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Considering it’s sci-fi from behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War, Eolomea is an unexpectedly bright, colourful, even countercultural space adventure. Some of it is still brilliant, some of it pretty dated. But it’s entirely fascinating, top to toe – this is how the East Germans were doing it in 1972. … Read more
The least satisfying Spike Lee film I’ve ever seen, Highest 2 Lowest at least has the excuse that it’s Spike Lee in gun for hire mode. Walter Salles, Mike Nicholls and Martin Scorsese were all lined up to direct at various points. It’s mystifying, though, because Lee’s journeyman work is usually better than this. It’s … Read more
Seedy atmosphere is Riptide‘s USP. So seedy is it, in fact, that when Une Si Jolie Petite Plage (its original title) debuted in 1949 it was felt necessary to add a little disclaimer up front for French audiences in an attempt to head off complaints. The makers of the film meant no offence to war … Read more
Constantly on the move, always trying new things, Sydney Sweeney’s advance on the Oscars probably won’t be helped by Echo Valley – she’s just not in it enough – but it won’t be hindered either. And she’s surrounded by the sort of actor the Academy loves. What is it though, this Echo Valley? Julianne Moore and … Read more
“The dirtiest great book in the Western canon,” is how the New Yorker once described Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Which made it a perfect fit for Pier Paolo Pasolini when he set out on his Trilogy of Life, three films based on old texts. The Decameron came first, in 1970, followed by The Canterbury Tales (1974) … Read more
Sorry, Baby is the sort of film that’s hard to write about. Which is irritating if writing about it is exactly what you want to do. But not giving the whole game away probably makes for a more rewarding viewing experience for anyone intending to watch it. Without letting the cat entirely out of the … Read more
Men are largely an irrelevance in So Close, Corey Yuen’s “girls with guns” actioner made in 2002 just as Hong Kong was exiting its glory period. I prompted Google in AI mode to list the key characteristics of the “girls with guns” genre were. It said – Hong Kong, female protagonists, gunplay and stunts, challenging … Read more
Juliet & Romeo is the sort of film that schoolteachers wary about introducing Shakespeare to 16 year olds show to the kids. Sexy young things have key roles, the original language survives only as a vestige and there are songs that use autotune quite a bit. Purists will hate hate hate it, but it has … Read more
1970s neo-noir doesn’t begin and end with Chinatown and The Long Goodbye. Here, for instance, is The Outfit, director John Flynn’s lean adaptation of one of the 24 novels Donald Westlake wrote under his Richard Stark pseudonym. Many Stark stories feature the no-nonsense career criminal Parker and in a mini-festival of Parker adaptations, The Outfit … Read more
In a developed world of plunging birth rates, here’s Elio, a Pixar animation for sad only children. An ET-flavoured tale flipped on its head and with Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the mix, it also doffs its hat to the era of Big Science, when the likes of Professor Carl Sagan were … Read more
Barry Lyndon tends to get summed up in one of two ways. It’s either Stanley Kubrick’s visually sensational magnum opus and a triumph of film-making at every level, or it’s a bit of a bore, a “one thing after another” drama with not much actual drama in it. Both are true. Adapting William Makepeace Thackeray’s … Read more
So here’s France’s best film of 2024, in the esteemed Cahiers du Cinéma’s estimation at any rate. Which may come as a surprise to many in the anglosphere, where Misericordia came and went without making much of a stir, as Alain Guiraudie’s films so often do. It’s a slight return to Guiraudie’s most well received … Read more
