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Have you ever wanted to see Malcolm McDowell’s cock? Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is at least one place to find it, the movie released in 1979 marking the high water mark of the arthouse/porn crossover. The story behind the making of the film threatens to overshadow the plot of the film itself, which can be … Read more
Angela Lansbury Sex Kitten is the offer in A Life at Stake, a short and atmospheric noir from 1955 with a looser attitude to sex than was usual at the time. But before we meet Angela’s minxy Doris (not the sexiest name in the world, but hey), we get an eyeful of our star, Keith … Read more
A collection of great scenes in search of a movie, MaXXXine opens with a quote from Bette Davis – “In this business, until you’re known as a monster you’re not a star” – and ends with the song Bette Davis Eyes. Between those bookends, the story of a porn actress (Mia Goth) trying to go … Read more
Captain Pirate? Pirate Captain, surely? This swashbuckler from 1952 went by the much more obvious title of Captain Blood, Fugitive in some regions, which makes more sense all round, since this is a sequel to Fortunes of Captain Blood from two years earlier. Fortunes had done pretty good business and so this revisit gets an … Read more
Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los Ojos in the original Spanish) makes it four full films in 50 years for writer/director Victor Erice. Hardly a punishing workrate. But then when your debut was The Spirit of the Beehive – often touted as the best Spanish film ever made – you can pretty much go at your … Read more
If you ran The 39 Steps through a photocopier a few times, you might end up with Man on the Run, a British noir from 1949 that yokes a couple together and watches as they fall in love. Which they do the moment they meet, on the evidence of what’s on the screen. But… in … Read more
A Vietnam war movie released in 2019, Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan has a couple of other potential strikes against it. It’s Australian, for one, and who even remembers that Australia lined up alongside the USA for that epic? For another, it’s not even vaguely interested in setting Vietnam in the wider political … Read more
If you’re looking for a drive-in movie set at a drive-in… Drive-In Massacre is the short, sharp schlock you’re looking for, a cult item shot in four days, without permits and with all the actors using pseudonyms because they were on a non-union production. It’s a cult movie, which is a way of rationalising its … Read more
Since Shotgun Stories, his 2007 debut, there hasn’t been a bad Jeff Nichols film. But The Bikeriders comes close, a downbeat affair quietly putting the glamorous image of the motorbike gang to the test, if not to the sword. The film is based on a 1960s photo-book by Danny Lyon, which followed the Outlaws (here … Read more
Fritz Lang’s scorching run of the late silent era continues with Frau im Mond. Translated variously as Woman in the Moon, Girl in the Moon and By Rocket to the Moon, it’s Lang’s second go at sci-fi. He’d made Metropolis only two years before, nearly bankrupting the Ufa studio in the process. And yet, for … Read more
No one was exactly clamouring for it but Twisters, the imaginatively titled sequel to Twister, turned out alright in the end anyway. The original, complete with flying cow, came out in 1996, 24 years ago. At that point Lee Isaac Chung, director of this sequel, was a fresh faced 18 years old, star Glen Powell … Read more
1966’s The Witches (aka The Devil’s Own) is another great opportunity to indulge the guilty pleasure of watching a once-glam Hollywood goddess at the tail end of her career being relentlessly monstered in a down-market movie. Think Joan Crawford in Trog or Bette Davis in Burnt Offerings. Here it’s Joan Fontaine getting the treatment, the … Read more
