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The Harder They Fall is Humphrey Bogart’s farewell movie. He’d been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer not long before shooting started and knew he didn’t have long to live. Though he looks tired and ill, it doesn’t affect his performance. In fact it probably enhances it. Careworn individuals being something of a Bogart speciality. In a … Read more
As you will know from reading your Homer, after his victory at the battle of Troy, the warrior king Odysseus got waylaid on his journey home to Ithaca. Instead of taking weeks, Odysseus’s voyage lasted years. There was many a mythical adventure en route. Hence, yes, the word “odyssey”. The Return picks up the story … Read more
When William Friedkin died in 2023, aged 87, the obituaries talked of the director of The Exorcist and the man who gave us The French Connection. The Boys in the Band, his groundbreaking film from 1970, which took dramas about gay men into the mainstream, got some bandwidth, as did Sorceror, his remake of Clouzot’s … Read more
Lesbian ladies undone by dastardly male alert! Between Us (Entre Nous in the original French) is a strangely not-quite-there tale of two young women and one awful man, done as a mix of cautionary thriller and soft-edged erotica. As the action opens, fragrant, pretty and broke Elodie and Laetitia are realising that they need a … Read more
Four Sided Triangle is a British B movie from 1953. That’s two if not three knocks against it straight away. Look it up in the books and you’ll see it generally doesn’t get very good reviews. And yet it’s a really interesting film from all sorts of approaches. It’s a kind of tweedy Frankenstein story, … Read more
Brian Cox apparently gets a bit sick of being asked in interviews about Succession and playing Logan Roy, which might explain his presence in The Parenting, a film unafraid to do jokes about projectile vomiting alongside a whole slew (spew?) of gags revived from the era of gross-out comedy. Look, this says, I’m an actor, … Read more
In many ways the perfect French movie, French-movie cliché even, 1970’s Claire’s Knee (Le genou de Claire) is one of Éric Rohmer’s most celebrated works and is a good place to start if you want to dig into his back catalogue. One of the key voices of the French New Wave, Rohmer regularly banged out … Read more
Though the title almost does all the explaining you’ll ever need, to spell it out in a full sentence Grand Theft Hamlet is an attempt to stage the Shakespeare play Hamlet inside the online version of Grand Theft Auto. The background. It’s the third Covid lockdown in the UK and husband and wife Sam Crane, … Read more
There is no sign of an orgy in The Vampires Night Orgy, that snippet of trivia on the IMDb does not lie. Nor is there very much in the way of vampires. Which leaves the Night bit of the title with quite a bit to do. This horror movie, no surprise, from Spain was made … Read more
Imagine reading Oliver Twist and suddenly Jack the Ripper turns up in it. The Girl with the Needle (Pigen med nålen in the original Danish) is a bit like that. A bracingly miserablist trek through the life of one of the urban poor in post-First World War Denmark, its Dickensian traipse from one grim situation … Read more
Mary Pickford once described the director Ernst Lubitsch as a “director of doors”. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play, you can see what she means. She meant it dismissively, though the door, and what’s behind it – or not – is key to Lubitsch’s work generally, and specifically here. This is … Read more
James Mangold gave Johnny Cash Walk the Line. Now he gives Bob Dylan A Complete Unknown, a biopic and instruction manual on how to do this sort of thing. If you’re being picky, it doesn’t say much that hasn’t already been said about Dylan. And its criticisms are ones Dylan has made about himself. But … Read more
