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Two boys hang out with their dad for the day in My Father’s Shadow, an enormously artful film using pace and rhythm, light, shade and colour as its warp and weft. Or, if you prefer a more thematic description, a warm and intimate film about memory and the family bond. Akinola Davies made it and … Read more
Thriller: A Cruel Picture goes by the name Thriller: En grym film in its original Swedish. And “grym” it is, an archetypal grindhouse thriller whose main character provided the inspiration for Daryl Hannah’s one-eyed Elle Driver in Tarantino’s Kill Bill, a light comedy by comparison. Director Bo Arne Vibenius has stated that he set out … Read more
Look at the long list of executive producers attached to The Last Son and you’ve got to wonder if they aren’t at least partly responsible for the film’s uncertainty about what it is. Even the title is in dispute – The Last Son of Isaac LeMay is an alternative. It’s got good bones, though, a … Read more
An important historical document, if nothing else, Kolberg is the last film the Nazis made. Partly written by Joseph Goebbels – or at least rewritten by him – it was also recut on the orders of the Reich’s propaganda minister. There were just too many battles, he thought, not without good reason, considering the Russians were … Read more
If it’s artisan film-making you’re after, authenticity guaranteed, then Mark Jenkin is your man. Rose of Nevada is his second film since he slapped critical acclaim about with Bait, his Cornwall-set black-and-white tale of a left-behind town and the awful DFL (Down From London) weekenders who regularly turn up looking for, yes, authenticity. Since then … Read more
These days, we’re used to a documentarian being an integral part of their own documentary. But Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 got there decades before the likes of Nick Broomfield or Michael Moore. Here, Kazuo Hara turns his camera on himself and his relationships and charts everything he sees. As an idea of what … Read more
Tuner looks like it’s going to be a cracking drama but it hits a bum note early on, ironic in a film about a guy whose job it is to make pianos ring true. Dustin Hoffman is prominently billed, seems to be prominent dramatically too, but has been all but retired from the movie after … Read more
Letty Lynton tells the story of Madeleine Smith, who wanted to move on from a lover who didn’t want to move on from her. And so she killed him. The same story was also told in David Lean’s Madeleine in 1950 (good too) and in Dishonored Lady, starring Hedy Lamarr in 1947 (not seen it). … Read more
Whatever else you think of Black Site, at some point during its short running time you’re probably going to start wondering how it can be that the second-in-command at a black site doesn’t understand what its purpose is. Black sites, for those who missed out on the early years of the 21st century, are – … Read more
Gambit upends the crime caper and that’s reason enough to watch it. It also features Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine playing exquisitely to type – another. Caine one year after Alfie and the same year as The Ipcress File is the smart, cocky working class guy in a hurry; MacLaine halfway between Billy Wilder’s Irma … Read more
A Useful Ghost reminds us that the ghost story and the horror movie can be different things entirely. Haunting doesn’t necessarily mean mayhem and death. This film in some respects takes us back to a time when films like I Married a Witch or The Halfway House provided mainstream entertainment of a spooky rather than … Read more
Here’s Leslie Nielsen before Airplane! changed the course of his career, in Night Train to Paris, a curio from 1964. Nielsen plays a former spy dragged back into the game over a valuable computer program. Alan Hamilton’s task: to get the tape containing the program to Paris pdq. The impediment: so far, everyone who’s handled … Read more
