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Walking the line between complex and convoluted plotting, The Kill Room is a dark comedy throwback starring Uma Thurman and Samuel L Jackson. It’s the first time these two have appeared together since 2004’s Kill Bill: Vol 2. The time before that was Pulp Fiction and it’s obvious that it’s the Tarantino connection that this … Read more
La Chienne. It translates as The Bitch, literally. But if it ever goes by an English title it’s usually Isn’t Life a Bitch?, which kind of misses the point. It was made by Jean Renoir in 1931 in France and then remade by Fritz Lang in Hollywood in 1945 as Scarlet Street, with Edward G … Read more
Andrew Haigh’s debut feature Greek Pete, a biographical “year in the life” of a London rentboy, takes the documentary form and gives it a good pounding. Pete is an early-20s dark-haired, nice-looking guy who loves to talk. We meet him as if we’re eavesdropping, from a distance, through a doorway. He’s on a sofa with … Read more
Aelita became a popular name for babies born in the Soviet Union the year after this movie, Aelita: Queen of Mars, came out in 1924. Apart from the devotees of the original novel by Alexei Tolstoy, few had heard the name before, or seen anything like this movie adaptation. It was a sensation, a sci-fi … Read more
Women Talking could have got a lot of dramatic mileage simply by telling the story of what happened rather than what happened next. But it opts for the latter, a daring ploy that eventually yields results, though there are moments on the journey when it looks like it’s not going to make it. Here’s what … Read more
Short but massively influential, Zéro de Conduite is 44 minutes (or so) of prime Jean Vigo. A film deemed “anti-French” when it was released in 1933, it went on to influence that most French of genres, the New Wave. François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows owes it a lot, as does British New Waver Lindsay Anderson’s … Read more
World of Tomorrow is a brilliant short by American animator Don Hertzfeldt, the latest in a career that stretches back at this point by nearly 30 years and has consisted almost entirely of shorts. Even his one long movie, It’s Such a Beautiful Day, turns out on closer inspection to be a compilation of three … Read more
1932’s Love Me Tonight is one of the best comedy musicals of the 1930s, a light-as-air confection designed to show that the talkies, only four years into the new era of sound, could be as nimble as the silent movies, which could shoot anywhere there was light – background noise, whether from traffic, thousands of … Read more
2016’s Looking is also known as Looking: The Movie, for reasons that are obvious if you were a fan of the TV show that suddenly got pulled just as everyone involved was gearing up for a third season. Looking: The Movie is HBO’s sop to the fans who bombarded the company with howling letters of … Read more
1936’s Desire is the sort of film Hollywood has always excelled at. A bit of this, that and the other – some fun, some jeopardy, some romance – parcelled up beautifully and sold by attractive people who are looking their best. Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in this case. The best bit actually comes at … Read more
The films of Christian Petzold often feature a man thunderstruck by a woman, and so it is with Afire (Roter Himmel), the second of Petzold’s “elements” movies and the second to star Paula Beer as the focus of enchantment. In Undine Beer played a water sprite in human form, though Petzold never explicitly said so. … Read more
So it turns out that when the aliens do eventually land on earth they’ll not be making a beeline for military installations or centres of scientific research and they won’t be seeking out hayseeds in remote parts of the USA. They’ll be heading for the metropolis, where their flying saucer just the size of a … Read more
