Forty Guns (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1957)

Samuel Fuller's reinvention of the Wyatt Earp myth is violent and elegant, a beautifully composed drama of love and death that plays out over an arid, seething terrain inhospitable to the human power games that nevertheless develop with all the inevitability of haunted fate. Stanwyck is imperious as Jessica Drummond, self-made rancher, mine-owner and territorial mob-boss, with the local marshals in her pocket and forty hard-nosed, free-firing enforcers in her service. Barry Sullivan, meanwhile, is her handsome, ruthless antagonist (and romantic interest), Griff Bonell, a lawman who is also a misfit and loner, belonging nowhere. Like a knight without armour, or a killer on the rampage, he takes on the task of rooting out corruption and bringing justice to the realm. With such ingredients in the mix, the film could easily have become a conventional genre-piece, like a re-run of High Noon (1952) without the stoney-eyed grandeur of the original. Fuller's direction, however, is kinetic and precise, switching from noirish interior scenes, heightening the inner turmoil of his protagonists, to majestic tracking shots over wild landscapes, with technical quirks along the way that could make Hitchcock envious. When Wes (Gene Barry) stares down a rifle at the woman he eventually marries (Eve Brent) – who is herself, enjoyably, a gun-maker and mechanic – the camera follows suit, scanning the room from the vantage-point of a bullet in a barrel. Later a roof-rattling, prairie-churning tornado storms across the Arizona scrub, sublimating the sexual tension inherent in the central relationship between Drummond and Bonnell. The whole thing plays as though My Darling Clementine were directed by Ida Lupino, or Johnny Guitar adapted by Orson Welles: an enthralling re-imagining of the hour of the gun.

Lions for Lambs (dir. Robert Redford, 2007)

Among the many journalists, pundits, and Clintonite public representatives who enthusiastically supported the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq at the start of this century, did any, when the spurious justifications they had helped to peddle were proven false, repent? As the body counts mounted, as reports of American war crimes emerged, as the lives of civilian populations in both countries were plunged into violent chaos, did the cheer-leaders of that euphemistic terror known as “regime change” ever acknowledge the folly of their ways? Released a year after the founding of Wikileaks, Robert Redford's slice of embattled liberalism – organised as a loose assemblage of clunkily staged dialogues – offers some kind of an answer. So Meryl Streep, in the role of a veteran correspondent whose op-eds have the power to make or break political careers, urges greater journalistic scrutiny of the presidency at home, and a tactically cautious approach to military occupation abroad (a slow and steady aggression, rather than an all-out blast of nuclear fire-power). Redford, disguised as a former anti-war activist turned college professor, wishes voters were more appreciative of the patriotic valour shown by his working-class students now enlisted in the military. Tom Cruise, playing an ambitious Republican senator with a surprising respect for the fourth estate, simply wants to win this latest war to end all wars, whatever the cost. I once asked a friend, an aspiring dramatist, if there were any contemporary film actors he admired, and was surprised to hear him reply, sincerely, that “Tom Cruise is probably the last great movie star.” Certainly, his performance is the most memorable element in this sloppy and sanctimonious attempt at political cinema. With hindsight, indeed, Cruise's media-savvy war-hawk bears more of a resemblance to Barack Obama than any Republican equivalent: smoothly charismatic as he green-lights air-strikes and destructive incursions on foreign soil, and all in the name of democracy. Liberty wept.

Megalopolis (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

It's commonplace for boomer directors to predict in tones of lamentation the impending collapse of American cinema. With Megalopolis now hitting big screens around the world, we might wonder whether that would be such a bad thing. Scorsese, after all, produced Mean Streets (1973) with a cast of half-known actors and a budget of $650,000; Coppola made The Conversation for roughly twice that amount the following year. Compared to those manic, knife-edge masterpieces, 2019's The Irishman (which cost over $200m to shoot), and this, Coppola's latest (financed to the tune of $130m), seem like crimes against the medium: bloated, plodding festivals of bad CGI and ham acting, hung together by sheer directorial hubris. Maybe it's time the Hollywood citadel was allowed its much-advertised decline and fall; if nothing else, directors, new and old, would be forced back to the grassroots of the art – where the likes of Sean Baker have already merrily set up camp, with exciting results. Megalopolis, for what it's worth, is supposed to be a “fable” of the death of the American republic, here called “New Rome”: not so much a place or a nation, as a turgid slideshow of fake-urban green screens and clumsy studio sets, where pretentious, oddly costumed B-listers speak Latin and quote Shakespeare at one another, while craving fame and power. Coppola's vision of elite decadence and corruption, of course, is itself a lavish parody of its own intentions. The script is ponderous; the satire (if that's what it is) feels lacklustre and confused; the politics veer between phallic self-absorption and aimless vituperation. Meanwhile, the actual United States seem to be well on the way towards their own implosion. If Coppola wanted to capture the tragedy and farce of it, he could have just walked the streets with a camera in tow, alert to the carnage. That's a film I'd have gladly paid to see.