Month: May 2026

Red Right Hand

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Close up of Orlando Bloom

We’re in Appalachia for Red Right Hand, latest film by the Nelms brothers, Eshom and Ian. And immediately having said Appalachia, the shades start to assemble. Poor lives on the margin. Cackling inbreeds. Illicit drugs. Attack dogs. Tattoos. Guns and hunting. God. The family. Male relationships that seem overly familiar. Check, check, check, check and check (plus a few more). No one seems overly intent on overturning the stereotypes in Orlando Bloom’s latest foray into action-hero territory. This he has been exploring, presumably since he and his agent sat around scratching their heads over what to do with his career – Lord of the Rings must have been lucrative but that was a … Read more

The Night Porter

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A naked Lucia dances for the SS

Problematical movies Exhibit A – The Night Porter. The story of a former guard at a concentration camp who meets up with an erstwhile prisoner some years later and starts a sexual relationship with her. Roger Ebert thought it “nasty”, Pauline Kael considered it “offensive” while Vincent Canby of the New York Times went for “a piece of junk”. Kael also described it as “veneered with redeeming social values”. Is it though? Even that is up for debate. The director Liliana Cavani based the film, so she said, on a conversation she had with a woman who’d been in one of the death camps and had fallen for a member of the SS. … Read more

Vesper

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Vesper peering through a crack

Ambitious sci-fi from Lithuania – but in English, before you switch off – Vesper is all about the world-building and the genre-tasting. One minute a coming-of-ager, another a love story, yet another a quest movie, its overriding vibe is the eco-apocalyptic thriller, set in a doomy world after the collapse of civilisation, where humans fight each other and an aggressive ecology for supremacy. Vesper Chronicles, the on-screen title actually proclaims, as if this were going to be the first of a series of movies. There is a Young Adult, almost Hunger Games aspect in its focus on a rugged young woman as its central figure. Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) lives out in a blasted … Read more

Monte Carlo

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Jeanette MacDonald and Jack Buchanan

Jolly and bright and unfashionable in so many ways – which just makes it better – Monte Carlo is also an Ernst Lubitsch film and so bubbles along like a thing demented. It has entirely uncool stars like Jack Buchanan and Jeanette MacDonald in the leads and a storyline taking repeated runs at the mistaken identity idea. MacDonald later became known for the films she made with Nelson Eddy, and is all the better without him here, as a flappy, silly, delightful countess who runs away on her wedding day from the oafish daddy’s-boy duke she’s meant to be marrying. In opening scenes that are textbook “Lubitsch touch” stuff and could come from a … Read more

Before the Fall

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Ale, with rifle, and the kids

A baroque apocalypse thriller and, in case it’s getting too existential for you, Before the Fall (originally Tres Diás) also adds a dab of serial-killer angst for good measure. This feature debut by director F Javier Gutiérrez made a big splash when it came out in 2008 and then quietly disappeared. Arriving three years before Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, it seems at first to ask the same question: how would you react to the news of an impending apocalypse? Alejandro (Victor Clavijo), living with his mother, is a disgruntled handyman who learns one day via TV bulletin that the world will end in three days. A gigantic meteor will eradicate any possibility of … Read more

100 Years of… The Adventures of Prince Achmed

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Prince Achmed fires an arrow

You don’t, in the normal run of things, expect a rape scene in old-time animation, but that’s what you get in 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the breakthrough for Lotte Reiniger, a pioneer in her field, artistically and technically. It tells the story of the an eastern prince who steps in to help his sister after an ugly African sorcerer makes a play for her. For his trouble the brother is whisked away on a magic flying horse, to a faraway realm where Princess Pari Banu, ruler of the spirit world of Wak Wak, beguiles him with her naked beauty. And he responds with the aforesaid rape. Unless I am very much … Read more

The Bride!

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Jessie Buckley as the Bride

Frankenstein’s unfortunate monster was put together out of offcuts and so is director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a furiously eclectic assemblage of body parts. Motivating breath, alas, is there none and so the film remains on the table, lifeless, a glorious mess of gorgeous odds and sods, twitching but refusing to draw breath. To summarise the main thrust of the plot, after a century alone Frankenstein’s monster – Frank here – decides he needs a wife, and arrives at the office of Dr Euphronious, renowned for her re-animation research. After some niceties, Frank makes his pitch to Euphronious and she flat-out refuses to build him a bride, on ethical grounds. He responds with … Read more

Le Doulos

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Jean-Paul Belmondo

Now considered a classic by the likes of Scorsese and Tarantino, Le Doulos got a harder ride when it came out in 1962. “Talkative and tiresome,” the New York Times called it. Maybe I caught it on a bad day, but I’m inclined to agree. When it comes to Jean-Pierre Melville, give me Le Samouraï, Army of Shadows or Un Flic any day. Only a fool would dismiss the film though, which is packed full of good things and is Melville to the end of its filmic digits. It’s all about masculine codes, in other words, or more specifically the breaking of them. Who among a gang of crooks is the snitch (The … Read more

ChaO

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ChaO in human form

Busy and strange, Japanese animation ChaO imagines a world where mermaids, mermen – merpeople? – commune regularly with humans, and where a lowly designer working for a shipping company becomes the romantic focus of attention of the daughter of the king of the sea. Make sure all your wits are primed when approaching this one, the plot details arrive at furious speed at the beginning – a fairytale princess, a fight with a monster, a mermaid, fantasy tales read in a book by an impressionable young man – before things settle down a touch as dogged reporter Juno finally tracks down his man and gets his scoop: the story behind the famous coupling … Read more

Knights of the Teutonic Order

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Danusia and Zbyszko embrace

1960’s Knights of the Teutonic Order is one of the most watched movies in Poland’s history. According to some sources, almost everyone in the country saw it when it was released and it remains popular to this day. What is it about this tale of proud Poles taking arms against an order of corrupt German clerics dominating their country, made less than 15 years after a German invasion had propelled Europe into the Second World War, that caught the attention? The historical parallels are obvious, but there was the added bonus of the film’s anti-clerical theme chiming with the anti-religious agenda of Poland’s communist overlords. There will be no pushback from that direction. … Read more