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The Surfer looks like it’s going to be a wet and sandy version of John Wick or Nobody, since it starts off with a dad and his son being chased off the beach where they want to catch a wave by a group of surf bums who insist this public beach is closed to outsiders. … Read more
A balding freak in white scare make-up who wore a geometric tuxedo and sang in a six-octave voice that ranged from a yelp to a bellow, Klaus Nomi’s strange, eccentric, short life is celebrated in The Nomi Song, a hymn to the artist rather than the man, though the man does keep peeping out from … Read more
Dumb fun, but definitely fun, Deep Cover is written by Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow, of Safety Not Guaranteed (love that film), plus Ben Ashenden, who presumably injected the British sensibility here and there. Knockabout entertainment, it takes most of its inspiration from 1990s action comedies about inadequate characters in hazardous situations. Who knew Orlando … Read more
A weirdly lugubrious serial-killer movie, 1965’s Le Vampire de Düsseldorf tells the story of Peter Kürten, a real-life killer who operated in the Düsseldorf area in the late 1920s before being caught, tried and executed in 1931. Look him up in Wikipedia, if have the stomach for it, and you’ll realise that director/writer/star Robert Hossein … Read more
Mountainhead is the movie for people who want more Succession but accept that Brian Cox’s Logan Roy and his vile but irresistible family are not coming back. Written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the Succession guy, it takes a similarly vile bunch of tech bros, deposits them in a swish mountaintop mansion and follows them … Read more
There is a legendary aspect to One-Eyed Jacks. The only film Marlon Brando ever directed, it became notorious because of Brando’s extravagant shooting style – miles of expensive film run through VistaVision cameras to catch the right wave, days waited for the light to be just right and so on. The results were mixed. Brando … Read more
Imagine a crime thriller where the guy who looks guilty from the outset is the killer… or is he? Or where the police achieve their aims not through diligent hard work but by sheer fluke. Where every cliché of the genre gets an outing and most of them left entirely unmauled… but some of them are given … Read more
Die Frau meiner Träume (The Woman of My Dreams) was just what the doctor ordered in 1944, if the doctor in question was Goebbels and you were a happy member of Germany’s Thousand Year Reich. Light, frothy entertainment in the Hollywood style was what propaganda chief Goebbels had commanded Germany’s UFA studio to make and … Read more
The Brutalist did well at the Oscars, winning three (Best Actor, Music, Cinematography) from a total of ten nominations. It is the sort of film the Academy likes – it’s got class written all over it, from the fancy opening credits and the high-end VistaVision process (not used for more than 60 years), to its built-in … Read more
Beautifully made and beautifully restored, Jean Epstein’s 1929 drama about kelp gatherers on a remote Breton island is also quite simply a beautiful film, picturesque enough to charm even the most unwavering hater of silent movies. Having discovered some islands off the coast of Brittany, Epstein decided to shoot a film there using local people … Read more
Beta-male-goes-mad time with Sharp Corner, borrowing the arc of The Shining and starring Ben Foster as a Jack Nicholson stand-in. There is no Overlook Hotel or supernatural stuff. Instead the action takes place in a “mansion” outside the city where Foster’s Josh McCall has moved his family, not once wondering why this great big house … Read more
Powell and Pressburger’s second collaboration, 1940’s Contraband (aka Blackout) is a knockabout knock-off of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps – two people yoked together against their will, a Nazi cell and so on – which also goes large on Hitchcock’s light-hearted energy and his fondness for a set piece. Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson had both … Read more
