Latest Posts
A Quiet Place: Day One
Hang on, A Quiet Place: Day One is the origin story, about how Earth is invaded by creatures who track humans using sound alone? Wasn’t that already covered in A Quiet Place Part II? Indeed it was, but if you are generous of spirit and reject the idea that A Quiet Place: Day One is just a reheat of old hash, you’ll be pointing out right now that A Quiet Place Part II did the whole “how the apocalypse arrived” thing in its first ten minutes, then zipped forwards in time about a year and a half to catch up with the Abbott family (Emily Blunt, John Krasinski and co) as they came … Read more
Straight Time
1978’s Straight Time would be a properly great film if it just stuck to being one story – about a felon trying to go straight. But instead it decides about halfway through that more juice can be squeezed by telling another story after the first one. The felon goes back to his old ways. Some exciting holdups and car chases and so on are the result, but a great film goes down the pan, to be replaced by one that’s merely OK. Massive pity. They’d be two great films, in fact. But the first is where the real meat is, in the performance of Dustin Hoffman as the habitual thief who gets out … Read more
Heretic
What happens if you turn wayward, dithery rom-com Hugh Grant all the way up to 11? Heretic is the answer, a through-the-looking-glass turn by Grant whose good guy/bad guy turn as a householder giving two young Mormon women a night they won’t forget is this movie’s main event. First we meet the young women – Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) – in a scene designed to demonstrate to us their everydayness. With their coy chat about Magnum condoms, penises and online porn, Bates and Paxton also demonstrate to each other that they are everyday normal young women, just ones who happen to members of the Church of Jesus Christ … Read more
Sudden Fear
Joan Crawford did not do shading, subtlety or character acting. She did something much more gothic. Sudden Fear plays straight to her strengths, a “woman in peril” movie that starts out in the world of realism but slips gradually into the realm of the histrionic. In early scenes Crawford’s acting looks mummified, as if the light of naturalism had been shone on a museum artefact. Playing a writer whose latest Broadway smash is about to be staged, her Myra Hudson is meant to be a woman born rich who has nevertheless forged her own career away from daddy’s money, and become successful in her own right. And then she meets Jack Palance’s Lester … Read more
The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady
The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady, for those who didn’t get enough musketeering with director Martin Bourboulon’s first trip out in a plumed hat, Part I: D’Artagnan. Shot back to back with the first movie, the sequel has all the strengths of the original, and all the flaws, but more so. It is static and lacking in drama but it does look fantastic, and the cast – who struggle to deliver because there is not a lot to work with – are exactly as you would want them to be. We pick up the story exactly where we left off, with D’Artagnan knocked unconscious while trying to prevent the abduction of his sweetheart, … Read more
Charley Varrick
Charley Varrick, a neo-noir from 1973, is much better than its mixed reputation would suggest. Lean and fast, dark and enigmatic, it stars Walter Matthau as a crop sprayer who heists a smalltown bank in the hope of making a fair amount of easy money. Nothing too massive, just a cushion. But when he and his sidekick come to count their haul, it turns out that it’s mostly 50s and 100s, not dollar bills, fives and tens as expected. They have inadvertently heisted a lot more money than they anticipated. This, for Charley, is a problem. It means the police will be particularly keen to get the money back. So will the bank. … Read more
The Count of Monte-Cristo
So here’s The Count of Monte-Cristo 2024 style, not to be confused with the TV show of the same name from the same year covering the same story. Or the more than 20 film adaptations down the years, the numerous TV and radio versions (including one by Orson Welles). Plays. Musicals. Games. You get the idea. The story has legs. Injustice, the upper orders out of control, a triumph against adversity, Alexandre Dumas’s original story has timeless drivers, plus a dramatic knot at its centre – whether to let revenge boil on or yield to something more gracious. As one tragic character on her death bed says to this story’s hero: “Between vengeance … Read more
Dahomey
Doing very little but saying quite a lot, Mati Diop’s documentary Dahomey tracks the return of a number of artefacts from France to Benin in West Africa, which was known as Dahomey when they were first appropriated – looted, if you prefer. The fairly short film divides up into three distinct chunks. In the first, Diop’s cool, fly-on-the-wall camera follows the action as the items – wooden carvings of deities, thrones and so on – are crated up, watched over by Calixte Biah. An elegant man with a grave expression who assesses the artefacts for damage, Biah notes the condition (cracks, flaking paint etc) of the treasures and supervises as they are carefully … Read more
The Cat and the Canary
Is there anything as unfashionable right now as a Bob Hope movie? The Cat and the Canary is as good a place to start as any if you want to start understanding the huge appeal Hope once had. Bear in mind that this movie was made in 1939, before he teamed up with Bing Crosby in the Road movies, which propelled the familiar Hope character – quipping and cowardly – to even greater heights. It’s a remake of a 1927 silent movie of the same name by Paul Leni, one of the great directors, largely forgotten these days because he died young, aged 44, a year after he arrived in Hollywood just as … Read more
Alien: Romulus
A reboot and a return to basics in Alien: Romulus, in which Ridley Scott hands over the franchise to Spanish director Fede Alvarez, who returns the favour by handing producer Scott a spectacular sci-fi horror movie up with the best (ie the first two) of the series. We’re on a grungey spaceship on a timeline somewhere between the original Alien and its follow-up, Aliens, where a murderous xenomorph is working its way through Cailee Spaeny’s girlish Sigourney Weaver stand-in Rain, David Jonsson’s “synthetic” Andy, Archie Renaux’s tough, blustering Tyler, Isabela Merced’s hot and vulnerable Kay, Spike Fearn’s callow and peevish Bjorn and Aileen Wu’s practical and sexually ambiguous Navarro. It doesn’t matter why … Read more
Penny and the Pownall Case
A Rank Organisation B movie coming in at only 47 minutes, Penny and the Pownall Case is interesting for all sorts of ancillary reasons, but interesting in its own right too. The ancillaries. An early role for Christopher Lee. An early role for Diana Dors, still brunette and not yet in “British Marilyn Monroe” mode (but then in 1948 Monroe herself was still on the starting blocks). The only film directed by the curiously named Slim Hand, who was more usually one of Rank’s production managers. The first British film scored by a woman, Elisabeth Lutyens (daughter of renowned architect Edwin). Lee referred to his time on the film as a “truly grisly … Read more
Blitz
A portrait of London in 1940, as the German’s attempted to bomb the city into submission, Steve McQueen’s Blitz is in many ways a very familiar war movie, a subversive ruse by McQueen. Whether his gambit works is another question. Superficially it’s a fine story, about a young lad being evacuated from the East End and sent off to safety out in the countryside, as thousands of children were during the Second World War. Except George never makes it to his billet. Instead, jumping from the train en route, he starts making his way back towards home and his mother, Rita, having adventures and meeting characters who are Dickens characters in a 1940s … Read more
