Mark Farnsworth on film.

1. Daniel Day-Lewis

Leader of the Brit-Pack in the 80s and the only man to win 3 Best Actor Oscars, Day-Lewis is the greatest actor of his generation and in my not very humble opinion, of all time. 

Michael Caine

What Caine did for the representation of working-class actors cannot be overestimated. For me he is the complete hero, always bringing something to every movie he is in. Let’s face it, a film with Caine in is superior to any film he isn’t.

Gary Oldman

Overshadowed by his contemporary Day-Lewis, nevertheless Oldman is a living legend. Go-to villain, lunatic and now a second career defining role as George Smiley (Bex in The Firm is his first) Oldman was cruelly denied an Oscar. I worshiped this man growing up.

Michael Fassbender

The successor to Daniel Day-Lewis and my favourite actor of his generation, Fassbender   is relentless in his attention to detail. The only actor I will see a movie for regardless of director-I haven’t been excited about an actor like this since I discovered Oldman.

Laurence Olivier

Dear old Larry simply exudes class. He is the benchmark by which all other British actors must measure themselves. 

Richard Burton

This picture says it all.

Tom Hardy

An acting juggernaut of a man that can do low grade sleaze as effortlessly as upperclass charm. Is he the next James Bond?

Cary Grant

A complete joy to watch at all times.

James Mason

Desert Fox or Humbert Humbert, Mason could be suave and sinister all wrapped up into one uneasy package.

Danny Dyer

You may laugh but I love his ugly mug. Dyer gets a bad press but I’ll watch him in anything. If he’s good enough for Harold Pinter then he’s good enough for me.

“Heroin is so passé” but the old warhorse of hard drugs has been resurrected along with another 80s cultural phenomenon, the Evil Dead. Mia wants to go cold turkey in a rotting cabin. Eric, Olivia, her estranged brother David and his girlfriend Natalie guard her. Mia force-feeds her remaining junk to the well Onibaba style and all hell is regurgitated.

Olivia is the sex-bomb nurse charged with administering Mia’s sedatives. She’s a draconian matron who will do everything to keep her charge from flying the coop. As Mia starts to freak out Olivia urges the friends do everything they can to keep her in that desolate place. It’s a neat set-up that keeps the prey in such a murderous environment.

When they find a book bound with barded wire in the cellar, surrounded by the rotting, stinking corpses of cats, Eric does what every self respecting Jesus haired geek would do-open it and read the words despite the desperate scratched writing warning him otherwise. That old camera shot rockets through the woods like a bad memory and this time minus Raimi’s sick sense of humour.

One by one the friends are possessed and Evil Dead becomes an endurance test of hacked meat, spraying blood and incestuous profanity. There is a sadistic pleasure in trying to spot how iconic moments from the original are twisted to fit in with modern horror sensibilities. Nail gun crucifixions and Mia’s rape by spidery trees are horrific as the abomination conjured by Eric’s stupidity throttles the audience into submission.

Strangely as the film becomes more visceral the grubby scares of the opening act subside. Early on there is a desperate feel of unease that infects the film, creeping up the backs of the audience, scratching at their peripheral vision. Once the decomposed cat is out of the bag Evil Dead is awash with blood that literally rains from the sky. No bad thing but blood washes off.  Real evil doesn’t. 

“Our father’s have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities.” The Place Beyond The Pines is an elegiac lament for absent fathers, for their frailties, for their fall from godhood. The title suggests a Lynchian quality, primordial darkness reaching out to massage the male ego, to snatch away happiness, to incite dismal failure. Require death.

Luke has a Cool Hand, a daredevil stunt rider, itinerant, irrelevant. His skill with a butterfly knife is unsurpassed, his tattoos tell of a wasted life in ink, a moth bitten Eminem. The camera hangs on his back like an eager cornerman following his fighter into the ring. Luke’s crowd love him, all 80 of them. His motorbike is his life, that most selfish of vehicles.

He barely remembers Romina’s name, she being another of his conquests a year ago. Romina has a memento of their time together-a son called Jason. Hidden away between the pines Jason is an American myth, raised by his mother, grandmother and modern day centaur, Kofi. Luke is sideswiped by his paternal instincts, unsure how to enter his son’s life he scratches at the sides, jealous and incapable.

Impulsive, he quits the stunt game and makes minimum wage for a local mechanic, Robin. Robin has that ferret quality, black nails and oil soaked skin, a scheme to make a fast buck using Luke’s particular “Skill set.” These twin loners are bereft of ideas when it comes to fatherhood. They are emotionally stunted, masculinity bred from TV dinners and late night movies. Luke and Robin rob banks so that Luke can win the affections of his newfound family.

