Mean Streets (1973)

Dir.: Martin Scorsese
Plot: A young man in Little Italy tries to keep his head above water whilst protecting his unpredictable friend from loan sharks.

For me, Scorsese is a director who, bafflingly, reached his peak before he’d even really got started. Mean Streets is a mesmerising exhibition piece which vividly highlights every quality which has since made Scorsese a legend. Shot through with both pathos and humour (the whole 'mook' sequence still gets me), it's an intensely personal but unromanticised look at life in Little Italy.

Winchester '73 (1950)

Dir.: Anthony Mann
Plot: A tough sharpshooter scours the plains in search of the man who killed his father, with a seemingly random assortment of characters slowly dragged into the quest.

Jimmy Stewart ditches his ever-comforting impersonation of warm molasses to play hard-bitten avenger Lin McAdam, on the trail of Dutch Henry Brown, the man who killed his father. On paper, it sounds like it's been done a hundred times before. However, this is a uniquely clever revenge western, revolving not around a simple pursuit, but rather around the titular rifle. Won in the opening scenes by Lin, stolen by Dutch and passed through a succession of people, all of whom contribute in some way to the bigger picture of Lin's quest, it ties the story together with peerless elegance. Everyone who comes into possession of the rifle seems almost supernaturally to become embroiled in the story as it unfolds.

Meek's Cutoff (2010)

Dir.: Kelly Reichardt
Plot: A band of 19th century pioneers led astray by a manipulative charlatan start to unravel in hostile terrain.


Described helpfully in the accompanying leaflet as an ‘indie Western’, cult filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s latest offering is a bleak, bleached-out odyssey following a cluster of lost would-be pioneers in 1840s Oregon plodding hopelessly through untamed territory. Tempted off the main trail by Stephen Meek, a colourful frontiersman with promises of a shortcut, the three couples come to bitterly regret their decision, their spirits ebbing away in conjunction with their supplies. Distrustful of their guide and of an Indian captive they cannot decide whether or not to kill, their fragile hopes start to crumble into an existential dread.

Friendly Persuasion (1956)

Words cannot express my love for this tagline...

Dir.: William Wyler
Plot: A Quaker family in the 1860s try to reconcile their pacifist beliefs with the danger of the approaching Confederate forces.

You'd really have to have a heart of stone not to like this simple but accomplished picture about a Quaker family trying to cope with the Civil War in rural Indiana. Gary Cooper and Dorothy Maguire turn in career-best or near career-best performances as the father and mother of the house. Maguire is an actress I've never really cared for, but she really sells the primness of her character without losing her likeability. Cooper, on the other hand, I've always liked and he has some of the best scenes of his career here - the battlefield sequence in particular stands out as a beautiful piece of acting from the often unfairly-maligned Coop.

The real mystery of the Thin Man reboot is what exactly is the point?

What do you get when you mix the director of the latest in the rapidly deteriorating Pirates of the Caribbean series, the screenwriter of that revered classic Bad Boys 2 and an actor who reached his dramatic peak in 1997 and hasn’t put in a really interesting performance since 2004?

Apparently, if you’re an executive at Warner Brothers, you get exactly the right ingredients to remake one of old Hollywood’s most sparkling jewels, namely 1934′s superlative and surprisingly enduring comedy-mystery The Thin Man.  The film, for those of you who don’t know, is based on a novel by the great Dashiell Hammett, and centres around a wealthy, witty, hard-drinking married couple who end up entangled in a murder mystery during a Christmas visit to New York.  Johnny Depp (for it is he) has been dragging his pitch for a remake around Tinseltown for a while now, and it seems as though the project is finally getting off the ground, with release tentatively scheduled for 2013, although given Depp’s committment to the PotC franchise, this date might well get pushed back. UPDATE: It was. Deadline reports that the movie is been flung into production deep freeze. And the gods rejoiced.

Three Came Home (1950)

Dir.: Jean Negulesco
Plot: A colonial official's wife struggles to survive imprisonment in a Japanese POW camp in Borneo.

To be honest, I downloaded Three Came Home simply because the story sounded interesting. Empire of the Sun is one of my favourite movies and I do love a good POW drama, especially ones like this that are based on a true story. However, I could not have known that I was about to discover one of my all-time favourite films. So many things about it knocked me for six, but the first and foremost of these has to be Claudette Colbert's lead performance as Agnes Keith.

True Grit (2010)

Dir.: Joel Coen
Plot: In the post-Civil War West, a fourteen year-old girl and a drunken marshal form an unlikely partnership to find her father's killer.

Well, the folks in Hollywood have finally deigned to release True Grit in the UK, and not a moment too soon - the waiting was killing me. The Coens are my favourite filmmakers of the modern era and seeing a new film of theirs in the cinema is like being able to go back in time and see a Frank Capra or Howard Hawks movie on opening night. Luckily, thanks to some sharp-elbowed maneoeuvring, I managed to bag myself the job of reviewing it for The Oxford Student (editorial privilege) and I thought I'd share it with you here, a whole four days before it will be appearing in print. So, without further ado...