Steve

The Last Movie

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Dennis Hopper in cowboy hat

When it came out the critical consensus on Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie was that it was a mess, the result of giving a druggie with questionable talent full creative control of a movie. Nowadays it’s more often seen as a lost cult classic, a bold experiment and an attempt to push the boundaries of what a movie can be. Neither is really true. It’s not a mess, nor is it really that experimental. From this distance it looks like what it is: Hopper’s homage to Godard, with borrowings from Alejandro Jodorowsky and Robert Altman. It does not help the movie – then or now – that it arrives panting from carrying so … Read more

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

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Gus March-Phillips and his team

You know The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a Guy Ritchie film even without knowing it’s a Guy Ritchie film. That Gentleman bit of the title is the giveaway – whether it’s Holmes and Watson or the Lock, Stock lads, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or The Gentlemen (film and TV versions), Ritchie has repeatedly demonstrated that he’s a guy Guy. Even his most feminine sounding movie, Snatch, is all about the boys. So the real-life story of the dude who became the template for Ian Fleming’s James Bond sounds like a good fit. And with Henry Cavill – regularly proposed as the next 007 – as Gus March-Phillips, what could possibly wrong? Before answering … Read more

The Beach Girls and the Monster

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The monster

The beach party movie, surfer and monster movies all hang out together in The Beach Girls and the Monster, an oddity from 1965 that often makes it into the “so bad it’s good” category, largely, I suspect, because people just don’t really know what to make of it. It’s Scooby-Doo in plot – fun-loving kids, a string of strange murders carried out by an unconvincing monster, who looks like a human in a bad costume because… well why spoil it. It’s the only film directed by Jon Hall, who also has top billing. Hall had swung from one terrible movie to another in a long Hollywood career and is now most often remembered, if … Read more

The Beast aka La Bête

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Gabrielle and Louis in 1910

Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (La Bête) isn’t the first adaptation of Henry James’s novella 1903 The Beast in the Jungle. It’s not even the first one of 2023. That honour goes to Patric Chiha’s French-language movie The Beast in the Jungle, which made it to the screens about six months before Bonello’s. Whether Bonello trimmed his sails having seen Chiha’s fascinating and underloved film is doubtful. The Beast looks like the vision of a man who’d already decided to take Henry James and put him through an extreme wash followed by a rigorous spin. James’s story has lost its original shape in Bonello’s version, which flips the genders for a start, and casts … Read more

The Exterminating Angel

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César del Campo, Lucy Gallardo, and Enrique Rambal

One of a string of films by Luis Buñuel sticking it to the bourgeoisie, the church, the authorities, the man, The Exterminating Angel (El Ángel Exterminador) looked wildly radical and political when it debuted in 1962. Now it looks like a metaphor in search of a story. Times change. Even before things have descended into the purely allegorical, Buñuel is telling us that something is afoot. All is not well at the grand house preparing for an after-party for the swells who have just attended the opera. Everyone is uneasy. The servants are making excuses to get out of the building before their social superiors arrive. When this gaggle of top-hatted, fur-wearing toffs … Read more

La Chimera

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Arthur with an ancient Etruscan artefact

Halfway through making La Chimera, its star Josh O’Connor took a break and went off to make Challengers for Luca Guadagnino, then came back to Italy to finish off for Alice Rohrwacher. Since his breakthrough in 2017’s God’s Own Country, after five or so years of plugging away, these days everyone wants a piece of O’Connor. They’re not remotely similar roles – a tennis player in Challengers, a graverobber in La Chimera – but from the actor’s point of view they have something in common. Both are essentially unlikeable people the audience needs to feel something for, and does, because O’Connor, as he also demonstrated in God’s Own Country and then Only You … Read more

Ho!

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François Holin smoking a cigar

After a year off working out what to do next, Jean-Paul Belmondo returned in 1968 with Ho! (sometimes called Ho! Criminal Face). Having been courted by Hollywood, he’d decided he wanted to stay in France and stick with what he was best at – films that emphasised a moody masculinity. It’s got to be said straight up that Ho! isn’t very good, but it is very stylish and so is Belmondo. He plays François Holin (aka Ho), a former racing driver who is now a getaway driver for a mob. Ho was once a star but now he’s treated like an errand boy by the other guys in the gang. Secretly he yearns … Read more

The Untamed

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Ruth Ramos as Alejandra

Genre collision is the dish of the day in The Untamed (La Région Salvaje) as the most down-to-earth drama, the soap, meets the most out there – sci-fi. The result probably shouldn’t work but it really does, thanks to writer director Amat Escalante’s decision to keep the sci-fi stuff in the background for most of the film. After an opening shot of a black meteorite in space, followed by one of a pretty young woman apparently pleasuring herself, or being pleasured by, a giant pink tentacle, we’re off into an entirely different realm until, in the film’s last section, the tentacle, and the creature it’s attached to, return for some very out-there cross … Read more

The Landlord

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Elgar arrives at his new block in his white VW Beetle

The Landlord is a remarkable film dealing in an unusually nuanced way with entitlement, white-saviour complex, gentrification, poverty tourism and cultural appropriation decades before the rest of the pack got there. It was made in 1970 by Hal Ashby in his first film as a director, but it’s Bill Gunn’s flexing, unflinching screenplay that makes it what it is. It also happens to be one of the best films ever to star Beau Bridges, who is really remarkably good as the very rich white boy who decides to buy a brownstone block in “the ghetto”, with the idea of turning it into one of those new-fangled loft spaces that all the “beautiful people” … Read more

Godzilla Minus One

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Godzilla on the rampage

A country basks in the reflected glow of a single man’s redemption in Godzilla Minus One, the 33rd outing for Toho Studios’ big bellowing beast/god and a contender for best of the bunch. Writer director Takashi Yamazaki wants to tell a story of shame and salvation rather than wang on about a big lumbering beast destroying things, though that happens as well, and narrows his focus onto a Japanese kamikaze pilot in the Second World War who chokes when it comes to his big day and then struggles to come to terms with his actions, or lack of them. Godzilla is effectively that pilot’s shame incarnate – the creature arrives on the scene … Read more