Month: April 2025

Wicked

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Cynthia Erivo and Ariane Grande

Can you believe there are still people out there who don’t know that all-conquering smash musical Wicked is the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. I know this because I met one of them just the other night. Relief: he did know what The Wizard of Oz was. That way true madness lies. So to this much feted, hated, memed and debated movie, which won Oscars for production design and costumes only. Precisely what that guy didn’t know but now does – the back story of Elphaba, who died at the end of the 1939 movie – Wicked picks up the story right there, before dissolving … Read more

Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street

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Glenn Corbett as private eye Sandy

Directed by Sam Fuller, Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße) is something of an outlier, both for Fuller and for the German TV show Tatort. Tatort, still running after more than 50 years, translates as Crime Scene, and is a Sunday-night landmark on the German TV landscape. It offers feature-length policiers set in various different parts of the German-speaking world and is populated with a huge cast of characters, some who recur and others who don’t. Part of its formula for success is this lack of a rigid formula – it’s highly adaptable. It’s also a proving ground for rising talent. Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot), Edward Berger (Conclave) and … Read more

Anora

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Ivan and Ani

A fable, a thriller, a subdued comedy and a cryptic love story, Anora is also the winner of five Oscars and confirmed the arrival of Sean Baker at the top of the film-making tree. This appeared to have started with his breakthrough, 2015’s Tangerine – the one shot on an iPhone – but in fact got going 15 years, four features, a couple of shorts and several episodes of TV earlier. Note to self, having seen all the post-Tangerine stuff (The Florida Project, Red Rocket and now Anora) isn’t it time to have a look at Baker’s earlier work? One of those Oscars went to Mikey Madison, a firecracker as a lapdancer with … Read more

Criss Cross

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Anna and Steve

If film noir is about men in the thrall of women being tossed about by cruel fate, Criss Cross is prime noir. Made in 1949, in black and white, and starring Burt Lancaster in his first, noirish iteration, it’s directed by Robert Siodmak, a dab hand at punchy, pitiless drama. The story is told in a strange semi-flashback style. Half of it in the present, where Steve (Lancaster) is a driver of an armoured car working as an inside man for a weaselly criminal about to pull a big heist. The other half back in the past, where we discover why the suburban, mother-loving Steve ended up on the wrong side of the … Read more

Memory

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Sylvia and Saul in profile

There are issues in Memory, and memory itself has something to do with what’s going on. But it’s the small things rather than the big ones that give the film its grip and punch. The many social-realist auteurs pushing our faces into the raw meat of life could learn a lot from Michel Franco’s remarkable film. It starts out like many a kitchen sinker – at an AA meeting where Sylvia, its hero, is just one of many unfortunates trying to put life back together after getting too friendly with the bottle. Then it follows her to her workplace. A day centre for adults with learning difficulties, a job that seems to be … Read more

Don’t Torture a Duckling

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Maciara after having been beaten up by the villagers

Which witch? That seems to be the question behind Don’t Torture a Duckling (Non Sevizia un Paperino in the original Italian), the film that made Lucio Fulci something of a name in his home country – the sex, the gore. It’s essentially a police procedural and sets off in a very familiar direction. A child is killed and a man has soon been arrested for the crime. But this arrest is too easy, too quick, and when another child is killed while the suspect is behind bars, it is suddenly clear that it cannot be Barra, the town simpleton and peeping tom. It must be someone else and Barra’s story about having buried … Read more

Y2K

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Eli, Laura and Danny open-mouthed

Teenagers save the world in Y2K, a larky take on the events that didn’t play out as one millennium clicked over into another and planes didn’t fall out of the sky, entire networks of computers didn’t crash and hospitals and traffic systems didn’t grind to a halt. That’s either because of the massive amount of behind-the-scenes work done to fix the problem by armies of techies, or it was never going to be a problem at all in the first place and was all got up by the same bunch who brought you the faked Moon landings and all that blah. In this version of events it does all happen, in monster, gonzo, … Read more

Paper Moon

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Ryan and Tatum O'Neal sitting on a car running board

Stunt casting gave Paper Moon an extra publicity push when it came out in 1973. Ryan O’Neal and his nine-year-old daughter Tatum were the headline-grabbing coupling, and the PR machine was glowing white hot by the time of the 1974 Academy Awards, when Tatum won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. This propelled the movie back into the big picture palaces and shot Tatum into the record books as the youngest winner of a competitive Oscar. Supporting actress schmupporting actress. As is entirely obvious from the first frame to the last, Tatum is obviously the lead in this movie. Madeline Kahn, who was in fact the supporting actress, said as much at the … Read more

All Happy Families

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Graham (Josh Radnor) close up

Like a few episodes of a gentle family sitcom bolted together and the joins sanded flat, All Happy Families is an Everybody Loves Raymond-style journey with a couple of issues thrown in to indicate grown-up-ness. It’s well acted, slightly sentimental, a little nostalgic for simpler times and is just the sort of vehicle you might expect Josh Radnor to board after 208 episodes of How I Met Your Mother on TV. It starts with a shot of what might be an endoscope snaking up someone’s colon but turns out to be a drains guy’s mini-camera in the sluiceways of the family home of the Landrys. They’ve all moved out, and the house is … Read more

100 Years of… The Salvation Hunters

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Georgia Hale as The Girl

Made in 1925, The Salvation Hunters was Josef von Sternberg’s directorial debut. It was a total flop, and only picked up a bit interest after it was endorsed publicly by Charlie Chaplin (who encouraged his business partners Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to go along with him). But in spite of newspaper advertisements tendering Chaplin’s personal seal of approval (“It’s a great picture and different”) it still refused to fly with audiences, who probably found its tone too didactic, its approach too abstract and its long scenes featuring people staring moodily into the middle distance too dull. They are right about all those things. But Chaplin’s point still stands. There is something important … Read more