(First published by Headstuff.org)

 

Modern Times (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1936)

 

Modern Times (1936) marked the final outing of Charlie Chaplin's beloved, silent-cinema persona, “The Tramp”, whose acrobatic exuberance and iconic hat, cane, and moustache had become world-famous over the previous two decades, and remain so today. Twenty-first-century audiences who have never seen a Chaplin film will probably know who he is, and associate him – by a kind of instantaneous brand recognition – with the elegantly ungainly gait and silhouette of his early character. 

 

His style of dowdy slap-stickery and glad romance – up-ending social solemnities with every beat – has also stayed a living thing, the subject of homage and affection among auteurs and afficionados. Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, for one, is a fan: his Fallen Leaves (2023) sparkles with lively quirks that add a joyous, Tramp-ish sheen to the whole, despite the sullen subject matter (including alcoholism, loneliness, and poverty) the film addresses. Chaplin's original character, of course, for all his glee, was no stranger to solitude or trouble.

 

Modern Times also signalled Chaplin's transition into sound cinema, and the title may be read in part as a wry acknowledgement, from the great pantomimist, that a new technological age had indeed begun. Released when the Great Depression was in full spiral at home in the United States, and as fascism and Stalinism were consolidating themselves abroad, the movie follows the fortunes of a nameless “Factory Worker” who repeatedly malfunctions, inciting havoc, indignation, strike action, and (among his audience) helpless laughter and affection, as he tumbles and skims from one scene to the next. 

 

The contrast between our experience of the film and any objective summary we give of it is part of its attraction. On the one hand, Modern Times is premised on a clear-eyed recognition of the repetitive, dehumanizing demands of industrial labour, sparking a “nervous breakdown” in the protagonist, and yet its ultimate brilliance is the hilarity and lightness of its approach, the ease with which Chaplin magnifies a simple theme to the scale of entertainment, for all to see. 

 

As ever, the performative gymnastics (this time, with roller-skates!) are both clownish and subtle, Chaplin's gloriously haywire dance a thrill to behold. Watching him, we can appreciate the American poet Hart Crane's tribute, “Chaplinesque”, in celebration of this cinematic super-star whose every action seems to fulfil an otherwise forgotten promise: that “we can still love the world”, in spite of the many “meek adjustments” and merely “random consolations” life has to offer. “What blame to us if the heart live on.”

 

Crane's poem offers a valuable insight into Chaplin's art, but also into film culture more broadly: as if we turned to movies – again and again – in a spirit of “gaiety and quest”, seeking shelter from “the fury of the street”, or hoping for that strange beast, happiness, to show its face, from the shadows of a world too often cold and jagged. Even as Chaplin slides and rolls hungrily, hunting for pennies, he somehow makes life delightful, and the movie-screen a momentary home. Modern Times is lovely and brilliant – a film for all the ages.

 

 

Midnight Special (dir. Jeff Nichols, 2016)

 

A boy is being hunted. His father and another man, a friend, are his reticent protectors. The FBI are also on their trail. And the boy, as it happens, has supernatural powers. So runs Midnight Special (2016), Jeff Nichols's pivot into Deep South sci-fi. 

 

Nichols is a formidable enough director that even when his stories lag, or don't quite hold up under the weight of their own conventions, they're never uninteresting. In this case, plot points involving laser eyesight, hurtling satellite dishes, invisible space architecture, and the rest, seem like so much Spielbergian kitsch. J.J. Abrams was in his post-Super 8, re-jigged Star Trek phase at the time, so perhaps it was those gimmicky aspects of Nichols's script that secured him funding. At any rate, they dilute and distract from what feel like the film's emotional core, which – as in many of his features – concerns taciturn, heroically dishevelled people on the edge, willing to risk danger or inflict harm out of the purest loyalty to the ones they love.

 

Nichols is something of a mythologist, in many ways a descendant of John Ford. He opens a window onto a world inhabited by veterans, miners, drifters, laid-off Southerners (usually, although not exclusively, white and male): worn, perceptive people who don't say much, for whom big government is either a threat or an irrelevance to the general pattern of their lives. In Jordan Peele's work, or indeed in Eric Kripke's The Boys (2019-2026), these types appear as evangelical, cultishly deranged supremacists. Everything in Nichols seems to resist the force of that designation, including in this film, which features Sam Shepard as the ruggedly memorable leader of a (white) church called The Ranch; the whiff of danger lingers, but only as a secondary ingredient in the larger ambience Nichols evokes.

 

In general, Nichols seems impelled more by the strange poetry of twilight gathered over the Louisiana flatlands, or of small gestures shared between silent people, and the shadows that line their faces, than by any satirical instincts or structuring political perceptions. In Loving (2016), racial segregation is not so much the overarching subject as the necessary context in which the central relationship unfolds; if the film is death-haunted, this is due to the gnarliness of chance and mishap, and not just the violence of the Jim Crow South.

