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Federico Fellini’s 1953 breakthrough I Vitelloni is often translated as The Bullocks. The Young Bucks would be better, since it’s the story of a group of young Italian guys – all of them pretty good looking, all of them with a high opinion of themselves – who do very little with their time apart from … Read more
Borgman is one of those head-scratching “what what?” movies which would be entirely transformed if the writer/director gave us access to a vital piece of missing information. But Alex van Warmerdam doesn’t, and so we watch and try to piece together what’s going on from clues scattered throughout, like following Hansel and Gretel’s trail through … Read more
By general consent a classic, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre also won three Oscars – best director and screenplay for John Huston and best supporting actor for Walter Huston (his father) – and is one of those films that also get film-makers dewy eyed. Stanley Kubrick named it one of his faves (in 1963 … Read more
Emergency is a funny name for a comedy but then it’s a funny sort of film, one that combines warm performances, likeable characters and high anxiety in a way that threatens at every turn to neutralise itself but never quite does. High wire stuff. It’s the “big night out goes wrong” sort of comedy that … Read more
Production on Larks on a String (Skrivánci na niti) started during the Prague Spring, an eight month period in Czechoslovakia when political liberalisation under the rule of new Communist First Secretary Alexander Dubček looked set to transform the country. It was not to be. By August 1968 the experiment was over, Soviet tanks were rolling … Read more
Sandra Bullock enters “getting too old for this shit” (© Mel Gibson/Danny Glover) in The Lost City, a knockabout adventure designed to be taken with an ironic pinch of whatever you fancy. Park critical faculties at the door and dive in. Explicit reference is made to Bullock’s antiquity at several points but actually the remarkable … Read more
At first glance One Minute of Darkness, last of the Dreileben trilogy, seems to be the most straightforward of the lot. A honest-to-goodness cat-and-mouser. On the one hand the escaped murderer Molesch, who has been little more than a bad smell in the first two films. On the other a cop on a mission to … Read more
The work of a genius though not quite a genius work, Mad God is a crazy phantasmagorical ride into a hellish underworld, a stop-motion encylopaedia of styles, some newly minted, others borrowed, which took 30 years to finally finish by its creator, Phil Tippett. If you don’t know Tippett, he’s an animator who’s won Oscars … Read more
Charlie Chaplin started making his film City Lights in one era and released it in another. In the three years the picture was in production, an epochal shift occurred as Hollywood abandoned the silent movie and went wholesale over to talkies. When Chaplin started shooting what was intended to be his biggest picture to date … Read more
Askel Vogt’s The Innocents takes a romantic notion about children – that they know something adults don’t – and gives it a damn good spanking. The result is one of the moodiest, creepiest and most unsettling films about childhood ever made. There’s a touch of the brilliant 1961 film also called The Innocents, a bit … Read more
An A team of acting and technical talent bring their A game to Roxie Hart, the tale of an innocent woman who pleads guilty to a murder in the hope that it’ll further her stage career. The law as an extension of showbusiness, the corrupting effect of the media, never mind the 21st century, this … Read more
Starting with its title and ending at infinity, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a “more is more” kind of movie that looks as if it was designed to be the last word in multiverse sci-fi. The plot is Matrix-shaped – nobody becomes somebody – but instead of a young dumb male as its protagonist, … Read more
