A Guide To Modern Cinema

If you ever find yourself struggling to add things to a a DVD rental list or confused about what is going on in cinema today help is at hand. Below is a a guide to the movers and shakers of modern cinema with recomendations of their best work. Go ahead and dive on in.

The Big Names:

Steven Soderbergh

Sex Lies And Videotape, Out Of Sight, Traffic, Solaris

Steven Soderbergh was the first big name director to be 'made' by the Sundance film festival, which annually showcases independent cinema. It was the arrestingly titled 'Sex, Lies and Videotape' that caught the imagination of the festival and was bought up by the then unknown Miramax studio. It's a conversational and reflective piece that has intelligence beyond it's racy title but it could be criticised for being slight. Soderbergh fell into obscurity for a while but then shot back to fame with the pulpy Out Of Sight with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. There have been many adaptations of Elmore Leonard novels to the screen but this is by far the best, using clever cutting and with a sharp script. Soderbergh managed to get two Oscar nominations for best director in the same year for Erin Brokovich and Traffic. Traffic is the better of the two films, a tangled web of stories regarding drugs in America that uses colour filtering to draw keep the viewer aware of which story they are following and to heighten the differences between the different parts of the drug spectrum. It has a great cast and is probably Soderbergh's high point. Also interesting is Solaris, a re-make of "the Russian 2001", which I found interesting but Katherine hated. Soderbergh has most recent made the highly successful Ocean's Eleven films.

The Coen Brothers

Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou, Intolerable Cruelty

Joel and Ethan Coen started out working for Evil Dead horror director Sam Raimi (who has since gone on to direct the Spiderman films). After a string of quirky independent films that they wrote, produced and directed they have now become mainstream fixtures without diluted much of the weirdness of their early work. Generally their films are based around some naďve whimsy such as a post clerk who gets made head of a corporation in the Frank Capra style The Husucker Proxy or a stoned hippy who is mistaken for a millionaire by a bunch of kidnappers in The Big Lebowski. O Brother Where Art Thou was an attempt to retell Homer's Odyssey as a depression era caper movie with elements of a bluegrass musical whih features a brilliant performance from George Clooney. Bizarre but brilliant. Their artistic high water mark was probably Fargo, where a heavily pregnant policewoman tries to solve a murder. This is slower and more deadpan than their other work, with much made of the natural dialogue employed. It lacks the knockabout fun of their other work but is a very striking film.

To make sure you don't find yourself at a loose end in your retirement here are a list of films to add to your DVD rental service. I've grouped these by director and highlighted in bold what I consider to be the best film to start with for each of them. I've also written a short summary of their work and given a link to their Wikipedia entry which provides much more information. Happy viewing and I'll be interested to see what you think of them.

Tim Burton

Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish

Tim Burton is now best known for the rather brilliant first two Batman movies and the highly misguided re-make of Planet Of The Apes, however his best work is still his smaller films. Edward Scissorhands is a film that now sits in that grey area between being cult classic and being a straight-forward classic. It tells of a mad-inventors creation, a strange gothic creature with scissors for hands, who tries to find his way in a white picket fence American town. At times it looks a little staid and dated but still has charm and beauty in spades. Ed Wood is a biopic of the man known as the world's worst director that is strangely sad and moving. Sleepy Hollow is a modern equivalent of a hammer horror movie, but with added weirdness, while Big Fish is a set of tall tales (and to be frank, bad American accents) starring Ewan Macgregor and Albert Finney.

M. Night Shyamalan

The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village

Shyamalan is a writer director who is partly the new Speilberg and partly the new Hitchcock. The Sixth Sense, which is his third film and not as many think his debut, became a huge hit with it's classic twist at the end and ever since his films have been judged by the traditional revelation at the end. This has undermined his reputation slightly, as his films are well written character pieces that don't rely on explosive set-pieces or lashing of sex and violence. All his post Sixth Sense films are worth seeing but my favourite is Unbreakable, a film where Bruce Willis survives a train wreck without a scratch and starts to wonder whether he may have special powers. A corny premise but brilliantly executed. Shyamalan is also the biggest Indian director working in America by quite some margin and makes small cameos in each of his films in true Hitchcock style.

