All 13 Nicolas Roeg Movies Ranked From Worst To Best
“Nicolas Roeg is a chillingly chic director.”
– Pauline Kael
(François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 [1966], and Richard Lester’s Petulia [1968] rank among his most noted works as DP)
and then later, of course, as composer, editor, writer, and director.
“When I first encountered cinema it was with a sense of wonder,” Roeg told Time Out in an interview back in 2006. That sense of wonder was evident in the first film he helmed as director, the narrative-shattering, censors-be-damned arthouse exercise/crime drama Performance (1970).
Much of what’s present in Performance (which was co-helmed by Donald Cammell) would come to characterize all of Roeg’s finest films; a narrative shell game of skewered chronology; elliptical and often jolting representations of fleeting memories; nightmarish variegations of sound and image, often kaleidoscopic abstractions and juxtapositions like shiny smashed glass once used to reflect the subconscious now reconstituted into Roeg’s expressive idiosyncratic style.
An almost immeasurable influence on many current mainstream filmmakers, particularly those with an experimental angle;
Danny Boyle, Gaspar Noé, François Ozon, Lynne Ramsay, Ridley Scott, Steven Soderbergh, and Ben Wheatley, to name just a few.
The following list examines Roeg’s feature films.
(PLEASE NOTE: absent from this ranking are his numerous shorts, made for TV projects, and Aria, a 1987 anthology film he contributed to), while also elaborating briefly on the societal impact of his considerable and often celebrated works.
If Roeg is a new discovery for you, than treasures await, and if he’s already a name very familiar for you, perhaps revisiting some of this marvelous work is in order?
“Fierce, uncompromising, iconoclastic, dazzlingly original, [Nicolas Roeg] is British film’s Picasso.”
– Danny Boyle
13. Two Deaths (1995)
Adapted from Stephen J. Dobyns’s 1988 novel “The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini”, Roeg’s dialogue-heavy film relocates the action from Chile to Romania, amidst a violent revolution running rampant in the streets, spurred by Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, near the end of his reign. Running contrary to the upheaval outside is the lush mansion interior of the hedonistic doctor, Daniel Pavenic (the always excellent Michael Gambon), who’s hosting his annual dinner party for his dozen closest friends.
As the revolution rages, only three of Pavenic’s friends are able to make it to the mansion where, as events often do in a Roeg film, discourse turns to sexual obsession. Pavenic, it’s revealed, has a very shocking and psychologically disturbing, not to mention unhealthy, relationship with his house servant, Ana Puscasu (Sonia Braga).
Largely a chamber piece structured around a startling and lengthy conversation, Two Deaths should be more engaging than it ultimately is. Smartly directed, and with strong performances, it’s a relentless and often unruly picture, and sadly only a minor one in Roeg’s otherwise remarkable canon.
12. Puffball (2007)
Potentially a fan’s only affair, Puffball employs Roeg’s requisite stock of frightening imagery in this deeply unsettling, supernatural-tinged tale of Liffey (Kelly Reilly), a young architect relocated to the bucolic Irish countryside with her fiancé Richard (Oscar Pearce) where she plans to refurbish and restore a long gone to waste cottage.
Unfortunately for Liffey, her ambition restoration dream home is the former abode of elderly Molly Tucker (Rita Tushingham), an eccentric neighbor who lives with her peculiar adult daughter Mabs (Miranda Richardson) – mother of three girls, but desperately wanting a son.
When Richard, an American, takes a trip back to his old haunts in NYC, Liffey learns she’s pregnant, which doesn’t sit at all well with Molly and Mabs. Certain that their family should be the ones to have a child, Molly and her brood, also occult dabblers, have no problem using black magic to upset Liffey’s pregnancy.
While certainly considered a minor work in Roeg’s canon, The Guardian’s Philip French accurately details the films as “a curious mixture of Straw Dogs and Rosemary’s Baby”, and if that descriptor piques your interest, be sure to see it.
11. Cold Heaven (1991)
Northern Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore’s 1983 novel “Cold Heaven” is the source material for this supernatural-infused thriller from Roeg (adapted for the screen by Allan Scott).
Alex (Mark Harmon) and Marie Davenport (Theresa Russell) are an unhappily married couple in Mexico for a medical conference/working vacay, where Marie is gathering the nerve to tell Alex that they’re through and that she will be leaving him to be with her lover, Daniel (James Russo).
Inexplicably (at least at first) haunted by an image of the Virgin Mary, Marie takes her time before revealing her intentions to Alex, and before she’s able to confess her affair he is involved in a boat accident. The events of which are so horrific and contradictory, they seem buoyed by the hand of God. With the aid of Sister Martha (Talia Shire) and Father Niles (Will Patton), Marie will, hopefully, ascertain the truth. Was it a miracle or something else?
