Latest Posts
Superb and quite mad, Possessed gives us Joan Crawford at full hatstand, eyes boggling, jaw tight, fists clenched, a portrait of an unhinged woman, a stalker before the term was coined. This melodrama from 1947 comes from a time when they knew how to do this sort of thing unapologetically. It opens calmly but oddly … Read more
Mark Cousins’s documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock steers a careful course between low and high culture, the crass, “did you know” approach to the great director and the earnest film studies route. Hitchcock understood the importance of fun. The result is an engaging, interesting, entertaining and enlightening 120 minutes, not the last word in … Read more
“Listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make.” Hollywood horror starts here, with 1931’s Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning, it made an international star of the man who uttered those words, Bela Lugosi. He’d already become a huge Broadway star off the back of a stage adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. … Read more
John Woo never feels fully in control of The Killer, the remake of his own film from 1989, an accusation you could never have levelled at the original. Flipping the gender of the assassin, and switching from Hong Kong to Paris both seem like sound ideas, not least because in some quarters the increasingly tight … Read more
Ghosts (Gespenster in the German original) is the film Christian Petzold made between Wolfsburg and the one that bounced him more into the international spotlight, Yella. It’s the second of his Ghosts trilogy – Die innere Sicherheit (aka The State I’m In) and Yella are the other two – and like Die innere Sicherheit stars … Read more
An adaptation of a self-flagellating William Burroughs novel, Queer sets out to explore identity politics in a refreshing way, tacitly asking a question about the nature of people. Does doing homosexual things make you a homosexual? In the red corner Bill Lee (Daniel Craig), a dyed-in-the-wool ageing queer hiding out in Mexico City in 1950, … Read more
Yes, Wonder Man, not Wonder Woman, a 1945 musical comedy with a dash of crime thriller starring Danny Kaye as Danny Kaye, or sailing so close to his public persona as makes no difference. As happened quite often in Kaye’s career, he plays two roles, twin brothers, one of whom is a light, facetious, musical … Read more
It’s easy to get sniffy about films like Eliminators, spam-fisted actioners featuring one lunk or another kicking the life out of some meathead, delivering the coup de grace with a quip that’s meant to be James Bond but is more often than not Steven Seagal. Even Seagal has been known to make good films, so … Read more
Steve Soderbergh’s Contagion seemed to be required viewing during Covid, Panic in the Streets not so much. But Elia Kazan’s film from 1950 has much to say about epidemics, why nipping them in the bud is important, how government can be a force for good and why scepticism needs to be countered not with shrillness … Read more
“It doesn’t all have to be Disney,” is animator Adam Elliot’s rallying cry. And in Memoir of a Snail, with jokes about masturbation and death, paedophilia, arson and murder, he proves it. It’s refreshing and yet oddly familiar, as if Wallace and Gromit had been given a wipe down with a mucky cloth. But cute … Read more
The Ipcress File is one of the great 1960s Cold War spy thrillers and its follow-up, Funeral in Berlin, attempts to do the whole thing again. Popular opinion puts the sequel as second best to Ipcress – something its star Michael Caine seems to agree with in various interviews (like this one) – with the … Read more
Starve Acre starts out looking like it’s going to be a folk-horror reworking of The Amityville Horror, spooky house and all that. Then changes tack and appears to be attempting a folk-horror reworking of The Exorcist, possessed child and all that. Before finally settling down to tell a story about different ways of coping with … Read more
