Latest Posts
Good Night Oppy tells the story of two robot explorers sent to Mars in 2003 by Nasa. The idea was for them to drive about collecting samples of rock and soil, with the ultimate aim of proving that what look like dried up rivers from Earth are in fact just what they look like, old … Read more
Europe is finished! Lars Von Trier’s finale to his Europa trilogy – Europa – makes summaries and predictions about life on a continent dragging a long, dark history behind it. All three films – The Element of Crime, Epidemic and now Europa – work in the same way, as grim anti-pantomimes of studied awfulness, presented in … Read more
Tár, not Tar – even in the title of this drama about a world-famous conductor’s epic fall from grace there are hints as to what exactly caused it. Writer/director Todd Field, in his first film since 2006’s Little Children, structures this grand return like a symphony, with a big opening statement à la Mahler’s Fifth, … Read more
In 1977, inspired by the success of Jaws, Japan’s Toho film corporation decided that it too wanted a slice of that action and so cast about for something similar. House is what they got. A film about a big marauding thing which consumes people indiscriminately, it ticks that one box at least. Commercials director Nobuhiko … Read more
The Viola Davis “is there nothing she can’t do?” list gets a bit longer with The Woman King, an action epic with issues it wants to address, but first it wants to show us Davis, oiled up and charging into battle as the warrior commander of a deadly elite troupe of female African soldiers in … Read more
Remember Victor Laszlo, the most boring character in Casablanca? If you’ve ever wondered what Victor did next when he flew off into the night with his wife Ilsa, leaving Humphrey Bogart and Claude Reins to play bromantic footsie on the airport tarmac, Watch on the Rhine is as near as you’re going to get to … Read more
A film “by Rosa Ruth Boesten and George Anthony Morton” it says at the beginning of Master of Light. Given that Boesten is this documentary’s director and Morton its subject, that’s an unusual way of putting it. And yet. It’s the story of a former drug dealer, a man who spent his entire 20s in … Read more
One of the “unholy trinity” of British folk-horror films of the era, 1971’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw sits between Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973) – there are a growing number of fans but it’s not as well known, cultish or highly regarded as the other two. I’m guessing the scrappy narrative is … Read more
Social media is never mentioned in God’s Country. No one even so much as pulls out a smartphone. And yet that seems to be what it’s about – the rush to judgment in a world of hot takes and the corrosive effect that that sort of behaviour has on public discourse. Thandie Newton is the … Read more
Another film that’s hard to like but easy to admire, Speak No Evil comes hot on the heels of a recent example of the same – Soft & Quiet – which I watched last week. Both set up and stoke a tension that becomes so janglingly unpleasant that, for this home viewer, pausing, getting out … Read more
Fans of plotless movies will love The Appointment, an increasingly cultish British horror from 1982. The only feature by Lindsey C Vickers, it was regularly described as lost until the British Film Institute got themselves together and released it as part of their Flipside series of under-appreciated left-fielders. As to plot, it’s the title. There … Read more
Misleading title, Too Late for Tears, suggesting there was a time for tears at all. By the time this 1949 film noir is done, the story of a woman rotten to the core, it’s clear that the time for tears – from her, or for her – might well be never. It’s Lizabeth Scott’s chance … Read more
