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If you’ve heard the name Jacques Feyder but never seen any of his films, Visages d’enfants is a prime place to start. A beautiful example of simple and direct storytelling done with more technique than you’d expect for a film from 1925, it demonstrates what a master Feyder was, particularly of the language of film … Read more
The opening credits of Rumours formally thank the leaders of the G7. Which must be some kind of joke, because none of them emerges reputationally intact from this very weird film. Though getting a precise bead on the type of humour in play is tricky. Is it political satire? Cultural satire? Surreal japery? Guy Maddin … Read more
A romance, a noir and a whodunit all in one, Deadline at Dawn is the only film Harold Clurman ever directed. A theatre director by background, Clurman wisely keeps it between the rails here with solid functionality. He shows us the stuff we need to see and nothing more. There’s no flash, no tricksiness. The … Read more
A hypnotic coming-of-ager from Robin Campillo, drawing on his own childhood growing up in one of France’s last colonial outposts (Madagascar) for Red Island (L’île rouge), a story about a little boy who watches and learns as the French expat community do their thing. It is beautifully observed and gorgeously put together but it’s the … Read more
Between Lethal Weapon 2 and Predator 2 Danny Glover starred in To Sleep with Anger, a genre film of an entirely different stripe, masquerading as a domestic drama about an extended family of black folk. Glover plays Harry, an old-school charmer with Southern manners, who after many years of absence arrives back in the lives … Read more
Barely promoted by a studio wary of its political content, Anniversary has a Stepford Wives – reality-adjacent – quality that stops it being really incendiary. It is chilly and chilling enough, though its big message is so emollient it almost undoes all the good work director and co-writer Jan Komasa has put in to stir things … Read more
Evidence that borders aren’t just a 21st-century hot button, 1949’s Border Incident is about the contentious human back and forth between Mexico and the USA. Every year workers cross the border to harvest the crops in California, an authoritative and majestic introductory shot of the All-American Canal tells us, all part of the Bracero Program … Read more
Like all the Beatles anthologies attempting to squeeze new juice out of old fruit, One to One: John & Yoko digs through the archives to document two years in the lives of the famous couple, when they lived in Greenwich Village and went about their lives almost like normal people did. The seclusion of the … Read more
“In a world at war many sparrows must fall.” A poignant line slightly out of keeping with the hard-boiled characters populating this atypical noir. Unusually on the money politically and psychologically, The Fallen Sparrow is a story about a volunteer fighter in the Spanish Civil War who returns to New York only to find it … Read more
Watching the struggles of Syrian refugees in Western Europe isn’t everyone’s idea of fun, so how about a spy thriller instead? That seems to be the idea behind Ghost Trail, which manages to have it both ways – the miseries of a life in exile and the thrill of the chase as its hero chases … Read more
A neat Blu-ray box set of some of Hungarian director István Szabó’s best – probably his best known – movies. Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1985) and Hanussen (1988) all star Klaus Maria Brandauer, all three are co-written with Péter Dobai and they’re all shot by Lajos Koltai. Thematically they all deal with essentially the same … Read more
If you enjoyed The Greasy Strangler and wondered whether writer/director Jim Hosking had anything else in his locker, Ebony & Ivory has your name on it. Imagining Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder meeting on the remote Mull of Kintyre in Scotland sometime in 1981, it’s not aiming for documentary realism – the two musicians met … Read more
