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We have Covid to thank for Perfect Days, the best film from Wim Wenders in some time. The original idea was to get Wenders to Tokyo to make a documentary about the toilets built for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (a gig is a gig). But the Olympics first got postponed to 2021 and then eventually … Read more
Here’s Maren Ade’s first feature, The Forest for the Trees (Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen in the original German), made in 2003. Though low in budget – it was a film-school project – it instantly established her as one to watch. The remarkable thing is that in the two decades since, Ade has made only … Read more
Sometimes you like something but you’re not sure why. Case in point: Blood for Dust, a 1990s style “who’s zooming who?” thriller full of bullets, bad guys and cases of money being swapped for white powder in remote locations. It is very familiar. And yet. The two central performances help a lot. First up, Scoot … Read more
Sick of “sad sack” roles, Joan Fontaine struck out for the border with 1947’s Ivy, a pivot away from the passive wallflowers of Rebecca and Suspicion, roles that had made her Hollywood’s biggest star and won her an Oscar, and towards something much ballsier. She plays Ivy (as in Poison Ivy), a woman in Edwardian … Read more
A naive young woman searches for her missing sister in Cadejo Blanco, a bloody coming-of-age thriller featuring a fabulous performance by Karen Martínez. If you’re wondering what the title translates as, the cadejo blanco is a mythical white dog – a spirit animal of Central America folklore. And once you know that you might also … Read more
Our Mother’s House didn’t get the acclaim of Jack Clayton’s previous film about spooky kids, The Innocents, when it debuted. Partly because The Innocents is one of the all-time greats. But also because Our Mother’s House appeared in 1967, and with its message of children going to the bad because of a lack of parental … Read more
Unusually for a film concerning King Henry VIII of England, Firebrand is not interested in wife one (Catherine of Aragon) or wife two (Anne Boleyn). Instead focus is on the last of Henry’s six wives, Katherine Parr. And, no bones about it, she is the focus of this film, not the king. A history lesson. … Read more
Cripple Creek takes place against the backdrop of the Colorado gold rush of 1892 and is a genre movie with an unusual slant, a western with a secret sauce. It’s introduced by a stern voiceover giving us chapter and verse on gold reserves in the USA, and how smugglers are undermining the American economy by … Read more
There are a lot of reasons why Uproar works so well, but its star, Julian Dennison, is a major one. This is a warm and likeable underdog drama slash coming of ager, and Dennison is a warm and likeable lead. Another is that every time writer/directors Paul Middleditch and Hamish Bennett sail close to mawkishness, … Read more
When the name Max Ophüls comes up, Sans Lendemain isn’t the first film most people think of. That would probably be Lola Montès, or La Ronde, or Letters from an Unknown Woman. But this 1939 outlier is distinctively Ophüls, a superb if small film, knotty in theme, beautiful in look and with a great performance … Read more
The first obvious thing about Ferrari, a film from 2023, is that it was written by Troy Kennedy Martin, writer of 1969’s The Italian Job. Martin died in 2009! It’s taken a long time to get this film made. Michael Mann has been talking about it since the early years of the new millennium. Back … Read more
A cult Spanish zombie film shot mostly in England’s Peak District in 1974 – those filters must surely narrow things down to Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, which also goes by the name of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, the slightly more anaemic Don’t Open the Window and the original Spanish title, No Profanar el … Read more
