Steve

It’s a Gift

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Harold sitting on a step with a dog

The best comedians don’t have an act, they are the act. 1934’s It’s a Gift is a brilliant example of this principle and of WC Fields’s approach to comedy. As a film it’s not always funny but he always is, every grimace and muttered aside comedy gold. This time around the Fields persona – a useless, drunken curmudgeon with the world against him – is a family man this with a wife, son and daughter, none of whom give him any respect. “I am the master of this household,” he says to his daughter at one point, but quietly so his wife doesn’t hear him. Harold Bissonette (his wife prefers the pronunciation Bisson-aye) … Read more

Babes

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Dawn and Eden

Comedies about people who refuse to grow up tend to be about men (howls of “oh no they don’t”), but Pamela Adlon’s feature debut, Babes, reminds us that women get stuck too. If that doesn’t grab you as a concept, what if I just say Babes is Booksmart for grown-ups? Ish ish ish. Clever, funny, earthy, it’s co-written by Ilana Glazer (with Josh Rabinowitz), who also co-stars, and follows two lifelong friends through the birth of children into a choppy patch and out into calmer waters on the other side, wisecracking all the way, in that smart New York way. We meet Dawn (Michelle Buteau), heavily pregnant with her second child, and perma-singleton … Read more

Lady in the Fog

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Cesar Romero as Philip O'Dell

In spite of its attempts to sabotage itself with comedy, Lady in the Fog (also known as Scotland Yard Inspector) is a successful noirish British thriller from 1952. An adaptation of the debut story in what would become a long-running BBC radio series, it takes a while to get going – two thirds of its running time in fact – but as it enters the home straight it finally gets its act together and finishes grippingly, satisfyingly and at speed. Being British and being made by Hammer – before the studio shifted into horror – it features a second-string American star in a lead role. Here Cesar Romero plays Phil O’Dell, an American … Read more

Thelma

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Thelma with electrodes on her head

Thelma, a collaboration between director Joachim Trier and writer (and sometime director) Eskil Vogt, is another reminder of what a dynamic duo these two are, separately and together. And that they make powerful and suggestive, moody and magnificent dramas that are also sly as hell. Slo-mo gotcha movies of a very high order. Thelma starts with a tender scene of a father out with his six-year-old daughter in the snowy wintry wastes of Norway. By the end of this sequence the father is taking aim at his daughter’s head with his rifle, unbeknown to her. Why? Trier and Vogt tell us almost two hours later, right at the end. In between they follow … Read more

The Furies

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TC Jeffords, daughter Vance and Rip Darrow

There’s not a likeable person in 1950’s The Furies, with the possible exception of a character who winds up at the end of a rope. It’s possibly why it’s so hard to get stuck into this complex and thematically rich film, though bad storytelling might be another reason. Since it’s called The Furies, you might expect a Greek tragic element, and you get it, in an Oedipal tale with a gender-flip, of an old patriarch and his two children: the son he can barely look at and the daughter he’s looking at a bit too much. She’s lavishing too much attention on him too, back rubs and whatnot, but for the most part … Read more

Silent Night

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Brian Godlock with a gun

John Woo goes John Wick in Silent Night, his first US movie in 20 years, since 2003’s Paycheck in fact. And if Wick was all about people doing creatively terrible things to each other in beautiful choreographed ways, so is Silent Night, with the added gimmick that here no one speaks. Not that they speak much in John Wick, or in any revenge movie of any sort, come to that. Charles Bronson was once the king of this sort of thing, but now Keanu rules the roost, with many jostling for some of the action. Here it’s Joel Kinnaman, playing Brian Godlock, an average sort of guy thrust onto the path of murderous … Read more

Kill, Baby… Kill!

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Spooky Melissa stares through the window

Amazing really what you can achieve with coloured lights, smoke machines, cobwebs and a zoom lens. Exhibit A: Mario Bava’s classic Kill, Baby… Kill! which goes by a whole host of names – Operazione Paura (literally Operation Fear) in the original Italian, and Orgy of the Living Dead, Curse of the Dead and Curse of the Living Dead in different countries at different times. What makes this prime chunk of Italian horror a classic is not its horror content – there’s nothing really here for the hounds – but its looks. Bava followed his father, a camera operator in the silent era, into the movie business but he had originally trained as a … Read more

Arthur the King

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Arthur and Michael

If it’s nothing else, Arthur the King is a solid introduction to adventure racing, an arduous mix of running, climbing, biking and kayaking in inhospitable climates over hundreds of miles. One race takes days. It’s not for the faint hearted. Unlike this movie, which is pre-chewed meat for the softest of constitutions, a fictional retelling of the story of Swedish adventure racer Mikael Lindnord, his mid-race encounter with a street dog and their mutual stagger together towards some kind of salvation. The original story took place in Ecuador, but Simon Cellan Jones’s film relocates the action to the Dominican Republic, where Mikael, now renamed Michael and played by Mark Wahlberg in another doughty-plugger … Read more

Forty Guns

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Barbara Stanwyck dressed in black

The French New Wave directors loved a bit of auteur machismo and they loved Sam Fuller’s Forty Guns, a tough, lean and smart western with lots to say and a pitiless logic that’s very un-Hollywood. Do not expect a happy ending. It’s filmed in CinemaScope and Fuller lets us know that immediately. Right after the 20th Century-Fox fanfare and before the opening credits there’s an opening shot of a massively wide panorama, followed by the entrance of a woman in black riding on a white stallion and in her thundering wake 40 (ish) men also on horseback. We have met Jessica Drummond, played by Barbara Stanwyck, the local rancher who is the alpha … Read more

I Saw the TV Glow

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Silhouette of someone watching a glowing TV

Not so much neo-noir as neon-noir, I Saw the TV Glow is Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and continues in much the same vein, interrogating identity and authenticity in psychic landscapes constructed from online memes. Pink and orange are the key colours, though it’s shot dark like a noir, often at night, and has problematical sexuality lurking beneath the surface, as noir so often does. Its story is about a smaltown girl too mixed up for these tame streets and the white-knight male who rides to her rescue and is entirely out of his depth – see almost every noir female/male coupling for more details. It’s the … Read more