Steve

100 Years of… The Strong Man

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Harry Langdon as Paul Bergot

Two people do special things in 1926’s The Strong Man. The first is director Frank Capra, inventing film language on the hoof in his feature debut and showing us why he was such a force on the 20th-century film scene. The other is Harry Langdon, demonstrating an ability to animate dead space with his fluid features and expressive body. The story is really a case of the tail wagging the dog and it takes a long time to get to the film’s point – elaborately conceived and expertly executed stunts. First there’s a preamble in the Great War, where Harry’s hapless soldier Paul Bergot is taking potshots at Germans with his catapult in … Read more

Wuthering Heights

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Cathy and Heathcliff face to face

It’s “Wuthering Heights”, in scare quotes, rather than just the plain old Wuthering Heights of Emily Brontë’s imagination. Adapter/director Emerald Fennell wants us to know she’s messing about with the text a bit and having fun. Either that or she’s hiding out behind a bit of punctuation. Good luck with that. Actually, the story remains pretty much as Brontë wrote it, though Fennell leaves out the entire “next generation” plotline, as did William Wyler in 1939. Cathy and Heathcliff grow up together on the top of wild and windswept Yorkshire moorland – she the wilful daughter of drunken Mr Earnshaw (an excellent Martin Clunes), he the orphan child Mr E brings home one … Read more

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying

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J Pierrepont Finch reading the book that will change his life

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying was a massive hit on Broadway in 1961, winning seven Tony awards, including best musical and book, plus a Pulitzer prize. It was quite the thing – Bob Fosse did the choreography, Frank Loesser did the music, audiences flocked to see it and it ran for nearly four years. Since then it’s done US national tours, transferred to London (twice) and also been been successfully revived on Broadway twice, once with Matthew Broderick in the lead and once with Daniel Radcliffe. And here’s the film version, made six years after that Broadway debut, with most of the stage stars back in the roles they originated, … Read more

The Undertaker

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Paul McGann

The Undertaker has a novel suggestion for gangsters needing to dispose of dead bodies in a hurry. Instead of going to all the fuss of running a waste disposal business, why not just bury the bodies in a the ground, beneath the coffins of legitimate new arrivals at their final resting place? Who’s going to look in a cemetery? And if you can’t be bothered with the rigmarole of being an undertaker yourself, just get a real one to play along, and pay him handsomely to keep his mouth shut. That is the simple and effective premise of Michael Wright’s debut feature, which he wrote and directed. Wright started out in the world … Read more

Signale: Ein Weltraumabenteuer aka Signals: A Space Adventure

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Juana flots weightlessly

The influences are obvious in Signale: Ein Weltraumabenteuer (Signals: A Space Adventure), a big-budget sci-fi actioner that’s higher on chat than actual action but was popular in the Eastern Bloc when it came out in 1970. A co-production between the German Democratic Republic and Poland, it takes its cues from Star Trek and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with its informal multi-racial crews, silent spaceships gliding through the solar system and its fascination with weightlessness. As the film opens the spaceship Ikaros is being bombarded by meteorites. Devastation. Everyone on board dead, or that’s the official line at any rate. One man isn’t so sure. Veikko, captain of the spaceship Laika, decides to … Read more

Anaconda

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Jack Black and Paul Rudd in the jungle

Clever, this Anaconda, a vastly ironic comedy horror written and directed by the guys who did The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent – which was also as clever as it was ironic. It follows a bunch of flaky dudes whose lives have been less than fulfilling in a last ditch attempt to do something meaningful by remaking 1997’s corny creature-feature Anaconda on a micro budget. Off they head, wedding videographer Doug (Jack Black) and useless actor Griff (Paul Rudd), with childhood friends Kenny (Steve Zahn) and Claire (Thandiwe Newton) to the Amazon, where the snake wrangler they hire will be as good as useless, and the pilot of their boat will turn out to … Read more

Phase IV

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Ant in foreground, Kendra in the background

The legendary titles guy Saul Bass (he did the opening credits sequence for Psycho, The Man with the Golden Arm and Casino) made only one feature film and Phase IV is it. A fascinating sci-fi/horror tale set in the desert, it has ideas, some great acting, excellent close-up cinematography, gorgeous locations and an excruciatingly static sense of pace. It also has Nigel Davenport, a real asset as Dr Ernest D Hubbs, a scientist alarmed at what’s happening out in Arizona (Kenya, in fact) and heads off there with fellow scientist James R Lesko (Michael Murphy) to investigate. The ants, it turns out, have started building huge structures, with square quasi-industrial chimneys. What can … Read more

Magellan

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Magellan out in the wilds of nature

Magellan is quite a conventional movie by the standards Lav Diaz sets himself. An ocean-going biopic about the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, it’s in English rather than Diaz’s usual Tagalog, features a well known actor in the shape of Gael García Bernal, is in colour (this is Diaz’s first colour film for 12 years) and it’s short. Short by Diaz’s standards at any rate, clocking in at two hours 40 minutes, which is breezy compared to other Diaz movies – 2013’s Norte, the End of History was four hours 10 minutes (and worth every minute), as was 2024’s Phantosmia. 2004’s Evolution of a Filipino Family comes in at ten hours 25 minutes. Diaz … Read more

The Clay Pigeon

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Jim Fletcher wakes up in a hospital bed with someone trying to strangle him

The issues are fascinating but the plotting swings about like a thing demented in The Clay Pigeon, a paranoid thriller written by Carl Foreman, of High Noon and The Bridge on the River Kwai fame, and directed by Richard Fleischer, estimable names both. Bill Williams plays a soldier who wakes up from a coma only to be told he’s about to be court-martialled for murder and treason for turning a fellow soldier over to the Japanese when both were PoWs. Since Jim Fletcher (Williams) has amnesia, he has no idea what the charges are all about but he is clear-minded enough to know he’s in a fix. Climbing out of his hospital bed … Read more

Grace aka La Gracia

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Toni Servillo as the President

In La Grazia (aka Grace) Paolo Sorrentino once again gives us what we expect – a lushly gorgeous movie about a man in an existential funk – except this time he’s turned the power down a couple of notches. We’re back (almost) in the realm of his breakthrough, The Consquences of Love. It’s a fugue of a film about a man in a fugue state, with Toni Servillo back for the seventh time with Sorrentino, this time playing the Italian president as he limps towards the end of his tenure. An extract from the Italian constitution up on the screen as the film opens us informs us that Il Presidente’s functions are mostly ceremonial, … Read more