Month: May 2025

Crossing Delancey

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Izzi with Sam in the background

Very New York, very Jewish, very of its time, 1988’s Crossing Delancey seems to divide opinion sharply. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus is largely in favour, though back in the day Roger Ebert wasn’t so keen (“not good enough,” said the usually fair-minded Ebert). It’s often billed as a rom-com, which is like calling Hamlet a comedy because it has the gravedigger in it. No, it’s a romance, a romantic drama, plain and simple, a genre that often has to fly under a flag of convenience. Plot: pretty but no longer quite so young Izzi works at New York’s most bookstore bookstore, where she’s in charge of looking after the writers who turn up … Read more

Kraven the Hunter

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Kraven in leather jerkin

A colossally charmless superhero movie, Kraven the Hunter got pummelled by the critics and didn’t do well at the box office. But never mind all that, who should we blame? Partly an origin story, it heavily features Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the lead role, though Levi Miller plays the youthful Kraven, the Russian oligarch’s son who is mauled by a lion and acquires some of its powers after a drop of its blood mingles with his own. Or was it the spooky vial of something administered to the near-dead Sergei (aka Kraven) by Calypso Ezili (Dianna Babnicova when young, Ariana DeBose when older)? You see, even there, in the birth event of this superhero, … Read more

Oil Lamps (Petrolejové lampy)

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Pavel cups Štěpa's breast as he teaches her to shoot

Czech master film-maker Juraj Herz’s 1971 follow-up to The Cremator is a complete change of gears, pace, look, intent, the whole kit and caboodle, as if Herz wanted to say to the Communist authorities – look, I can do it straight too. Oil Lamps (Petrolejové lampy) is in colour, for a start, whereas The Cremator was a more serious black and white, and there’s nothing fancy in the lens choices, no unsettling edits, no barbed message hiding in the undergrowth. The story it tells is pretty straightforward too, about a woman desperate to be married who plumps for entirely the wrong man and then repents at leisure. It’s clearly informed by John Schlesinger’s … Read more

Stupid Games

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Celeste in profile

“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” an on-screen snippet tells us at the beginning of Stupid Games. It’s a phrase that’s been attributed to any number of people – Tom Clancy to Taylor Swift – but probably predates them all. “Stupid is as stupid does,” is another one, and is particularly apt in the case of Jaxon and Rex, a pair of horny young men heading to an apartment for a night with three young women and their “games with boys”. “Boys” is not exactly how Jaxon and Rex would describe themselves, but it’s probably OK with Stanley, the speccy guy they pick up en route to make up the numbers. Jaxon, Rex … Read more

All the King’s Men

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Willie Stark sprawling in a chair

All the King’s Men is, give or take, a potted history of the rise and fall of Huey Long, the populist, Depression-era senator and governor of Louisiana. The names have been changed to protect the innocent/guilty (delete according to political preference), party particulars have been redacted and so have references to any specific state or region. But the ambitious public-works, education and health programmes launched by the stand-in for Long, Willie Stark, give us a flavour of Long that’s undeniable. Long thought the big state spending of Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t go anywhere near far enough and wasn’t shy about saying so. Audiences back in 1949 would have known exactly who the film … Read more

The Coffee Table

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Jésus with blood all over his hands

The Coffee Table (La mesita del comedor in the original Spanish) is a gonzo bad taste very black comedy that’s sat down and wracked its brains as to what could be the very worst situation that could befall a couple with a new baby, and then gone there, stayed there and started sending posts back to the rest of us. “My guess is you have never… seen a movie as black as this one,” no less than Stephen King opined after having seen it. It’s now been picked up by Screambox, who with films as bleak and out there as this might be on the verge of starting to give Shudder a run … Read more

3 Women

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Millie and Pinkie

3 Women, or Robert Altman’s 3 Women as the screen title has it, is Altman’s attempt to go one better than Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which was a peculiar story about two women whose identities become melded, switched, lumped together. Bergman did it as sci-fi, of sorts, whereas Altman’s crack at the same idea leans harder on horror. It’s Gerald Busby’s relentlessly spiky and spooky score that most obviously alerts us that this is a horror movie, again of sorts. Though this is an almost relentlessly bright and clean movie, here and there Altman reminds us what he’s about with temporary dives into gothic Hammer-style visuals. Sissy Spacek plays the naive young blow-in from … Read more

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

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Porky and Daffy

Where’s Bugs Bunny? There are many ways this film’s makers could have made a bold statement. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie has decided to do it by presenting an animated whackadoodle comic adventure featuring Looney Tunes characters but minus the most famous one. There’s not even the tip of a wabbitty ear to be seen in what’s claimed to be the first feature-length fully-animated Tunes to be released theatrically – the terms doing the work there are “fully-animated” (there have been a couple of feature-length Looney Tunes movies with live-action input) and “theatrically” (many straight-to-video features). Instead of Bugs it’s Daffy Duck and Porky the Pig, who eventually team … Read more

Les bas-fonds aka The Lower Depths

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Natacha and Pépel

Beautiful but basic, Jean Renoir’s 1936 movie Les bas-fonds (aka The Lower Depths) isn’t the only adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s stage play. Among many, many other people, Kurosawa did a version in 1957, sticking closer to Gorky’s 1902 original, something Renoir himself later acknowledged he himself should have done. Kurosawa’s is the better version, he reckoned. Renoir’s reason for fiddling with the story was, he said, to get around the casting of the actresss Jany Holt – who he thought was “terrible” but was forced to accept – rewriting around her to diminish her role. There is room for the experiment. Gorky’s original plot is full of people, very Russian, but it constellates … Read more

Mickey 17

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Mickey floating in a spacesuit

Well Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer didn’t quite work, and nor does his Mickey 17, and for pretty much the same reasons. Small stuff – great; world building – great; political satire – gruesome. It’s Robert Pattinson in the lead, vaguely back in the sort of fantasy territory that made his name (I mean Harry Potter and Twilight), as an “expendable” in a dystopian future where humanity is fleeing Earth, heading out towards the brave new world of Niflheim on board a spaceship. He’s the living equivalent of a crash-test dummy, the one sent in to check things out whenever a new situation arises. Is it poisonous, will it eat us, will it cause our flesh … Read more