Reviews

My trusty sidekick IMDB tells me that the last time I bothered to write a review in this website was way back in 2013.

Never in my wildest dreams did I see myself coming back, let alone to enthuse over an M. Night Shyamalan movie. Sure, I liked The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, but the good bits in Signs didn't hide an obvious decline. For the next years I only heard about Shyamalan whenever a friend griped about another dud; his output seemed to be getting progressively worse.

I was so uninterested in Shyamalan's movies I only crossed paths with them whenever Honest Trailers released another mockery. And so it was that Split flew under my radar - I now regret I didn't pay money to watch it on the big screen - until I clicked on its Honest Trailer back in 2018, expecting another belly of laughs... and for once they actually praised it. A lot. That was unexpected. More importantly, I learned it was an Unbreakable sequel. What?

Of course I knew the rumors from yore that Unbreakable was intended as a trilogy; but as the years went on and nothing happened, I figured the projected had been abandoned. And a good thing too because Unbreakable was still the best superhero movie ever made after The Incredibles, and it didn't need to be ruined by Shyamalan's decline. But Split seemed interesting and meanwhile the trailers for Glass were coming out, and they were so exciting I had to watch them for closure.

So I watched Split and it was as if Shyamalan had made a smooth transition from Unbreakable to it; it's as if he hadn't made anything else in between. Here was the inventive, sensitive, spiritual filmmaker I remember admiring all the way back in 2000. Here was another one of his beautiful, slow dramas about ordinary people discovering extraordinary gifts and learning to cope with them. And it was packaged as a tense thriller about a kidnapped girl trying to escape from a serial killer with multiple personalities who discovers he's more than human, like David Dunn. It was also an emotional story about finding the courage to face up to our inner demons. Thinking about it now, if I didn't cry at Split's beautiful ending, it's probably because I was subconsciously saving them for Glass.

Ah, Glass. A movie so reviled by critics you'll think it was directed by Tommy Wiseau. I don't understand what happened, I don't know what they expected, and what they saw. For my part, I saw the fitful ending to what is now one of the rare perfect movie trilogies.

Glass builds on the previous movies and maintains its tone and pace. By tone I mean it's a low-key superhero movie grounded on realism. Like in hard sci-fi novels, frequently the characters will discuss plausible theories for feats and powers that seem extraordinary. By pace I mean it's mostly a character drama spiced with tense situations and spliced with trappings from horror, sci-fi, mystery, and thriller.

Were people really expecting a 2-hour showdown between David and The Beast? On Titan, perhaps? When were Split and Unbreakable action movies? Strange thing to expect from the sequel to a movie whose most iconic scene consists of a man standing in a train station being touched by strangers.

Glass is a slow burner like its predecessors. By now we've had the characters' origin stories; they've accepted their roles as heroes and villains. We know who they are; we've grown to love them. The focus, then, is no longer on David and Kevin but on Elijah. His goal has always been to show the world that superhumans exist, in order to find a role in the world for himself, so he won't feel like a mistake anymore. As such the movie revolves around his plan to escape from a mental facility where all three are being held. Of course they'd end up there, because that's where people go who claim to be superhuman. They may believe in their powers, but the rest of the world doesn't. This is consistent with the rules Shyamalan has been playing with from the start. And even the reasons for this realistic disbelief get a twist in the end.

Basically, this movie focuses on Elijah's transformation into Mister Glass, a genius supervillain; and since he's the cerebral villain you shouldn't expect action but displays of genius. And that genius is shown in the way he plots the escape and also in the third twist ending. (By my count the movie has 3 twists in a row.) Those who want to see David fighting The Beast - that's what I wanted - won't be disappointed. There are two well-directed, fluid fight scenes that seem like fossil records in this age of shaky cam and fast-cut editing. But this is Mister Glass' movie and it's all about his uber-plan; in the end, David and Kevin are just pawns in his plan to justify his existence to himself.

While the plot unfolds towards its gut-wrenching climax, Shyamalan elevates the most mundane scene with odd angles, the use of color, and games of light and shadow. He imbues the movie with an atmosphere of enigmatic dread. I missed James Newton Howard's score; although West Dylan Thordson composed some very good tracks, and Shyamalan uses them to add tension and sentiment to the scenes, I wish I had heard more of the original score. Although Bruce Willis doesn't have a meaty role, nobody can complain about the performances by Samuel Jackson and James McAvoy. And then there were the little things I only picked up on the way home: the leitmotif of the train station used in the three movies. The beautiful symmetry of the ending, with Mister Glass not just bringing David and Kevin together, but also three strangers who loved those three extraordinary beings to honor them. The more I think about the movie, the more I marvel at its intricacy.

I didn't feel bored for a moment. Before I knew it, the climax was on. And this is where many people say the movie was ruined. I think the fury viewers are showing is a sign that Shyamalan imparted these characters with life and so they're real to a lot of people. I wish their fates had been different. But I don't begrudge the decision nor do I think the execution was flawed. Some seem to think David deserved a more dignified ending. As someone who's been reading superhero comics since the age of 9, I sympathize with that; I personally love a heroic sacrifice, going out in a blaze of glory, one outnumbered guy holding off the line. That never fails to get me. But once again, reality-grounded rules apply. The truth is many good, heroic people don't receive a dignified ending; many, like Dunn, never even receive any recognition for their deeds.

I understand that the climax is upsetting in an industry where superheroes "die" turned into dust after a magic finger snap; and stay "dead" while trailers announce one of the "dead" heroes' is not too "dead" that he can't star in another money-grabbing movie, around the same time another movie will officially undo all the "dead" heroes' deaths because they also need to star in some more movies, whether they're alive or "dead" - we can't let Disney's shareholders be kept away from money they make exploiting true creators like Jack Kirby and Jim Starlin. I can understand why so many are upset in a world where people have been trained to treat superheroes as their indestructible, unkillable, cool-one-liners-spouting virtual best friends who'll never abandon them, so long as they keep buying tickets. I mean, what kind of sadistic imbecile would kill his cash cows? Like I said, it's a testament to Shyamalan's ability to impart real life to his creations. It's funny, I've been reading DC and Marvel's superheroes for longer than I've known David Dunn; I've spent thousands of hours with them, much more than I ever did with him; I only saw Split last week. And yet nothing in those superficial, pandering, glib adaptations of my favorite superheroes has ever elicited from me the bliss I felt watching Glass. The kind of bliss I only get from well-written, well-acted, well-made human drama. I never imagined that I'd leave a theater room in 2019 crying from a M. Night Shyamalan movie.

What's sadder, though, is that the critics will frighten viewers away from a movie that's better than 90% of what comes out every Summer. In a world where any crappy, soulless, mindless blockbuster makes 1 billion dollars easy, this movie probably won't even make it to 300 million. Split didn't and had better reviews. And so we'll continue to get bad thrillers, action and superhero movies full of CGI, pointless explosions, and boring, by-the-numbers, sequel-hinting storytelling everyone wants - and cynical shareholders will continue to get richer while creative filmmakers see their opportunities dwindle. Funny, even in that Glass was grounded on reality: in the end the faceless villains we never suspected existed, chilling out in elitist restaurants we can't get in, always win. Curiously, that's one of the messages in the movie: the gifted are always being held back, overshadowed by the uncreative, those who enforce normalcy. But as the ending shows, the creative ones always find a way to outsmart the bureaucrats of normalcy. I hope that with time more people will come to know the truth that the critics have been hiding.

My current obsession with Italian actor Gian Maria Volonté eventually brought me to Giuliano Montaldo's Sacco and Vanzetti, an excellent courtroom drama where Volonté and Riccardo Cucciolla play two anarchists unjustly tried for murder, while it becomes obvious they're in fact being tried for being anarchists, lefties, reds, whatever, in a country that never had any love for them, and in a time that was perhaps the second worst time to be an anarchist/communist/socialist in America after the McCarthy years. This movie is set a few decades before that, but the hysteria and strident violation of civil rights is the same.

Montaldo does a good job directing the movie - for instance the black-and-white opening sequence, with the cops making a raid on an Italian neighbourhood, rounding up men, women and children in front of their buildings, spanking innocent people, and basically acting like vicious animals, is a powerful sequence that immediately sets the theme of abuse of power. Then we have the courtroom scenes, with Cyril Cusack playing a fierce DA seeking to send the two anarchists to the electric chair, Geoffrey Keen playing a clearly bigoted judge, and Milo O'Shea as the defense lawyer who is systematically humiliated, bullied and discredited because he's doing his job too well. When these three actors share a scene you can see sparks fly off the screen! Ennio Morricone provides the music, which is melancholy and elegiac, and Joan Baez contributes with some excellent ballads that are positioned in key moments of the movie. These two together make the score for this movie one of the best I've ever heard.

Gian Maria Volonté is of course excellent: his performance is showier and more furious than Cucciolla's. But then their characters also have different personalities. Whereas Volonté's character, Vanzetti, understands the mythical dimension of his person, realizes that his death will turn him into a symbol of freedom for the new generations, and he's fine with that, Cucciolla plays Sacco, an ordinary man who wants to live and who is having trouble accepting his new condition as a man charged with murder. Cucciolla received a prize in Cannes for his performance in this movie over Volonté and I have to say it wasn't undeserved. His subdued, reserved performance was the right touch that makes him the focus point of the viewer's sympathies.

