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I Want to Live! won Susan Hayward a Best Actress Oscar and yet the film, like Hayward herself, is barely remembered today. The story of a woman who is convicted of murder and is then executed in a gas chamber, it is an emotional and fairly gruelling drama which leaves one question entirely open – … Read more
Advancing on greatness by stealth, writer/director Jérémy Clapin’s Meanwhile on Earth (Pendant ce temps sur Terre) isn’t all the way there, and he throws away a lot of goodwill towards the end, but the great stuff really is great, and his movie is bold and unusual too. It also features a star with one of … Read more
Issue-driven but dramatic enough and making political points that still resonate, No Way Out is a film about racism and stars Sidney Poitier in his first major role. He’s 22 and his self-assurance is both remarkable and one of the key selling points of director Joseph L Mankiewicz’s film. Poitier plays Dr Luther Brooks, a … Read more
The People’s Joker started life as a re-edit of the original Joker movie, then that idea was junked in favour of shooting something that was all new, though leaning heavily on the intellectual property of Batman and his DC adversaries. So much did it lean, in fact, that it got as far as one screening … Read more
Technically remarkable, fitfully brilliant, not entirely successful, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse) was Fritz Lang’s second time out with a character who fascinated him. His creation is the archetypal Bond villain, a criminal mastermind whose tentacular reach extends right through the city of 1930s Berlin and from the here and … Read more
Linda wants chicken, that’s the plot and the literal translation of the original French title of Chicken for Linda! (Linda veut du poulet!), a farce of sorts about a young girl and her hassled mum, a dead dad and a search to get together the ingredients to make the dish that reminds Linda of her … Read more
Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte tries to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle that was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And fails. It’s not even a valiant fail, instead director Robert Aldrich and co cynically re-run the same basic idea – two vintage dames doing battle most foul – but this time around one essential ingredient is lakcing. Joan … Read more
The quipping and meta-referencing have started even before the Marvel Studios ident is fully on the screen. Deadpool & Wolverine carries on in this vein, hitting Peak Ryan Reynolds at about the halfway mark, before realising it’s also meant to be a superhero movie, stops waving its hands around airily and finally balls them into … Read more
So here’s the world’s first feature-length werewolf movie, 1935’s Werewolf of London, which wasn’t particularly successful financially or critically but did get into the ether most of the nuts and bolts, the lore, of weremovies to come. It owes a tiny bit to Frankenstein – gentleman scientist interfering with the nature of things in a … Read more
Latvian animation phenomenon Gints Zilbalodis follows up his extraordinary debut, Away, with more beautifully rendered imagery in Flow, an Apocalypse Now-style quest, but with animals instead of people. They’re in a boat, in other words, sailing up a waterway and having adventures on the way, none of which ever look like they’re going to be … Read more
If you were alive and aware of what was going on around you in the UK in the 1970s, The Black Panther will ring all sorts of bells. Because it tells the story of the man behind the abduction and death of Lesley Whittle. She was a blameless teenager who wound up suspended by her … Read more
Hang on, A Quiet Place: Day One is the origin story, about how Earth is invaded by creatures who track humans using sound alone? Wasn’t that already covered in A Quiet Place Part II? Indeed it was, but if you are generous of spirit and reject the idea that A Quiet Place: Day One is … Read more
