Steve

Encanto

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Encanto's heroine, Mirabel

If you liked Moana then you are the target for Encanto, a song-filled animated story of young female derring-do, set against the background of an ancient civilisation and with a sprinkling of magic to help things along. Polynesia did the decorative thing for Moana, it’s Mesoamerica in Encanto, but if actual knowledge brings you in out in hives, be not afraid, it’s largely just a few masks and other accessories borrowed from the Amerindian back catalogue to give Disney’s latest princess a USP that sets her apart from Pocahontas, Mulan, Merida et al. This one also wears glasses just to make her stand out from the increasingly homogenous big-eyed throng. The action takes … Read more

100 Years of… The Toll of the Sea

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Lotus Flower finds the half drowned sailor

There are two good ancillary reasons for watching The Toll of the Sea, on top of the fact that it’s a touching, almost heartbreaking drama of a sort it’s almost impossible to imagine being made today. The first is that it stars Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Chinese American star, here only 17 years old in a role that puts her to the test in terms of subtle emoting, and finds her sailing through unscathed. The second is that it’s the oldest existing Technicolor movie left on the planet. There was an older one, The Gulf Between, made in 1917, but that went up in flames and is now permanently lost. It was … Read more

House of Gucci

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Adam Driver and Lady Gaga

House of Gucci, Ridley Scott, this looks like a good fit. A fashion house relying on its image to shift product and a director who started out in advertising and still has an eye for an arresting visual. And so it proves to be, mostly… though by the end you might be staring at the screen with head slightly aslant. The what, the huh? Pushing comparisons to beyond their limit, in some ways it’s a remake of Alien, though this time Lady Gaga plays the invading creature who’s going to wreak havoc, a brassy little minx called Patrizia who bumps into sober, low-key Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) – scion of the fashion house … Read more

Fanny and Alexander

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Fanny and Alexander

Fanny and Alexander won four Academy Awards at the Oscars in 1984 and was the first foreign movie to have done so. No foreign movie has ever won more and Ingmar Bergman’s film has only been matched twice in the years since – by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Parasite (2019). At the time it was the most expensive film ever to come out of Sweden and was designed by Bergman to be his last, a grand autobiographical flourish to explain the man behind a remarkable run of astonishing movies as the director started to look back at his accomplishments. With that autobiographical aspect in mind, and armed with the knowledge that … Read more

Nightmare Alley

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Stan and Zeena

2021’s Nightmare Alley isn’t based on the 1947 film noir of the same name, so we’re told by various venerable authorities. Tell that to the judge. Even if it genuinely is a bona fide and honest reworking of the same source material, William Lindsay Gresham’s smash 1946 novel, even a quick look at the 1947 movie is enough to convince anyone that this Nightmare Alley has seen the older one, taken notes and then studied them hard. This extends to the casting choices. These start with Bradley Cooper as the grifter who starts out as a nobody in a carnival, works his way to the top of showbiz with a mentalist routine, over-reaches … Read more

Nightmare Alley

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Zeena and Stanton in a carnival truck

1947’s Nightmare Alley is lavish, melodramatic, contains a hint of the supernatural and is a touch too long – you can see why Guillermo Del Toro wanted to remake it. It’s also a great role for a matinee idol trying to shrug off a pretty-boy tag (Tyrone Power even more so than Bradley Cooper in the remake). In a tale about a carnival worker tasting the heights and then plunging into the depths, Jules Furthman’s adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s best-seller plays the hubris card early on, in a little speech in which carnie Stanton Carlisle (Power) explains himself. “You see those yokels out there,” he says to mindreader Zeena (Joan Blondell), laying … Read more

Cyrano

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Roxanne and Cyrano

If the tricky bit in musicals is the moment when people transition into song, what about the quasi-musical? Cyrano demonstrates that the problem isn’t doubled but squared – every time Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett or Kelvin Harrison Jr burst into song, it’s a genuine shock. The fact that the actual songs are a bit hit and miss is an added burden. In Edmond Rostand’s original story, Cyrano de Bergerac is the warrior poet with a massive nose and effortlessly spectacular language skills who falls badly for Roxanne, his ideal of femininity, but then helps a fellow soldier – handsome but dim Christian – woo her with his words, knowing that he has no … Read more

Laura

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Laura with Shelby Carpenter

A complex psychological thriller masquerading as a film noir, 1944’s Laura is about three men who are bewitched by a woman so ethereally, transcendentally beguiling that it is entirely appropriate that, when director Otto Preminger takes the curtain up, Laura (Gene Tierney) is already dead. What follows is a basic whodunit pulled in various unusual directions. A for-instance: the cop on the case, Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews), invites one of the men suspected of killing her, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), to accompany him while he cross-examines other witnesses. What cop does that? Another: the cop doesn’t do very much actual investigating and instead spends an inordinate amount of time in the dead woman’s … Read more

Old Henry

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Tim Blake Nelson as Old Henry

Suddenly everyone wants a very particular set of skills. Old Henry is the latest in a line of movies where the hero turns out to be capable of things he initially appears not to be capable of at all. Before Bob Odenkirk did it in Nobody. Before Keanu Reeves in John Wick. Before Liam Neeson got the current phase underway in Taken. Before all of those there was Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, reluctantly strapping the guns back on and doing what a killing machine does. Since then Marvel and DC have reminded us of the type with many variations of the same thing – the mild mannered type who’d rather not fight, but … Read more

While the City Sleeps

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Dana Andrews, Sally Forrest, Thomas Mitchell and Ida Lupino sitting at a bar

While the City Sleeps is one of the great noir titles. Which is not the same as saying it’s one of the great noir movies. In fact it’s barely noir at all. Though it does start off looking like it might be. A lurid murder before the opening credits, then titles that come blaring at us in gigantic white letters, while Herschel Burke Gilbert’s title music of clarion brass and shrill strings suggests a great noirish feast is about to be served up. The director’s name – Fritz Lang – also promises the same. He’d done Scarlet Street and The Big Heat, after all, noir lodestones. There’s been a murder and the murderer … Read more