Sacco and Vanzetti is a great movie, a beautiful movie, that tells an interesting episode about American history that is often ignored - the racism, discrimination and suspicion against immigrants. Like any other country, the USA has an official history that is more mythology than truth, that is inevitable to all nations in their construction of a national identity, but I'm glad there will always be movies like these to continue to deflate the myths and reveal the truth. I just hope there will always be viewers for them too.

People can say the Academy is worthless but at the end of the day it is still useful to point me in the direction of a movie I could easily have overlooked. If No hadn't been nominated for an Oscar I probably wouldn't have heard of it, watched. It probably wouldn't even have come out in Portugal. I'm glad it did because it's an excellent political drama about the twilight of Pinochet's regime in Chile.

Gael García Bernal plays René Saveedra, an ad executive who helps a coalition of parties to organize a campaign to vote Pinochet out of power in a referendum. Although Pinochet had ruled Chile for over a decade when, international pressure forced him to take measures to legitimize his regime, hence a referendum to vote YES or NO to his staying in power. This gives a coalition of parties (mainly left-wing, from what I understood) temporary freedom to pass TV spots against his regime. This unusual premise results in a fine movie.

Although García Bernal isn't one of my favourite actors, I have to applaud him for almost carrying the movie alone. He gives a fine, subdued performance, nothing two showy, but efficient. His character is more interested in marketing techniques than politics, and the irony is that he joins the campaign not because of beliefs but because he thinks they're doing a horrible job and he can do better. He takes marketing very seriously. All the other actors are mysteries to me, I've never seen them before, but they do a fine job too. I have to single out Alfredo Castro, who plays Lucho Guzmán, René's boss in the marketing agency. Lucho is an oily, two-faced, cowardly Pinochet sympathizer working in the YES campaign. They're always at each other's throats because René is working for the NO, and their discussions constitute many memorable scenes.

Prior to this movie I had never heard of Pablo Larraín before, but I liked the way he shot this movie. He used a video support from the '80s to make it look like a homemade movie from the era, which is an interesting choice because when the film footage is mixed with the life ad footage of the time, there's almost a complete harmony. As for the screenplay, Pedro Peirano does a good job too. I was amused to learn this was based on a play by Antonio Skármeta, famous for a novel about Pablo Neruda. I though the novel was horrible but at least resulted in a great Italian movie called The Postman.

I'm a huge fan of political movies, whether they be thrillers like Z, satires like In The Loop, or war like The Battle of Algiers, and I think No is a strong addition to this subgenre of cinema. It has drama, it has humour, the dialogue is intelligent, and the discussions about the power of marketing to influence people remain timeless. In fact I liked the fact that movie spent a lot of time going over about marketing techniques - it could only have paid lip service to it and focused only on the characters, but no, this movie shows the decisions ad executives take and what goes in their mind when they're coming up with ads to convince people to buy, do or think something. This view of the profession alone is worth watching the movie.

Gad Elmaleh plays Marc Tourneuil, an employee at a powerful French bank, the Phénix, who unexpectedly becomes its president when his boss starts dying from cancer. Handpicked by him because he will be easier to control, Tourneuil turns the tables around when he starts going against the board members' wishes. His real challenge, however, comes when Dittmar Rigule (played by Gabriel Byrne), a financer running a hedge fund out of Miami, becomes the Phénix's major stockholder and forces it to adopt American-style wild capitalism. Tourneuil's first mission is to fire around 10,000 people in order to increase the stockholders' profits by 20%. That he does with aplomb, even after organising a world-wide video-conference with every Phénix employee and director to assure them that there will be no massive downsizing. But Tourneuil starts sensing a real threat to his survival when Dittmar insists in him buying a Japanese bank that a report claims to be in serious financial trouble. Guessing Dittmar's plan to make him look incompetent while debilitating the Phénix with a ruinous hostile takeover that will guarantee the Miami hedge fund to gain total control of it, Tourneuil puts into practice a two-faced scheme not so much to save his bank but to make sure he comes out of the battle as its de facto leader.

In our current economic climate, one has to wonder about the wisdom of making the hero an immoral, selfish banker who calls himself a modern Robin Hood, stealing from the poor so the rich may become richer. Tourneuil shows off his affluence without moral pangs for the lives he destroys, and his daily existence is a series of globe-trotting journeys to exotic places like Tokyo and Miami, where he hangs out at luxurious parties with models. He cheats on his wife (Natacha Régnier), rapes a fashion model (Liya Kebede), and belittles the optimism of one of his employees (Céline Sallette) not long after he had made her believe he shared her moral values. Add to Tourneuil's loathsome personality and actions Elmaleh's cold stare and stony facial expressions, and you have a protagonist who is only the hero because the villains, the predatory Miami bankers, are much worse. Elmaleh is so bland one presumes if has to be part of the acting. Perhaps it's Costa-Gavras' intention to totally dehumanize the banking class. Be as it may, Elmaleh comes off as a poor man's Alan Delon, no emotion in his icy blue eyes, but no charisma either.

The vicious, ambiguous Tourneuil is in the vein of Costa-Gavras' previous anti-hero from The Axe. In this movie an upper-middle class executive is fired during his company's downsizing. After two years unemployed, he starts killing his competitors for job vacancies. It's a lovely dark comedy that constantly asks the viewer why he should care about this ruthless bastard getting a job when there are millions of better people with worse lives in the same desperate situation. I think perhaps it's because we don't care about poor people anymore. Decades ago – I mean the turbulent and hopeful sixties and seventies – people believed in class war, people even had had and though the world could be made a better place. But we live in an age when the media vehemently say class war does not exist, and instead scares us into thinking the world is a cesspit that will remain a cesspit because we're too insignificant to make a difference. And perhaps they're right. So in this atomised environment, the poor are poor because they want to not because of circumstances beyond their power, we are frequently told. And although in the past one could feel sympathy for them, nowadays we feel disgusted by them. We don't like poor people, we don't want to see them, we don't want to think about them. We admire the rich, the famous, the powerful, we want to be them. So instead of wanting to make the viewer feel sad about the wretched, when that shtick doesn't work anymore in our selfish era, Costa-Gavras shows how he thinks the rich think and live, and then asks, "Are these your modern heroes, are these the people you want to be? Are you really capable of rooting for these scumbags?" The message is interesting, but the actual execution lacks merit and sounds too preachy to seduce any viewer who reasonably doesn't like to be lectured without a good dose of entertainment to wash it down. The characters' motivations are frequently sketchy, many characters are one-dimensional, and the dialogue is peppered with too many corny aphorisms that lack the depth the screenwriters mistakenly think they have.

In 1969 Z, a fast-paced thriller about the investigation into the murder of a left-wing Greek candidate, won two Academy awards, was a worldwide success and catapulted the director into stardom. In the seventies, working with screenwriters Jorge Semprún and Franco Solinas, he made several good movies: The Confession, State of Siege, Special Section. Each showcased his knack for exciting montages, clever humour, polemical topics and entertaining story lines, and although they never met with Z's success they were at least every bit as watchable. But starting in the eighties his career started decaying, his movies losing their panache and becoming bland vehicles to vent his moral and social outrage. The fury started compromising the artistry. The world today isn't very different than the world of the young filmmaker who made Z and State of Siege. But I think it's time for a new generation of politically-committed filmmakers to bear the torch, with Costa-Gavras's fierce passion but also the skills he displayed decades ago. Then we can have intelligent and relevant political cinema again. If art has the power to change the world, and I believe it has that power, it must be an art of a greater aesthetic value than Le Capital.

Marathon Man is not a very good movie. The seventies, which were cinema's greatest age of thrillers, produced many movies that could teach this hodgepodge mess of a movie a thing or two about pacing, editing and storytelling. I don't even know where to begin with this absurd story.

Dustin Hoffman, around 39 when he starred in the movie, implausibly plays Babe Levy, a college student. Throughout the movie the awkward age of the actor sticks like a sore thumb. But the character himself is bizarre. He's running for the marathon, although that seems to have nothing to do with the plot per se (the one moment when he uses his training to escape a bad guy, his pursuer, clearly in worse physical shape than him, nearly catches him). Levy is traumatized by the suicide of his father, a historian who fell in disgrace because of McCarthy's communist witch hunts. It's an interesting background, but it seems to belong in another character and another movie. And his brother, Doc (played by Roy Scheider), is a secret agent working for a governmental organization that somehow keeps track of Nazi criminals.

The action starts when the brother of a notorious Nazi fugitive, Dr. Szell, dies in an accident in New York. Szell's brother, another Nazi, was stupid enough to go around shouting racist slurs at a Jew in a Jewish neighbourhood, attracting his ire and causing a moronic car accident. I don't presume to be able to get inside the head of Nazi fugitives, but I have serious difficulty believing one would be attracting so much attention on himself in the middle of New York, especially after he just retrieved a tin can full of diamonds to be delivered to his brother in Uruguay. Marathon Man is the proverbial thriller where you have to leave your brain at the door to enjoy it, proud precursor of Michael Bay. It pains me to write this of the director of Midnight Cowboy and the screenwriter of All The President's Men, but that's the hard truth.

