Welcome To Marwen: The figure picture

Like many children of the '80s, my life was nudged in a specific direction by Bob Zemeckis and his little film about the boy whose mum tried to fuck him in the past. Zemeckis channelled 1.21 gigawatts of power into my interest in cinema, and I repaid him by watching everything else he made, up to and including Beowulf. But his forays into motion capture left me as cold as CG Tom Hanks' dead doll's eyes, and forgive me father, for I have forsaken Bob this past decade; not one of his post-2007 films have passed mine eyes.

But then along came Welcome To Marwen, with its intriguing blend of motion capture and live action, and its bizarre claim to be based on a true story despite having a trailer full of scenes that appeared to be from a spectacularly violent, war-movie version of Toy Story, and like Doc Brown I figured: what the hell.

Steve Carell engages Serious Steve Mode for his role as Mark Hogancamp, a lonely and apparently eccentric man who takes photos of dolls posed in WWII costumes and situations, and who has a thing for women's shoes. Hogancamp's true story was told - reasonably well, by all accounts (I haven't seen it) - in Marwencol, a 2010 documentary that provided the inspiration for Zemeckis' film. The reasons for Hogancamp's model behaviour are undeniably fascinating and tragic, but the first problem with Welcome To Marwen is that it takes two hours to explain them when they could have been dealt with in a ten-minute prologue. This has two immediate effects: firstly, to summarise the premise here would count as a spoiler for the whole film; secondly, Zemeckis needs to pad out the running time somehow. And if there's one thing Hogancamp's story doesn't have that Bob Zemeckis can add, it's a metric fucktonne of motion capture action sequences.

And so about half of Welcome To Marwen consists of those war-movie Toy Story scenes, in which 'Hogie', a heroic GI action figure in 1940s Belgium (who looks suspiciously like Steve Carell) is repeatedly captured by Nazi action figures, then rescued by a collection of sexy female action figures who kill the Nazis in increasingly violent fashion. Hogancamp merely photographed these imagined stories; Zemeckis splashes them on the screen in stunningly-realised fantasy sequences that are undeniably fun to watch, but which add little to the film's emotional core that the photographs don't. In fact these sequences unbalance the story, creating a weird tonal mixture of effects-driven action comedy and weighty drama that is going to be a nightmare to sell to audiences. Here's a film that wants to cover transvestism, Neo-Nazism, hate crime, violence as a solution, substance abuse, PTSD and other assorted mental health issues, but at the same time foregrounds cutting-edge CG action and visual gags. It's certainly not boring, but it is a little uncomfortable.

Carell is fine as Hogancamp (although clearly has an absolute ball as his 1/6th scale alter-ego), and Leslie Mann is wonderful as his near-mythically non-judgemental neighbour Nicol, but every other character is a cliché of some kind or other - Gwendoline Christie's Russian carer, for example, is teeth-itchingly ill-advised. Zemeckis' script, co-written with Caroline Thompson, is clunky and obvious at times: a barman drops a lead weight of exposition on a character who is only there to receive that exposition on our behalf, for example, and unnecessary narrative devices are crowbarred in to ramp up dramatic tension. Good Characters 100% accept Mark for who he is while Bad Characters 100% reject him for being a weirdo, as if the script is terrified of offending anyone with nuance. And Zemeckis can't resist a distractingly meta, extended Back To The Future-referencing gag which made me wonder if he'd lobbed it in after watching Ready Player One.

There's a truly original and inspiring film in here somewhere, but you can't help thinking it's the one that somebody else made eight years ago. Hogancamp deserves to be acknowledged for his art and the events that led him to create it, but he probably didn't deserve to have those events diminished by embellishing them with button-pushing melodrama and a side order of mega-budget kids' holiday filler. Welcome To Marwen isn't a total failure while you're watching it, and if more people look up Mark Hogancamp as a result then all well and good. But I'm fairly sure Bob Zemeckis can do better than this, and I hope it's not another ten years before I can be arsed to find out.

Ten films from 2018 that weren't the best but at least they made me forget about Brexit for a bit

It's end-of-year list time guys, a tradition for which I usually spend 365 days planning (366 in some cases) with feverish anticipation. However, having spent this year continuously adjusting and amending my ranking of all the films I saw in 2018 (which you can find here), I've come to the conclusion that it's very very boring. I stand by my opinion that all the ones at the top end deserve their place in a list of Films I Thought Were Really Very Good, but I've given hardly any of them a second thought since I saw them.

