Richard Donner is a smart producer and director.  After a lot of work in television and a few small films, he broke into the big time in 1976 with The Omen.  He followed it with Superman: the Movie.  In the mid-1980s, he was even more successful with Lethal Weapon (and followed with three sequels).

The first year I was reviewing films, one of the popular comedies of the year was Yours, Mine and Ours.  The title referred to eighteen children (cheaper by the dozen and a half!!).

This is the last of the Merchant Ivory films.  Producer Ismail Merchant died in 2005.  While he and James Ivory began making films together in India in the 1960s and have a strong list of productions, it was only in the 1970s that they began to tackle literary classics (Henry James’ The Europeans in 1979).

Back into pre-Arthurian times and legends.  Like the recent King Arthur, the film-makers have opted for a rather serious and sombre presentation, a darker (grey and blue) palette for the film and lonely and sometimes eerie landscapes.  So, this is not a Camelot-like story – well, in fact it really is, at least in plot outline and characters and their tragedies.  The ideal marriage between Guinevere and Arthur was undermined by her love for Lancelot.  This time, Isolde is married to King Mark but was already in love with Tristan.  Kingdoms collapse as a consequence of these loves and betrayals.

Almost fifteen years ago, the phrase ‘Strictly Ballroom’ was made popular by Baz Lurhman’s entertaining film about ballroom dancing, the odd assortment of characters who frequented the lessons and the competitions and the demanding rules and protocols required for dancing success.  Take the Lead fits into this category of movie entertainment.

An intelligent and thought-provoking film.

It will not be to everyone’s taste.  It is a glimpse of a surface-successful family and then it probes beneath the surface, dramatising the selfishness and ugliness, the potential for good that is squandered.  Some of the ugliness is heard in the language and seen in some bizarre behaviour of the children.

This is quite an exotic horror tale (though it was only at the end that I discovered it is based on a computer game).  Written by Roger Avary (Kill Zoe and co-writer with Tarantino on Pulp Fiction) and directed by Christophe Gans (The Brotherhood of the Wolf) and a Canadian/French co-production, it is actually set in the US, in the forests of West Virginia.

An impressive cinema achievement.  Also impressive in its portrait of a priest and the Catholic Church.

Not the greatest teen movie that ever was, despite the basis in Shakespeare.  The writers of She’s the Man include Karen McCullah Lutz who adapted The Taming of the Shrew for the high school comedy Ten Things I Hate About You (as well as Legally Blonde and the Cinderella adaptation, Ella Enchanted).

The Shaggy Dog is really a shaggy dog for younger audiences and tolerant parents.  It was told in the late 1950s with Fred MacMurray becoming a dog and learning a lesson or two about life and relationships from his dog’s eye view.  Dean Jones had the same experience in the 1970s with The Shaggy DA.

Longing is a deceptive film.  On the surface, it looks very simple and straightforward.  However, there is a lot going on beneath the surface.  Director, Valeska Grisebach) has said that she interviewed around 200 people in the street to ask what they imagined their future would be like.

What is there to say about a movie spoof except to say whether the reviewer found it funny and to indicate what are the targets of the satire.

After a screening at the Berlin Film Festival where it won the award for Direction, The Road to Guantanomo was given a cinema release, a television screening and DVD distribution within a few weeks.  It is well worth catching.

Rent was one of those Broadway musicals, like Hair, that dramatised the social questions and issues of the times.  One of the difficulties with this kind of play is that it can date because it is so anchored in the ethos of the period or the location in which it takes place.  Rent has been seen on stages throughout the world and is still popular, after ten years, in New York.

It’s not the most attractive theme for a movie biography: the life and career of one of Britain’s principal hangmen, Albert Pierrepoint.  It is, however, a very interesting topic, especially for those who have strong opinions about capital punishment.  The title of the film is simply, Pierrepoint.  Timothy Spall, seen to advantage in many films, especially in Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies and All or Nothing, is Albert Pierrepoint and Juliet Stevenson is his wife, Anne.

Moguls, this crowd of buddies certainly are not.  Andy Sargentee (Jeff Bridges in his Big Lebowski mode) thinks up ideas, ideas for making money, involving his friends and their money – and they never work.

More than a touch exotic.  Like the spices that are ever-present, the film has a range of flavours, some beguiling, some a touch sweet, others bittersweet.

The Bengali cinema is the exact opposite of Bollywood. It is not bright, loud, musical and colourful.  It has the tradition of one of the nation’s most celebrated film-makers, Satyajit Ray.  Prolific director, Dasgupta, was a disciple of Ray but takes the tradition into a combination of the realistic and the mystical.  There is a great dignity and beauty in the seriousness of many of the Bengali films.

Kamataki is a fine and beautiful film.  The director, Claude Gagnon, is married to a Japanese wife and spent a decade there during the 1970s.  He is able to look at his own native French-Canadian culture as well as that of Japan and the interactions between an eastern and western culture.

What are we to make of a title like Junebug?  Even knowing that it is the chosen name for an unborn child is not a great help either.  Let’s just say it’s a tantalising title for what turns out to be a very good film.