Month: February 2026

Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay

by
Françoise

When the boomers were young, they were youth-obsessed like no other generation. 1971’s Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (Morgane et ses nymphes) captures the febrile insecurity of a generation whose claim to specialness was its own youth, in a story about bright young women, already feeling the years aged only 20, being offered immortality by an ageless vamp. The opening shot – a young woman naked, surrounded by old women clothed, some sort of black mass or diabolical chastisement going on – sets the tone, though director Bruno Gantillon then pulls way, way back after the opening credits, in a change of tone so startling it’s camp. Suddenly we’re on holiday with … Read more

The History of Sound

by
David and Lionel

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in a film together? Sold to that salivating wreck at the back of the room. The History of Sound has pulled off a casting coup, that’s for sure. Two of the hotmost of actors right now in the same movie. If you were to take a guess as to what sort of movie that might be – given their CVs of sexy and queer-adjacent stuff – you might go for something like a Brokeback Mountain remake. And that’s just what this is, dressed up in a different era’s clothes and with the two men committing themselves to the roles as a pair of students who meet at Boston … Read more

Dead Reckoning

by
Lizabeth Scott and Humphrey Bogart stare straight into camera

Dead Reckoning cashes in on the Humphrey Bogart persona big time – a drawl and a rough and ready way with women but beneath it all a courtly gent with a thirst for truth. It was made in 1946 when peacetime mopping-up was the order of the day. War is over. Men are returning to where they came from. Things are going back to normal. Or that’s what’s meant to be happening, at any rate. As we meet Bogart’s Rip Murdock, he’s covered in blood, scared and on the run. If this is a reset then something has gone wrong. With plenty of voiceover from Bogart, and the useful shimmer of an extended … Read more

Alone in Berlin

by
Otto and Anna Quangel face each other over the dinner table

During the Second World War, a Berlin couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, waged a two-person war against the Nazi regime. Prompted by the death of their son at the Front, they embarked on a campaign of writing seditious postcards and leaving them all over the city for people to find. The cards urged their fellow countrymen to rise up against Hitler and join the German resistance. Being just little postcards, they weren’t much of a statement, maybe, but they were enough to make the authorities to sit up and take notice. In 1947 writer Hans Fallada published Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone), a novel about the Hampels and their … Read more

Showbiz Kids

by
A young Henry Thomas and family

I’m reasonably sure Alex Winter is fine about being the one in Bill and Ted who isn’t Keanu Reeves. Showbiz Kids is part of the reason why I think that. The latest in a stream of fascinating documentaries taking in subjects as various as the downloading revolution (2013’s Downloaded), government secrecy (2018’s The Panama Papers) and Frank Zappa (2020’s Zappa), his latest takes in the landscape of the movie brat, the child star, focusing not so much on the obvious benefits as the near-bottomless downside. Like his earlier docs, this is well informed, humane, intelligent and thoughtful. In interviews publicising his films Winter comes across as someone who is fulfilled in his work, … Read more

Night Has a Thousand Eyes

by
Edward G Robinson, John Lund and Gail Russell publicity shot

If it’s a really good Edward G Robinson performance you’re looking for, can I suggest Night Has a Thousand Eyes, a knotty little potboiler elevated by Robinson. Out of gangster mode he was a versatile actor who could bring home the goods in all sorts of roles. Here he’s a stage magician who gets spooked when the phoney predictions he offers audiences start coming true. So spooked that he gives it all up and flees, away from the woman he loves – a premonition has told him she’ll die if he stays – and away from the best friend who will become stinking rich by investing in oil, another fulfilment of John Triton’s … Read more

Crown Vic

by
Nick and Ray on the job

Crown Vic goes by the title Bulletproof in the UK and Protect and Serve in Australia, because barely anyone in those countries has any idea what a Crown Vic is. Maybe not that many in the USA do either. So I’ll tell you. It’s the Ford Crown Victoria cop car, the black and white one that’s been speeding off after bad guys in movies (and on the streets) for at least 20 years, from the start of its production run in 1992. It was made in Canada, ironically enough for a car so iconic in US culture, and is roomy, well built and has rear-wheel drive – so it’s good around corners. Real-life … Read more

The Amazing Mr. X

by
Turhan Bey as Mr X

The only really normal person in The Amazing Mr. X, Richard Carlson’s Martin Abbott, is presented as a complete dope. It’s that sort of film – exotics, psychotics, psychics, camp conmen and vamps circle each other while boring old Martin sits stupidly at the centre. The two real reasons to watch are Cathy O’Donnell, again effortlessly sexy as she was in They Live by Night. She plays the concerned sister trying to get her widowed sibling Christine (Lynn Bari) to marry again. To… you guessed it… chump and dullard Martin. Christine is understandably hesitant. Martin clearly a mistake. But Christine is also reluctant to let go of the hope that husband Paul (Donald Curtis) … Read more

The Secret Agent

by
The secret agent by his yellow VW Beetle

It’s never entirely clear what’s going on in The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto), a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller from Brazil with lots of good hair and tasty roles for old dudes. Director/writer Kleber Mendonça Filho doesn’t even make clear until right near the end that it’s all taking place in flashback, yet another veil between the audience and his protagonist, Wagner Moura’s secret agent – of sorts. There’s a lot of good things to say about this film but the plot is not easy to talk about. There just isn’t that much to it – Moura’s Marcelo/Armando/Fernando (depending on who he’s talking to) returns to his native Recife at carnival time, possibly on … Read more

The Long Night

by
A contemplative Joe

The Long Night is a remake of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Lève hoping to do for American audiences what Carné’s film had done for the French – wow them. It was a flop, in spite of having a good cast, a fine director and top flight technical team. In case anyone wanted to make a direct comparison, before it came out RKO took the precaution of buying up all the prints of Carné’s film and destroying them. Luckily, not absolutely all of them, so now we can enjoy the Carné original and watch it alongside the remake to work out what went wrong. I’ll just say it here – timidity is the … Read more