 

Midnight Special is somewhat uneven compared to Nichols's other movies, despite sharing their blended tone of melancholy (for times past or places gone) and affection (for their rough-hewn protagonists). In contrast to Take Shelter (2011), for most of which the audience was unsure as to whether the main character was experiencing visions or a break-down, in Midnight Special we're aware of Alton's supercharged abilities from the outset, and so the themes of difficult trust and conflicted belief that power the narrative can seem superfluous and overwrought as the story develops.

 

In its strongest segments, however, the film is entrancing. The opening ten minutes are saturated with nocturnal mystery and the tension of a mortal chase that hasn't yet been explained: a master-class in dramatic scene-setting. And the cast throughout give it their all. Kirsten Dunst and Joel Edgerton both bring feist and quiet sadness to roles that could easily have seemed stoney and blank. Michael Shannon, likewise, has an angry woundedness that hangs from him like an aura, and which he translates to tenderness, in moments, in a way that only the great actors can.

 

As a sci-fi flick, Midnight Special is probably a failure. But as a love story, Nichols's film is often captivating, dramatizing how a human faith might be maintained between people who have every reason to give up on one another or surrender to their own doubts.

 

 

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2025; dir. Baz Luhrmann)

 

Baz Luhrmann has long been one of cinema's glitzier philosophical minds. Noisy by nature, lavishly distractable, he pursues his craft like a bubble-gum addict in a fizz factory. Everything turns out to be either giddy and gorgeous, or hopelessly over-s(t)imulated. 

 

In EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, he ponders – with all the energy we've come to expect of his work – the great questions of the modern age. Was a Elvis really a God, sent down to heal the sick and uplift the horny? And does his soul continue to live on, wherever hips wiggle and music soars? After rooting around in the film archives of Warner Bros. studios, Luhrmann has unearthed compelling evidence – and a good deal of previously unseen footage – that affirms the highest hopes of all true believers in the Presley legend. In answer to our conundrums above, there can be no more doubt: Elvis was indeed a deity incarnate, and yes, he remains eternally present. Oh Happy Day! All hail the King.

 

As everyone knows, this is Luhrmann's second attempt to commune with the grand entertainer, summoning his spirit while shoring up the scattered gospel fragments into a glorious mosaic that all can worship. Starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks as prosthetic imitations of the Tupelo prodigy and his wheeler-dealer manager, “The Colonel”, Elvis (2022) was silly and reverential by turns. In the usual manner of creatures emerging from Luhrmann-land, it was also quite exciting to watch. 

 

His new documentary nonetheless shows up the limitations of the earlier feature by restoring the man himself, the one and only, to centre-stage: where he gusts down the heavens with his soulful, rippling voice, and storms our hearts with his boyish humour and sweat-drenched, acrobatic grace. Personal flaws and ambivalences occasionally flicker into view: this is an idol well capable of living the high life, while rarely (if ever) speaking about the burning issues of his day, from the Civil Rights Movement to the war in Vietnam. For the most part, however, our impression is of a lightning-flash in human form: a gifted, infectiously exuberant singer, who could channel rhythm, blues, country, gospel, and whatever you're having yourself, in a revelatory gestalt that's proven easy to parody but impossible to best. 

 

Before the final credits rumble, we learn that between 1969 and his death in 1977, Elvis – who never toured outside of the USA – sometimes delivered three live performances a day, a working regimen that secured his fame for a new generation, and also surely contributed to the drastic decline of his health and personal life. Luhrmann leaves most of the latter off-screen, preferring to revel in the best of what Elvis could be and do. By making him seem more alive than ever, EPiC shows us what movies are capable of. There's barely a moment when we don't feel like dancing – in love and jubilation. 

 

 

The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)

 

Charting, almost in real time, the explosive growth of the Algerian independence movement in the 1950s, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) is a tour de force of political cinema that nevertheless stands in a class of its own. There's a guerrilla grit and dynamism to Pontecorvo's direction, as he balances news-reel-style sequences with a mobile, up-close-and-personal intimacy with the Algerian rebels themselves. The film, indeed, feels like a documentary, despite being entirely a reconstruction and interpretation of historical events.

 

The general approach may hark back to the neorealism, grainy and passionate, pioneered in Italy in the aftermath of the second world war. Mixing what seemed like found footage from the blasted capital with a street-level, person-centred outlook, Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) depicted the violent cruelty of Nazi occupying forces, as well as the dishevelled humanity and heroism of ordinary Italians, with a visceral accuracy that made Casablanca (1943) look like a fairy-tale. 

 

Deeply moving as Rossellini's picture was and is, what grants The Battle of Algiers its added charge is its fiery streak of anti-imperial sympathy. This time round, the occupying soldiers are survivors of Nazi and Vichy rule in France: the courageous partisans of yesteryear have stepped out from their hideouts into the role of colonial masters, condescending and savagely ruthless in their treatment of Algeria's native Arab population, some of whom opt, with limited resources, to meet fire with fire.

