Where James Toback’s 1978 drama Fingers was the inspiration for Jacques Audiard’s celebrated 2005 film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, for the pulsating, brutal and achingly tense prison drama A Prophet the French director has mined the likes of Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jules Dassin and Jean-Pierre Melville to create a instant genre classic and an audacious piece of cinematic story telling. It is the standout film of the last 12 months, quite possibly of the 12 to come, and places Audiard firmly in the pantheon of great European filmmakers. Indeed, there must be a claim that over the course of a career in which he has directed a comparatively bashful five films in 16 years (including, A Self Made Hero, Read My Lips and The Beat…), Audiard has assembled a beautifully refined collection of work to rival, or better, the notional cream of the cinematic world. In an industry that celebrates overindulgence and lavishes praise on creative gluttony, Audiard, much like that other inspired recluse Terence Malick, proves that sometimes less is almost certainly more.

In A Prophet he has created a complex but hugely rewarding film about growth and survival. It is the story of an illiterate young inmate rising through the ranks of the prison criminal classes, from nervous greenhorn to formidable player. It tells of his transformation, his manipulation and his shifting status under the (precarious) guidance of the prison kingpin until, armed with a new cunning and swagger, he ruthlessly and decisively acts to usurp his tutors-in-violence. It is moving, vicious, grimly cynical and entirely dispassionate, claustrophobic and elaborately constructed. It is also utterly absorbing.

The film’s star, Tahar Ramin, gives a beautifully nuanced performance as the enigmatic Malik, the cornered, wide-eyed innocent cast adrift into the fierce bear pit of blood-soaked prison hierarchies who grows in confidence, and influence, as he slowly unpicks the complex and nefarious web of tribal codes that underpin criminal life. While Niels Arestrup, as the toxic Corsican overlord, Cesar, who rules obdurately over the fate of others and commands Malik’s allegiance by ordering him to murder a fellow Arab inmate, is fearsome and convincing. The sequence in which Malik is trained and prepares for that assassination is one of the most tense and unsettling I have ever experienced and the murder itself, clumsily executed in cocktail of panic and naivety, is filmed with absolutely no concession to audience sensibilities. Cesar’s desperate decline, too, from tyrannical ogre to ineffectual bit-part player, coldly pushed aside in the unrelenting battle for a very tenuous kind of power, is perfectly played out.

Watching A Prophet I was reminded of another towering prison film of recent years, Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008); but where that film played out almost serenely, just below the surface of prison life, A Prophet mines a far deeper seam of realism, one submerged in the shadowless spaces. Audiard disentangles the labyrinthine, poisonous realities of state captivity without sentimentality for the protagonist and with a dramatic momentum that underscores the survival-at-any-costs mentality required to endure, from lights-up to lockdown. It is an inevitable and gelatinous mire into which Malik is pulled but from which he emerges formidably schooled in a unique strain Darwinian darkness. At 2h30m this is a long film, but it is impeccably paced to capture this conversion in all its callous glory.

A Prophet throws up many intriguing questions about ethnicity, post-colonialism, loyalty and (im)morality, but first and foremost it is a wickedly compelling film. Its power derives from the density of its plot – one that requires absolute surrender to its numerous, interwoven strands – its uncommon refusal to pass judgement on any of its players and, aesthetically, on the stark juxtaposition between bleak realism and heightened fantasy, and all that it implies within the context of the narrative. The result is a triumphant film that demands viewing, and reviewing, and one that confirms, along the work of Micheal Haneke, Claire Denis and Andrea Arnold among others, quite what a strong year it has been for European filmmaking.

Gil Scott-Heron, arguably the most influential poet to come out of America in the last fifty years, the master chronicler of American mistrust and arch social provocateur, has released his first album since 1996’s Spirits and twenty-eight years after his last release for Arista Records, Moving Targets. The great pioneer of socially conscious soul and rap has emerged from this extended hiatus, part spent incarcerated on Riker’s Island for cocaine possession, with the searingly brilliant I’m New Here and, if he has taken a step away from the acid-jazz and soul that made him famous a quarter of a century ago, placing him among yet detached from the pantheon of great soul revolutionaries of the era, including Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, a new rawness acquired with age makes this album a match for anything that he released at his zenith.

