Latest Posts
With a new Fantômas film in the works, a quick look at the first one, Fantômas: À l’ombre de la guillotine (aka Fantomas: In the Shadow of the Guillotine), which came out in 1913. Which is, let’s face it, a hell of a long time ago. Remarkably, it stands up pretty well and is a … Read more
I’m amazed at how many of “the best films of 2025” have left me pretty cold. Die My Love joins the list alongside the likes of Sinners, The Mastermind and Bugonia – everyone loves them, but I thought they were just OK. I did like Die My Love, though, particularly the florid performance by Jennifer … Read more
Because Marcel Carné made Les Visiteurs du Soir in Nazi-occupied France, and because it’s about a realm invaded by the The Devil’s Envoys (the English title), it’s often seen as allegorical. Carné denied it to the end of his life. But his film works perfectly well as an allegory as long as you stop there … Read more
Loved by lovers of French film who can tell their Bresson from their Melville, The Mastermind is a touch inert if you come to it expecting what it’s billed as – an art-heist thriller. Instead Kelly Reichardt and her star, Josh O’Connor, cook up something altogether more speculative, meditative. Dull? We are largely denied the … Read more
I asked Gemini, Google’s AI thingie, what the best “abnormal psychology” film noir was, pretty certain it would say The Dark Mirror. It did. Along with In a Lonely Place and Night of the Hunter, a couple of other suggestions. In the halls of appreciation of old movies those last two get plenty of love, … Read more
Zach Cregger found his niche with Barbarians and double-whammies with Weapons, a horror movie so intensely focused on character that the horror could easily be removed and it would still work. Here they are, all these small townsfolk, warts and all, peccadilloes to spare. Julia Garner as Justine, the teacher of young kids who drinks … Read more
Made in 1964, in America’s Deep South – Alabama, to be precise – Nothing But a Man is, if nothing else, a remarkable document giving us an insight into the everyday lives of people on the wrong side of the racial divide at precisely the moment when the civil rights struggle was coming to some sort … Read more
Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary Architecton is a poetic rumination on the building blocks of settled societies – stone in the ancient time, concrete today. What about brick, you might immediately ask? It’s been around for at least six thousand years in its baked form, and even longer if we include unbaked mud. Not a squeak, not … Read more
Something of an outsider, an unknown quantity even by the standards of old cinema from far-flung corners of Europe, Teuvo Tulio is quite a maverick and The Way You Wanted Me (Sellaisena kuin sinä minut halusit, in the original Finnish) is a great example of what he does. A stark and direct melodrama, it’s a … Read more
Mock-serious bad times in New York City. Scorsese did it memorably in After Hours, and 40 years later Darren Aronofsky has a go with Caught Stealing, a gonzo nightmare missing a certain something. Comedy, I think, or the right comedic tone at any rate. Anyway, on the upside there’s Austin Butler as a dude in … Read more
Anyone for the fifth best British film of 1936, as voted for by the readers of the defunct Film Weekly? Secret Agent is one of a run of spy thrillers Alfred Hitchcock made in the 1930s. Sandwiched between The 39 Steps and Sabotage it’s the least compelling of the three, a misfire in many ways. … Read more
Old Guys R Us: Part Two – Sisu: Road to Revenge repeats the formula of the first movie, of the iron-hard old Finnish dude taking on unimaginable numbers of bad guys… and prevailing, in a vastly entertaining way. He’s John Wick in a beard, transposed back to the 1940s. First time around the enemy was … Read more