So this year - the latest in a series of years designed to break the human spirit and batter us all into wearily accepting a succession of apocalypses not of our choosing - here's something a bit less worthy. The following are not the films I thought were 2018's best (OK, some of them are), but rather the ones that made me smile, laugh, cry, cry-laugh, go "ooh", "aah", "holy shit" and "wheee!" the most, and which generally reminded me of cinema's power to cheer me the fuck up.

So here, in order of release, are my Ten Films From 2018 That I Will Almost Certainly Watch Several More Times, Probably On A Saturday Night, In My Pants And With A Little Bit Too Much Gin Inside Me!

COCO Tragically all but forgotten in most Best Of 2018 lists due to its release in the year's infancy, Pixar's first original story since 2015 is a kaleidoscope of eye candy, emotional manipulation and narrative rug-pulling. An odyssey through the great beyond stuffed with gags, great songs, intrigue, amusing skeletons and a wonky dog, it deserves an afterlife as long and fun as the one it depicts. And it all takes place within the pre-title sequence of Spectre! Amazing.

BLACK PANTHER I missed the first five minutes of this at the cinema because I had to go outside and complain that the fucking lights were still up, so that put me in a bad mood and I didn't enjoy myself. Pretty sure it was OK though and it's one of those "MCU" things that are all the rage these days so I'll definitely watch it again when Cineworld Enfield eventually send me the Blu-ray as compensation for yet another sub-par cinematic experience.

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR Long, dumb and full of fun: as much as these things are starting to look more and more like Pixar films, and as much as they're increasingly uninterested in what it means to be superhuman (or, indeed, human), I can't help but have a good time with them. It's just a blast to spend time with all these characters, and almost everyone gets a satisfyingly balanced amount of screentime here without it feeling like an exercise in scriptwriting box-ticking. Not sure how worthwhile it is to complain that this one just isn't very clever; I guess all the payoff will be in Endgame.

SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY Smashing into my official Best Of 2018 list at (*checks notes*) number 33, Solo is so hamstrung by the needlessness of its own existence that it fights an uphill battle from the beginning and never feels like it makes much ground in that fight. Alden Ehrenreich has about 3.8% of the personality required to match Harrison Ford, Emilia Clarke is, as always, terrible, Paul Bettany is a limp villain and Bradford Young's cinematography is like watching the film being projected onto the bottom of a puddle. BUT its title contains the words "Star Wars", so fuck you. Yes I am aware that I am part of the problem.

INCREDIBLES 2 In truth the fourteen-year wait has dulled the sheen of this franchise a little (especially as the sequel isn't a giant leap on from the original) but Incredibles 2: 2 Fast 2 Cred makes up for it by boasting the most retina-pleasing Pixar visuals yet, electrifying set-pieces, another swaggering Michael Giacchino score, some canny commentary on parenting and - most crucially - Elastigirl, Pixar's sexiest sprite. I mean what a woman. Those curves... the lycra... the... uh, sorry, excuse me a sec

MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN I can take or leave Cher (sorry Twitter), but for everything else in Mamma Mia 2: 2 Mamma 2 Mia I just throw my hands in the air and surrender to the cheese. Nothing else this year gave my emotions as thorough a workout as this merciless bastard of a film: I did 94% of all my laughing and crying for 2018 in its 113 minutes. All I ask for now is a Godfather cut of both films so I can watch them in chronological order.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT So good of Christopher McQuarrie to personally apologise to me for Rogue Nation by taking action directing to the kind of levels that literally scare off Bond directors. Helped in no small part by Lorne Balfe's occasionally Zimmeresque score, McQuarrie hewed eerily close to Christopher Nolan with this relentless thrillgasm, his shot choices and editing taking this franchise way beyond anything it had ever previously promised. This is an ankle-smashing leap forward in blockbuster filmmaking that evokes Buster Keaton at his most inventive, and that is about the highest compliment I can pay it.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY There's a really good film at war with a really bad one in here, but the really good one wins because it brings out the ruddy artillery right at the end. Despite valiant attempts to sink itself with a general sense of superficiality, some truly hackneyed bits of writing and a plodding insistence on hitting all the expected beats of the rock biopic, all that cringing guff is washed away by the tidal wave of awesomeness that is those final 20 minutes. A three star film but a five star experience that I fully expect to watch many, many more times than Phantom fucking Thread.

