Month: May 2025

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare

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Peter removes his mask to reveal a disfigured face

“All children, except one, grow up.” The opening line to JM Barrie’s Peter Pan is already plenty creepy (especially those commas). Ripe for exploitation even. Now that the copyright has expired on the book, in the USA at any rate, someone has gone ahead and mined the children’s classic it for its horror potential. Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is the result, a gory and unsettling tale of kidnap, drug abuse, dismemberment, screaming and lots of blood. We get a flavour of what’s to come in the pre-credits sequence. A young boy is charmed at the circus by a clown twisting balloons into animal shapes. Later the same boy is accosted at home by … Read more

A Story of Floating Weeds

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Kihachi and Otsune on a tatami mat

Beautiful, exquisite, poetic – choose your adjective, but there’s no denying the extraordinary visual effect of A Story of Floating Weeds, Yasujirō Ozu’s silent glory from 1934. A box-office smash in his native Japan, it was also a critical hit worldwide, and is a good place to start if you’re interested in tracking the development of Ozu’s classic style. Low, slow and nothing fancy, if you’re after a soundbite. It’s the story of a troupe of kabuki players who blow into a small town where, years before, the troupe’s leader, Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) fathered a child with a young woman, Otsune (Chōko Iida). Now, older and perhaps tiring of the life of the … Read more

Fréwaka

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Close up of Shoo's face with red crucifixes reflected

There’s a definite influence of The Wicker Man in Fréwaka, Aislinn Clarke’s second feature. You might call it The Fréwaka Man if you were being facetious. But it deserves better than that. And in any case the main character is a woman, so that’s enough of that foolishness. It’s also the first horror movie in the Irish language, so doubly deserving of more than just a casual glance. Before the opening credits have rolled, Clarke has set out her stall – pagan, unnatural, spooky things are going to happen in this movie, it seems clear, from the vignette we’re given of a wedding where a clearly pregnant young woman is the bride, it’s … Read more

1984

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Aleksandr Obmanov as Mathematician D503

Diana Ringo has made the first feature film of 1984 in Russian, and she’s done it her way, with little in the way of exterior financial backing. It’s cheap and it’s cheerless, but that just adds to the dystopian gloom. George Orwell would probably approve. He might not be quite so happy about Yevgeni Zamyatin’s name being on the credits as a co-writer. Zamyatin wrote We, a Russian dystopian classic from 1924, which Orwell clearly borrowed from, though he stridently rejected the suggestion. In fact he’d already chucked that rock at Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World was definitely lifted from Zamyatin, according to Orwell at least. Both men, at various points, would … Read more

Ashes and Diamonds

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Maciek and Krystyna in bed

Set at the moment when Poland escaped the Nazis only to fall into the hands of the Soviets, 1958’s Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament) is a philosophical, even existential, take on the recent history of director and co-writer Andrzej Wajda’s country. Really, it’s a day in the life of some Polish partisans, and of Poland itself, at the point where one enemy is being swapped out for another. But not without some psychological adjustment en route. In the opening sequence an assassination attempt against some communist party officials goes wrong – the partisans shoot the wrong men – and here is where the wrangling with conscience begins, particularly for Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) … Read more

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

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Leo Woodall, Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Bridget Jones Calls It a Day might have been a better title, but Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy it is, a final trot around the paddock for Renée Zellweger and most of the familiar faces from the previous three films, plus a few new ones. Instant verdict: not bad. Definitely better than BJ2, but then that isn’t hard. Set in that Richard Curtis Cinematic Universe – a cosy well-to-do London beyond the imagination of most of its residents – it’s a genial, good-natured and ultimately rather rueful farewell which picks up the action with near-shut-in Bridget mourning the death of her husband (Colin Firth, who does a couple of ghostly cameos). The story then … Read more

100 Years of… La fille de l’eau aka The Whirlpool of Fate

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Close up of Catherine Hessling

Nothing wrong with a nepo baby if they’re actually any good. La fille de l’eau (aka The Whirlpool of Fate, sometimes known as The Girl of the Water) is Jean Renoir’s first feature film, shot when he was 31, using Paul Cezanne’s property as a location and financial assistance from the estate of his own dad, the painter Pierre-Auguste (flogging one of dad’s paintings often came in handy in the early days). What he gives us is a lyrical and beautiful film harking back to the Impressionist/Post Impressionist style of Renoir Sr, Cezanne et al and forward to Renoir Jr’s own deliciously pretty films of the 1930s. What you don’t get is much … Read more

Parthenope

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Parthenope listens as someone whispers in her ear

Parthenope is Paolo Sorrentino vamping, riffing on Paolo Sorrentino. A fabulously good looking film full of defeated old guys and spectacularly hot women, it nods as ever to La Dolce Vita, has a nice cameo for a famous actor, and the grotesques keep coming as if it had somehow accessed Fellini’s dreams. What is it about though? Sorrentino has said it’s not about the Greek version of the Parthenope myth – the siren who lured men onto the rocks. Or the Roman version – the beauty loved by the centaur Vesuvius, who was turned into a volcano by jealous Jupiter while Parthenope herself became a city, the future Naples. And yet it is … Read more

The Heartbreak Kid

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Chris and Nick lie on the ground side by side

As I write this, there is one review for The Heartbreak Kid on the IMDb (soon to be two!). One. A good film that did well in its native Australia, good box office and reviews, spawned a TV spinoff (Heartbreak High), good looking stars, talking points, teachable points, well shot, well acted and written. What’s the problem? I suspect it’s the lack of shame on the part of its female protagonist, Cristina Papadopoulos, a 22-year-old teacher in an Australian high school who falls for one of her pupils, 17-year-old Nick Polides, and embarks on a wild and torrid affair with him. Claudia Karvan, who was 19 when she played Cristina, has spent good … Read more

Along Came Love aka Le temps d’aimer

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François, Madeleine and Jimmy lying on the grass

Katell Quillévéré’s follow-up to Heal the Living takes the bare bones of her own grandmother’s story – a Frenchwoman who had a relationship with a German soldier during wartime, wound up a single mother in the post-war years, then met the man who’d become her husband on a beach in Normandy – embroiders on it heavily and repurposes it as a decade-straddling tale of cockeyed love and melodramatic dark secrets. Along Came Love (Le temps d’aimer) whisks us briskly from the aftermath of the end of the war – archive of GIs being feted as they march into France, cutting to “collaborating” French women having their heads shaved in orgies of public shaming … Read more