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Often described as a neorealist film, Roberto Rossellini’s second collaboration with Ingrid Bergman, Europa ’51, is more a Hollywood melodrama with a breakaway neorealist moment. More than that it’s a vehicle for the rehabilitation of Bergman by getting her to suffer on screen – her forte. It’s the story of a high society woman who’s … Read more
A decent sci-fi movie almost drowns in police procedural cliché in Restore Point (Bod Obnovy), a Czech movie owing something to Blade Runner – but then so much sci-fi does. The year is 2041 and in a world of driverless cars, dizzy buildings and swooshy screen tech, cop Emma Trochinowska (Andrea Mohylová) is assigned to … Read more
The weird thing about Traitement de Choc, usually shown in English-speaking areas as Shock Treatment, is that it went by the title Doctor in the Nude in the UK when it was released in the early 1970s. Nothing to do with the comic novel Doctor in the Nude by Richard Gordon, the latest in his … Read more
Talk to Me announces Danny and Michael Philippou as gifted new arrivals on the Australian indie scene. With a feature debut this strong, how long the twins remain indie and in Australia is anyone’s guess. Apparently they turned down a directing gig on one of the DC Extended Universe movies to do this, so they … Read more
Two things impelled me towards 2002’s Old Men in New Cars (Gamle Mænd i Nye Biler in the original Danish). The first was the quirky title, which has no real connection with anything that happens in the film. The second was the name Kim Bodnia at the top of the credits. You might know him … Read more
The Zone of Interest is a film set in the house that’s right next door to Auschwitz, so it has a mountain to climb. Which is this – against the brute fact of exterminating people en masse, pictorial representation of the same is always going to look a bit kitsch. Jonathan Glazer, who directs and … Read more
Voskhozhdenie, the USSR movie from 1977, usually goes by the English title The Ascent, though The Ascension would be semantically and tonally closer to the mark, since this is a war movie done as an allegory for the passion of Jesus Christ. It’s a “lost patrol” movie. Or, to be strict, a lost patrol of … Read more
Jason Statham enters the territory of John Wick, Taken and The Equalizer (feel free to add your own) with The Beekeeper, a midweight actioner marked out by spectacular fight sequences and violence that’s ingenious and gloriously brutal. He plays one of those retired guys who used to be something in the secret service. They’re never … Read more
Too fast and furious, maybe, Johnnie To’s 1993 superhero actioner The Heroic Trio nevertheless has energy and style to spare, and as much of that strange Hong Kong martial-arts weirdness – all leaping and spinning but no contact – as you could want. The plot gets kind of lost in the excess but it’s about … Read more
A heist movie done as slow cinema, The Delinquents (aka Los Delincuentes) sets up genre expectations then delivers them with a twist. But mostly doesn’t deliver them at all. What a strange, big beast of a film Rodrigo Moreno has given us. Moreno gets straight into the meat of his story – Morán (Daniel Elías), … Read more
Brigitte Bardot turns 90 in 2024 so this is a good time to have a look at her first starring role, in The Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter. It wasn’t her first film. That was Le Trou Normand, which also came out in 1952. It isn’t really her first starring role either, since Bardot herself doesn’t appear until … Read more
Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to The Favourite, is an act of restitution to Emma Stone, who was the best thing in that movie and yet lost out at awards’ time to Olivia Colman. Queens (as Colman was) trump upstarts. Stone does not lose out this time (in between writing and posting this, she has … Read more
