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Persistently undead, always on point, it takes more than a stake and some garlic to keep the Carpathian count in his box. This Dracula is one of several outings for the thirsty aristocrat and pretenders to his crown in recent years. As well as a recent Nosferatu, other high-profile entries on a long list include … Read more
Going only off the title, I thought Daughters of Darkness was going to be a typical early 1970s vampire movie, featuring breasty young goths with prosthetic teeth wafting around in chiffon. My prejudices. I was partly right – it is from the early 1970s, and it is about vampires of a sort. There are breasts … Read more
Imagine a standing ovation lasting for 19 minutes – enough time to have a bath. That’s what Sentimental Value got when it was shown at Cannes. Where, admittedly, they like this sort of thing – European, dense, non-genre, self-referential, serious, full of unsympathetic characters and recalling auteurs of the past. Bergman most obviously, and Persona in … Read more
Fantômas: L’échafaud magique (aka Fantomas: The Magic Scaffold) is the first of four feature-length adaptations made in the 1980s for French TV. No less than Claude Chabrol directed this first one, with Juan Luis Buñuel (son of Luis) picking up numbers two and three, before Chabrol returned to round the series off. If you know … Read more
Exhibiting Forgiveness is the sort of film I don’t naturally gravitate towards. It’s about human feelings. It’s heartfelt. It holds out the possibility of positive change in a world stuck in a rut. It’s a Sundance movie. Nothing wrong with Sundance movies but, as an entirely unfair generalisation, they do seem to exhibit a belief … Read more
There are two decent films based on the Majczek and Marcinkiewicz case, Railroaded! and the better known Call Northside 777. The real-life case revolved around a miscarriage of justice resulting in two young men being sentenced to 99 years in jail for the murder of a cop. The Majczek and Marcinkiewicz case scandalised the mid-1940s … Read more
Park Chan-wook probably hit peak cultural clout with 2003’s Oldboy. No Other Choice reminds us yet again that he’s still here, and has been knocking out good films ever since. If The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave and a clutch of others don’t quite get the coverage that Oldboy and the other two films of … Read more
Apparently Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio were discussing a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel. It never happened, but we do at least have the 1948 original, a study of two flawed men in the Japanese equivalent of a film noir setting. On the one side a gangster played by Toshirô Mifune. On the other … Read more
Marvel you probably know, Misfits possibly not. Hi-Five is a bit of both – the superhero powers go to a bunch of high school kids in this soaraway South Korean actioner that’s obviously good from its opening moments. And it pretty much stays that way to the end. Pacy, witty, with likeable characters and a … Read more
Flesh and the Devil was Greta Garbo’s third Hollywood movie after arriving from Europe aged 20 in 1925, and it’s the one where everything suddenly clicks. She has the right director (Clarence Brown), the right director of photography (William H Daniels) and the right co-star (top-billed John Gilbert aka The Great Lover). Originally it was … Read more
The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren) started life as a film about a woman with a talking vulva. Then writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt decided to come at the same idea – the onerous demands put on young women – by taking a second run at the Cinderella fairy tale. The resulting debut feature introduces a really … Read more
The plot’s terrible but the mood is tasty in All the Colors of the Dark (Tutti I colori del buio), an Italian/Spanish giallo from 1972 that does its best – and breast – work early on. The opening sequence is formidably unsettling. A lurid montage of nudity, distortion, doubled imagery, a hideous pregnant woman in a fright … Read more