So Szell travels to New York to retrieve the rest of his diamonds, and this is where the story gets really confusing. Doc's agency apparently works with Szell, who gives them information on other Nazis in return for being left alone. What is never made clear is what is Doc's role in all this, what are the feelings of his parter, Janeway, over his murder since he's obviously a participant in it, or why Szell uses a student called Elsa to watch over Babe. It's not so much that the movie is confused, rather it's confused, it doesn't understand itself, it rushes into each scene instead of lingering over a single dialogue that explains anything.

In the end, Marathon Man is just a collection of exciting scenes barely glued together by the ghost of a plot. We have exciting scenes galore: Babe trapped inside his bathroom as thugs try to break into it; a woman chasing Szell as she recognises him from Auschwitz; the infamous torture scene with dentist instruments; and more, lots more. It's just a pity that none segues rationally into the next. This is pure escapism, but so was The Day of the Jackal and The Parallax View, and they're infinitely better written and edited. It's really disturbing to imagine that this movie was written by William Goldman, who the same year rightfully won the Oscar for All The President's Men. It seems he only has enough talent for one intelligent script per year.

Dustin Hoffman was far from amazing in this, certainly not as great as in All The President's Men or Lenny (1974). Roy Scheider, William Davane and Marthe Keller give efficient performances. The only shining moment acting-wise is Laurence Olivier, who gives one of his most chilling performances as Dr. Szell, the Nazi dentist. Olivier gave many great performances in his final decade, and this role is up there with his work in Sleuth and The Boys from Brazil. Everything I heard about him in this movie is absolutely true, and he remains the best reason to watch this movie.

Una Storia Semplice is the last of four film adaptations of Leonardo Sciascia's books that Gian Maria Volonté starred in in his prolific career. He was 58 and his role was but a supporting role, but it's still enjoyable to see this extraordinary Italian actor at the end of his career (he died three years later, in 1994).

The movie, directed by Emidio Greco, is, like in most Sciascia adaptations, a murder mystery. Once again we're back in Sicily, the author's birthplace, and the local police is investigating the death of an old man in an inhospitable villa outside town. With a bullet hole in his forehead and an old gun lying on the floor, the authorities are anxious to write it off as suicide, except the tenacious Brigadier Lepri (Ricky Tognazzi) refuses to drop the case until the truth is ascertained.

The movie, however, is less concerned with truth than with the atmosphere of silence and class prejudices that govern Sicilian society's views on crime and justice. Not investigating murder is safer since you never know if the criminals involved aren't important pillars of society, and going against such people is always a pain in the ass. With that in mind, the end of the movie is darkly humorous for its bleak cynicism.

Una Storia Semplice is a simple movie and hardly to impress itself on viewers' minds. The plot is relatively straightforward, the camera work is conventional. The best thing the movie has in its favour is the dialogues, with the usual Sciascia wit, and the performances. Volonté plays an aging teacher who knows the victim and helps in the investigation. We also have Ennio Fantastichini (he had co-starred with Volonté before in Porte Aperte) as a shifty chief of police, and Ricky Tognazzi as the suffering honest cop who wants to get to the bottom of the murder.

The movie benefits from Sicily's natural landscapes, I'm always amused by the fact that such a beautiful place has acted so often as the setting of gruesome murders in Italian movies. Although Una Storia Semplice is hardly essential cinema, it is worth watching once.

Although Leonardo Sciascia may be a name that means nothing to most viewers, he was a brilliant Italian novelist of Sicilian origins who acted as his country's moral consciousness for several decades, writing novels and short-stories that analysed Italy's Mafia, the fascist years, and the recrudescence of totalitarianism during the chaotic 'years of lead' during the '60s and '70s. So popular and extraordinary were the novels of this first-rate storyteller, that many of them were turned into movies, and quite good in their right.

Porte Aperte, based on one of his final novellas, concerns an elderly judge burdened with the responsibility of trying a multiple murderer. It's 1938, the Fascists are in power and Italy is re-enacting the death penalty again, in order to show the regime's strength and zero tolerance with crime. Judge Vito Di Francesco, although not an anti-fascist, isn't ready to simply sentence the defendant to death. Carefully and meticulously, he tries to understand the motives of the killer and to find a way of reducing the penalty to life imprisonment. Against him is the regime, which wants an example of swift justice, and the defendant himself, who demands to be executed.

This movie, to me, has flaws and weaknesses that need to be quickly addressed. I found the killer's motives to demand the death penalty unclear: was he making a political point? Was he holding the regime's inhumanity to their eyes? I never understood what motivated him to act in such a suicidal manner. I also found it hard to sympathise with the plight of a man sentenced to death who himself had killed four people, including his wife, right after raping her. But perhaps a point of the movie was just that – that even the most vicious criminals have a right to live.

Otherwise, the movie is quite solid and watchable. As a court room drama, the movie is slow-paced and introspective rather than frantic and bombastic. There are some fine verbal skirmishes between the judge and the witnesses and the defendant, but otherwise the movie focus a lot on his doubts and attempts at finding a loophole to save the man from execution.

Gian Maria Volonté, the great Italian actor, plays the judge, and needless to say he brings the gravitas and serenity required for the character. Although Volonté is mainly known as El Indio from Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More, movies like Porte Aperte were really the sort of movies he preferred to star in. Volonté took seriously the '60s and '70s call to artists and intellectuals to join the revolutionary struggle. Whatever people may think of that nowadays, it led to Volonté starring in many fine movies with a political tinge: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Todo Modo (another Sciascia adaptation, and hilariously and chillingly prophesying the murder of Italian prime-minister Aldo Moro), Ogro, The Working Class Goes To Heaven, etc. Watching Porte Aperte, however, I was taken aback at his age and frail look. Knowing him mainly from when he was a younger actor, filling his performances with rage and energy, it was a surprise to see him still deliver such a nuanced and powerful performance just a few years before his death.

I keep getting pulled into these film adaptations of Leonardo Sciascia's novels and I never cease to wonder at their fine quality. Sciascia was an Italian novelist from Sicily, famous for being one of the first writers to openly write about the Mafia, a subject that in the early '60s was still prickly, in fact many still denied the Mafia existed when The Day of the Owl was published in 1961. Today this criminal organization is an incontrovertible fact, which perhaps affects the impact this film adaptation has on modern viewers.

I would still heartily recommend this movie to fans of the crime genre on the simple fact it remains a gripping and well-written crime drama. Franco Nero plays Bellodi, a police captain recently transferred to Sicily, where he's slowly learning the ropes. Full of new ideas and a passionate attitude, he tries to rip the veil of silence that covers Mafia hits when the owner of a construction company shows up murdered. As always everyone denies having seen anything. His only possible witness is a man who lives in a house nearby the murder scene; but he's nowhere to be found, and his wife, Rosa (played by Claudia Cardinale), doesn't know where he's gone to.

Bellodi not only has to investigate a murder that leads to one of the most important men in the town, Don Marino (played by Lee J. Cobb), the local Mafia don, but he also has to untangle the truth from the lies surrounding the case, since the Mafia tries to hide the true motives of the murder by making it look like a crime of passion involving Rosa, the victim and Rosa's wayward husband – in that society honour can be conveniently used to cover up all crimes.

Nero, Cardinale and Cobb are excellent, and the other actors, mainly unknown Italian actors, do a great job bringing the movie to life too. The movie doesn't have a boring moment, and the intellectual conflict between Bellodi and Don Mariano is gripping. The movie, being one of the first ones to tackle the Mafia, uses many tropes that since then have become trademarks of the genre – the cop willing to bend the rules a little for justice, for instance, but more importantly the sense that the Mafia is an unbeatable opponent, too rich and powerful ever to be brought down. Compared to American movies, this one is quite pessimistic, but then again the Mafia in America is not half as chilling as it is in Italy and Sicily.

1976 was a magical year for cinema: Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Bertolucci's Novecento, Bergman's Face to Face, Polanski's The Tenant, Zurlini's The Desert of the Tartars, Bozzetto's Allegro non Troppo. No doubt many other masterpieces came out that year, but although I can't remember or know them all, there's one I'm not likely ever to forget: All The President's Men.

The seventies were being a good decade for Alan J. Pakula: he had already made two excellent movie, first the crime drama Klute (1971), for which Jane Fonda got her first Oscar, and then the paranoid extravaganza The Parallax View (1974), still very entertaining, and gorgeous to look at thanks to Gordon Willis' cinematography. The Parallax View starred a journalist (a brash performance by Warren Beatty) trying to untangle a vast governmental/corporate conspiracy that involved brain-washed assassins. His next movie, as a way of conclude this loose trilogy, was also a story about journalists uncovering a conspiracy on the higher echelons of government – what makes it infinitely more disturbing is that it is all true.

No one should have to live in a world where it's perfectly reasonable to write that this movie is about two journalists thwarting the sinister machinations of corrupt American President Richard Nixon, but we're not to blame if truth more often than not looks like a rejected Jamed Bond plot. Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford give extraordinary performances (Redford especially; Hoffman is undoubtedly a greater actor, so it's more exciting when Redford admiringly holds his ground against him) playing Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two journalists for The Washington Post who investigate the Watergate break-in and slowly unravel a presidential conspiracy that, in time, would lead to Nixon himself. Around them is a cast of some of the best actors from America's past and some still going strong nowadays: Jack Warden, Hal Holbrook, Jason Robards, Ned Beatty, Jane Alexander. The movie was written by William Goldman, and many of the crewmembers were regular Pakula collaborators: David Shire on the music, bringing adding his chilling and minimalist style to the atmosphere of the movie, and DP Gordon Willis lighting and framing each frame with the usual artistry that he displayed in The Godfather trilogy.

