Steve

The Return

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Odysseus and Penelope reunited

As you will know from reading your Homer, after his victory at the battle of Troy, the warrior king Odysseus got waylaid on his journey home to Ithaca. Instead of taking weeks, Odysseus’s voyage lasted years. There was many a mythical adventure en route. Hence, yes, the word “odyssey”. The Return picks up the story as the last section of The Odyssey did, with Odysseus finally washed up half-dead on his troubled native island. Grizzled, battle-scarred and bewildered, he is taken in by a swineherd, where he licks his wounds and mentally regroups before eventually heading off towards his palace disguised as a beggar. Surely he will re-assert himself as king? Surely things … Read more

Cruising

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Steve applies some eyeliner

When William Friedkin died in 2023, aged 87, the obituaries talked of the director of The Exorcist and the man who gave us The French Connection. The Boys in the Band, his groundbreaking film from 1970, which took dramas about gay men into the mainstream, got some bandwidth, as did Sorceror, his remake of Clouzot’s 1953 classic The Wages of Fear, which has gained in reputation ever since it was released in 1977. Cruising not so much. Or if it was mentioned it was usually in passing, as the controversial film that ended Friedkin’s time at the top. In fact Sorceror had already done that. The title had confused people thinking they were … Read more

Between Us aka Entre Nous

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Laetitia and Elodie

Lesbian ladies undone by dastardly male alert! Between Us (Entre Nous in the original French) is a strangely not-quite-there tale of two young women and one awful man, done as a mix of cautionary thriller and soft-edged erotica. As the action opens, fragrant, pretty and broke Elodie and Laetitia are realising that they need a third person in their apartment to cover the bills and so decide to advertise for someone. And along they come, the hopefuls, in the standard movie-montage process of interviewing the awfuls. The film proper starts at the point when the successful candidate, Simon, emerges as the best of the bunch and moves in. The ideal guy, on paper … Read more

Four Sided Triangle

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Lena and Bill at the beach

Four Sided Triangle is a British B movie from 1953. That’s two if not three knocks against it straight away. Look it up in the books and you’ll see it generally doesn’t get very good reviews. And yet it’s a really interesting film from all sorts of approaches. It’s a kind of tweedy Frankenstein story, set in the bucolic English countryside, and introduced by a decent chap, a local doctor (James Hayter) who with rounded vowel sounds and in a voice like warm gravel recounts the story of two boys and a girl. Perhaps Robin and Bill were rivals for Lena’s affection even as kids, the flashback structure tells us, before Dr Harvey … Read more

The Parenting

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Rohan and Josh looking scared

Brian Cox apparently gets a bit sick of being asked in interviews about Succession and playing Logan Roy, which might explain his presence in The Parenting, a film unafraid to do jokes about projectile vomiting alongside a whole slew (spew?) of gags revived from the era of gross-out comedy. Look, this says, I’m an actor, now doing something completely different, alright, because that’s what acting is. Craig Johnson is the director and Kent Sublette the writer, but it’s the Farrelly or Wayans brothers who really preside over this movie – comedy done with a wink and a how-low-can-you-go chuckle. It’s a Meet the Parents set-up. Rohan (Nik Dodani) and Josh (Brandon Flynn) are … Read more

Claire’s Knee

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Béatrice Romand as Laura

In many ways the perfect French movie, French-movie cliché even, 1970’s Claire’s Knee (Le genou de Claire) is one of Éric Rohmer’s most celebrated works and is a good place to start if you want to dig into his back catalogue. One of the key voices of the French New Wave, Rohmer regularly banged out films from the mid 1950s until, in 2007, old age forced him to step back. Unlike other old dogs of the New Wave (Godard springs to mind), right to the end Rohmer’s newest offerings were still consistently putting bums on seats. It’s the perfect and cliched – archetypal, if you like – French film because it has the elements … Read more

Grand Theft Hamlet

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A green alien on stage in Hamlet

Though the title almost does all the explaining you’ll ever need, to spell it out in a full sentence Grand Theft Hamlet is an attempt to stage the Shakespeare play Hamlet inside the online version of Grand Theft Auto. The background. It’s the third Covid lockdown in the UK and husband and wife Sam Crane, a theatre director, and Pinny Grylls, a documentary maker, are suddenly workless and at home cooling their heels. He’s a bit of a console jockey. She isn’t. Inspired by a comment from their kids about a YouTube gamer going by Dream (31.9 million subscribers as I type) who’s been staging performances inside Minecraft, they wonder if they can … Read more

The Vampires Night Orgy

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Helga Liné as the vampire countess

There is no sign of an orgy in The Vampires Night Orgy, that snippet of trivia on the IMDb does not lie. Nor is there very much in the way of vampires. Which leaves the Night bit of the title with quite a bit to do. This horror movie, no surprise, from Spain was made in 1973, when sex, horror and arthouse cohabited in a lot of European movies. It’s hideously dubbed, as was also often the case, and it was originally served up in two forms: the tame one for domestic consumption and the “nude export version”, which is the one you are likely to find, especially if it’s flying by its … Read more

The Girl with the Needle

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Karoline and Dagmar

Imagine reading Oliver Twist and suddenly Jack the Ripper turns up in it. The Girl with the Needle (Pigen med nålen in the original Danish) is a bit like that. A bracingly miserablist trek through the life of one of the urban poor in post-First World War Denmark, its Dickensian traipse from one grim situation to the next is interrupted towards the end with the dawning realisation that its heroine, poor benighted Karoline, has somehow wandered into the orbit of Dagmar Overby, Denmark’s most prolific serial killer. The film never tells us that the Dagmar on screen is Overby but the woman portrayed is presented as a serial murderer of infant children, which … Read more

100 Years of… Lady Windermere’s Fan

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Irene Rich as Mrs Erlynne

Mary Pickford once described the director Ernst Lubitsch as a “director of doors”. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play, you can see what she means. She meant it dismissively, though the door, and what’s behind it – or not – is key to Lubitsch’s work generally, and specifically here. This is a story all about secrets – as Wilde’s so often were – a tale of mistaken identity with ironic distance between what the people on the screen imagine themselves to be and how the audience sees them. To thumbnail-sketch a delicately intertwined plot, it centres on Lady Windermere, who is in love with her husband but being pressed … Read more