Month: May 2025

Of Human Bondage

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Mildred (Bette Davis)

Of Human Bondage is the film to point to whenever some marketing guy is wanging on about “brand”. In it, Bette Davis demonstrates as clearly as can be done that it’s product – in the movies the role and performance – that’s critical. Get the product right and the brand takes care of itself. In doing it so brilliantly, Davis transformed her career. This was her breakthrough, in a part that most of her peers turned down – not on-brand enough for them. Davis lobbied for it and forced Warner Bros to lend her out to RKO to play it. It not only made her a star but whipped up talk out of … Read more

The Assessment

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Aaryan and Mia sitting up straight

Harold Pinter never wrote out-and-out sci-fi, but if he had done it might have looked like The Assessment. A queasy and uneasy excavation of people’s motivations, its tension stems from confrontations deferred, which break suddenly in discomfiting and absurdist ways. Yet it’s simple, in set-up and execution. It’s easy to imagine this punchy three-hander being performed in an experimental theatre in the upstairs room of a pub. Another Pinteresque aspect – it’s an actors’ drama rather than a director’s, and it calls for subtlety and sudden switching of gears from its performers, which Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel all manage with real precision – Olsen and Vikander get the best of … Read more

Il Sorpasso

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Bruno and Roberto looking backwards from the front seat of a car

Google Translate suggests The Overtaking as a translation of Il Sorpasso. It’s not perfect – the less elegant “overtaking manoeuvre” is more precise – but it knocks the English-language title of the film, The Easy Life, out of the park. Maybe, in 1962, when the film came out, international distributors were trying to cash in on the success of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (which translates as The Sweet Life) from two years earlier. Any port in a storm, I suppose. Foreign-language movies have always been a tough sell in countries where English is the first language. Though both films are in black and white, the comparisons pretty much stop there. Il Sorpasso is a … Read more

La Cocina

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Julia and Pedro head to head in silhouette

If you’ve seen the TV show The Bear then you’ve seen a good chunk of La Cocina, a hothouse drama set in a fast-paced New York restaurant kitchen. New York makes a difference – more illegal workers. And La Cocina is more explicit than The Bear about its racialised pecking order, though it’s a very uneasy order and prone to break down when the orders pile up. Estela (Anna Díaz) is our introduction to this semi-familiar world, a wetback from Mexico wandering lost around New York until she finds what she’s looking for: The Grill in Times Square, the sort of high-volume eatery that knocks out fish and chips, pizza, pasta, burgers, plus … Read more

Fort Ti

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Fortune Mallory and Captain Jed Horn

Fort Ti is a 3D western and it really wants you to know it. Everything that can come the audience’s way does – a tomahawk, an Indian, a cannonball, more Indians, more cannonballs, bats, bullets, yet more Indians. In the action sequences at least it keeps coming. It’s the first 3D western and shot in Technicolor just to make the whole thing stick out in more ways than one and stars good old dependable George Montgomery as a captain in the Rogers Rangers getting caught up in a conflict with Indians and then the French. There are not just two enemies but two potential love interests too – Joan Vohs as Fortune Mallory, … Read more

Dead Mail

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A pair of bound hands holding a piece of paper begging for help

Horror-flecked crime thriller Dead Mail suffers from the death early on of one of its main characters and it never really quite recovers from it. But it’s good anyway, just not as good as it might have been if xxxxxx (no spoilers) hadn’t bitten the dust. It’s the second feature by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy and it’s all set in the 1980s, where, in a mail room in Nowheresville, USA, various members of the postal team try to reconnect lost letters with their intended recipients. The really discombobulating ones get sent up to Jasper (Tomas Boykin), a strange man who, when not at work, lives in a flophouse. A recovered down and … Read more

Angst

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K in close up with a knife

Angst is director Gerald Kargl’s only film. But what a film! Grim, depressing, formidably unsettling, it is the psychopath-killer movie the others want to be. Gaspar Noë watched it repeatedly before borrowing bits for his Irreversible, Kargl’s fellow Austrian Michael Haneke surely studied it before he embarked on Funny Games. There’s clear evidence of it in Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove. More recently, Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature – another disturbing shocker – openly acknowledged the debt. Angst is the full-strength hit, though, so full-strength in fact that the film got banned outright in some places when it came out in 1983, and where it wasn’t banned it was barely shown. Perhaps most … Read more

Black Bag

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George Woodhouse in his kitchen

What does all that spying do to spies? That’s Black Bag in a neat explicatory parcel, a Steven Soderbergh movie that mixes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with the Michael Caine Harry Palmer films – or so say Soderbergh and writer David Koepp. But there’s John Le Carré in there as well. And as this densely packed, forensic examination of the spy psyche eases onto its queasy final straight, the comparisons with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy become unavoidable. Soderbergh opens with a long, glam tracking shot following Michael Fassbender’s George Woodhouse into a bar and then down and back up some stairs where, in wham-bam plotting, Koepp lays out the whole film in … Read more

Broken Flowers

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Don in his car with a bunch of pink flowers

If you’re looking for peak Bill Murray, 2005’s Broken Flowers is a strong contender. Murray himself recently said, “that was a perfect movie… it really did happen”, (while eating spicy chicken wings on a YouTube show called First We Feast, in case you want to check that out too). It’s peak Murray because it’s a Jim Jarmusch movie, and Murray and Jarmusch are both masters of cool deadpan. But also because this is a Murray vehicle in a way even Groundhog Day cannot match. He is in every scene, the story is all about his character and though there’s obviously a gulf between the Murray we see on screen and the real one, what … Read more

Captain America: Brave New World

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Captain America head shot

A bit Sixties, a bit Eighties and a bit all over the place, Captain America: Brave New World is a strange mishmash of a movie. According to Variety, it wiped the floor with Kraven the Hunter at the box office. Which says more about that movie than this one, having seen both of them. First up, it’s a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie (Kraven was Marvel but not canonical MCU, if these theological niceties mean anything to you). Second up, Chris Evans has been replaced by Anthony Mackie as Captain America, least interesting of the Marvel superheroes. Third up, the story harks back to The Incredible Hulk of 2008, which heavily featured General “Thunderbolt” … Read more