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It was The End We Start From‘s misfortune to come out not long after The Last of Us, the TV show starring Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal. Mahalia Bello’s film arrived a few months after The Last of Us had finished and covers much of the same ground, though here the focus is really on … Read more
1946’s O.S.S. makes a strong case for Alan Ladd as the first James Bond, sort of, ish, in prototype. A new sort of spy thriller about a new sort of spy agency – the Office of Strategic Services was the forerunner to the CIA and had only been set up four years before – it … Read more
Lila Avilés has only made one film before, The Chambermaid, in which a lot happened without very much seeming to happen at all. The same thing is going on with Tótem, superficially an almost-fly-on-the-wall naturalistic drama tracking a family through the day leading up to the birthday party of Tono, a very sick husband, father … Read more
So what else did Darth Vader do? It’s often forgotten that James Earl Jones, the voice (though not the body – that was Dave Prowse) behind the galaxy’s most badass dad had an acting life away from Star Wars. Exhibit A – 1974’s Claudine, in which he goes toe to toe with Diahann Carroll in … Read more
Men are scumbags and tech bro’s the scumbaggiest of them all. Blink Twice isn’t exactly making the most out-there statement for 2024, but in her directorial debut (she also co-wrote) Zoë Kravitz shows she knows her way around a horror movie, can build mood and tension and get performances out of her stars which are … Read more
One of the little joys of Moontide is trying to work out which bits of it were directed by Fritz Lang. His name isn’t on the screen credits but he was the original director, until he was fired after falling out with its star, Jean Gabin. Ironically, it was Gabin who had campaigned to get … Read more
It’s only while watching The Magician, a cult Australian movie from 2005, that it really hits home how prissy other mockumentaries are. Scott Ryan’s film goes in with both feet and by getting it wrong – wrong lens, bad lighting, framing all over the place – he gets that on-the-fly feeling just right. It’s the pretend-real … Read more
The screamer hanging off the end of Hangmen Also Die! kind of says it all. As if “hangmen” and “die” in the same sentence weren’t enough, the title of Fritz Lang’s 1943 film adds extra emphasis, just in case we hadn’t got it. The scrolling opening prologue continues in much the same vein, informing us … Read more
A woman wakes up in the night to find her husband bolt upright in bed talking in his sleep. “Someone is inside,” he says, before sparking back out again. The next day she asks him about what he said the night before. It was a line from a script I’ve been reading, her actor-husband tells … Read more
A nice 95-minute advertisement for a company still with us, 1941’s Western Union is appropriately both a western and about the Union, being an adaptation of a Zane Grey story about how the west was won, or at least connected up to the rest of the United States, by telegraph wire. In linking coast to … Read more
Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger is another of those Michael Scorsese Does… affairs (see My Voyage to Italy), which is to say a hot letter from a fan to the object of his adoration, this time the British duo behind movies like A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus. So, … Read more
So The Return of Frank James it had to be, what with Frank’s brother Jesse James having died at the end of his eponymous 1939 movie. No sequel featuring hotshot outlaw Jesse being possible, how about one all about his more grounded older brother, the big sell being that Henry Fonda had been persuaded to … Read more
