Steve

The Walking Target

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A calm and collected Nick

The Walking Target packs a lot of people and a lot of plot into its brief 74 minutes running time. That is a feature not a bug. It’s a story about a man freshly out of prison who is, as the prison governor tells Nick Harbin (Ron Foster) while reluctantly releasing him, a “walking target”. Because he’s never divulged where the heist money was stashed that got him the jail sentence in the first place. As he heads out through the front gates of the prison there they all are waiting for him. The girlfriend, Susie (Merry Anders), who visited him only once while he did his five-year stretch but now wants to … Read more

Man Finds Tape

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A woman has her throat cut by a mystery man

Like one of those Victorian novels that spends a chunk of time laying out its bona fides, Man Finds Tape does a lot of scene-setting early on, establishing the who and the what and the where. This all really happened, it insists. But this being the 21st century rather than the 19th, its claims to authenticity rest on different foundations. Victorians were happy to be fed a yarn about the narrator being told a tale by a stranger in a coaching inn on a dark stormy night, a tale that purportedly came straight from eye-witness accounts. Fast-forward to now and Man Finds Tape does it with a camera, a voiceover and a welter … Read more

I Love Trouble

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Janet Blair and Franchot Tone publicity shot

I Love Trouble is The Rockford Files, or a dry run at it, give or take. If you don’t know what The Rockford Files is, that means you’re not ancient, so well done you. It’s the TV show where James Garner played a dog-eared detective raising a wounded eyebrow as he got beaten up week after week. Roy Huggins wrote both. I Love Trouble was his screen debut, an adaptation of his own novel, The Double Take, which S Sylvan Simon directs with half an eye on the drawing-room whodunits of yore. Huggins also wrote 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive and Maverick (also starring Garner) – so was something of a TV colossus … Read more

Lesbian Space Princess

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Saira and Willow, the goth musician who helps on her quest

So what are you expecting from a film called Lesbian Space Princess? A countercultural screed with a blast of porn maybe? Once upon a time, maybe. But these days things are slightly less urgent. “Real-life girlfriends” (their scare quotes) Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese want to tell us an animated story that’s light and bright and very cute, with swear words and some cultural critique slid in on the downlow. Take “downlow” on advisement because it’s all set on the planet of Clitopolis – “famously hard to find” – where, as things get going, our heroine, Princess Saira (voiced by Shabana Azeez) is being dumped by her girlfriend Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel), … Read more

Long Live the Republic!

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Close up of Oldrich and his dog

Memory, fantasy and the Second World War make surprisingly comfy bedfellows in Long Live the Republic! (Ať žije republika), Karel Kachyňa’s lyrical and lovely coming-of-ager from 1965. A Czech movie set in Moravia as the German army pulls out and the Soviet army readies itself to take over, it’s far less critical of the communist regime than you might expect from a mid-1960s film. Especially from a film-maker who’d later make The Ear, a film so scathingly anti that it was instantly banned and not seen until communism collapsed. But poke around a bit and there’s a critique of sorts going on, delivered with the maximum of plausible deniability. The non-plot follows a … Read more

Alias Nick Beal

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Nick Beal close-up

Also known as The Contact Man, Alias Nick Beal is the much better title of this unusual political allegory meets supernatural drama. The Nick is Old Nick and the Beal is short for Beelzebub. Got it? A retelling of the Faust story is the idea, with Ray Milland as the Mephistopheles stand-in and Thomas Mitchell as Joseph Foster (Foster/Faust, see?), a principled and upstanding district attorney determined to nail a career criminal who has been outsmarting him for years. I’d give my soul to get that guy, says Foster in so many words at one point. And that’s it – unbeknown even to himself the deal is done. So when he meets the … Read more

Splitsville

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Carey and Paul grapple on the floor

Fans of the prosthetic penis will like Splitsville. For the rest of us there’s smart writing and a farcical plot aiming at… I have no idea… modern relationships? Is this really how people behave? I doubt it. Shorthand – it’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice meets The Break-Up (the one starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston as an estranged couple sharing an apartment). The basic set-up is that Carey (Kyle Marvin) and Ashley (Adria Arjona) are a married couple who split up suddenly when she decides she can do better than this deadbeat. She’s also hotter than him by an order of magnitude – Arjona is hotter than almost everybody – so … Read more

The Woman on Pier 13

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Bad girl Christine with reformed communist Brad

Imagine that, the man who directed Mary Poppins also directed 1948’s Cold War thriller I Married a Communist aka The Woman on Pier 13. Though, when all is said and done, both are about infiltration and indoctrination when you come to think of it. One, of course, was madly successful and the other was such a clanger that they had to change its title (which is where Pier 13 came in). Whereupon it flopped all over again. It’s not hard to see why. This is anti-communist propaganda so flagrant it’s hard to swallow, in which the capitalists are the good guys – how they strive to improve the lot of the working man! … Read more

Lola

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Thomasina on the phone

Back to the Future meets It Happened Here in Andrew Legge’s bold and original debut feature, Lola. What did you do during lockdown? Legge got out some pre-war wind-up cameras, threaded them with black and white film and shot a Nazi-inflected found-footage time-travel epic. Mad scientists are usually male and old but Legge’s heroes (if that’s what they are) are young and female, long-limbed aristo types fashioned after the Mitford sisters and played by Stefanie Martini, as Martha, and Emma Appleton as Thomasina. In a little preamble we’re given the found-footage set-up – reels of film found in the cellar of a country house in Sussex in 2021 – before we’re supposedly presented … Read more

Holiday in Spain aka Scent of Mystery

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Peter Lorre and Denholm Elliot as Smiley and Oliver

The odd thing about Holiday in Spain is that it was originally released in Smell-O-Vision under another title, Scent of Mystery. It flopped, even with the gimmick of various aromas being piped into cinemas as audiences watched. With another smelly film, Dead Lover, currently doing the rounds (writing this in March 2026) – it’s in Stink-O-Vision, a scratch-and-sniff take on the same idea – I thought I’d go back to this 1960 oddity and give it a spin. Which, of course, I can’t. Not the original Scent of Mystery at any rate. I don’t have the Smell-O-Vision technology and can’t find a copy of the film. Holiday on Spain, on the other hand, is … Read more