It is an album so sparse, so rare and desolate, set against the simplest electronic and acoustic canvas, that it exploits every nuance and shade of Scott-Heron’s ravaged vocals to the most magnificent, hypnotic effect. Me and the Devil is a cover of Robert Johnson’s blues classic remolded with a dark electronic undercurrent; Bobby Bland’s ambiguous blues appeal, I’ll Take Care of You, is rendered dense with hope and heartache, positively bending under the weight of love’s ambition, impelled by a steady bass drum and lingering beautifully over measured piano chords; Where Did the Night Go is a short, sharp burst of ambient darkness tracing the singer’s unresolved relationship with his own existence and ideologies; while The Crutch mines the similar territory with stripped back and powerful effect. Throughout Scott-Heron displays the most captivating, free-flowing and soulful curiosity and the effect is mesmeric.

I’m New Here is an album that advances Scott-Heron’s reputation as an outstanding poet but one that simultaneously strips away and demystifies all that made him such a powerful revolutionary force in the first place. No one more than the man himself is as acutely aware that his legacy means little across the time that has elapsed and the changes that have occurred in his absence and from this modest, introspective foundation a new, more meditative artist has emerged. It is a hugely charismatic album, soaked in a lifetime’s experience and wisdom; it is bold, beguiling and triumphantly fashioned. I’m New Here might just come to be the album that defines this mighty artist’s career.

Photograph: Terrence Jennings /Retna Ltd./Corbis

In Sarah Bakewell’s versatile, brilliant and joyful account of Michel de Montaigne’s life and work there is a quote from poet and author Leonard Woolf proposing the 16^th century French philosopher to be “the first completely modern man” with an “intense awareness of and passionate interest in the individuality of himself and all other human beings.” Reading Bakewell’s book, and Montaigne’s Essays themselves, one becomes acutely aware of exactly how modern he is, of quite how relevant he is today as he was some 350 years ago. The time that has elapsed since first committing his thoughts to paper seems to have concertinaed into the briefest of moments and his ambiguity, his uncertainty and his energy, his awe and innocent perplexity at the vagaries of life, remain entirely undimmed. They are, even in the swirling miasma of twenty-first century living, some of the most exciting and thrilling and instructive ideas one is likely to come across. Indeed, it is this notion that the Essays transcend history that, for Bakewell, makes them such important writings.

Not that Montaigne’s age was devoid of incident, far from it. Sixteenth century France was a nation beset by rebellion, war, religious enmity, fraught political infighting, domestic uprisings and a succession of weak and ineffectual monarchs; but it was also an age of great philosophical introspection and few were as introspective as Michel Eqyuem de Montaigne. It is this that made, and still today makes, Essays so captivating or, in the words of the man himself “both wild and extravagant”: the subject matter is, quite simply, the author himself. Montaigne spares no aspect of his life, however trivial, in the pursuit of some meaning, doing nothing more than merely inviting his readers to watch him think. It was as beautiful a conceit then as it is today and in his easy-going and accessible style he creates an intense familarity, disarming in his honesty (“I am free to give myself up to doubt and uncertainty, and to my predominant quality which is ignorance”) and appealing in his idiosyncrasies. The result is a free-flowing ramble, a saunter through the mind of a man who, by a series of incidents scattered across his lifetime (including the death of all but one of his children, that of his most cherished friend La Boétie to the plague and his own near-death experience in a riding accident) had learnt that the best way to deal with life’s episodic inconsistencies was simply happy acceptance, just to relax; what we might call today “letting it slide.” As he says himself, “the only thing certain is that nothing is certain.”

Bakewell, rightly, places this attitude firmly within the lineage of the Hellenistic philosophy of the Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics and their collective encouragement of “mindfulness” through “equilibrium”, that is to say having complete control of one’s emotions – the goal should be happiness in this world (eudaimonia) not Heaven. But Montaigne extricates himself from the fanaticism, often violent, that can beset both philosophy and religion by remaining entirely grounded in the quotidian. It is an approach that would later drive some to distraction, notably Pascal and Descartes, but it is one that has ensured an unbreakable bond with the common reader. So, he writes on his forgetfulness, his cat’s role in his understanding of differing perspectives, liars, thumbs, “That we laugh and cry for the same thing”, smells, sleep, the scent on his moustache, pedantry, cannibals…the essays are as varied as they are simple. And they are more accomplished and relevant for it.

