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Mads Mikkelsen is a reassuring presence in any movie and is the making of The Promised Land (Bastarden in the original Danish), a movie that promises much and eventually delivers too much, but stylishly, always stylishly. He plays Ludvig Kahlen, an 18th-century ex-soldier who petitions the Danish king to allow him to cultivate the Jutland … Read more
Thrillers generally work backwards, towards who done it or why. The Manchurian Candidate doesn’t do it that way at all. We know that something’s wrong from the opening scenes of John Frankenheimer’s chilly Cold War thriller, but we’ve no idea where everything is headed. And Frankenheimer keeps it that way until the film’s dying (literally) … Read more
A clever one-two of a movie, Marmalade starts out looking like one thing, then turns into something else, but saves its best moves for the finale, when revelations come tumbling out at a rate of knots. What it looks like is one of those dweeby, comic coming-of-agers of the early 2000s, movies like Elizabethtown or … Read more
I’m not sure why there aren’t more movies like Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America. To make one all you need is some found footge – real found footage, not stuff you faked – an edit suite and a voiceover. Plus ideas. This strange movie from 1992 is a collage of bits and pieces that writer/director … Read more
Long films are often thought to have something profound to say. I’m not sure Trenque Lauquen does, unless you’re counting what it has to say about the act or art of cinema itself. Philosophically there might not be too much going on here but artistically this is a remarkable film. Cahiers du Cinéma named this … Read more
1995’s Ghost in the Shell was meant to be the Japanese anime that cracked the world market wide open. It didn’t work, but that’s not to say it wasn’t successful in its own way. A slew of sequels, TV shows and eventually a highly contested Hollywood remake followed (on account of Scarlett Johansson playing its … Read more
Can you be black in America and not live in the hood? What would the Great American Novel look like if it turned on the life and thoughts of a black man, rather than some old white dude like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow? American Fiction tackles those questions and a few more, in the … Read more
If it’s a performance you want – and I mean a performance – look no further than Luchino Visconti’s 1951 comedy Bellissima (Beautiful to English speakers), in which Anna Magnani turns on the acting flamethrower in the film’s opening moments and runs it at full intensity until fadeout. She plays the mother with aspirations that her … Read more
Close by name and nature, this intense, tightly packed, intimate study of a friendship between two 13-year-old Belgian boys took the Grand Prix prize at Cannes, where they do like a bit of a wallow. Beautifully made and sensitively played, it starts out in one territory but ends in another. The focus is on Leo … Read more
Birth doesn’t quite sit with Jonathan Glazer’s other films. As I write (February 2024), his latest, The Zone of Interest, is attracting awards like an MRI scanner attracts spoons. As did Glazer’s debut, Sexy Beast, in 2000, and the film that followed Birth, 2013’s Under the Skin. As for Birth, it was booed at its … Read more
All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh’s first movie since the atypical Lean On Pete, sees him back in familiar Haigh territory – with a twist. “Familiar” means an intense, almost claustrophobic, relationship-focused drama, but the twist comes from the way Haigh tells his story. It’s a spooky, old-fashioned ghost story. Not, note, a haunted house … Read more
As good a portrait of what it means to be old and lonely as any you’ll see, 1967’s The Whisperers is an atypical British movie for the Swinging mid-Sixties, almost a return to the kitchen-sinkers of the early part of the decade. Bryan Forbes, who wrote and directed and was a smart man, understands the … Read more
