Steve

Man on the Run

2024-09-15 by Steve

If you ran The 39 Steps through a photocopier a few times, you might end up with Man on the Run, a British noir from 1949 that yokes a couple together and watches as they fall in love. Which they do the moment they meet, on the evidence of what’s on the screen. But… in opening scenes that turn out to be as good as the film will get until it reaches its closing moments, we meet Peter Burdon (Derek Farr), an army deserter passing himself off as Peter Brown and working in a very British pub in a village far away from where anyone will find him. Until he is discovered, by … Read more

Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan

2024-09-14 by Steve

A Vietnam war movie released in 2019, Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan has a couple of other potential strikes against it. It’s Australian, for one, and who even remembers that Australia lined up alongside the USA for that epic? For another, it’s not even vaguely interested in setting Vietnam in the wider political context. All good reasons to watch it, then. Long Tan was a real battle, in which 108 Australian and New Zealand troops somehow managed to hold off an enemy Vietcong force of 2,000 in a battle that took place in a rubber plantation, at a huge cost in lives on both sides. Not that this movie is really … Read more

Drive-In Massacre

2024-09-132024-09-13 by Steve

If you’re looking for a drive-in movie set at a drive-in… Drive-In Massacre is the short, sharp schlock you’re looking for, a cult item shot in four days, without permits and with all the actors using pseudonyms because they were on a non-union production. It’s a cult movie, which is a way of rationalising its low score on the IMDb – 3.7 out of 10 at the time of writing – but it’s better than its rating and has the sort of breezy, trashy quality you’d expect from a director with titles like Teenage Sex Therapy, Let’s Play Doctor and Teeny Buns on his CV. Stu Segall is the name. The premise is simple. … Read more

The Bikeriders

2024-09-122024-09-12 by Steve

Since Shotgun Stories, his 2007 debut, there hasn’t been a bad Jeff Nichols film. But The Bikeriders comes close, a downbeat affair quietly putting the glamorous image of the motorbike gang to the test, if not to the sword. The film is based on a 1960s photo-book by Danny Lyon, which followed the Outlaws (here renamed the Vandals) motorbike club for several years, photographing the guys and girls and talking to them about their lives. Constructed as a series of flashbacks, it is strung together by interviews Lyon (played here by Mike Faist, of Challengers fame) conducts over the years with a young woman called Kathy (Jodie Comer), who fell badly for a … Read more

Frau im Mond aka Woman in the Moon

2024-09-11 by Steve

Fritz Lang’s scorching run of the late silent era continues with Frau im Mond. Translated variously as Woman in the Moon, Girl in the Moon and By Rocket to the Moon, it’s Lang’s second go at sci-fi. He’d made Metropolis only two years before, nearly bankrupting the Ufa studio in the process. And yet, for some reason, Ufa gave Lang his head again. The fact that Spione (aka Spies), Lang’s creation of the modern spy caper the year before, had been a massive success might have had something to do with Ufa’s readiness to be so generous. Frau im Mond is the realistic, plausible sci-fi to Metropolis‘s poetical, fantastical one, an attempt, using … Read more

Twisters

2026-01-302024-09-10 by Steve

Kate in shades sits on the roof of a chaser truck

No one was exactly clamouring for it but Twisters, the imaginatively titled sequel to Twister, turned out alright in the end anyway. The original, complete with flying cow, came out in 1996, 24 years ago. At that point Lee Isaac Chung, director of this sequel, was a fresh faced 18 years old, star Glen Powell was eight and co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones was minus two. To the film’s credit it leaves Twister where it was, not referring back to it at all. There are no cameos to remind us when Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton were the plucky duo chasing tornadoes around the mid-West, trying to heal a broken relationship as they dodged airborne … Read more

The Witches

2024-09-09 by Steve

1966’s The Witches (aka The Devil’s Own) is another great opportunity to indulge the guilty pleasure of watching a once-glam Hollywood goddess at the tail end of her career being relentlessly monstered in a down-market movie. Think Joan Crawford in Trog or Bette Davis in Burnt Offerings. Here it’s Joan Fontaine getting the treatment, the one-time star of Rebecca, and Oscar-winner for Suspicion, returning to the land of her British parents to play a teacher recruited to run a primary school in a picture-postcard English village. In Wicker Man style, Miss Mayfield does not realise that almost everyone in the village is involved in something untoward, and that one of her charges has … Read more

Perfect Days

2024-09-08 by Steve

We have Covid to thank for Perfect Days, the best film from Wim Wenders in some time. The original idea was to get Wenders to Tokyo to make a documentary about the toilets built for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (a gig is a gig). But the Olympics first got postponed to 2021 and then eventually took place behind closed doors without any spectators. The toilets barely got used. Wenders, however, did get to make his film. But instead of a documentary, Wenders pushed to make a feature film, incorporating those 17 toilets designed by leading architects, with the action focused not on the toilets themselves – though they do feature prominently – but on … Read more

The Forest for the Trees

2024-09-07 by Steve

Here’s Maren Ade’s first feature, The Forest for the Trees (Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen in the original German), made in 2003. Though low in budget – it was a film-school project – it instantly established her as one to watch. The remarkable thing is that in the two decades since, Ade has made only two more films, 2009’s Everyone Else and 2016’s Toni Erdmann, the one that made her name internationally and won her an Oscar nomination (she lost out to Asgar Farhadi, who isn’t a bad name to lose out to). So what’s she been up to all this time? Producing, is the answer. Ade’s name turns up all over the … Read more

Blood for Dust

2025-08-252024-09-06 by Steve

Sometimes you like something but you’re not sure why. Case in point: Blood for Dust, a 1990s style “who’s zooming who?” thriller full of bullets, bad guys and cases of money being swapped for white powder in remote locations. It is very familiar. And yet. The two central performances help a lot. First up, Scoot McNairy, so good in Gareth Edwards’s feature debut, 2010’s Monsters, a smart reworking of 1930s screwball comedy It Happened One Night as sci-fi. Underused almost ever since, he proves himself again here, his dustbowl features lending a haunted aspect to his portrayal of Cliff, a travelling salesman lured into taking a courier-level gig with a gang who run … Read more