Bakewell’s thrust that Essays has passed through the ages undiminished is hard to dismiss. So much of what Montaigne concluded then, in that he concludes anything at all other then there are no simple conclusions, might help us to better grasp the violent shifts in today’s changing world should we choose to embrace it. The notion that the best way to tolerate randomness and uncertainty, to understand and engage with haughty ideologies that pass as universal codes of behaviour, to comprehend the multiplicity of the human condition, would be simply to suspend judgment is a wonderfully truthful one. And it is one that, while counterintuitive to a modern world where we are encouraged to seek out only definitive answers, should really command our attention. For this reason alone How to Live is a fantastic, enjoyable and enthralling primer into a world of relaxed thinking and tolerance and it, and of course the essays themselves, thoroughly deserve to reach as wide a readership as possible.

Image courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library

In its favour, Winstone is magnificent as ever. There are very few actors who can pull off such fraught inner-turmoil, a heady mix of sensitivity, innocence, confusion and extreme violence, with quite the same conviction. His screen presence is alarmingly intense and his delivery, jumbling rapid-fire, staccato despair with drawn out and prolonged agony, a man completely unable to express himself, is beautifully nuanced. While his character fails ultimately to live up to his promise, Winstone is clearly an actor at the very top of his game. McShane, too, is magnificent as a sinister, homosexual gangster boss, a Pinter-esque figure calmly and menacingly pulling the strings from the corner of the room in which much of the drama is set. And in that room, other than the disappointing script, lies one of the film’s main problems: it all feels very “stagey” and so, from a cinematic perspective, very limited. Whereas other “theatrical” films, such the David Mamet-scripted formidable Glengarry Glen Ross, excel precisely because they are so tightly written, the characters so finely realised and the pace pitch-perfect, here there is simply not enough at the heart of the narrative, enough spark, to keep the film moving forward. There are no interesting puzzles or plot devices to maintain momentum and while the characters are, broadly, an intriguing bunch they are nowhere nearly fascinating enough to sustain an entire film.

This is a great shame because amongst all the relentless machismo, swearing and bus pass cockney bravado there really is much more interesting film pushing to get out. Like Sexy Beast it is one of loyalty and love, of men testing the boundaries of friendship and exploring the lengths that they might go to protect their extraordinary brand of honour. Here, however, it is too cartoonish, too bluntly finished to be anything other than only mildly interesting or entertaining and ultimately all we are really left with is a group of faakin’ ‘ard old geezers shoutin’ and yellin’ and whackin’ people. Which, even with some brilliant star turns, makes it if not dull then just a little tired.

The plot is a starkly simple, if troubling one. An unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), both deserted by their wife/mother (Charlize Theron), cross a decimated and desolate America in an ongoing fight to preserve their own humanity. Exhausted, cold and hungry, their journey, ceaselessly and perhaps pointlessly pushing their trolley of threadbare and limited possessions (the shadow of Beckett again) is both a physical and symbolic test that takes them through wretched landscapes, derelict, skeletal towns where monuments to man’s follies once stood, to the barren sea and deep into their own souls. Morality has been cast adrift in the aftermath of this cataclysmic event and the question of whether the man can maintain self control in the face of the depravities against which he is trying to protect his son – cannibalism being the starkest and darkest – looms large. As the journey evolves the pair encounter a succession of dangers and while the man becomes ever more resolute in his role as protector, and concurrently ever more resigned to their condition, then the boy begins to assume the role of a soulful, broader moral conscience, questioning their own behavior in this theatre of malevolence. Their relationship, while frequently tender and moving, is, one senses, heading in opposite directions, compelled by competing urges. It is a fascinating development.
Hillcoat was also at the helm of another fantastic, and woefully overlooked, exploration of morality, loyalty and betrayal, The Proposition, and here as there the landscape plays a central role. Where that film was scorch-dry and dripping red with the dustbowl wastelands of the Australian outback, then The Road, terminally grey and washed out is, too, in so many ways defined by the palpable realism of its nightmarish setting. This is surely a rendering of a decimated planet that we can relate to in its striking resemblance to the one we are already committed to, and it is all the more terrifying for that. It is real and heartbreakingly authentic (Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography is magnificent, there is no CGI and the film is shot on location in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and, most poignantly, in the suburbs of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans) and so the question that one must ask is, in the face of such wretchedness, when one is all alone and the only reason to live is the relentless fight to survive, then what exactly is there to survive for?
This is the existential question that, in the absence of any traditional narrative drive, propels the film forward and is one that translates well from book to film. And for that reason, for that intelligence, The Road, while desperately bleak and demanding, should be warmly praised. It is a beautifully realised film and among the growing cycle of apocalypse films that has emerged over the last decade it is, while not without fault, a standout work.

