Woman in Black: (2012. dir: James Watkins) A surprisingly good and old-fashioned Old-Dark-Houser. It moves away from the cheap scares and hokum of the long-running play and delves back into the original (and also very good) novel by Susan Hill. No doubt its chief draw is the casting of Daniel Radcliffe in the lead as a grieving widower sent to rummage through legal papers in a truly spooky haunted house, but its main charms lie in its marvellous colour-chiaroscuro lighting, the genuine creeps it coaxes out of a collection of Victorian toys and furniture, and Janet McTeer in a seamless performance as a mother half-crazed with loss of her child. For a story whose genesis lay in the early '80s, it has an extraordinarily Victorian feel, including an ending which those old Victorians would call redemptive but can only seem macabre to those of us from a more cynical age. There is, in fact, a moment played straight in which the Ciaran Hinds character, a practical man, gently pooh-poohs the young solicitor's suspicions of ghosts: "We cannot give in to superstition. When we die, we go up there; we do not stay down here." It's a bit like being transported back into a previous (and grotesquely eldritch) age, and a fulsome shudder ran down my spine on more than one occasion.
Haywire: (2011. dir: Steven Soderbergh) Because it's Soderbergh, it's a notch above most "Bourne" pretenders. It's got Fassbender, Banderas, Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Bill Paxton, Ewan McGregor and Michael Angarano, alternately trying to kick or save the tough-chick heroine's ass at one time or another. The bendy story is told clearly and well, and the fighter-girl who plays the lead (Gina Carano), while lacking the head-turning charisma of a Jolie, holds her own well enough. And Banderas, in a secondary role (really, everyone's role is secondary; Carano carries the bulk of it) has got a final scene displaying a subtle and vanity-less inhabitation of character which gives the film its satisfying full-stop.
Runaway Train: (1985. dir: Andrey Konchalovskiy) It's a movie from that brief moment when Eric Roberts was still being lauded as a new-rising DeNiro, a movie which was, interestingly, based on a Kurosawa script. It begins as a prison break-out but only hits its stride once the two escapees jump a train whose conductor simultaneously has a heart attack and they find themselves speeding through a frozen landscape on a driver-less machine towards an apparently inevitable catastrophe. (OK, it's an allegory, see?)
Roberts is so vulnerable as to be painful to watch, which I very much mean as a compliment, and Jon Voigt gives a career-crowning performance as a character who is larger than life: half monster, half demigod. The end-shot, in fact, achieves a nobility and transcendence which is magnificent to behold.
The Return of a Man Called Horse: (1976. dir: Irvin Kershner) This is the '70s version of Dances With Wolves, in which a rich white guy (he's an English Lord, trapped in this huge castle with a mess of people to wait on him hand and foot and a woman -- albeit, admittedly, white,-- who loves him faithfully, and an endless amount of money to spend; a terrible existence; we see him crumpled in a corner screaming in agony over it at one point, and I'm utterly serious about that) finds personal fulfillment in leading a helpless band of Good Indians to find their self-respect in victory over the Bad White Men (Evil French Trappers, to be specific) and their Bad Indian cohorts. It's better than the original Man Called Horse, which had a weaker story, and this one has at least one great scene (when he dandies up to avoid rousing suspicion while doing recon in the fort) and other good ones, including an intensive sun-dance.
It's darker, it's got less sugary coating than Dances; it's still the white man's fantasy. But Richard Harris was a fine actor, no two ways about it, and Geoffrey Lewis hits just the right note as the malevolent chief canuck trapper guy.
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