Narratively sewed up, technically impressive, and never specific to any one genre, it’s also a film that’s been described, not surprisingly, as challenging and polarizing (like pretty much all of Roeg’s work).
“Cold Heaven starts out as a standard melodrama about adultery, continues as a head-scratching mystery thriller, takes a slow left turn into religious allegory, and winds up as a speculative and highly moral poem about marriage,” wrote noted film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, adding; “Trying to squeeze this plot into a genre would almost constitute an act of violence against movie and audience alike.”
10. Track 29 (1988)
Another notable collaboration between Roeg and his then wife Theresa Russell is the somewhat scabrous Dennis Potter adaptation Track 29 –– itself a reworking of Potter’s 1974 television play, Schmoedipus. Relocating the action from London to North Carolina, Linda (Russell) is one day confronted by a young man named Martin (Gary Oldman), who claims to be her long-lost son.
Linda, deeply unhappy in her marriage to her ill-suited and unfaithful husband, Henry (Christopher Lloyd), she places her affections into Martin, whom she gave up for adoption years ago, when she was a desperate teenager. But a violent streak reveals itself in Martin, as does an unruly obsession Henry.
Track 29 deliberately confronts the viewer with kink, misogyny, and societal violence. It won’t sit well with its audience, nor is it supposed to. Tantalizing and perhaps tortuous, Track 29 will trouble you and turn in your mind for some time afterward, and that is the intent. In a conflicted and mixed review of the film Roger Ebert suggests that “…not every film is required to massage us with pleasure. Some are allowed to be abrasive and frustrating, to make us think.”
9. Castaway (1987)
Famously adapted from Lucy Irvine’s 1984 book “Castaway”, which detailed her year spent on the isolated isle of Tuin (nestled in the Torres Strait, between Australia and New Guinea) with writer Gerald Kingsland, this inspired true story, is also Roeg’s most conventional and therefore easy to digest, drama.
Amanda Donohoe is Lucy, a London secretary who answers an ad and beats out over 50 other applicants to join the wealthy and reclusive middle-aged writer, Gerald (Oliver Reed) on a tropical isle and be his wife for one year.
Par for the course with Roeg in the director’s chair, the visuals are nothing short of mesmeric (particularly the underwater sequences) and do the exotic locations considerable justice. Donohoe and Reed are excellent in their roles, and watching as their personalities coalesce and also crash, and how that resonated in their emotional and mental states is astonishing to behold.
Unfairly ignored on its initial release, Castaway was denied a U.S. release, it’s not just a film from an auteur director unfairly shunned, but a brilliant turn from a notable cast. “Reed gives the performance of his career as a sexually frustrated middle-aged man in search of sun and sex,” wrote Variety at the time of the film’s original release, also adding that “[Reed] is admirably complemented by Amanda Donohoe as the determined but fickle object of his lust.”
Thanks to an elegantly restored 4K Blu-ray and DVD editions, Castaway can and should be appreciated anew by admirers of Roeg’s. Don’t miss it.
8. Bad Timing (1980)
The scandalous, X-rated mini-epic Bad Timing (denounced unfairly as tasteless and misogynistic upon its original release) has been described by award-winning British author and cineaste Geoff Dyer “…as bonkers as it is beautiful”, and he’s not wrong.
Perhaps Roeg’s most polarizing film, it’s one that explores some very upsetting places as we get familiar with expat American psychiatrist Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel). Living in Vienna, and not a particularly likeable lad, Alex has a potentially dangerous, and certainly unhealthy sexual obsession with Milena (Theresa Russell), a married American woman with more than a few vices.
Also added to the jigsaw-puzzle-that’s-missing-a-few-pieces narrative is Harvey Keitel’s police inspector Netusil, a man convinced that Milena’s hospitalization isn’t as cut and dry as Alex has made it out to be, and this is illustrated via the detective’s fantasized replaying of what could have gone awry.
Told in Roeg’s atypical nonlinear fashion, Bad Timing may read as experimental arthouse inanity for non-fans or those not so adventurous. But Roeg takes pains to detail the voyeuristic psychoanalysis of a wronged relationship, as well as the wistful and lascivious elements of an affair; how despairing people still hold powerful passions, and how some actions are too horrible to be easily or ever forgiven.
7. The Witches (1990)
Ably assisted by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop (Henson was also a producer, and unfortunately he and Roeg regularly disagreed with one another during the production), and a wonderfully OTT Anjelica Huston, The Witches tells the tale of 9-year-old Luke Eveshim (Jasen Fisher), who is staying at a resort with his recuperating grandmother Helga in Norway (Mai Zetterling).
His idle is ruined by other guests at the hotel, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, led by one Miss Ernst (Huston) who also goes by the secret sobriquet of Grand High Witch. Luke is certain this society, secretly a witches coven, has a fondness for transforming children into mice.