All The President's Men is an intelligent, slow-paced but tense political thriller that honours the best done in the genre – this may well be America's response to Costa-Gavras' superb Z (1969) – and that has left a mark too on all that followed – think of The Insider and State of Play, for instance. This movie pretty much helped codify the language and tropes of things we expect to see in movies of this type – journalists fearing for their lives, a non-cooperative government, night conversations in dark garages, leaked documents, the inner workings of newspapers. There's nothing clichéd here, though, each scene and trope still has vitality not only for inventing them in the first place but for setting such a high standard for imitators.

Although I've seen Taxi Driver many times, on TV and on DVD, today I had the rare opportunity of watching it on the big screen, seated in a dark theatre room, the way all movies should be seen. No matter how many times I watch the movie, and in whatever conditions, I never cease to be amazed at this movie, at its boldness, at the fact it exists at all. The '70s are my favourite era of film, both in American and around the world, and for me Taxi Driver is one of its most magnificent achievements, so many decades later still towering over many of that decade's masterpieces, so ahead of its time the tribulations of the protagonist still disturb modern viewers by how prescient and immediate they are.

Robert DeNiro plays Travis Bickle, a Vietnam veteran who can't sleep at nights and drives around, and so he may as well do that for money. Bickle is lonely, socially inept, almost always wears his army jacket, his name written on the back, a part of his identity he clings to tenaciously. Bickle is the proverbial nobody, but in his slowly-decaying mind he conjures thoughts of becoming a great man, of doing something important. His thoughts, though, are as blurry as his conversational skills and he's not sure what he wants to achieve, what ideas are those. Nevertheless constantly writes in his diary that he wants to clean up the city, which is an open sewer full of filth, and the movie slowly shows Bickle changing into a megalomaniac vigilante with delusions of grandeur. The movie, and Bickle, are preparing the viewer for a spectacular finale, and they don't disappoint.

Although the movie makes it clear Bickle is slightly unbalanced from the first moment we see him, applying to a job as a cabbie (in a short but memorable scene with Joe Spinell), it doesn't bother trying to give reasons, or any background on his past life. His hatred for lowlifes, pushers, prostitutes and pimps isn't a cause but just something his already deranged brain focuses to release his anger. When he tries to be an ordinary man, and find love and companionship, we see how out of his element he is. His conversations with other cabbies are always tense and awkward. And when he tries to date Betsy, a woman (Cybill Shepherd) involved in a campaign to get Senator Palantine elected as President, she breaks up with him when he casually takes her to a porn movie. When his experiments at normalcy fail, he concentrates his efforts and money to remake himself into a vigilante with a confused plan to murder Palantine on vague motives (Bickle's mind is hazy, the movie never is – it just puts the viewer right in his head, which probably makes not a lot of sense even to himself) before becoming obsessed with saving a teenage prostitute (Jodie Foster) from her smooth-talking pimp (Harvey Keitel).

Every scene and line in this movie is carefully thought to show Bickle's deranged state of mind and to carefully and thoroughly chronicle his descent into suicidal madness. Few movies are more perfect than Taxi Driver in bringing together all aspects of filmmaking into a perfect whole. Lawrence of Arabia, Chinatown and 2001: A Space Odyssey before, and a handful since. It's a marvel to see it unwind before your eyes: the dialogue, the performances of everyone, the shots of New York at night, Bernard Herrmann's half romantic half bleak score so often perfectly mirroring and enhancing Bickle's state of mind. Although DeNiro is to commend for this performance, undoubtedly the best of his career, all the other actors are equally excellent, from Shepherd to Foster, from Keitel to a young Albert Brooks in a short but wonderfully comical role. Martin Scorsese's direction was perhaps never this crisp and accurate again, and Paul Schrader never wrote such a remarkable screenplay again. It's clear on every scene that these men and women brought their best talent to the movie, and thanks to their hard work we've been graced with one of the best movies ever made.

The USA have made all my favourite TV dramas, but when it comes to humor, no one beats the UK. Every year I must watch one or two shows that make me think, "Wow, this is the greatest comedy show I've ever seen!" A couple of years ago it was The League of Gentlemen, then The Mighty Boosh, then The IT Crowd. Last year it was The Thick of It, and indeed it's very, very hard to top Malcolm Tucker's foul-mouthed tirades and the government's screw ups he has to solve. But for now I'll go with Coupling as the best comedy show ever.

Coupling is a deceptively simple show about relationships - between sexes, between friends, between husband and wife, between rivals - but it's made with quirkiness, a great cast and some of the most intelligent dialogue ever to grace TV. Steven Moffat, the writer, loads the dialogues with insightful and original observations about language, human behaviour, the different way men and women think about certain topics like sex, faithfulness, marriage, etc., that makes this show one of the sharpest modern treatises on human relationships of our times. I think male and female viewers, watching this show, will frequently nod, "He's absolutely right!," even when he's saying something very insolent about men and women.

He's also helped by an excellent cast - Jack Davenport, Richard Coyle (the real star of the show, who sadly left after season 3), Ben Miles, Kate Isitt, Gina Bellman, Sarah Alexander, and the under-appreciated Richard Mylan (who has the unenviable task of replacing Coyle as the crazy, wacky character); they worked well together and their friendship and occasional spats were convincing and emotional. Richard Coyle stole the show as the socially awkward, sex-crazy Jeff - any scene with him is unforgettable, as are the weird situations he gets himself into. He sadly left the show after three seasons. Although I missed him, I disagree with some who think the show took a nosedive in the last series - Mylan was quite good as the comic book store owner Oliver, an insecure but lovable geek.

In fact the last season has many of my favourite episodes. One of the things that made Coupling so good was that it also played with timelines and parallel stories, and sometimes told stories out of order. In episode 4.1 we have the same story told from three perspectives, and 4.2 has one of the highlights of the show, a phone conversation that starts with two people and ends with the five characters all getting in it. Moffat's scripts are brilliant at a sense of crescendo - they start small and turn into epic situations that completely distort the everyday world. And what of 4.5, when Jane visits Oliver's porn-filled apartment? As far as hilariously embarrassing moments, only Jeff stripping naked in front of his co-workers tops it.

Coupling is one of the few TV shows I'd call perfect. The writing, the acting, the jokes, the timing, everything is just right about it. It's a pity it didn't go on for more seasons, but then probably it wouldn't have been so good. Excellence can only be sustained for so long. So thanks to Moffat and the cast for four amazing seasons!

Creators Dario Russo and David Ashby first caught my attention with their International Spiderman! series, the online adventures of, well, Italian Spiderman, a hilarious spoof of action, science fiction and horror '70s movie. What I loved especially about that show was the accuracy of the period - they even used a 16mm camera to capture the feel of this 'lost film'.

With Danger 5 they're carving a unique niche for themselves as satirists of '60s and '70s pop culture, TV shows and cinema. The series follows the five members of a special team on their missions in an absurd version of World War II, where Adolf Hitler has created a way of sexually transmitting Nazism!, has armed intelligent dinosaurs, has turned POWs into super-robots, operates from Casablanca-like clubs, has almost stolen all the world's monuments, and is protected by invulnerable diamond girls.

At the start of every episode the team is briefed by the eagle-headed Colonel, whose bullying of Claire, a stuck-up British officer, is always hilarious, as is his constant reminder that their mission is to 'kill Hitler!" Each member basically plays to national stereotypes: there's Jackson, the gung-ho American; Pierre, the joyful French who befriends everyone and makes mean martinis; Tucker, the square-jawed, all-American hero; and Ilsa, the tough-as-nails sexy Russian. They're all excellently played by a team of newcomers, who show great talent in playing their characters badly. Everything in the series is supposed to be bad and corny, from the acting to the absurd dialogue, down to the fake and cheap-looking sets and props. Likewise the Italians are all festive people, the British are all stiff upper lips, and regarding the Swiwss, well, we find out their blood is actually made of money. No surprise there really.

Also excellent is Carmine Russo as Adolf Hitler. Hitler hasn't been used this comically since The Producers. There's a running gag about Hitler and a window that never feels stale.

If you like spoofs of old shows, or if you're into the absurd humor of The Mighty Boosh, you ought to give Danger 5 a look. Its seven episodes won't disappoint.

Henri Verneuil's political thriller is a French take on the assassination of JFK. Yves Montand plays a magistrate investigating the murder of a president. After disagreeing with the findings of an official commission to find out what happened, he starts his personal investigation, reviewing the evidence, interviewing witnesses, discovering holes in the official interpretation and slowly revealing a network of influences that implicates organized crime, secret services and the government.

Yves Montand is excellent in his role. It's ironic - and perhaps not a coincidence - that he was chosen for this role. After all he's known as the murdered politician in Costa-Gavras' Z, so this is an inversion of his role. His character Henri Volney embodies all the values we want our civil servants to have: responsibility, courage, initiative, moral convictions.

Also fascinating is the subplot about Stanely Milgram's experiments on obedience and authority. In the 196's Milgram conducted experiments to find out how quickly people would surrender their will to others, in order to understand the mentality that allowed Germans to carry out gruesome crimes against innocent people. He discovered that people easily submit to authority figures and will commit atrocities in their name with little incentive.

