Review | MovieSteve

A Fortunate Man

2026-08-082026-07-24 by Steve

The title isn’t so much ironic as a question. Is Per (Esben Smed), the hero of A Fortunate Man, actually fortunate? Or a hero, for that matter? Danish director Bille August sweats bullets to condense this adaptation of Nobel-Prizewinner Henrik Pontoppidan’s eight-volume novel Lykke-Per down to movie size. At two hours 40 something minutes, it’s a big, sweeping, historical epic of a thing, a carriage-clock movie at bottom posing a simple question: what is the good life? Pontopiddan’s eight volumes were intended as a compare and contrast to Hans Christian Andersen’s last book, the near-namesake Lykke-Peer, which was a tale of heroic struggle crowned by the ironic death of its lead character at … Read more

Rosa la rose: fille publique

2026-07-232026-07-23 by Steve

A film about a sex worker who falls dangerously in love with a client, Rose la rose: fille publique has also fallen in love with its subject – life on the streets, where working girls have sex with men and like it, the girls all get along together and pimps are on the whole benign and serve a necessary purpose. Buy it? Me neither, but there is a lot to like in Paul Vecchiali’s 1986 film, which he says is influenced by the sort of films France was making in the 1930s and is dedicated to Danielle Darrieux, Max Ophüls, Dora Doll and Jean Renoir. Opening shot: Rosa (Marianne Basler), a young woman … Read more

Primate

2026-07-22 by Steve

Primate tells us what it’s all about in its opening moments – a chimp mad with rabies bent on killing the people who raised it. And then, having told us how the trick plays out, puts the rabbit back in the hat and invites us to be amazed and awed all over again even though we know what’s coming. It is a testimony to the skill of director Johannes Roberts that he pulls off the feat, relying on a different mechanism to generate tension second time around. We’re on Hawaii, the only state in America that’s rabies-free, we learn as the film goes along. Or was, anyway. And we’re in the house of a … Read more

Donkey Skin

2026-07-21 by Steve

A big thing in France but barely talked about anywhere else, Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin (Peau d’âne), sometimes known as The Magic Donkey, possibly owes its failure to ring cultural bells globally to its plot, which is about a king trying to marry his own daughter – incest, in other words. It’s Catherine Deneuve as the daughter, trying to put the king off with one ruse after another. Jean Marais as the king, Delphine Seyrig as a fairy godmother reinforcing the young woman’s belief that sleeping with daddy is wrong, and Jacques Perrin as the prince of a neighbouring kingdom who falls for the disguised young woman after she goes on the run … Read more

Carolina Caroline

2026-07-20 by Steve

If you’re not familiar with the work of Adam Rehmeier, he made the harrowing The Bunny Game as a feature debut, later following up with Dinner in America, another distinctive, idiosyncratic film. Carolina Caroline is neither of those, in mood or intention. Instead it is a down-the-line crime drama seemingly designed to show Hollywood that Rehmeier can play quirk-free. It’s a Bonnie and Clyde kind of thing, with the emphasis firmly on the female party, a smart, hot young woman in a small nowhere town who one day realises a grift is taking place under her nose – a passing motorist is pulling it on the owner of the gas station where she works. … Read more

The Psychic

2026-07-19 by Steve

Tarantino’s proposed remake starring Bridget Fonda never happened and so we have only Lucio Fulci’s 1977 original of The Psychic (aka The Psychic, Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes aka Sette note in nero) to scare us, though in all honesty it’s not so much scary as an exercise in Italian gothic style and 1970s advertising imagery. Which sounds like a put-down but Fulci turns the sleek, airbrushed looks to his own ends, in a story about a young woman who sees dying people, in particular a woman at some unspecified time in the past being walled up alive in the palazzo belonging to her husband Francesco (Gianni Garko). It … Read more

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

2026-07-18 by Steve

Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert. A marketing award to whichever genius came up with that title for this epic rebrand of old product done with such polish and dash that it casts Elvis Presley anew – all over again. Baz Luhrmann is credited as the director but here he’s more an editor. Having come across tons of never-seen material in the vaults while researching his Elvis biopic a few years back, he decided to take a closer look at what he’d found, the raw footage to the Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and the Elvis on Tour movies. Undoubtedly this was prompted by the realisation that the celluloid itself was in astonishingly good … Read more

Broadway Melody of 1940

2026-07-17 by Steve

If it’s not quite the big deal it maybe ought to be, Broadway Melody of 1940 does do one great service to posterity: it brings together for the only time on screen Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, whose ferocious tap skills Astaire admired and even feared. The story is the corny Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers one of mistaken identities, with Powell as a successful Broadway star and Astaire as one half of a struggling song and dance act. Seeking to freshen up her act with some new blood, Clare Bennett (Powell) gets her agent to contact talented, committed Johnny Brett (Astaire), but instead winds up with his deadweight song-and-dance partner, King Shaw (George Murphy). … Read more

The Last One for the Road

2026-07-16 by Steve

Carlobianchi and Doriano and a table full of beer bottles

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Don Quixote, Lost in Translation, Waiting for Godot, The Last One for the Road (aka Le città di pianura) contains elements of all, without obviously borrowing from them. A “state of Europe/Italy” comedy of sorts, it follows two drunken has-beens – smalltime criminals who are waiting for their boss Genio to show up and in the meantime are drinking themselves to a standstill. It’s funny, amused, cock-eyed, nostalgic, a little bit 1990s, a touch Tarantino, and rests entirely on the performances of Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla as Carlobiancho and Doriano. Strange, old-fashioned names for a pair of fiftysomething archetypes who we meet utterly drunk and … Read more

Berlin Express

2026-07-15 by Steve

First of the so-called “Trümmerfilme”, after the German word for rubble, films shot in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when Germany lay in ruins. Berlin Express was directed by Jacques Tourneur and features a high-tone cast including Merle Oberon and Robert Ryan, with much of the action set on a train sweeping through Germany – Frankfurt a heap of bricks apart from the IG Farben building – and on to the eventual destination of Berlin. No one uses the word Nazi, which sets the tone of the piece, which is all about recovery rather than recrimination. On board the train representatives of the victorious powers – American Robert Lindley (Ryan), Brit … Read more

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