Latest Posts
“All children, except one, grow up.” The opening line to JM Barrie’s Peter Pan is already plenty creepy (especially those commas). Ripe for exploitation even. Now that the copyright has expired on the book, in the USA at any rate, someone has gone ahead and mined the children’s classic it for its horror potential. Peter … Read more
Beautiful, exquisite, poetic – choose your adjective, but there’s no denying the extraordinary visual effect of A Story of Floating Weeds, Yasujirō Ozu’s silent glory from 1934. A box-office smash in his native Japan, it was also a critical hit worldwide, and is a good place to start if you’re interested in tracking the development … Read more
There’s a definite influence of The Wicker Man in Fréwaka, Aislinn Clarke’s second feature. You might call it The Fréwaka Man if you were being facetious. But it deserves better than that. And in any case the main character is a woman, so that’s enough of that foolishness. It’s also the first horror movie in … Read more
Diana Ringo has made the first feature film of 1984 in Russian, and she’s done it her way, with little in the way of exterior financial backing. It’s cheap and it’s cheerless, but that just adds to the dystopian gloom. George Orwell would probably approve. He might not be quite so happy about Yevgeni Zamyatin’s … Read more
Set at the moment when Poland escaped the Nazis only to fall into the hands of the Soviets, 1958’s Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament) is a philosophical, even existential, take on the recent history of director and co-writer Andrzej Wajda’s country. Really, it’s a day in the life of some Polish partisans, and of … Read more
Bridget Jones Calls It a Day might have been a better title, but Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy it is, a final trot around the paddock for Renée Zellweger and most of the familiar faces from the previous three films, plus a few new ones. Instant verdict: not bad. Definitely better than BJ2, but … Read more
Nothing wrong with a nepo baby if they’re actually any good. La fille de l’eau (aka The Whirlpool of Fate, sometimes known as The Girl of the Water) is Jean Renoir’s first feature film, shot when he was 31, using Paul Cezanne’s property as a location and financial assistance from the estate of his own … Read more
Parthenope is Paolo Sorrentino vamping, riffing on Paolo Sorrentino. A fabulously good looking film full of defeated old guys and spectacularly hot women, it nods as ever to La Dolce Vita, has a nice cameo for a famous actor, and the grotesques keep coming as if it had somehow accessed Fellini’s dreams. What is it … Read more
As I write this, there is one review for The Heartbreak Kid on the IMDb (soon to be two!). One. A good film that did well in its native Australia, good box office and reviews, spawned a TV spinoff (Heartbreak High), good looking stars, talking points, teachable points, well shot, well acted and written. What’s … Read more
Katell Quillévéré’s follow-up to Heal the Living takes the bare bones of her own grandmother’s story – a Frenchwoman who had a relationship with a German soldier during wartime, wound up a single mother in the post-war years, then met the man who’d become her husband on a beach in Normandy – embroiders on it … Read more
Of Human Bondage is the film to point to whenever some marketing guy is wanging on about “brand”. In it, Bette Davis demonstrates as clearly as can be done that it’s product – in the movies the role and performance – that’s critical. Get the product right and the brand takes care of itself. In … Read more
Harold Pinter never wrote out-and-out sci-fi, but if he had done it might have looked like The Assessment. A queasy and uneasy excavation of people’s motivations, its tension stems from confrontations deferred, which break suddenly in discomfiting and absurdist ways. Yet it’s simple, in set-up and execution. It’s easy to imagine this punchy three-hander being … Read more