The freakish fun of the Witches, which also zigzags into creepier waters at times, is also improved upon by Rowan Atkinson’s put upon hotel manager, Mr. Stringer. For inventive and ambitious fantasy for all ages, Roeg’s The Witches delivers. Perhaps the only real caveat here, and it’s one that ruffled Dahl’s feathers more than anyone else, is that it has a much more upbeat ending than the decidedly darker source material.
6. Insignificance (1985)
Adapted from Terry Johnson’s play, Roeg’s film occurs on a summer night in 1954, set in anonymous hotel rooms where the lives of four iconic figures; Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Russell), Albert Einstein (Michael Emil), Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey) and Joe McCarthy (Tony Curtis) – though in the film they are simply and slyly referred to as the Actress, the Professor, the Ballplayer, and the Senator – fatefully intersect.
These recognizable popular culture figures, in typical Roeg fashion, riff on grandiose ideas and floundering emotions. What begins as trivial digressions gains momentum and significance, buoyed by stellar performances (like Curtis’s McCarthy, witch-hunting endlessly in his mind, or Russell’s Monroe, who, despite her ditzy dilettante routine can still teach Einstein a thing or two about relativity).
On the surface Insignificance may not be the exacting pedigree of Roeg’s recognized masterpieces, but it’s still a vast, ingenious allegory on fame, life, love, obsession, jealousy, and substantially so much more.
5. Eureka (1984)
Another of Roeg’s films to be unjustly ignored upon release, “Eureka was very bad timing,” he explains. “It was the early 1980s: Reagan and Thatcher were in, greed was good, and here was a film about the richest man in the world who still couldn’t be happy. Politically and sociologically, it was out of step.”
Inspired by compelling true events, Eureka tells the story of a Klondike prospector who hits it rich, the fictional Jack McCann (Gene Hackman), based off of Sir Harry Oakes, who was murdered in the Bahamas, on an island he owned back in 1943.
In Roeg’s film, Jack’s tale jumps back in forth through his life, and we find his dynasty from the gold rush put in jeopardy as his adult daughter Tracy (Theresa Russell) and her husband Claude (Rutger Hauer) scheme away to usurp his fortune, even his soul.
Simultaneously to this almost Shakespearean betrayal are a pair of greedy, mob-tied investors Mayakofsky (Joe Pesci) and Aurelio D’Amato (Mickey Rourke), but even they seem subdued compared to JAck’s own inner demons.
Director John Boorman (Deliverance [1972]) famously described Eureka as “the best picture ever made — for an hour”, and Danny Boyle (Trainspotting [1996]) recounted how inspiring he found the film; “There was a couple of scenes [in Eureka] in particular, a death scene, and a kind of orgy, and I remember I just felt completely breathless, just unable to catch a breath at all… It’s not a bad thing to aim for.”
As beautiful, bizarro, and byzantine as Roeg’s finest films, Eureka is a film in need of a reappraisal. “One of the richest movie labyrinths since Citizen Kane,” writes Film Comment’s Harlan Kennedy, and he’s not at all wrong. It’s another dizzying tour de force, and perhaps an unexpected one. “What Roeg brings to the party is a flair for the sensational,” enthused Roger Ebert, “for characters who are larger than their weaknesses, who are connected to great archetypal forces.”
4. Performance (1970)
Roeg’s directorial debut (co-directed with Donald Cammell) was a product of the psychedelic and very Swinging Sixties. Produced in ‘68, Performance didn’t get released until 1970 as Warner Brothers was cold footed to release a film with such graphic violence and strong sexual content.
Today viewed as the quintessential cult film, Performance is all hallucinations and psychologically complex melodramatics, geniusly shot and edited into a compelling and complex mosaic.
Also contained within its paranoia-addled mainframe is a zero cool British gangster template (a huge influence on the crime films of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino, amongst others), and one of the most influential and imitated soundtracks of that era (Ry Cooder’s slide guitar gets mad props).
The film stars James Fox as a violent, hair-trigger hitman from London named Chas. In a serious jam, Chas tracks down the semi-reclusive rock star Turner (Mick Jagger, in his film-acting debut), looking for a place to hideout.
Turner lives with two smokin’ hot scenester companions, Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michele Breton), and though Chas and Turner initially clash, their mutual fascination with one another, combined with their drug-enhanced psychological sparring results in a stunning blur of assimilation, self-loss, and identity thievary. Sensational strangeness abounds in this phenomenal mindfuck of a film.
3. Walkabout (1971)
“A meditation about living on earth, which finds beauty in the way mankind’s intelligence can adapt to harsh conditions while civilization just tries to wall them off or pave them over,” praised Roger Ebert, who wrote about the film many times, accurately and enthusiastically proclaiming that “Walkabout is one of the great films.”