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (specifically, THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS) The Coens' album of mini-westerns is fine, obviously, but the title track would have been my film of the year if only those pencil-pushers at City Hall would just let me include specific seventeen-and-a-half-minute segments of films rather than the whole shebang. Thank God for Netflix, then, who let me watch as much or as little of whatever I want whenever I want like I'm some kind of entitled millennial. (Don't "at" me, kids)

SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE I literally just finished banging on about how astonishing, amazing, spectacular etc this is, don't make me repeat myself.

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse: Thwip it up and start again

If there's one thing I bloody love, it's a good hard kick up the bum. Not literally you understand, and also not aimed in the direction of my own bum, but rather the kind that someone gives to a flagging movie franchise every now and again. I've wanged on about it a thousand million times but see Dynamite Comics' James Bond stories for a classic example of cracking the mould while remaining respectful to the source, or The LEGO Batman Movie for a triumphant and hilarious cape caper that never forgot what made its hero unique.

Superheroes, of course, are massively ripe for this kind of bum-kicking, and while Spider-Man got a decent enough reboot last year when the MCU finally got its hands on him, there was still a sense of the same beats being followed that have been the Spidey road map for five preceding films. So thank the lord (or, more accurately, Phil Lord) for Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, a film as unconventional as its embarrassing-to-say-out-loud title.

"Two for Spider-Man Into The Spider-Verse
In Theaters Christmas In 3D And Real D 3D please"

Jerking us sideways into the universe of the Spidey comics, Into The Spider-Verse is set in an alternate dimension not entirely dissimilar to - but significantly different from - the one that the Spidey we know and love occupies, thereby immediately sidestepping tedious "BUT IS IT CANON?" questions. They've got their own webslinger, but they've also got Miles Morales, an ordinary schoolkid facing similar bother to that which Peter Parker experienced before his encounter with a nuclear arachnid. When Miles gets bitten by a similar bug, becoming New York's second Spider-Man, he finds himself up against exaggerated villains and aided by - for reasons way too bonkers to explain here - a handful of Spider-guys from other dimensions, including two Spider-women, one Spider-pig and one Spider-Nicolas-Cage.

As you have no doubt deduced, all of this turns out to be absolutely batshit crazy. It's the kind of plot and execution that live-action super-films are usually terrified to go near, and when you walk out of the Spider-Verse, anything Sony or Marvel ever did with the character on screen before suddenly seems about as cutting edge as the Nicholas Hammond-starring late '70s TV series in comparison. There are so many unfeasibly ginormous monsters, truly mental set-pieces and white-hot meta references to previous incarnations of the character that every cinemagoer should be issued with a coffee-table book of every frame of the film to get the most out of it.

But all that would be pointless if it weren't carried off with the love, humour and storytelling skills on display here. With Phil Lord writing and Chris Miller also tinkering in a producing capacity, the frothing excess of ideas that characterised The LEGO Movie spill out of the frame and into your incredulous, gaping facehole. Despite detailing about half a dozen origin stories (usually the curse of the modern superhero flick), Into The Spider-Verse is almost comically efficient, setting up its own cinematic universe of characters in the time it takes most franchises to stretch out one character's backstory. The assorted Spider-people are like the Avengers, if the Avengers were all slightly different versions of the same character, and each gets their own USP and moment in the sun without losing sight of the core plot.

"Is anyone else's NikNak sense tingling?"

That plot, of course, is Miles' journey from paint-spraying delinquent to web-shooting legend, and Lord peppers that story with a perfect balance of knowing nods to the Spidey mythology (uncles play as crucial a role here as ever, and familiar scenes from the past are given hilarious twists) while entirely surprising tangents come so thick and fast they give you thwiplash. And while Miles Morales isn't Lord's creation, the decision to use a half Puerto Rican, half African-American kid as the lead in a superhero movie (a youth- and diversity-celebrating choice reflected in the hip-hop soundtrack that left me scratching my old, white head) is only to be applauded.

The one thing I haven't mentioned yet is the thing that gives Into The Spider-Verse its licence to flip out and take all these liberties: it's animated. But this is nothing like any animation I've seen before; what's being fired into your eyeballs at a thousand miles an hour here can only be described as Spectacular Spider-Manimation. It's a mash up of comic-book dots and lines and bleeding-edge CGI that takes some getting used to (for at least half an hour I was convinced the cinema had forgotten to dish out the 3D goggles), but it's innovative, retina-popping and staggeringly beautiful at times. In all honesty it's also occasionally too much, especially in busy action scenes that overloaded my optic nerves a few times and, for me, could have been dialled just a notch below supermassively megafrantic. But I'm an old man who doesn't get hip hop, so what do I know.