 

Played with steely charisma by Jean Martin, Colonel Mathieu is laconic and even eloquent in his insistence on brutality, bombing, assassination, curfew, and martial law as operational necessities in quelling the FLN (or National Liberation Front): an aim he justifies in part by reference to his own distinguished contribution to the anti-fascist struggle on home soil a generation earlier. 

The logic is similar to that deployed by American (and other) politicians during their country's invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq at the start of our own century: the USA being the quintessential defender of liberty and democracy, standard principles of law and international relations can and should be suspended to serve its strategic ends, no matter how ill-defined, contradictory, or destructive these may be. As it happens, Pontecorvo's film has been used by both the Pentagon and Argentina's military junta to educate military operatives in counter-insurgency tactics, particularly in urban settings.

 

Throughout, Brahim Hadjadj brings hungry rage to the part of the militant, Ali La Pointe: like Malcolm X, a former street hustler who later became, for many, an inspiring symbol of revolutionary commitment. Most memorable, however, are the vivid faces of the non-actors who comprise the background cast, who add a startling depth and immediacy to Pontecorvo's presentation of the Algerian independence struggle. By the closing scene, as crowds march and dance in protest against the murderous tactics of the French colonial regime, palpable defiance seems to emanate from every body and every gaze. 

 

There's a tough clarity – and a brilliance – to the way The Battle of Algiers captures the tenacity and gradual sense of popular possibility that powered decolonization movements across the global south in the period of its making, as well as the harsh sacrifices that were made for the cause. After sixty years, the film has lost none of its power, but its emotional resonance has surely changed. Today the governing classes of post-colonial nation-states – from India to Egypt, from Ireland to Haiti – seem to have replaced the crimes and inequalities of their former imperial overseers with their own. Algeria itself has suffered civil war, as well as its own slew of corrupt and repressive regimes. In its uncompromising portrayal of decolonization in action, Pontecorvo's picture no longer seems to be showing us a world we have to win, but a vanished future that might have been.

 

 

Fuze (dir. David MacKenzie, 2025)

If a bomb is introduced in the first act, does it have to go off before curtains close? A range of sombre and giddy answers have been posed to this dramaturgical conundrum, in vehicles as various as Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2008) and Tom Cruise's many adrenaline-courting Mission Impossible flicks. In Fuze (2025) – an unsmiling joy-ride from start to finish – David MacKenzie exploits the uncertainty that still lingers over the initial query. The opening shot cranes in on an explosive device being unearthed on a London building site, not far (we soon see) from a den of robbers, inscrutably preparing their next score. We're safe in assuming that fizzles and eruptions are both on the menu in the ninety minutes to follow.

 

Sporting a refined moustache and a sour-puss Rhodesian accent, Theo James, a criminal, stomps and sulks like a not-uninteresting out-take from Blood Diamond (2006). His counter-force and possible nemesis, Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays a grumpy hunk in a beret, tasked with disarming the torpedo planted (miraculously) on a building site in the vicinity of the bank that, unbeknownst to the concerned authorities, is due to be cased while the power is knocked out in the surrounding area. 

In the background, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Saffron Hocking – each perfecting a kind of supermodel-as-public-servant poise – strike a continuous chord of intelligent trepidation, which they translate into jargonese that only officials in action movies understand in full. Stuff like: “Scoping protocol! Deploy grey lantern code two-two-one! Non-compliant CM at speed, Colonel Sir!” As all this unfolds, Sam Worthington pops in and out of the main frame to simmer scruffily, an honest thief, made of menace and grizzle, while trying his best only to inflict harm when tested.

 

Cranking up the tension while keeping the various plot-cogs slickly turning, MacKenzie is smart enough to realise that a good deal of how we react to his (rather leanly sketched) cast of tough-jawed protagonists will depend on whether we view the Met Police and British Armed Forces, for example, as guardians of civilization or purveyors of violence. Without quite venturing into the region of political critique, the film tosses enough sand in the eyes of patriotic viewers as to cloud the distinction between murderous rogue and violent hero. The question of imperial blowback – or as one rueful underling puts it, professional “disenchantment” – is even allowed to hover mid-air, between the gunshots that inevitably perforate the surface-narrative as it whizzes along.

 

To suggest that Fuze (2025) peddles in implausibilities would be akin to arguing that Logan Lucky (2017) was something less than an exercise is neorealist meditation: correct, while also gloriously missing the point. There are touches of Michael Mann's Collateral (2004) throughout, as well as occasional echoes from MacKenzie's earlier (and much better) exploration of hunted heist and fraternal complication, Hell or High Water (2016).

 

Elaborately far-fetched, undeniably thrilling, Fuze may deal in familiar tropes, but it handles them well. Like the dug-up bomb that opens the chase, it's no dud.