Month: December 2024

Lake George

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Phyllis and Don

Neo noir of a particularly minimal sort, Lake George gets better the longer it’s up there on the screen, and by the time it’s hitting its closing scenes it’s almost in a zen state. It’s largely a two-hander centred on two actors who are generally more support players than leads. Shea Whigham, brilliant in any number of other films (Eileen, Fast & Furious 9, Joker) and Carrie Coon (The Nest, Widows and a couple of Avengers movies, as Proxima Midnight). He’s the jailbird just out after a ten-year stretch. An accidental jailbird, it transpires, who made a complete mess of a job for a Mr Big called Armen and yet still wants to … Read more

Party Girl

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Robert Taylor as crooked lawyer Tommy Farrell

Party Girl reminds us that director Nicholas Ray wasn’t just a master of noir. Alongside the stark monochrome of great dramas like In a Lonely Place and They Live by Night, there’s this insanely lush, ridiculously colourful offering, often bracketed with Ray’s other colour movies of the era – Johnny Guitar or Rebel without a Cause, for instance – but quite apart from them in tone. It’s still very noirish, a gangster movie in colour, really, with Cyd Charisse the titular star but the movie very much focused on the character Robert Taylor plays, Tommy Farrell. They’re both not-quite people: she’s a fan dancer (which really means stripper at the very least) at … Read more

Silver Haze

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Florence and Franky kiss

I saw Vicky Knight being interviewed around the time Silver Haze came out in 2023. She is its star, as she was in Sacha Polak’s previous film, Dirty God, and is once again hellishly good as a woman in search of a better life being tripped up by her circumstances. The jaw-to-the-floor moment of the interview came when the quietly spoken and very unactorly Knight revealed that she still had a day job, working in Britain’s National Health Service as a health support worker. Everyone in the room took a breath. The scarring she sustained after being trapped in a fire in her grandfather’s pub aged eight must be some of the reason … Read more

Crossfire

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Robert Mitchum in army uniform

In 1947’s swift noirish crime drama Crossfire a bunch of Army guys in the process of being demobbed meet a guy in a bar. By the end of the evening the guy is dead. But who did it and why? Director Edward Dmytryk opens with the death happening in shadowplay against a wall, as the unfortunate Samuels (Sam Levene) is worked over in a room by two assailants we never see. Samuels goes down, the men flee, the cops arrive. The questioning starts, and it’s a strange affair, with no names being asked for by the cop, and the guy he’s questioning not surrendering any either, it’s just “this man”, “this fella”, “two … Read more

Abigail

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Melissa Barrera as Joey

How to describe Abigail without ruining it? It starts out looking very much like a heist thriller, except it’s not money the gang in question is trying to lift, but a young girl called Abigail, the daughter of a very rich man, we later learn, who is expected to pay out $50 million to get her back. The gang all have aliases – Frank, Sammy, Joey, Peter, Dean and Rickles, the Rat Pack in other words, which gives everything a Tarantino-esque flavour. And Reservoir Dogs slight return is seemingly what’s on the cards once the gang successfully kidnap Abigail and wind up back at the big old mansion. Here it looks like they … Read more

The Seventh Victim

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Kim Hunter as Mary

A prequel of sorts to Cat People, 1943’s The Seventh Victim is also something of a warm up for Rosemary’s Baby – Satanists in New York! – and the debut of Kim Hunter, who plays the little girl lost in the big city. It’s a bit of a mad film, not quite all adding up but stoked with atmosphere, all kicking off with schoolgirl Mary (Hunter) being called into the principal’s office at her school because her older sister, Jacqueline, has not been keeping up with the payments on the fees. She’s gone missing, it seems. So Mary heads to New York to find her, and there tangles with one New York type … Read more

Conclave

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Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence

Conclave is not so much a case of who done it as who won it, a thriller set in the Vatican as the cardinals gather to elect a new pope. Being an adaptation of a Robert Harris novel, like Enigma (which became a film of the same name) and The Ghost (which became The Ghost Writer), it’s a closely researched thing, its potentially deadening attention to detail kept spiky by the addition of some suspense, intrigue, cloak and dagger and some lively thumbnail performances by a lot of mostly old white guys as the cardinals. Following custom, when an old pope dies, the men in scarlet come together from the four corners of … Read more

Our Last Tango aka Un Tango Más

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Nieves and Copes face to face

“There will never again be another tango couple like us,” says María Nieves, best known for her long-standing partnership with Juan Carlos Copes. You’ll never have heard of the pair of them if you’re not interested in tango, but Our Last Tango (aka Un Tango Más), German Kral’s film about them, works just fine whether you’re a newbie or an aficionado of these Argentinian dancing giants, largely thanks to its emotional core. “If I could do it all again, I’d do it all the same. Everything… except being with Juan,” says María at one point. At just shy of 80 when this was made in 2015, she’s about to hang up her shoes and … Read more

The Dead Don’t Hurt

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Vivienne and Holger sitting together under a tree

How much of The Dead Don’t Hurt could you cut out without hurting it? Quite a bit, I’m guessing. It’s a slow and steady western, and that’s at least partly the point of it, an exercise in style and genre that could be quite a bit shorter but also a fair bit longer without changing its complexion. The story it tells is archetypal as are the characters in it. But the focus is on the woman, unusually, which brackets this alongside Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, another distinct and handsome movie with a female focus. It’s directed by Viggo Mortensen, who also takes a key role (he stepped in at the last second, apparently, … Read more

The Blue Gardenia

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Norah on the phone

A young woman whose soldier boyfriend has just dumped her goes out for a drink with a known “wolf”. Drunk and vulnerable, she then heads back to his place, where, he tells her, there’s a party going down, only to discover that the party consists of just her and him. The next morning the very handsy Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr) is dead, beaten to death with a poker. Did sweet Norah (Anne Baxter) do it? Of course she didn’t – we know how these things go. But for the rest of this underwhelming thriller’s 85-minute running time we watch and wait for energetic journalist Casey Mayo and lacklustre cop Sam Haynes to arrive … Read more