Latest Posts
Hell is someone else’s pubic hair in your bath. WM Weikart’s feature debut hits us with this and other observations – some grimly funny others just bizarre – in Soul to Squeeze, a psychological moshpit of a drama about a guy on a trip into his own unconscious mind. There’s a Red Hot Chili Peppers song … Read more
Watercooler TV from a land without watercoolers, Seventeen Moments of Spring lays claim to being the most successful Soviet TV show ever made. It was commissioned at the command of KGB boss Yuri Andropov. USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev loved it. But the public did too – streets emptied when it was first aired, stripped over 12 … Read more
Samurai swords in Scotland in the 1700s. Like his debut, Slow West, John Maclean’s follow-up Tornado is a grand chase movie held together by not much at all. In this case a simple plot about a young Japanese woman on the run from some vagabonds who want their gold back. Simple stuff. Akira Kurosawa is … Read more
Desert Sands tells a few stories but the nuanced drama about camaraderie among French Foreign Legionnaires and the salty romance between a white man and a dusky Arab princess are subordinate to a Zulu-like clash of civilisations – the beastlike many against the civilised few. Paul Newman was lined up for the lead role but … Read more
Hitler without the histrionics, From Hilde, with Love (In Liebe, Eure Hilde in German) sets out to do something unusual for a film set during the Nazi era – to lay it all out for us, the everyday normality of it all, the “banality of evil”, to misuse Hannah Arendt’s phrase. But can you make … Read more
So here’s the best performing domestic film at the French box office in 1976. The Wing or the Thigh (L’aile ou la cuisse) also did well against foreign competition, coming in second overall to Les Dents de la mer (Teeth of the Sea, literally), as Jaws was called in France. It’s a lively farce set … Read more
John Travolta won a Worst Actor Razzie for his turns in Trading Paint (aka Burning Rubber) and The Fanatic (a joy for another day) so you might expect this film to be terrible and Travolta’s acting ditto. But acting awards good and bad often go to the undeserving, which is the case here. Travolta is … Read more
Look at the talent in Cut Bank – John Malkovich, Bruce Dern, Michael Stuhlbarg, Oliver Platt, Liam Hemsworth, Teresa Palmer. And Billy Bob Thornton. Clearly great things were intended. But maybe 2014 was just too early for a revival of the gonzo Tarantino movie of yore. Ten years later movies like Cut Bank were all … Read more
It’s pronounced “maa.lay.gao”, a screen note informs us, before Superboys of Malegaon gets properly underway. And that’s the tone of the entire film – nothing left to chance, a narrative that is laid out with one logical piece following another, nothing fancy, nothing tricksy, just the age-old “let’s do the show right here” tale, of … Read more
As any proper conspiracy theorist will tell you, 2012’s The Philadelphia Experiment is a movie based on a true incident, when the US government, at the conclusion of some weird research in 1943, disappeared destroyer escort the USS Eldridge in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. According to whichever version of the story you go for, the … Read more
The IMDb plot resumé for American Refugee says it’s a film about race in America. There is a black family and a white family in it, and they come into conflict, that’s true. Race, however, is not mentioned once. In fact class and cultural politics, plus masculinity – toxic and otherwise – seem to be more … Read more
King Vidor’s first name really was King. It suited him. The master of the big Hollywood movie, here he is in 1925 with The Big Parade, laying down the template for all the war movies of the future. The Big Parade is the highest-grossing silent film of all time so it would be nice if … Read more
