Steve

Alone in Berlin

by
Otto and Anna Quangel face each other over the dinner table

During the Second World War, a Berlin couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, waged a two-person war against the Nazi regime. Prompted by the death of their son at the Front, they embarked on a campaign of writing seditious postcards and leaving them all over the city for people to find. The cards urged their fellow countrymen to rise up against Hitler and join the German resistance. Being just little postcards, they weren’t much of a statement, maybe, but they were enough to make the authorities to sit up and take notice. In 1947 writer Hans Fallada published Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone), a novel about the Hampels and their … Read more

Showbiz Kids

by
A young Henry Thomas and family

I’m reasonably sure Alex Winter is fine about being the one in Bill and Ted who isn’t Keanu Reeves. Showbiz Kids is part of the reason why I think that. The latest in a stream of fascinating documentaries taking in subjects as various as the downloading revolution (2013’s Downloaded), government secrecy (2018’s The Panama Papers) and Frank Zappa (2020’s Zappa), his latest takes in the landscape of the movie brat, the child star, focusing not so much on the obvious benefits as the near-bottomless downside. Like his earlier docs, this is well informed, humane, intelligent and thoughtful. In interviews publicising his films Winter comes across as someone who is fulfilled in his work, … Read more

Night Has a Thousand Eyes

by
Edward G Robinson, John Lund and Gail Russell publicity shot

If it’s a really good Edward G Robinson performance you’re looking for, can I suggest Night Has a Thousand Eyes, a knotty little potboiler elevated by Robinson. Out of gangster mode he was a versatile actor who could bring home the goods in all sorts of roles. Here he’s a stage magician who gets spooked when the phoney predictions he offers audiences start coming true. So spooked that he gives it all up and flees, away from the woman he loves – a premonition has told him she’ll die if he stays – and away from the best friend who will become stinking rich by investing in oil, another fulfilment of John Triton’s … Read more

Crown Vic

by
Nick and Ray on the job

Crown Vic goes by the title Bulletproof in the UK and Protect and Serve in Australia, because barely anyone in those countries has any idea what a Crown Vic is. Maybe not that many in the USA do either. So I’ll tell you. It’s the Ford Crown Victoria cop car, the black and white one that’s been speeding off after bad guys in movies (and on the streets) for at least 20 years, from the start of its production run in 1992. It was made in Canada, ironically enough for a car so iconic in US culture, and is roomy, well built and has rear-wheel drive – so it’s good around corners. Real-life … Read more

The Amazing Mr. X

by
Turhan Bey as Mr X

The only really normal person in The Amazing Mr. X, Richard Carlson’s Martin Abbott, is presented as a complete dope. It’s that sort of film – exotics, psychotics, psychics, camp conmen and vamps circle each other while boring old Martin sits stupidly at the centre. The two real reasons to watch are Cathy O’Donnell, again effortlessly sexy as she was in They Live by Night. She plays the concerned sister trying to get her widowed sibling Christine (Lynn Bari) to marry again. To… you guessed it… chump and dullard Martin. Christine is understandably hesitant. Martin clearly a mistake. But Christine is also reluctant to let go of the hope that husband Paul (Donald Curtis) … Read more

The Secret Agent

by
The secret agent by his yellow VW Beetle

It’s never entirely clear what’s going on in The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto), a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller from Brazil with lots of good hair and tasty roles for old dudes. Director/writer Kleber Mendonça Filho doesn’t even make clear until right near the end that it’s all taking place in flashback, yet another veil between the audience and his protagonist, Wagner Moura’s secret agent – of sorts. There’s a lot of good things to say about this film but the plot is not easy to talk about. There just isn’t that much to it – Moura’s Marcelo/Armando/Fernando (depending on who he’s talking to) returns to his native Recife at carnival time, possibly on … Read more

The Long Night

by
A contemplative Joe

The Long Night is a remake of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Lève hoping to do for American audiences what Carné’s film had done for the French – wow them. It was a flop, in spite of having a good cast, a fine director and top flight technical team. In case anyone wanted to make a direct comparison, before it came out RKO took the precaution of buying up all the prints of Carné’s film and destroying them. Luckily, not absolutely all of them, so now we can enjoy the Carné original and watch it alongside the remake to work out what went wrong. I’ll just say it here – timidity is the … Read more

Hard Truths

by
Pansy has her hair done by sister Chantelle

Hard Truths must be Mike Leigh’s most straightforwardly enjoyable movie since Topsy Turvy. Which is probably all kinds of wrong, since it’s about a woman in the grip of a depression so profound and persistent that she’s almost learned how to live with it. Leigh likes these pithy titles – High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Naked – and Topsy Turvy is an outlier in his work, being a quasi-musical about the partnership of British operetta powerhouses Gilbert and Sullivan. Hard Truths is more the Leigh we expect – working class, a bit dour, a kernel of something tasty in there, fabulous performances. For all the genuinely great acting on display here, it’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste … Read more

Jigsaw

by
Franchot Tone with gun drawn

Organised race hate is a grift, the unusually prescient 1949 film Jigsaw points out, and is just another way of separating the poor and gullible from what little money they have. Donations, uniforms, other paraphernalia, it all adds up. Franchot Tone plays an assistant district attorney investigating the death of a printer. Who, it turns out, used to do off-the-books work for a far-right hate gang. The dead man’s wife insists that a journalist is involved in her husband’s death. Though she also insists that her husband killed himself, so who knows. DA Howard Malloy believes that the woman is scared out of her wits and is only telling him what she’s been … Read more

It Was Just an Accident

by
Vahid has a cigarette

It Was Just an Accident is the latest in a string of films from a director who officially does not make them. Iranian Jafar Panahi was sentenced to a 20 year ban on making films in his homeland in 2010. Since then he’s made six features, all in Iran. Among them, This Is Not a Film, a pointed “fuck you” to the authorities shot in his apartment under house arrest. And the equally ingenious Taxi Tehran, in which Panahi drove about Tehran in a taxi, filming his interactions with people he picked up. His latest film continues the trend. Shot on the hoof, with a tiny cast and crew, using a van as … Read more