Month: November 2024

Suspicion

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Johnnie and Lina

Anxiety was the fashionable diagnosis if you went to see a shrink in the 1940s. Suspicion is the anxiety movie, the story of a prim spinster swept off her feet by a handsome chap who then starts wondering what he saw in her. Her money is the obvious answer, though Joan Fontaine looks like a prize worth having in Alfred Hitchcock’s fraught little melodrama halfway stranded between the gothic of Wilkie Collins and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalyst’s couch. Cary Grant plays the raffish Johnnie, the bounder who whirls into the life of wealthy wallflower Lina (Fontaine), quickly marries her and then reveals that he hasn’t a penny to his name. He’ll work, he says, … Read more

The Substance

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Young Judith in gym gear in front of a picture of Old Judith

Youth is wasted on the young in The Substance, writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s long, exciting and technically brilliant sci-fi fable swaggering like a 1980s action movie. Demi Moore plays Judith Sparkle, the ageing actress who takes “the substance” after being nudged in the direction of the age-reversing serum by a doctor with too-blue eyes, too-tight skin and too-perfect hair. With a wave of a magic syringe she has soon budded, allowing a younger version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) to go out and play in Hollywood, leaving the aged and inert husk back at the ranch. The wrinkle is that it’s a week on, a week off. Every seven days Young Judith has … Read more

Bad Seed

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Jeannette and Henri

Billy Wilder directed 1934’s Bad Seed (Mauvaise Graine) more out of necessity than desire. He’d never directed a film before, in spite of having been quite a big wheel as a writer in the German film industry (the Nazis put paid to that). But he was in a tight spot and so had to add a string to his bow. He wouldn’t direct another film for eight years, in Hollywood, where 1942’s The Major and the Minor became the first of a remarkable run lasting nearly 40 years. Alexander Esway also gets a director’s credit, but he was little more than a gracious front man whose name helped Wilder’s movie get financed. What’s … Read more

Luz

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Luz

So was Tilman Singer’s first feature, 2018’s Luz, as inventive as Cuckoo, his most recent one (starring Hunter Schafer)? Yes, is the answer, though Luz is inventive in an entirely different way. It plays about with time in ways that are unusual – Singer doesn’t do flashbacks and flashforwards so much as infect the here and now with snatches of what’s happened and what’s about to come. It sounds like it’s hard to follow and at first it is, but by the end Singer has given us enough plot for us to have a grasp of what’s been going on. This seems to be, in as much as we can tell, the story … Read more

The Thirteenth Chair

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Suspect Helen Trent (Elissa Landi)

A classic country-house whodunit from 1937, The Thirteenth Chair gets the whole thing done and dusted in just over an hour, which is more than you can say for a lot of these things. And it can boast May Whitty – billed as “the Distinguished English Actress Dame May Whitty” – in the lead role as a clairvoyant. Set in India during the Raj, it opens with Scotland Yard inspector Marney (Lewis Stone) and local man Commissioner Grimshaw (Matthew Boulton) discussing the recent murder of a man not universally loved by the expat community who lord it about in Calcutta. The dead man’s best friend, John Wales – “fanatical”, says Grimshaw, so obviously not … Read more

The Crime Is Mine aka Mon Crime

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Madeleine and Pauline

Mixing it up is writer/director François Ozon’s way. Mon Crime (aka The Crime Is Mine) sees him back on the comedic territory of 8 Femmes, Potiche and In the House, leaving his more serious, more recent movies, like Peter von Kant (a remake of a fraught Fassbinder film), Summer of 85 (a veiled autobiography) and Everything Went Fine (a drama about assisted dying) looking a little like aberrations. Farce, old-school, 1930s-style, screwball is the idea. A style borrowed from Lubitsch and Capra, and a story that looks like it’s borrowed from the 1926 play Chicago but, so we’re told, is actually based on the 1934 play Mon Crime, which, it’s possible, might have … Read more

Don’t Bother to Knock

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Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe

The casting is crucial to the success of Don’t Bother to Knock as a taut psychological drama. On one side two actors – Richard Widmark and Elisha Cook Jr – known for playing weirdos, psychos, oddballs or generally damaged individuals. And on the other is Marilyn Monroe. In her first lead role, after a series of minor cheesecake roles and light comedies, it’s actually Monroe who’s the proper whacko in this strange story centred on Nell Forbes (Monroe), a disturbed young woman who is babysitting a little girl for one night when by rights Nell should probably be in an asylum. As for Cook and Widmark, the former plays Nell’s decent uncle Eddie, … Read more

Sweet Dreams

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Hayati Azis as Siti

If Knives Out weren’t a lark it would look something like Sweet Dreams (Zoete Dromen), a thriller from the Netherlands where the usual murder mystery is sharpened by a hit of oppression mixed with anti-colonial hatred. It’s a lovely-looking, lushly colourful movie set around 1900 in the Dutch East Indies where the white colonists are running a sugar-factory concern and living the high life indoors – dressing entirely in white for dinner, dining on sucking pig – while the brown folk do all the work outdoors. Unlike the usual Agatha Christie-style whodunit, all the sublimated stuff gets given its moment in the sun. There are servants who they simmer with resentment. There are natives … Read more

Fail Safe

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Translator Buck and the US president

The dark twin of Dr Strangelove, Fail Safe came out the same year as Kubrick’s film and was sued by him over copyright infringement. There wasn’t any, but for a quiet life Kubrick’s studio, Columbia, played along and released his film first in January, then Sidney Lumet’s film later in the year. Both films are reactions to the Cuban Missile Crisis two years before, a point in history when events seemed to gain a traction all of their own and humans seemed powerless to prevent what looked like a slide towards nuclear war between the USA and USSR. Both Strangelove and Fail Safe ask the question: what if humans really hadn’t been able … Read more

Causeway

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Close up of Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence)

Welcome back, Jennifer Lawrence, who as recently as 2015/16 was the world’s highest paid actress and in Causeway reminds us why. And perhaps needed to – so many films she’s appeared in since her high-water mark have been just a touch underwhelming. And welcome to the big time for Brian Tyree Henry. Oscar-nominated for his role here, he’s been impressive in everything he’s been in for years, but it was 2020’s The Outside Story that proved he could carry an entire movie on his own. In what’s largely a two-hander – it could almost be a play in a studio theatre – Lawrence plays a soldier suffering post-traumatic physical and mental trauma after … Read more