Steve

Fancy Dance

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Lily Gladstone in a darkish room

Lily Gladstone shot Fancy Dance in breaks in the filming of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. His film might be the reason why she got the gig on the fiction debut of documentarian Erica Tremblay. Or maybe not. Either way, Gladstone repays Tremblay’s compliment with a performance every bit as eye-catching as the one she gave for Mr S. They’re not dissimilar in many ways – stoic is probably the word to describe them. What also connects the two films up is that they’re both set in the world of the Native American, and neither is going for the sentimental easy goal. There the similarities don’t exactly cease so much as … Read more

The Day of the Jackal

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The Jackal practises shooting to kill

The Day of the Jackal would probably appeal to the members of a Facebook group called the Dull Men’s Club – recent topics include fuel efficiency while driving, insulating old buildings and dealing with nail fungus. The Dull Men’s Club (a Dull Men’s and Women’s Club also exists) loves detail, procedure, process, how things work and why they sometimes don’t. The Day of the Jackal is the procedural film with knobs on. It came out in 1973 and was made by Fred Zinnemann, an Austrian-born American director based in London who managed to get studio sign-off on his adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s novel about an assassination attempt on the life of General de Gaulle, … Read more

Janet Planet

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Janet and Lacy

Janet Planet is interesting on all sorts of levels but the title is a good place to start. Because the film is really concerned with Lacy, a girl of about 11 who is withdrawn and self-absorbed, friendless and a bit weird but sweet, smart and nice with it. Why she has no friends seems like a mystery and by the end of the film it remains largely unanswered, but writer/director Annie Baker gives us clues – the big one being Janet, the planetary object around which Lacy orbits, her mother. This is Baker’s first film, and the debut also of Zoe Ziegler, who plays Lacy, but most of the rest of the cast … Read more

100 Years of… The Eagle

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Rudolph Valentino in hussar uniform

Rudolph Valentino made The Eagle in 1925 and while it wasn’t a smash along the lines of Blood and Sand or The Sheik, it did better than his previous four films – it was a comeback of sorts, and came not long before Valentino was whisked to the place from which no comeback is possible, after contracting peritonitis and dying. Death is on the cards in The Eagle too, an adaptation of a Pushkin story about a young hussar who is spotted by the libidinous Czarina Catherine II and offered a place in her bed. But young, handsome and proud Vladimir Doubrovsky (the name is spelt a number of ways on screen) doesn’t … Read more

Femme

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Preston and Jules in a car together

Femme has a really powerful premise – a black drag artist in full cross-dressed glory is beaten up one night by a white tattooed thug for being a “faggot”, then months later happens upon the same guy in, of all places, a gay sauna. The angry closeted homophobe clearly doesn’t recognise the meek black guy out of costume and the two of them get into a strange sort of relationship – no-strings, ask-no-questions sex. What’s going on here? Is the black guy a masochist who’s taking his liking for a bit of rough to the next level? Is he seeking revenge and keeping his powder dry? Or is it physical attraction pure and … Read more

Two or Three Things I Know About Her

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Juliette stands by a mirror smoking

It’s often said that Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle) has no narrative throughline, that it’s freeform, experimental, avant-garde and so on. This is both true and not true. There is a story, though Godard does his best to hide it, of a young Parisian woman, Juliette (Marina Vlady), who intersperses her roles as wife and mother with a bit of prostitution on the side. This she does, she explains in voiceover, at the request of her husband, who she met while working as a prostitute, and who suggested she go back on the game as a way of making a … Read more

Inside Out 2

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Riley wakes up confused

It’s been nearly 40 years since Pixar got going in the, yes, garage of one of its founders, and in that time it’s gone from being cult item to monster indie to part of the Disney mega-stable. Inside Out 2 comes at an interesting point in its history. Pixar is now part of the cultural furniture and at this point in its development is well used, to mix metaphors, to having its lunch stolen by younger, nimbler rivals. Gone also are the years when every new release was a banger – Toy Story followed by A Bug’s Life, followed by Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles is a good run … Read more

Three Days of the Condor

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Turner in front a bridge on the Hudson River

The Bourne movies lifted a lot of their MO from Three Days of the Condor, one of the key political conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. Behind the scenes the way the film was financed – sold before it was even made – would change the way the film industry worked in the 1980s, but Sydney Pollack’s loose shooting style and fast edits intercutting action with depictions of slickly professional characters doing what they do, that looks even further into the future. This is also peak Robert Redford, who plays a desk jockey for some branch of the secret service who goes out to lunch one day and comes back to find that everyone … Read more

Nosferatu

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Ellen Hunter (Lily-Rose Depp) screaming

The films of Robert Eggers can get a bit overwrought and Nosferatu is no exception. Both The Northman and The Lighthouse (The Witch not so much) overdid it. All well and good if you subscribe to the view that too much gothic is still not enough. And you’ll be doubly re-assured by Eggers’s decision to go back to the sensational source as the inspiration for his turreted gothic assemblage. That’s not entirely true. Eggers does lean narratively and visually on FW Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, but that itself was a blatant steal from Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. Murnau and co hadn’t paid for the rights and hoped that changing character names would be enough … Read more

100 Years of… Go West

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Buster Keaton with a train in the background

Because Go West came out in in the middle of Buster Keaton’s hot run, it’s often bracketed with the rest of them – The Three Ages, Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr, The Navigator and The General. But Go West isn’t conceptually brilliant, like Sherlock Jr is. Nor is the 1925 feature a compendium of brilliant sight gags, like The General. Instead, Keaton settles for making relentless fun of his character, billed only as Friendless, in a story following a hungry and penniless man initially to New York City. New York turns out to be a bad idea – Friendless is literally crushed underfoot by the teeming crowds – and so he decides to heed the advice … Read more