I was ambling happily along Camden High St on my way back from lunch today, running the usual gauntlet of heroin addicts, charity muggers and Kestrel drinkers and dreaming lazily of nothing much in particular, when I skidded wildly across a particularly fruity patch of ice and landed squarely on my coccyx. As I writhed limply on the busy pavement in mixture of agony and humiliation, roundly ignored, stepped over and certain that my stock could sink no lower, a long shadow loomed over me and I was finally offered the assistance of a passing good Samaritan. This everyday hero? This guardian angel with a sturdy gait and rippling forearms like hocks of ham….?

A grey-haired, hunched lady of at least 90 years. With a walking stick. And outdoor slippers. How utterly and hopelessly degrading. Humiliation over, at least……Not so! Once I had clawed myself to my feet, clinging pathetically to her BHS anorak, it became quickly apparent that a group of unruly local youths had gathered ringside with the express intention of laughing at me. Loudly. And pointing to draw maximum attention. And shouting incoherent abuse. And possibly filming it on their phones. It was hard to tell in the red-hot fug of total embarrassment. Have you noticed that the freckled, cheeky n’er-do-wells of yesteryear have morphed into a herd of crack-fuelled, malicious little sh*tsticks not satisfied until they have, at the very least, sliced up some poor innocent with a blunt and rusty Stanley knife. What ever happened to nipping over the garden fence to pinch a couple of mouldy apples from miserable old Mr. Miggins? Or postman’s knock? Or setting fire to your sister’s valuable collection of Beatrix Potter books?

Thanking the generous, and now possibly quite self-conscious old lady, I scurried and skidded away, keen to retreat to the sanctity of my office, a cockle-warming brew and a medicinal afternoon on YouTube, only to be met with yet more peels of laughter and mocking invective. In the name of Satan’s burning crotch, what had I done to deserve such further cruelty? The large, muddy damp patch swelling handsomely across the seat of my trousers gave me my answer, it making me look, no less, like some frantic, howling escapee who’d shat is undercrackers in some sort of filthy protest now that the heavy sedatives were wearing off. Brilliant!

Forced to make my way back to my desk by edging slowly through the streets with my back to various walls and fences like a midnight peeper, once returned I contemplated removing my strides and drying them on a radiator. However, the added humiliation of appearing like the weird kid who defecates himself on the school trip and has to spend the rest of the day sitting on the minibus with the dinner ladies, in a pair of borrowed yellow Y-fronts, was just too, too much. So I just sat there like a damp, muddied, red-faced tit.

Just thought I’d share this with you. To get it off my chest, you see. And possibly brighten the end of your day.

