May 2024 | MovieSteve

Cut-Throats Nine

2024-05-21 by Steve

With eyes obviously much sharper than mine, some people maintain that 1972’s Cut-Throats Nine (Condenados a Vivir) is the inspiration for Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. It’s true both are westerns and the snowy setting of Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent’s original is unusual in the same way that The Hateful Eight’s was (though let’s not forget Sergio Corbucci’s great snow-filled western The Great Silence of 1968). And it’s also true that Tarantino loves to plunder overlooked genre movies of yore. Which would make this spaghetti western – a paella western, more precisely, since it’s made in Spain – a prime candidate. But having watched it I cannot see much more connecting the two films than … Read more

The Long Summer of Theory

2024-05-20 by Steve

The “theory” in the title The Long Summer of Theory (Der lange Sommer der Theorie) refers to critical theory, a grab-bag term that lumped together the likes of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, an achingly fashionable cohort of philosophers and theorists whose thoughts and theories were referenced in universities and in the wider field of (especially) the arts until one day, someone concluded, their “summer” had ended. That someone was Philip von Felsch, whose book, The Summer of Theory, is the starting point for film-maker Irene von Alberti’s relentlessly fascinating examination of the political scene among young people – women mostly – who reckon themselves to be progressive, politically engaged and … Read more

Footprints on the Moon

2024-05-19 by Steve

What is Footprints on the Moon (aka Footprints aka Le Orme), apart from an Italian movie from 1975? Genre categorisation isn’t easy but how about psychological sci-fi thriller meets love story meets giallo horror meets paranoid modernist dreamscape? Or, from a different direction, it’s DP Vittorio Storaro’s entry in the “world’s best cinematographer” competition. The visuals are astonishing, glorious, technically insane at times. And they also threaten to bring the film to a complete standstill here and there. But it just doesn’t matter because a) they are so bloody amazing and b) there isn’t very much to bring to a standstill in the first place. So, yes, there’s not much plot. But what … Read more

Mara

2024-05-18 by Steve

“Over 40% of the world’s population suffer from sleep paralysis,” the written preamble to Mara informs us. “Two thirds of them describe being attacked by a demonic entity.” Entirely fanciful statistics delivered, director Clive Tonge, who presumably wrote this nonsensical opening statement with co-writer Jonathan Frank, gets his movie underway. It is, you won’t be surprised to discover, a horror movie about demonic entities – just the one, in fact – visiting people in the night and pinning them to the mattress while they lie in their beds asleep, or are frozen in fear half awake while is this all going on. The star is Olga Kurylenko, who plays a forensic psychologist working … Read more

Eastern Plays

2024-05-17 by Steve

What has a guy got to do to stay noticed? Take Bulgarian director Kamen Kalev’s 2009 feature debut Eastern Plays. It got good reviews (Variety called it “an impressive debut”), went to Cannes and won a clutch of awards on the festival circuit. But Kalev has made only three films in the intervening 15 years and his latest, 2020’s Février (aka February), is currently sitting on the IMDb with no reviews whatsoever to its name. On the evidence of Eastern Plays, which is the only one of Kalev’s films I’ve seen, this is grossly unfair. This is an extraordinarily accomplished film, full of visual style, and loaded with a vivid punk energy and … Read more

Sometimes I Think About Dying

2024-05-16 by Steve

Can we agree that the casting of Daisy Ridley in the Star Wars reboot was one of the best right calls ever made? My preferences established, can we all also agree that her non-Star Wars choices have often been less than stellar? On to Sometimes I Think About Dying, a reminder of why she was chosen for The Force Awakens and how good she can be with the right material. In flat grey Oregon, flat grey Fran (Ridley) lives a mouselike existence, creeping every day into her desk job in a run-of-the-mill office, creeping home again after work for a dinner consisting of cottage cheese before settling down for the evening with a … Read more

Que la Bête Meure aka This Man Must Die

2024-05-15 by Steve

Writing poetry doesn’t pay very well and so in the 1930s Cecil Day Lewis, father of Daniel, started writing detective fiction on the side. The Beast Must Die was his fourth crime novel. Translated literally into the French, it gave Claude Chabrol the title of his unusual 1969 thriller, Que la Bête Meure, which in English usually goes by This Man Must Die, and even sometimes Killer! As titles go all three are good penny-dreadful shockers but the film is anything but, even though it starts with the death of a child mown down by a car going recklessly fast and continues with the father’s quest to find and kill the driver. Michel … Read more

The Teachers’ Lounge

2024-05-14 by Steve

Instructive but not didactic – and also as tense as hell – The Teachers’ Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) takes a fairly simple situation and not only escalates it but pushes it out in all directions. Good guys and bad guys are there none, or not, at least, any that we can quite get a glove on. We’re in a German school where someone has been stealing stuff from the staff room. It’s one of the kids, is the feeling, since what adult would do such a thing? As the action opens Clara Nowak, an idealistic new teacher, is trying to prevent her class of kids from being physically searched. She’s unsuccessful and the search does … Read more

Les Espions aka The Spies

2024-05-13 by Steve

In the 1950s Alfred Hitchcock and Henri-Georges Clouzot were always looking over the directorial shoulder at each other. In Les Espions (The Spies in English) Clouzot attempts his most overt homage to one of Hitchcock’s amused thrillers… and gets it completely wrong. A non-thrilling thriller crossed with a non-funny comedy is the result. Gérard Séty plays the Hitchcockian innocent abroad, a shrink running a struggling private psychiatric clinic who takes up an offer from a shady American agent in a bar to hide a spy on the run in return for a big wedge of cash. The Americans chose this man and this place, it seems, because it’s ideal as a safe space: … Read more

Dune: Part Two

2024-05-12 by Steve

Let’s get straight to the verdict. Dune: Part Two is visually spectacular but dramatically inert, the good stuff attributable to its remarkable director Denis Villeneuve, the bad stuff down to the writer of the original novel/doorstop, Frank Herbert. This is not going to be how everyone sees it, of course, what sort of a world would that be? But if you’re one of the people who picked up Herbert’s original Dune at some point only eventually to put/fling it down again after tiring of the relentless one-thing-after-anotherness of it (see also Tolkien) the movie won’t offer much that the book didn’t, its retina-cleansing visuals to one side. It picks up right where Part … Read more