Out to stop them is clean cut Avery, a rich kid slumming it as a cop. His father was a judge, a political animal trying to pull his son’s strings. Luke and Avery’s duel is as exhilarating as anything else in film, a chase that has repercussions 15 years later. Avery has a young son too, AJ who he finds it difficult to bond with. Here The Place Beyond The Pines enters the realms of Greek mythology, the great American novel made celluloid.

Their sons rekindle Luke and Avery’s feud as they battle to fly from beneath the shadows of repression. Jason is a wiry, sensitive DiCaprio back when he was shooting up junk in The Basketball Diaries. AJ is a wannabe Sopranos character, and an obnoxious bully mixing his metaphors with The Wu-Tang Clan. Their story is an epic tale that will continue long after this mesmerising, hypnotic film has drifted into the sunset and dissolved into legend, The Place Beyond The Pines.

On the edge of humanity, the twilight of existence a father revels in concrete. An Englishman’s house is his castle but this house is a stark, prefabricated outpost, a monument to failure, and a bastion against the natural order of things, against nature itself.

Weeds try to reclaim their territory; the empire of the ants spew forth from the cracks in his cement. The father wants to repress mother earth with the liquid of industry, coat his apocalyptic eyesore from top to bottom in the stuff. His house is an affront to emotion, cocooning his wife and four children in his petty madness.

The father collapses and dies amongst his crazy paving. His wife succumbs to a nameless illness, just weeks later. Cast adrift from parental responsibility the four children degenerate into their own particular grief. They cement their mother into the basement. 17-year-old Julie courts an older businessman Derek whose designs on her are dubious at best. She’s a shorthaired Lolita, dominant, fearless.15-year-old Jack retreats into shoddy science-fiction novels and washes less and less frequently.

Julie and Jack act as de-facto parents for their younger siblings Sue and Tom. Sue keeps an accurate diary of events after the death of their mother and Tom dresses up as a girl before sleeping in a crib and feeding from a bottle, regressing to infancy. The sweltering summer heat is relentless, cooking the moral decay slowly until the incest sweats off of the walls.

Equally androgynous, both Julie and Jack resemble the same entity. The sexual tension between them stems from their desire to be the same person; a singular soul rather than two separate forms, could they be an alien organism from one of Jack’s books? Yet they are brother and sister and their desires are rotting the house from within. Flies infect the kitchen, the stench of their mother creeps up from the basement.

The Cement Garden is The Lord of the Flies in minutiae, children free from the shackles of adults, acting as adults before their socialisation is complete. Like Great Britain in the late 70s when Ian McEwan’s novel is set, the family is decrepit, slowly dying out. Like Great Britain in the early 90s when the film was made, the family is beset by Tory sleaze, outstaying their welcome in that sun-kissed mausoleum. 

Hieronymus Bosch is alive and well and living in Florida bitches! He’s melding slobbering hunks of flesh into micro bikinis Brian Yuzna style. Two finger smiles, porn star tongues-this could be an X-rated Coke advert. Sun kissed skin sizzles in montage, booze cascades in slow motion, Sodom meets Gomorrah by the sea. Welcome to Heaven and Hell. Welcome to Spring Break. Say hello to the “Spring Breakers.”

Missing all of the orchestrated spontaneity are college friends, Faith, Brit, Candy and Cotty. They’re the skeleton crew left to rattle about in their sleepy, grey, minimal University. $320 just wont cut it but Brit and Candy are hardcore, “Pretend like you’re in a video game. Act like you’re in a movie or something.”  They decide to rob a chicken shack and press gang Cotty into being their getaway driver.

Like everything in Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers” the robbery is voyeuristic, littered with pop culture references. Cotty circles the restaurant as we spy Brit and Candy through the windows smashing the gaff up with hammers and spite. It’s “Grand Theft Auto,” “Pulp Fiction” and “A History of Violence.” Christian Faith waits in their dorm none the wiser, Dorothy dreaming of Oz. The girls hit pay dirt-Spring Break is on muthafuckers!

We’re served up a smorgasbord of kinky hi-jinks; lipstick lesbians snort coke nyotaimori style, billion dollar bongs and siphoned hooch litter every shot like extraterrestrial breathing apparatus. The girls love it, the boys love it, and despite the gleaming neon swimwear everyone is achingly dull, vapid youth marshalled into hedonistic pursuits before the reality of the college bills hit home and capitalist slavery takes hold. These are the bronzed victims of the “120 Days of Sodom,” not the perpetrators.

