Steve

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

The Killer

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Chow Yun-Fat as the killer

There’s a remake of 1989’s The Killer in the works, with Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy in lead roles. But can it match up to the original, even with original director John Woo calling the shots. I believe it’s Emmanuel as the assassin in the update/reimagining, but it was Chow Yun-Fat way back when, as the supercool killer motivated to do “one last job” to raise enough cash to restore the eyesight of an innocent singer who got caught in the crossfire of a previous hit. Compare and contrast the relative importance of female roles. Blind singer Jennie, played by Sally Yeh, does not do much more than scream and whimper in the … Read more

My Mistress

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Maggie

My Mistress is the story of a bored, horny teenage lad and the dominatrix he hooks up with, to the ultimate satisfaction of neither. Imagine inserting a character clad entirely in wetlook PVC into the Australian TV show Neighbours and you’re most of the way there. Handsome young Charlie comes home from school one day to find his dad has hanged himself in the family garage. Mum was having an affair with dad’s best friend, it turns out, though why exactly dad did the deed we never quite find out. The funeral comes and goes. Charlie is wracked with grief but not so wracked that he hasn’t by this point noticed sexy older … Read more

The 39 Steps

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Richard Hannay clambering along the outside of a train

In a world where the excellent is often the enemy of the good, what about The 39 Steps? Not Hitchcock’s 1935 classic, but the 1959 remake starring Kenneth More? So often compared to the original, so often reviled – especially in its native UK – the 1959 version is actually a pretty good stab at an adaptation of John Buchan’s rattling thriller and a decent film in its own right. But thanks to the Hitchcock version it struggles to get a hearing. To watch it, it’s probably best to mentally lock Hitchcock’s version away, though there is also something to be said for watching it as a compare and contrast. Same plot more … Read more