Happy New Year, folks! Happy New Year! x

Precious, Lee Daniels’s screen adaptation of the 1997 novel, Push, by New York poet Sapphire, is less a rollercoaster of emotion than a nine-pound sledgehammer of unrelenting torment that hits you right between the eyes. From a critical perspective this is both a curse and blessing. Indeed, so disturbing are some of the key moments that, dare I say it, by the final quarter one starts to become relatively inured to the ordeal. What starts out as a stark, often grotesque, but never-less-than compelling film begins to feel strangely tired, so mired in its own horror that it feels uncertain about how it should bring itself to a satisfying, narrative resolution. Because despite its Indie credentials and its triumphant reception at the Sundance and Cannes festivals, Precious is, structurally, very much a mainstream film that does demand a resolution. It does finally end with hope of some sort, although knowing the political and social trajectory of late-Eighties New York (the film is set in 1987) one can assume that nothing hopeful should be taken for granted. That is not to say that it fails as such, or that this should detract from the remarkable performances of its two main stars in particular, but it does suggest that it is so heavily loaded with suffering that the storytelling begins to dull slightly, ultimately deferring to the weight of the message. For obvious commercial reasons the literal expression of the unfolding tragedy is in many ways artfully done, anesthetised even, but the overarching implication is never less than crystal clear: for a certain and not insignificant proportion of American society, life is only tragedy, little more than a remorseless succession of personal, familial and systemic failures against which any flecks of hope and light, any gestures at breaking the cycle, however small, will ultimately be snuffed out without the help of an extraordinary coterie of golden-hearted guardian angels. And if that sounds rather like a variation on a fairytale, then herein lies one of the films flaws. Precious is powerful, affecting and important but it falls frustratingly between camps, caught between two, or arguably three, narrative and aesthetic impulses: horror, hope and beauty.

Claireece “Precious” Jones (a remarkable debut by Gabourey Sidibe) is an obese, illiterate, African-American teenager growing up in New York’s Harlem borough. She is pregnant with her second child by her own father, who rapes her under her own mother’s impassive gaze; she is repeatedly physically and mentally maltreated by her mother (an extraordinary, intense performance by US comedian and chat show host, Mo’Nique); she is humiliated by her peers on a daily basis; and, it later transpires to our horror as we imagine, and hope, that she is through the very worst, she is HIV+ as a result of her sexual abuse. Expelled by her school because of her pregnancy she transfers to an alternative facility, Each One/Teach One, where her (saintly/serene/beautiful) teacher, Blu Rain (Paula Patton) urges her to search deep inside herself for salvation from the living hell in which she is trapped. For while she is physically impassive, a near-silent, murmuring mass of unyielding, repressed agony, inside she is a richly imaginative young woman (although in imagining herself to be white on one occasion she demonstrates palpable self-loathing.) It is a contradiction that Daniels plays out through a series of woozy, fantasy vignettes. On her journey to self-realisation and a relative empowerment she encounters a supporting cast of compassionate individuals – a nurse (Lenny Kravitz), a social worker (a revelatory Mariah Carey), her assorted band of new misfit classmates – who encourage her in their own unique ways to push herself to escape.

Precious will provoke two polarised responses when it is released in the UK: one from those who are shocked, shattered but ultimately inspired by a powerhouse narrative and the scorching emotion that demands you engage with the horrors against which some people must battle merely to wake up each morning. And one from those unable to see beyond a heavy-handed sequence of hackneyed clichés that assault them with every emotional trick in the book, forcing a passive audience to engage with a situation with which they have, ultimately, little in common. This makes Precious, in many ways, a contradictory film, one at once propelled by the hope that must prevail and yet one simultaneously pulled back by the sheer scale of horror that its protagonist has to endure. This makes it stylistically ambiguous, too, for while it is genuinely harrowing in parts it is also undeniably attractive, particularly as more colour and light floods in, literally, as the metaphorical light shines brighter also. Accusations of exploitation and “pornographying” the violence will surely follow. This inherent stylistic/narrative conflict is one that looms large in realist cinema and is one that Daniels, in as much as this is a “realist” film, has failed to resolve. Yet one can understand from a commercial perspective why he may have baulked at a visually more repressive approach, in the manner of, say, Gary Oldman’s 1997 tour-de-trauma, Nil By Mouth. The subject matter may be unpalatable but the film, to attract the Cineplex audience at which it is ultimately now targeted, needs to be, at the very least, bearable (one of the film’s Executive Producers is that most vigorous flag waver for mainstream American positivity and self-actualisation, Oprah Winfrey.)

For all these reasons I found Precious a difficult film, in every sense. It is courageous, no doubt, and is superficially a remarkable story bolstered by some remarkable performances. So I urge you to seek it out. But as to whether it lives up to the Sundance and Cannes hype, I am less sure. To me it feels like Daniels has missed the resolution that he sought when adapting the book, and the hope and the power of ”pushing” back at adversity, however ubiquitous, never really materialises in full. The US playwright John Guare once said that audiences should not be fed a replication of life but “have to earn the truth.” If this is so, and I am inclined to agree, the danger with Precious is that these contradictions will leave this audience in a kind of suffocating no-mans land, unable to decide where to go from here.

