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MadS is good. Not sure about the big S in MadS. Or even what “MadS” is meant to mean (on screen it’s MADS, by the way). Typography to one side, surely it’s one of the best one-shot movies of all time, in the pantheon alongside the likes of Russian Ark and Victoria, with director David … Read more
Bill Murray made What About Bob? in 1991, two years after Ghostbusters II and two years before Groundhog Day. Richard Dreyfus, his co-star, was one year on from Postcards from the Edge and on a run including Lost in Yonkers (1993) and Mr Holland’s Opus (1995). Director Frank Oz’s previous two movies had been Little … Read more
A shipwrecked robot adopts an orphaned gosling and learns to be a mother in The Wild Robot, a perky and poignant animation produced by DreamWorks and directed by Chris Sanders of How to Train Your Dragon fame. The bumf says Miyazaki and old Disney informed the look of the finished product, but the DreamWorks hit … Read more
Sally Potter took quite a chance with her 1997 movie The Tango Lesson, by casting herself as herself in a lightly fictionalised version of her relationship with tango dancer Pablo Verón. Potter does like taking risks, though. Her previous film, Orlando, was an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s story about a character (Tilda Swinton) who travels … Read more
Michael Felker’s debut movie, Things Will Be Different, is billed as “A Felker Film”, which is ominously grandiose. But things are indeed different here and Felker emerges as a writer/director you might term an auteur, which is what the whole Felker Film thing is suggesting, right? Most movies don’t operate like Felker’s film. They set … Read more
1933’s Ecstasy is famous for a couple of reasons. It was the first non-porn movie to show a woman having an orgasm, or so its reputation insists. And it was the film that introduced Hedy Lamarr to the world. Ironically, the actress so shockingly beautiful that other Hollywood screen goddesses were wary of being seen … Read more
Sydney Sweeney plays a nun – how about that for an elevator pitch? Immaculate is a film that Sweeney really wanted to play, having first auditioned to play the lead role aged 17. Now, ten years on, with money in the bank and acting as a producer on the movie, she finally gets the project … Read more
If you’re looking for a slightly leftfield scary movie for Halloween, you could do a lot worse than 1934’s The Black Cat, which not only stars horror titans (veterans division) Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the first of a run of movies they’d do together but is directed by Edgar Ulmer, a largely wasted … Read more
Impressive, the way Alex Garland shifted from being just an incredibly successful author to being an incredibly successful director as well. Men follows his previous two films, Ex Machina (what a debut) and Annihilation plus the TV show Devs, all three of which he also wrote. It’s a superbly conceived film, a folk horror movie … Read more
War is hell but also kind of fun in Confirm or Deny, one of a series of movies made by Hollywood when America was still a neutral power using emotional blackmail to counter isolationism and persuade the country to join the fray. Eventually Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s insane decision to declare war on the USA … Read more
Raven Jackson used to be a poet and is still a photographer. You can see traces of both in her feature debut, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (a line from a poem), a deeply meditative celebration of rural black life on the Mississippi. The film starts with long, slow, close-ups of a girl and … Read more
If I tell you that The Hop-Pickers (original Czech title: Starci na Chmelu) is sometimes known as Hop Side Story, that’ll give you a flavour of what’s going on in this quirky film from 1964, often described as Czechoslovakia’s first musical (there are other claimants, also from 1964). Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is also … Read more