British Directors:

Danny Boyle

Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, 28 Days Later

Trainspotting was the fashionable British hit of the 90's, however Danny Boyle's earlier film Shallow Grave is probably the better film. A low budget tale of greed and paranoia set in an Edinburgh which is both chilling and funny. After a couple of wobbles in the shape of Americana romance A Life Less Ordinary (which I really like) and The Beach (which is fairly good as well) Boyle got back to top form with 28 Days Later, a low budget horror movie that features some remarkable footage of a deserted London that was shot very quickly with heavily marshalled traffic rather than CGI.

Neil Marshall

Dog Soldiers, The Descent

Neil Marshall has directed two very effective low budget horror movies. Dog Soldiers is basically squaddies against werewolves whilst The Descent follows a group of women who go out on an underground caving trip and find scary beasties along the way. The Descent is a great example of how you can build tension just with having someone crawl through a confined space and by the end will have you turning on all the lights in the house.

Shane Meadows

24/7, Dead Man's Shoes

For modern day English films with proper accents that don't require the chipper feel good factor of The Full Monty or Calendar Girls, Shane Meadows is your man. He started out with 24/7, a black and white film about a boxing academy run by Bob Hoskins that attempts to keep kids from running into trouble on the streets. He followed this with the similarly serious A Room For Romeo Brass and then the sit-com style Once Upon A Time In The Midlands but his best film to date has been Dead Man's Shoes, a film that can draw favourable comparisons with Get Carter. An army man returns home to find his brother has suffered some undescribed abuse by local drug dealers and decides to take matters into his own hands. What follows is a warped and terrifying trail of retribution but with a heart and mind behind it. Both Philip and I thought this was a brilliant film and definitely one to watch in a single go (no pee breaks or getting up to make a cup of tea!)

Michael Winterbottom

Welcome To Sarajevo, A Cock And Bull Story, Road To Guantanamo

A versatile and clever director, Michael Winterbottom has jumped genre and style time after time. Welcome To Sarajevo is set during the war in Bosnia and charts the story of an ITN journalist whose priorities change from trying to get the biggest story to trying to save children left in an abandoned orphanage. His latest film is a political docu-drama about three people who have recently been released from the Guantanamo detention camp. His most inventive film is A Cock And Bull Story, an adaptation of the unfilmable novel by Tristam Shandy that focuses on the attempt to make the film rather than the film itself. What stops this from becoming a conceptual nightmare is a sharp and witty script and great chemistry between the bickering leads.

Christopher Nolan

Memento

Christopher Nolan has very quickly gone from making short films to directing Al Pacino and helming the latest Batman movie. The film that allowed him to make the jump was Memento, an inventive thriller about a man who is trying to find out who murdered his wife. The probably is he has an problem with his brain that means he can't make new memories and so can't remember anything for more than five minutes. To convey his sense of confusion the film runs backwards, but with flashbacks to earlier times. Though it isn't as clever as it would like to think it is, this is still one of the most distinctive films made in recent years and one I really think you will enjoy seeing as an example of good filmmaking.

Edgar Wright

Shaun Of The Dead

Shaun Of The Dead is a "romantic comedy with zombies" from the makers of the TV show Spaced. It references huge amounts of other films yet was still commended as one of the best structured films of the year by famous film academic Robert McKee.

Jonathan Glazer

Sexy Beast, Birth

Jonathan Glazer started out in music videos and commercials, directing the famous black and white Guinness surfers advert ("Tick followed tock followed tick", "This ones for you Ahab" etc). Sexy Beast was his debut feature and is probably the best British gangster film of the last 10 years. It has Ray Winstone as a retired ex-con sunning himself in Spain when a psychotic Ben Kingsley (you'll never see Ghandi the same way again) comes to bring him back for one more job. It then becomes a battle of wills between the two as Ray Winstone finds that you can't just walk away. Glazer's follow up was clearly influenced by Stanley Kubrick. It tells the story of a widower, played by Nicole Kidman, who is about to re-marry when a 10 year old child turns up and claims to be her late husband. Both films are well worth seeing.

