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I’m a member of an informal ‘music and movies’ quartet that exchanges views each month of what we’ve seen, heard and read. Two of the others always put me to shame with the quantity of their consumption – but that’s probably because they’re not stupid enough to set themselves tasks like ‘write a blog everyday’.

(I was much relieved when the fourth member joined, as I was never sure whether the groups title – The Good The Bad & The Ugly – was a reference to the material we watched, or self-description.)

Here are my January five:

MISERY: Based-on a Stephen King novel, written by screenwriting god William Goldman and directed by Carl ‘Spinal Tap’ Reiner. Even if you’ve never seen the film, you know the story: writer James Caan is held captive by obsessive ‘number one fan’, who does unspeakable things to him while forcing him to re-write the draft in which he plans to kill off her favourite character.

It’s a tight, claustrophobic picture, which is really a two-hander between Caan and Cathy Bates. Bates picked up an Oscar (although her performance straddles a fine-line of self-parody) and Caan is very believable, but I think it’s Richard Farnsworth who steals the picture as the dogged, intuitive local police chief.

Script and direction are economic, delivering a story as taught as a tennis racket, and while the climactic violence is quite grotesque, it is not especially graphic – and the more shocking for that.

KRAMER V KRAMER: While Misery was a re-visit for me, KVK was the first on this year’s ‘I-should-have-seen-this-but-haven’t’ list . Divorcees Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep try acting each other off the screen, only to be upstaged by the cute, blonde 8 year-old source of their custody battle, Justin Henry.

This is most certainly AN ACTORS’ MOVIE. The story is slight, giving no more than briefly sketched scenes into which the cast, Hoffman particularly, fill the detail. Which is no complaint – this kind of film can easily be way over-written, taking it into melodrama, and KVK avoids that.

It is also a piece of its time. This is the mid-70s feminist backlash – the battle for a child seen from the father’s point of view. Or rather, taking his point of view. From the first scene, there’s no doubt that Streep is the villain – cold, self-centred, emotionally detached, in search of ‘herself’. And the main premise is summed up by Hoffman when he’s on the stand: “I don’t buy the idea that caring for a child is exclusively the domain of a woman”.

If we’d followed Streep to California, no doubt we’d have greater sympathy for her by having a greater understanding of her turmoil. But instead, we stay in the family apartment, and watch Hoffman go through his change – from learning to cook French toast to his shifting ambitions.

(Just to be sure, I checked all the above with Mrs R. My sense of decorum and modesty forbid me from repeating her view of the Streep character).

THE SQUID & THE WHALE: Fast forward 30 years, for New York divorce 2005-style. Boy – how things have changed, at least from the child’s point-of-view.

This is writer/director Noah Baumbach’s view of his parents and the experience of being caught in the middle. It’s messier, more untidy and far more morally ambiguous than KVK. Neither parent comes out well from this tragi-comedy. The heroes are the sons, and their heroism is just to survive.

Jeff Daniels is a self-deluded literary academic whose star obviously shone brightly early in his career, but has been on the wane ever since. To add insult to injury, his wife (Laura Linney) is starting to get some recognition for her short stories. Oh, and getting laid by their tennis coach.

(This is New York; everyone has a tennis coach. It’s like Londoners having an Oyster card.)

When the parents decided to separate, Daniels finds a house ‘across the park’ in an altogether seedier part of town, reflecting his moral decline. He takes in a female student lodger (he’s obviously never read Malcolm Bradbury’s “The History Man“). His book is rejected by his publisher. Meanwhile, Linney gets a short story published in The New Yorker, and goes off for a weekend to improve her backhand.

And somewhere in this solipsistic, spite-filled shambles, the two sons try to make sense of it all.  Either by masturbating in the school librabry or feigning insight into Kafka.

TS&TW is very funny and very painful in equal measure. There’s no doubt that the father is the villain this time, but the mother is ambiguously drawn – although somewhat redeemed at the end. It’s not as simple as KVK, and is more demanding for all that.

GOMORRA: I hesitate to write about this. There are some things that are too dangerous to comment upon – as Roberto Saviano discovered after publishing his expose of the Camorra, the ‘other Mafia’ in Naples, which is the basis of this brilliant film.

To describe it is to diminish it. Five narrative streams, following the lower rungs in organized crime; the children for whom ‘gangsters’ are the only role-models; money collectors who trade information (and lives) to protect themselves; bag carriers who assist corrupt officials make even more corrupt deals; young men on the make, stealing their way to an inevitable bloody end.

The brilliance of the film is that the characters in each storyline are fleshed out with uncertainty and fear. Fear runs through Gomorra’s 150 minutes like water through a storm drain: it engulfs every frame and every conversation.

Like its source material, the film tells a fictional narrative, but has all the sensibility of a documentary; an earthy, gritty, griminess, stripped bare of any glamour or beauty.

The cast is uniformly brilliant, but two performances stand out: Salvatore Cantalupo as a pattern-cutter who decides to moonlight for some Chinese entrepreneurs, and Toni Servillo, a man filling uneconomic farmland with toxic waste. Cantalupo desperately sad, Servillo desperately in denial.

OF TIME AND THE CITY: A long, long time ago (far more years than I care to remember), director Terence Davies gave me an epiphany. His autobiographical film “Distant Voices, Still Lives” showed me that movies didn’t have to be linear, that emotion didn’t have to be rooted in action, and that ordinary people can be heroic. It remains one of my favourite films.

So I approached OT&TC with high expectations – which is always a mistake. And while I’m relieved to say that it has many good features, it left me a trifle under-whelmed.

If Gomorra is over-endowed with narrative. OT&TC has done away with it completely. It is a very lyrical documentary, combining literary and visual poetry to describe Liverpool, Davies’ home city.

The new material is beautifully shot, the archive footage (Davies was a post WW2 baby) exquisitely arranged and highly evocative. He shows us the poverty of austerity Britain, the hope of the 1960s, the disappointment of the 1970s, all narrated by his own voiceover readings of poetry and opinion. With a voice like a hot bath, he’s seductive, angry, disillusioned and mournful.

But for me, it doesn’t quite work. Indeed, it feels just a little self-indulgent. This is a memoir created using the medium that Davies knows best: why write a book when you are more comfortable using visual language? And yet he seems determined not to draw any conclusions. I suppose we should be grateful that he treats his audience with respect, and doesn’t look for force-feed us a ‘message’, but as someone who’s never really got on with ‘Ulysese’, I struggle with stream-of-consciousness material. And that’s how OT&TC feels; we are inside Davies’ head,  listening to his thoughts, as they happen.

So although it looks like a documentary of what happened out there, it’s actually a reflection of what’s happening in here.

Perhaps it needs another title: “Being Terence Davies“?

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