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Gentle and beguiling, Touch is a change of gear for director Baltasar Kormákur, the Icelander who made his name with a series of genre movies, like the homegrown thriller 101 Reykjavík, before heading to Hollywood where 2 Guns (with Denzel Washington) and Everest (Sam Worthington, Keira Knightley) showed he could handle big stars and big … Read more
First things first. I, the Executioner, the 1968 one I mean, has nothing to do with the 2024 film. They share a snappy title and both trade in violence but it doesn’t go much further than that. The new movie is a police-focused South Korean action sequel (to Veteran) full of martial-arts sequences. The 1968 … Read more
Since Reality Sydney Sweeney has nothing left to prove. A standout performance that didn’t rely on her usual standout performers, it was sober and pitiless and one of the best films of 2023. And now? Anyone But You, the sort of thing you might have thought she’d have left behind, a boy meets girl, loses … Read more
Tales of Ordinary Madness is a snappier title than the book it’s based on. Charles Bukowski’s Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness is the source of Marco Ferreri’s semi-doomed attempt to get the beat poet for guys (always guys) too young for Kerouac et al onto the screen. It doesn’t work and … Read more
Trench 11 (aka Death Trench) belongs to a genre that didn’t much exist before the 21st century – war horror. Alongside films like Overlord, Frankenstein’s Army, Ghosts of War and Dead Snow, war horror slickly insists that war isn’t horrific enough, and that what’s needed is a bit more supernatural nastiness on top. Or, seen … Read more
Translating 1978’s Ciao Maschio as Bye Bye Monkey doesn’t really help the film very much. Literally, it should be something like Farewell Machismo, and that title makes a lot more sense when you actually watch the film, whose eventual English-language title has been overwhelmed by the presence of a chimpanzee in the film. So, where … Read more
The TV show American Horror Story is probably partly responsible for Damian McCarthy’s Oddity, a horror movie that cuts through the subgenres with a cackle. AHS does it season by season, but McCarthy is doing it all in one compendious film, a bit of 1970s here, some 1930s there, a hint of silent-era horror even, … Read more
Not the best Otto Preminger film but a very good example of what he was about, Where the Sidewalk Ends is a film noir directed with maximum economy that re-teams Laura‘s golden pairing of Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, he again impassive as you like, she almost unbearably long-suffering. It’s not much of a role … Read more
I’d not heard of Kneecap. The band from Northern Ireland rap in the Irish language, which makes them unusual and worthy alone of a biopic. The fact that they’re good at it and are also buzzy, funny, lairy lads who can act is just a bonus. There are only 80,000 native Irish speakers on the … Read more
There’s nothing wrong with The Shout that a different screenplay wouldn’t fix. In front of and behind the camera it’s brilliant. But further back than that, at the conceptual stage, there’s not much beyond a spectacularly tedious allegory about something or other. Into the marriage of John Hurt’s Anthony and Susannah York’s Rachel comes a … Read more
Spoofy rather than spooky, Zombie Town is no good at all if a proper scaring is what you want but a wholly different proposition if you’re after the sort of knowing salute that Ghostbusters made to drive-in horror all those years ago. Dan Aykroyd, yes, Dan Aykroyd, is one of the stars, and one of … Read more
More than just a miserable face, arthouse darling Carl Theodor Dreyer could also churn out the hits. Master of the House is one such, a counter to the suggestion that he was just an austere Dane interested only in the beauty of human suffering – see The Passion of Joan of Arc or, much later, Ordet, … Read more
