Steve

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

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