surprisingly sensible film. The present-day scenes, perhaps deliberately, are a tad stale: McAdams has a damp squib of a part, her parents are awful, and Michael Sheen's smart alec isn't as funny as he should be (Wilson's intellectual victory over Sheen in front of the Picasso is disappointingly predictable). However, as soon as we go back in time, the film finds its rhythm. In the same way the film begins with an overlong postcard slideshow of Paris (a simpler, less ironic companion to the start of Manhattan), the checklist of obligatory big names does start to irk after a while ('Oh look, there's Luis'; 'We're going to Gertrude's house'). But who cares? They're great company, especially Tom Hiddleston's classy, gregarious Scott Fitzgerald and Kathy Bates' spikily supportive Gertrude Stein, although Corey Stoll's Hemingway steals the show. He is a revelation, a bruisingly charismatic purveyor of crystalline wisdom, addled with booze and political ideals. He speaks as he writes: terse, forceful, more affected than he lets on.

My favourite scene, and one on which the film unexpectedly twists, is when Owen and Marion go back to the Belle Epoque and meet Degas et al. It is a subtle, beautifully observed defence of the contemporary, ignored by Cotillard but heeded by Wilson. Perhaps we Woody Allen nostalgists should stop pining for the old days and appreciate this late European phase for what it is (given the film's made over $115 million worldwide, perhaps people already do). Midnight in Paris is not a masterpiece, it is not hilarious, and it doesn't break a great deal of ground. But it is very easy viewing, brings to life a fascinating artistic milieu, and offers a cosy, escapist reflection on escapism.

Sheeps

Sheeps: A Sketch Show, Pleasance Courtyard Hut, 11:00pm and 4:45pm

Many critics have noted, and possibly over-intellectualised, the decision taken by certain members of certain sketch groups (including all three Penny Dreadfuls and the bearded one from Pappy’s) to do their own solo shows at Edinburgh this year. Whatever their reasons, the creative spring-clean comes not a moment too soon for some: last year’s Penny Dreadfuls show, in an enormous venue full of guffawing disciples, was a dull, complacent mess. More excitingly, if it means that the wiser and purer likes of Sheeps have more room in the sketch field to flourish, this can only be a very good thing.

There are three Sheeps and they are all former Cambridge Footlights. Alastair Roberts is angular, stern, birdlike, and often the Peter Cook alpha tone-setter. The sketch where he is unable to play the straight man to a wigged, mincing, lisping mad professor (a rare genuinely funny sketch-within-a-sketch) is probably rooted in some sort of rehearsal truth. Daran Johnson is the cheery, boyish, flexible fall-guy and the emotional compass (he corpsed in at least two sketches, which I rather liked). But Liam Williams is the most impressive. He is a terrifyingly good performer: haggard, quiet-eyed and blessed with the soft intensity of a character actor (someone like Gabriel Byrne or Jonathan Pryce), his movement and delivery shimmer with class and certainty, even in the most throwaway lines. About thirty seconds in, he says, “Hello, mate” to Johnson in such an unusual, sweet, patient way that it was probably my favourite moment of the show.

The writing is tremendous. The only sketch that shows at the seams, one that belongs to a far less imaginative student troupe (or Harry and Paul), is the interview with the footballer whose every answer includes ‘at the end of the day’. But the rest are fluent, original, varied, and crammed with subtle delights. They also come very quickly: the three run between sketches like Twenty20 cricketers running between overs. They frame the show neatly too, beginning with a selection of ‘deleted scenes’ (which included a worryingly convincing medley of cod-Oliver! songs) and finishing with a brilliantly blocked ‘highlights reel’.

This is the very best kind of sketch comedy: wry, effervescent, rich, self-aware, impeccably performed and oddly moving. Please go and see it.

Tom Rosenthal

Child of Privilege, Pleasance Courtyard Attic, 9:30pm

What a crafty, inventive and playful debut solo this is. Tom Rosenthal has transposed the Powerpoint-propelled pseudo-pomp of Jonny Sweet to a concept piece (loosely) about privilege where the audience is divided on arrival: those who end up on the right side of the venue are treated to cushions, programmes and Ferrero Rochers, those on the left get bits of old newspaper and (briefly) the company of a tramp.

