Steve

100 Nights of Hero

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Maika Monroe as Cherry

100 Nights of Hero re-invents the One Thousand and One Nights, aka The Arabian Nights, aka the story of Scheherazade, making sex and gender dynamics more explicit even than they were in the original stories and packaging everything up like a gift of Turkish delight wrapped in gossamer, drenched in perfume, and then swaddled in silk. Don’t come for realism, in other words. Instead director Julia Jackman defiantly heads into the realm of the fantastical, the exotic, the exquisite. Her Middle East is one of grand viziers and curly slippers rather than mad mullahs and nuclear enrichment facilities. So, we all know the Scheherazade story. A wily virgin bride, the latest in a … Read more

A Woman’s Secret

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Marian leans over the body of Susan

Thriller? Farce? A Woman’s Secret eventually collapses under the weight of its own indecision but until it does it’s a rapid-fire piece of brilliance, full of sparkling wit, weirdness, coded aberrant sexuality and lethal shenanigans including one woman trying to kill another, and that’s all in the first opening scenes. It was a flop, and it’s easy to see why. Read it as a thriller and it’s no good at all. But watch it as a camp front-of-curtain entertainment by showbiz folks for showbiz folks and it makes a lot more sense. The key roles are played by Gloria Grahame, who plays a big radio singer, who in opening scenes informs us that … Read more

The Wrecking Crew

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Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista head to head

My first movie from 2026. And because it was released in January, I’m not expecting much of The Wrecking Crew. The prestige movies come at the back end of the year, so as to be fresh in the minds of voters when awards season gets underway (roughly, November to February/March). Not that The Wrecking Crew is the sort of film that is ever lined up for anything at all, except the appreciation of fans of movies like this. It’s Jason Momoa and Dave Baustista, before we go any further, playing a pair of estranged, muscley Hawaiian brothers thrown back together when their dad dies unexpectedly. It turns out that Dad possessed something the … Read more

The Iron Curtain

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Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews

Winston Churchill made his “iron curtain” speech on 5 March 1946. In late 1947, 20th Century-Fox went into production with The Iron Curtain, one of a rake of movies designed to prove to the House Un-American Activities Committee that its assertion – “subversive” Hollywood doesn’t make anti-communist films – was baseless. The fact that filming started two days after the “Hollywood Ten” had been blacklisted for refusing to answer HUAC’s questions is also significant. Considering its whens and wheres, the resulting film is a remarkably sophisticated work – it’s not just anti-communist propaganda but also a coded rebuke to the likes of Senators McCarthy and J Parnell Thomas and their prescriptive view of what … Read more

Diabolik

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Diabolik in his mask

What sort of a supervillain has his secret lair in his girlfriend’s back garden? Why not his own turf? While we’re about it, why does Diabolik – the title of the film and the name of its antihero – lift so much of its plot from Fantomas, another European masked villain? If those are the sort of questions you’re asking while watching this film then it probably isn’t working for you. A stew, a pastiche, Diabolik is bits of Bond stirred together with a sliver of The Pink Panther and then spritzed with Italian glamour. We are not here for originality, but for cars and girls, mid-century modernism and split screens, hot women … Read more

The Locket

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Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum head to head

A locket opens once, to reveal what’s within. The 1946 movie The Locket, on the other hand, keeps on opening. Flashback follows flashback, with more information delivered each time the hinge creaks ajar. What’s inside is sort of special, sort of irritating. This is a film whose most difficult bits are quite easy to follow. It’s the rest of it that gets a touch troublesome. That flashback-within-flashback structure is the film’s USP. Otherwise it’s a mid-1940s aberrant-psychology drama focusing on one Nancy Patton (Laraine Day). As the curtain rises Nancy is about to get married to big swell John Willis (Gene Raymond) at a society wedding. But then Dr Blair (Brian Aherne) sits … Read more

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

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Dad Iman with a gun in his hand

Political hotheads start revolutions but it’s the apolitical masses who win them when they abandon the old regime. The Seed of the Sacred Fig was shot in secret in Iran by Mohammad Rasoulof and it’s set against the backdrop of the Masa Amini protests of 2022. This was the moment when, after the Iranian morality police killed a young woman for not wearing a hijab, nationwide civil unrest broke out and for a moment it looked like the regime was going to topple. It survived to fight another day, which lends Rasoulof’s film an extra piquancy. His film is history as written by the losers not the winners, an examination of something very … Read more

Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay

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Françoise

When the boomers were young, they were youth-obsessed like no other generation. 1971’s Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (Morgane et ses nymphes) captures the febrile insecurity of a generation whose claim to specialness was its own youth, in a story about bright young women, already feeling the years aged only 20, being offered immortality by an ageless vamp. The opening shot – a young woman naked, surrounded by old women clothed, some sort of black mass or diabolical chastisement going on – sets the tone, though director Bruno Gantillon then pulls way, way back after the opening credits, in a change of tone so startling it’s camp. Suddenly we’re on holiday with … Read more

The History of Sound

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David and Lionel

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in a film together? Sold to that salivating wreck at the back of the room. The History of Sound has pulled off a casting coup, that’s for sure. Two of the hotmost of actors right now in the same movie. If you were to take a guess as to what sort of movie that might be – given their CVs of sexy and queer-adjacent stuff – you might go for something like a Brokeback Mountain remake. And that’s just what this is, dressed up in a different era’s clothes and with the two men committing themselves to the roles as a pair of students who meet at Boston … Read more

Dead Reckoning

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Lizabeth Scott and Humphrey Bogart stare straight into camera

Dead Reckoning cashes in on the Humphrey Bogart persona big time – a drawl and a rough and ready way with women but beneath it all a courtly gent with a thirst for truth. It was made in 1946 when peacetime mopping-up was the order of the day. War is over. Men are returning to where they came from. Things are going back to normal. Or that’s what’s meant to be happening, at any rate. As we meet Bogart’s Rip Murdock, he’s covered in blood, scared and on the run. If this is a reset then something has gone wrong. With plenty of voiceover from Bogart, and the useful shimmer of an extended … Read more