Lucid

Laurie Calvert and Billy Zane

Adam Morse’s feature debut, Lucid, is an ideas-driven supernatural drama that could almost double as an instructional video for shy boys who’d like to meet girls. In The Matrix style, it’s got a nerdy guy, Zel (Laurie Calvert) at its centre, an incel gamer whose mother (Sadie Frost) still hovers, concerned that her son isn’t getting out enough, worried that he’s never going to meet a nice girl if he doesn’t maintain normal standards of personal hygiene, even more worried that he can’t look a pretty woman in the eye without going to pieces if he’s got any interest in her at all. By night Zel has the sort of job shut-ins have … Read more

Waxworks

Harun Raschid, Ivan the Terrible, Rinaldo Rinaldini and Jack the Ripper

In probably the best condition it’s ever going to be seen, the Eureka Masters of Cinema 2019 restoration of Waxworks is a good 25 minutes shorter than the German original, all trace of which has disappeared. Instead, the Deutsche Kinemathek and Cineteca di Bologna took a surviving print from the British Film Institute and, using elements scavenged from around the world, put together this assemblage for a 2K restoration reinstating the original colour tinting. It’s a historically important film but also a vastly entertaining one, and if you’re a fan of German expressionism, it’s probably required viewing.  The original German title, Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, is a clear nod to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, … Read more

The County

Inga out with the cows

The County is yet more proof that Icelandic film-makers punch above their weight. Grímur Hákonarson is one of a band of modern Icelandic writer/directors including Benedikt Erlingsson (Of Horses and Men, Woman at War) and Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavík, The Deep) turning out films that manage to have something going on below the surface while also being entertaining. If Kormákur has recently gone a bit Hollywood (2 Guns, with Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, and currently finishing The Good Spy with Hugh Jackman), Hákonarson has stayed closer to home and more stereotypically “Icelandic”, like countryman Erlingsson. You might have seen Hákonarson’s excellent last film, Rams, which told the story of two ageing sheep-farmer … Read more

Salting the Battlefield

Bill Nighy as Johnny Worricker

After the exotic holiday atmosphere of the second film, Turks & Caicos, The Worricker trilogy concludes with Salting the Battlefield. Writer/director David Hare takes us back, literally, to where we started gradually, starting the action out in Europe, where former agents and lovers Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) and Margot Tyrell (Helena Bonham Carter) are on the run, before swinging the focus back onto England, then London and finally the claustrophobic confines of the spying community and the upper echelons of the UK government. Familiar faces return – a heavily pregnant Felicity Jones as Worricker’s permanently angry estranged daughter Juliette, Saskia Reeves as Anthea Catcheside, the deputy prime minister wondering if her hour might be … Read more

Wet Season

Yeo Yann and Koh Jia Ler

More tales of emotional desperation from Anthony Chen, Wet Season follows 2013’s Ilo Ilo, using a couple of the same actors from his brilliant debut to squeeze a single drop of comfort from a scenario that would have been a full-bore histrionic melodrama in other hands. The returning actors are Koh Jia Ler, only 12 years old when he played the vile, utterly spoiled child in 2013, so about 18/19 in this film, as an attentive diligent student. Also back is Yeo Yann Yann, who was the vile child’s bitch of a mother in Ilo Ilo, and is now playing a thoughtful, dedicated teacher. Both are chalk and cheese transformations. Dysfunctional family life … Read more

Turks & Caicos

Bill Nighy

Turks & Caicos is the second of the Johnny Worricker trilogy of TV movies made by Carnival Films (of Downton Abbey fame) for the BBC and boasting the sort of cast that was still rare at small screen level in 2014. Christopher Walken and Winona Ryder are the properly big names, though Dylan Baker, Helena Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves and Ewen Bremner (returning from the first movie) are hardly kitty litter. Ralph Fiennes, though present and correct, is only on screen for a few seconds and so doesn’t really count. For those coming in cold, there is absolutely no need to have watched the first one (Page Eight) to enjoy the second. All … Read more

In Her Hands

Mathieu plays the train station piano

Two Brits starring in a French film. In Her Hands (Au bout des doigts in French) didn’t get a theatrical release in the UK or the US, so if the strategy was to guarantee anglosphere box-office action by casting Lambert Wilson and Kristin Scott Thomas (both of whom speak fluent French), it clearly hasn’t worked. The film did get some exposure in Canada (plenty of French speakers) and Australia, where it was called In Your Hands. Perhaps that’s all a bit of red herring, because, though Wilson and Scott Thomas’s names come up first in the screen credits, it’s actually Jules Benchetrit who’s the star here. In his first major role, Benchetrit plays … Read more

Page Eight

Rachel Weisz and Bill Nighy

From the instant Page Eight starts we know where we are. The camera focuses on Bill Nighy’s face. He lights a cigarette and, as jazz music sulks away on the soundtrack, he strides out into the night. Johnny Worricker (Nighy) is another of Raymond Chandler’s white knights tilting at baddies out on the mean streets and we’re in a noirish thriller set in a world of duplicity. Personally, I’ll watch anything with Nighy in it, his gangling deadpan generally improving everything it’s inserted into. But there are two other “watch anything they’re in” presences in Page Eight. Michael Gambon (not in it nearly long enough), “the Great Gambon” as Ralph Richardson called him, … Read more

The Intruder

Louis in Tahiti

Claire Denis’s remarkable film The Intruder (L’intrus) was first released in 2004, rolled out worldwide in 2005 and promptly disappeared. In some countries it was never shown at all; in the US, for instance, it’s only in 2021 that people are getting a chance to see it. It is a deliberately oblique drama, constructed almost as a series of questions – where are we? who is this guy? who’s that strange woman? and what the hell is Béatrice Dalle doing in this film, and why for only for a handful of seconds? Denis has said that she’s done this deliberately, having taken the original idea – an adaptation of an essay by French … Read more

Wildcat

Khadija sitting in a cell

Wildcat is the sort of film where strangers wake up in a room together. Often, this sort of film – a handful of actors on one set – is all about learning who these people are and why they are in the room together in the first place. Often there’s also a kick in the tail where one person turns out not to be who they say they are, or the commonality connecting everyone is suddenly revealed. Not so here. We know almost from the outset who these people are – they’re journalist Khadija Young and a soldier called Luke, only survivors of an ambush on a convoy in Iraq, who are now … Read more