The revelation of the piece is Tom's butler Leonard. He greets the audience at the door and shows them to their seats (both funny and practical, unlike poor Ahir Shah, who had to restart his show at the Wee Coo four times due to latecomers). Leonard then assists Tom throughout - it was he, Tom tells us, that put together the Powerpoint presentation ('I took an online course') - before the tables are appropriately turned. It is a lovely tragicomic performance: pained, understated, and a perfect foil to Tom’s exuberance.

The technical fireworks aside, I wonder if some bits are stronger than others. The stuff about his famous dad Jim (ITV Sport legend) is illuminating and self-aware, and there's a very smart sequence about philosophical logic, but the vague digs at Simon Bird (his co-star in Channel 4 sitcom Friday Night Dinner, a show that managed to be so much less than the sum of its parts - salt in the water, oh no!) weren't quite funny enough to avoid the whiff of a lazy showbiz in-joke, and does the self-consciously Stewart Lee self-consciousness add anything to the set? It is increasingly fashionable to knock Lee, the much-imitated Cervantes of stand-up who is slowly turning into the Don Quixote of stand-up in grouchy middle-age, but it’s the sort of gimmick to which a comic as gifted as Tom doesn't need to resort. Then again, the Lee-baiting is part of the entitled, self-promoting persona with a thirst for awards (when asked by Leonard what he would like to drink, Tom requests 'a Perrier. Or a Fosters'), so one shouldn't be too hard on the lad. He also dealt extremely well with a drunk boor in the front row, who, angry at being refused a Ferrero Rocher, gave his name as Chav and parped tedious wisecracks throughout.

To conclude, this is cracking stuff from a hugely likeable act who is, as expected, much better than the TV show for which he is best known (I was surprised that the average age of the audience was as high as it was - no bad thing at all, but it suggests FND wasn't aimed at me). Leonard the butler is worth the entrance fee alone, but the odd provocative urge aside, Child of Privilege is a mischievous, sparkling and remarkably assured debut hour. Fosters?

James Acaster

Amongst Other Things, Pleasance Courtyard Below, 9:45pm

James Acaster is an endearing, unpredictable, quietly audacious young man who combines understated physical comedy with gentle absurdism. He has a blonde mop, a slender, perpendicular frame conducted by wiry, expressive hands, and a soft, slightly nasal Northamptonshire accent. He holds the microphone by the bottom with two pinched fingers as if it were a drawing pin and does a funny thing with his eyebrows, a suggestive, old-fashioned, Eric Idle-style double-raise that makes me laugh every time.

 
He has a lovely sense of rhythm and control, bold enough to slow the tempo right down, to dwell on the consciously banal, and to lower his voice to a half-whisper (there are two tantalising moments within the set where he makes no noise at all for at least two minutes). He is also a dab hand with an audience. He struck gold our night with a gentleman who turned out to be an old university friend of his dad's, and later with two laddish locals, catching one falling asleep twenty minutes in and cajoling the other into re-enacting a tandem sky-dive. Very occasionally, his callback-putdowns might be too clever and faint for their own good (possibly me being slow, but a couple of references seemed to go astray with our sleepy 9:45pm mid-first-week crowd). But this knack at locating fun punters seems to come instinctively and will only improve (about a month ago, for what it's worth, I saw Acaster compère a comedy evening in front of a much larger, rather lethargic and begrudging Shepherd's Bush audience and he was equally impressive, this time happening across a man who drew shoes for a living and changed seats after both intervals: Acaster found him both times).

The subject matter in this, his first solo show, is ingeniously off-beat - the psychology behind the act of 'hiding'; different types of doughnuts and the reactions they elicit; dating as a bouncy castle – and it is handled with warmth and eloquence. The final ten minutes, about a teddy bear called Willoughby that James' mum knitted when he left home, is one of the sweetest, bravest codas I've seen in an Edinburgh show (curiously, both Acaster and Alex Horne feature teddies sitting behind microphones, though Horne's panda moves and talks while Willoughby very much doesn't).

