Steve

Red Island

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Thomas and mother Colette

A hypnotic coming-of-ager from Robin Campillo, drawing on his own childhood growing up in one of France’s last colonial outposts (Madagascar) for Red Island (L’île rouge), a story about a little boy who watches and learns as the French expat community do their thing. It is beautifully observed and gorgeously put together but it’s the sort of subject matter which, in the wrong hands, would be all sorts of boring. Campillo, though, is a great film-maker and with open nods masters like Abel Gance and Eisenstein, he assembles his film poetically. It is an intoxicating experience. And yet, superficially, it is done as if this were cold, clean and factual storytelling. Life on … Read more

To Sleep with Anger

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Harry being charming

Between Lethal Weapon 2 and Predator 2 Danny Glover starred in To Sleep with Anger, a genre film of an entirely different stripe, masquerading as a domestic drama about an extended family of black folk. Glover plays Harry, an old-school charmer with Southern manners, who after many years of absence arrives back in the lives of old friend Gideon and his wife Suzie. Gideon invites his old childhood friend to stay and Harry soon has his feet well under the table. Writer/director Charles Burnett spends time detailing the extended family Harry finds himself among. It’s a slightly soapy portrait of a large group of people who get along just fine though not entirely … Read more

Anniversary

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Paul and Ellen Taylor celebrate their anniversary

Barely promoted by a studio wary of its political content, Anniversary has a Stepford Wives – reality-adjacent – quality that stops it being really incendiary. It is chilly and chilling enough, though its big message is so emollient it almost undoes all the good work director and co-writer Jan Komasa has put in to stir things up. It’s the story of a big, noisy and mostly successful family – liberal as you like – brought low by a regime change precipitated by a book the girlfriend of one of them has written. When we first meet girlfriend Elizabeth Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor) she is nervously prepping herself for the meeting with the parents of her guy … Read more

Border Incident

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Ricardo Montalban as Pablo

Evidence that borders aren’t just a 21st-century hot button, 1949’s Border Incident is about the contentious human back and forth between Mexico and the USA. Every year workers cross the border to harvest the crops in California, an authoritative and majestic introductory shot of the All-American Canal tells us, all part of the Bracero Program to import a workforce to do the jobs Americans don’t want to do. Braceros – from the Spanish for arms, because they’re manual workers – are a good thing, director Anthony Mann’s picture is at pains to point out. They only become a problem when they arrive in the USA illegally. Here, the picture is at even more … Read more

One to One: John & Yoko

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John and Yoko embrace on stage

Like all the Beatles anthologies attempting to squeeze new juice out of old fruit, One to One: John & Yoko digs through the archives to document two years in the lives of the famous couple, when they lived in Greenwich Village and went about their lives almost like normal people did. The seclusion of the Dakota Building years were still in the future. Starting out in 1971, Kevin Macdonald’s film catches Lennon at the intersection of two eras. Lennon the ex-Beatle is still largely of the opinion that he is a spokesman for progressive youth, but between the lines Macdonald’s film gives us a glimpse of Lennon either realising he no longer is … Read more

The Fallen Sparrow

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Maureen O'Hara and John Garfield

“In a world at war many sparrows must fall.” A poignant line slightly out of keeping with the hard-boiled characters populating this atypical noir. Unusually on the money politically and psychologically, The Fallen Sparrow is a story about a volunteer fighter in the Spanish Civil War who returns to New York only to find it full of Nazi sympathisers. John Garfield’s decent American John “Kit” McKittrick has been fighting the good fight abroad and is now ready to fight it at home too, even though he’s weighed down with a hefty amount of PTSD after being tortured in Spain. Kit never saw the Nazi who directed Franco’s torturers, he explains early on, but … Read more

Ghost Trail

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A watchful Hamid

Watching the struggles of Syrian refugees in Western Europe isn’t everyone’s idea of fun, so how about a spy thriller instead? That seems to be the idea behind Ghost Trail, which manages to have it both ways – the miseries of a life in exile and the thrill of the chase as its hero chases down his quarry. It’s quite John Le Carré in many respects, with the focus on a Syrian refugee who is part of a network tracking down the people who tortured and killed back in the home country. In Zoom calls with his mother, who is in the Bekaa refugee camp in Beirut, Hamid pretends that he’s in Berlin, … Read more

István Szabó: Mephisto/Colonel Redl/Hanussen

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Klaus Maria Brandauer in white-face make-up in Mephisto

A neat Blu-ray box set of some of Hungarian director István Szabó’s best – probably his best known – movies. Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1985) and Hanussen (1988) all star Klaus Maria Brandauer, all three are co-written with Péter Dobai and they’re all shot by Lajos Koltai. Thematically they all deal with essentially the same issue too – personal integrity, though they come at it from different directions. To précis the plots, Mephisto is a Nazi-era tale of an actor who is “invited” to endorse the new regime in return for career success. Colonel Redl follows a traitor on his path towards sending thousands of countrymen to their deaths in the dog days … Read more

Ebony & Ivory

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Stevie and Paul hug

If you enjoyed The Greasy Strangler and wondered whether writer/director Jim Hosking had anything else in his locker, Ebony & Ivory has your name on it. Imagining Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder meeting on the remote Mull of Kintyre in Scotland sometime in 1981, it’s not aiming for documentary realism – the two musicians met in Montserrat in the Caribbean, for one – and is the sort of whimsy that seems aimed at stoners. And yet there is a kernel of something weird but true going on here. The British Wool Marketing Board feature in the closing credits, that’s how all over the place this film is, leading to theorising (if only on my … Read more

Clash by Night

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Marilyn Monroe and Barbara Stanwyck face to face

Marilyn Monroe as a fishwife?! 1952’s Clash by Night has some fun incidentals like Monroe, making much of a small role. But the real action is with Barbara Stanwyck, as a goodtime girl who’s worn out her welcome after ten years in the big city and is now back in the coastal town where she grew up to wreak havoc among the menfolk. It’s another tough-nut role for Stanwyck, who plays a woman who decisively knows what she doesn’t want but isn’t quite sure what she does want. Should Mae, for instance, go with her head and marry dull and dependable Jerry (Paul Douglas)? Or have a fling with bad boy Earl (Robert … Read more