Everything is shot through a bubblegum lens, bright and delicious, sleazy and vicious. Simultaneously we condemn and condone the frailty of youth, the barbaric poolside hedonism that spits in the face of all that’s proper and decent. Like what? In “Spring Breakers” America’s institutions are themselves infected by pop-culture sensibilities. A lecturer refers to D-Day, as “Double-D” and Faith’s rock and roll preacher spouts wisdom like, “Are you crazy for Jesus? Are you jacked up for Jesus?” and “pray hardcore. Pray super hardcore.”

Gradually “Spring Breakers” plays on shuffle as scenes and dialogue are repeated, overlap and blur into a drugged up mess-any lurid sexploitation eroded by the film’s ponderous meandering. The girls are busted at a party and thrown into County until gangsta rapper/drug dealer Alien bails them out and wants to hang. Brit and Candy are mesmerised, Cotty a little more cautious but Faith sees through him and leaves. Would you want to really live in a 2-Live Crew video?

When most dealers are busted the police nearly always find “Scarface” in their DVD collection. Alien is no different, “I got Scarface. On repeat. SCARFACE ON REPEAT. Constant, y’all.”  His pad is a scaled down Tony Montana mansion full of material nonsense and heavy weapons. He’s RiFF RaFF pontificating on his style,”All this shit! Look at my shit! I got…”  Alien’s diatribe is ludicrous, hilarious as he lists everything from blue-Kool-Aid to shurikens to dark tanning oil. Ludicrous but he’s deadly serious, the uneducated American Dream sponsored by advertising.

Girls like Brit and Candy eat up Alien’s homogenised breed of gangsta rap lifestyle. As dubious as we are about Faith’s religion at least her moral compass is intact. Alien’s a deluded child and Brit and Candy’s warped adulation leads to a video game finale. They could be in “Chicks Who Love Guns” as they strut about with automatic weapons wiping out a rival gang, their hedonism reaching its logical conclusion. Whether that conclusion is ridiculous, exploitative, or a vital critique of vacuous celebrity remains a tantalising mystery.

Peter Gabriel’s haunting score spikes through the memories, dark skies, and barred windows. A phone rings as strip lighting escapes overhead. Below the stuttering neon, strapped to a gurney lies Alfonso Columbato, bandaged like the invisible man, the invisible generation.  Al lost his face in Vietnam but his earnest, boyish confidence remains just about intact.

As a strutting teenager in 60s Philadelphia Al meets Birdy, a loner fixated on birds and flight. Their childhood is tinged with golden light, fire hydrants, and the endless possibilities that new friendships offer. They train homing pigeons, rebuild a car to sell on and work as dog-catchers-anything to earn a fast buck. Where there’s muck there’s brass and their relationship blossoms amongst a backdrop of scrap and garbage.

Birdy has also returned from the war, physically unharmed but mentally scared. The mental hospital cages his dreams of flight, beyond the window lies Birdy’s hope of metaphysical transformation and spiritual release. He remains perched in his cell, mute, waiting, wanting-a silent Gregor Samsa under the charge of Dr. Weiss.

Weiss is struggling with Birdy’s condition. As a last ditch attempt to break Birdy’s catatonic state he asks Al to try and get through to his boyhood friend. Al chats and cajoles, bullies and breaks his heart, his efforts fruitless and more desperate. During these one-sided conversations their flashbacks become more intertwined, the shared memories, the secret dreams of Philadelphia testament to their unlikely friendship.

Birdy shares touching moments with his understanding father, their gentler aspirations stolen by the necessities of the working-class ideal. Philadelphia is not the land fit for America’s WW2 heroes but a battered industrial landscape of rust and ruin. “It’s kinda hard to be good at something that nobody wants,” reasons Birdy to his father as they sit in the school’s boiler room.

Alan Parker doesn’t dwell “In country” but concentrates on the spellbinding performances of his two young stars, Cage as Al and Modine (looking startlingly like Brad Davis) as Birdy. Their friendship at turns is funny, tragic and homoerotic. Al disintegrates from wise guy to shuffling, hysterical wreck as he tries to save not only his friend but also his own crumbling sanity. Birdy retreats into his dreams breathtakingly shown in an audacious flight sequence, Parker’s camera swooping over the apocalyptic backdrop of “The City of Brotherly Love.”

Birdy is a soaring tale of brotherhood and a searing indictment of young men chewed up and spat out from the meat grinder of war. Gabriel’s music brilliantly underpins the nightmares and hopes of Michael Seresin’s surrealist cinematography and Parker’s stark, modernist, very assured direction. “I’m trying to decide what I am,” says Birdy. 30 years later so is Parker’s wonderful, enigmatic film.