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The “conquistador of the useless” is how Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald – known by the Peruvian locals as Fitcarraldo – is described at one point in Werner Herzog’s fourth collaboration with actor Klaus Kinski. It helps, watching this mad epic conceived on the grandest of scales, to remember that Herzog often described himself that way too. … Read more
Simple and powerful, Tori and Lokita is the latest example of a film by the Dardenne brothers, a film-making duo who these days have to clear a high bar to get real praise, one raised by their own string of good-shading-to-great films. Two Days One Night, The Kid with a Bike, Lorna’s Silence, pick a … Read more
Screwball but not comedy, 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum is less well known than its remake, 1953’s House of Wax, but more fascinating in many respects, particularly in its portrayal of liberated young women making their way in the world. There’s sex and drugs too, though you wouldn’t bother with it for those. The … Read more
Cheers aren’t what you get in an Ulrich Seidl movie but let’s give one anyway for his return to fiction after a ten-year absence, with Rimini, a glisteningly dark, drily amusing character study of a man who’d be funny if he wasn’t so pitiful. Actually, he’s quite funny too. Looking not a million miles away … Read more
Salomé, a notorious enterprise for the Russian-born, now-forgotten Hollywood great Alla Nazimova, its star, co-writer, co-director and producer, is the film that ruined her financially and brought an end to her time as a Hollywood player. It needs to be bad to justify the damage it caused to such a glittering career. It is. The … Read more
What happens when the constraints of civilisation are loosened? It’s the sort of question Michael Haneke asks in a series of films, Funny Games and Time of the Wolf most obviously. In Infinity Pool Brandon Cronenberg attacks the same subject, except from a typically Cronenbergian direction, but comes to more or less the same grim … Read more
From the moment Alfred Hitchcock adapted Strangers on a Train in 1951, Patricia Highsmith was hotly pursued by film-makers. Her stories have a plot, thrills, seedy glamour, black humour and the suggestion of transgressive sex, any element of which can be dialled up and down. As I write there have been approaching 40 film and … Read more
Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is a behemoth about Hollywood excess in the silent era, a feisty female ingenue’s rise and its biggest male star’s fall, and the arrival of the talkies and how that changed everything. It packs a lot in and moves at pace but whoah is it long. At three hours and a handful … Read more
This heist-gone-wrong movie starts with a heist going wrong. 1953’s Crime Wave (aka The City Is Dark) is a B movie and wastes no time hanging around. The setup is classic – within scant minutes of opening a cop is dead, one of the bad guys is in urgent need of a doctor and the … Read more
On a filthy rainy South Korea night a young mother abandons her baby, leaving it in the “baby box” – designated for just this thing – attached to a church. The next day, having changed her mind, she heads back to the church, only to find that a pair of “baby brokers” got to the box before … Read more
Everyone gets a raw deal in Raw Deal, a taut and dark film noir from 1948, directed by Anthony Mann, lit by the great John Alton and so often overlooked when Greatest Noir lists are being compiled. Its characters all come with a tragic flaw which writers John Higgins and Leopold Atlas are eventually going … Read more
Huesera: the Bone Woman opens and ends with spectacular images – of a gigantic golden Virgin Mary at a shrine to start, and of a writhing mass of naked zombie-like creatures to finish. In themselves they’re impressive but they also offer a distilled show-and-tell of the shift in tone Mexican director Michelle Garza Cervera has … Read more
