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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
Miller’s Crossing
By the time the Coen brothers made Miller’s Crossing, their third movie, it had become obvious that their films weren’t really set in the real world. Like Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing is set in an adjacent reality constructed entirely from moviescapes and populated with characters we seem to have met before. That it works brilliantly, both as pastiche and as a drama in its own right, is the difference between the Coens and some others who try the same thing. That it also manages to be funny when it should be and tense as hell when necessary, marks them out as something really special. The film is built around askew … Read more
In a Violent Nature
Have you ever wanted to see a man being fed into a log-splitting machine? Yes? Then In a Violent Nature is for you. No? There’s still something for you, if you enjoy (wrong word) well crafted films with an innovative approach to sound and a sharp eye for a visual. Imagine The Texas Chain Saw Massacre entirely from Leatherface’s point of view and that’s more or less what you have here. Except this monster makes Leatherface look like an articulate sophisticate he’s so lumpen, monomaniacal, unstoppable. This update on the Golem is a killing machine who’s been buried underground for at least ten years, but now he’s been reactivated by a bunch of … Read more
They Drive by Night
A film about truckers that doesn’t quite deliver – bum tish – They Drive by Night is also very much a story heading off up one road only to take a sharp turn onto another. George Raft (top billed) and Humphrey Bogart (fourth billed) play Joe and Paul Fabrini, brothers who drive as a team of “wildcat” drivers. They don’t work for the man, like many truckers do. Instead they’re entrepreneurial go-getters financing their own rig, buying up loads of farm produce and then shipping it to market where they sell it. Or that’s the idea. In fact they don’t own their own rig but they are working their way towards it inch … Read more
Red Rooms
Red Rooms (Les Chambres Rouges) started life as a drama about the sort of women who befriend or become romantically attached to men accused of terrible, heinous crimes, but ended up being about something else entirely. That initial idea is still in there, though, in the character of Clementine, a short, nervous young woman who has hitch-hiked and travelled by bus to Montreal to sit in on the trial of a man, Ludovic Chevalier, accused of kidnapping, torturing and dismembering three girls. Chevalier, adding insult to mortal injury, then sold the films shot in his “red room” on the dark web. Alongside Clementine in the audience at the trial another woman, Kelly-Anne, a … Read more
Dark Passage
“Completely preposterous,” is how the Chicago Tribune described Dark Passage in its 1947 review. No argument here. But did Delmer Daves, who wrote the screenplay and directed this bizarre noir, simply make a bad film, or was he saying something about the latent absurdities of the genre, in particular the way fate operates? Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, an innocent man doing time in San Quentin for murdering his wife, who we first meet breaking out by stowing away in a garbage truck. He’s soon been picked up by a man who quickly works out who he is. Ructions follow, but Parry wins out, and is then picked up by the very woman … Read more
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
There’s nothing wrong with Ghostbusters: Afterlife at all, apart from its strange reluctance to reference Ghostbusters, the 2016 reboot directed by Paul Feig. The one that exercised a lot of bedwetters with its “controversial” cast with a lot of women in it. It wasn’t very good, but not because it starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Patty Tolan and Kate McKinnon. It just wasn’t funny or scary. They never are, scary I mean, the Ghostbusters films. That’s not really the point. The idea is to deliver lots of likeable knockabout camaraderie and good vibes, which is what Afterlife does, liberally scattering easter eggs referring back to one of the original two movies, but not … Read more