The movie is well written, has excellent cinematography, good twists, gripping suspense, well-defined and likable characters, and a great but severely underused score by Ennio Morricone.

Claude Chabrol's Alice or the last escapade is a rare foray into fantasy with many of the signature elements that made this French filmmaker a consummate storyteller and creator of suspense. One night, the unhappy Alice Carroll (Sylvia Kristel) leaves her boring husband. Then her car's windshield inexplicably breaks in the middle of a storm and she finds shelter in an estate. The old owner and his butler kindly put her up for the night, but when she wakes up the inhabitants have disappeared and her car has been repaired. However, she can't find the gate leading back to the main road. She's trapped inside the estate's walls.

Although written by Chabrol himself, the film is based on Lewis Carroll's classic novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Kristel reads Jorge Luis Borges' Fictions at one point. One could also establish connections with a famous Ambrose Bierce short-story and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. It's a far cry from his realistic thrillers but I think it's also his sense of realism that makes the subdued fantasy elements work so well in this movie. The strangeness of the movie comes mostly from plays on language – like the inhabitants who refuse to answer any questions – and old-fashioned camera tricks and sound effects. When Alice climbs up the wall, thinking she get on the other side, she discovers there's just more estate, or as a character tells us, "there's no other side." These are all neat tricks that fortunately don't require elaborate special effects, but allow the movie to explore concepts like infinity, paradoxes and the nature of time.

What makes the movie so remarkable, besides the strange concepts it explores and the bizarre situations it thrusts its heroine into, is that Chabrol never seems to be directing a fantasy movie. In fact Jean Rabier's luminous camera captures every surface and space with a decidedly non-threatening light. In an age when movies come out with preconceived palettes – you know a horror movie these days is going to have that sickly green hue – the colors in this movie seem out of place, radically so, and better suited in a drama. It's this sense of unfamiliarity that makes the movie more settling.

Sylvia Kristel was very good in this movie, although she was mostly a passive character being thrust from one absurd situation to another. I think Chabrol was more fascinated with the beauty of the sets than with her legendary body. Still, watching this movie, one wonders why her career derailed into a string of erotic movies. She had all the qualities to make it as a decent actress.

Alice or the last escapade is a frolic for movie lovers. There's nothing visionary about this movie: it seems in the 1960s and 1970s everyone was doing their own weird fantasy movie: Robert Altman (Images), Ingmar Bergman (The Hour of the Wolf), Elio Petri (A Quiet Place in the Countryside, Roman Polanski (What?), and this is just another addition to this whimsical body of cinema. But if you're a fan of artistic fantasy movies, you ought to watch it.

Prometheus managed to get me very excited: from the trailer I expected an intelligent, gripping, visually splendid science fiction movie like we haven't seen in a long, long time. Well, I got the pretty visuals, but Prometheus is a movie in search of sensible characters and an intelligent plot.

Two archeologists discover a star map on a cave painting and from such scarce evidence infer that Mankind was created by aliens, which they call the Engineers. They convince Weyland Corporation to finance a trillion-dollar expedition to the planet to search for alien life, filled with incompetent geologists and botanists who never heard of basic health procedures. At this point the movie basically becomes a remake of Alien - ships lands on alien planet, scientists find alien complex, strange things creep them out, people get infected with aliens, a double-crossing android (brilliantly played by Michael Fassbender, one of the movie's saving graces) manipulates the crew, people fight aliens, etc.

Most of what you see in this movie was already in Alien, all the way back in 1979, and the new ideas aren't particularly well developed. I'm sure an interesting movie about aliens creating mankind could be made, but Sir Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof aren't up to the task. Most of the movie's problems come from the script: characters do bizarre, irrational things all the time - people with state of the art digital maps get lost in straight tunnels, scared scientists try to pet visibly hostile alien creatures; people with almost no information make incredible assumptions - Janek, the ship's commander, who never leaves the ship, out of the blue claims that the aliens were building biochemical weapons. There's an absurd twist halfway that introduces a new character in a very silly way. Alien, let's be clear, didn't have brilliant characters and the dialogue was so-so, but their personalities were well-defined and they were instantly compelling. Most of the characters here were loathsome and I was hoping they'd all die violently.

As a stand-alone movie Prometheus is a disgrace. But it's even worse what it does to Alien; basically it cheapens it by destroying the wonderful mysteries it kept for decades. I don't think the world ever needed to know who or what the Space Jockey was, we were all better off finding our own solutions in our imagination. But Scott must hate people using their imagination. He and Lindelof must also hate their because they came up with a dull explanation for him, not to mention he changed his bizarre look. The original Space Jockey was gigantic, this one is almost the same of a human. Although they're not the same character, since Prometheus takes place in another movie, I really want to see what explanantion - if any - they're going to find to there being two Space Jockeys of different sizes.

Besides Fassbender's excellent performance, this movie has excellent special effects, sound design and cinematography. The opening shots are beautiful and the visual inside the alien compound are very good, even if they're not up to H.R. Giger's.

I expected more, I was anxious to love this movie.

Elio Petri directs his frequent collaborator, Gian Maria Volonte, in a drama about Lulu, an Italian factory worker contemptuous of his colleagues' attempts to get better pay and working conditions through their union. Lulu prides himself on being a productive worker, and the bosses praise him for his almost superhuman devotion to work. In spite of that, Lulu is just another worker scraping a meager job, living in a crummy apartment, with a woman he doesn't love very much. His personal life seems to amount to visiting a former work mate, who's now living in a mental hospital.

Lulu's outlook, however, changes when he loses a finger in a factory accident. Although the accident doesn't leave him disabled, it makes him spin out of his numb existence as he gets more interested in the unions' struggles. But if before he was indifferent, now he starts getting involved with radical extremists preaching a new social revolution, instead of the more moderate but realistic unions.

The movie is interesting because of the way it portrays the schism between unions: on the one hand, there's the traditional union, composed of workers, who just want to improve their lot, get a payrise. And then there are the Marxist-Leninist students and intellectual nutjobs who never put a foot inside a factory and who want to blow society up and rebuild it from the ashes. Petri is deservedly critical of the latter.

The movie shares similarities with neorealist cinema in the way it portrays the squalor and working conditions of ordinary people, but Petri isn't particularly soft on the working class. Their inability to get organised, their own selfishness, and the lack of credible leaders to inspire them, is nicely dealt with in here. The viewer expecting just propaganda will be disappointed.

Gian Maria Volente delivers a fine performance, especially in his mad outbursts of rage and madness. Petri has directed better movies, but The Working Class Goes to Heaven manages to tackle many of the issues in his oeuvre and so is also an indispensable movie for fans.

Gillo Pontecorvo's final movie is an outstanding thriller. After watching Kapo, The Battle of Algiers and Burn, I was curious to watch this movie about an ETA terrorist cell carefully plotting the assassination of Franco's successor in the final days of his regime.

Ogro is a movie that has all the marks of the celebrated director of The Battle of Algiers: it's based on real events, it's realistic, it's political. But it's also a child of the glorious '70s, the greatest period for intelligent political thrillers. I really don't know why we film lovers were blessed with Costa-Gavras, Bernardo Bertolucci, Elio Petri, Francesco Rosi, Alan J. Pakula and Pontecorvo in such a short time: the movies they left behind were all entertaining, gutsy, raw and stimulating. Ogro is slow-moving, but well-written, acted and directed. It's a very convincing portrayal of the lives of terrorists operating secretly in the streets of Madrid to assassinate a well-guarded politician. The terrorists' plan is like the movie - it demands method, patience and precision. We follow their daily lives as they have secret meetings, change hideouts, abort plans because of changes in circumstances, and live under constant fear of being arrested or murdered. If I had to compare this movie with others, I'd say it's similar in tone to Alain Resnais' The War Is Over, about a members of the Spanish resistance during Franco's era, and Jean-Pierra Melville's Army of Shadows, about the inglorious actions of the French resistance in World War II.

There isn't a lot of action, but the suspense builds up from start to finish. The terrorists' plan moves slowly, but also has some boldness to it, including pretending to belong to the electricity company and setting up a detonator in broad daylight to blow up their target in middle of the road.

The movie, however, is not a celebration of terrorism: although it recognizes the use of violence against totalitarian regimes, when no other solutions are available, it's very clear in denouncing its use in democracy, which is the dilemma that continued to plague Basque nationalists for decades after Franco's fall.

All the actors are very good in this movie, with particular attention to Gian Maria Volontè, who plays the leaders' group and the voice of wisdom and experience. The movie was co-written by two-time Oscar nominee Ugo Pirro, screenwriter of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and A Ciascuno il suo. To watch Ogro is to watch a movie by some of Europe's finest talents of the time. Satisfaction guaranteed.

Elio Petri made a string of good and interesting movies from the '60s to the '70s. He tackled the Mafia, fascist cops, union strikes, and deranged artists. Todo Modo, although not his best and most entertaining movie, may be the sum of all his socio-political interests. A dark satire about Italian politics, based on Leonardo Sciascia's novel, Todo Modo is a very bizarre movie that may not make a lot of sense unless the viewer knows a bit of what was going on in Italy in the 1970s.

