Film

99 Homes is an American drama about house repossession. Bummer, you might think, but here is what you don’t yet know: films about house repossessions can be electrifying. Or at least this one is. Set in 2008 or thereabouts, against the backdrop of the real-estate bust and ensuing foreclosure crisis, this has much to say about a system that allows the rich to get richer while the poor get shat on (basically), but, above and beyond that, it is also nail-bitingly tense, as gripping as any thriller, and it will totally tear your heart out. In terms of impact, it may even be the Cathy Come Home of our times.

If you don’t want to spend hundreds of euros on a good seat, the best place to watch the Palio di Siena is by the start. For my first time — decades ago — I arrived early in the apron-shaped Piazza del Campo and sweated out the long afternoon as a tide of tension rose. By early evening, when the horses and jockeys finally entered from the courtyard of the towering Palazzo Pubblico, 50,000 spectators ached for release. I clambered on to a temporary fence for a better view. A Sienese woman who was maybe 19 hauled herself up and, for balance, grabbed me from behind. As the jockeys embarked on the long, casuistical process of lining up at the start rope, she began to moan, then weep.

When I was at university, Reggie Kray was my penpal. I wrote to him in 1991, asking for an interview for The Word, an Oxford student newspaper. Kray was unavoidably detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. But he sent me a prompt, polite letter back. ‘Thanks for your letter,’ he wrote. ‘I will see you as soon as possible. We only get three visitors a month. Could you send me a copy of The Word?’ I sent him a copy — but I never did get to be among his three monthly visitors before his death in 2000, at the age of 66. Still, I’m ashamed to say, I was thrilled enough just to get a letter from him; and to drink in his wild, scrawling handwriting — three huge, near-illegible words to a line; nine skew-whiff lines to a page of prison-issue foolscap.

Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as a long married couple whose relationship is disturbed by a letter relating to his first girlfriend, a German who died in the Swiss alps 50 years earlier. Aside from that, not much happens. A shopping trip to Norwich is about as exciting as it gets, on the action front. But this is one of those ‘inaction films’, as I call them, in which nothing happens, but everything happens; it is simple yet absorbingly profound. And it will resonate. It will resonate afterwards and it will resonate the next day and it will resonate the day after that. In fact I am still resonating, and rather wish I wasn’t, so I could move on with my own life. It’s rare for a film to affect me in this way.

Gemma Bovery is a modern-day refashioning of Gustave Flaubert’s literary masterpiece Madame Bovary, and while such refashionings can work well in some instances — Bridget Jones as Pride and Prejudice, for example, or West Side Story as Romeo and Juliet, if we want to go further back —this is not one of those instances. Instead, this is that other kind of instance; the one that desperately makes you wish they’d left well alone. It’s based on the graphic novel by the writer-artist Posy Simmonds which, in turn, was based on her comic strip in the Guardian.

It’s one thing to make the most boring film in cinema history — at least you can kid yourself at the outset that it might turn out differently. It’s quite another to lovingly recreate the same film half a century later, shot by eye-bleeding shot, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, I’m proud to say. I say shot by shot, but since Andy Warhol’s Empire consists of a single locked-off shot of the Empire State Building running to 8 hours 5 minutes in black-and-white yawn-o-vision, that’s not much to write home about. Nor is the rest of the movie, from almost any popcorn-munching perspective you can think of.

Were you ever not very nice at school? A bit of a tosspot to others, perhaps. Ever so slightly a jerk now and then and here and there? Were you inclined to take advantage of the weak, the vulnerable, the defenceless and lonely, to tease and wound and give not a single thought to the profound and lasting consequences that may come back to bite you in the posterior decades later? No, neither was I. At least I don’t think I was. Still, The Gift is enough to give you pause. If you are affected by any of the issues in this film, best log on to Friends Reunited, locate anyone to whom you may once have said even the teensiest mean thing. Just in case. And grovel, abase yourself, say you’re really really sorry and mean it. Because you just never know.

Odessa, the pearl of the Black Sea, is one of the most charming port cities you can imagine, the centre of the city mainly 19th-century Italian and French architecture. Like a run-down Riviera, but with the exchange rate gone from 8 grivnas to the pound to 34, it’s fabulously cheap for visitors. At my favourite Azeri restaurant, which doesn’t sell wine, they offered to go to the supermarket and buy me a bottle of red. £1.50 for perfectly drinkable Ukrainian plonk. The rate has dived due to the unrest and war in the East of course. On the surface things are somewhat calmer than last year when a fire killed dozens in a trade union building. There’s enough instability and sporadic bombing, however, to keep people on their toes.

The Legend of Barney Thomson is the directorial debut of actor Robert Carlyle, and it’s one of those black comedies about a serial killer in which, as the bodies pile up, plausibility edges closer and closer to the window until it flies out completely. (No. Wait. Come back! I’ll massage your feet!) This wouldn’t, in fact, matter at all if there were something else to hang onto; if the characters were involving, or the story was told with wit, zip and panache, but it just monotonously drones on. The central figure is a barber so I guess you could say this is Sweeney Plod rather than, you know, that other one.

Brace yourself, reader. This is an account of a conversation with the director of the yucky trailer-trash comedy Pink Flamingos. Perhaps you won’t recall the final scene in which the overweight transvestite Divine munches on an actual dog turd. No, it wasn’t faked — this was in 1972 and there was no budget for trickery. ‘Because we were on pot all the time it didn’t seem that strange,’ John Waters recalls. ‘It’s lost today, but it was a political commentary. At the time Deep Throat had just come out; pornography had become legal. What’s left? What can’t you do?’ Waters is celebrated for his pencil moustache and transgressive movies, which shake a (knowingly limp-wristed) fist at the tyranny of good taste.

It’s hard to overstate how much I wanted to like Magic Mike XXL, the sequel to the 2012 Steven Soderbergh hit about male strippers. I have long proclaimed loudly to anyone who will listen that the first film is a stroke of genius, a subtle, sweet and, yes, gloriously sweaty exploration not just of women’s desire but of men’s too. It also, incidentally, features one of the last pre-Oscar performances from Matthew McConaughey before he got all serious in True Detective and Dallas Buyers Club, working that pop-eyed southern charm and those absurdly large abs in a tiny yellow crop-top and grotesquely leathery y-fronts until the audience wasn’t sure whether it was tickled or turned on.

Asif Kapadia’s documentary about Amy Winehouse, whom Tony Bennett describes as ‘one of the truest jazz singers that ever lived’, and who died of alcohol poisoning at 27 (FFS), is masterly and gripping, which is a pity, as you can’t look away. You will want to look away, and may even yearn to do so once the heroin comes into play, and the crack, and that husband and that gig in Belgrade, when she was all unsteady, shuffling and broken beneath the big hair, but you can’t. Oh, Amy, I kept thinking, if only — if only — you’d said, ‘Yes, yes, yes’. It is almost unbearable in this way.

The writer and director Peter Bogdanovich has made three of my favourite films of all time (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, What’s Up, Doc?) but I don’t think I’ll be adding his latest, She’s Funny That Way, to the list. It’s a screwball comedy of the old school and, although it is slightly intriguing at first, where is all this manic activity going? You get your answer after 96 minutes. The answer is: absolutely nowhere. Set in New York, it stars the British actress Imogen Poots laying on a Brooklyn accent with several trowels and also a spade. (Oh, how one yearns for just the one trowel.) She plays Izzy Patterson, a ‘call girl’ — never ‘prostitute’ in these instances — and straight off I’m in trouble.