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Shelved for tax purposes then hauled back to improbable life – like its cartoon star Wile E Coyote – Coyote vs Acme made it through when Batgirl and Scoob!: Holiday Haunt fell by the accountancy wayside. But is it more than a “from the grave” resurrection sticking it to the bean counters? I laughed about … Read more
Barbara Stanwyck chews her way through another knotty melodrama in No Man of Her Own, a fraughtly plotted and deliciously implausible story about a desperate woman who gets into trouble after accidentally assuming another woman’s identity. But first, an introduction to the characters. In particular Helen Ferguson (Stanwyck), initially encountered wailing and distressed outside an … Read more
Would Motor City be a better film without the gimmick? Which is? No dialogue. Or not much anyway. Five lines, the blurbs say, though even that might be an exaggeration. Director Potsy Ponciroli made Old Henry a few years ago, and I liked that. So I gave him the benefit of the doubt and waded … Read more
This is The Great Gatsby no one talks about. Not the Baz Luhrmann one from 2013, or the Robert Redford one from 1974, but the 1949 version starring Alan Ladd as Jay Gatsby, the poor boy made good who’s trying to chummy up to old money and finds it comes at a cost. In 1949, … Read more
Translating as “set”, as in film set, Decorado is the animated tale of a rat who wants out of the rat race and has more inventiveness in its busy first ten minutes than in the whole of the recent Minions & Monsters. But be warned, it’s bleak, very very bleak. In a society run entirely … Read more
Sometimes called The Outrageous Baron Munchausen, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (originally Baron Prásil) is the better title. Karel Zeman’s fantastic and fantastical 1962 adaptation of Rudolf Erich Raspe’s 1785 publishing phenomenon is all about a European baron who can’t stop telling tall tales. He’s Fabulous as in inclined to fabulate – or make shit up, in … Read more
Play nice is the ultimate message of Mārama, which the IMDb describes as “a Maori gothic revenge horror set in Victorian England, 1859”. You won’t find me disagreeing. The “revenge horror” takes a while to come, but there’s plenty of Maori gothic in the interim. Or plain old gothic, served up with a Maori central … Read more
To that list of 1960s films about voyeurism add La Prisonnière, the great Henri-Georges Clouzot’s last film, his only (completed) one in colour and a worthy, if weird entrant in the canon containing Psycho, Peeping Tom and Blowup. There is definitely something very, very Hitchcock going on in this offering from 1968, made when Hitchcock … Read more
A popular and critically acclaimed novel somehow just doesn’t make it to the screen in Dirt Music, an Outback tale about people with broken lives trying to find romance. It’s the slushy sort of story often associated with women’s fiction – chick lit, if you like. Georgia (Kelly Macdonald) is out swimming naked in the … Read more
A spooky psychological drama, The Second Woman is often misdescribed as film noir but really it’s much closer to being overwrought melodrama of the sort Douglas Sirk used to make. That’s probably misdirection on my part – because there is no sotto voce examination of social mores going on here. Instead we’re asked to try … Read more
So here’s the set-up for Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Gail (Zoey Deutch) is a hairdresser in smalltown Kansas who’s been having a conversation with fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) about which celebrity each of them would like to have as their celebrity sex partner – a free pass, all just a fun fantasy. Tom … Read more
The films of the Catherine Breillat regularly run into trouble, often because of Breillat’s use of what looks like unsimulated sex. Fat Girl (aka À Ma Soeur aka Story of a Whale) isn’t as explicitly explicit as Romance – which featured a real porn star doing the business with a young actress (fake, she said; … Read more
