Month: February 2025

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

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A wounded Bennie

It’s one of the great movie titles, so it may be no surprise to learn that Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia‘s title came first. Co-writer Frank Kowalski came up with the Bring Me the Head bit, and co-writer/director Sam Peckinpah took it from there, helping flesh out a story that would both justify it and do it justice. It is a deliberately shonky quest movie, set up in its opening scenes of a Mexican patriarch, his henchmen and family interrogating the man’s clearly pregnant teenage daughter as to who is the father of the child. She says nothing, even as the interrogation turns into torture. Eventually, at the sound of a … Read more

Late Night with the Devil

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Jack Delroy introduces the show

David Dastmalchian’s wonky presence slots right in to Late Night with the Devil, a horror movie with a difference, though if I say “found footage” and The Exorcist you might wonder where exactly the difference is. A preamble explains that what we’re about to see is a lost recording of a live, late-night TV chat show that went spectacularly bad on the night of Halloween 1977. It also explains that Jack Delroy (Dastmalchian) is a wannabe Johnny Carson whose successful TV chat show has been on the skids for some time now. After losing his wife to cancer, and having courted some mysterious conspiratorial organisation called The Grove, Jack is now casting around … Read more

Golem

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Pernat with newspaper stuffed in his mouth

Golem is the first of Polish director Piotr Szulkin’s Apocalypse Tetralogy – as it’s sometimes called – and is also often credited as being one of the inspirations for Blade Runner. Before Ridley Scott fans start rubbing their hands together with glee, Szulkin is far less interested in entertainment than Scott. His film is bleaker, more paranoid and more obviously Kafkaesque than Blade Runner. Think Rainer Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz meets Terry Gilliam’s Brazil rubbed all over with an oily rag heavy with swarf. It’s political too, in a coded sort of way and though set ostensibly in a destroyed society decades after an apocalyptic nuclear event, it’s clear that Szulkin has Communist Poland in … Read more

Every Little Thing

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A hummingbird caught mid flight

Every Little Thing is a documentary about a hummingbird sanctuary. A funny sort of documentary if you’re interested in the birds themselves and want to know how much they weigh, or how long they live, what they feed on or how big their eggs are – tiny, presumably, since the birds are only as big as your thumb. Based on the book Fastest Thing on Wings, by its subject, Terry Masear, it’s an emotional rather than informational portrait of the woman who runs this animal hospital, seemingly on her own. Masear is the woman to call in California – where hummingbirds flourish – if you’ve found an injured or orphaned bird and don’t … Read more

High Sierra

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Roy and a bruised Marie eye each other

1941’s High Sierra was the last time Humphrey Bogart took second billing to anybody. It’s clearly his film yet Ida Lupino got top billing, playing a gangster’s moll. Neither the star nor the moll has very much to do and it’s pretty clear that Lupino’s part has been pumped up a bit to justify her position on the credits. As said, Bogart’s film, and it’s his character’s story too, the noirish, fatalistic tale of a life-serving criminal who is pardoned in the film’s opening moments. Which seems remarkable until we learn that a very big Mr Big in the criminal underworld wants Roy Earle (Bogart) on the outside so he can supervise a … Read more

My Old Ass

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Younger Elliott meets Older Elliott on a log

Aubrey Plaza in a film called My Old Ass looks like a case of someone getting their defence in early, but is in fact a canny repositioning of Plaza – more mouth, less sex – and another demonstration of her ability to light up a film with dark snark in a supporting role. The film actually belongs to Maisy Stella, in her first time out, playing a young Canadian woman – bit snarky, bit dark – who meets her older self after going on a mushroom trip with her friends, in a last hurrah before they all leave their home town for the next phase of their lives. Shrooms ingested, all three sit … Read more

Three Wishes for Cinderella

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Cinderella on a horse talks to the prince

If you already know Václav Vorlíček’s Three Wishes for Cinderella it’ll most likey be because you grew up on it. It’s a tradition in some European countries to watch it at Christmas. A Czech/East German co-production made in the days of the Iron Curtain, its appeal is obvious as soon as it gets going. It gives it to us straight – a good, old-fashioned fairy tale so traditional it could be half-timbered, with virtuous maidens and hissable villains, noble rulers and stout yeoman. All is in its place and all is right in the world. That said, there is no fairy godmother, no pumpkin coach and no glass slipper. Instead the nearest we … Read more

Omni Loop

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Zoya and Paula in the lab

Sci-fi or is it? Omni Loop certainly doesn’t look or feel like a sci-fi movie. In fact it’s all about human foibles, regrets, the life lived rather than the life that could have been lived. But its ostensible story – a woman reliving the last week of her life over and over again thanks to a magic time-travelling pill – has sci-fi written all over it. Groundhog Week, you could call it. The action sets out from the point where Mary-Louise Parker’s Zoya Lowe is given a terminal diagnosis. Heading home from the hospital to die with the family, instead of breathing her last with them at the decisive moment she takes one of … Read more