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John Woo’s woo-hoo moment came in 1986 with the release of A Better Tomorrow, the crime drama that revived his career, created the “heroic bloodshed” sub-genre and, ultimately, influenced the way action movies the world over would look. It’s a simple story, of two brothers on either side of the legal divide. Leslie Cheung plays … Read more
Let It Snow looks like a thought experiment: could we remake The Revenant, shift the action to Georgia (the country, not the US state), swap out Leo for a relatively unknown female, and bring home the whole thing on a fraction of the budget The Revenant might have spent on turmeric tea? The answer is … Read more
Unsurprisingly, 1992’s Dragon Inn (aka New Dragon Gate Inn) is a remake of 1967’s Dragon Inn. One of the pivotal movies of the wuxia genre, the 1967 original paved the way for the martial arts explosion of the 1970s. If the remake is opportunistic, it also a showcase for the sort of production that Tsui … Read more
Lean On Pete isn’t at all like Andrew Haigh’s last film with the word “Pete” in the title. Greek Pete was a biographical mostly-documentary about the life of a London rent boy. It was adult in both senses of the word. Lean On Pete is YA, young adult, the coming-of-age tale of a lonely 15-year-old … Read more
With Ridley Scott’s Napoleon thundering over the horizon on horseback, time to haul out a movie Scott and his star Joaquin Phoenix have clearly feasted on, 1927’s historic and historical behemoth, Napoleon, aka Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (ie “as seen by Abel Gance”). Adored by Coppola, derided by Kubrick, who thought it “really terrible” … Read more
Originally intended as a Marx Brothers movie, Million Dollar Legs is a comedy with humour verging on the surreal and is set in a familiar Marx Brothers world. Even so it’s probably too mad even for them. It’s so familiar, in fact, that you might wonder if they read Joseph Mankiewicz’s original treatment for Million … Read more
At the beginning of The Equalizer 3 we appear to be in familiar “action hero in retirement” territory. A sunny place. Beautiful scenery. The camera drinking it all in. Surely, any minute we’ll be meeting Denzel Washington in a Hawaiian shirt, a cocktail in one hand, a pretty young woman on his arm, in much … Read more
Charles Burnett’s movie Killer of Sheep was shot in 1972 and 1973, mostly at weekends, didn’t get shown until 1978 and then vanished for about three decades even though it had had rave reviews from the few people who’d seen it and had been selected for preservation in 1990 by the Library of Congress as … Read more
It Be an Evil Moon does not declare itself immediately, but debut feature director Ben Etchells offers snacks to keep us going with a pre-credits sequence – a guy driving on a forest road at night finds something blocking the way. Gets out. Moves it. Gets back in the car. The audience at this point … Read more
In American Gigolo a man falls in love with the wrong woman and is framed for a murder he didn’t commit. It’s a classic film noir plot given a neo-noirish treatment in what looks like writer/director Paul Schrader’s homage to Howard Hawks and The Big Sleep. The twist being that this is the 1980s. And … Read more
“Oh no, no, no, no, not another fucking cancer film,” was Stellan Skarsgård’s response when he was asked to be in Hope (aka Håp in the original Norwegian) by his old friend, its writer/director Maria Sødahl. Skarsgård has a point. The terminal illness weepie can itself be pretty deadly. But Hope is more about love … Read more
Going in to 1970’s Count Yorga, Vampire, the thing to remember – and the reason why it sometimes flies under an alternative title, The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire – is that it was originally destined to be a vampire movie of a softcore persuasion, at least as much about tits as teeth. It explains … Read more
