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All the King’s Men is, give or take, a potted history of the rise and fall of Huey Long, the populist, Depression-era senator and governor of Louisiana. The names have been changed to protect the innocent/guilty (delete according to political preference), party particulars have been redacted and so have references to any specific state or … Read more
The Coffee Table (La mesita del comedor in the original Spanish) is a gonzo bad taste very black comedy that’s sat down and wracked its brains as to what could be the very worst situation that could befall a couple with a new baby, and then gone there, stayed there and started sending posts back … Read more
3 Women, or Robert Altman’s 3 Women as the screen title has it, is Altman’s attempt to go one better than Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which was a peculiar story about two women whose identities become melded, switched, lumped together. Bergman did it as sci-fi, of sorts, whereas Altman’s crack at the same idea leans harder … Read more
Where’s Bugs Bunny? There are many ways this film’s makers could have made a bold statement. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie has decided to do it by presenting an animated whackadoodle comic adventure featuring Looney Tunes characters but minus the most famous one. There’s not even the tip of a … Read more
Beautiful but basic, Jean Renoir’s 1936 movie Les bas-fonds (aka The Lower Depths) isn’t the only adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s stage play. Among many, many other people, Kurosawa did a version in 1957, sticking closer to Gorky’s 1902 original, something Renoir himself later acknowledged he himself should have done. Kurosawa’s is the better version, he … Read more
Well Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer didn’t quite work, and nor does his Mickey 17, and for pretty much the same reasons. Small stuff – great; world building – great; political satire – gruesome. It’s Robert Pattinson in the lead, vaguely back in the sort of fantasy territory that made his name (I mean Harry Potter and Twilight), … Read more
Spooky at first, then chilling and eventually utterly grim, Juraj Herz’s remarkable The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol in Czech) entirely lives up to its billing as the pre-eminent film of the Czech New Wave. Here’s where advocates for Closely Observed Trains, The Firemen’s Ball, Daisies and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders pitch in. And on … Read more
Let’s hear it for Popeye the Slayer Man, a title so brilliant and obvious you might wonder why it’s never been used before. The reason is quite simple: Popeye fell out of copyright in 2025 and so the intellectual property became easy pickings. Hot on the case, two movies have already appeared this year (I’m … Read more
An entertaining fruit cocktail, All Through the Night was one of a raft of propaganda movies Hollywood made to try and turn isolationist American public opinion in favour of entering the Second World War. In the end it didn’t matter. By the time the film came out in early 1942, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, … Read more
Paced like a TV show with a writers room on autopilot, The Invitation behaves as if it has all the time in the world. It’s about vampires, so taking it slow, there not being any real rush, entire centuries of time to kill and all that are obviously part of the idea. But even so… … Read more
Prime Czech New Wave, The Barnabáš Kos Case (Prípad Barnabáš Kos) is a satire about a system that cannot recognise it’s gone wrong and cannot autocorrect because there are no mechanisms – a free press, for instance – to point out failure. Instead of fixing things, in its paranoia it doubles down on its decision. … Read more
There are good things and bad things in The Doorman, a Die Hard retread that hands the Bruce Willis role to Ruby Rose, the onetime model and TV presenter who made her name in Orange Is the New Black and has played Batwoman with some aplomb in TV shows Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and, unsurprisingly, … Read more
