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The Bourne movies lifted a lot of their MO from Three Days of the Condor, one of the key political conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. Behind the scenes the way the film was financed – sold before it was even made – would change the way the film industry worked in the 1980s, but Sydney … Read more
The films of Robert Eggers can get a bit overwrought and Nosferatu is no exception. Both The Northman and The Lighthouse (The Witch not so much) overdid it. All well and good if you subscribe to the view that too much gothic is still not enough. And you’ll be doubly re-assured by Eggers’s decision to … Read more
Because Go West came out in in the middle of Buster Keaton’s hot run, it’s often bracketed with the rest of them – The Three Ages, Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr, The Navigator and The General. But Go West isn’t conceptually brilliant, like Sherlock Jr is. Nor is the 1925 feature a compendium of brilliant sight gags, … Read more
As if made by the “if you like that you’ll like this” algorithm, Gladiator II takes all the bits you liked in the first film and does them all over again, with a bit more blood, a touch less swagger and far better CGI than Ridley Scott could muster in 2000. Scott is again at … Read more
Cosy supernatural horror? There is such a thing and here it is in the shape of 1944’s The Uninvited, a strange mix of the jaunty and the spooky, a dialled-down take on the sort of comic horror that Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard had piloted to box-office glory in The Cat and the Canary and … Read more
The conceit of Daddio is that it’s just two people in a car driving from JFK Airport into New York City. It’s a yellow cab and the driver is played by Sean Penn, the passenger by Dakota Johnson. As the car rolls towards the city they talk. At first Clark makes cab driver smalltalk, kneejerk … Read more
Graham Greene didn’t like the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but he did like Sabotage. The novelist was a film critic in his early years and was regularly on Hitchcock’s case for what he described as “inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities.” Tough room. But, as I say, Sabotage got the Greene seal of approval. Which is … Read more
Whoosh, Patrick Dickinson’s film Cottontail rushes into the territory generally occupied by Hirokazu Kore-eda. That is, the deceptively simple, beautifully crafted, sensitively acted, tender human drama. He’s even given it a Japanese top coat, since it’s the story of an emotionally inert Tokyo dad whose wife has just died heading to Lake Windermere in the … Read more
“Stagey” is not usually a compliment when it comes to screen works. But it is in the case of 1963’s An Actor’s Revenge, a Japanese film combining the the dynamism of cinema with the intensity of the theatre experience. Before the action kicks off, a little on-screen note tells us that this was the 300th … Read more
Compendium horror – who’s it for? That question formed in my mind as The 100 Candles Game told its seven different stories, plus another one that links them all together, Arabian Nights style. Are audiences hungry for this sort of thing? I don’t think so. Film-makers love the portmanteau horror film, though, because it gives … Read more
Time has diluted the impact of Brute Force, but this prison drama from 1947 remains a good film, largely because it doesn’t live up to the title. There is brutishness, but not too much. For much of its length, in fact, it’s a study of character, of how men who are all packed together in … Read more
Old wine in new bottles, Limbo is a case – a jeroboam? – of the familiar served up in a starkly different way. A desert noir, an Outback noir more specifically, it’s the latest from Ivan Sen, whose Mystery Road about ten years ago opened up this territory. Now he exploits it, with a savage, … Read more
