Review

Mauvais Sang

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Juliette Binoche covered in shaving cream

French neo-noir at its most stylish, Mauvais Sang (confusingly it also goes by the titles The Night Is Young and the more literally translated Bad Blood) was Leos Carax’s second feature, the enfant terrible of French cinema still only a youthful 26 in 1986 when the film was made. The majority of his cast are pretty young too. We’re seeing early outings for Denis Lavant (25), Juliette Binoche (22) and a very young Julie Delpy (she’s about 15 here, having debuted the year before for Jean-Luc Godard in Detective). If you read any plot precis it’ll tell you that the action is set in some version of the future, where a virus is … Read more

A Thousand and One

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Inez out on the streets

Films that watch poor people having a bad time aren’t everyone’s idea of fun and while A Thousand and One walks a familiar path, it does so with a keen knowledge that misery is a turn-off, and even throws in some firecracker performances to help sweeten the pill. Chief among those is Teyana Taylor, in a star-is-born role as Inez, a street skank fresh out of Rikers Island who “kidnaps” her own child, Terry, aged six and in care, and sets out to bring him up while ducking the authorities. Will Inez make it? Will Terry? Starting out in 1994, the story of Inez and Terry is also, to an extent the story … Read more

Danger: Diabolik

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Diabolik and Eva in front of a white E type Jaguar

Arsène Lupin, Fantomas and James Bond all come together in Danger: Diabolik, the first screen appearance of the Italian masked master criminal. A flop on its initial release in 1968, it’s now regarded as something of a cult classic. The reasons for that are hard to ignore. This is prime mid-1960s kitsch, a psychedelic, phantasmagoric, frequently silly, almost always entertaining dollop of schlock elevated by the superb eye of director Mario Bava and a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone at his most poptastic – twangy guitars, wordless choirs, drums thrashing, a harpsichord, the sonic equivalent of Bava’s colour-soaked, bright, stylish and slightly demented visuals. Italian audiences were familiar with Diabolik (also the film’s original … Read more

The Blackening

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Group shot of the cast of The Blackening

The Blackening is an amiable throwback to who-dies-next? horror movies of yore, with a take on race trying to ignore the fact we live in the post-Get Out era. There is what you would expect from a cabin-in-the-woods horror, including a pre-credits death or two, followed by the traditional re-establishing shot of a new batch of people winding their way towards the same destination in one of those aerial shots of a car from way overhead, the isolated vehicle moving through the vastness of the encircling forest. Is someone watching? But these are not booze-chugging, drug-popping white people – long-legged girls, chunky jocks, a dweeb or two – instead a gaggle of black … Read more

Gilda

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Rita Hayworth in femme fatale pose with cigarette

A froth of noir, romance and melodrama aerated using Rita Hayworth as a whisk, Gilda exploits the star’s status as the number-one pinup girl for American troops fighting overseas during the Second World War. It’s the Rita Hayworth movie, not just in the eyes of posterity but according to its own estimation of itself. “Starring Rita Hayworth” it says, alongside nobody else’s name in the opening credits, while a massive fanfare blares as the big, big sparkly letters dance on the screen. And, surely, what with Hayworth being a triple threat – she acts, she sings, she dances – this is going to deliver. Surely? The noirish story focuses on a pair of … Read more

Devotion

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Jonathan Majors as Jesse Brown

Three stories fight for space in Devotion. Most obviously the Korean War, which turns up so infrequently it’s almost as if film-makers have taken a vow of silence on the subject (Robert Altman’s Mash, while set in the Korean War, was really about Vietnam – and it was 50 years ago). Second up, the trials and tribulations of a black naval flyer in a largely white American fighting force after the Second World War. And third, a story of platonic love between two men. It’s a true story, about white preppy academy guy Lieutenant Tom Hudner (Glen Powell, who’s also the producer) and black up-by-his-bootstraps Ensign Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors, so hissably good … Read more

The Big Sleep

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Boagart and Bacall sit on a desk

The older it gets, the better 1946’s The Big Sleep looks. When it was new, Howard Hawks’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s famously unfathomable story was rooted in reality – the clothes, the cars, the language, the streets of LA. Since then, as it’s become detached from the everyday, it has risen unimpeded into the mythic. The opening scene sets the tone. A detective, Philip Marlowe, arriving at the mansion of General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), where the sick old man lives in an orchid house, staying alive on the heat, while his daughters run wild with his money. One of them, the general informs Marlowe, has got into some trouble. Can Marlowe fix it? That’s … Read more

Peppermint Candy

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Kim on the railway track

What makes a person commit suicide – is it bad genes, bad luck or a bad attitude? Peppermint Candy doesn’t answer the question but it has a good hard look at it. One man, an extreme case when we meet him, angry, disoriented, drugged-up maybe, crashing a 20-year school reunion in the town where he grew up. The other members of the group try to calm him down but this one’s not for placating and, after disruping the party with his aggressive manner, Kim Yong-ho has soon climbed onto the elevated railway line nearby. And soon after that he’s dead, having disappeared under the front of an oncoming locomotive while screaming “I’m going … Read more

Paris Memories aka Revoir Paris

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Mia walks the streets at night

Tragedy destroys but maybe it can also heal. Paris Memories kicks off with a terrible terrorist attack in a Paris restaurant. A man, school-shooting style, wandering through the place and putting a bullet into everything that moves. It’s a grim and powerful opener directed with an eye for maximum shock by Alice Winocour, whose films usually focus on intangible emotion rather than concrete deed. You get both in these opening moments. But once she’s made her opening statement, Winocour reverts to type. The film is about the aftermath rather than the event, with Virginie Efira playing one survivor who, amnesiac since that night, only returns to the scene of the atrocity by accident … Read more

Kiss Me Deadly

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Velda and Mike get close

Here’s Kiss Me Deadly, the American film that gave birth to the French New Wave, or so said both Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, so that’s a claim made with some authority. It starts with a terrified woman flagging down a car containing private eye Mike Hammer and ends with another woman who opens a box containing nuclear material and bursts instantly into flames. In between one of the most abjectly nihilistic of the noirs, with not a smidgeon of light relief, not a smile, very little in the way of social nicety, and a detective who takes on a case not because he’s crusading for justice but rather, we sense, because there’s … Read more