Review

The Head Hunter

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Christopher Rygh as the lone warrior

The Head Hunter is three quarters of the way to greatness as a high-concept fantasy horror movie. Fans of all things runic will love the beards and dirt, though they may balk at the length – it’s only 72 minutes long. If you’re in the market for a doorstop, there’s always Game of Thrones to rewatch. Also, here be no dragons whatsoever, so be warned. But in the shape of Christopher Rygh as its Nordic warrior hero it has an excellent star. Rygh is stout of limb, bright of eye and splendid of beard. It’s hard to tell whether he’s a great actor since there’s so little dialogue, but he passes muster in … Read more

Wet Job

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Angela Browne and David Woodward

Wet Job is a 1981 TV movie and the last outing for Edward Woodward’s Callan, the touchiest secret operative British TV ever produced. Callan is a version of Harry Palmer of Ipcress File fame, a working class lad forced out of the army for insubordination and then picked up by the secret service because of his special set of skills. If Palmer was designed as the anti-007, Callan is another rung down on the ladder – there’s no glamour to the man, and he has absolutely no pride in his work, which is killing people. Callan is on TV rather than the big screen too. Palmer reported to a dowdy office front; Callan’s … Read more

American Utopia

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David Byrne, dancers and musicians on stage

David Byrne’s American Utopia show, essentially a greatest hits package plus plus, was getting towards the end of its run in 2019 when Spike Lee arrived to film it. Part of Byrne’s wider Reasons to Be Cheerful project aimed at spreading good vibes, it had become, like Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway shows in 2017, a must-see event by that point. Both Byrne and Lee are New Yorkers and there’s a definite Big Apple sensibility to this show – smart, dry, liberal, culturally catholic. Another way to see it is as Stop Making Sense Part II. That, if you remember, was Jonathan Demme’s great 1984 concert movie of Talking Heads in their pomp, and kicked … Read more

What We Wanted

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Niklas and Alice with their neighbour's daughter

What We Wanted (Was Wir Wollten in the original German) is the story of a late-30s Austrian couple who signed up to be together, have kids, the whole kit and caboodle, trying to renegotiate their relationship after their fourth round of failed IVF treatment. We meet them just as they’re getting the bad news in the IVF clinic. But their other problem, and what this exquisitely crafted film is about, is that they have never really had “the conversation”, never really hashed out, possibly in horrible recriminatory detail, why they can’t have kids, who’s to “blame” and where they go from here – what they wanted, what they want now and what they … Read more

La Llorona

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María Mercedes Coroy

La Llorona is a figure in Mexican folklore, a tragic ghostly beauty dressed in white clothes who haunts the world she once lived in, having drowned first her own children and then herself. You can find a faint echo of La Llorona in the Wilkie Collins novel The Woman in White, but though The Woman in White has been turned into several movies, TV series and an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, it’s never really taken hold in the anglosphere quite the same way as La Llorona has with Spanish speakers – in fact there were two other movies based on the myth in production when this La Llorona debuted. I mention all that because … Read more

Stories from the Chestnut Woods

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Massimo De Francovich as Mario

Stories from the Chestnut Woods could so easily have been a misery memoir or poverty porn but thankfully it’s not. Instead director/writer Gregor Bozic has crafted an elegiac film of real beauty and poignancy. It’s set on the border where old Yugoslavia (now Slovenia) meets Italy, a region that’s been in decline for a long time and, judging by most of the houses and the people in them, has seen better days. The people who are left are either old, or they’re young and have a plan to get out quick and take advantage of the prosperity that’s transforming much of the rest of Europe in the post Second World War era. Mario … Read more

The Commuter

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Liam Neeson between two train carriages

Liam Neeson. A Very Particular Set of Skills. They’re back in The Commuter, in which everyone’s favourite geri-actioner gets physical… this time on a train. This is the fourth collaboration between Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra, after Unknown (skills in Berlin), Non-Stop (Skills on a plane), Run All Night (Skills in New York) and now Skills on the way home from work. If it seems like there have been a lot more of these films than that, you’re probably also adding Taken (three of them) and Walk Among the Tombstones to the tally. They were directed by different people but also featured a gravelly and largely unsmiling Neeson being forced into a corner and … Read more

Song Without a Name

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Pamela Mendoza as Georgina

Song Without a Name is the first feature from Peruvian director Melina Léon, who has made a beautiful but grim drama which can’t quite live up to its early promise. The beauty comes from the look of it all – shot in black and white, fantastically lit, framed in the Academy format with the image dropping off as it bleeds towards the edges. It’s a thing to behold. The grimness comes from the story at its heart – of a pregnant 20-year-old peasant girl who is lured by radio adverts to a “philanthropic” clinic and then has her newborn baby stolen from her by the doctors and nurses. She never sees the baby and nor … Read more

The Dark and the Wicked

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Marin Ireland

Some horror directors favour the balls-out approach of a high concept, others go down the skill route. Call it art v craft or wit v cunning. Then you get directors who manage both – Sam Raimi went down the the first path with Evil Dead and down the second with Drag Me to Hell. The Dark and the Wicked is writer/director Bryan Bertino’s fourth horror movie after The Strangers, Mockingbird and The Monsters. And if none of the others set people alight, they did at least give Bertino the space to make some mistakes and learn how to make a horror movie properly. That all comes good here, with a film that’s not … Read more

Lucky Grandma

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Tsai Chin as lucky grandma

There’s a silent movie quality to Lucky Grandma, the story of a Chinese grandmother in New York’s Chinatown who gets tangled up with the Triads and somehow (OK, improbably) comes out on top. But first let’s meet Grandma, played superbly by Tsai Chin (86 when this was made, though she could easily be 15 years younger) as a Buster Keaton-style stone-faced senior, smoking smoking smoking the entire time, partly just because she wants to, partly, we suspect, as a rebuke to a world that is increasingly infantilising her. One of the places where she isn’t infantilised is the casino, where we follow her just after she’s turned town her caring son’s offer of … Read more