Spring Part 1: Just Like Me

The days grow longer and brighter as the green buds burst and the sneezes splash the air. It's spring and our thoughts turn to attraction ... to the difficult and irresistible ones in our lives, the ones we can neither live with or without, who'll be the death of us and to whom we are always extending one last chance. So, don't get too blithe with the sprigs and puffy eyes: summer's on the way and spring is smirking and saying, "that's just like me."

Season trailer

A New Leaf (USA 1971, Elaine May)

One of the funniest rom coms ever from the dark, satirical mind of Elaine May. Walter Matthau's upper crust bachelor must marry or forego a fortune so plans to find a future victim of a planned honeymoon accident. She is the klutzy Henrietta, played by May herself. For all the toughness of its social satire it yet retains a strange goodness of nature. From the year that brought us the obscure gem Little Murders and the deathless classic Harold and Maude.

Diary (Hong Kong 2006, Pang Brothers)

The Pang brothers output has appeared uneven but really they've just been trying different things and they are to be applauded for straying from the expectation that they should just keep remaking The Eye. Diary is the tale of a young woman grieving from rejection meets the object of her obsession's doppelganger and they start their own romance. But what is really going on? The mystery intensifies so much that the film has to begin all over, the second part having it's own opening credits. Not fun but deep and dark and worth your while.

Dead Ringers  (Canada 1988, David Cronenberg)

As with The Dead Zone David Cronenberg showed he was happy to broaden out from his trademark body horror into terror more psychological. Dead Ringers' tale of the intimidating intimacy of a pair of twins who use their societal clout to get what they want and their knowledge of each other to keep things interesting ... and disturbing. Jeremy Irons thanked David Cronenberg in his Oscar victory speech years after this film, adding that some of us would know why. "Why" was being lifted from the talent-obscuring aristocrat roles that he had been getting that promised a career of blandness. Cronenberg clearly saw much more in him and the results are anything but bland.

The Innocents (U.K. 1960, Jack Clayton)

Spooky go at the oft adapted Turn of the Screw has proven the most durable due to casting and some very canny depictions of the weird. You want ghosts? Ditch the mist and bedsheet look and show them how the were in life. There are scenes in this film that can still go right through you. And that's before you get to the brooding psychological undercurrent which, depending on how you flip it, can lead to even more disturbing images. A must.

The Ugly (New Zealand, 1997, Scott Reynolds)

A nightmarish mental hospital on a dark and stormy night. A young hot shot psyche visits a troubling patient, a serial killer with the demeanour of a quiet young bloke who doesn't always understand his crimes. The shrink wants a career-making triumph, an expose and cure of the monster's disorder. But it just isn't going to go that way. That goes for us. We think we have this film pegged from the urban gothic opening but we're going to need some presence of mind as those on screen seem destined for perdition. An extraordinary genre-warping entry into the 1990's fascination with serial killers on screen The Ugly is unjustly little seen. Let's change that.

Eyes Wide Shut (U.K./U.S.A, 1999, Stanley Kubrick)

Often dismissed as a transitional effort for Kubrick on his way to A.I., his final film has both substance and depth. The cinemaster is having some winking fun with the casting of the golden couple of Cruise and Kidman but his examination of the double standard at the centre of the story is rigorous. The ad campaign led to expectations of debauchery when Kubrick had made elegance. And eloquence: the final word of the film and his screen career might well have been his own last words.

Apologies for the lateness of this season. Life catches up and gets in the way. But it's here. Have fun finding some of these and enjoy everyone. Sooner than I would have wanted, spring part 2 will be up. So, take your antihistamines and buckle in.