So going to see Nine, the new film from the director of Chicago, Rob Marshall, was always going to be something of a personal challenge. And I wasn’t to be disappointed by my complete lack of expectation. The last time that I felt this uncomfortable was crawling through the Cu Chi tunnels on a tourist trip to Ho Chi Minh City. Although credit to the Vietcong, the tunnels were better lit and there is a certain collective spirit to be had dragging yourself on your hands and knees in 98% humidity with you face pressed into the voluminous buttocks of a stationary salesman from Baton Rouge.

Nine is a self-indulgent turkey of unmitigated proportions. On paper, I suppose, it should have been magnificent. The film is drowning in, or is that sinking under the weight of, star quality: Judi Dench, Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Kate Hudson, Stacy Ferguson and even that venerable siren of yesteryear European cinema, Sophia Loren. They are all variously, and predictably, beautiful, pouty, husky, busty, scantily clothed, wise, mysterious and alluring. And the sets are frequently quite staggering. But the film is so contrived, awkward and ridiculously ham-fisted that it is impossible to take it or its stars remotely seriously for even a moment. It is a monumental over-baked pudding of extraordinary confusion, condescension and superficial posturing. And shouting.

And then there is Daniel Day-Lewis. It is difficult to know where to begin here. Day-Lewis is one of cinema’s great actors and his performance in There Will Be Blood one of the defining screen roles of this or any generation. His Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York is, for my mind, lagging not too far behind. His reputation and brilliance hinge on his complete immersion in the roles that he accepts, his reluctance to talk about his methods and the accompanying eccentric mystery that this provokes, and the astuteness with which he accepts those roles in the first place. You wouldn’t catch a giant of his reputation, for example, hamming-it-up and tragically mis-firing in an overblown, catastrophic folly that is to the film to which it pays homage, Frederico Fellini’s masterly, towering 8½ (radical, challenging, intelligent, beautiful) what The Muppets’ Treasure Island is to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel of high seas adventure, piracy and virtue…..oh, Daniel, what have you done? (Chorus: What have you done? What have you done? What have you done?)

Without doubt I hauled a disproportionate bag load of prejudice into this film and there was every likelihood I was never really going to like it. Or even mildly enjoy it. But what can you do? That’s what prejudice does to you. It makes you small-minded. And bitter. So if you like musicals and have sat happily grinning through or, God forbid, singing along to Cats or Joseph or, sweet Jesus, Annie, go and see Nine. And if you don’t, don’t. Watch Fellini’s film instead. I’m sorry if that all seems a little flippant but I’m still trying to get the feeling back in my head. In my head. IN MY HEAD! YEAH!

While on holiday last week I re-read the toast of the Signifying Monkey (here), an African-American reworking of African mythology depicting the survival strategies of the trickster (the titular monkey) attempting, in the face of oppression and discrimination to defuse the powers of exploitation and undermine (racial) misrepresentation. He does so not through violence or aggression but cunning and wit. It is a powerful poem with a strong resonance in the African-American political struggle. Signifying, in the non-folkloric sense, is the creation of new “language”, a “way of saying one thing but meaning another”, and is a trope that can be found in music, particularly in blues and jazz, in the improvisations of Coltrane, Monk and others, and in soul music, in testifying and calling out (see the music of James Brown especially.) Here, though, it reminded me of Muhammad Ali.

Ali was the great urban trickster of sixties and seventies America and, arguably more than any other popular black performer (Ali was as much a performer as a brilliant athlete) epitomised the guile of the Signifying Monkey. Basing his flamboyance and showmanship on the outrageous wrestler Gorgeous George, Ali was famed for his self-aggrandisement (invariably proven when in the ring) and trash talking. No opponent, black or white, was immune to the sharpness of Ali’s tongue, nor any sports journalist or newscaster (most notoriously the self-regarding US TV reporter Howard Cossell) as he sought to manoeuvre situations and circumstances to his favour.

