Latest Posts
Rolling Thunder
A guy comes back from Vietnam and runs into a whole load of trouble in 1977’s Rolling Thunder, the sort of “guy comes back from Vietnam” movie they used to make around then. Except this one’s all messed up. William Devane plays the guy, Major Charles Rane, who returns from seven years in a Vietnam prisoner-of-war camp where he’s been tortured but has survived. At what personal cost is what the film sets out to examine, until it decides to stop doing all that and instead turn into a genre movie. A film ostensibly about survivor’s guilt, PTSD and the sexual revolution that’s changed America while Rane has been inside, Rolling Thunder gets … Read more
Joker: Folie à Deux
Joker: Folie à Deux has madness in its title and in its conception – it’s a bold thought experiment that hasn’t translated into a good movie. If it had stopped at the half-hour mark I’d have said it was brilliant, a genius move, but it goes on and on with its attempt to weld the comicbook thriller to the musical and wears out its welcome, but still won’t leave. It opens more or less where the original Joker left off – no, hang on, there’s a short Looney Tunes-style cartoon first, also featuring Joker – before director Todd Phillips cuts to live-action footage of a broken Arthur Fleck (a shockingly emaciated and tortured … Read more
Liliom
“I almost like Liliom best of all,” Fritz Lang said in 1974 about the film he’d directed 40 years earlier. This from a director who invented whole genres (like the spy thriller), directed massive epics (Metropolis) and went on to dominate the crime drama with films like The Big Heat. Lang’s entirely atypical film about the poetic side of wife-beating is quite a surprise. It is a film full of surprises though. The story for one – sweet young Julie falls for rapscallion carnival barker Liliom, a man who loves her but is violent, lazy, feckless and eventually meets an ugly end after taking part in a heist. He then ascends to purgatory, … Read more
Fast Charlie
There’s nothing really fast about Fast Charlie, a relaxed, medium-weight saunter through thriller territory in the company of some fine people. Pierce Brosnan, now in his 70s but still with the 007 swagger and nonchalance, plays Charlie, a fixer for an aged gang boss who winds up on the wrong side of a rival gang boss in a turf war in New Orleans. The film is an adaptation of Gun Monkeys by Victor Gischler, a writer who puts a comedic spin on familiar crime-fiction material. And more information than what I’ve already written isn’t strictly necessary. You’ve seen this movie before. But the casting is good and includes James Caan in his very … Read more
The Dark Corner
The Dark Corner didn’t do too well when it debuted in 1946. There were too many other noirs around and it struggled to stand out from the pack. Now, though, it looks a lot better – its dark wit, snappy one liners and good cast help, plus the direction of Henry Hathaway, who knows how to be economical and inject pace. Hathaway blamed Mark Stevens for the film’s failure, and though Stevens is playing a private investigator as a second-order simulacrum – a version of a version – he gets the lines out well enough, and it is the lines that this film is about… when it’s not about plot. Stevens plays Bradford Galt, a … Read more
About Dry Grasses
Winner of the annual “most arthouse-movie-title award” – About Dry Grasses (Kuru Otlar Üstüne)? That academic “About”. The fact that it’s in Turkish. Over three hours long. By a director whose name many non-Turks struggle to pronounce. Exotica ahoy! The award is just a joke, but the movie is by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (roughly pronounced Nooree Bill-geh Jail-ann), who has directed some exquisite movies since his debut nearly 30 years ago, among them Uzak, Climates, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Winter Sleep. About Dry Grasses is his longest feature to date, edging out 2014’s Winter Sleep by a minute or so, at three hours 17 minutes. And while it does occasionally … Read more
A Kiss before Dying
A Kiss before Dying is the movie Robert Wagner made to solve the Prince Valiant problem – he was too pretty and too old-school in a Hollywood that had suddenly gone sweaty and Method, in a nutshell. Prince Valiant was the film he’d made two years earlier, camp nonsense about a Viking prince in the court of King Arthur. Wagner is about as far as he can get from that here, as a handsome college psychopath who decides that the best way to deal with his suddenly pregnant girlfriend Dory (Joanne Woodward) is to get her to have an abortion (the word is never used though “pills” are mentioned). And when that doesn’t … Read more
100 Yards
100 Yards is directed by the Xu brothers, Haofeng and Junfeng, and it’s a great martial arts movie – though any more than that is a stretch. The martial arts sequences are spectacular, the fighting epic, the moves expertly choreographed and it’s shot the proper way – so you can see how good the combatants are not how nimble the editor is. But between the spectacular set pieces things tend to go a bit limp. Gentle, if we’re being kind, or elegant maybe. It’s all set in 1920s Tianjin, which is another part of its appeal, and opens with an old kung fu master about to breathe his last. Shen An (Jacky Heung), the … Read more
Heroic Purgatory
The question mark that hangs over Kiju Yoshida’s 1970 movie Heroic Purgatory is: is he joking? Is this a grand avant-garde modernist movie told in a deliberately non-narrative way, or is it Yoshida parodying the same, as if to pour scorn on an idea prevalent at the time – that you can’t break the bourgeois system using bourgeois tools? Either way, whether he’s joking or being deadly serious, the one thing that will haul you from opening to closing credits nearly two hours later is Yoshida’s astonishing visual sense. This is a fabulously photographed movie full of stark, awkward, angular compositions shot in a high-contrast and often high-key monochrome, and it all takes place … Read more
My First Film
My First Film is not Zia Anger’s first film, and it isn’t a documentary either, which is what it sounds and looks like it’s going to be. Nor is it formidable, which its meta-sounding title suggests it might be. In fact it’s a surprisingly easy and enjoyable watch. Though it does start off in an esoteric direction – “assoteric”, Anger calls it – with a rough collage of staged recollection, old home movie footage and words typewritten on the screen designed to recall meetings Anger had with a production company to direct a film about, more or less, how tough it is being a woman. Something, she eventually realised, she just didn’t want to … Read more
The Big Heat
The Big Heat is one of the big movies of film noir – see The Big Sleep, The Big Clock, The Big Combo from the classic era, or The Big Easy, The Big Blue and The Big Lebowski from later on. Weak joke aside, it’s big in the other sense too, being important, pivotal, epochal even. Here you get director Fritz Lang at the top of his game and a screenplay that works like a ratchet, almost every scene advancing the story a notch while flinty characters are pushed hither and yon by a cruel and ironic fate. It’s the film that famously starts with the image of a gun on a desk. … Read more
Tuesday
Films about pretty young people dying miserably of some terrible but usually not disfiguring condition can be a bit of a drag. Tuesday writer/director Daina Oniunas-Pusić has found a way of injecting a bit of zip – adding a bit of the weird supernatural. We’re told from all the publicity that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the star, but in fact Lola Petticrew more than capably holds the whole thing together as Tuesday, a teenager with not long to live, who is visited one day by a talking macaw that can change size at will. She intuits instantly that this is Death itself (we already knew that because an early montage sequence has shown us … Read more