Hold me

Bravo, then, to this mad, anarchic bastard of a film and the hurricane force blast of fresh air it aims at its overstuffed genre. What looked like it might have once been a straight-to-Netflix, kid-oriented time-passer for restless toddlers is in fact as game-changing a cinematic experience as any cape film we've seen since Superman: The Movie. It also makes a strong case for all superhero films from now on to be made like this, and with Nicolas Cage playing a monochrome, 1930s detective version of Spider-Man in each of them. If you ask me that's exactly the kick up the bum they all need.

LFF 2018: The Favourite & Stan & Ollie

The Favourite

dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland / UK / USA, 2018

Yorgos Lanthimos is back back back, and he's brought the triple threat of Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone with him for this sumptuous and irreverent telling of the true rivalry between Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Weisz) and Abigail Hill (Stone) for the affections of Queen Anne (Colman). The often-troublingly idiosyncratic director clearly enjoys throwing together a relatively straightforward comedy for a change (albeit in full Restoration costume), but anyone hoping for the pitch black absurdism of Lanthimos at his Lanthimost might leave disappointed.

There is much to love here: Colman's dotty, temperamental and ailing monarch, Weisz's ruthless confidante and lover, and Stone's Machiavellian usurper are all more than we deserve, and all three leads make the most of the offbeat humour in Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara's script (Emma Stone in particular has a great line in falling over that endears her even more than ever). Working from someone else's screenplay for the first time since his debut, Lanthimos turns out an uncharacteristically warm film full of human beings with relatable emotions - love, fear, jealousy, ambition - which is slightly at odds with his Kubrickian shooting style (fish-eye lenses and long, deliberate tracking shots are still the order of the day). And there are some proper belters waiting to leap off the page: I don't know if this is the first use of the word "cuntstruck", but it's certainly the best so far.

If the chilling lack of humanity Lanthimos usually favours has turned you off him in the past, then this may be the film that finally lets you just enjoy yourself without that gnawing sensation of futility and discomfort that The Lobster and The Killing Of A Sacred Deer had in spades. Personally though, I miss not feeling like I've spent a hundred minutes trapped in a room with a psychopath. If anyone else had made The Favourite I feel like I'd be celebrating it a little more; as it is, I'm just hoping that Lanthimos' impressive work rate means we'll be seeing something original and faintly bonkers from him again very soon.

Stan & Ollie

dir. Jon S Baird, UK, 2018

The TV series Feud, about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford's epically antagonistic relationship, set a high standard for dramatisations of the truth behind Hollywood's thin veneer of glamour. It showed what you can do with a terrific double act, a pair of talented actors and a small amount of dramatic licence, although it did absolutely no harm that there was plenty of juicy drama to work with in the first place. Stan & Ollie, another biopic about an iconic couple from cinema's heady heyday, also has a terrific double act, a pair of talented actors and a small amount of dramatic licence, but crucially it has a total absence of juicy drama to work with. Laurel & Hardy neither hated each other's guts nor unquestionably loved each other, they were just two colleagues who had the odd disagreement here and there. This film, then, is an excellent portrait of two colleagues who had the odd disagreement here and there; it's just that... well, that's just not very interesting, is it?

To be fair, Stan & Ollie is a much sweeter, gentler proposition than Feud, and was never going to be an exercise in muck-raking as much as a fond look at a world-famous cultural phenomenon that fizzled out in its later years, as pretty much all world-famous cultural phenomena do. Steve Coogan is great as Stan, nailing that elastic brow and weird America-via-Lancashire accent (although you can see him trying a little hard with the stooping gait), but he's eclipsed - literally and figuratively - by John C Reilly's Ollie, transformed under layers of prosthetics into a wholly convincing Hardy. A last-ditch attempt to rekindle the old magic nearly two decades after their popularity peak sees them touring the music halls of the UK: Coogan's involvement invites you to think of it as The Trip To Britain, but there's far less entertainment value in these two hours than in a single episode of his razor-sharp verbal jousts with Rob Brydon.

The lack of any real drama isn't helped by the bland supporting cast: a handful of cutout characters given nothing much of interest to do (except for Nina Arianda as Mrs Laurel, who effortlessly steals every scene from under her co-stars' noses). But in their place are a selection of delightful moments, usually involving one or both of the duo performing a mini routine for an audience of one, as if they just couldn't help themselves. Director Jon S Baird makes more of Jeff Pope's script than it probably deserves, lending real pathos to the general mood of melancholia and reluctant acceptance of mortality, and allowing his leads the time and space to truly assume the physicality of their parts. Inoffensive and undemanding, this is pleasant but forgettable stuff.

