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For a while it looks like A Quiet Place Part II is perversely going to be a prequel story. We’re not in the post-apocalyptic world of the first film, where much of humanity is dead and ghastly monsters are picking off the survivors one by one. Instead we’re at a baseball game, where the pre-disaster … Read more
Barely ever really funny, The Money Pit is something of a slapstick classic all the same, a triumph of a kind of Hollywood film-making and playing that’s so precise that you have to admire it… even though you’ll probably not laugh. The scenario is lifted wholesale from the 1948 comedy Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, … Read more
Servants is a story about the collusion between the Catholic Church and the Czechoslovakian StB (its secret service) in the days of the Cold War. It’s also a beautifully made film, full of arresting cinematography and a soundtrack so haunting that it alone makes the film worth catching. The opening shot, of a car seen … Read more
There are two films called Asylum from 1972. One is typical of its era – a compendium horror produced by the Amicus studio, directed by Hammer regular Roy Ward Baker, written by Robert Bloch, of Psycho fame, and starring Peter Cushing. And so is the other, a fly-on-the-wall documentary taking seriously a countercultural moment at … Read more
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), what a treasure trove of spine-tingling musical goodies this film is. “Directed” by Questlove, whose role is really more curatorial and editorial, it’s a compendium of highlights from a series of six free concerts held on Sundays in Harlem from June to August 1969. … Read more
If the prolific Romanian director Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn does nothing else, it wins its lead actress an award for bravery. Its opening scenes feature Katia Pascariu in full-on sex with her screen husband, the pair of them putting it all on tape – her swinging tits, his erect cock, her … Read more
Decade of Fire is a mix of the dispassionate investigative documentary and the more personalised Who Do You Think You Are? style of “one person’s journey into the archive”. It works, not always and not entirely, but it works. Vivian Vazquez is our guide into the history of the South Bronx and the epidemic of … Read more
“John Wick with a Pig” is how Pig, starring Nicolas Cage, is often described. Fair enough, even if that only really works as a shorthand if you’ve got a big bag of “buts” handy. Admittedly, the plot is strangely similiar – loner loses favourite animal and goes on a payback jag. But though Cage and … Read more
A screen adaptation of Polish-born Jerzy Kosiński’s novel The Painted Bird probably should have been made before 2019. “Of all the remarkable fiction that emerged from World War II, nothing stands higher than Jerzy Kosiński’s The Painted Bird,” wrote Jonathan Yardley in The Miami Herald in a typical rave when the book first appeared in … Read more
The fresh and the familiar collide to good effect in Eighteen (or 18, if you like), a coming-of-age tale set on the Bulgarian equivalent of Prom Night, when a near-lifetime of schooling comes to an end and old friends stare at each other and at the future, suddenly seeing both in a different light. Being … Read more
Deerskin is a film about the film-making process, or a film about a man in the grip of a massive self-delusion, or one about the making of a serial killer, take your pick. It’s a comedy and it made me laugh several times, often simply because it is Jean Dujardin as the man at the … Read more
Charming rather than gripping, Weathering with You is a bizarre mix of the everyday and the fantastical, a story set in a world where it never stops raining, unless you happen to know a “sunshine girl” who can bring the weather to a standstill. That mix – of normal and weird – will be familiar … Read more
