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One of the big surprises of late 2023 was Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves making it onto so many “Best of…” lists for the year. Even more surprising, it actually deserves to be there (usual caveats apply). It’s a big sword-and-sorcery quest movie, with all the stuff you’d expect – spells, elves, shapeshifters, a … Read more
The first in a successful franchise and cornerstone of an entire genre – jiangshi – 1985’s Mr Vampire is a highly entertaining and madly inventive movie, particularly if you like high-level buffoonery and vampires who hop. It wasn’t the first jiangshi movie. That honour probably goes to Sammo Hung’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind in 1980, … Read more
It’s easy to see The Holdovers as Alexander Payne’s riposte to all the moaning that Martin Scorsese and a few other members of the old guard were doing not so long ago about the predominance of superhero movies and how, you know, they don’t make ’em like they used to etc etc. Payne has gone … Read more
The openings are both figurative and literal in The Opening of Misty Beethoven, the pornified Pygmalion that’s a key movie from the so-called Golden Age of Porn. The real Pygmalion, you’ll recall, is about two la-di-dah gentlemen betting on whether they can get a Cockney flower girl to pass as a duchess. Here, Henry Higgins, … Read more
Makoto Shinkai is one of the “other guys” of Japanese animation – he’s not Hayao Miyazaki, in other words – and if it does nothing else, his movie Suzume demonstrates the vast amount of influence the director of Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away still wields in that country, … Read more
A key “pre-Code” movie, Baby Face is one of a handful of 1930s movies said to have accelerated Hollywood’s movie studios into the era of self-censorship – the government was threatening to step in if they didn’t act. It was a key movie for Barbara Stanwyck too, and helped her cement a reputation for playing … Read more
The Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s heyday was about 50 years, in the 1970s, a fact that make EO all the more remarkable. Here Skolimowski is, in his mid 80s, knocking it out of the park with a film that’s warm and tender, dramatically intense and also put together with a master’s touch. The even more … Read more
A Christmas movie for Satanists, The Day of the Beast (El Día de la Bestia) is one of the key movies of a very 1990s style of grindhouse film-making. It’s the gonzo wild ride in which pump-action shotguns and breasty women compete for screen space with demons and SWAT teams, while rock music and satanic … Read more
A movie called The Burial that buries its main story – it sounds like some kind of meta-joke. But it isn’t. Whether the strategy works is the real question though. The story was first told in the New Yorker and relayed what happened to a real-life Mississippi guy called O’Keefe whose struggling funeral-home business was … Read more
A squeezing of yet more blood from a very well squeezed stone, It’s a Wonderful Knife takes the 1980s/90s slasher movie and gives it a multiverse tweak by way of that 1946 Christmas classic starring James Stewart. The slasher movie and the Christmas movie often have similar starting points – peace and goodwill to all … Read more
A spy movie written by people who’d been actual on-the-ground spies, Orders to Kill is a gripping thriller with an unusual focus on psychology rather than action. It’s set during wartime, in occupied France, where a member of the Resistance is suspected of selling agents down the river to the Nazis. Back in Boston, a … Read more
A kind of meta-The Mousetrap, See How They Run plonks itself down on the sofa alongside the other representatives of the whodunit revival – the likes of Knives Out and Kenneth Branagh’s adaptations of Agatha Christie. In essence it’s Agatha Christie’s venerable long-running play subjected to mock trial by a thousand in-jokes, some knowing, others … Read more