Gian Maria Volontè plays a prime-minister who enrolls in spiritual resort, together with his cabinet of ministers and the opposition, where, under the guidance of Don Gaetano (Marcello Mastroianni), they attend lectures against sin, vices, money and the thirst for power. They're there to become better men, while outside the city is being ravaged by an epidemic. But instead they use the spiritual retreat to scheme, conspire and plan the future, in order to maintain their tight grip on power, which they've held for decades, while the people suffer under their indifferent, predatory rule.

Then there's a murder, and another, and all hell breaks loose. The murder, however, doesn't turn into a classic police investigation, especially because inspector Scalambri (Renato Salvatori) is out of his league investigating the government members. Sciascia's previous novel, which was turned into 'Cadaveri Eccellenti' (directed by Francesco Rosi), treads similar ground with the same level of ambiguity and meditations on the structures of power. After watching Todo Modo, everyone should give it a try. Instead of a police investigation, Todo Modo shows ruthless, treacherous men trying to back-stab each other for survival. It's like a political version of Agatha Christie's 'And Then There Were None'. In one of the best scenes, Scalambri attempts a reenactment of the first murder; he tries to ascertain where each person was at the time of the murder, which occurred in the middle of a crowd. But this appeal to justice is marred by the politicians' instincts never to be compromised in an investigation. As each man denies that he was to the right or left of someone else, it becomes obvious left and right stop being directions and become political tendencies, ending with the hilarious accusation, "Come off it! You've always been on the right! You were even to the right of Mussolini!" The movie has a slow start, but once the first murder occurs, it picks up a gripping pace until culminating in an hecatomb in the end. Everyone's very good in this movie, including Volontè and Mastroianni. The cinematography of Luigi Kuveiller is at the peak of his talent. Even if it's not a masterpiece, the talent concentrated in this movie makes it worth watching.

Leonardo Ferri can't paint. He's the toast of the town thanks to his abstract paintings, which fetch incredible prices. He dates the beautiful Flavia, his manager. A collector loans him a luxurious villa in the countryside to work. Life should be easy for Leonardo, but he's going through a creative crisis and having violent nightmares. He gets worse when, after driving aimlessly through the countryside, he discovers an abandoned villa for sale and becomes obsessed with living in it. If he already showed signs of mental instability from the start, the legend of a young countess who died mysteriously there during World War II, finally erases the last vestiges of sanity.

Cinema has long loved to explore the relationships between art, creativity and madness. A Quiet Place in the Country was released before Black Swan, The Shining, Robert Altman's Images, and on the same year as Ingmar Bergman's The Hour of the Wolf, with which it shares a few similarities: distraught painter living in isolation is haunted by things which may or may not be figments of his imagination. Although Bergman's remarkable incursion into horror has achieved a degree of fame, Elio Petri's movie remains undeservedly obscure; the fact that it so perfectly embodies the formula many of the above-mentioned movies still cling to, should make it essential watching for fans of movies about artists going murderously crazy.

The first thing one notices is Ennio Morricone's dissonant, deliberately ugly score for the movie. It's loud, clangourous, distorted, and interspersed with metallic noises. It's music meant to disturb and irritate. It gnaws at ones' nerves, predating the score John Williams composed for Images in collaboration with Stomu Yamashta, whose random weird sound effects disrupt the traditional harmony of Williams' compositions. In fact the whole movie is cacophonous from start to finish. The first act in Milan is thundering with urban noises: the indistinct humming of people, the ringing of telephones, the screeching of tires. Ironically, when the action moves to the countryside, it remains equally noise: the omnipresent chirping of birds and droning of critters simply replaces man-made sounds. In spite of the title, there's nothing quiet in the movie, whose frenzied sound wonderfully reflects Leonardo's deranged mind.

The dilemma about Leonardo's mental state is that we can never tell whether he's imagining things or whether a ghost is really manipulating him. He's in almost every frame of the movie, meaning the information we get is mediated by his perception. But the way he sees reality is fragmentary, blending the past and present, hallucinations and memories; he imagines fascist soldiers storming the gardens of the villa as he gazes out of a window. Ambiguity builds up until not even the viewer is capable of distinguishing fantasy and reality. It's not unlike the way Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining slowly becomes part of the hotel's history.

Elio Petri, famous for the Oscar-winning political parable Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, had a dynamic career. He arguably directed the first movie to talk about the Mafia, We Still Kill The Old Way; he directed Marcello Mastroianni in science fiction and crime movies; he tackled labour rights in The Working Class Goes to Heaven, and his political satire Todo Modo predicted the assassination of Italian prime-minister Aldo Moro. For this horror movie he got together with an excellent cast and crew: the actor Franco Nero, already a star thanks to the Django movies, Vanessa Redgrave, the legendary screenwriter Tonino Guerra (co-author of many movies with Antonioni, Fellini and Tarkovsky), and the underrated cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, who worked with Dario Argento in Deep Red. Knowing the names associated with this movie helps explain why it's such a fascinating work of cinema: the strong colours are the mark of Kuveiller, who could saturate the frame like few cinematographers. And the strangeness of the story owes a lot to Guerra's favourite themes of memory and perception (could we expect less from the screenwriter of Blowup?). That this movie is unique isn't remarkable; that some of the finest filmmakers of their time got together to make it is our luck.

Nero also shines in his difficult role and portrays Leonardo's insanity always on the edge of exploding into violence. His feverish, paranoid look greatly enhances the mood and grounds the disparate plot around him. For as much as this movie owes to the absurd and the irrational, it's never a deeply alienating experience thanks to Nero's charisma.

A Quiet Place in the Country is a great '60s movie. It drips with sensuality and coolness. Like Blowup, it defines a time and a place. Pop art is much on display throughout the movie, and American pop artist Jim Dine contributed created the paintings used in the finale. Probably shocking for its time because of the sex and violence, it's aged into a very respectable piece of weird cinema that fans of cult movies will want to add to their repertoire.

Not since The Shield ended have I followed a TV show with so much devotion. Romanzo Criminale, an Italian crime series aired between 2008 and 2010, in two seasons, is one of the best reasons to watch television in recent years. It's adapted from a novel which in turn is based on the real life events surrounding the Banda della Magliana, a criminal gang that operated in Rome between the 1970s and 1990s. In the late seventies, the entrepreneurial and ambitious Lebanese, the leader of a four-man gang in Rome's Magliana area, makes an alliance with another four-man gang, led by Freddo, to kidnap a wealthy Baron and demand a ransom. They invest the money on drugs and start controlling the supply in all of Rome, muscling out small pushers and dealers and powerful, Mafia-backed crime bosses. The visionary Lebanese turns the eight members into the leaders of Rome's underworld, with him as the self-declared King.

And once they run out of enemies, they start killing each other. The series is mainly about two things: first of all, the themes associated with these kinds of stories: loyalty, honor, betrayal, greed, arrogance, power. The hard work Lebanese puts into creating a united gang is constantly undermined by the members' individualism supplanting their communal activities. All men are corrupt and no one wants to be controlled: everyone has a side racket, everyone is making deals with someone else, everyone is stealing a bit of the profits; it's not even for them – it's because they have wives and kids on the way, or mothers to take care of; or they just want to buy expensive houses, cars and clothes, or they have a prostitute to keep. Conciliating the personal with the professional is one of the main themes of the show. The members recognize that being united has brought them great advantages, but there's always the propensity for corruption threatening to destroy Lebanese's dreams. But it's not just corruption: in Freddo's case, for instance, love makes him question his place in the group. Like Lebanese, Freddo's one of the great characters whose personality dominates the series. When either isn't present, you feel the lack; and when they're on screen, the show crackles with energy.

The other thing the series is about, is giving a vast vista of Italy during the Years of Lead, a period ranging from the late '60s to the early '80s, when Italy was in socio-political turmoil: left- and right-wing groups killed hundreds of innocents in explosions, and the government, the secret services, and the organized crime were all working together for mutual gain. Several historical facts are alluded to throughout the series, namely the assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978, the death of Roberto Calvi, known as God's Banker, in 1982, the 1980 Bologna train station massacre, and more. The characters, like their real-life counterparts, were involved with neo-fascist groups and the secret services, in a complex web of favours, blackmailing, and mutual interests. The series is political and dense. In this regard, I'd compare it to the French mini-series Carlos. The series was made for Italians, though, so don't expect information to be spoon-fed. These events are so recent in Italy's history, like the P2 scandal, that the creators presumed viewers would still be familiar with them. Non-Italian viewers are advised to do a bit of research: it's actually quite informative and interesting. However, it's not so overwhelming viewers will feel lost. At least I didn't.

But if you can put up with these bits of Italian history, you'll be rewarded with a fascinating, well-written story about the rise and fall of the gang members. The first season deals with Lebanese's transformation into a powerful boss, but also chronicles his inability to maintain power due to what in tragedy we're taught to call 'character flaws:' arrogance, paranoia, micro-management. Season two allows Freddo and Dandi, Lebaneses's best friend, to grow as characters as one struggles to keep the group united and the other forges new alliances that will make his old friends irrelevant in his thirst for power. But although those three are the best delineated characters in the series, everyone gets a chance to shine. One of the things I appreciated here was how the characters were dynamic instead of being stuck in their own circumstances. There's for instance a character called Ricotta in season 1 who seems like a mere Mafia henchman, but throughout the series he slowly becomes a part of the gang and turns into a pivotal figure in the final episodes. The same can be said for Bufalo, who at first was just another member, but whose quest for revenge in season 2 becomes one of the most spectacular subplots of the show. Everyone is granted his moment of humanity and after 22 episodes, it's hard not to sympathize with all of them, even if some are despicable people.