LFF 2018: In Fabric & Suspiria

In Fabric

dir. Peter Strickland, UK, 2018

Ground floor, perfumery, homicidal evening gowns, mannequins with pubic hair, masturbating boss. Going up! Peter Strickland's own brand of movie Marmite hits new heights of oddballery with his fourth and maddest feature, a freaky mash-up of Are You Being Served? and Tales Of The Unexpected, as directed by Mike Leigh after fourteen straight days without sleep. Personally I'm on board for every second of it, but I wasn't the least bit surprised to see a couple of walkouts at the press screening. Essentially a film about a killer dress that curses everyone who wears it, Strickland's film touches on the evils of consumerism and wonders what would happen if clothes treated us the way we treat clothes, to be discarded or recycled once tastes change. However, this is the sultan of modern British surrealism we're talking about, so the literal fashion victims of this phantom thread are the last things we're expected to care about.

Instead, In Fabric is all about its avant-garde form, whose influences stretch as far and wide as the light-hearted social realism of Leigh, the dark side of Roald Dahl and the Claret-splashing nonsense of giallo, all stuffed into a dangerously faulty washing machine and put through a spin cycle. The result is entirely unique, though, and it's a pleasure to be around while Peter Strickland's Loopy Laundry is open for business. Yes, much of it is absolutely bananas, but it makes perfect sense within the (admittedly blurred) boundaries of the film, and that's what counts. Challenging, surprisingly funny and never for a second predictable, this is where you come to see what cinema can really be.

Suspiria

dir. Luca Guadagnino, Italy, 2018

Luca Guadagnino's remake of Dario Argento's giallo standard is set in Berlin in 1977, so the first thing you expect to see is David Bowie sitting in the Dschungel, on Nürnberger Strasse, composing Heroes in his head. Sadly that doesn't come to pass, but we do get Tilda Swinton dressed as a man, which is pretty much the same thing. Swinton's not-quite-surprise turn as an octogenarian male makes sense in a film where about 98% of the actors are women, and the uncanny nature of his/her appearance - you can just about sense that something's not quite right - sets the tone for the weirdness to come.

Inserting subtext into the shallow schlock of the original, Suspiria '18 is a necessarily richer affair, taking in global power struggles and gender politics to bolster its undeniably daft core of witches seeking a sexy young Dakota Johnson type to assume the spirit of their chief crone. And while that's all very well, it does stretch out the first two hours to such an extent that when the inevitable last-act grand guignol sloshes in, it feels like a tonal shift too far. There's a terrific early scene of gruesome horror (if you ever thought Strictly was torture via the medium of dance, you ain't seen nothing yet) which suggests a new and genuinely creepy experience, but any tension is dissipated by the pacing, and that finale never horrifies as much as it should.

LFF 2018: Roma & The Green Fog

Roma

dir. Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico, 2018

Alfonso Cuarón's semi-autobiographical love letter to the women he grew up with in Mexico in the early 1970s will hit your TV screens, courtesy of Netflix, very soon. I feel it's only fair to warn you that if you watch it on your telly, unless your telly is sixty feet wide and there isn't a single thing in the room to distract you, then I will come round there and slap you with a cold chimichanga. Get thee to a cinema to see this while you can, because it is one of the most beautiful things created by mankind since the chord of A minor and deserves better than you watching it with the lights on and looking at Twitter every six seconds.

Shot by Cuarón himself in luscious, pin-sharp monochrome, Roma tells the story of Chloe, a maid and all-round skivvy to a slowly-disintegrating middle class family in Mexico City. It's slow and without much in the way of incident until the incredible final act, but it's packed with beautifully observed tiny details that leave you in no doubt about how deep Cuarón has reached into his memories. His camera moves at the same unhurried pace no matter how prosaic or extraordinary the onscreen events, as if he's going over them in his mind in a comfortable armchair with a glass of port and a cigar, and the effect is hypnotic.

A story of strong women beaten down by weak, flawed men, but rising up to answer a natural instinct to protect and nurture, Roma could so easily have been a mawkish, melodramatic, button-pushing weepie in lesser hands. But Cuarón is a master storyteller, as he's repeatedly proven - most recently in Gravity, which gets an unexpected but fun nod here. And while the quietly gritty urban reality of Roma couldn't be further from the noise and spectacle of Gravity, it's infinitely more fulfilling, finding poetic symmetry in the sluicing of a driveway and the cleansing power of the sea, and suggesting unattainable relief from a thankless existence in the distant passing of an overhead aeroplane. So treat it with the respect it deserves, and buy yourself a 60-foot-wide telly.

