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Hard Truths must be Mike Leigh’s most straightforwardly enjoyable movie since Topsy Turvy. Which is probably all kinds of wrong, since it’s about a woman in the grip of a depression so profound and persistent that she’s almost learned how to live with it. Leigh likes these pithy titles – High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Naked … Read more
Organised race hate is a grift, the unusually prescient 1949 film Jigsaw points out, and is just another way of separating the poor and gullible from what little money they have. Donations, uniforms, other paraphernalia, it all adds up. Franchot Tone plays an assistant district attorney investigating the death of a printer. Who, it turns … Read more
It Was Just an Accident is the latest in a string of films from a director who officially does not make them. Iranian Jafar Panahi was sentenced to a 20 year ban on making films in his homeland in 2010. Since then he’s made six features, all in Iran. Among them, This Is Not a … Read more
Anthony Mann called Desperate his first proper movie, the one where he got to do what he wanted to do. Mann, now so famous for his westerns, had previously proved himself a master of film noir, as Desperate proves. This was the first of seven he’d crank out in 1947 and 1948. It’s a good … Read more
Billed as sci-fi, Happyend is actually closer to films like Dazed and Confused or The Last Picture Show. It catches a bunch of Japanese youngsters just as they start the transition away from high school and on to the next thing. If there are the end of times coming down the track, they are not … Read more
It’s only in B movies that the bad guy gets top billing. That’s the case with The Devil Thumbs a Ride, a showcase for Lawrence Tierney, playing a villain who looks like he’s been lifted out of the 1930s and dropped into this 1947 noir. Cold and deadly, side-of-the-mouth diction. He fits in perfectly with … Read more
As a title Preparation for the Next Life sounds a bit sci-fi, spiritual maybe. But in fact it’s set in the very real world of the immigrant experience, as seen through the eyes of a young Uyghur woman who has arrived in New York on the back of a truck and is now trying to … Read more
Stirringly democratic and winningly romantic, The Clock is one of Judy Garland’s best films. She sings not a note, you may be surprised to learn, but brings a tear to the eye with her portrayal of a sweet young miss having a whirlwind romance in surely the most New York New York ever committed to … Read more
Robert DeNiro turned it down and so Richard Gere wound up with another decent role, in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, a cool look at “heroic” types who have done little more than hitch a ride on a wave. Gere plays a crusading documentarian who, stricken with terminal cancer at the end of his life, is … Read more
The Woman on the Beach is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Designed as a dreamy, psychological tear through the unconscious, where libido is locked in a fight with other bits of the psyche, it wound up looking like it had been in a fight with itself. After a negative preview screening, panicked director Jean … Read more
As you might expect, Riefenstahl is a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl, “Hitler’s favourite film-maker”. The director of Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl’s career was first boosted and then destroyed by her association with the Führer. She insisted to the grim end – she died aged 101 in 2003 – that she was enthusiastic for … Read more
Very meta, especially for 1947, The Unsuspected is a crime thriller about a murder at the home of the host of a true-crime podcast – whoops, radio show. The show is called The Unsuspected too, and is hosted by Victor Grandison, those names suggesting he’s both victorious and grandiose. It’s obviously him wot dunnit, innit? Even … Read more
