Steve

Dark aka Dying of the Light Director’s Cut

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Nicolas Cage as Evan Lake

Dark is writer/director Paul Schrader’s cut of Dying of the Light, the 2014 spy thriller that was taken from him, re-edited, de-kinked and reworked into something more akin to what the studio wanted – a Bourne movie. Schrader was not happy about it at the time and you might remember him, his stars Nicolas Cage and Anton Yelchin and executive producer Nicolas Winding Refn all posing for pictures in matching T shirts bearing the “non-disparagement” clause in their contracts, which prevented them from saying anything bad about the movie. Point made, point taken. Originally Refn had been meant to direct the film, with Harrison Ford starring and Channing Tatum in the Yelchin role. But … Read more

Last Woman on Earth

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Betsey Jones-Moreland aka the last woman on earth

Chinatown is what the writer Robert Towne will be remembered for, rather than Last Woman on Earth, a cheap and short B movie cranked out by one-man movie-making machine Roger Corman in 1960. But it’s worth a look, not just because it was Towne’s first screenplay but also because he acts in it, under the alias Edward Wain. The screenplay is credited to Towne, though, which says a lot about where his priorities lie. Corman and Towne open the action at a cock fight in Puerto Rico, where rich but dodgy businessman Harold Gern and bored trophy wife Evelyn meet Harold’s accountant, Martin Joyce (Towne). While the men chat, Corman’s camera lingers on … Read more

Beau Is Afraid

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Joaquin Phoenix as Beau

Three’s a trend, so they say, and with Beau Is Afraid writer/director Ari Aster does just what his previous two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, did – he gets everyone talking. Terrible, some said. Brilliant, said others. Maybe it can be both at the same time, you could conclude, sitting right on the fence. And, fence-sitting coming naturally to some people, that is what it is – a brilliant meta-movie that simply doesn’t know when to stop and so outstays its welcome. In one of many comedy moments which seem less well advised the longer Beau Is Afraid goes on – it’s three hours long – Aster starts the action at the moment Beau … Read more

Dementia 13

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Luana Anders as interloper Louise

So, a Francis Ford Coppola movie with significant action taking place on a boat. That would be Dementia 13 (aka The Haunted and the Hunted), the director’s first mainstream movie (if we’re ignoring sexploitationers The Bellboy and the Playgirls and Tonight for Sure). Make me something that’s a bit Psycho-esque was producer Roger Corman’s instruction to Coppola, who had already been working with Corman in Ireland on 1963’s The Young Racers. There was money left over from that film, so Corman gave it to Coppola, and lent him the cast and crew from The Young Racers to make his film. The only significant other instruction was that the finished movie needed to have … Read more

Master Gardener

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Narvel and Maya

The guy who wrote Taxi Driver is at it again. Master Gardener, as so often with Paul Schrader, is a film about human beings in need of redemption, a worthless humanity rather a wicked world. Schrader, it comes as no surprise to learn, was raised in the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church. Joel Edgerton’s Narvel Roth could almost be an older version of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle. Roth is a guy with a complicated history – or so the alarming tattoos all over his back and chest suggest – who has put his past behind him and now leads a sedate and austere life as the head gardener on an estate owned by grande … Read more

Mauvais Sang

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Juliette Binoche covered in shaving cream

French neo-noir at its most stylish, Mauvais Sang (confusingly it also goes by the titles The Night Is Young and the more literally translated Bad Blood) was Leos Carax’s second feature, the enfant terrible of French cinema still only a youthful 26 in 1986 when the film was made. The majority of his cast are pretty young too. We’re seeing early outings for Denis Lavant (25), Juliette Binoche (22) and a very young Julie Delpy (she’s about 15 here, having debuted the year before for Jean-Luc Godard in Detective). If you read any plot precis it’ll tell you that the action is set in some version of the future, where a virus is … Read more

A Thousand and One

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Inez out on the streets

Films that watch poor people having a bad time aren’t everyone’s idea of fun and while A Thousand and One walks a familiar path, it does so with a keen knowledge that misery is a turn-off, and even throws in some firecracker performances to help sweeten the pill. Chief among those is Teyana Taylor, in a star-is-born role as Inez, a street skank fresh out of Rikers Island who “kidnaps” her own child, Terry, aged six and in care, and sets out to bring him up while ducking the authorities. Will Inez make it? Will Terry? Starting out in 1994, the story of Inez and Terry is also, to an extent the story … Read more

Danger: Diabolik

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Diabolik and Eva in front of a white E type Jaguar

Arsène Lupin, Fantomas and James Bond all come together in Danger: Diabolik, the first screen appearance of the Italian masked master criminal. A flop on its initial release in 1968, it’s now regarded as something of a cult classic. The reasons for that are hard to ignore. This is prime mid-1960s kitsch, a psychedelic, phantasmagoric, frequently silly, almost always entertaining dollop of schlock elevated by the superb eye of director Mario Bava and a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone at his most poptastic – twangy guitars, wordless choirs, drums thrashing, a harpsichord, the sonic equivalent of Bava’s colour-soaked, bright, stylish and slightly demented visuals. Italian audiences were familiar with Diabolik (also the film’s original … Read more

The Blackening

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Group shot of the cast of The Blackening

The Blackening is an amiable throwback to who-dies-next? horror movies of yore, with a take on race trying to ignore the fact we live in the post-Get Out era. There is what you would expect from a cabin-in-the-woods horror, including a pre-credits death or two, followed by the traditional re-establishing shot of a new batch of people winding their way towards the same destination in one of those aerial shots of a car from way overhead, the isolated vehicle moving through the vastness of the encircling forest. Is someone watching? But these are not booze-chugging, drug-popping white people – long-legged girls, chunky jocks, a dweeb or two – instead a gaggle of black … Read more

Gilda

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Rita Hayworth in femme fatale pose with cigarette

A froth of noir, romance and melodrama aerated using Rita Hayworth as a whisk, Gilda exploits the star’s status as the number-one pinup girl for American troops fighting overseas during the Second World War. It’s the Rita Hayworth movie, not just in the eyes of posterity but according to its own estimation of itself. “Starring Rita Hayworth” it says, alongside nobody else’s name in the opening credits, while a massive fanfare blares as the big, big sparkly letters dance on the screen. And, surely, what with Hayworth being a triple threat – she acts, she sings, she dances – this is going to deliver. Surely? The noirish story focuses on a pair of … Read more