This is a joy: a clever, fresh, acute and deceptively dangerous debut that picks up on every tiny ambiguity, awkwardness or nervous lilt in the audience members he picks on. The show probably deserves a Best Newcomer nomination, but more importantly, this heralds the arrival of perhaps the subtlest figure in the new, post-Key wave.

The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick is the epic poet of American cinema. His first film, Badlands (1973), is a work of senseless beauty, a rich, aloof parable of crime, youth and solipsism. His second, Days of Heaven (1978), is a pastoral, crop-crackling, dusk-buttered ode to landscape, toil in the fields and family, as if painted by Jules Breton and written by Steinbeck. His third, released a casual twenty-one years after his second, is The Thin Red Line (1999), a strange, philosophical, Homeric, aesthetically radical requiem to masculinity, memory, loss and friendship. It is, after Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, perhaps the finest war film ever made (though it suffered for being released the same month as Saving Private Ryan). His fourth, The New World (2005), is a handsome, marvellously understated colonial allegory, which meshes the tentative palliative femininity of Days of Heaven with The Thin Red Line’s battle-hardened, soulful men without women.

The Tree of Life, for which Malick won (but, rather satisfyingly, refused to collect) this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, is his fifth film and combines elements of the previous four – the lyricism; the spiritual self-interrogation; the tensions between man and nature – yet it stands out, already, within the director’s canon. Sean Penn is a wealthy architect called Jack who, between meetings, remembers his childhood and, in particular, his relationship with his father (Brad Pitt) and the death of his brother R.L. His early life parallels the evolution of the universe, of which we get fleeting, heady glimpses throughout, before an ambiguous, Tarkovskian finale where people paddle about on the beach and you can’t be sure of anything.

It is Malick’s most ambitious film so far, and also his riskiest. It can seem, at times, like two very different films spliced together, an elegant, emotionally desiccated fifties family drama, with the occasional celestial interlude courtesy of Sir Patrick Moore. But it works rather well. Indeed, the cosmic landscapes are amongst the most extraordinary images I’ve seen in a cinema (though the scene with the dinosaurs is less convincing).

Brad Pitt is wonderful as the overbearing, Brahms-loving, Old Testament God of a father figure. At one stage, he asks his middle son at the dinner table to promise to do something for him without asking what it is, expecting the sort of unquestioning obedience God demands of Abraham in Genesis 22. It is an exemplary study in confused masculinity (teaching his boys how to throw a punch one minute; reminding them to give him a goodnight kiss the next) and a fascinating companion performance to his Jesse James: the harsh allure, the weary superstition, the warped paternal instincts, the temper. He is our Paul Newman. The other performances are nicely sketched, with Hunter McCracken particularly impressive as the bruised, callow young Jack.

The film is constellated with Biblical overtones. The prologue comes from The Book of Job, that proto-absurdist masterpiece of cruelty and patience. Pitt orders his sons to look after the garden; Jack is jealous of his younger brother R.L.; even Sean Penn’s skyscraper has echoes of the Tower of Babel. Throughout the film, this synthesis of the Christian and the scientific is a surprisingly harmonious one. Is the film as lovely to look at his others? Apart from the bits in space, I’m not sure. Emmanuel Y Tu Mamá También Lubezki (yes, he did The New World too, well done) is a fine cinematographer, but those jittery, hyper-Robert Bresson close-ups are slightly wearying.

To conclude, this film is a nebula, a dust cloud of contemplation, fear, love, anger, nature, humanity, time and space that is simultaneously troubling and full of hope. It is a long, treacherous piece and it’s very difficult to navigate, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in an Emperor’s New Clothes, Last Year in Marienbad, oh-for-fuck’s-sake sort of way (two couples walked out during our screening, but then we were in the Kingston Rotunda). Nevertheless, its unapologetic grandeur, its infinite poetry and its detached, difficult characters, amongst much else, restore one’s faith in American cinema.