July 2026 | MovieSteve

Donkey Skin

2026-07-21 by Steve

A big thing in France but barely talked about anywhere else, Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin (Peau d’âne), sometimes known as The Magic Donkey, possibly owes its failure to ring cultural bells globally to its plot, which is about a king trying to marry his own daughter – incest, in other words. It’s Catherine Deneuve as the daughter, trying to put the king off with one ruse after another. Jean Marais as the king, Delphine Seyrig as a fairy godmother reinforcing the young woman’s belief that sleeping with daddy is wrong, and Jacques Perrin as the prince of a neighbouring kingdom who falls for the disguised young woman after she goes on the run … Read more

Carolina Caroline

2026-07-20 by Steve

If you’re not familiar with the work of Adam Rehmeier, he made the harrowing The Bunny Game as a feature debut, later following up with Dinner in America, another distinctive, idiosyncratic film. Carolina Caroline is neither of those, in mood or intention. Instead it is a down-the-line crime drama seemingly designed to show Hollywood that Rehmeier can play quirk-free. It’s a Bonnie and Clyde kind of thing, with the emphasis firmly on the female party, a smart, hot young woman in a small nowhere town who one day realises a grift is taking place under her nose – a passing motorist is pulling it on the owner of the gas station where she works. … Read more

The Psychic

2026-07-19 by Steve

Tarantino’s proposed remake starring Bridget Fonda never happened and so we have only Lucio Fulci’s 1977 original of The Psychic (aka The Psychic, Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes aka Sette note in nero) to scare us, though in all honesty it’s not so much scary as an exercise in Italian gothic style and 1970s advertising imagery. Which sounds like a put-down but Fulci turns the sleek, airbrushed looks to his own ends, in a story about a young woman who sees dying people, in particular a woman at some unspecified time in the past being walled up alive in the palazzo belonging to her husband Francesco (Gianni Garko). It … Read more

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

2026-07-18 by Steve

Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert. A marketing award to whichever genius came up with that title for this epic rebrand of old product done with such polish and dash that it casts Elvis Presley anew – all over again. Baz Luhrmann is credited as the director but here he’s more an editor. Having come across tons of never-seen material in the vaults while researching his Elvis biopic a few years back, he decided to take a closer look at what he’d found, the raw footage to the Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and the Elvis on Tour movies. Undoubtedly this was prompted by the realisation that the celluloid itself was in astonishingly good … Read more

Broadway Melody of 1940

2026-07-17 by Steve

If it’s not quite the big deal it maybe ought to be, Broadway Melody of 1940 does do one great service to posterity: it brings together for the only time on screen Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, whose ferocious tap skills Astaire admired and even feared. The story is the corny Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers one of mistaken identities, with Powell as a successful Broadway star and Astaire as one half of a struggling song and dance act. Seeking to freshen up her act with some new blood, Clare Bennett (Powell) gets her agent to contact talented, committed Johnny Brett (Astaire), but instead winds up with his deadweight song-and-dance partner, King Shaw (George Murphy). … Read more

The Last One for the Road

2026-07-16 by Steve

Carlobianchi and Doriano and a table full of beer bottles

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Don Quixote, Lost in Translation, Waiting for Godot, The Last One for the Road (aka Le città di pianura) contains elements of all, without obviously borrowing from them. A “state of Europe/Italy” comedy of sorts, it follows two drunken has-beens – smalltime criminals who are waiting for their boss Genio to show up and in the meantime are drinking themselves to a standstill. It’s funny, amused, cock-eyed, nostalgic, a little bit 1990s, a touch Tarantino, and rests entirely on the performances of Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla as Carlobiancho and Doriano. Strange, old-fashioned names for a pair of fiftysomething archetypes who we meet utterly drunk and … Read more

Berlin Express

2026-07-15 by Steve

First of the so-called “Trümmerfilme”, after the German word for rubble, films shot in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when Germany lay in ruins. Berlin Express was directed by Jacques Tourneur and features a high-tone cast including Merle Oberon and Robert Ryan, with much of the action set on a train sweeping through Germany – Frankfurt a heap of bricks apart from the IG Farben building – and on to the eventual destination of Berlin. No one uses the word Nazi, which sets the tone of the piece, which is all about recovery rather than recrimination. On board the train representatives of the victorious powers – American Robert Lindley (Ryan), Brit … Read more

Midwinter Break

2026-07-14 by Steve

Unfashionable and not particularly worried about it, Midwinter Break is a showcase for the acting talents of Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds, who play a long-married couple taking a city break in Amsterdam. She bought them both the trip for Christmas and if he’s being honest he probably didn’t want to go but is not saying so. Because? That’s your film. A bit of infill. Stella and Gerry are originally from Northern Ireland but relocated years before to Scotland, after she got caught by a bullet during the Troubles. She was pregnant at the time. The child survived, but her ability to have more kids was taken from her. Now, Stella’s daughter is … Read more

Where Danger Lives

2026-07-13 by Steve

The film equivalent of being sent to sit on the naughty step, Where Danger Lives is where Robert Mitchum was put to cool off after a marijuana bust put him in the newspapers for all the wrong reasons. It is low-level, cheese-paring noir well below his pay grade and with not really enough plot to get it to the finish line. But the finish is spectacularly good and Mitchum puts his back into the role of the decent humanitarian doctor who falls for a bad girl and ends up on the run with her after her husband dies. Dr Jeff Cameron (Mitchum) is introduced reading a bedtime story to a girl in an … Read more

Two Prosecutors

2026-07-12 by Steve

What happens when a state goes mad and its leader starts to behave like a king, ruling by whim? Two Prosecutors (aka Zwei Staatsanwälte) is asking that big question right from its opening frame, in which state prosecutor Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov) arrives at a 1930s Soviet gulag and asks to see a prisoner. Other countries/regimes are also available. As the film goes on we’ll learn something about Kornev but Ukrainian writer/director Sergei Loznitsa, working off Georgi Demidov’s novel, holds back vital information and to an extent leaves us in the dark about him and about what’s going on. Two Prosecutors, the title says. Here’s Kornev, he’s one, but who’s the other one? All … Read more