On the other side of the law there's Scialoja, a policeman investigating the gang for years, trying to disrupt their activities. Like Lebanese, Freddo and Dandi, he's one of the most interesting characters of the series. Idealistic, reviled by peers for alleged communist sympathies, he's the classic do-gooder, except in a highly-corrupt society his power of maneuver is greatly debilitated. Fans of The Wire who loved the final season's downbeat ending will love this pessimistic look at the law and the portrayal of a society where justice is broken and the actions of good men are pointless.

Like The Shield, Romanzo Criminale is a work of long-term plotting. Its 22 episodes have to be seen in order, each episode continues from the previous one. And if possible, it has to be re-watched: some scenes are heartbreaking in retrospect, like the football game in episode 2. Now that foreign shows are finally becoming popular – The Killing, Spiral, Wallander – it's a good time to discover Romanzo Criminale, one of the best shows on TV in recent years.

I haven't watched many TV shows ever since The Shield ended, and never again with the same devotion and lack of critical attitude. After The Shield, I just couldn't go back to watching problem-of-the-week type of shows, whether it be super-duper, morally perfect policemen solving a crime every episode (CSI, Criminal Minds, The Mentalist, et cetera), or some young reluctant hero killing monsters (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, et cetera). I became used to long-term plotting, dynamic characters constantly changing, complex narratives developing organically, and incisive critiques of society, race, sexuality, power, politics, family relationships, and more, much more. Yes, I even became used to bleakness, a lot of pessimism and a refusal to offer viewers simple solutions to complex problems. In this sense, The Shield is less a conventional TV show and more a novel in visual form, a long story, carefully plotted, full of meditations and insights into human nature, and a mirror to our times.

The story revolves around Vic Mackey and the other members of the Strike Team, a special LAPD unit that deals with street crime by bending the law as much as possible without snapping it. But then David Aceveda, the new captain, arrives at their precinct, demanding better crime stats. Aceveda is a cop with political ambitions and his cleaning up crime is just the first step on the road to become the mayor. This pushes the Strike Team to start using illicit methods to control the crime in their area, which ironically prompts Aceveda to start investigating them, by planting a spy in their group. When they get wind of this, they execute their team-mate and cover it up. This action reverberates throughout the series for all its 89 episodes. The Strike Team starts planning their early retirement by stealing from Armenian criminals, deal with betrayals, frequently try to redeem themselves, skirmish with Internal Affairs, all the while uncovering corruption, forging allies with criminals and federal agencies and simply trying to sort out their messy personal lives.

Every character is missed dearly, for no matter how corrupt, evil or Machiavellian, they were clearly loved by the writers. Instead of stock characters, we have human beings with distinct personalities, dreams, motivations, fears, different worldviews, ways of operating and different levels of morality. It was always fascinating to see the outspoken, bullying Vic Mackey share scenes with the subtle, scheming Aceveda; or to compare Detective Claudette's by-the-book approach to morals with Vic's the ends-justify-the-means philosophy; or to compare Captain Monica Rawling's progressive but unpopular methods with Aceveda's media-friendly ones; or Vic's attempts at redemption with his good friend Shane's downward spiral into corruption. Or you can just be enthralled by the characters' personal struggles: Officer Julien's battle with his repressed homosexuality; Detective Dutch's social awkwardness and inability to become popular in spite of being a damn good cop, arguably better than Vic; or I.A. Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh's own battle to remain a good policeman while allowing his obsession to nail Vic turn him into the criminal he despises. I could write an entire page just listing the fascinating characters in the show. And I haven't even mentioned the villains: Antwon Mitchell, whose attempt to grab power in LA dominated one of the best seasons of the series; or the final villain of the series, the businessman Pezuela and his blackmail network. Still the best villains in the show tend to be the cops: Vic, Kavanaugh, Aceveda, Shane, et cetera. Through them we get a sweeping vista of contemporary society as well as penetrating studies of morality. Season 3, which is undeservedly considered one of the series' weakest parts, is arguably the best study of greed ever written for TV, on par with The Treasure of Sierra Madre. And the fast-paced season 7, after dozens upon dozens of speeches on loyalty, ends with one of the most devastating betrayals ever. I wouldn't say The Shield is a difficult series to watch; in fact it's immensely watchable and entertaining; but unless you're prepared to accept that people are basically corrupt and selfish, you probably won't appreciate it a lot. Like many good novels, it provides an unglamorous, bleak portrayal of people that is a far cry from the soothing pabulum TV offers.

The Shield mixes delicate drama with fast-paced action: it's fascinating to watch not only because of the violence, the sex, the cool and badass moments, but also because of the deep inner lives of each character, so well delineated and laid bare that we almost think we know them better than ourselves or our friends and relatives. Every action and decision exists organically; no character does anything that seems out of character or just to service the plot. Frequently they do stupid things, like we all do in our lives, but always for motives resulting from their own psychologies. The characters make the story, which is a nice change from typical TV storytelling, where often it seems characters are made to fit, by hook or by crook, into predetermined plots and conclusions. In opposition, The Shield's seasons build on each previous one, just like in a novel. When the series ends on episode 89, we know it was the only possible conclusion for every character. So it demands an investment of time and patience. In the 21st century, television finally learned that Twin Peak's formula was the way to go, namely long-term storytelling. Many mediocre TV shows were quick to bank on it, like Lost, with its ridiculous twists that screamed lack of planning, and Prison Break that started rehashing the same plot every season. But there were also a few good TV shows that learned the lesson well: The Wire, for instance. The Shield, however, for me is the apex of this new way of making TV shows. Even if it's not perfect, for nothing is, anything less than a 10 would be farce.

Since 2001 studios have overwhelmed audiences with movies about terrorism and the war on terror, set in locations like Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, that, once exotically vague, now vied for didactic realism as they had become too familiar to continue to be irresponsibly depicted like in the old days of Rambo III.

Terrorism is such a broad topic it has originated many different movies: movies that explore the social-economical-political roots of the violence (Syriana; Munich); excellent satires (In The Loop; Four Lions); movies concerned with the impact of new terrorist laws on civil rights (Rendition); and real-life stories (United 93). A lot of movies have been made on this matter. Some are good; some are bad.

One of my favourite efforts was A Mighty Heart. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, from a screenplay by John Orloff, it's hardly a movie that will go down in film history as a masterpiece. When it came out in 2007 it received mostly positive reviews but since then has faded out of memory. However, with American troops finally abandoning Iraq in December 2011, and scheduled to fully leave Afghanistan by 2014, hopefully signalling the end of the era of the war on terror, I'm compelled to review this delicate, heartbreaking drama about a woman coping with the impact of terrorism on her life.

The movie is based on Marianne Pearl's non-fiction book. In January 2002, her husband, the American journalist Daniel Pearl, was abducted in Pakistan and nine days later beheaded by terrorists. The story is an account of the race against time initiated by Marianne, in cooperation with the American Embassy and the Pakistani secret services, to try to save him. It's a slow-paced drama that unfolds like a thriller. The outcome is no surprise and although we're expecting the inevitable conclusion, the kidnapping by overshadowed by Marianne's personal ordeal.

I read the book before watching the movie; it pleases me to declare that it's very faithful, if not completely to the events – it omits and compresses some facts but distorts little – at least as far as the emotional aspect of the story is concerned. Although the book has fascinating details about the complex, intense investigation, the movie is ultimately about triumphing over evil, and defeating terrorism simply by refusing not to be terrified.

Many movies have explored the causes of terrorism; others have explored (or exploited) the effects of terrorism in their pyrotechnical, widescreen spectacle. Few have shown that the purpose of terrorism is, bombings aside, to provoke fear in people, undermine their sense of security and render them paranoid and emotionally vulnerable. And that makes Marianne Pearl's experience truly inspiring.

Angelina Jolie was chosen by Marianne Pearl herself for the main role, and although her accent is problematic and occasionally slips, her grip on the character's inner turmoil never lets go. Playing a woman who lives in expectation of being told that her husband is either dead or alive, her performance is in constant flux, from hysterical outbursts of grief, to strength and confidence, to compassion. This is probably the most demanding role she ever played.

Sadly Marianne Pearl's role is overdeveloped to the detriment of the other characters. The screenplay fails to give Irrfan Khan, Will Patton, Archie Panjabi, Dan Futterman and the rest of the cast much to do. Khan's character especially, the Pakistani chief of secret services known only as The Captain, changes from one of the most interesting figures in the book to a stock police detective. In the book, The Captain exhibited a conflicted, tense personality, torn between protecting Pakistan's image and using illicit means like torture to make breakthroughs in the investigation. This dual conflict is barely hinted at in the movie. Many scenes barely have room to breathe.

And the movie never resolves this problem. It can't make up its mind about whether it's an ensemble movie or a drama about a woman. It tries to give a panoramic vista of the event while focusing on Marianne Pearl. Everyone else is underwritten and rushes through snippets of scenes that beam with untapped potential.

