Three Films Make A Post: We'll do it every year..until we get it right

Home for the Holidays (1995): It’s a bit of a shame that Jodie Foster has been doing only a little direction work in her career, for she’s a rather great director, in the unassuming way that treats the job of a director as mainly concerned with helping a script and the actors bringing it to life breathe; there’s really no vanity in her direction here but a lot of focus. The ensemble cast – led by a typically wonderful Holly Hunter – clearly thanks her for it, going through family relations painful, loving, complicated and darkly funny with the same focus. One might say that a film about a holiday bringing together a disparate bourgeois family and letting the cracks show isn’t exactly news (and wasn’t in 1995 either), but Foster is excellent at turning the commonplace and unspecific concept of “bourgeois family” into something very specific. And you know what they say about unhappy families.

The She Beast (1966): This first of three full features in the tragically short career of director Michael Reeves is a bit of a mess, clearly having difficulties deciding if it is a comedy, a gothic horror film, some kind of satire, or a mixture of all of these things. Seen separately, any given scene – particularly those indebted to Italian gothic horror - shows Reeves’s talent, but they never truly cohere into a full film. There are also some peculiar decisions: why hide Barbara Steele, who is basically playing the same kind of role she did in a lot of Italian gothic horror films, under a conceptually creepy but actually pretty crappy looking mask when her possession is really taking hold, when her body of work already shows that she doesn’t have need of this sort of thing? Is the fearless vampire hunter supposed to be a rip-off of Polanski’s film? What is it with witch possession and lakes?


My Neighbour Totoro (1988): This is one of the younger skewing Miyazaki Ghibli films with a couple more moments that seem more childish than childlike than in most of Miyazaki’s work. However, apart from looking pretty damn beautiful, this also features some of the most beautiful depictions of childlike wonder I’ve ever encountered, as well as a deft portrayal of children as actual children. And as with all things Miyazaki, there’s also a knowledge of the sad realities of life in the film. Not one that ever overwhelms it, its wonder, or its child protagonists, but one that very well knows that everything’s eventual, yet beautiful and important because of that. Plus, there’s the cat bus, and how can anyone not love a movie containing that?