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Ragebait Sense and Sensibility from the Hallmark Channel, which seems perverse on the face of it. The home of white-sliced drama brings us a Jane Austen adaptation peopled with black faces. Bonnets and breeches are as per, stately piles visited, manners and refinement much in evidence. Before the purists take up their burning torches, this … Read more
A cult movie from a cult director, Mikey and Nicky stars the ever-cultish John Cassavetes and his old friend Peter Falk as a pair of low-life crooks having one last night together before the day of reckoning arrives. Nicky (Cassavetes) has done something to a bad guy and is now in hiding, petrified, in a … Read more
Holy Days is a twinkly and comforting National Treasure Road Movie about three New Zealand nuns who go on a road trip to try and stop their convent being pulled down by a nasty developer. Miriam Margolyes, Jacki Weaver and Judi Davis play the valiant sisters trying to locate the property deeds that will avert … Read more
Can a dancer also be a lady? 1933’s Dancing Lady is already asking the question in its title. It stars Joan Crawford – 1933 Joan Crawford, before the batshit stare developed – as a dancer in a risqué burlesque show who, in the film’s opening moments, is being arrested for indecency by the cops. And … Read more
In the end I gave up and started liking Night Patrol, a hybrid beast that starts out as an update on Romeo and Juliet, with action shifted to the LA of Bloods and Crips, but winds up somewhere else entirely – in vampire territory. I think it was the audacity of the move that tickled … Read more
Manège is the French word for a riding school. One features centrally in Manèges (aka The Cheat), a superbly unpleasant French movie from 1949. It’s also the word for merry-go-round – worth remembering as this tale about a cuckold being given the absolute runaround plays out. The casting is bang-on perfect. Bernard Blier as Robert, … Read more
There’s nothing lean about Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi epic Disclosure Day. Even the title has a portentous ring to it. What is it exactly that is to be disclosed? Is it a secret of the universe by any chance? Of course it is. Grandiosity to one side, Spielberg delivers an entirely enjoyable 145 minutes, in a … Read more
A perfect farce from 1937, Easy Living catches Jean Arthur at the peak of her career and is so devilishly constructed that explaining the plot would be a fool’s game. But the gist of it is that a normal young woman on the top deck of an open-top bus suddenly finds herself draped in a … Read more
Nerds win the war in Pressure, which entertainingly tells the story about the meteorological johnnies who made the D-Day landings possible. How, when you’re launching the biggest seaborne invading force in human history, do you make sure the weather isn’t going to destroy your armada on the high seas? Whether the gap between England and … Read more
Ealing Studios’ The Halfway House is a halfway sort of film. Made in 1944, it’s not quite propaganda but is clearly on that road. Not quite a ghost story either, or not the usual sort of ghost story. Brigadoon is somewhere in the back of the plotting. A mysterious pub out in delightful sun-dappled Welsh … Read more
May is a disturbing film full of weirdos but almost none of them is the real deal, apart from the central character of May herself. In a world where people play-act at being strange to make themselves seem interesting, May is properly odd. Lucky McKee’s solo debut came out in 2002, to a little acclaim, … Read more
David Lean made Madeleine for his latest new wife – Ann Todd was number three of six. She’d played notorious murderer Madeleine Smith on stage and wanted her performance captured for posterity. The result was a good film, she thought; the great director thought it his worst. Having just watched it, I reckon Todd gets it … Read more
