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Tarot is a horror film for people who don’t like horror films. Or a horror film for people who like to shout at the screen, possibly after a couple of drinks. Or that’s the initial impression at any rate. It starts out in territory so familiar it feels like a large language model wrote it. … Read more
Either a hopeless genre mishmash or a brilliant psychological thriller gone a bit wrong – probably both – 1945’s The Unseen was sold as a follow-up of sorts to the spooky thriller from the previous year, The Uninvited. In fact they have little to do with each other beyond the same director (Lewis Allen), one actor … Read more
It’s hard to discuss a film you viscerally hate, as I did Friendship. Call me a sensitive snowflake but I’m just not into protracted depictions of inadequacy leading to humiliation. This has been Tim Robinson’s shtick in the various TV shows he’s been involved with. Now he’s brought the same cringe persona to a film, … Read more
Ruth Rendell didn’t like many adaptations of her books but she did like 1995’s La Cérémonie (The Ceremony), a reworking of her thriller A Judgment in Stone. She wasn’t alone. Roger Ebert put it on his Great Movies list, the Cahiers du Cinéma people named it the best film of 1995, and Bong Joon Ho … Read more
Two Jewish cousins go on a Holocaust Holiday? No end of things could go wrong with that as an idea. The marvel of A Real Pain is that writer/director/producer/star Jesse Eisenberg doesn’t just sidestep potential disaster, but hands the film to another actor, Kieran Culkin, while doing so. It’s Before Sunrise in structure, but instead … Read more
The film that put the Italian giallo genre on the international map, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo) is Dario Argento’s directing debut and the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s first film in colour. It’s archetypal giallo in many ways. Archetypal Argento, too, you could say, for bad and good. Formless … Read more
Is Sinners a vampire movie? Even members of the cast couldn’t agree whether it was or not. Delroy Lindo said it wasn’t, Michael B Jordan said it was. Either way it’s bold and ambitious, full of stuff to discuss, book-club style, over a drink afterwards. A bit didactic, a bit tasteful, a bit too in … Read more
It’s unlikely you will ever have seen anything like The Bunny Game before, or will want to again. A film too strong and dark for many tastes, it’s undeniably brilliant at what it does. But couldn’t it do it elsewhere? Facetiousness to one side, The Bunny Game gets the thumbs up from the likes of … Read more
Old Guy should be a good film but isn’t. Thanks to someone somewhere along the line deciding to funny things up. Not that the funny doesn’t have its moments. Take the opening scene, of an old guy with a big floppy grey moustache at a rave full of young people. Smiling ecstatically and throwing shapes, … Read more
Carlos Saura’s Tango, from 1998, is a backstage musical with a techy overlay and a political undertow. It’s meta this, that and the other, which distracts from the simplicity of what’s on offer to some extent. Which is… an old-fashioned Fred Astaire-style musical. Nothing wrong with a Fred Astaire musical, as long as the dancing is … Read more
There’s an opaque quality to Divine Love (Divino Amor), as there was with Gabriel Mascaro’s last film, Neon Bull. But, subject matter to one side, the big difference between them is that Neon Bull didn’t explain itself, whereas Divino Amor does, only in the film’s last third revealing that it hasn’t really been explaining itself … Read more
The revisionist western par excellence, Devil’s Doorway is the story of the despicable white man stealing the land off the noble American Indian and then getting nasty when the Indian objects. It stars Robert Taylor as Broken Lance, a Shoshone Indian known as Lance Powell while serving in the US Army, where he won a … Read more
