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Looking like an instant classic, The Ballad of Wallis Island is that rare thing: a beautifully crafted feelgood Britcom with no Richard Curtis involvement whatsoever. Though, while we’re about it, Curtis himself has called it “one of the greatest British films of all time.” On the face of it, it could not have come from … Read more
The vampire genre gets reinvented every few years. Trouble Every Day is Claire Denis doing it definitively in 2001, a few years before Tomas Alfredson gave it the IKEA flatpack refit with Let the Right One In and Ana Lily Amanpour boldly put an Iranian spin on the whole thing with A Girl Walks Home … Read more
First feted then hated, Emilia Pérez got a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize. By the time the Oscars came around the tide had started running the other way, with its 13 nominations resulting in only two wins – Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldaña, plus Best Song … Read more
Manipuri cinema, from the state of Manipur in northwest India, only got going in 1972 and it’s pretty fair to say that Ishanou (The Chosen One) is either the most famous film ever to come from there or a contender for the title. Made in 1990 by Aribam Syam Sharma it’s a beautiful and deceptively … Read more
Juror No. 2 is a rare thing these days: a good old-fashioned courtroom thriller. Director Clint Eastwood, 93 when he made it, does it old-style, the way his mentor Don Siegel might have done it, and the result is a streamlined drama revolving around a central dilemma, just the sort of lean and fast second … Read more
The “miracle” of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is that audiences in 1943 bought Preston Sturges’s film as a proposition. The story makes no sense and Sturges knew it didn’t. Hence the framing device added to distance the “facts” of what we see on screen from their telling. The film begins with a state governor … Read more
Lacking the crackle and wit of the usually fairly mad Joe Carnahan movie, Shadow Force is full of charismatic performers angling for a moment in the sun. Which, for most of them never comes. Gunplay and banter are there, but they’re swamped by slack verbiage and scenes full of characters never properly introduced. So when … Read more
Director Terry Bishop won an Oscar for his semi-documentary Daybreak in Udi in 1949. Oscars aren’t handed out for films like Model for Murder, a British B movie from 1959. But Bishop does a good job with what he’s been handed and puts a polish on a noirish, crime-thrillerish story with a subtext all about … Read more
Monkey Man is the latest in a string of John Wick-adjacent movies. Blame Liam Neeson for starting it, with those Taken movies. Or the Incredible Hulk, and his “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” warning. Or even, just maybe, the vengeful God of the Old Testament. You don’t want to get any of these … Read more
Cheap, badly written and not very well directed, Dangerous Voyage (aka Terror Ship) is the classic British B movie, directed by Vernon Sewell, a journeyman who knocked out a lot of films like this. The actors gabble, the plot isn’t particularly convincing and psychologically it never quite adds up. But, if nothing else, Sewell has … Read more
Well, whatever else it is, Megalopolis isn’t boring. Mad, megalomaniacal, chaotic, absurd and confused, certainly, but also inspired and weird in a good way, it’s a deliberately difficult piece of “late style”, financed entirely by Francis Ford Coppola out of money made from his wine business. Not beholden to anyone, the director can do what … Read more
Rape Zombie: Lust of the Dead is its full title, though Naoyuki Tomomatsu’s film from 2012 also goes by the more decorous and bare-bones Lust of the Dead, which makes the debt to George Romero’s Dead movies even more stark. The twist this time is that it’s only men who are becoming zombies, and they’re … Read more
