Review

Man’s Castle

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Trina and Bill hugging

There’s something a bit mad and a bit magical about Man’s Castle, one of the lesser known of director Frank Borzage’s movies. Expert at delivering dramas with complicated romantic relationships at their core, Borzage’s 1933 movie fits snugly alongside the likes of 1928’s Street Angel, 1932’s A Farewell to Arms and 1936’s Desire. A 1933 release means Man’s Castle arrived just as the Production Code was coming into effect. It was released again in 1938, off the back of the heightened fame of its star Spencer Tracy, by which time the Code was fully operational. If the version you are watching is 75 minutes long, you have the 1933 version. If it’s 66 … Read more

Pacifiction

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De Roller

You’ll probably enjoy Pacifiction if you go for Graham Greene stories about shady white guys in white suits hitting the moral buffers in some sweaty colonial sump. It’s a familiar screen sub-genre. Most obviously there’s The Quiet American (either version) or 1967’s The Comedians, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But Greene’s complex-hero-abroad scenario turns up regularly in other people’s work – for example in The Tailor of Panama (writer John Le Carré obviously channelling Greene) and in Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon (Denis Johnson doing the same). And so to our man in Havana. Tahiti, in fact, where the compromised hero is a gent called De Roller. Dressed in a white suit … Read more

100 Years of… The Thief of Bagdad

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The princess and the thief

Douglas Fairbanks was the Tom Cruise of a century ago and in 1924’s The Thief of Bagdad, Fairbanks’s favourite of his own films, you get to see him at his very best, in the peak of physical condition, in a film that’s one remarkable action set piece after another. As you’ve probably guessed, it’s silent, in black and white and set out in old Bagdad, where an Arabian Nights story unfolds concerning Ahmed (Fairbanks), a common street thief caught up in the machinations over who will wed the country’s fair princess (Julanne Johnston). Many would scale those walls, not least Ahmed, though he understands he has only a snowball’s chance in hell against … Read more

Yannick

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A picture of Yannick disfigured with marker pen

Just when it looked like Quentin Dupieux had hit a creative wall, out comes Yannick, a swerve from his more surreal outings towards something a touch more political. If it’s not entirely plausible, it mostly is, and for Dupieux – the man who gave us a sentient truck tyre in Rubber and a chase comedy involving a gigantic insect in Mandibles – it’s probably as normal as it’s ever going to get. It’s also short, which Dupieux films tend to be, this one clocking in at only 67 minutes. It was short enough that Dupieux was able to film it on the hoof while preparing for his next official movie, Daaaaaali! (about surrealist … Read more

The Cat and the Canary

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Annabelle in bed with a hand hovering over her

The director Paul Leni died just as the talkies were coming in, but even so his name still has clout 100+ years on. 1927’s The Cat and the Canary reminds us why. It’s not only a cracking whodunit, and a demonstration of technical wizardry but is also a masterpiece of gothic expressionism… done only semi-seriously. Leni later directed The Man Who Laughs and he’s also having a lot of fun here. The plot is so familiar Agatha Christie might have written it – a group of people gather in a spooky old house to hear the reading of the will of a relative who died 20 years before. This will make one of the … Read more

The Origin of Evil

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Laure Calamy as Nathalie

Farce played as a thriller, The Origin of Evil (L’Origine du Mal) stars the brilliant Laure Calamy. If you enjoyed her style of paranoid ditziness in the worldwide TV hit Call My Agent (Dix Pour Cent), there’s plenty more of the same on offer here. She plays Nathalie, an ex-jailbird who decides that while her lover, Stéphane (Suzanne Clément), is in jail on a five-year stretch she’ll impersonate her and introduce herself to the father Stéphane never knew. For why? This is not exactly clear – she hoping to get some money out of him, maybe, or it’s just the latest of her scams, or she’s after a family she can call her own … Read more

The Burmese Harp

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Mizushima as a monk

After a career banging out one makeweight movie after another, on the 27th go director Kon Ichikawa hit paydirt with The Burmese Harp. A box-office smash and critical hit at home in Japan and abroad, it propelled Ichikawa into the ranks of internationally celebrated Japanese directors, alongside Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi et al. It’s worth remembering the Japanese martial code before diving into this strangely meditative drama – death before dishonour, to boil it down – and that the surrender by the Japanese emperor in 1945 had been seen by many in the military as an act of treason. The film deals with that surrender and the acceptance, or lack of acceptance, of it. … Read more

I.S.S.

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Dr Kira Foster in her space suit

I.S.S. is a thriller set on the International Space Station where Russians and Americans are co-operating happily until a nuclear war breaks out down below. First up, why haven’t more films been set on the ISS? What a golden opportunity. Second up, did you realise (as I didn’t) that missions continue to be flown to the ISS, even though tensions between the USA and Russia are hardly at an all-time low (writing this in March 2024)? Pushing that tension into the fictional realm, I.S.S. becomes operational as a space thriller when one of the crew notices that massive eruptions are taking place down on planet Earth. Volcanoes, suggests one? It turns out the … Read more

Hanky Panky

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Socially anxious Sam

Sam and Diane? Dr Crane and Lilith? Why is everyone in Hanky Panky named after characters in Cheers? The answer would appear to be that writer Nick Roth and his co-director/wife Lindsey Haun thought it was funny. Nothing deep, nothing meta, just good old-fashioned funny. The film’s title logo is styled like the Cheers one too, giving absolutely no indication that comedy horror is on the menu (though the Cheers set-up of a bunch of characters trapped together in a bar isn’t that far from horror). How to describe this? An inventive lo-fi gonzo comedy set out in a remote log cabin where Stephen King and Eli Roth might once have stayed. That … Read more

Monster

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Yori and Minato

Second-rate Hirokazu Kore-eda is still first-rate moviemaking. Here’s Monster, the first film he hasn’t written himself for nearly 30 years, a mix of familiar Kore-eda themes and explorations of new fields. Yûji Sakamoto is the TV writer Kore-eda contacted to write his first Japanese-language film in several years, having gone to France for The Truth (2019) and South Korea for Broker (2022). He’d always wanted to work with Sakamoto, Kore-eda said. For his part, Sakamoto pounced at the chance, having once described Kore-eda as “the world’s best screenwriter”. No pressure then. What they came up with together is a faintly Rashomon-style re-examination of the same story from different angles. Each pass over the … Read more