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The bare bones of ace provocateur Andrzej Zulawski’s final film, 2015’s Cosmos, are easy to lay out. A writer called Witold goes to Portugal to write a book. He is staying in a French-speaking private house, the sort of place where everyone eats dinner together in the evening. While there he strikes up a friendship … Read more
Frank Grillo is the best thing about Lamborghini: the Man behind the Legend, putting force and subtlety into his portrayal of Ferruccio Lamborghini, the farmer’s son who wanted to make tractors, later the tractor manufacturer who became a producer of high-end sports cars. Choose your metaphor – a vehicle that never quite gets going, a … Read more
Dangers on a train? If it’s jeopardy on board a speeding locomotive you want, The Narrow Margin is the way to go. Made for buttons, shot in 13 days and with no big tentpole stars, it made the name of director Richard Fleischer, a B-movie guy bumped straight up to the big time once it … Read more
Terence Davies struggled to raise the finance for Benediction, as he does so often with his films. There’s no multiplex demand for Emily Dickinson (subject of his last feature, 2016’s A Quiet Passion) or Edith Wharton (2000’s The House of Mirth), he’s told, and in any case the uncompromising Davies isn’t the sort of writer/director … Read more
When it’s remembered at all, 1981’s Cutter’s Way is often lumped in with All the President’s Men, The Parallax View and conspiracy dramas from the 1970s. But it’s much more at home in the company of 1970s noirish murder thrillers like Chinatown, or, most obviously, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Apart from mis-categorisation its other … Read more
Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898), the focus of writer/director Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, isn’t that big a deal outside the Germanosphere. Inside it, though, it’s a different matter. A huge number of documentaries have been made about her in Germany and Austria, going all the way back to 1921. The interest remains fervent in the 21st … Read more
The usual description of Jean Renoir’s 1939 classic La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) as a swingeing/coruscating/blistering (or some such) indictment of the ruling class on the eve of the Second World War misses something – it’s a farce, and a funny one, done at breakneck speed. Sure, the swingeing etc etc … Read more
Between August 2000 and July 2001, Iranian serial killer Saeed Hanaei murdered 16 women in the holy city of Masshad, Iran, in what he claimed was a jihad against decadence – Hanaei’s victims were either prostitutes or drug users or both. Holy Spider tells the story of the “spider killer” – he lures them to his … Read more
Talking of twice, there are two good reasons why reviews of the movie The Postman Always Rings Twice almost invariably mention the book’s author, James M Cain. Cain’s name has no real resonance today, but his book was Fifty Shades of Grey shade of famous in 1934 and made a celebrity of the author. As … Read more
There’s much aggro with agri-business in Percy Vs Goliath, the – surely no surprise – David and Goliath tale of a Sesketchewan farmer taking on the agri-biotech conglomerate Monsanto after the company accused him of patent infringement. It’s a true story. In 1997 a pious, frugal, hard-working 70-ish farmer was suddenly landed with a lawsuit … Read more
1980’s The Hard Way sounds like the answer to several questions in a quiz with a special round on esoteric movie trivia. What’s the only film that Patrick McGoohan and Lee Van Cleef starred in together? What’s the only screen acting performance of the novelist Edna O’Brien? Michael Dryhurst has directed only one film – … Read more
As solidly made as the shoes of its subject, though not as imaginative, Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams does exactly what it sets out to do – tell the life story of Salvatore Ferragamo, the man who puts shoes on Dietrich, Garbo, the Duchess of Windsor and Ava Gardner and built an empire based on high-end … Read more
