Steve

Ms .45

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Thana dressed as a nun, with a gun

All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, so the old saying goes. Ms .45 takes it literally and concisely, squeezing both into the title of Abel Ferrara’s unglamourised, low-budget 1981 exploitationer, making much of the New York streets of the era and the face of its star, 18-year-old Zoë Tamerlis. Face not voice. Tamerlis plays a mute, a seamstress in the Garment District who is driven to psychotic acts of revenge after being raped twice in the same day, first in an alley on the way home (Ferrara plays the rapist) and then again once she’s arrived back at the safe haven of her apartment. Second time … Read more

The Nature of Love

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Sophia in washing up gloves

A cliche sits at the centre of The Nature of Love, caught by its original French title, Simple Comme Sylvain (which translates as Simple Like Sylvain). Namely, that what a nice middle class woman with a white-collar job really wants is a no-nonsense big-handed guy who knows his way around a toolbox and a woman’s body. After putting up the shelves he’ll take her roughly from behind, or from any other direction he fancies. Writer/director Monia Chokri introduces us to nice middle-class Sophia (Magalie Lépine Blondeau) at a dinner party, where she and her partner Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume) are having a lovely evening with old friends, chatting about things in a conceptual, liberal … Read more

China Girl

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Tony and Tye meet at the club

1987’s China Girl is usually described as a reworking of the Romeo and Juliet plot, or as a song-free update on West Side Story (which is a reworking of the Romeo and Juliet plot). But that’s to fall for the elaborate feint of director Abel Ferrara and writer/frequent collaborator Nicholas St John. Yes, there are star-crossed lovers meeting across an unbreachable divide – ethnicity in 1980s New York – but Ferrara and St John are not that interested in handsome Tony (Richard Panebianco) and sweet Tye (Sari Chang), the Romeo update from Little Italy and the reconditioned Juliet from Chinatown. Instead, flipping the dynamic, their focus is on the modern-day Montagues and Capulets, … Read more

Hundreds of Beavers

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Jean Kayak with a fish

Like the main character in it, Hundreds of Beavers just keeps going, throwing gag after gag after gag at an audience you suspect it suspects will only yield if buried. It works. It’s a semi-cartoon – its looks and its approach to the laws of physics – about a 19th-century applejack (hooch made from apples) salesman who destroys his career to the accompaniment of a cheerful song in the film’s opening moments. Applejack factory exploded, apple orchards all in flames thanks to a freak accident, Jean Kayak is left alone in the snowy wastes of North America – no food, no gear, no prospects. But instead of laying down and dying he sets … Read more

A Touch of Zen

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Hsu Feng as warrior Miss Yang

Sex, death and people flying about in the air fighting each other, A Touch of Zen is the Taiwanese martial-arts movie that reminded Hong Kong directors how to do it properly, with space used intelligently, fluid cameras, energetic edits, restrained performances, humour that isn’t just about falling flat on your face and stuntwork that’s extravagant but not ridiculous. It’s rightly acclaimed as one of the best examples of the genre and was released in 1971 when martial arts was generally a B or even C movie affair, by King Hu, the director who changed all that. Ang Lee borrowed heavily from it for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and there’s enough Star Wars-y feeling … Read more

Coherence

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Emily Baldoni as Em

A dinner-party-from-hell movie, a multiverse movie, Coherence deftly manages to be both, as if one of Luis Buñuel’s torture-the-bourgeoisie dramas from the 1960s had teleported to 50 years in the future. Coherence was released in 2013 to the odd handclap from festivals specialising in the left-field but it’s only now over a decade later that it seems to be getting more namechecks. And with films like Parallel Forest, or Parallel, its remake, in its thrall to an extent, that’s understandable. So, James Ward Byrkit wanted to make a feature but had no money to speak of. But thanks to a career in the movie biz (he wrote the story to Rango, for instance) … Read more

Yeelen

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Issiaka Kane as Niankoro

Like an Afro-futurist Arabian Nights or Homer’s Odyssey, 1987’s Yeelen tells in simple episodes the story of a young man on the run from his father. It’s often referred to as the greatest film ever to come out of Africa (no, Black Panther does not count) but even if you don’t buy that you’ll surely agree that it’s a beautiful film with an otherworldly atmosphere all its own. Director Soulemayne Cissé set out to make a film about Africa that rejected the usual colonial views of the continent – backward, savage etc – and largely succeeds, giving us a mysterious place steeped in tradition and running on old hierarchies and a rigid sense … Read more

Radical

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Eugenio Derbez as Sergio

Radical is a good thing but there is a lot of it. An inspirational-teacher drama, it’s a dramatisation of events that took place in 2012. Those events became the basis of a 2013 Wired article written by Joshua Davis, this film’s producer. And from there ten years ago to this film in 2023. Meanwhile, the teacher at the centre of the whole thing, Sergio Juárez Correa, works in the José Urbina López Primary School to this day. Co-writer/director Christopher Zalla makes sure we know where we are and who we’re dealing with. A poor Mexican border town where guns, gangs and poverty grind out any aspiration parents might have for their children. A … Read more

Point of Order!

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Joseph McCarthy makes a point of order

1964 documentary Point of Order! is a strange one for a number of reasons. It’s not really a documentary at all, in some respects, but more a recut, a redux, of some blurry, black-and-white live TV footage shot by CBS of a senate hearing that had happened ten years before. Second up, it’s not really about what it purports to be about. Ostensibly it’s a hearing into the strange case of David Schine, a private in the US Army who had become the focus of a baffling tug of war between Senator Joseph McCarthy and his counsel Roy Cohn on one side and the US Army, in the shape of US Secretary of … Read more

Parallel

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Vanessa has seen something

A different take on the multiverse movie, Parallel does it all with acting. Just three people in a clinically modern house in a forest: a husband, a wife and the husband’s brother. Think of Everything Everywhere All at Once or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and you’re summoning frantically busy films with a huge array of characters. Here, none of that. But Parallel isn’t just a calm corrective to an exhausting genre but also a smart drama that stands up on its own terms. Instead of busy, here we have a film that’s cool, almost static at times, wordy, contemplative. Set in a chichi modern lake … Read more