In his 1964 heavyweight title fight, and first of two bouts against the feared Sonny Liston (the metaphorical lion and king of the jungle), Ali, then Clay, played the role of goading “monkey” with relish. His manipulation of his natural role as the lesser fighter in the unfolding drama – lighter (although taller), weaker, less experienced – by provoking Liston with innuendo, abuse and contempt was a master class in self-empowering mockery. Like a jazz performer dropping elisions or pendular and blue thirds in to a standard, his improvisations and unorthodox strategy, both in and out of the ring, created mayhem and diversion.

Driven to a state of apoplexy by the young upstart, Liston, the archetypal, glowering “bad” negro and one of the most feared and hard-hitting heavyweights in a long history of heavy hitters, was no longer just expected to win but to annihilate the “Louisville Lip” in an affirmation of his superiority and masculinity. Yet under the intense scrutiny of the press, who were both bewildered and delighted by Clay’s antics, and the overwhelming expectation of victory, Liston was unable to impose himself on his faster and more agile opponent. The younger fighter shuffled, danced and darted around the ring making the once domineering Liston appear unwieldy and one-dimensional. Despite an agonising burning in his eyes in rounds four and five, brought about by astringent either from an application to Liston’s cuts or perhaps, more suspiciously, applied deliberately to his gloves (now half blinded he had to dance twice as smartly to avoid the stalking, bloodthirsty Liston - another moment of theatrical cunning), Clay was able to pick off the bigger man with powerful jabs and eventually the champion, claiming a disabling shoulder injury but possibly as much humiliated into defeat, refused to answer the bell for the seventh round. Hurtling around the ring, leaning over the ropes and pointing at the crowd and gathered ringside reporters, Clay’s frenzied reaction to his epic victory was a moment of pure theatrical brilliance

“I am the greatest…I don’t have a mark on my face…I upset Sonny Liston…I just turned twenty-two years old…I must be the greatest…I showed the world…Tell the world…I talk to God every day…the real God…I’m the King of the world…I shook up the world…I am the prettiest thing that ever lived…”

The world had seen nothing quite like it. The monkey had outwitted the lion.

Throughout his career Clay/Ali assumed this role, manoeuvring his opponents into the position of unwitting dupe against whom he would fling insults, jibes and humiliations to simultaneously belittle theirs and enhance his own reputation. Where Liston was the “big ugly bear” who he goaded with a hunting trap at his hotel at midnight, the genial Floyd Patterson became “a rabbit”, “an old Negro” and “a Tom” and in 1965 (the year of the LA riots and Martin Luther King Jnr’s Selma to Montgomery march*) he was subjected to the cruellest of beatings for his refusal to acknowledge Clay/Ali by his new chosen, Muslim name. It was an act of barbed cruelty reminiscent of the deliberate, unforgiving kind administered to white opponents by that other great trickster, and the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, and one that he would repeat in 1967 against Ernie Terrell.

Joe Frazier, with whom Ali would fight a triptych of career-defining bouts, was labelled an “ugly gorilla” - “Joe Frazier is so ugly he should donate his face to the US bureau of wildlife.” Ali lost to an enraged and relentless Frazier in the “Fight of the Century” in New York, 1971, knocked out in the fifteenth round despite pre-fight predictions that he was simply too fast and “too pretty” to be beaten. However, perhaps predictably in the near-perfect narrative of his fighting career, he avenged that defeat twice, most thrillingly in the devastating “Thrilla in Manila” in 1976 when Frazier, exhausted and all but blind from a swelling over his left eye, was unable to answer the bell for the final act.

In Zaire in ’74 out of the ring the brutal, surly monolith George Foreman became “The Mummy”, a slow and unimaginative one-dimensional brute. In the ring Ali executed one of the greatest sporting “hustles” of all time. Baiting the powerful Foreman by playing what he termed “rope-a-dope” Ali, leaning far back on the ropes and covering his face and kidneys, forced his opponent to expend all his energy by pounding his arms and shoulders like a human wrecking-ball. Vastly experienced and tactically more acute than his detractors had given him credit Ali dragged the unwitting Foreman to the brink of exhaustion and, with his in-fight, emasculating mockery, to distraction (“Is that all you got, George? They told me you could punch harder than Joe Louis!”) In the eighth round, spinning his larger opponent round like a top, he knocked him to the canvas and regained the heavyweight crown to become champion for an unprecedented second time.

