Steve

The Girl without Hands aka La Jeune Fille sans Mains

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The girl examines her stumps

A miller down on his luck meets a man in the woods. The man is the Devil, though the miller doesn’t know it, and after a bit of smalltalk he’s soon offered the miller a deal. Give me what you have behind your mill and I’ll make you rich, offers the Devil. Behind the mill, thinks the man, that’s an apple tree. An apple tree for a crock of gold sounds fair enough to me, he reasons. Obviously never having read any fairy tales, he agrees to the bargain. It turns out that the miller’s daughter was also behind the mill and the miller has now signed her over to the Devil himself. … Read more

A Place in the Sun

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Elizabeth Taylor

Based on the appropriately named novel An American Tragedy, A Place in the Sun is a noirish and properly tragic melodrama hailed as a nigh-on perfect movie when it came out in 1951. Since then its stock has fallen somewhat, though the first two thirds still work beautifully, thanks in no small part to the performance of Shelley Winters, though Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor’s scenes together also exert a mesmeric pull. Its tragic hero is George (Clift), the poor relation of the wealthy manufacturing family the Eastmans, who, having tapped his uncle for a job, catches the eye of Alice (Winters), a demure sweetie who works alongside him on his uncle’s production … Read more

Showing Up

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Lizzy at work in her studio

After the success of 2019’s First Cow, you might have expected Kelly Reichardt’s 2022 follow-up, Showing Up, to be a bigger hit than it was. Critics liked it; audiences not so much. It seems that Reichardt most hits the target with paying punters when she delivers westerns. See also Meek’s Cutoff. But all her films are engaging, and she’s always up to something, often in the background, as she is with Showing Up, which is the story of an artist who struggles through the distractions of everyday life to produce her work. But what Reichardt is she actually up to, that’s the question. Is this a slice of life? Or the story of … Read more

That Most Important Thing: Love aka L’important c’est d’aimer

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Fabio Testi and Romy Schneider

Mad, anguished romantic drama on an exaggerated scale from Andrzej Żuławski, warming up with That Most Important Thing: Love (a clumsy translation of L’important c’est d’aimer) for his maddest romance of them all, Possession, which would follow six years later, in 1981. In the meantime audiences were more than happy with a tortured tale of twisted troilism – the actress, her husband and the hot photographer who comes between the two of them. Unusually, for a film from the 1970s, it takes the side of fidelity, more or less, of higher ideals over a quick bunk-up. In a bohemian, but not particularly boho-chic Paris, actress Nadine Chevalier (Romy Schneider) is all too aware … Read more

The Lesson

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Liam has a swim

If Saltburn left you craving more class envy and death in a grand country house then pile your plate high with The Lesson. You also get another helping of Richard E Grant at his most brutally awful. At his best, in other words. Like Saltburn it’s the story of an outsider invited to spend some time with a very la-di-dah family. Liam (Daryl McCormack) is a very smart would-be writer taken on to act as the tutor (the film’s original title) to the son of the nation’s favourite novelist, JM Sinclair (Grant). The job: get son Bertie (Stephen McMillan), a shoegazey heap of attitude and entitlement, into Oxford. Also in residence, as Liam … Read more

The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist

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Murizio Merli as Leonardo Tanzi

A good place to start if you’ve never seen one of the “poliziotteschi” films popular in Italy in the 1970s, The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist (Il Cinico, l’Infame, il Violento) is one of a series of movies actor Maurizio Merli made with director Umberto Lenzi, both leading lights of the genre that took over when spaghetti westerns lost their box-office allure. The action is set during the so-called “years of lead” of political turmoil in taly and centres on Inspector Leonardo Tanzi (Merli), a decent cop who handed in his badge in the previous outing for Merli and Lenzi, The Tough Ones. But his life as an everyday freelance sword of … Read more

MK Ultra

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Anson Mount as Dr Strauss

If the title MK Ultra means something to you already, you’ll know what this movie is about – the CIA’s MKUltra program, mind-control experiments on unwilling, ignorant or forced volunteers (soldiers, prisoners, prostitutes) using LSD and other drugs, often psychotics or psychedelics. There were various aims but one of them was the creation of the perfect soldier, one who would obey orders without thinking. What’s odd and bold about writer/director Joseph Sorrentino’s fictionalised retelling of the story is how unsensational he makes it considering the historical facts – the experiments were entirely illegal and secret and only came to light in the 1970s. Sorrentino’s preamble tells us the program got up and running … Read more

Cut-Throats Nine

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Sgt Brown and his daughter

With eyes obviously much sharper than mine, some people maintain that 1972’s Cut-Throats Nine (Condenados a Vivir) is the inspiration for Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. It’s true both are westerns and the snowy setting of Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent’s original is unusual in the same way that The Hateful Eight’s was (though let’s not forget Sergio Corbucci’s great snow-filled western The Great Silence of 1968). And it’s also true that Tarantino loves to plunder overlooked genre movies of yore. Which would make this spaghetti western – a paella western, more precisely, since it’s made in Spain – a prime candidate. But having watched it I cannot see much more connecting the two films than … Read more

The Long Summer of Theory

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Katja, Nola and Martina relaxing

The “theory” in the title The Long Summer of Theory (Der lange Sommer der Theorie) refers to critical theory, a grab-bag term that lumped together the likes of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, an achingly fashionable cohort of philosophers and theorists whose thoughts and theories were referenced in universities and in the wider field of (especially) the arts until one day, someone concluded, their “summer” had ended. That someone was Philip von Felsch, whose book, The Summer of Theory, is the starting point for film-maker Irene von Alberti’s relentlessly fascinating examination of the political scene among young people – women mostly – who reckon themselves to be progressive, politically engaged and … Read more

Footprints on the Moon

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Alice asleep with eye shade

What is Footprints on the Moon (aka Footprints aka Le Orme), apart from an Italian movie from 1975? Genre categorisation isn’t easy but how about psychological sci-fi thriller meets love story meets giallo horror meets paranoid modernist dreamscape? Or, from a different direction, it’s DP Vittorio Storaro’s entry in the “world’s best cinematographer” competition. The visuals are astonishing, glorious, technically insane at times. And they also threaten to bring the film to a complete standstill here and there. But it just doesn’t matter because a) they are so bloody amazing and b) there isn’t very much to bring to a standstill in the first place. So, yes, there’s not much plot. But what … Read more