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Conclave is not so much a case of who done it as who won it, a thriller set in the Vatican as the cardinals gather to elect a new pope. Being an adaptation of a Robert Harris novel, like Enigma (which became a film of the same name) and The Ghost (which became The Ghost … Read more
“There will never again be another tango couple like us,” says María Nieves, best known for her long-standing partnership with Juan Carlos Copes. You’ll never have heard of the pair of them if you’re not interested in tango, but Our Last Tango (aka Un Tango Más), German Kral’s film about them, works just fine whether … Read more
How much of The Dead Don’t Hurt could you cut out without hurting it? Quite a bit, I’m guessing. It’s a slow and steady western, and that’s at least partly the point of it, an exercise in style and genre that could be quite a bit shorter but also a fair bit longer without changing … Read more
A young woman whose soldier boyfriend has just dumped her goes out for a drink with a known “wolf”. Drunk and vulnerable, she then heads back to his place, where, he tells her, there’s a party going down, only to discover that the party consists of just her and him. The next morning the very … Read more
Having paused for 38 years to catch its breath, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reminds us what we loved about the original 1988 movie… and what we found slightly less than satisfying. 1988 was when some of today’s biggest actors were born – Emma Stone and Glenn Powell for instance. It was the year of Seoul Olympics. And it … Read more
If you liked Humphrey Bogart’s cynical romantic Rick in Casablanca, Key Largo gives you another go around the track with him. And if you liked the dynamite pairing of Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep or Dark Passage, they get another outing too, in the last of the films … Read more
The Outrun is the latest from director Nora Fingscheidt, whose edgy, urgent System Crasher opened doors in 2019 that she largely closed again with her follow-up, 2021’s The Unforgivable, which many critics indeed found unforgivable, even though it starred Sandra Bullock. She’s on the upswing again here, with the jumbled-up story of a young woman … Read more
Jules Dassin is so associated with Rififi (aka the best heist movie ever) that his other films tend to get eclipsed. Here’s 1949’s Thieves’ Highway, one of his run of great movies, which had got underway with Brute Force two years earlier. It’s the story of a guy who comes back from the war to … Read more
Smart eight year olds might go a bundle on Scarygirl, an Australian animation visually targeted more at their parents, though its bounce, straightforward storytelling and bold (ok, simplistic) messaging says young. There’s a touch of Finding Nemo in the plotting. Actually it’s more Finding Dory, the sequel, the one in which little Dory goes on … Read more
1971’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death was originally titled It Drinks Hippie Blood and was a satire on 1960s counterculture. And then John Hancock got involved and, one rewrite later, out popped this much more straightforward but rather superior horror movie setting out to unsettle rather than amuse. Hancock also directs, in his feature debut, … Read more
All sorts of klaxons are sounding, red lights flashing and warning bells ringing at the beginning of Magpie, a neo-noir which, by the end, has triumphed in telling a story which Roald Dahl (wearing his adult hat) might be proud to call one of his own. It’s a screenplay written by an actor and it’s … Read more
A guy comes back from Vietnam and runs into a whole load of trouble in 1977’s Rolling Thunder, the sort of “guy comes back from Vietnam” movie they used to make around then. Except this one’s all messed up. William Devane plays the guy, Major Charles Rane, who returns from seven years in a Vietnam … Read more
