Month: February 2025

Wonder Man

by
Bookish Edwin with Ellen

Yes, Wonder Man, not Wonder Woman, a 1945 musical comedy with a dash of crime thriller starring Danny Kaye as Danny Kaye, or sailing so close to his public persona as makes no difference. As happened quite often in Kaye’s career, he plays two roles, twin brothers, one of whom is a light, facetious, musical theatre type, the other a bookish stiff. After big, brash, brassy musical opening credits with the word Technicolor prominent, a musical number right at the beginning showcases most of the Kaye skillset – corny songs delivered with a wink, tongue-twisting wordplay, goofing about, awful puns (dad jokes), silly dances and so on. It looks like this version of … Read more

Eliminators

by
Scott Adkins points a gun

It’s easy to get sniffy about films like Eliminators, spam-fisted actioners featuring one lunk or another kicking the life out of some meathead, delivering the coup de grace with a quip that’s meant to be James Bond but is more often than not Steven Seagal. Even Seagal has been known to make good films, so let’s park the prejudices and get down to action. Scott Adkins, a British actor, plays a federal agent hiding out in London on some witness protection program, whose life is upended when three local desparadoes looking for a stash of cocaine break in to his house waving guns about. They threaten his daughter, bad mistake, and are soon … Read more

Panic in the Streets

by
Dr Reed explaining that it's plague

Steve Soderbergh’s Contagion seemed to be required viewing during Covid, Panic in the Streets not so much. But Elia Kazan’s film from 1950 has much to say about epidemics, why nipping them in the bud is important, how government can be a force for good and why scepticism needs to be countered not with shrillness but facts, reason and the force of argument. All this wrapped up in a tense, noirish thriller starring Richard Widmark and handing Jack Palance the first of a long string of “mad dog” roles, which he was uniquely suited to playing. As Soderbergh, so Kazan – realism and immediacy are the key concerns. Panic in the Streets is … Read more

Memoir of a Snail

by
Grace in her snail hat

“It doesn’t all have to be Disney,” is animator Adam Elliot’s rallying cry. And in Memoir of a Snail, with jokes about masturbation and death, paedophilia, arson and murder, he proves it. It’s refreshing and yet oddly familiar, as if Wallace and Gromit had been given a wipe down with a mucky cloth. But cute is the overriding impression, from the old-school ragged-edged stop-motion animation – Wallace and Gromit before Nick Park got the big bucks – to the characters on display. The “snail” is actually a girl in a snail hat called Grace, one of two twins with her brother Gilbert, born with a cleft lip to a mother who died in … Read more

Funeral in Berlin

by
Harry Palmer by the Berlin Wall

The Ipcress File is one of the great 1960s Cold War spy thrillers and its follow-up, Funeral in Berlin, attempts to do the whole thing again. Popular opinion puts the sequel as second best to Ipcress – something its star Michael Caine seems to agree with in various interviews (like this one) – with the third in the series, Billion Dollar Brain, trailing along at the back. The fun in The Ipcress File was in watching a man who was not a spy – and possibly wasn’t suited to becoming a secret agent – being turned into one in spite of himself, all part of a bigger plot to flush out a double agent … Read more

Starve Acre

by
Juliette stares at a wicker crib

Starve Acre starts out looking like it’s going to be a folk-horror reworking of The Amityville Horror, spooky house and all that. Then changes tack and appears to be attempting a folk-horror reworking of The Exorcist, possessed child and all that. Before finally settling down to tell a story about different ways of coping with grief. It’s a mood piece in many ways. So if you’ve pitched up looking for entertainment – boo scares, ghoulies, things going bump – park those expectations. Subterranean sounds and bleak visuals abound in this story set on the Yorkshire moors in the 1970s, where the modern, rational mindset meets the old ways and comes off second best. … Read more

The Silent Partner

by
Elliott Gould and Susannah York

The story goes that Elliott Gould screened The Silent Partner for Alfred Hitchcock after it was finished. Hitchcock apparently liked it, as well he might, since it’s about 75 per cent Hitchcock by look and theme. There’s a blonde, a bit of mistaken identity, a nobody who finds he’s a somebody when tested, and even a nod to Hitchcock’s set pieces, particularly in the finale. Gould plays a meek bank teller who discovers quite by chance that there’s going to be a raid on his bank, and that a guy disguised as Santa Claus is going to do it – I won’t explain but it’s either ingenious or ridiculous depending on which side … Read more

Good One

by
Close up of Sam

Midlife males fall apart in Good One, writer/director India Donaldson’s debut feature, which looks at masculine fragility through the eyes of a teenage female who’s gone walking in the woods with her dad and his old friend for three days. Sam and dad Chris are on the three-day hike in the Catskills with Matt. Matt’s son Dylan was meant to come too, but he flamed out at the last second, so Sam lost someone her own age to roll eyes with and is now toughing it out with two men not in the best place, though neither of them is going to admit it. So it’s dad jokes and laddish references to lesbian … Read more

Horrors of Malformed Men

by
Komoda and his wife

If it’s highly controlled yet mad gothic you’re after – plus a wackadoodle title – Horrors of Malformed Men, a Japanese cult item from 1969, should do it for you. Director Teruo Ishii wastes no time setting out his stall. The opening shot is of a woman’s bare breast, followed half a second later by a knife aimed at the chest of the only man in a cell full of half-clothed women. Breasts abound. If this is your thing the entirely well formed women of this movie are an extra bonus. The knife turns out to be a stage prop, and the man is not in any immediate danger. Once rescued from the … Read more

The Order

by
Terry fires a rifle

Masculinity on the downswing meets white supremacism on the up in The Order, a typically unsettling film by Justin Kurzel, who’s never quite topped his devastating debut, Snowtown, though this comes pretty close. The casting is unusual for something set in redneck USA. Nice, pretty Nicholas Hoult as Bob Mathews, head of a white-power outfit that’s broken away from a parent group of Nazis because it wasn’t extreme enough. And nice, diffident fellow Brit Jude Law as FBI cop Terry Husk, whose hopes of a quiet life on a new posting in Idaho are dashed when he realises he’s tangling with guys who are planning the overthrow of the US government. Both are … Read more