Month: September 2025

Rotation

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Hans and brother-in-law Kurt

German film-makers of the post-Second World War era weren’t exactly falling over each other examining the country’s recent history. Which makes Rotation special. In episodic scenes it attempts a cool and not-too-political examination of what had possessed Germans to sign up to the Nazi project, and what Hitler had cost them in return. Significantly, it was made in Communist-controlled East Germany rather than the West. In the DEFA studio, the famous UFA of Lang, Murnau and Wiene rebadged, and is directed by Wolfgang Staudte, who had been responsible for Murderers Among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns), the first Trümmerfilm (“rubble film”) of the post War era. If you’ve seen David Lean’s This … Read more

The Prosecutor

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Donnie Yen with a gun

Genres collide! Actually, in The Prosecutor, they don’t. Two distinct species of movie live separate lives in this odd courtroom drama with martial arts action bolted on. Strangely, it works, because Donnie Yen, who stars and directs, has decided to keep them as separate entities – he gives us a bit of this and then a bit of that and doesn’t try too hard to make the two genres cohabit. Even so, those gear changes are awesomely noisy. The story is based on the real case of Ma Ka-kin, a Hong Kong kid who took delivery of a parcel of cocaine at his house, not knowing what it was, and wound up – … Read more

Angels Hard as They Come

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Scott Glenn as Long John

Hippies! Bikers! Bikers! Hippies! They’re not really the same thing but 1971’s Angels Hard as They Come (aka Angel Warriors) doesn’t care. Get the women to take their clothes off now and again, add in some yowling rock boogie. Long hair! Marijuana! Yay – we got ourselves an exploitationer. Of course it’s a Roger Corman movie, since he specialised in vibe-adjacent movies designed to squeeze a dollar from the latest fad. Here he’s working off the back of Easy Rider and, as was Corman’s trick, he’s got some good people in to assist. This was the first movie Jonathan Demme wrote, along with his mate from advertising Joe Viola, who took on directing … Read more

Materialists

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Lucy and Harry dance

Celine Song’s follow-up to 2023’s Past Lives is disappointing if you’re expecting Materialists to be more of the same – exquisite slow-burn romance done with a sadist’s sense of deferred gratification. Instead Materialists is… a satire? An attempt at a takedown of When Harry Met Sally soppiness? A reckoning with Clueless, Bridget Jones or Jane Austen’s Emma, as if to atone for having, in Past Lives, made some sort of modern classic? I don’t know. Ask Song’s therapist. What, ladies – this film takes aim at women – do eligible young women want? A financially sorted guy who has his own hair and a status job (finance), it seems. Tall, tall is mentioned several … Read more

Bitter Rice

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Silvana Mangano and Raf Vallone

Italian neorealism meets the crime drama in 1949’s Bitter Rice (Ris Amaro), Giuseppe De Santis’s gritty fable about a pair of petty thieves joining a horde of itinerant workers to plant and harvest rice. If drama is life minus the boring bits, De Santis is aware that neorealism at its worst can be a bit like life plus extra boring bits. So he brightens things up with crime thrills and a cast full of good-looking young things. In case we’re still not feeling it, more often than is absolutely necessary he’ll poke his camera into the cleavage of a few of his female stars as well. The thieves are played by Vittorio Gassman … Read more

The Christmas Break

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Uncle Jack with the nephews

You know what you’re getting with a Christmas movie – after a trudge out in the cold comes the good cheer. Whether it’s the Santa Claus no one believes is really Santa (A Miracle on 34th Street), the old grouch abandoning his curmudgeonly ways (A Christmas Carol), or the malevolent Father Christmas threatening peace on earth who is eventually dehorned (Rare Exports), the Christmas movie maps out its obstacles early on and then sets about clambering over them. There are quite a few in The Christmas Break but the biggie is whether nice Chicago couple Caroline (India Mullen) and Jack (Justin Long) are going to have children or not. He’s dead keen and … Read more

Gaslight

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Bella is seized by the shoulder by her husband

This Gaslight, the 1940 version, shouldn’t really exist. When MGM decided to remake the British original in 1944 as a star vehicle for Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, they tried to destroy the original prints, as if the 1940 film had never existed at all – a case of gaslighting Gaslight? Bergman and Boyer are good in the remake, and they have alliteration on their side. But so do (Anton) Walbrook and (Diana) Wynyard, in Thorold Dickinson’s excellently creepy original. The plot in a thumbnail. He’s gaslighting her into thinking she’s mentally unstable. Why? So she won’t ask too many questions about what’s going on under her roof. To the point where she … Read more

Together

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Millie and Tim seen from below

Alison Brie and Dave Franco are a couple in real life and in excitable quarters this fact alone earns Together extra kudos. It’s a talking point, but the Brie/Franco connection doesn’t otherwise make any difference to this movie. They are fine, separately and together, as people whose too-close relationship shifts from the figurative to the literal in a dire and grisly way. We know this before it happens because a pre-credits sequence has told us so, in a tone-setting mini-drama in which two separate dogs have wound up fused together in a gruesomely icky way. Which is what’s coming down the pipe for Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco) once they head out into … Read more

The Fall of the House of Usher

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Madeline Usher swathed in chiffon

Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher is surely the best version of the Edgar Allan Poe story ever. Loved by director Kurosawa, revered by critic Roger Ebert, it perversely only seems to exist in streaming and hard-copy versions that don’t do it justice. This is one of the best gothic chillers ever made – why doesn’t it look better than this? Possibly because it’s a silent movie, and they tend to get the silent treatment? Luis Buñuel worked on it too, so there’s another reason it should be more respectfully treated, though he did walk off halfway through, appalled at Epstein’s cavalier treatment of Poe’s story. But it remains true … Read more