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The odd thing about Holiday in Spain is that it was originally released in Smell-O-Vision under another title, Scent of Mystery. It flopped, even with the gimmick of various aromas being piped into cinemas as audiences watched. With another smelly film, Dead Lover, currently doing the rounds (writing this in March 2026) – it’s in Stink-O-Vision, … Read more
Absolutely one for the buffs, Resurrection is Bi Gan’s love letter and farewell to cinema. It’s dead is the overall message, but didn’t we have a lot of good times while it was here? A five-part compendium, each chunk different in terms of tone, look and genre, it’s a remarkable technical achievement, if nothing else. … Read more
The Man Who Cheated Himself is a prime example of a good movie ruined by bad casting. Lee J Cobb’s in this case, who’s meant to be playing a cop blinded by love and winding up on the wrong side of everything. If Cobb’s Lieutenant Ed Cullen is a poor sap being driven by his … Read more
28 Years and a Bit Years Later, as 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was never going to be called. It’s the 2026 sequel to 2025’s 28 Years Later, which came 18 years after 28 Weeks Later, and it started shooting as soon as Danny Boyle had handed over to his replacement and handed the … Read more
Redux Redux retools the high concept of Edge of Tomorrow, but instead of Tom Cruise being endlessly regenerated as an ever better fighting machine, it’s Michaela McManus as an endlessly vengeful mother repeatedly killing the man who killed her daughter, and visiting all the trillions of parallel universes to do so. Actually, Irene is hoping … Read more
Hit Man is not really about a hit man. It’s about a guy who pretends to be one to lure potential perps into showing their hand. He’s whatever the male version of the honey trap is, and in this fictionalised retelling of the story of real-life dude Gary Johnson he is played by Glen Powell. … Read more
Robert Young forever played a good guy and wound up on TV as nice doctor Marcus Welby MD. In They Won’t Believe Me he doesn’t and the film really benefits from the against-type casting. As we meet his character, Larry Ballantine, he’s in the dock in court, where his own lawyer is describing him as … Read more
Things change and things stay the same in Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhang-ke’s experimental movie inspired by the Covid pandemic. Locked down at home with nothing to do, Jia wondered if he could put something together using unused footage shot over the years – rehearsals for movies, location scouting, technical try-outs to see how … Read more
Like a yard sale of the junk in Tennessee Williams’s mind, Reflections in a Golden Eye is a trawl of pre-loved Southern gothic artefacts in various states of disrepair. Directed by John Huston in 1967, it was adapted from a novel by Carson McCullers – a Williams protégé. Brace yourselves. What might you expect to … Read more
Talking about runaway successes, Zootopia 2. Though you might not fully credit it, this movie made its $150 million budget back in 48 hours and, on the day I saw it, had already become the ninth-highest grossing movie of all time. It’s clearly made even more money since then. Not bad for a sequel, an … Read more
Threaded with religious sentiment like a 1970s Martin Scorsese or Abel Ferrara movie, 1948’s Cry of the City stars Richard Conte and Victor Mature as two Italian-Americans who knew each other as kids. Now grown up they’ve wound up on opposite sides of the law – Martin Rome (Conte) is a criminal languishing in a prison … Read more
I got sent a link to Haunters of the Silence by its director, Tatu Heikkinen, with a nice note attached. Would I like to review it? Yes, of course, though my heart sank slightly. Not because I have anything against indie Finnish directors who have made a film for nothing ($2,000!) with friends and family … Read more
