Month: December 2024

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

by
Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice

Having paused for 38 years to catch its breath, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reminds us what we loved about the original 1988 movie… and what we found slightly less than satisfying. 1988 was when some of today’s biggest actors were born – Emma Stone and Glenn Powell for instance. It was the year of Seoul Olympics. And it was around then that Tim Berners-Lee started messing about with a concept that would become the World Wide Web. So, yes, a while ago. Clicking right through back to the present, there’s no sign of Alec Baldwin or Geena Davis in this sequel but a lot of the cast and crew are back – most crucially Michael Keaton … Read more

Key Largo

by
Nora and Frank

If you liked Humphrey Bogart’s cynical romantic Rick in Casablanca, Key Largo gives you another go around the track with him. And if you liked the dynamite pairing of Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep or Dark Passage, they get another outing too, in the last of the films they’d make together. He plays a major back from the war and in the sweltering Florida Keys on a courtesy visit to the father of one of his men, who died in the Italian campaign. But when Major Frank McCloud gets to the hotel owned by James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), he discovers that it’s been taken over by … Read more

The Outrun

by
Rona on a windswept Scottish island

The Outrun is the latest from director Nora Fingscheidt, whose edgy, urgent System Crasher opened doors in 2019 that she largely closed again with her follow-up, 2021’s The Unforgivable, which many critics indeed found unforgivable, even though it starred Sandra Bullock. She’s on the upswing again here, with the jumbled-up story of a young woman from the Orkneys who goes to London, becomes a terrible alcoholic and then returns to the wild islands off the coast of Scotland to seek balm for the soul and a new start in life. The arc is not unlike the one for Wild, the brilliant Jean-Marc Vallée film starring Reese Witherspoon as a wild child recapturing her … Read more

Thieves’ Highway

by
Mike Figlia, a haggling customer and Nick

Jules Dassin is so associated with Rififi (aka the best heist movie ever) that his other films tend to get eclipsed. Here’s 1949’s Thieves’ Highway, one of his run of great movies, which had got underway with Brute Force two years earlier. It’s the story of a guy who comes back from the war to find that his immigrant dad Yanko, a truck driver, has lost his legs in an accident and been swindled out of all of his money by an unscrupulous wholesaler. Determined to find answers, Nick buys a truck and takes to the road himself. Dassin gives us a movie that’s three things simultaneously. At one level a movie about … Read more

Scarygirl

by
Scarygirl in person

Smart eight year olds might go a bundle on Scarygirl, an Australian animation visually targeted more at their parents, though its bounce, straightforward storytelling and bold (ok, simplistic) messaging says young. There’s a touch of Finding Nemo in the plotting. Actually it’s more Finding Dory, the sequel, the one in which little Dory goes on a big long undersea quest to find her parents. Here it’s Arkie, a strange cross between an octopus and a human, with a patch over one eye and a mouth held together at the edges with stitches, setting off to find her dad, Blister, who’s been kidnapped by the despicable Dr Maybee. Blister is a big yellow/green octopus … Read more

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death

by
Jessica hugs a floral pillow

1971’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death was originally titled It Drinks Hippie Blood and was a satire on 1960s counterculture. And then John Hancock got involved and, one rewrite later, out popped this much more straightforward but rather superior horror movie setting out to unsettle rather than amuse. Hancock also directs, in his feature debut, and as in the best horror movies (this is one of Stephen King’s faves) he spends plenty of time establishing mood, so when the bad stuff arrives it’s got something to stand out against. There are two interwoven stories here. In one, Jessica (Zohra Lampert) is a troubled woman recently released from a mental asylum who is trying … Read more

Magpie

by
Annette looks into a broken mirror

All sorts of klaxons are sounding, red lights flashing and warning bells ringing at the beginning of Magpie, a neo-noir which, by the end, has triumphed in telling a story which Roald Dahl (wearing his adult hat) might be proud to call one of his own. It’s a screenplay written by an actor and it’s his first one – two amber signals right there. What’s more writer Tom Bateman is the husband of the film’s star, Daisy Ridley. And the story is “based on an original idea by Daisy Ridley”. There are are so many potential bear traps there that trepidation is understandable. And yet. A small, dark, exquisitely formed thriller-ish story is … Read more

Rolling Thunder

by
Major Rane in dark glasses

A guy comes back from Vietnam and runs into a whole load of trouble in 1977’s Rolling Thunder, the sort of “guy comes back from Vietnam” movie they used to make around then. Except this one’s all messed up. William Devane plays the guy, Major Charles Rane, who returns from seven years in a Vietnam prisoner-of-war camp where he’s been tortured but has survived. At what personal cost is what the film sets out to examine, until it decides to stop doing all that and instead turn into a genre movie. A film ostensibly about survivor’s guilt, PTSD and the sexual revolution that’s changed America while Rane has been inside, Rolling Thunder gets … Read more

Joker: Folie à Deux

by
Arthur and Lee touch noses through the prison bars

Joker: Folie à Deux has madness in its title and in its conception – it’s a bold thought experiment that hasn’t translated into a good movie. If it had stopped at the half-hour mark I’d have said it was brilliant, a genius move, but it goes on and on with its attempt to weld the comicbook thriller to the musical and wears out its welcome, but still won’t leave. It opens more or less where the original Joker left off – no, hang on, there’s a short Looney Tunes-style cartoon first, also featuring Joker – before director Todd Phillips cuts to live-action footage of a broken Arthur Fleck (a shockingly emaciated and tortured … Read more

Liliom

by
Liliom at the carnival

“I almost like Liliom best of all,” Fritz Lang said in 1974 about the film he’d directed 40 years earlier. This from a director who invented whole genres (like the spy thriller), directed massive epics (Metropolis) and went on to dominate the crime drama with films like The Big Heat. Lang’s entirely atypical film about the poetic side of wife-beating is quite a surprise. It is a film full of surprises though. The story for one – sweet young Julie falls for rapscallion carnival barker Liliom, a man who loves her but is violent, lazy, feckless and eventually meets an ugly end after taking part in a heist. He then ascends to purgatory, … Read more