Ali’s freeform heterodoxy in the ring can be seen as an extension of his showmanship out of it. Or, indeed, visa versa - the two were irrevocably enmeshed. A trainer’s nightmare, he boxed with his hands low, his head high, often moving backwards and with his weight habitually on either his front or back foot but never, as accepted convention suggests, spread between both. Not only that he had the audacity, and inherent skill, to throw right hand leads – the longest punch an “orthodox” (as opposed to southpaw) fighter can throw. Just as Coltrane, Mingus and Monk liberated jazz from the oppressive orthodoxy of perceived musical wisdom, Ali demonstrated that there could be beauty and inspiration in eccentric individuality in boxing, too. Yet each was so much more then merely practitioners of their art forms. They were political liberators.

Ali was the beautiful trickster of late twentieth century age, a man who mesmerised with his ingenious and phaneric displays of cunning. He was the Signifying Monkey incarnate.

*1965 was also a hugely significant year in jazz. Miles Davis recorded the epic E.S.P while Coltrane’s prolific studio output included Ascension, Om, Kele Su Mama, Meditations and Sun Ship. It is also widely accepted to be the year that Free Jazz, following from Hard Bop, was acknowledged as the next phase in jazz’s evolution.

1.       The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)

Haneke’s latest masterpiece. Beautifully scripted, shot and acted it is a glorious examination of the potential for human cruelty and moral collapse, issued down from one generation to the next. Bleak, disturbing but staggeringly beautiful.

2.       A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen)

Only the Coen brothers could make the hopelessness of life seem so funny. We can only laugh at our impending demise in this retelling of the story of Job.

3.       A Prophet (Jacques Audiard)

Audiard, channelling the very best of Jean-Pierre Melville and the Nouvelle Vague, shows he is a director so far ahead of the pack that we can only watch in awe. After Read My Lips and The Beat That My Heart Skipped he is redefining French (and European) cinema and showing the Americans exactly what they should be striving for. Utterly brilliant. Utterly French. And utterly, utterly cool.

4.       Soul Power (Jeffery Levy-Hinte)

Soul music, African-American politics, James Brown, The Detroit Spinners, Miriam Makeba, Don King, BB King, uptight whitey, Muhammad Ali. What’s not to like?

5.       The Hurt Locker (Katheryn Bigelow)

Bigelow takes us into the claustrophobic heart of modern warfare and, in doing so, to the heart of a very special brand of adrenaline-fuelled masculinity. A film about people not politics and the defining war movie of the era.

6.       Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)

Stark and uncomfortable in parts, gripping and poetic throughout. Arnold’s wonderfully directed and edited exploration of a society and generation on the edge was a triumph.

7.       Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)

A film only the Spanish maestro could pull off as he ascends to a new cinematic language entirely his own. Gloriously over-the-top, acutely funny, heart-breaking and beautifully directed. And Penelope Cruz…..

8.       Mesrine Killer Instinct/Mesrine Public Enemy No. 1 (Jean-Francois Richet)

Flawed, frantic and French. Over four thrilling hours in the company of a mesmeric anti-hero the gangster biopic genre is given a distinctly Gallic, and welcome, shot of adrenaline. Epic European cinema.

9.       Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino)

Sorrentino proves once again he is a director with a masterful hand in this visually stunning examination of political mystery and corruption.

10.   The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Terry Gilliam)

Inevitably inconsistent and damaged and I’m not even sure I liked it, but few other directors have such a wonderfully and utterly liberating approach to creativity. Completely unencumbered by conformity, this was nothing less than flamboyant and magical storytelling. Gilliam gets a terrible beating at the hands of critics, some of it deserved, but film would be a lesser, duller place without him.

Honourable mention (because no list is ever long enough….)

The recent  re-release of Powell and Pressburger’s resplendent Technicolour masterpiece The Red Shoes

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)

Public Enemies (Michael Mann)

In The Loop (Armando Iannucci)