Latest Posts
Confirm or Deny
War is hell but also kind of fun in Confirm or Deny, one of a series of movies made by Hollywood when America was still a neutral power using emotional blackmail to counter isolationism and persuade the country to join the fray. Eventually Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s insane decision to declare war on the USA would render films like this redundant, but in 1941 they were turning up regularly, all of them positioning the UK, Britain, England, call it what you like, as the home of a doughty breed, people just like its intended American audiences, who needed all the help they could get in their hour of need. This is a remarkably … Read more
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Raven Jackson used to be a poet and is still a photographer. You can see traces of both in her feature debut, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (a line from a poem), a deeply meditative celebration of rural black life on the Mississippi. The film starts with long, slow, close-ups of a girl and her daddy fishing by a river, the father calmly and quietly instructing his daughter when to pay out a bit more line and when to slowly start winding it in with a fish on the end. From here a series of languid scenes tracking the girl, Mackenzie, through life at home with her sister and parents, forwards in … Read more
The Hop-Pickers
If I tell you that The Hop-Pickers (original Czech title: Starci na Chmelu) is sometimes known as Hop Side Story, that’ll give you a flavour of what’s going on in this quirky film from 1964, often described as Czechoslovakia’s first musical (there are other claimants, also from 1964). Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is also a useful steer, since this is an ensemble piece full of young men and women who, when not picking hops out on a collective farm, are singing and dancing their way through first love, to a soundtrack that’s a wild mix of Soviet choral, jazz, skiffle, pop, twangy guitar and wafts of music influenced by Vyacheslav Mescherin’s space-pop/loungecore … Read more
The End We Start From
It was The End We Start From‘s misfortune to come out not long after The Last of Us, the TV show starring Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal. Mahalia Bello’s film arrived a few months after The Last of Us had finished and covers much of the same ground, though here the focus is really on just one person, Jodie Comer’s Woman (as she’s billed). It’s pretty familiar stuff if you’ve seen The Last of Us, which most of us have. So you know it’s the post-apocalypse, the action kicking off with a woman, or Woman, going into labour. As her waters are breaking torrential rain is pouring out of the sky, and it … Read more
O.S.S.
1946’s O.S.S. makes a strong case for Alan Ladd as the first James Bond, sort of, ish, in prototype. A new sort of spy thriller about a new sort of spy agency – the Office of Strategic Services was the forerunner to the CIA and had only been set up four years before – it was rush-released by Paramount, who knew that other studios were hot on their heels with similar movies. It’s written by Richard Maibaum, who’d go on to work on almost all the James Bond movies from the first, Dr No, to his death in 1991, aged 81. With that knowledge frontloaded, the experience of watching O.S.S. is indeed like … Read more
Tótem
Lila Avilés has only made one film before, The Chambermaid, in which a lot happened without very much seeming to happen at all. The same thing is going on with Tótem, superficially an almost-fly-on-the-wall naturalistic drama tracking a family through the day leading up to the birthday party of Tono, a very sick husband, father and son, who will probably not see another birthday, it becomes apparent fairly early on. Tono used to be the hottest guy in town, we later learn, but in glimpses of his body as he tries to hold himself upright to take a shower, he’s now a skeletal remnant of what used to be. Without the horrorshow of … Read more
Claudine
So what else did Darth Vader do? It’s often forgotten that James Earl Jones, the voice (though not the body – that was Dave Prowse) behind the galaxy’s most badass dad had an acting life away from Star Wars. Exhibit A – 1974’s Claudine, in which he goes toe to toe with Diahann Carroll in an earlier role as a feckless dad. Or is he? That, in a way, is what the film is all about. He plays the catalyst in the life of Carroll’s Claudine, an inner-city ghetto gal raising six kids by various fathers and working a job for a purse-lipped white family while also claiming welfare. Roop (Jones) is the … Read more
Blink Twice
Men are scumbags and tech bro’s the scumbaggiest of them all. Blink Twice isn’t exactly making the most out-there statement for 2024, but in her directorial debut (she also co-wrote) Zoë Kravitz shows she knows her way around a horror movie, can build mood and tension and get performances out of her stars which are genre-familiar and yet fresh. Kravitz’s current partner, Channing Tatum, is particularly excellent as Slater King, a performative billionaire – think Musk rather than Bezos – who, as the film opens, is apologising with all his heart in an address to the world. He’s sorry for something. Penitent, pleading, he insists he’s learned from whatever he’s done, is now … Read more
Moontide
One of the little joys of Moontide is trying to work out which bits of it were directed by Fritz Lang. His name isn’t on the screen credits but he was the original director, until he was fired after falling out with its star, Jean Gabin. Ironically, it was Gabin who had campaigned to get Lang attached to the film in the first place, which shows he had quite a lot of pull in Hollywood for someone who might have been France’s biggest star but was unknown in America when he arrived there to escape the Nazis. Archie Mayo gets the director credit but it’s surely Lang behind the camera for the opening … Read more
The Magician
It’s only while watching The Magician, a cult Australian movie from 2005, that it really hits home how prissy other mockumentaries are. Scott Ryan’s film goes in with both feet and by getting it wrong – wrong lens, bad lighting, framing all over the place – he gets that on-the-fly feeling just right. It’s the pretend-real story of a hitman called Ray, played by Ryan himself, a wiry and wired gun for hire with a bullet head and a bullet ready for a victim in the film’s opening moments, all very indistinct, though we do manage to glean that the hit has been accomplished and Ray will be paid. The rest of the film … Read more
Hangmen Also Die!
The screamer hanging off the end of Hangmen Also Die! kind of says it all. As if “hangmen” and “die” in the same sentence weren’t enough, the title of Fritz Lang’s 1943 film adds extra emphasis, just in case we hadn’t got it. The scrolling opening prologue continues in much the same vein, informing us that the “thousand year flaming tradition” burning in the hearts of the people of Czechoslovakia was in danger of being extinguished by the Nazis. Czechoslovakia was in fact about 25 years old at the time, having been cobbled together at the end of the First World War (it is now two separate countries again). This insistence is all … Read more
Sleep
A woman wakes up in the night to find her husband bolt upright in bed talking in his sleep. “Someone is inside,” he says, before sparking back out again. The next day she asks him about what he said the night before. It was a line from a script I’ve been reading, her actor-husband tells her dismissively. The next night something a bit different. The husband starts scratching at his face uncontrollably while apparently asleep. The wife wakes him up and quietens him down, then she goes back to sleep and so does her husband. But in the morning his face is a mass of bloody red scratches so bad that make-up will … Read more