The Green Fog

dir. Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, USA, 2017

Every year by law, the London Film Festival must show an Alfred Hitchcock-referencing curio of some kind, and 2018 is no exception. This time it's Guy Maddin's quite bonkers collage movie The Green Fog, which is both a loose remake of Vertigo and an ode to San Francisco's long and varied history on film. Using only existing footage, Maddin and co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson stitch together clips from dozens of movies and TV shows set in Frisco to retell the story of an acrophobic detective and the lols he has forcing a woman to look like another woman who is in fact the same woman but not the woman he thought she was.

As Maddin hops between films, actors and characters chop and change identities (look closely, you can see what he's done there) while the story unfolds with all the structural discombobulation of a cheese-fuelled dream. There's very little dialogue; in fact most scenes literally cut out all the dialogue, leaving a staccato series of facial expressions that tell the story visually, as Hitchcock himself did so often and so well. It's all very weird, for sure, but not without a sense of humour: Scottie and Madeleine's day trip to Muir Woods is represented by NSYNC's similarly-set video for This I Promise You, while a clip from The Streets Of San Francisco sees Michael Douglas commenting on his own buttocks in a scene from Basic Instinct.

Maddin could've taken the easy route and built his film entirely from clips of Brian De Palma films (he does allow himself a couple of shots from High Anxiety, which is surely cheating), but perhaps he's saving that for another time. For now this is a loving, original and - at 63 minutes - blissfully short tribute to Hitchcock. And like any curated selection of film clips it's fun to spot the ones you recognise (drink a shot every time you see A View To A Kill pop up), but it's just as enjoyable to lose yourself in The Green Fog's brand of oddness, which is derived straight from the source material's own uniquely unsettling atmosphere.

LFF 2018: The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs & The Old Man & The Gun

The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs

dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, USA, 2018

For the first twenty minutes or so of The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs - the Coen brothers' anthology film of six tales of the American frontier (with colour plates) - I was in absolute heaven. Tim Blake Nelson's titular cowboy, as adept at singin' as he is at gunslingin', rattles off the kind of classic Coens dialogue that makes your ears melt, while providing some of the most violence-derived lols I've had in a cinema since I don't know when. But this is just the first story: an amuse-bouche to whet the appetite for a tasting menu of considerably darker shaggy dog stories. For me, nothing else matched up to that opening blast of blood-spattered fun, but there's still plenty of beautifully grim western wonder here to wrap your undeserving eyes around.

Largely fixated on the wavering value of human life in the formative era of the United States (and therefore inextricably linked to the current era of the United States), The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs also takes in such themes as art vs commerce, the natural beauty of the untouched land (and its destruction for the sake of financial gain) and the good old futility of humanity against unpredictable cosmic machinations that drives some of the Coens' best work. Some of it is, I'm afraid, quite dull, but there's always the stunning cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel to admire, not to mention the shock and awe you may experience if, like me, you had no idea that that one character was played by Dudley Dursley from Harry Potter until you looked it up later when you were in Sainsbury's and nearly passed out from disbelief. Anyway I gave each story a star rating out of five and divided the total by six, and the result was 3.66 recurring, so make of that what you will.

The Old Man & The Gun

dir. David Lowery, USA, 2018

Set in 1981, and perhaps the only modern film to genuinely look like it was made and released in 1981, The Old Man & The Gun sees a twinkly-eyed Robert Redford calling time on his acting career by politely robbing a few banks and sweeping Sissy Spacek off her feet with his improbably-coloured thick mop of hair. It's a warm, cosy film without much incident - Casey Affleck's determined cop is a cliché, but is never allowed enough screen time to bother either Redford or the audience - and Daniel Hart's smooth, smoky jazz score carries it along on a wave of easygoing cool.

As Redford's career criminal looks back on a life spent doing jobs for no other reason than he simply enjoyed doing them - it just so happens they also brought him buckets of cash - the parallels with the actor's own life are unavoidable. But director David Lowery never lets his script get too clever-clever or his star too knowing, and the result is a low-key but fitting epilogue for Redford that would make a good double bill with Widows as another, albeit gentler, twist on the crime-caper-heist-movie.