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1978’s Straight Time would be a properly great film if it just stuck to being one story – about a felon trying to go straight. But instead it decides about halfway through that more juice can be squeezed by telling another story after the first one. The felon goes back to his old ways. Some … Read more
What happens if you turn wayward, dithery rom-com Hugh Grant all the way up to 11? Heretic is the answer, a through-the-looking-glass turn by Grant whose good guy/bad guy turn as a householder giving two young Mormon women a night they won’t forget is this movie’s main event. First we meet the young women – … Read more
Joan Crawford did not do shading, subtlety or character acting. She did something much more gothic. Sudden Fear plays straight to her strengths, a “woman in peril” movie that starts out in the world of realism but slips gradually into the realm of the histrionic. In early scenes Crawford’s acting looks mummified, as if the … Read more
The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady, for those who didn’t get enough musketeering with director Martin Bourboulon’s first trip out in a plumed hat, Part I: D’Artagnan. Shot back to back with the first movie, the sequel has all the strengths of the original, and all the flaws, but more so. It is static and … Read more
Charley Varrick, a neo-noir from 1973, is much better than its mixed reputation would suggest. Lean and fast, dark and enigmatic, it stars Walter Matthau as a crop sprayer who heists a smalltown bank in the hope of making a fair amount of easy money. Nothing too massive, just a cushion. But when he and … Read more
So here’s The Count of Monte-Cristo 2024 style, not to be confused with the TV show of the same name from the same year covering the same story. Or the more than 20 film adaptations down the years, the numerous TV and radio versions (including one by Orson Welles). Plays. Musicals. Games. You get the … Read more
Doing very little but saying quite a lot, Mati Diop’s documentary Dahomey tracks the return of a number of artefacts from France to Benin in West Africa, which was known as Dahomey when they were first appropriated – looted, if you prefer. The fairly short film divides up into three distinct chunks. In the first, … Read more
Is there anything as unfashionable right now as a Bob Hope movie? The Cat and the Canary is as good a place to start as any if you want to start understanding the huge appeal Hope once had. Bear in mind that this movie was made in 1939, before he teamed up with Bing Crosby … Read more
A reboot and a return to basics in Alien: Romulus, in which Ridley Scott hands over the franchise to Spanish director Fede Alvarez, who returns the favour by handing producer Scott a spectacular sci-fi horror movie up with the best (ie the first two) of the series. We’re on a grungey spaceship on a timeline … Read more
A Rank Organisation B movie coming in at only 47 minutes, Penny and the Pownall Case is interesting for all sorts of ancillary reasons, but interesting in its own right too. The ancillaries. An early role for Christopher Lee. An early role for Diana Dors, still brunette and not yet in “British Marilyn Monroe” mode … Read more
A portrait of London in 1940, as the German’s attempted to bomb the city into submission, Steve McQueen’s Blitz is in many ways a very familiar war movie, a subversive ruse by McQueen. Whether his gambit works is another question. Superficially it’s a fine story, about a young lad being evacuated from the East End … Read more
By the time the Coen brothers made Miller’s Crossing, their third movie, it had become obvious that their films weren’t really set in the real world. Like Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing is set in an adjacent reality constructed entirely from moviescapes and populated with characters we seem to have met before. That … Read more