Powerful visual compositions with an almost religious intensity permeates Roeg’s meditative, haunting, and at times eerily surreal story of survival in the Australian outback. Using James Vance Marshall’s 1959 novel “The Children” as a starting point, Roeg’s story involves a teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her little brother (Luc Roeg, the director’s son), who are left stranded in the wild after their father (John Meillon) suffers a breakdown and attempts to murder them before his own horrific suicide.
Aided by an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on his titular rite of passage journey, and Roeg’s exuberant visual dynamism, Walkabout is an exotic, inspiring, and absolutely unforgettable arthouse entry.
“One of the most original and provocative films of the 1970s,” wrote The Movie Guide’s James Monaco, adding that “Walkabout is set in terrain stranger and more awe-inspiring than that of any science fiction film.”
2. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
With an abundance of unexplained skips in location and chronology and his cheeky trademark sophisticated style, Roeg’s adaptation of the 1963 Walter Tevis novel, “The Man Who Fell to Earth” is an ambitious and meditative marvel that was, of course, quite ahead of its time.Described by Time Out as “the most intellectually provocative genre film of the 1970s,” and starring Thin White Duke-era rock icon David Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien who’s doomed visit to Earth offers up a multifaceted and ultra-sophisticated inspection of American culture, heartbreak, and homesickness.
The film struck a chord with niche audiences, rendering it cult status pretty quickly (prolific sci-fi author Philip K. Dick became particularly smitten with the film, incorporating elements of it and of Bowie’s iconic eminence into his must-read 1981 masterpiece “VALIS”).
Bowie’s character is named for the English scientist Isaac Newton, discoverer of gravity, and as our protagonist in this mind-bending SF masterpiece, he makes discoveries as philosophically and psychologically substantial.
“The story unfolds in a daring sequence of narrative leaps,” writes The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw in his glowing five star review, adding that the film is “a freaky, compelling concept album of a film.”
Poignant, provocative, and deeply transfixing, genre films are rarely as meaningful, extravagant, or as ambitious as The Man Who Fell to Earth. Populist cinema this most certainly is not (when was Roeg, wearing his director’s hat, ever mainstream?), and though at times perhaps indecipherable, Roeg is a satirist and an artist of incredible breadth of view. When was sci-fi ever this iconoclastic and cool?
1. Don’t Look Now (1973)
“[Don’t Look Now] remains one of the great horror masterpieces, working not with fright, which is easy, but with dread, grief and apprehension,”
writes Roger Ebert, adding that “few films so successfully put us inside the mind of a man who is trying to reason his way free from mounting terror.
Roeg and his editor, Graeme Clifford, cut from one unsettling image to another. The movie is fragmented in its visual style, accumulating images that add up to a final bloody moment of truth.”
After their daughter’s tragic death by drowning, grieving parents John and Laura (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) retreat to Venice in hopes of healing and finding peace in Roeg’s stunning arthouse horror Don’t Look Now, itself a very inspired and embellished adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1971 short story.
Using a fragmented visual style involving abrupt cuts, unanticipated segues, ambiguous, often cryptic associations (the color red has never been so unsettling), Roeg creates a feeling of perpetual dread and impending doom.
This suffocating atmosphere that Roeg so expertly conjures is met with an unforgettable romantic interlude wherein John and Laura make love in one of the most brazenly erotic scenes in all of cinema. Controversial back in 1973, the love scene is still shocking and miraculous when viewed today, 45 years later.
Prolonged, explicit, and imitated many times since (perhaps most notably in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight [1998]) the passion of the damaged couple is unmistakable, and their pre- and post-coital embrace of one another shows a passion and an affinity that feels absolutely genuine.
“[Don’t Look Now] is an example of high-fashion Gothic sensibility,”
wrote Pauline Kael, remarking how
“Venice, the labyrinthine city of pleasure, with its crumbling, leering gargoyles, is obscurely, frighteningly sensual here, and an early sex sequence with Christie and Sutherland nude in bed, intercut with their post-coital mood as they dress to go out together, has an extraordinary erotic glitter. Dressing is splintered and sensualized, like fear and death… Roeg comes closer to getting Borges on the screen than those who have tried it directly.”
Wow!
In the years since its release Don’t Look Now is regularly regarded as one of the greatest British films of all time (a recent 2011 panel of industry experts organized by Time Out ranked it number one), often echoing sentiments articulated by the San Francisco Chronicle calling it “a haunting, beautiful labyrinth that gets inside your bones and stays there.”
Don’t Look Now is a troubling, stunning, and sensual masterpiece you’ll never forget, and it’s also the pièce de résistance of a major filmmaker at the height of his considerable powers.
Author Bio:Shane Scott-Travis is a film critic, screenwriter, comic book author/illustrator and cineaste. Currently residing in Vancouver, Canada, Shane can often be found at the cinema, the dog park, or off in a corner someplace, paraphrasing Groucho Marx.Follow Shane on Twitter@ShaneScottravis