Steve

The Shout

by
Charles shouts

There’s nothing wrong with The Shout that a different screenplay wouldn’t fix. In front of and behind the camera it’s brilliant. But further back than that, at the conceptual stage, there’s not much beyond a spectacularly tedious allegory about something or other. Into the marriage of John Hurt’s Anthony and Susannah York’s Rachel comes a stranger, a domineering man dressed in black whose shout, he says, can rip universes apart, pulp souls, burst brains, and so on. But is Charles Crossley (Alan Bates) just a lunatic, as he appears to be? We have after all first met him at an asylum watching a very English cricket match overseen by a chief medical officer … Read more

Zombie Town

by
Dan Aykroyd as director Len Carver

Spoofy rather than spooky, Zombie Town is no good at all if a proper scaring is what you want but a wholly different proposition if you’re after the sort of knowing salute that Ghostbusters made to drive-in horror all those years ago. Dan Aykroyd, yes, Dan Aykroyd, is one of the stars, and one of the joys of the film is that he doesn’t just blur on, say something corny, and, cameo over, blur off again. He plays Len Carver, a reclusive horror-movie legend who hasn’t directed a film in decades, so famous that the town where he lives has been named after him. But he comes out of retirement for a hometown … Read more

100 Years of… Master of the House

by
Mads comforts Ida

More than just a miserable face, arthouse darling Carl Theodor Dreyer could also churn out the hits. Master of the House is one such, a counter to the suggestion that he was just an austere Dane interested only in the beauty of human suffering – see The Passion of Joan of Arc or, much later, Ordet, for plenty of that. Madly successful at the box office, Master of the House is, as near as you got from Dreyer, a Hollywood entertainment, telling a story with a clear beginning, middle and end, emotional arcs, good guys and bad guys, fairly realistic performances and a moral at the end that you can actually see coming from … Read more

The Devil’s Bath

by
Agnes in semi shade, suffering

Powerful to the point of punishment, The Devil’s Bath (Des Teufels Bad) is Austria’s contender for the Best International Feature Oscar in 2025. It won’t win. It probably won’t even make the shortlist. Too bleak. Too uncompromising. Seen one way, it’s a group portrait of the extremely grim existence hacked out by peasants in a remote part of 18th-century Austria. Seen another, it’s the progress of one female from fragile, dreamy single girl to married woman in psychological extremis. Anja Plaschg plays Agnes, a sweet, unworldly creature who in early scenes is married off to Wolf (David Scheid), a bear of a man who seems delighted to be married to her. Or maybe … Read more

Fallen Angel

by
Eric and Stella

Watching a conman grift himself into a corner is always fun. In 1945’s Fallen Angel Otto Preminger gives us just that while Dana Andrews delivers another of the flat-faced, almost featureless performances he was so good at. He plays the shyster arriving in a small town with barely a cent in his pocket, who sets about trying to work his charms on a town full of hayseeds. Stop number one, another pair of grifters who run a clairvoyant act. But even before he gets stuck into Professor Madley (John Carradine, cadaverous features well deployed) and his assistant Joe (Olin Howard), Eric (Andrews) has had the misfortune of running into Stella (Linda Darnell), the … Read more

Semmelweis

by
Ignác and Emma

If you know the name, you’ll know the film. Semmelweis tells the story of the 19th-century doctor who introduced hand-washing to labour wards in Vienna and at a stroke reduced the incidence of puerperal (aka childbed) fever, a killer of new mothers. Opening shot: a pregnant woman going into labour on the Austrian capital’s streets screaming blue murder when the police try to hustle her into the “death factory”, as she calls the maternity hospital. We’ve been plunged straight into the meat of the movie. Why is she so reluctant to go? What is regularly killing new mothers in this venerable institution, and why, we soon learn, does the midwife clinic across the … Read more

Fury

by
Katherine consoles Joe

In 1936’s Fury, Fritz Lang revisits one of the key themes of M, his 1931 paranoid classic about a child murderer on the run. The focus on mob rule had seemed prophetic in a country about to install the Nazis as its rulers, but how well would it translate to democratic America? Very well is the answer, and it would stand up even better now, in the world of social media, where a rumour is enough to convict in the court of public opinion and the best option for anyone caught up in a pile-on is to disappear entirely. Joe (Spencer Tracy) and Katherine (Sylvia Sidney) are very much in love and plan … Read more

Oktober November

by
Sonja dressed in a little black dress

After sublime revenge thriller Revanche, Austrian writer/director Götz Spielmann falls back to earth with Oktober November, a soap, a melodrama, call it what you will, but whether you like it or not, it’s a film with a chrome-like finish. It hangs off the spectacular cheekbones of its star, Nora Waldstätten, an ice-maiden specialist giving us blasts of wintry chill in her portrayal of Sonja, a successful actor who’s headed back home where her dad is sick and her sister is conducting an illicit affair with the handsome local doctor who tends to the old man. Here, in the bosom of her family, as dad shuffles towards his final days, old tensions re-emerge, secrets … Read more

The Killing

by
Johnny lays out the plan to the gang

Stanley Kubrick really gets going with 1956’s The Killing, the first of his grand march through the genres. Paths of Glory, Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut would follow but here Kubrick’s attempt to do genre movies in a distinctively different way focuses on film noir, and in particular the noirish heist. Yes, there had been earlier movies, Killer’s Kiss and Fear and Desire, but Kubrick considered those the training warm-ups of the ambitious amateur rather than considered finished products. Here, thanks to a partnership with producer James Harris, he had enough money and enough technical talent behind and in … Read more

The Vourdalak

by
An indistinct vourdalak bites into the neck of the marquis

Dracula before Dracula, the original of The Vourdalak, Aleksei Tolstoy’s The Family of the Vourdalak, was written in 1839, nearly 60 years before Bram Stoker sat down to write his tale of the Undead. It’s a refreshingly different take on the story we’re all used to, with a focus, unsurprisingly given the title, on how the average everyday vampire might get along with his relations, blood and otherwise. This retelling of the story makes for a very drole movie, in the very French sense of the word. Not exactly comedic but prancing about in that territory somewhere and incarnated in the central character – the Jonathan Harker, if you like – an innocent … Read more