Month: October 2024

The Black Cat

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Lugosi and a shirtless Karloff

If you’re looking for a slightly leftfield scary movie for Halloween, you could do a lot worse than 1934’s The Black Cat, which not only stars horror titans (veterans division) Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the first of a run of movies they’d do together but is directed by Edgar Ulmer, a largely wasted talent who could put on a real show when he wanted to, and he does here. Freud lurks in the undergrowth of the story of a man back from the Great War facing down the man who stole his wife while he was away. But first let’s meet the teams, as they say. In the vanilla corner, a … Read more

Men

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Harper in a dark passage

Impressive, the way Alex Garland shifted from being just an incredibly successful author to being an incredibly successful director as well. Men follows his previous two films, Ex Machina (what a debut) and Annihilation plus the TV show Devs, all three of which he also wrote. It’s a superbly conceived film, a folk horror movie with a great cast, fabulous atmosphere, a spooky score and some fabulous imagery. But is it actually scary? Is the sense of threat felt rather than just observed? I’m not convinced, though plenty of rave reviews seem fairly sure it is. Jessie Buckley plays an everywoman, Harper, a successful something or other with a swish apartment overlooking the … Read more

Confirm or Deny

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Mitch types while a locked up Jennifer tries to persuade him not to file his story

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

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Charleen McClure as the older Mack

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

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Hanka (Ivana Pavlová)

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

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Baby Zeb with his mother, Woman

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.

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Rogers and Masson

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

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Sol looks on while her dad's birthday cake candles are lit

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

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Claudine and Roop smiling

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

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Channing Tatum with Polaroid camera

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