Latest Posts
The Last Stop in Yuma County is a reminder of the sort of film there used to be a lot of in the late 1990s. In that first post-Tarantino wave, low-budget film-makers would head to the desert, find a diner somewhere, load it up with gonzos and dimwits, add guns and fruity dialogue and then … Read more
Yes, Madam! isn’t in any way like a fine wine. It has not aged well and looks far worse now than it did when it came out in 1985. A Hong Kong comedy actioner that knows its audience and its times, it was made quickly for a market that wanted it. Posterity could sort itself … Read more
The dramatised behind-the-scenes story of the rise and demise of the company that had the world where its customers had its little black phone – in the palm of its hand – BlackBerry is so well designed, tooled and assembled that it could be used as a case study for how to make a film … Read more
By a stretch the best of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s so-called BRD Trilogy, Veronika Voss stands out against The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola because Fassbinder had the great good sense to co-opt Billy Wilder’s brilliant Sunset Boulevard to help with the telling of the story of an ageing German actress and the young man … Read more
2018’s Abrakadabra rides the giallo revival like an ace jockey, completing in one hour nine minutes what the likes of Amer, Berberian Sound Studio and Dario Argento’s Dark Glasses spent much more time over, packing it all in and then doling it all out atmospherically. For all its race-winning form, it never feels hurried. It’s … Read more
The comedy of remarriage is really a creature of the 1930s but here it is alive and reasonably well in 1954 in Phffft, a screwbally kind of thing starring Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday as a married couple of eight years who decide wedlock isn’t for them, then try the alternatives only to eventually have … Read more
A horror movie coming at the genre from three different directions, Reborn starts off in distinct tits’n’gore territory, jumps quickly into the supernatural and then eventually morphs into something altogether more psychological. Key asset is Kayleigh Gilbert, who has a big-eyed face and long physique built for the gothic. She plays the teenager who was … Read more
Once Elizabeth Taylor realised she wasn’t going to be starring in Cleopatra, or anything like it, any more, she set off on a mad career jag that saw her playing a succession of weirdos, harpies, harridans, drunks and foul-mouthed vixens. If that sounds like something you’d like to see, X, Y & Zee, or Zee … Read more
Belgian rapper Baloji’s feature debut Omen (Augure in French) starts with an image that might have come from a spaghetti western. To a whistled tune on the soundtrack a lone rider on horseback pitches up at a watering hole. Dismounting, the figure pulls one of her breasts from under her dark robes and squirts what … Read more
Almost a commentary on Hollywood’s transition from Pre-Code licence to Post-Code moralising, 1936’s Theodora Goes Wild is a breezy screwball comedy that straddles the decades with its opposition of conservative smalltown standards and liberal big-city values. Irene Dunne is the go-between, playing Theodora Lynn, a compliant daughter of the founding family of the small burgh … Read more
A heartfelt attempt to save a bossa nova pianist’s name from oblivion as his peers die, They Shot the Piano also sees Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba collaborating again for the first time since 2009’s Chico & Rita. That was a bright, busy, noir-tinged animation aiming to lever Cuban and Latin musicians back into the … Read more
Number ten of the 14 features Myrna Loy and William Powell made together, Love Crazy never quite achieves classic status, though all the elements are here – smart writing, brilliant playing, fantastic support players. All that’s needed is a plot that makes some sense. It’s a “remarriage comedy”, the genre that emerged once Hollywood’s production … Read more
