Month: August 2025

Extraction

by
Kellan Lutz and Bruce Willis

Extraction is late-era Bruce Willis so it comes prejudged. Which, it must be said, is entirely Willis’s own fault. He didn’t have to sign on for so many sub-par actioners. Surely someone somewhere was offering him a decent gig at a decent screw? Maybe not. It also, on account of subsequent developments in Willis’s health, comes pre-forgiven. Anyhow, in keeping with many other “starring Bruce Willis” movies, this one doesn’t really star Bruce Willis. He plays a decommissioned CIA agent and the real star of the movie is Kellan Lutz, as the son of the retired dude. A desk jockey at the CIA, Harry Turner really wants to be a field agent like … Read more

The Fall of the House of Usher

by
The Hag

Overshadowed by both the Jean Epstein silent 1928 version and Roger Corman’s one from 1960, 1948’s The Fall of the House of Usher isn’t exactly a good film but it is a hellishly interesting one. Directed by Ivan Barnett, it was shot mostly at GIB Studios in Hastings on the south coast of England, a town not exactly bristling with movie production facilities and people. GIB stands for George Ivan Bennett, the director’s full name. The studio was an offshoot of a film society Barnett had formed in 1944 when he was about 19. When Sight and Sound magazine did a report on the Hastings film scene in the mid-1940s they declared the … Read more

Presence

by
Chloe in a dark room

There are big Steven Soderbergh movies and small Steven Soderbergh movies. Presence is the latest of the small ones, stacking up alongside Let Them All Talk and Unsane as another fascinating experiment in Soderbergian minimalism. Between starry, big-budget affairs like Oceans 11 or Contagion, in his smaller movies this master of technique sets himself film-making challenges, much as Hitchcock did with the likes of Rope or Lifeboat, perhaps also inspired by Lars Von Trier’s concept of “obstructions” (self-installed hurdles designed to jump-start the creative process). Soderbergh shot Let Them All Talk guerrilla-style, on board a cruise ship while it went about its regular business with paying customers. Quite a feat considering the cast … Read more

Christmas Holiday

by
Deanna Durbin haloed in light

Imagine calling a film Christmas Holiday and then filling it with desperation, prositution, twisted mother love and murder. They knew how to have fun in 1944. Ignore all the opening flimflam about a lieutenant being dumped by his girl on Christmas Eve, the day before his wedding. The film only really takes wing once we get to the backstory of Jackie (Deanna Durbin), the prostitute that heartsore Lieutenant Charles Mason (Dean Harens) hooks up with after accidentally landing in New Orleans en route back to San Francisco for the furlough he now no longer wants or needs. He winds up taking not to bed but to… midnight mass. Charlie is a nothing in … Read more

The Phoenician Scheme

by
Zsa-Zsa Korda in the bath

Symmetrics. Opulence. Screwball comedy pacing. Whimsy. Deadpan. A nostalgic evocation of old Hollywood. The Phoenician Scheme must be a Wes Anderson movie and if nothing else it finally does with Bill Murray what should have been done long ago. It casts him as God. Wes Anderson. By now about 50 per cent of his potential audience have had enough of the tableaux vivants and the mid-century-modern sets and candy colours, the endless digressing, and films that seem longer than they actually are (The French Dispatch and Asteroid City were both only about 1 hour 45 minutes, but felt longer). But fear not, The Phoenician Scheme has pace, it has jokes and it has … Read more

The Big Bluff

by
Fritzie is kissed by Ricardo

Did you know that Billy Wilder had a brother and that his name was Billy too? In fact W Lee Wilder had more of a claim on “Billy” than Billy did, being two years older than his more famous sibling and having actually been baptised William. Billy’s birth name was Samuel. W Lee Wilder also worked in the film biz, though down the chain quite a bit. He specialised in making shorts about church music in the Southern USA. There were 16 of those, produced to little acclaim. When W Lee was not ploughing this furrow he was busy in another, churning out unremarkable if not downright terrible low-budget sci-fi like 1954’s Killers … Read more

The Rule of Jenny Pen

by
Jenny Pen

Horror films are often about old age without being explicit about it. Think of all those shuffling zombies. The Rule of Jenny Pen cuts right to the chase to tell a story about nasty goings-on in a care home, where tangential horror occurs but the care home itself is the real concern of co-writer/director James Ashcroft. It’s a punchy and effective 100 minutes or so. Stephen King is a fan (“one of the best movies I’ve seen this year”). Maybe you should be too. Ashcroft starts with a joke. The actor Geoffrey Rush, five years absent from our screens thanks to legal wrangles, playing a judge. A New Zealand judge struck down by … Read more

Operation Cross Eagles

by
Richard Conte

Operation Cross Eagles is the only film Richard Conte ever directed. Great at playing bad guys and constipated good guys, in Conte’s one and only go calling the shots he never quite works out what he’s meant to do with the camera and the film is a bit of a mess. That said, it is a fine example of a particular type of movie made at a particular time and came out the same year as Where Eagles Dare, 1968, which does the same thing but better. We’re talking not just about the adventure movie but about the adventure movie stacked with ageing thespians, in reality too old for the action hijinks their … Read more

Crumb Catcher

by
John and his crumb catcher

In Crumb Catcher a doorstep salesman makes his big pitch in a revenge-of-the-nerd thriller with a comic edge, served straight-up with no messing about. Bloody and funny, it’s not bad for a debut at all, though director Chris Skotchdopole did co-write the story with Larry Fessenden (who’s also a producer), one of the stalwarts of low-budget horror. None of the relationships in it are quite right and Skotchdopole and Fessenden get us straight onto that trail with opening scenes set at the wedding of Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck). A street guy, possibly the son of a gangbanger, Shane is also a writer and is currently in the middle of … Read more

The House of Laughing Windows

by
Restorer Stefano with girlfriend Francesca

Pupi Avati isn’t one of the big names of giallo and yet The House of Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono) easily stands alongside or even ahead of the best of Argento, Bava and Fulci. It’s a triumph not of concept or style, though it has both of those, but of a thousand careful craft decisions. It is simply a beautifully made film with a fabulous gothic eloquence, luxuriating in old places and odd faces as it tells a story about a picture restorer in 1950s Italy being menaced by characters from the church fresco he is working on. There’s a hint of Don’t Look Now in the idea, but really … Read more