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Moody horror from Jacques Tourneur, Night of the Demon battles all the way against a studio that wanted to make the director’s psychological approach more literal. Hence the Demon itself, shown early on and right at the end, against Tourneur’s wishes. From this distance Tourneur was obviously right. There’s nothing remotely convincing in what looks … Read more
The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The title is a joke, a reference to Marvel history and also an announcement – this, fanfare please, is the opening film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s glorious Phase Six. The joke. The Fantastic Four has taken many first steps before. It’s the failed-to-launch superhero franchise par excellence, with three … Read more
Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock and (using a time machine) the Knives Out franchise jostle along chummily in The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (L’assassin habite… au 21), the 1942 feature debut by Henri-Georges Clouzot and a confident beginning by a film-maker who knows exactly what he’s about. Winking all the while at the audience, Clouzot … Read more
Life in a call centre is the focus of Next Sohee, July Jung’s belated follow-up to 2014’s A Girl at My Door. But it’s more than the story of grim days in a headset and on the clock. Based on the true case of a young woman who committed suicide while doing work experience in … Read more
Often billed as a drama but obviously a farce, The Price of Wisdom is a British “quota quickie”, one of many films churned out in the 1930s to shore up domestic production. “Quota quickie” is usually a useful synonym for “pile of crap” but this is an exception and if you’re on the lookout for … Read more
One of the great benefits of the whole 1990s revival thing has been a run of movies inspired by the early Coens. Psycho Therapy does a bit of a number on Barton Fink, not the Coens’ funniest or weirdest film, and is a re-assessment of their re-assessment of Hollywood output in its golden age. Screwball … Read more
Gary Cooper was a long way from his craggy, motionless Mount Rushmore phase when he made City Streets in 1931. In fact he still looked boyish enough to play a character called Kid, a fairground worker who gets caught up with some gangsters, finds he has a taste for it and then lives to regret … Read more
The bots are coming for us. Companion is the latest in a line of more or less scary looks into the near future, when even the most crucially human aspects of our existence will be outsourced to machines. Am I even writing this? After Robot & Frank, Ex Machina, The Trouble with Being Born and … Read more
A film about the all-conquering power of Freudian psychoanalysis, Blind Alley lasts just a bit longer than a session with a shrink and in its 69 minutes attempts to convince us that the root of all evil lies in our relationship with our parents. It’s a bit mad but highly entertainingly done, and in the … Read more
Ron Howard loves a fact-based story and in Eden he delivers a punchy one about romantic and naive people getting a rude awakening – the natural state of humanity isn’t bliss but blood. After recent films about Pavarotti, JD Vance and Jim Henson, Howard turns to the far less famous Margret Wittmer, who along with … Read more
The Pawnbroker used to be a prestige movie, both when it came out in 1964 and for decades afterwards. It’s lost some of its sheen over the years, for a variety of reasons. Films referencing the Holocaust are no longer as scarce as they were when the Beatles were first conquering America. Rod Steiger’s star … Read more
Cool rather than hot, and about events not as they happened but as they were reported, September 5 is the story behind the story, of how a sports team from ABC TV found themselves at the cutting edge of a major news event at the 1972 Olympics, when a group of Israeli athletes were taken … Read more
