Steve

Together

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Millie and Tim seen from below

Alison Brie and Dave Franco are a couple in real life and in excitable quarters this fact alone earns Together extra kudos. It’s a talking point, but the Brie/Franco connection doesn’t otherwise make any difference to this movie. They are fine, separately and together, as people whose too-close relationship shifts from the figurative to the literal in a dire and grisly way. We know this before it happens because a pre-credits sequence has told us so, in a tone-setting mini-drama in which two separate dogs have wound up fused together in a gruesomely icky way. Which is what’s coming down the pipe for Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco) once they head out into … Read more

The Fall of the House of Usher

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Madeline Usher swathed in chiffon

Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher is surely the best version of the Edgar Allan Poe story ever. Loved by director Kurosawa, revered by critic Roger Ebert, it perversely only seems to exist in streaming and hard-copy versions that don’t do it justice. This is one of the best gothic chillers ever made – why doesn’t it look better than this? Possibly because it’s a silent movie, and they tend to get the silent treatment? Luis Buñuel worked on it too, so there’s another reason it should be more respectfully treated, though he did walk off halfway through, appalled at Epstein’s cavalier treatment of Poe’s story. But it remains true … Read more

On Swift Horses

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Lee, Muriel and Julius on a swing seat

On Swift Horses is giddy 1950s melodrama for the 21st century, with Will Poulter and Jacob Elordi as brothers charting separate courses through the great American post-War boom. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays the prize for one of them, or she would be if she weren’t also on a journey of her own, towards a sense of self-actualisation. The dynamic is good boy/bad boy, Poulter drawing the short straw as Lee, the hard-working, conformist brother married to wife Muriel (Edgar-Jones), while Elordi has the fun as Julius, the sexy gambler on the road less travelled. In the film’s opening moments Julius arrives back from the Korean War at the homestead of Lee and Muriel and … Read more

Journey into Fear

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Joseph Cotten and Dolores Del Río

Is Journey into Fear an Orson Welles film sailing under a foreign flag? Norman Foster is the director name up on screen, but credits can be deceptive. The wartime thriller was co-written by Welles, though he has no screen credit. It was also produced by him, again uncredited. And we know for certain that Welles directed some bits of it – the opening sequence is pure Welles, inventive and with real narrative punch. But since Welles was never backward at coming forward, we have to assume that because he never laid claim to it – Welles was asked often enough if Journey into Fear was one of his – that Foster is the main … Read more

Mr Blake at Your Service! aka Well Done!

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John Malkovich and the cast in a group publicity shot

Some films aren’t that great but you like them anyway. That, for me, was Mr Blake at Your Service! (aka Well Done! aka Complètement Cramé), a cosy French comedy with, crucially, a starring role for John Malkovich. Deep breath for the plot. He plays a big something in London who gives it all up on a whim and heads off to France, to revisit the chateau where he first met his beloved but recently deceased wife 40 years before. Emotionally and spiritually exhausted, Andrew Blake is hoping for some balm for the soul by staying as a paying guest in the old place, which now does B&B, or so he mistakenly believes. Instead … Read more

Fruits of Passion

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O, in chains

If you’ve ever wanted to see Klaus Kinski’s hairy anus, Fruits of Passion (Les fruits de la passion) is the movie for you. A sequel of sorts to the infamous/scandalous Story of O, it’s a “life inside the brothel” tale about the sentimental education of an impressionable young beauty at the hands – and other body parts – of a ripe old western roué. Directed and co-adapted from the Anne Declos novel Retour à Roissy by the multi-hyphenate Shūji Terayama, it is both orientalist and a critique of the same, with Kinski the absolute embodiment of the lordly patron. Dressed in white throughout, shock of blond hair, eyeliner, cadaverous as usual, he is … Read more

Birdeater

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Louie and Irene

Yikes, Birdeater, the sort of movie I don’t like watching, but I did watch it. And in the end… liked? Not quite. Admired…? Again, not quite. But there is something special going on in Jack Clark and Jim Weir’s debut feature, a kind of Festen among the Aussies. Unpleasant secrets surfacing at a social gathering, sort of thing. Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, a seminal 1998 movie sometimes going by the English translation of The Celebration, is one of the movies that Clark and Weir got their cast and crew to watch before embarking on Birdeater, along with The American Friend, My Night at Maud’s, Nashville and A Brighter Summer’s Day. And one of the … Read more

Hôtel du Nord

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Edmond and Raymonde

It’s soap, it’s melodrama, have a go if you like, but if it’s absolutely nothing else, Marcel Carné’s 1938 hit Hôtel du Nord is an object lesson in how to use a hair light. Watch it for its looks rather than its plot, in other words, which slaloms about a touch preposterously, though its actors are beyond criticism. Carné preceded it with Port of Shadows, and followed up with Le Jour Se Lève, though it can’t match either for punch, coherence or consistent characterisation. Apart from one ridiculous digression to the south of France en route to Egypt, it all takes place in and around the Hôtel du Nord, a Paris flophouse where … Read more

Heart Eyes

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The heart eyes killer

It’s a good moment for whacked-out horror. Heart Eyes joins Crumb Catcher, The Rule of Jenny Pen, Bring Her Back, Together, Gazer and The Monkey, to name just the ones I’ve seen in the last few weeks. Heart Eyes is less icky than some, more larky than others – it’s Whedon-esque, Buffy-like, horror done with a smirk. So, very referential? Yes, indeedy. The pre-credits sequence sets us up nicely for what’s going to play out. A sweet young-lovers proposal scene. He’s going to pop the question. She’s trembling with anticipation. But instead of the two of them walking off into the sunset together, he winds up with an arrow in the head and … Read more

Paracelsus

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Paracelsus with a sword in his hand

Paracelsus, the great Swiss renaissance physician. Who could want a film about him? Adolf Hitler, it turns out. Maybe in the story of the proud loner standing against received wisdom, the tribune of the Volk and all that, Hitler saw a kindred spirit – the Führerprinzip in action before the Führer. The director was the GW Pabst, who’d been caught in France en route to the USA at the beginning of the war and was then forced to turn out films for the Reich. With a lot of foot-dragging and a determination to keep Nazi ideology as much as possible out of the finished product, the great Austrian made only two in five … Read more