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I was initially suspicious of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy – does anyone care who Lee Cronin is, or his Mummy, and why should this film bear his name? It turns out there’s a good reason for the director’s name up top – no one involved wanted audiences thinking they were getting a continuation of either … Read more
I don’t remember there being an immigration angle to The Pied Piper of Hamelin, at least in the story I heard as a child, but it’s clearly there in this otherwise very traditional version of the fairy tale from 1957. The plot otherwise remains as I recall it. The town of Hamelin is plagued by … Read more
Is it possible to reject the big idea but still like the movie? Exhibit A: The Drama, a producers’ wet dream of casting – Robert Pattinson and Zendaya – and a strange hybrid of the talky New York dramedy, of the sort Woody Allen made his own, and a horror film. Woody Allen done as … Read more
When William Jacobs wrote the short story The Monkey’s Paw in 1902, could he have realised what sort of afterlife it would have? It’s been adapted dozens of times, even more if you count productions that don’t use its original title. This 1948 version is a short and atmospheric rendition of Jacobs’s story, changing the … Read more
By the end of Power Ballad I felt like I had been emotionally manipulated all the way up a very familiar garden path. In case I’m giving the wrong impression, I also cried. On balance I’d summarise it as “John Carney does it again”, the writer/director who does other things but regularly returns to the … Read more
Clear-eyed but compassionate, Il Posto is the other film by Ermanno Olmi, the one that isn’t The Tree of Wooden Clogs. Both are neo-realist to an extent and are concerned, obsessed, with the stuff of everyday life. Here, though, the focus is on the city, whereas Clogs was resolutely a tale of rural peasant life. … Read more
The intimate, highly personal family drama shot in an unobtrusive, semi-documentary way is Spanish auteur Carla Simón’s speciality, and in Romería, her latest film, she stays true to her vocation. Born in the mid-1980s, Simón was orphaned at an early age and raised by an uncle. In the early 2000’s she set off on a … Read more
Who killed Oliver Lacat (Jean-Claude Rolland)? The Second Twin is a strange film that manages to fold suspect, investigator and lawyer all into one person, Pierre Montaud (Robert Hossein). Meanwhile, director Christian-Jaque’s 1966 whodunit serves up distinctive visuals as it plays with suspects, as if this were an expressionist film from the 1930s, but in … Read more
A Private Life is the “Jodie Foster speaks French shock!” movie, and it’s a funny old beast, as if the plot of Jane Austen’s Emma – the fixer who cannot fix her own life – had been re-written by Agatha Christie and then weirded-up with a plot involving past lives. Another way of looking at … Read more
“Do not underestimate the British” is the message of Went the Day Well?, a tea-and-crumpets piece of wartime propaganda from Ealing Studios. It begins with a unit of Germans – disguised as British Tommies – arriving in the village of Bramley End and ends with the villagers uniting to give Fritz a bloody nose. Actually, much … Read more
Feelgood movies often lunge for the heartstrings. The Marching Band (originally En fanfare) does so too, but there is finesse here as well, and lovely performances, plus a plot that doesn’t always go where expected. And when it does go where expected it does it so unapologetically and majestically that you might feel like applauding, … Read more
If you’re buying Tension as a “physical”, it often comes packaged together on DVD or Blu-ray with Where Danger Lives, as if it were a makeweight. Strange, since it’s a cracking film in terms of plot and character. Ostensibly designed as a vehicle for Audrey Totter, it ended up with Richard Basehart’s name first in … Read more