During the investigation, Marianne's house in Pakistan was the hub where everyone gathered to share new information, make plans and also to socialize. What the movie does well is show how Marianne, through her resilience, managed to coordinate all the efforts and create a close-knit group that was united not just by a mission but through friendship. It'll be difficult to find another movie about terrorism with such a serene, even optimistic atmosphere. And in the regard, the movie is also very faithful to the book.

Like the book, the movie depicts a woman who refuses to be terrified and fights to maintain a sense of normalcy in her home. In order to defeat terrorism, this movie argues, reinforcing bonds of community and maintaining one's humanity is perhaps more effective than violence. No other scene demonstrates this better than the dinner Marianne gives at the end of the movie. By then her husband's body has been discovered; she is about to leave Pakistan. But not before dining one last time with everyone who stood by her during those nine days of anxiety and dread. It's a scene that is totally out of place in this type of movie. And that's what makes A Mighty Heart stand out from the competition.

Movies about terrorism usually lead to a lot of preaching and finger-pointing. A Mighty Heart is subtler, almost apolitical. It doesn't seek to inflame or upset us. It doesn't make us cry out for justice or shake ours heads at the horrible world we live in. It's a movie about mercy and the ability to overcome tragedy and conquer hatred. In the darkly pessimistic world we live in, that makes A Mighty Heart's message a wonderfully radical one.

It's debatable whether the meeting of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Rome, in 1938, was a special day, but it was a day that changed the lives of Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni) and Antonietta (Sophia Loren). After seeing her extended family off to the parade, Antonietta, a depressed housewife, meets Gabriele, a radio broadcaster reviled by his neighbours for being a known anti-fascist, an unusual and unpopular position in those days. Although a fascist sympathiser, Antonietta can't attend the parade because of her domestic duties; Gabriele stays home because he feels lonely in a country that considers him a criminal just for being different. In fact he feels so lonely he's about to commit suicide when Antonietta knocks on his door to ask for a strange favour. And that sets off a story about two desolate people knowing and finding emotional support in each other.

A Special Day is mainly about life under fascism but it takes the unusual route of not demonizing it directly through ponderous, preachy sermons. In fact, fascism is depicted as a normal activity in the movie, and fascists as ordinary people with children, spouses, jobs, aspirations, etc, rather than monsters. The real deviant is Gabriele, an intellectual who refuses to get on with the program, not for particularly idealistic principles but for personal reasons carefully revealed throughout the movie.

Antonietta's life isn't any easier just because her household is a fascist. With a husband and six children to take care of, she has given up her dreams and happiness to serve others. Barely literate, she resents the fact that her husband is cheating on her with a schoolmistress. Although living in a house full of people, her entire personality expresses as much loneliness and sadness as Gabriele's. Loren's performance is particularly remarkable for the way she tones down her legendary beauty to become a pale, weary-looking, sunken-eyed woman in her mid-forties. If there's any doubt that Loren was an excellent dramatic actress, this movie is proof.

As the day marches on, they discuss what it means to be happy, tolerance, freedom and human dignity. Hope arises when Antonietta learns to respect Gabriele and his differences, in spite of everything she was taught to believe in. The movie is stagy and wordy, taking place mostly inside dingy rooms, as they move from one apartment to another and back, always having conversations in which they lay bare their deepest fears, dreams, sorrows and views about life. But Mastroianni and Loren are on hypnotic mode here, and even if the screenplay weren't outstanding already, their performances should hold any viewer's attention in thrall.

Director Ettore Scola, however, is no slouch. The movie, after several minutes of original footage showing Hitler arriving in Rome, opens with a long take that lasts almost five minutes: the camera slowly moves across the façade of a building complex, enters Antonietta's apartment and follows her as she wakes up each one of her children and gets them ready for the parade. The movie was appropriately shot in a complex built in the thirties, with iron bars running along windows giving it the look of prison bars, and yellowish apartments oppressively facing each other, as if no tenant is safe from the prying eyes of neighbours. Like a stage play it may be, but the attention to atmosphere makes up for dazzling camera-work exercises.

Inside, Antonietta's apartment is riddled with fascist motifs, portraits of Mussolini, banners and flags, and religious art. It's a sharp contrast to Gabriele's apartment, which shows abstract (or degenerate, as it was called at the time) art hanging on the walls, and piles of books. Their personalities are clearly delineated without waste of words. The movie tells a lot through pictures. Fascist and Nazi symbols are almost omnipresent around them, and Antonietta even has a caged bird that symbolises their condition.

Although it's a talking heads movie, dramatic silence and noise are as much a part of it. Radios blare their announcements and songs at dramatic intervals, and the air is awash with the cheers of distant crowds bringing the historical meeting into the lives of the two protagonists. All this subtlety makes A Special Day an unusual political movie. Political cinema always runs the risk of wearing its beliefs on its sleeve, certain that an important message is enough, and that things like aesthetics just get on the way of whatever point the filmmaker is trying to make from his pulpit.

A Special Day is an entertaining, deeply humanist movie, whose politics are organically entwined with the story of two people searching for a new purpose in their lives. Anyone who's ever been treated unfairly just because he's different, or anyone who simply opposes intolerance on moral grounds, or deplores the curtailment of civil liberties, cannot fail to be moved by this special movie.

In 1976 an airplane travelling from Tel Aviv to Paris made a stop in Athens and was hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists. They flew the plane to the Entebbe airport in Uganda, then under the rule of the dictator Idi Amin, separated the Israeli passengers from the others and threatened to kill them if Israel didn't release several Palestinian prisoners. Israel's response was to organise one of the most perfect rescue operations in the history of rescue operations.

Operation Thunderbolt was not the first dramatisation of this rescue but was the first one fully made by Israelis, with the collaboration of the Israeli government and the Israeli Air Force. This has worked simultaneously in its favour and detriment. From a purely factual and realistic perspective, it's the best dramatisation of the events. But the movie carries a slight stench of propaganda – one gets quickly tired of listening to characters declaring Israel as the greatest country in the world; even if that is true, there is a thing called modesty. Israel is a small country that has successfully repelled attacks from its neighbouring enemies. I can understand how that inflates its citizens with a sense of ego. But one thing is national pride; chauvinism is something quite different. Watching this movie I also remembered some of the criticism the Brazilian movie Elite Squad was levelled with: this movie sounds and looks like a massive recruitment campaign. Join the army and kick ass! The movie also has a bipolar approach to some of the factual events of the hijacking. On the one hand, it surprisingly portrays the terrorists in a very objective light. I can't imagine a better choice to play the terrorist leader than the devilish Klaus Kinski, an actor who portrayed evil so seductively. Kinski's terrorist sees himself as a freedom fighter, an idealist who believes in the Palestinian cause. He's smart, in control and attentive to the needs of his hostages. Kinski plays Wilfried Böse. Böse's terrorist career was recently portrayed in the French TV series Carlos, which briefly references the Entebbe Operation. Böse was a left-wing revolutionary who opposed imperialism and dreamed of a world revolution to make the world a fairer place. Like many revolutionaries of his time, he embraced the Palestinian causes as a just one. This movie sadly skips most of the historical context but still portrays him as a credible person and not as a caricature.

On the other hand the movie fails to clearly address the fact that this wasn't about kidnapping Jewish people but Israeli citizens. In the harrowing sequence when the passengers are separated in two groups, we're shown the passengers being divided between Jews and Gentiles. In fact several Jewish people who did not have an Israeli passport were released. The terrorists retained only Israelis citizens. This for me is the movie's major weakness – trying to frame the event as a crime of anti-Semitism and not putting in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where terrorists are motivated not by ethnic but political reasons. In other words, the movie shows the Israelis being kidnapped just because they're Jews and not because they belong to a country whose successive governments have been accused of committing war crimes too. This simple victimisation and lack of self-scrutiny is the strongest criticism I can level against this otherwise remarkable thriller.

Politics aside, Operation Thunderbolt is an amazing adrenaline rush, tightly edited and always moving at a frantic pace, shifting between the Israeli forces and the terrorists, keeping the viewer glued to the screen as he impatiently waits for the spectacular climax. The movie opens with Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu (Yehoram Gaon) training with his men for hijacking situations in a foreshadowing of the actual operation. Yonatan is never satisfied with his men's results and has them repeat the exercises over and over. Then the action moves to Athens, introducing the passengers. Several are described in broad strokes and immediately gain the viewer's sympathy. When the terrorists take over the plane, the viewer is already on the hostages' side.

Although the outcome is already known, the movie sustains a high note of suspense. The ending doesn't lose one iota of its emotional impact just because we know the hostages will be saved. After sharing with the hostages their plight, I think any viewer will finish this movie feeling a triumphant joy. There are happy endings a dime a dozen and then there are endings that fill us with a deep sense of justice, that leave us with the impression that the world has been put back in order.

I couldn't finish this review without praising Dov Seltzer's score, whose powerful main theme is played throughout the movie with several variations in tone, from elegiac to a fast-paced groovy theme that screams '70s. Seltzer's music is almost the cement that holds movie together and deftly underscores the tension and the horror of the story. Like the movie, the score is an unknown gem awaiting greater recognition.

Menahem Golan achieved some success in the United States after this movie. He went on to make The Delta Force, with Chuck Norris. I never saw it and I don't know much about Golan's style. In this movie he thankfully didn't try to make anything too ostentatious. He shoots the scenes with simplicity and the certainty that the true story is enough to carry the movie, and indeed it is.