Review

Couture

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Maxine is marked up with a pen for her operation

Gentle gothic. If there is such a thing then Couture might be it. A slice down through the fashion industry, it’s also, maybe, Alice Winocour’s riposte to Robert Altman’s Pret à Porter – serious, ground-level drama not airy, star-filled satire. That said, no less than Angelina Jolie is in it. She plays a commercials director whose big break has just come – an invitation to shoot a short opening film for a French fashion house’s latest collection. As she’s arriving in Paris, Maxine is also fielding phone calls from a doctor back home – I have your results, they don’t look good, he says. Please go and see an oncologist buddy of mine … Read more

100 Years of… Secrets of the Soul

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Herr Fellman in the throes of a dream

Is it Secrets of a Soul or Secrets of the Soul? Both variations of the title seem to be in play. It was Geheimnisse einer Seele in the original German, which suggests it’s the indefinite article – do with that what you will. Either way this is a strange film from the silent era. Expressly designed to take key concepts of psychoanalysis and give them cinematic life, it was directed by GW Pabst, who really wanted Sigmund Freud to contribute. Freud was less keen – his work was more than mere entertainment – so declined, but Pabst did persuade a couple of Freud’s collaborators to take part at the writing stage, including Karl Abraham, … Read more

Obsession

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Nikki with blood running down her face

Bunny-boiler females are nothing new. But if there is a pantheon, Inde Navarrette must surely be in it on the strength of her performance in Obsession, sitting alongside Glenn Close (for Fatal Attraction), Kathy Bates (Misery) and, perhaps closest of all in spirit, Isabelle Adjani, for her unhinged performance in Possession. Navarrette plays Nikki, a hot girl Nikki certain she has decidedly and forever consigned old chum Bear (Michael Johnston) to the friend zone, that’s if she really thinks about him at all. What she doesn’t know is that Bear has somehow come across a hocus-pocus piece of gimcrackery that will grant him one wish – a One Wish Willow. “I wish Nikki would … Read more

Survive Style 5+

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The hypnotist at work

Five loosely interlinked dollops of gonzo storytelling is the offer in Survive Style 5+. They are all, to an extent, stories of surviving, and there are five of them, so that more or less explains the title. The + could be a reference to the second half of the movie, when things take a turn tonally. It might not. It’s that kind of film. After opening credits that are a frantic display of prime colours and might be described as titles genius Saul Bass seeing God on a mescaline binge, director Gen Sekiguchi gets down to business with his five stories, told in the order 1, 2, 4, 5, 3. Number one is … Read more

Miss You, Love You

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Diane seen outdoors

How angry would you be if your life partner suddenly died and your son sent an employee along to help with the funeral, rather than turning up himself? That is the opening position of Miss You, Love You, an unusual two-hander running largely on bile. One of life’s great joys is watching Allison Janney playing righteously angry women and there’s plenty of that going on here. Furious Diane Patterson (Janney) on one side and meekly apologetic Jamie Simms (Andrew Rannells) on the other. The grieving wife and the office assistant, she needing help at this time… just not him. And Jamie there because he’s being paid to be, he’d probably rather be anywhere … Read more

The Lost Moment

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105-year-old Juliana

A flop redeemed by time, The Lost Moment was too gothic, too excessive for 1947 but here in the 2020s it fits quite snugly in alongside the likes of The Vourdalak, Uninvited, The Girl with the Needle, The Maid or either of the recent takes on Nosferatu. An adaptation of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, it tells the story of a publisher posing as a writer inveigling himself into the Venice palazzo of ancient Juliana Bordereau, the onetime love of famous poet Jeffrey Ashton (as the Byron/Shelley composite Jeffrey Aspern is called here), hoping to lay his hands on the love letters Ashton left behind. It’ll be the publishing event of the century, … Read more

Girls Like Girls

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Sonya and Coley embrace

A coming-of-ager set in 2006. Which means what? iPods and computers with big chunky displays. AOL Messenger. And Zach Braff! All are here in Girls Like Girls, Hayley Kiyoko’s feature debut, which was a song, a music video and a book before it became a film. Work that IP. Though not in it much, Braff embodies that time almost like no one else – he’d been in the wispy, troubled-dude dramedy Garden State in 2004 and was midway through his run on Scrubs. He’s really just a flavour bomb this time around, here to remind us what it was all like back then. The focus is actually on teenager Coley (Maya da Costa), … Read more

Kiss of Death

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Victor Mature cradles Coleen Gray's head

Fans of Richard Widmark who can’t get enough of his giggling psychopath routine, Kiss of Death is for you. This is where it all started, in 1947, a crime drama notable not only for being Widmark’s screen debut but also for delivering a really good performance by Victor Mature. Having grown up in a household where Mature’s presence on the small screen was usually greeted by titters, I personally wasn’t quite ready for this. But good he really is. He plays Nick Bianco, a smalltime crook who gets caught doing a jewellery heist but refuses to name his accomplices when taken in by the police. All this changes some way down the road … Read more

Blue Heron

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Edik Beddoes as Jeremy

Blue Heron is largely the story of its maker, Sophy Romvari, or of her young life, as seen from a couple of decades on. How much of it is true? There’s a disclaimer up front about memory and its unreliability, so possibly not all of it. And in any case Romvari takes a couple of conceptual leaps towards the end of her debut feature that lift it into a different realm altogether – two different realms, in fact. But for the most part this is the story of a family of six from Hungary who arrive in 1990s Canada and set about assimilating – they try to speak only in English at home, … Read more

Holiday

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Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn face to face

Screwball but not particularly comedy, in spite of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn’s presence, Holiday is too serious a business to be unserious about, and there aren’t really any jokes in it. But Grant bashes through it as if it were in the key of fun, and he drags everyone and everything along in his wake. He even throws in a backflip or two here in there, to remind us he got his start in showbiz as a tumbler. Grant plays Johnny Case, a normal, everyday guy who’s worked his way up to a decent job in finance. Johnny has met and fallen for Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), unaware that she’s from a … Read more