Month: February 2025

An Actor’s Revenge

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Kazuo Hasegawa as Yukinojo

“Stagey” is not usually a compliment when it comes to screen works. But it is in the case of 1963’s An Actor’s Revenge, a Japanese film combining the the dynamism of cinema with the intensity of the theatre experience. Before the action kicks off, a little on-screen note tells us that this was the 300th film performance of its star, Kazuo Hasegawa. Remarkably Hasegawa played exactly the same role when this film was first made in 1935. Housekeeping out of the way, enter the plot, which immerses us straight away in the film’s opening shot. Hasegawa plays an onnagato – a male kabuki actor who specialises in female roles – who is mid-performance … Read more

The 100 Candles Game

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Alicia Gerrard in the segment Blight

Compendium horror – who’s it for? That question formed in my mind as The 100 Candles Game told its seven different stories, plus another one that links them all together, Arabian Nights style. Are audiences hungry for this sort of thing? I don’t think so. Film-makers love the portmanteau horror film, though, because it gives directors a chance to hawk their wares, in affordable chunks, often supported by a producer who knows his way around the business. But on the whole they are patchy affairs, usually a mix of the OK, the pretty skanky and, rarely, a magnificent outlier. There is no true magnificence here, though the film-makers on display are a lot … Read more

Brute Force

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Captain Munsey and Joe Collins

Time has diluted the impact of Brute Force, but this prison drama from 1947 remains a good film, largely because it doesn’t live up to the title. There is brutishness, but not too much. For much of its length, in fact, it’s a study of character, of how men who are all packed together in an overcrowded prison get along together, or don’t. Richard Brooks wrote the screenplay and Jules Dassin directs. This was the first of Dassin’s run of great movies – The Naked City, Thieves’ Highway, Night and the City and Rififi would follow. Burt Lancaster is the star, in his first film since his breakout in The Killers, and slots … Read more

Limbo

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Travis and Emma sitting in a car

Old wine in new bottles, Limbo is a case – a jeroboam? – of the familiar served up in a starkly different way. A desert noir, an Outback noir more specifically, it’s the latest from Ivan Sen, whose Mystery Road about ten years ago opened up this territory. Now he exploits it, with a savage, scorched-earth aesthetic, in a story about a troubled cop – wrecked marriage, bit of a drug problem – rocking up in a remote Outback town to open the books on the unsolved murder of a local aborigine girl, though the nearest you get to the word “aborigine” in this film is “black fella”. Mystery Road had more or less … Read more

Possessed

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Louise in bed in the hospital

Superb and quite mad, Possessed gives us Joan Crawford at full hatstand, eyes boggling, jaw tight, fists clenched, a portrait of an unhinged woman, a stalker before the term was coined. This melodrama from 1947 comes from a time when they knew how to do this sort of thing unapologetically. It opens calmly but oddly enough. After big, blaring, noirish opening credits we’re on city streets at dawn, where a discombobulated lone woman (Crawford) is stumbling about looking for someone called David. She’s clearly in the midst of some kind of breakdown and winds up in hospital, in the Psychopathic Ward, in a catatonic state. The doctor, after opining that there’s a lot … Read more

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock

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Hitchcock with his fingers splayed

Mark Cousins’s documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock steers a careful course between low and high culture, the crass, “did you know” approach to the great director and the earnest film studies route. Hitchcock understood the importance of fun. The result is an engaging, interesting, entertaining and enlightening 120 minutes, not the last word in Hitchcock, but a lively addition to a library which, in my view, could not get full enough. “A showman, a daredevil, a fun fare,” says Hitch in a film entirely written and narrated by him, or so it’s claimed at the outset. In fact that’s all a bit of a lie. Cousins wrote the script that impressionist Alistair … Read more

Dracula

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Close up of Dracula's face

“Listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make.” Hollywood horror starts here, with 1931’s Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning, it made an international star of the man who uttered those words, Bela Lugosi. He’d already become a huge Broadway star off the back of a stage adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. This film would propel him onto the global stage, and into posterity. The film sticks fairly close to the play, which sticks fairly close to the book. There have been trims in characters and settings but most of the original plot is intact as Browning’s version of it follows Dracula from his ancestral home in Transylvania, on to … Read more

The Killer

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Nathalie Emmanuel with the Eiffel Tower in the background

John Woo never feels fully in control of The Killer, the remake of his own film from 1989, an accusation you could never have levelled at the original. Flipping the gender of the assassin, and switching from Hong Kong to Paris both seem like sound ideas, not least because in some quarters the increasingly tight relationship between the assassin and his cop pursuer in the original seemed a bit too close to homosexual. No chance of that now. Omar Sy is in the cop role, and of all the many actors in this strangely off thriller, Sy probably comes out of it least shortchanged. There are two familiar tales here. First the “a … Read more

Ghosts

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Nina and Toni

Ghosts (Gespenster in the German original) is the film Christian Petzold made between Wolfsburg and the one that bounced him more into the international spotlight, Yella. It’s the second of his Ghosts trilogy – Die innere Sicherheit (aka The State I’m In) and Yella are the other two – and like Die innere Sicherheit stars Julia Hummer as a bit of a waif trying to shore up her personality against a hostile world. Here she’s a teenage girl who lives in a home, a shy kid who one day meets her exact opposite, a tough street rat who lives on her wits, largely by shoplifting, and who knows what else. Nina (Hummer) is … Read more

Queer

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Daniel Craig smoking

An adaptation of a William Burroughs novel of the same name, one of the things Queer does is explore identity politics in a refreshing way, tacitly asking a question about the nature of people. Does doing homosexual things make you a homosexual? In the red corner Bill Lee (Daniel Craig), a died-in-the-wool ageing queer hiding out in Mexico City in 1950, where he lives the life of the dissolute bohemian expat on his American dollars, and flits from one seedy gay bar to another, to chitchat and drink, but mostly drink, and then weave home where a spoon and a syringe await. In the blue corner Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), recently out of … Read more