Steve

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock

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Hitchcock with his fingers splayed

Mark Cousins’s documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock steers a careful course between low and high culture, the crass, “did you know” approach to the great director and the earnest film studies route. Hitchcock understood the importance of fun. The result is an engaging, interesting, entertaining and enlightening 120 minutes, not the last word in Hitchcock, but a lively addition to a library which, in my view, could not get full enough. “A showman, a daredevil, a fun fair,” says Hitch in a film entirely written and narrated by him, or so it’s claimed at the outset. In fact that’s all a bit of a lie. Cousins wrote the script that impressionist Alistair … Read more

Dracula

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Close up of Dracula's face

“Listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make.” Hollywood horror starts here, with 1931’s Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning, it made an international star of the man who uttered those words, Bela Lugosi. He’d already become a huge Broadway star off the back of a stage adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. This film would propel him onto the global stage, and into posterity. The film sticks fairly close to the play, which sticks fairly close to the book. There have been trims in characters and settings but most of the original plot is intact as Browning’s version of it follows Dracula from his ancestral home in Transylvania, on to … Read more

The Killer

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Nathalie Emmanuel with the Eiffel Tower in the background

John Woo never feels fully in control of The Killer, the remake of his own film from 1989, an accusation you could never have levelled at the original. Flipping the gender of the assassin, and switching from Hong Kong to Paris both seem like sound ideas, not least because in some quarters the increasingly tight relationship between the assassin and his cop pursuer in the original seemed a bit too close to homosexual. No chance of that now. Omar Sy is in the cop role, and of all the many actors in this strangely off thriller, Sy probably comes out of it least shortchanged. There are two familiar tales here. First the “a … Read more

Ghosts

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Nina and Toni

Ghosts (Gespenster in the German original) is the film Christian Petzold made between Wolfsburg and the one that bounced him more into the international spotlight, Yella. It’s the second of his Ghosts trilogy – Die innere Sicherheit (aka The State I’m In) and Yella are the other two – and like Die innere Sicherheit stars Julia Hummer as a bit of a waif trying to shore up her personality against a hostile world. Here she’s a teenage girl who lives in a home, a shy kid who one day meets her exact opposite, a tough street rat who lives on her wits, largely by shoplifting, and who knows what else. Nina (Hummer) is … Read more

Queer

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Daniel Craig smoking

An adaptation of a self-flagellating William Burroughs novel, Queer sets out to explore identity politics in a refreshing way, tacitly asking a question about the nature of people. Does doing homosexual things make you a homosexual? In the red corner Bill Lee (Daniel Craig), a dyed-in-the-wool ageing queer hiding out in Mexico City in 1950, where he lives the life of the dissolute bohemian expat on his American dollars, and flits from one seedy gay bar to another, to chitchat and drink, but mostly drink, and then weave home where a spoon and a syringe await. In the blue corner Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), recently out of US military service, female friend always … Read more

Wonder Man

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Bookish Edwin with Ellen

Yes, Wonder Man, not Wonder Woman, a 1945 musical comedy with a dash of crime thriller starring Danny Kaye as Danny Kaye, or sailing so close to his public persona as makes no difference. As happened quite often in Kaye’s career, he plays two roles, twin brothers, one of whom is a light, facetious, musical theatre type, the other a bookish stiff. After big, brash, brassy musical opening credits with the word Technicolor prominent, a musical number right at the beginning showcases most of the Kaye skillset – corny songs delivered with a wink, tongue-twisting wordplay, goofing about, awful puns (dad jokes), silly dances and so on. It looks like this version of … Read more

Eliminators

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Scott Adkins points a gun

It’s easy to get sniffy about films like Eliminators, spam-fisted actioners featuring one lunk or another kicking the life out of some meathead, delivering the coup de grace with a quip that’s meant to be James Bond but is more often than not Steven Seagal. Even Seagal has been known to make good films, so let’s park the prejudices and get down to action. Scott Adkins, a British actor, plays a federal agent hiding out in London on some witness protection program, whose life is upended when three local desparadoes looking for a stash of cocaine break in to his house waving guns about. They threaten his daughter, bad mistake, and are soon … Read more

Panic in the Streets

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Dr Reed explaining that it's plague

Steve Soderbergh’s Contagion seemed to be required viewing during Covid, Panic in the Streets not so much. But Elia Kazan’s film from 1950 has much to say about epidemics, why nipping them in the bud is important, how government can be a force for good and why scepticism needs to be countered not with shrillness but facts, reason and the force of argument. All this wrapped up in a tense, noirish thriller starring Richard Widmark and handing Jack Palance the first of a long string of “mad dog” roles, which he was uniquely suited to playing. As Soderbergh, so Kazan – realism and immediacy are the key concerns. Panic in the Streets is … Read more

Memoir of a Snail

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Grace in her snail hat

“It doesn’t all have to be Disney,” is animator Adam Elliot’s rallying cry. And in Memoir of a Snail, with jokes about masturbation and death, paedophilia, arson and murder, he proves it. It’s refreshing and yet oddly familiar, as if Wallace and Gromit had been given a wipe down with a mucky cloth. But cute is the overriding impression, from the old-school ragged-edged stop-motion animation – Wallace and Gromit before Nick Park got the big bucks – to the characters on display. The “snail” is actually a girl in a snail hat called Grace, one of two twins with her brother Gilbert, born with a cleft lip to a mother who died in … Read more

Funeral in Berlin

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Harry Palmer by the Berlin Wall

The Ipcress File is one of the great 1960s Cold War spy thrillers and its follow-up, Funeral in Berlin, attempts to do the whole thing again. Popular opinion puts the sequel as second best to Ipcress – something its star Michael Caine seems to agree with in various interviews (like this one) – with the third in the series, Billion Dollar Brain, trailing along at the back. The fun in The Ipcress File was in watching a man who was not a spy – and possibly wasn’t suited to becoming a secret agent – being turned into one in spite of himself, all part of a bigger plot to flush out a double agent … Read more