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A young FBI agent investigates a serial killer who cackles, dresses creepily and likes to leave cryptic clues at the scene of the crime. Longlegs is another belt of 1990s horror for those who can’t get enough Seven, It or The Silence of the Lambs. It’s derivative and yet it’s also its own beast, involving, … Read more
Anxiety was the fashionable diagnosis if you went to see a shrink in the 1940s. Suspicion is the anxiety movie, the story of a prim spinster swept off her feet by a handsome chap who then starts wondering what he saw in her. Her money is the obvious answer, though Joan Fontaine looks like a … Read more
Youth is wasted on the young in The Substance, writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s long, exciting and technically brilliant sci-fi fable swaggering like a 1980s action movie. Demi Moore plays Judith Sparkle, the ageing actress who takes “the substance” after being nudged in the direction of the age-reversing serum by a doctor with too-blue eyes, too-tight skin … Read more
Billy Wilder directed 1934’s Bad Seed (Mauvaise Graine) more out of necessity than desire. He’d never directed a film before, in spite of having been quite a big wheel as a writer in the German film industry (the Nazis put paid to that). But he was in a tight spot and so had to add … Read more
So was Tilman Singer’s first feature, 2018’s Luz, as inventive as Cuckoo, his most recent one (starring Hunter Schafer)? Yes, is the answer, though Luz is inventive in an entirely different way. It plays about with time in ways that are unusual – Singer doesn’t do flashbacks and flashforwards so much as infect the here … Read more
A classic country-house whodunit from 1937, The Thirteenth Chair gets the whole thing done and dusted in just over an hour, which is more than you can say for a lot of these things. And it can boast May Whitty – billed as “the Distinguished English Actress Dame May Whitty” – in the lead role as … Read more
Mixing it up is writer/director François Ozon’s way. Mon Crime (aka The Crime Is Mine) sees him back on the comedic territory of 8 Femmes, Potiche and In the House, leaving his more serious, more recent movies, like Peter von Kant (a remake of a fraught Fassbinder film), Summer of 85 (a veiled autobiography) and … Read more
The casting is crucial to the success of Don’t Bother to Knock as a taut psychological drama. On one side two actors – Richard Widmark and Elisha Cook Jr – known for playing weirdos, psychos, oddballs or generally damaged individuals. And on the other is Marilyn Monroe. In her first lead role, after a series … Read more
If Knives Out weren’t a lark it would look something like Sweet Dreams (Zoete Dromen), a thriller from the Netherlands where the usual murder mystery is sharpened by a hit of oppression mixed with anti-colonial hatred. It’s a lovely-looking, lushly colourful movie set around 1900 in the Dutch East Indies where the white colonists are … Read more
The dark twin of Dr Strangelove, Fail Safe came out the same year as Kubrick’s film and was sued by him over copyright infringement. There wasn’t any, but for a quiet life Kubrick’s studio, Columbia, played along and released his film first in January, then Sidney Lumet’s film later in the year. Both films are … Read more
Welcome back, Jennifer Lawrence, who as recently as 2015/16 was the world’s highest paid actress and in Causeway reminds us why. And perhaps needed to – so many films she’s appeared in since her high-water mark have been just a touch underwhelming. And welcome to the big time for Brian Tyree Henry. Oscar-nominated for his … Read more
Suddenly is apparently the movie that Lee Harvey Oswald watched before setting out to kill President John F Kennedy. God knows why Oswald was looking to it for inspiration because things don’t end triumphantly at all for the guys on screen trying to assassinate their own US president. It is triumphant as a movie though, … Read more
