Month: June 2025

Juror No. 2

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Close up of Nicholas Hoult

Juror No. 2 is a rare thing these days: a good old-fashioned courtroom thriller. Director Clint Eastwood, 93 when he made it, does it old-style, the way his mentor Don Siegel might have done it, and the result is a streamlined drama revolving around a central dilemma, just the sort of lean and fast second feature Siegel might have cranked out in the 1950s. It is a very neat plot, which I’m not going to ruin by explaining. What I can say is that Nicholas Hoult is the titular juror, a man who suddenly realises mid-trial that he can free the man accused of murdering his girlfriend at a stroke, but only if … Read more

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

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The Justice of the Peace with Trudy and Norval

The “miracle” of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is that audiences in 1943 bought Preston Sturges’s film as a proposition. The story makes no sense and Sturges knew it didn’t. Hence the framing device added to distance the “facts” of what we see on screen from their telling. The film begins with a state governor being told a wildly implausible story in a telephone call from an excited journalist, and ends back in the governor’s office, where the final tawdry details are being received. Sturges obviously intends that we understand we’re getting the facts at one remove and that there’s been a bit of journalist licence used in the story’s reporting. Here’s the … Read more

Shadow Force

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Omar Sy points a gun while lying on the ground

Lacking the crackle and wit of the usually fairly mad Joe Carnahan movie, Shadow Force is full of charismatic performers angling for a moment in the sun. Which, for most of them never comes. Gunplay and banter are there, but they’re swamped by slack verbiage and scenes full of characters never properly introduced. So when the trademark Carnahan Big Finale arrives – guns blaze, wisecracks spark – ignition does not happen. It should be good, with its mix of Kill Bill, John Wick and Mr and Mrs Smith plotting. Omar Sy and Kerry Washington play Issac Sarr (codename Sombra) and Kyrah Owens (codename Ombra), two members of a crack black-ops squad who, years before … Read more

Model for Murder

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Sally and David

Director Terry Bishop won an Oscar for his semi-documentary Daybreak in Udi in 1949. Oscars aren’t handed out for films like Model for Murder, a British B movie from 1959. But Bishop does a good job with what he’s been handed and puts a polish on a noirish, crime-thrillerish story with a subtext all about strange, strained and irregular relationships. In the familiar American-in-England role is Keith Andes as a guy called David Martens, who is in the country looking for traces of his dead brother and striking up a relationship in a cemetery (as no one ever does) with a young woman. Sally Meadows (Hazel Court) is a bright young thing currently … Read more

Monkey Man

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Dev Patel close up

Monkey Man is the latest in a string of John Wick-adjacent movies. Blame Liam Neeson for starting it, with those Taken movies. Or the Incredible Hulk, and his “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” warning. Or even, just maybe, the vengeful God of the Old Testament. You don’t want to get any of these guys riled. It’s Dev Patel this time around, returning to the India of his breakthrough movie role. Slumdog Millionaire made Patel movie-famous after TV show Skins had made him TV-famous (in the days when there was still a big difference). Here he is playing a guy from the streets wangling a job in a high-end brothel so he … Read more

Dangerous Voyage

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William Lundigan and Naomi Chance publicity shot

Cheap, badly written and not very well directed, Dangerous Voyage (aka Terror Ship) is the classic British B movie, directed by Vernon Sewell, a journeyman who knocked out a lot of films like this. The actors gabble, the plot isn’t particularly convincing and psychologically it never quite adds up. But, if nothing else, Sewell has an eye for a lovely image, and there are plenty of those in a plot that starts on the British South Coast before venturing into the English Channel and then on to France, from where Sewell sends us one picture postcard after another: of Trouville, of Deauville, of Paris, of Honfleur and from many a charming spot along … Read more

Megalopolis

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Adam Driver as architect Cesar Catilina

Well, whatever else it is, Megalopolis isn’t boring. Mad, megalomaniacal, chaotic, absurd and confused, certainly, but also inspired and weird in a good way, it’s a deliberately difficult piece of “late style”, financed entirely by Francis Ford Coppola out of money made from his wine business. Not beholden to anyone, the director can do what the hell he wants, and he has. The closest thing to it in intention is Godard’s late works – odd movies like Film Socialisme or Goodbye to Language, doggedly playful and wilfully experimental attempts to say everything there is to say about everything. At another level it’s an 85-year-old man’s confusion about the way the world has gone … Read more

Rape Zombie: Lust of the Dead

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Close up of Momoko in tears

Rape Zombie: Lust of the Dead is its full title, though Naoyuki Tomomatsu’s film from 2012 also goes by the more decorous and bare-bones Lust of the Dead, which makes the debt to George Romero’s Dead movies even more stark. The twist this time is that it’s only men who are becoming zombies, and they’re raping their way towards a zombie apocalypse by violating everything female they come across. Isn’t that just men all over though? The film has a bit of fun with this idea. In early scenes just after the worldwide epidemic has taken hold, a scientist on a TV news item informs the Japanese viewing public that these zombies have … Read more

Final Destination: Bloodlines

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Stefani in a burning building

As witty and ingenious as the best of its predecessors, Final Destination: Bloodlines revives the old franchise after a 14-year hiatus, number six in the series keeping faith with an idea originating in a script for The X-Files that was killed off before making it to the screen. Which is appropriate, since the Final Destination franchise is all about death. Capital D Death, who will not be cheated when he comes for you. And should you by some chance manage to elude him, he’ll be back to reap his grim harvest, going to elaborate lengths to achieve his goal if necessary. We never see Death, so he could be a she or an … Read more

The Magic Mountain

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Hans kisses the hand of Clawdia

There are two versions of the 1982 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s weighty novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg). One is the theatrical cut, which came in at about 153 minutes. The other is the TV cut, which weighs in at an epic 312 minutes over three instalments. That’s the one I watched yesterday, all five hours and a chunk of it, having taken heed of reviews complaining about the theatrical cut’s lack of coherence. The theatrical cut is a lousy edit is the gist of the complaints. As to the full-fat version, it was easier to digest than I’d expected. I suspect the complaints about the theatrical cut are right. In the long … Read more