And I'm afraid you've been naughty. No presents for you. That should save me a few quid.

We're back! Yes, dear reader, exams are over (not very well, thanks for asking) so after a three week hiatus Films on Friday returns, boasting more movies than you could shake a lamb's tail at, if that was the sort of thing you were interested in. In addition to the eerily familiar Films on TV guide, we're continuing the countdown of our Favourite 100 Movies and – for one week only – present no fewer than THREE cinema reviews.

Talk about a bonanza. And when you've finished talking, read this week's Films on Friday, in association with your favourite brand of tea and a nice slice of cake.

***

Cinema reviews

These write-ups are notably lacking in jokes, but hopefully you'll warm to them anyway. After all, the jokes are never funny.

Up

Fantastic Mr Fox

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

***

Films on TV - Your guide to the week ahead
Nov 14 to 20

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14

FILM OF THE WEEK
My Darling Clementine (1946, More4, 12.10pm) – "You never had too much of a chance in life, did you James?" asks Henry Fonda in John Ford's classic Western*, his brother gunned down in cold blood by the Clanton family. Fonda is Wyatt Earp, the quiet, moustachioed sheriff who comes to clear up the town of Tombstone and finds that means allying with boozing, spluttering saloon-keeper Doc Holliday. This retelling of the shootout at the OK Corral is a semi-remake of the '39 movie Frontier Marshal, but superior in every way, as the myth-making is turned up to 11. "When the fact becomes legend, print the legend," said the journalist in Ford's Liberty Valance. That's what the director does here. He's not showing us the way it was, but the way it should have been. The cast is exceptional – not just Fonda, but Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, Tim Holt, Ward Bond, Alan Mowbray, Jane Darwell and hulking heartthrob Victor Mature in by far his best screen turn – and the scripting superb, but the most remarkable thing about the movie is its emphasis on telling, unforgettable details. Like the scene where a newly-shaved Earp relaxes by swinging on a porch chair (Ford noticed Fonda doing this on set and worked it into the film), or the barn dance, where the shy lawman cuts loose with some wooden moves. It's one of the key Westerns of the period and still looks terrific today. (5/5)
*Apparently Ford didn't direct this graveside scene, but we'll let that slide, since it's a motif that turns up in many of his films.
Trivia notes: Notorious fibber Ford claimed he had based the film on his own conversations with Earp in the '20s.
If you're wowed by the film, pick up the 'Cinema Reserve' DVD, which includes an earlier cut featuring several of Ford's ideas for the film that were eventually excised.

Never mind How the West Was Won (73 Oscar winners, 16 Nobel Prize winners, four former Mayors of Harrogate and George Peppard), get this for a cast: Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Socrates, Napoleon (him again), Beethoven, Billy the Kid, Sigmund Freud and Abraham Lincoln… They're the historical figures enlisted by the stoner heroes of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989, ITV1, 1.10pm), which is a good deal less thick than it likes to make out. Some choice lines (Bill: "(phonetically) So-crates - 'The only true wisdom consists of knowing you know nothing.'" Ted: "That's us, dude.") and a general playfulness make up for the paper-thin plotting. Pretty good. (3/5)

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994, C4, 9.30pm) is a reasonable romcom, generally undeserving of all the praise foisted upon it, but not bad on its own terms. Essentially a sitcom with a Hollywood romance scrawled over the top of it, the film tracks a group of friends as they attend the film's five get-togethers. Hugh Grant is quite good in his breakthrough role, while Kristin Scott Thomas and Charlotte Coleman do fine work in support, but Simon Callow seems dreadfully overbearing. John Hannah's showstopping clock-stopping is fine, but belongs in another film. (3/5)

Ashes of Time Redux (1994, Film4, 1.05am SUN) is a re-edited version of Wong Kar Wai's baffling, bewitching 1994 movie – one of the most unusual film experiences out there. The film sees a hitman pitch up in the middle of a desert. Crippled by his longing for a lost love, he starts farming out his jobs to others. Subplots include a devilishly complex storyline about two warring halves of the same woman (Brigitte Lin), and a swordsmen who's drinking to forget –and finds a wine that erases memory. WKW was in the midst of his mid-'90s purple patch when he made this one, shooting the low-key international hit Chungking Express during breaks in production, and about to embark on the stunning Fallen Angels. This peculiar, emotionally devastating near-epic may be convoluted in the extreme, but the compensations are tremendous, with spellbinding direction and a faultless performance from the ethereal, tragic leading man Leslie Cheung. Sammo Hung's up-close-and-inexplicably-fuzzy fight choreography, so frustrating elsewhere, actually fits this film perfectly. I haven't seen WKW's new cut, showing tonight, but apparently it's slightly shorter, with a different score, the removal of two early fight scenes and a heap of minor tweaks. Frankly I can't wait. The original gets a (5/5).


SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15

Ghost World. Heathers. Brick. Even Juno. Those teen films offered cynical, laconic anti-heroes, speared pop culture targets and the concept of schoolgirl cliques and added a slew of words to the adolescent lexicon. Clueless (1995, C4, 5.45pm) is kind of alright. An update of Jane Austen's Emma, it's pitched somewhere between those irresistible indie comedies I mentioned and the affable, but ultimately mindless fodder of say, Legally Blonde. Sometime figure of 13-year-olds' lust Alicia Silverstone is Cher Horowitz, who helps new student Brittany Murphy find a boyfriend, but struggles to find a mate herself. It's hit-and-miss, and takes the odd step of presenting its heroine as a blinkered airhead, but writer-director Amy Heckerling's script provides a few big laughs, when she isn't striving, self-consciously, for effect. (2/5)

Austin Powers (1997, E4, 10pm) you'll probably know. A none-more-broad spoof of '60s espionage films – including the Harry Palmer series, Our Man Flint and Bond (with the latter two being spoofs or self-parodies themselves) – it stars Mike Myers as a rug-chested superspy who's defrosted after 30 years in a cryogenic chamber and finds himself all at sea in 1997 ("I can't believe Liberace was gay. I mean, women loved him! I didn't see that one coming"). Powers himself is pretty annoying, but Blofeld-esque villain Dr Evil remains a fine comic creation and while it's a scattershot film, and far from a great one, it's worth sticking around for the highlights: the ill-tempered, mutated sea bass, the back stories given to the usually faceless henchmen and the scene in which Powers tries to rip off an old lady's hair, shouting "It's a man!". Well I never said it was sophisticated. A high (2/5).

Worth setting the video (or sacrificing your sleep) for tonight is Wild Strawberries (1957, Film4, 1.35am MON), the most accessible – and best – Ingmar Bergman film I've seen. Victor Sjostrom plays a cantankerous professor en-route to receive an honorary degree. Via flashback – and a miraculous, much-imitated device by which we join him as he strolls through scenes from his life – we learn his story. This is a one-of-a-kind work that exudes a quiet, reflective melancholia but has moments of warmth and humour somewhat atypical of the director's work. It's fantastic. (5/5)


MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16

The Gunfighter (1950, More4, 11.15am) is perhaps the best of the "reformed gunslinger" Western sub-genre, where a world weary pistol packer tries to reform, but can't escape the violence he's always lived by. Gregory Peck is the outlaw, Jimmy Ringo, who arrives in a small Western town to see his girl, schoolteacher Peggy Walsh. The marshal wants to drive him out of town - and the townsfolk? Well they just want to kill him, if they can quit shaking first. Peck, sometimes wooden but unjustly maligned, is perfect in the lead (he played a similarly interesting character in the neglected classic Yellow Sky the previous year), and there are arresting supporting characterisations from Walsh, Skip Homeier, Millard Mitchell and Karl Malden. This one is built on an intelligent, thoughtful, elegiac script and gets a big boost from its crisp monochrome photography - moodier lighting might have made it look more fatalistic, but it works great this way too. This is the film repeatedly referenced in the great 1986 Bob Dylan song 'Brownsville Girl' (which contains strong spoilers). (5/5)

The Sixth Sense (1999, ITV2, 11pm) has one of the best children's performances of recent decades, as Haley Joel Osment's troubled youngster sees dead people – all the time. Much more than just a twist (please see also: The Crying Game), it's an arresting, original sleeper that offers genuine human emotion alongside the requisite chills. I've seen a couple of movies I didn't cry during, but this wasn't one of them – Osment's monologue about his grandmother, delivered to convince mum Toni Colette that he really can see, y'know, them – may be sentimental, but it's still a knock-out. I liked it. (4/5)

And while I'm praising oft-derided films to the hilt, might I mention how much I enjoyed Wedding Crashers (2005, F4, 9pm) – a bawdy, overlong, morally confused comedy. It's dreadfully funny, compensating for a certain lack of sophistication with a plethora of belly laughs. Perhaps that's always the case. I could draw a graph. Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play best buddies whose blissful existence (which consists largely of disrupting other people's nuptials in an alcoholic stupor) is threatened when Vaughn falls in love. It's a cut above the other "Frat Pack" films, being seriously funny rather than just loud and boorish. Will Ferrell's slender talent seems to have stretched a long way thus far, but he has an excellent cameo here as a funeral crasher. And the montage in which an unkempt, unhappy Wilson crashes parties very badly is hysterical. (4/5)


For TUE to FRI picks, please click on the link below right.