Steve

The Beta Test

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PJ, intern Jaclyn and Jordan

There is no test in The Beta Test but there is a Beta – lead character Jordan (Jim Cummings), a would-be Hollywood big wheel who’s not quite got the clout of a producer or agent, because he’s more a “packager” of deals, one of those legends in his own lunchtime who secretly wants to be Harvey Weinstein, though he’s too attuned to the zeitgeist to ever let on. Like Griffin Mill in Robert Altman’s The Player, Jordan looks impressive to people who aren’t in the know, but is less impressive to those who are. And he feels this so keenly it’s destroying him. When a potential client, an actual hotshot with money to … Read more

Les Diaboliques

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Christina and Nicole

Les Diaboliques is the film that Alfred Hitchcock missed out on making after getting pipped to the post by another master of suspense, Henri-Georges Clouzot. If the story is true, Clouzot stayed up all night reading the original novel, Celle qui n’était plus, and then called writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac the next morning, desperate to have the rights. By the time Hitchcock rang a few hours later those rights were no longer available. Hitchcock did not walk away entirely empty handed. Boileau and Narcejac went on to write D’Entre les Morts for him, which he turned into Vertigo, currently ranked at number one in the Sight & Sound 100 Greatest Films … Read more

Run

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Finnie and Kelly

Short, bleak and tense, Run is writer/director Scott Graham’s third feature, his third to have a single syllable title and the third to be about a person bridling against a life of limited opportunity. His previous two, Shell and Iona, were about semi-attached women, Run is about a very-married man. Finnie (Mark Stanley) is a big, permanently angry husband and father stuck in a crap job in a fish preparation plant in Fraserburgh (Graham’s home town), north west Scotland. Hating his job, he’s also resentful of his son, Kid (Anders Hayward), who’s just walked off the same job, and painfully resistant to the charms of Katie, his doting wife (Amy Manson). Both Katie … Read more

Coup de Torchon

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Cordier puts a move on Rose Marcaillou

Bertrand Tavernier’s 1981 movie Coup de Torchon is a bizarre adaptation of Jim Thompson’s novel Pop. 1280. Bizarre not because Tavernier and his co-writer Jean Aurenche have moved the action from Texas to West Africa. Nothing wrong with that. It’s the way they’ve excised Thompson’s black humour and inserted French farce in its place, draining the story of power as they do so. It’s 1938 and we’re in Senegal, where the white colonial French lord it over the black locals. They’re a mixed bunch, the whites, most of whom wouldn’t amount to much back home but have a status and lifestyle out here that, Tavernier makes clear, is really rather lovely. They drink, … Read more

Halloween Kills

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Karen, Laurie and Allyson

The franchise as unkillable as Michael Myers himself returns with Halloween Kills, a direct continuation of 2018’s franchise reboot, Halloween. For those who don’t remember, it finally saw the masked psychopath consigned to an early grave, having been trapped by Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) in a burning cellar from which there was no escape. Except obviously there was, because here we are with Myers again on a killing spree, and there’s one more film before the curtain comes down (again, but who knows for how long) with 2022’s Halloween Ends. Which makes Halloween Kills the middle film of three, and it feels like … Read more

I’m Your Man

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Dan Stevens and Maren Eggert dance

Imagine that, a film called I’m Your Man and no sign of Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack. Or Wham! Partly that’s because this is a German film (originally called Ich bin dein Mensch) but mostly it’s because this funny and clever movie wants to do things its own way. How about a romcom plot involving C-3PO, for instance, to put it in elevator-pitch terms. Of course that’s not who Dan Stevens is playing but there’s more than a hint of the prissy Star Wars robot in Stevens’s portrayal of an AI-juiced man-machine designed expressly to be everything Alma, a university researcher, could want in a partner. As for Alma (Maren Eggert), she’s signed … Read more

This Gun for Hire

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Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd

The gun for hire in This Gun for Hire is Alan Ladd’s, here in the role that made him a star, his blond hair dyed black the better to play a character called Philip Raven, a hitman who’ll do in anyone anytime as long as the money is right. It’s also the film that first teamed up Ladd with Veronica Lake – three more features and a number of appearances in morale-boosting wartime musical revues were to follow – one of the great pairings of the film noir era. It’s an adaptation of Graham Greene’s redemptive novel A Gun for Sale, and tells the story about a hitman (Ladd) who kills a man … Read more

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

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Kiyohiko Shibukawa and Katsuki Mori in Door Wide Open

More is sometimes less. Not so with Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, three separate love stories connected by the fact that the the people in them are a bit fucked up and which together deliver more synergistic bang for your buck than the average single-plot feature. Offbeat associations are something of a theme with the films of writer/director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, whose feature debut was all about an astronaut’s relationship with his dead wife. Yes, reader, it was a remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, no less – made while Hamaguchi was at college. He went on to explore human relations in films like Passion, Intimacies and Touching the Skin of Eeriness and his current film, … Read more

Wife of a Spy

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The wife and the spy go shopping

There’s a real lack of urgency in many of the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Sometimes it works in his favour, sometimes against. Against, I’m feeling, with Wife of a Spy. Though there are plot bombs dropped towards the end, and fascinating ideas bubbling away in there to, this high-tone mix of lush period drama and fine acting is undercut by Kurosawa’s tendency to soft-pedal. Spies, a time of national emergency, marital infidelity, Wife of a Spy doesn’t lack for hot subject matter and, for the non-native viewer, it also offers a window on a world we don’t often see – Japan during the Second World War, when patriotism took on an almost mystical … Read more

Dune

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Max von Sydow, Patrick Stewart, Kyle MacLachlan and Jürgen Prochnow

Dune. Not Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 behemoth, that pleasure still awaits. But David Lynch’s 1984 version, the only film in his career that he wished he hadn’t made and will not talk about in interviews, except to say he shouldn’t have made it. And not the theatrical version either, but the “extended” one worked up for TV so it could be shown in two 90 minute chunks. Lynch hated this one so much he had his name taken off the credits. So welcome to another “Alan Smithee film”. Acutally Lynch originally had a four-hour cut in mind but had managed to get the running time down to three hours. Not short enough for his … Read more