Steve

In Front of Your Face

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Sang and Jeong

A poet of the mundane, Hong Sang-soo’s films are meditative, ordinary, commonplace affairs, static of look, unhistrionic in delivery. Boring as hell if viewed through your Marvel Cinematic Universe goggles. But look at a film like In Front of Your Face through the same eyes you use for everday life and a whole other world opens up. Two sisters. Korean. Reunited after one of them, formerly an actress, returns to her native land to visit the other. Sang (Lee Hye-yeong) seems slightly withdrawn, is given to muttering mindfulness mantras to herself but seems largely at peace with the world. Her sister, Jeong (Jo Yoon-hee) is delighted to have her back and together the … Read more

All Quiet on the Western Front

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Lew Ayres and Louis Wolheim

If Netflix’s 2022 remake of All Quiet on the Western Front has done anything it’s revived interest in this 1930 original, a film more people have heard about than seen but which has been influential on generations of film-makers. It’s obvious that Kubrick borrowed heavily from it for the trench sequences in Paths of Glory, and Steven Spielberg has acknowledged its influence on Saving Private Ryan. And what a beast it is, a marvel of technical brilliance, directed with almost insane virtuosity by Lewis Milestone, who’d already made a name for himself by 1930 and would go on to direct for decades to come – he directed the original Ocean’s Eleven in 1960, for … Read more

Grand Jeté

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Nadja and Mario naked on a bed

A former ballerina embarks on an intense sexual relationship with her own son. That bald plot outline of Grand Jeté doesn’t give any sense of the almost tactile intensity of Isabelle Stever’s film, a drama driven by emotion rather than events. Plot junkies might need to sit this one out. But for those who like mood and texture, Stever is the real deal, a director with a precise control of the warp and weft of film-making, with a camera that’s almost subjective in its shallow focus on its subject and its interest in the minutiae of everyday life. She follows, in an almost furtive documentary style, Nadja (Sarah Grether), from the practice room … Read more

Ex-Lady

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Helen and Don

“A piece of junk” is how Bette Davis described 1931’s Ex-Lady in her 1962 autobiography. By the early 1960s a good chunk of Davis’s stock in trade was disdain but even so it’s a tall claim. The film was, among other things, the first to put Davis’s name above the title. It’s a Hollywood “problem movie”, the problem being the incompatibility of marriage and “young moderns”, as the film calls people like the progressive, independent illustrator character Davis plays, a woman who wants to carry on with life as it is – and not get married to Don (Gene Raymond), the advertising guy she’s currently hooking up with for clandestine sex. Then he … Read more

The Enforcer

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Antonio Banderas as Cuda

The Enforcer. Not Clint Eastwood, or Jet Li or even Humphrey Bogart (who starred in a mostly forgotten film of the same name in 1951). Instead it’s Antonio Banderas’s name over the title of this very familiar sounding movie, which has ambitions that go not much further than getting itself onto a screen near you. The “bad guy gets a conscience” plot falls into two halves. First we get to see what sort of a bad guy we’re dealing with – the strong arm of a Miami crime boss with a wretched personal life (wife hates him, daughter wishes he’d drop dead). Then the epiphany, as Cuda (short for Barracuda) gets involved with street … Read more

The Razzies – Winners Who Showed Up

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Mike Meyers and Jessica Alba in 2010's The Love Guru

One supposedly represents the best of the best and the other the worst of the worst. In theory the Oscars and the Razzies are polar opposites, yet they have something in common. Each loves a pile-on. Every year as awards season comes around again, a fog seems to descend on the members of the voting academies, groupthink sets in and some perfectly OK but largely unremarkable movies start mysteriously migrating – up to become Academy Award contenders, or down to where the Razzies await. If a bona fide celebrity is involved, the movement can be quite dramatic. Was Driving Miss Daisy really the best picture of 1990? Against, say, Do the Right Thing? Did … Read more

The Devil Is a Woman

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Morenito and Concha

Marlene Dietrich’s favourite of all the films she appeared in was The Devil Is a Woman. Maybe because she’s playing an independent woman beholden to no man. Maybe because she laughs quite a lot in it. The two might not be unrelated. It’s set in Spain, and Dietrich plays Concha Perez, a beauty spotted first on a float at the carnival by dashing gay blade Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero), who falls for her instantly and badly. Woe betide any man who messes with Concha, Galvan is told by older, wiser Captain Pasqual Costelar (Lionel Atwill), a soldier and stuffed shirt who has already thrown himself on those rocks. And in a protracted flashback … Read more

Love Possibly

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Lana and Alex in a restaurant

Love Possibly is a riff on Love Actually, obviously, a romantic comedy about the hopelessly mismatched being manoeuvred together by fate and circumstance. If only it weren’t done in the mock documentary style. If only. It was made in 2018 when the mock-doc genre was even more overcooked than it is now (writing this in 2023) and like its sibling, the found-footage horror, was finally beginning to hit exhaustion point. But. The acting is good. In fact the acting is its saving grace. Steve Hodgetts deserves awards for dicing with typecasting death for playing Alex, a nerdy, spoddy, on-the-spectrum virgin whose favourite film is Sleepless in Seattle and who dreams of having the … Read more

Blonde Venus

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An exquisitely lit Marlene Dietrich draws on a cigarette

The fifth collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich, Blonde Venus is a film that’s been strangled at birth, hacked at, mutilated, and then dressed up nicely and put out there as if all was still well. It’s a strange and unsettling story, if you can pick its story out from what’s left after the censors got at it, of a woman whose husband needs a lot of money for a life-saving medical procedure and sells her body to raise it. The four-square Herbert Marshall plays the husband, a chemist who’s been hurt through exposure to radium and needs to leave the USA and go to Germany for an experimental … Read more

Kill Me Please

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Bia with blood on her lips

Sex and death go hand in hand in Anita Rocha da Silveira’s impressive feature debut, Kill Me Please (Mate-Me Por Favor) which would look like a fairly simple coming-of-ager if it weren’t for a pre-credits sequence which puts a morbid kink in everything that follows. It’s arresting in itself – a lock shot of a young woman staring straight into the camera at some nightclub, close up. The camera holds, holds, holds and she stares, stares, stares. Eventually a tear rolls down her cheek. It might be just a bad night out or something else. We never find out, because the nameless woman is soon dead, having been jumped on as she totters … Read more