Review

The Dark Corner

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Bradford Galt hides in the shadows

The Dark Corner didn’t do too well when it debuted in 1946. There were too many other noirs around and it struggled to stand out from the pack. Now, though, it looks a lot better – its dark wit, snappy one liners and good cast help, plus the direction of Henry Hathaway, who knows how to be economical and inject pace. Hathaway blamed Mark Stevens for the film’s failure, and though Stevens is playing a private investigator as a second-order simulacrum – a version of a version – he gets the lines out well enough, and it is the lines that this film is about… when it’s not about plot. Stevens plays Bradford Galt, a … Read more

About Dry Grasses

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Ece Bagci as a snow speckled Sevim

Winner of the annual “most arthouse-movie-title award” – About Dry Grasses (Kuru Otlar Üstüne)? That academic “About”. The fact that it’s in Turkish. Over three hours long. By a director whose name many non-Turks struggle to pronounce. Exotica ahoy! The award is just a joke, but the movie is by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (roughly pronounced Nooree Bill-geh Jail-ann), who has directed some exquisite movies since his debut nearly 30 years ago, among them Uzak, Climates, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Winter Sleep. About Dry Grasses is his longest feature to date, edging out 2014’s Winter Sleep by a minute or so, at three hours 17 minutes. And while it does occasionally … Read more

A Kiss before Dying

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Dory and Bud

A Kiss before Dying is the movie Robert Wagner made to solve the Prince Valiant problem – he was too pretty and too old-school in a Hollywood that had suddenly gone sweaty and Method, in a nutshell. Prince Valiant was the film he’d made two years earlier, camp nonsense about a Viking prince in the court of King Arthur. Wagner is about as far as he can get from that here, as a handsome college psychopath who decides that the best way to deal with his suddenly pregnant girlfriend Dory (Joanne Woodward) is to get her to have an abortion (the word is never used though “pills” are mentioned). And when that doesn’t … Read more

100 Yards

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Shen An and Qu Quan fight

100 Yards is directed by the Xu brothers, Haofeng and Junfeng, and it’s a great martial arts movie – though any more than that is a stretch. The martial arts sequences are spectacular, the fighting epic, the moves expertly choreographed and it’s shot the proper way – so you can see how good the combatants are not how nimble the editor is. But between the spectacular set pieces things tend to go a bit limp. Gentle, if we’re being kind, or elegant maybe. It’s all set in 1920s Tianjin, which is another part of its appeal, and opens with an old kung fu master about to breathe his last. Shen An (Jacky Heung), the … Read more

Heroic Purgatory

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Ayu upside down

The question mark that hangs over Kiju Yoshida’s 1970 movie Heroic Purgatory is: is he joking? Is this a grand avant-garde modernist movie told in a deliberately non-narrative way, or is it Yoshida parodying the same, as if to pour scorn on an idea prevalent at the time – that you can’t break the bourgeois system using bourgeois tools? Either way, whether he’s joking or being deadly serious, the one thing that will haul you from opening to closing credits nearly two hours later is Yoshida’s astonishing visual sense. This is a fabulously photographed movie full of stark, awkward, angular compositions shot in a high-contrast and often high-key monochrome, and it all takes place … Read more

My First Film

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Devon Ross and Odessa Young

My First Film is not Zia Anger’s first film, and it isn’t a documentary either, which is what it sounds and looks like it’s going to be. Nor is it formidable, which its meta-sounding title suggests it might be. In fact it’s a surprisingly easy and enjoyable watch. Though it does start off in an esoteric direction – “assoteric”, Anger calls it – with a rough collage of staged recollection, old home movie footage and words typewritten on the screen designed to recall meetings Anger had with a production company to direct a film about, more or less, how tough it is being a woman. Something, she eventually realised, she just didn’t want to … Read more

The Big Heat

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Debby and Sgt Bannion

The Big Heat is one of the big movies of film noir – see The Big Sleep, The Big Clock, The Big Combo from the classic era, or The Big Easy, The Big Blue and The Big Lebowski from later on. Weak joke aside, it’s big in the other sense too, being important, pivotal, epochal even. Here you get director Fritz Lang at the top of his game and a screenplay that works like a ratchet, almost every scene advancing the story a notch while flinty characters are pushed hither and yon by a cruel and ironic fate. It’s the film that famously starts with the image of a gun on a desk. … Read more

Tuesday

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Tuesday and Death, the giant macaw

Films about pretty young people dying miserably of some terrible but usually not disfiguring condition can be a bit of a drag. Tuesday writer/director Daina Oniunas-Pusić has found a way of injecting a bit of zip – adding a bit of the weird supernatural. We’re told from all the publicity that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the star, but in fact Lola Petticrew more than capably holds the whole thing together as Tuesday, a teenager with not long to live, who is visited one day by a talking macaw that can change size at will. She intuits instantly that this is Death itself (we already knew that because an early montage sequence has shown us … Read more

Bride of Frankenstein

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The Bride and her famous hair

Modern film-makers could learn a lot from Bride of Frankenstein and its illustrious predecessor, 1931’s original Frankenstein, not least how to tell a story at speed. And the amazing thing is that director James Whale took the finished cut of his sequel, a tight 90 minutes, and took a further 15 minutes out of it after a few test screenings. The result is a brilliant and furiously paced 75 minutes of entertainment. Whale hadn’t wanted to make this sequel at all, but Universal persuaded him with a promise of total artistic control. And so he set to work, opening his film with an introductory sequence set in Switzerland, where a ridiculously la-di-dah Lord … Read more

Longlegs

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A reflective Agent Lee Harker

A young FBI agent investigates a serial killer who cackles, dresses creepily and likes to leave cryptic clues at the scene of the crime. Longlegs is another belt of 1990s horror for those who can’t get enough Seven, It or The Silence of the Lambs. It’s derivative and yet it’s also its own beast, involving, excellently crafted and stonkingly acted. And Nicolas Cage is in it – as mad as a bat and every second he’s on the screen wildly entertaining, and freaky. Director Osgood Perkins’s decision to shoot it all like an Edward Hopper painting – still, flat, empty, so many brown hues – is the masterstroke, and Maika Monroe plays along … Read more