European Directors:

Lars Von Trier

Dancer In The Dark, Dogville

Danish director Lars Von Trier is the enfant terrible of European cinema. He was one of the authors of the Dogme 95 manifesto that rejected Hollywood filmmaking and claimed that all films should be shot with natural light, use linear storytelling and no special effects. An interesting idea but the resultant films (including Festen and The Idiots) were poorly structured rubbish in my opinion. The idea was abandoned by it's originators soon afterwards (an effective publicity stunt perhaps?) but it has been taken forward by others. More interesting are Dancer In The Dark, an bleak naturalistic musical starring Bjork and Catherine Denueuve where the songs build out of the ambient noise surrounding the characters and Dogville an allegory on the formation of America that was filmed on a bare set with chalk outlines representing the buildings. Both films are more interesting than enjoyable, but give a great idea of what avant garde narrative cinema looks like these days. If you are still interested after getting through these Dogville is part of a trilogy whose sequel, Manderlay has just been released and Breaking The Waves is a distressing earlier film by the director.

Jean Pierre Jeunet

Delicattessen, Amelie, A Very Long Engagement

Jeunet is a French writer-director with an eye for the surreal. His first major film, Delicatessen, was co-written and directed by Marc Caro. It is a darkly comic tale in a post apocalyptic world where a butcher takes in lodgers to fix up his house before he kills them and sells the meat to the neighbours. An ex-circus performer is the latest lodger who may or may not feel the cleaver. After the stranger, but still interesting City Of Lost Children, Jeunet went to Hollywood and directed Alien 4, but with heavy interference. He then returned to France to make Amelie, a fantastical romance that proved to be a worldwide success. Amelie is a timid woman, played by the Audrey Tautou who has a touch of Audrey Hepburn about her, and the strange ways she changes people's lives. A Very Long Engagement pares Jeunet and Tautou again with a tale about a woman's search for her lover who went missing in World War 1. This is a darker film that Amelie but still has it's moments of whimsy and is very good.

Alejandro Amenabar

Abre Los Ojos, The Others

Amenbar is a Spanish director whose Abre Los Ojos was re-made as the far lesser Vanilla Sky starring Tom Cruise. It is a strange tale of a man who life starts turning very strange after he is involved in a car accident. His follow up was The Others which starred Nicole Kidman as a mother on the Channel Islands whose children are allergic to sunlight and who is waiting for her husband to return from the first world war. It develops into a very tense and effective human drama as strange things start happening in the night and has a fantastic central performance from Nicole Kidman.

Pedro Almodóvar

Live Flesh, All About My Mother, Talk To Her

Almodovar is an institution in his native Spain. He rose to fame with a series of melodramatic high camp films such as Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! He gained widespread international success with Live Flesh, an adaptation of a Ruth Rendell novel which toned down the neon excess of his earlier work focussing more on the deeper emotions behind. This was followed by the more epic All About My Mother, featuring Penelope Cruz, which played heavily on the idea of motherhood. With Talk To Her he embraced the surealism and playfulness of his earlier work, but this time infusing a greater sense of high art.

Tom Tykwer

Run Lola Run, Heaven

Run Lola Run is basically a 20 minute film told three times, with each telling having slight differences. The film follows Lola as she receives a call from her boyfriend say he has lost 100,000 marks he owes to a mob boss and if he doesn't come up with the money in 20 minutes he is dead. Lola then runs from her apartment to try and help him. Though this idea of alternate realities has been done many times in films like Rashomon and Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run is startling due to it's frentic pace, real time nature and use of animated segments. It is probably one of my 5 favourite films of the last 10 years. More recently Tykwer directed Heaven, the project Krystof Kiewlowski, directed of the acclaimed Three Colours trilogy and the biblical Decalogue series, was working on when he died. Heaven is a beautiful and poetic film about a teacher who tries to murder the head of a drugs ring with a bomb but ends up killing someone else instead.

Luc Besson

Leon, Unleashed

Luc Besson is a French director who is probably best known for La Femme Nikita (re-made as The Assassin) and The Fifth Element. He has also made a film of the life of Joan Of Arc called The Messenger which starred his supermodel wife. His best work is undoubtedly Leon, a film about a simple assassin played by Jean Reno whose sole care is a small pot plant before he ends up taking in the daughter of a man he has killed by Gary Oldman's corrupt, classical music loving, police officer. More recently Besson has focussed on producing B-movie action fodder such as The Transporter, Kiss Of The Dragon and Taxi. All of which are immense fun. The best of these is Unleashed which stars Jet Li as a man brought up as an attack dog by Bob Hoskins who is taken in by Morgan Freeman's blind piano player. Set in Edinburgh it is more fun that 95% of the action films Hollywood churns out.