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If it does nothing else then Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga reminds us what a bolt from the blue Mad Max: Fury Road was. How, after a string of Mad Maxes offering diminishing thrills (I mean Beyond the Thunderdome), writer director George Miller turned to gentler pursuits – Babe, Happy Feet – before blistering back … Read more
Watching The Glass Key you wouldn’t think it was the inspiration behind Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which itself inspired Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. But they’re in there if you peel back the 1942 fashions and noirish looks and swap out Alan Ladd for Toshirô Mifune or Clint Eastwood. Ladd plays the cool, smart, tough loner caught … Read more
A film of two halves, two time periods and, in fact, two films, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World also tells two stories. In one the everyday travails of a production assistant driving around Bucharest auditioning injured people to appear in a public information film about workplace safety. In the … Read more
A film expressly designed to lure the US into the war in Europe, 1941’s Man Hunt is also Fritz Lang’s attempt at a rollicking The 39 Steps-style yarn, with dashing about, derring-do, stiff upper lips, local colour and a man/woman yoking-together that’s got everything Hitchcock had except handcuffs and his exquisite sense of pace. It … Read more
My dictionary defines “aporia” (from the Greek) as “an irresolvable internal contradiction or internal disjunction in a text, argument or theory”. In sci-fi movies such an internal, irresolvable contradiction – like a man who is his own father – is called a time paradox. Ironically, Aporia, a fascinating attempt to weld one aesthetic to another, … Read more
When it came out the critical consensus on Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie was that it was a mess, the result of giving a druggie with questionable talent full creative control of a movie. Nowadays it’s more often seen as a lost cult classic, a bold experiment and an attempt to push the boundaries of … Read more
You know The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a Guy Ritchie film even without knowing it’s a Guy Ritchie film. That Gentleman bit of the title is the giveaway – whether it’s Holmes and Watson or the Lock, Stock lads, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or The Gentlemen (film and TV versions), Ritchie has repeatedly demonstrated that … Read more
The beach party movie, surfer and monster movies all hang out together in The Beach Girls and the Monster, an oddity from 1965 that often makes it into the “so bad it’s good” category, largely, I suspect, because people just don’t really know what to make of it. It’s Scooby-Doo in plot – fun-loving kids, … Read more
Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (La Bête) isn’t the first adaptation of Henry James’s novella 1903 The Beast in the Jungle. It’s not even the first one of 2023. That honour goes to Patric Chiha’s French-language movie The Beast in the Jungle, which made it to the screens about six months before Bonello’s. Whether Bonello trimmed … Read more
One of a string of films by Luis Buñuel sticking it to the bourgeoisie, the church, the authorities, the man, The Exterminating Angel (El Ángel Exterminador) looked wildly radical and political when it debuted in 1962. Now it looks like a metaphor in search of a story. Times change. Even before things have descended into … Read more
Halfway through making La Chimera, its star Josh O’Connor took a break and went off to make Challengers for Luca Guadagnino, then came back to Italy to finish off for Alice Rohrwacher. Since his breakthrough in 2017’s God’s Own Country, after five or so years of plugging away, these days everyone wants a piece of … Read more
After a year off working out what to do next, Jean-Paul Belmondo returned in 1968 with Ho! (sometimes called Ho! Criminal Face). Having been courted by Hollywood, he’d decided he wanted to stay in France and stick with what he was best at – films that emphasised a moody masculinity. It’s got to be said … Read more
