This article is taken from the June 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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“Any last words?” The question is directed by a Gestapo officer at Aatami Korpi, a Finnish prospector caught by Nazi soldiers as he makes his way across Lapland with a satchel full of gold. First words would have been a start.

Clint Eastwood gave us The Man With No Name. In Sisu, Jorma Tommila plays Korpi as The Man With No Lines. He grunts, screams, moans, yells and, occasionally, sobs. But he doesn’t talk.

There’s a lot to love about this movie, made with no budget and starring no one you’ve ever heard of (unless you’re a Finn). It is hilariously violent, and if that’s not your thing, then I cannot emphasise strongly enough that you should not under any circumstances watch it. But if you think you might see the funny side of a German soldier being ordered into a minefield only for his severed leg to come flying back, then this is the film for you.

If you want to watch a Nordic pensioner spray gore all over the screen as he hacks Nazis to death one by one, this is the film for you

Although superficially a war movie, it is scored as a Western, and it feels like one, too. Korpi no longer cares about the war, he just wants to cash in his gold. He meets a squad of retreating Nazis who don’t care about the war either. But they realise Korpi’s gold could be their ticket out, and decide to take it off him. How hard can it be?

Korpi, of course, has a past. But you knew that. You know all of it. The ultimate destination of the film contains very few surprises. The joy is in the journey. There’s something marvellous in the casting of Tommila, well over 60 and showing it, as an action hero. For most of the film he looks exhausted. But, as a Finn explains to the baffled Germans, “This is not about who’s the strongest, this is about not giving up”.

This, apparently, is the quality described by the “untranslatable” word that the film takes as its title: “Sisu”. After 1945, we British used war movies to tell ourselves who we were. Here we learn how the Finns see themselves.

Aside from an inexplicable decision to use a narrator at the very start of the film, there are no weak links here. There isn’t a moment of screen time wasted. The cast, from Tommila to the villainous Germans to the women that they’ve taken with them as spoils of war, are all fantastic.

We can presumably look forward to many of them popping up in Hollywood films as “person of indeterminate accent” in years to come. If you want to watch a Nordic pensioner spray gore all over the screen as he hacks Nazis to death one by one, this is the film for you.

Slightly less bloody is Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, an attempt by British director Guy Ritchie to create a blend of Ocean’s 11 and Mission: Impossible. Streaming on Prime Video, it stars Jason Statham as a superspy whose day-to-day focus is extracting as much cash as possible from His Majesty’s Government, much of it for the traumatic stress he has supposedly suffered on his missions.

Like some of the other threads in the plot, this idea is never fully followed through, and the result is a perfectly satisfactory action movie with comic interludes chiefly delivered by Hugh Grant, whose willingness to ham it up as a middle-aged villain is proving more reliably charming than many of his leading man appearances in the 90s.

In 1991 Michael J. Fox, another leading man of the era, had hoped that he was maturing as an actor. His face, so constantly animated in his early starring roles, was now steadier. Perhaps, he thought, he was going to be able to make his way into more serious movies. And then, consulting a doctor about a tremor he’d noticed in his hand, he was told he had early onset Parkinson’s disease. His less mobile face was another symptom. “You weren’t getting better, just sicker,” the actor recalls sadly in Still, now on Apple TV.

The film is about more than Fox’s illness. It’s his life story, intercutting interviews and his narration over appropriate clips from his films, covering his rise to megastardom and then his descent into alcoholism

This is an affecting documentary even for those of us who never had posters of Fox on our bedroom walls. It is unflinching in showing how the disease has ravaged the star’s body, making even walking a struggle and leaving him in intense pain for much of the time.

A man who used to run across the screen now works with a physiotherapist to take even a few steps. The fast-talker of Back To The Future struggles to get words out. “It sucks,” Fox says of his body’s inability to deliver the one-liners that his mind still produces. “My world is getting smaller.”

The film is about more than Fox’s illness. It’s his life story, intercutting interviews and his narration over appropriate clips from his films, covering his rise to megastardom and then his descent into alcoholism. As the story moves into the 1990s, and he talks about his increasing anxiety at the time about his twitching, we suddenly see his on-screen efforts to mask it.

Like any good Hollywood movie, the story finds its resolution when the hero realises he must be open about his condition. Even after 30 years of Parkinson’s, Fox still has what it takes to keep things more or less on the right side of schmaltz. It’s an uplifting watch, and at no stage does anyone stab a Nazi in the head.