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Decoy is a tightly wound, plot-driven noir from producer/director Jack Bernhard, made in an attempt to turn Bernhard’s British wife, “Miss Jean Gillie” as she’s billed, into a Hollywood star. It didn’t work, though Gillie is actually very good as Bernhard’s female lead. Anticipating the femme fatale character of Gloria Grahame to some extent, complete … Read more
The war in Ukraine cannot end well if 2000 Meters to Andriivka is anything to go by. A bulletin from the frontline during Ukraine’s counter-offensive in 2023, it paints a bleak picture of two countries at war, one of them fighting for its life, the other kicking sand in its face. (As I type in … Read more
Night Editor started life as a popular radio show supposedly telling stories inspired by listeners’ letters. This 1946 movie spin-off, based on the episode titled Inside Story, was meant to be the first of a series. But that never came to be, and so we have only this as a suggestion of what might have … Read more
A supernatural comedy just like Hollywood used to make – that’s the big idea behind Eternity, Irish indie film-maker David Freyne’s arrival in the bigtime, a knowing nod to Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch with a touch of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death thrown in for fun. To be fair to Freyne … Read more
“This is the new Dick Powell,” the trailer insists. “Rougher. Tougher than in Murder, My Sweet.” Cornered is indeed the “new Dick Powell”. Audiences in the late 1930s and early 1940s knew him best as a crooner. But 1944’s Murder, My Sweet changed all that, when Powell became the first screen iteration of Philip Marlowe, … Read more
In a year packed with 1990s revivalism, noir resuscitation and franchise exhaustion, these are the films I liked the most in 2025. I’ve attempted to avoid the obvious but not be wilfully obscure and have probably succeeded at neither. Without further ado, with links to full reviews, here goes – in 1-10 order. Dying (dir: … Read more
One for lovers of noirish movies with twisty plots, High Wall doesn’t in the end quite add up emotionally, but its serpentine bends make it an enjoyable crime thriller asking us to reconsider an open-and-shut case once any number of impediments have been thrown in the way. The opening scene – a man is driving … Read more
If Alfred Hitchcock, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka made a multiverse movie it might look like The Universal Theory, a fabulous and madly forensic undertaking by Timm Kröger, who gets just about all of it right and tells a really good story. You don’t need to be well versed in the works of any of … Read more
Imagine that, one of the best movies ever made is only 75 minutes long. All those epics striving for significance with buttock-flattening running times outdone by Battleship Potemkin, a century-old silent movie lasting only one hour and 15 minutes. Sight and Sound in their latest poll of the all-time greats currently have Potemkin in joint … Read more
The crappier sort of biopic tries to get the whole life into a couple of hours’ running time. The better ones seize on a moment or a few moments in the life of Famous Person X and make it/them emblematic. That’s what Blue Moon does, in spades. This is the story of the life and, … Read more
There’s a lot going on in Joyless Street (Die freudlose Gasse), GW Pabst’s epic “Straßenfilm” about the Weimar era in Germany, made during the Weimer era in Germany. Greta Garbo is in it, which tends to draw a lot of attention, and because the film survives only in a print with a good half hour … Read more
The reinvention of Dylan O’Brien continues with Twinless, a tale of fruitless love and stalkerish obsession aimed at the mopey Gen Z contingent but with enough meat and thrillerish darkness to satisfy most tastes. It’s billed as a black comedy on Wikipedia (all the research I did before watching it) which seems like a bit … Read more
