Month: March 2026

Nowhere Special

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John gives Michael a ride on his shoulders

The terminal-illness weepie needs a firm hand or it can run off all over the place. Nowhere Special is a great case in point. Writer and director Uberto Pasolini keeps a tight grip, and James Norton’s impassioned but restrained performance is a thing of wonder. It’s so good that – as happens with proper acting – barely anyone noticed him when it came to awards time. Check it out, though. This is an undeniably simple film, but like a fine meal made from a few good ingredients, it just all comes together. Norton plays John, a window cleaner with some non-specific cancer. The entirety of Nowhere Special consists of John trying to find new … Read more

Deluge

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Peggy Shannon as Claire

For anyone convinced post-apocalyptic movies are a recent phenomenon, here’s Deluge, a remarkable film from 1933. It’s got all the stuff you might expect from a big disaster movie and some thoughtful stuff you might not. Some of it you might even recognise – the makers of The Day After Tomorrow paid direct homage to this movie when they destroyed New York with a massive tsunami. Like The Day After Tomorrow we’re dropped down right in the middle of things. The film opens with a breakneck montage. The barometer is dropping and scientists are expressing concern. Ships are being called back to port, planes and airships (gratifyingly 1930s) are being grounded. As the … Read more

Sirât

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Esteban and Luis in the middle of a rave

If ringing the changes is the big challenge of genre cinema, Sirât pulls it off brilliantly. Occasionally the workings of writer/director Óliver Laxe’s mind are visible – how can I catch the audience off guard? Mostly they’re not. And that’s probably down to the people and the places – both unusual. It’s two genres in one, really. In one, a father and son are trying to track down a missing daughter/sister in Morocco – a road movie. In the other the father/son brush up against a contingent of old ravers, the ones who didn’t go home when the party finished, and end up hooking up with them, certain that they will lead them to the … Read more

Road House

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Lily (Ida Lupino) seen from the back

Road House is a bad movie full of good things – yes, that is the sort of line often trotted out by the terminally indecisive or foolishly fixated when they don’t want to just come right out and condemn something. But in this case it’s true. Why it’s bad first: it’s a film suggesting it’s about one certain person when it’s about another. The several good things: the acting by Ida Lupino and Richard Widmark plus the crackling dialogue. And the cinematography is pretty tasty too. And, before going any further, there is no connection to the Patrick Swayze movie of four decades later, though both stories take place at a road house, … Read more

100 Nights of Hero

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Maika Monroe as Cherry

100 Nights of Hero re-invents the One Thousand and One Nights, aka The Arabian Nights, aka the story of Scheherazade, making sex and gender dynamics more explicit even than they were in the original stories and packaging everything up like a gift of Turkish delight wrapped in gossamer, drenched in perfume, and then swaddled in silk. Don’t come for realism, in other words. Instead director Julia Jackman defiantly heads into the realm of the fantastical, the exotic, the exquisite. Her Middle East is one of grand viziers and curly slippers rather than mad mullahs and nuclear enrichment facilities. So, we all know the Scheherazade story. A wily virgin bride, the latest in a … Read more

A Woman’s Secret

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Marian leans over the body of Susan

Thriller? Farce? A Woman’s Secret eventually collapses under the weight of its own indecision but until it does it’s a rapid-fire piece of brilliance, full of sparkling wit, weirdness, coded aberrant sexuality and lethal shenanigans including one woman trying to kill another, and that’s all in the first opening scenes. It was a flop, and it’s easy to see why. Read it as a thriller and it’s no good at all. But watch it as a camp front-of-curtain entertainment by showbiz folks for showbiz folks and it makes a lot more sense. The key roles are played by Gloria Grahame, who plays a big radio singer, who in opening scenes informs us that … Read more

The Wrecking Crew

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Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista head to head

My first movie from 2026. And because it was released in January, I’m not expecting much of The Wrecking Crew. The prestige movies come at the back end of the year, so as to be fresh in the minds of voters when awards season gets underway (roughly, November to February/March). Not that The Wrecking Crew is the sort of film that is ever lined up for anything at all, except the appreciation of fans of movies like this. It’s Jason Momoa and Dave Baustista, before we go any further, playing a pair of estranged, muscley Hawaiian brothers thrown back together when their dad dies unexpectedly. It turns out that Dad possessed something the … Read more

The Iron Curtain

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Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews

Winston Churchill made his “iron curtain” speech on 5 March 1946. In late 1947, 20th Century-Fox went into production with The Iron Curtain, one of a rake of movies designed to prove to the House Un-American Activities Committee that its assertion – “subversive” Hollywood doesn’t make anti-communist films – was baseless. The fact that filming started two days after the “Hollywood Ten” had been blacklisted for refusing to answer HUAC’s questions is also significant. Considering its whens and wheres, the resulting film is a remarkably sophisticated work – it’s not just anti-communist propaganda but also a coded rebuke to the likes of Senators McCarthy and J Parnell Thomas and their prescriptive view of what … Read more

Diabolik

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Diabolik in his mask

What sort of a supervillain has his secret lair in his girlfriend’s back garden? Why not his own turf? While we’re about it, why does Diabolik – the title of the film and the name of its antihero – lift so much of its plot from Fantomas, another European masked villain? If those are the sort of questions you’re asking while watching this film then it probably isn’t working for you. A stew, a pastiche, Diabolik is bits of Bond stirred together with a sliver of The Pink Panther and then spritzed with Italian glamour. We are not here for originality, but for cars and girls, mid-century modernism and split screens, hot women … Read more

The Locket

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Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum head to head

A locket opens once, to reveal what’s within. The 1946 movie The Locket, on the other hand, keeps on opening. Flashback follows flashback, with more information delivered each time the hinge creaks ajar. What’s inside is sort of special, sort of irritating. This is a film whose most difficult bits are quite easy to follow. It’s the rest of it that gets a touch troublesome. That flashback-within-flashback structure is the film’s USP. Otherwise it’s a mid-1940s aberrant-psychology drama focusing on one Nancy Patton (Laraine Day). As the curtain rises Nancy is about to get married to big swell John Willis (Gene Raymond) at a society wedding. But then Dr Blair (Brian Aherne) sits … Read more