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Blade Runner, City of God, Charles Dickens? Funny the things that sprang to mind watching Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, a self-conscious attempt to replicate the Hong Kong urban crime movie of yore. It’s a dystopian actioner set in a shantytown and focused on a central character who you might characterise as a 21st … Read more
All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, so the old saying goes. Ms .45 takes it literally and concisely, squeezing both into the title of Abel Ferrara’s unglamourised, low-budget 1981 exploitationer, making much of the New York streets of the era and the face of its star, 18-year-old Zoë … Read more
A cliche sits at the centre of The Nature of Love, caught by its original French title, Simple Comme Sylvain (which translates as Simple Like Sylvain). Namely, that what a nice middle class woman with a white-collar job really wants is a no-nonsense big-handed guy who knows his way around a toolbox and a woman’s … Read more
1987’s China Girl is usually described as a reworking of the Romeo and Juliet plot, or as a song-free update on West Side Story (which is a reworking of the Romeo and Juliet plot). But that’s to fall for the elaborate feint of director Abel Ferrara and writer/frequent collaborator Nicholas St John. Yes, there are … Read more
Like the main character in it, Hundreds of Beavers just keeps going, throwing gag after gag after gag at an audience you suspect it suspects will only yield if buried. It works. It’s a semi-cartoon – its looks and its approach to the laws of physics – about a 19th-century applejack (hooch made from apples) … Read more
Sex, death and people flying about in the air fighting each other, A Touch of Zen is the Taiwanese martial-arts movie that reminded Hong Kong directors how to do it properly, with space used intelligently, fluid cameras, energetic edits, restrained performances, humour that isn’t just about falling flat on your face and stuntwork that’s extravagant … Read more
A dinner-party-from-hell movie, a multiverse movie, Coherence deftly manages to be both, as if one of Luis Buñuel’s torture-the-bourgeoisie dramas from the 1960s had teleported to 50 years in the future. Coherence was released in 2013 to the odd handclap from festivals specialising in the left-field but it’s only now over a decade later that … Read more
Like an Afro-futurist Arabian Nights or Homer’s Odyssey, 1987’s Yeelen tells in simple episodes the story of a young man on the run from his father. It’s often referred to as the greatest film ever to come out of Africa (no, Black Panther does not count) but even if you don’t buy that you’ll surely … Read more
Radical is a good thing but there is a lot of it. An inspirational-teacher drama, it’s a dramatisation of events that took place in 2012. Those events became the basis of a 2013 Wired article written by Joshua Davis, this film’s producer. And from there ten years ago to this film in 2023. Meanwhile, the … Read more
1964 documentary Point of Order! is a strange one for a number of reasons. It’s not really a documentary at all, in some respects, but more a recut, a redux, of some blurry, black-and-white live TV footage shot by CBS of a senate hearing that had happened ten years before. Second up, it’s not really … Read more
A different take on the multiverse movie, Parallel does it all with acting. Just three people in a clinically modern house in a forest: a husband, a wife and the husband’s brother. Think of Everything Everywhere All at Once or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and you’re summoning … Read more
The best comedians don’t have an act, they are the act. 1934’s It’s a Gift is a brilliant example of this principle and of WC Fields’s approach to comedy. As a film it’s not always funny but he always is, every grimace and muttered aside comedy gold. This time around the Fields persona – a … Read more
