Latest Posts
At last, in American Star, someone has given Ian McShane a lead role in a movie that he can get properly stuck into. Not a fine co-starring role (Sexy Beast) or fine supporting role (John Wick and its sequels) or as a fine co-lead in a spin-off from a TV show (Deadwood) but a bona-fide … Read more
Hayao Miyazaki’s career as an animator in charge of his own destiny starts here, with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, two hours of typical Miyazaki, from 1984, which more or less set the benchmark for what was to come. There had been one full feature before, 1979’s The Castle of Cagliostro, but that … Read more
Writer/director Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel slots into the “people having a terrible time in the Outback” groove but her follow-up to The Assistant is also its own distinctive beast. It’s more Wake in Fright than Wolf Creek, with its subjects/victims being tested to their psychological limits rather than out-and-out monstered. It’s a “thriller” says … Read more
1984’s The Brother from Another Planet is a smart, funny, smallscale sci-fi movie about an alien who crashlands in New York. In some respects it’s a sibling movie to 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth – weird dude with special gifts has a mixed time of it on planet Earth. Because the alien resembles … Read more
Godland reminds us yet again that when it comes to film-making there’s always something going on in Iceland. How can a population that small – roughly 380,000 – produce so many talented writer directors? Hlynur Pálmason sits alongside the likes of Valdimar Jóhannsson, Baltasar Kormákur, Benedikt Erlingsson, Grimu Hákonarson and Óskar Jónasson as a director … Read more
Reinventing a genre he had more or less invented in the first place, Fritz Lang’s 1960 movie The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (originally Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse) also revisits an established intellectual property. The character of Mabuse had already served Lang well, having taken centre stage as the arch-villain in Lang’s silent … Read more
As handsome as its star, François Civil, The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan was shot back-to-back with its bookend companion, The Three Musketeers: Milady, a pair of old-school spirited adventures full of flashing eyes and flashing blades. I read somewhere that it’s quite tonally different from other Musketeer movies. It didn’t seem so to me. I only … Read more
The superb McCabe and Mrs Miller (generally styled McCabe & Mrs. Miller) was sold as a revisionist western when it came out in 1971. Its director, Robert Altman, went so far as to call it an “anti-western”. Even though Anthony Mann in the 1950s and Sergio Leone in the 1960s had paved the way with … Read more
Another tale of female self-actualisation from William Oldroyd, who follows Lady Macbeth with Eileen, a low-key melodramatic adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s best-seller. Lady Macbeth made a star of Florence Pugh, who had been a star-in-waiting since her debut in Carol Morley’s The Falling, in 2014. The transformation isn’t quite so marked here, since Thomasin McKenzie … Read more
Largely bonkers, 1947’s Secret Beyond the Door is a great film if what you need is a laugh, but a joke as what it’s meant to be – a twisted psychological film noir. It’s the last of five collaborations between Joan Bennett and director Fritz Lang, and it’s produced by Bennett’s husband, Walter Wanger, who … Read more
Lots of things do battle in Piggy, but most of all it’s a story about a teenager at war with herself. Or is it a slasher movie? Or a coming of ager with a visceral psychology at work? Bit of all three, and possibly a few more things besides. Writer/director Carlota Pereda welds all the … Read more
“Trash,” was MGM boss Louis B Mayer’s verdict on The Asphalt Jungle when he saw it in 1950. “Ugly people doing nasty things,” he added, possibly unhappy that John Huston had borrowed from the glamour-dodging European neorealists to make what’s now considered to be one of the pre-eminent films of the 1950s. Does Mayer have … Read more
