Review | MovieSteve

Normal

2026-06-24 by Steve

After John Wick, Nobody and after Nobody, Normal, all films written by Derek Kolstad and all telling essentially the same story – mess with this seemingly placid dude at your peril. Normal is Bob Odenkirk going around the block one more time with Kolstad – Nobody one and two did good business so why not? But this time Kolstad has Coen brothers ambitions in his broadening out of the landscape and deepening of the characterisation. Though for the most part it is another example of Kolstad as the consummate Hollywood writer – everything has its place and everything has its pace, and a detail dropped in now is surely going to pay off later, … Read more

Big Wednesday

2026-06-23 by Steve

Gary Busey, Jan-Michael Vincent and William Katt head for the waves

Expectations were high for John Milius’s Big Wednesday when it debuted in 1978. Based on Milius and co-writer Dennis Aaberg’s own experiences growing up as California surfers, it tracks three dudes from callow youth to maturity, dropping in periodically as they also surf the waves of life. So high, in fact, that Milius kindly swapped profit points with his old friends, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Which is how he ended up owning a tiny piece of Close Encounters and Star Wars and they ended up with a little bit of Big Wednesday. Which worked out better for Milius than for Lucas and Spielberg. He became rich on his end of the deal … Read more

Enzo

2026-06-22 by Steve

If it’s gay versus queer then gay wins out in Enzo, a coming-of-age/coming-out drama of the old school, where the homosexuality is the subject under discussion, the problem to be solved, rather than window-dressing to something else. Enzo is a 16-year-old French lad who has rejected the life that was in his stars. Currently working as a labourer, he was meant to be following a similar trajectory to his brother – university, some sort of career – but has instead dropped out and is hefting sacks about on a building site where his soft hands are picking up blisters. As we meet him, Enzo is being given a hard time by his boss, the … Read more

The Wrecking Crew

2026-06-21 by Steve

1968’s The Wrecking Crew was the last of the Matt Helm movies. A series of chintzy James Bond knock-offs – Faux Faux Seven? Junk Bond? – starring Dean Martin as a spy laidback to the point of requiring resuscitation, it had pretty much exhausted the seam by this fourth outing. Box office wasn’t great either so when Martin’s co-star, Sharon Tate, got murdered it made for a handy smokescreen. In public utterances Martin said that her death had taken the fun out of the films and that’s why he was giving up. In reality… who really knows? As for plot: a bullion heist so huge that it needs to be kept quiet otherwise … Read more

Nuremberg

2026-06-20 by Steve

Would you have guessed, when Russell Crowe was appearing in Australian TV soaps like Young Doctors and Neighbours that one day he’d be playing the lead in Nuremberg? And that he’d have gone from being a slim, handsome chap with tousled hair to someone who could effortlessly play Hermann Göring, sour-faced, fat and oozing self-regard. The self-regard maybe – actors, huh – and transformations are what actors are all about, after all. Wibbling to one side, Crowe’s performance as Göring, Hitler’s Supreme Commander of the Air Force and an unrepentant Nazi right to the last moment, is the making of James Vanderbilt’s film. Set at the Nuremberg War trials in the aftermath of the … Read more

St Benny the Dip

2026-06-19 by Steve

Lionel Stander, Dick Haymes, Roland Young

I didn’t know, going into St Benny the Dip, that a “dip” is a pickpocket. In these circles the dip is the one who goes in for the goods, the “stall” having provided a distraction, while the “mule” is the one to whom the hot item is swiftly transferred, in case the dip is caught in the act. That established, into the film, which doesn’t seem to be about pickpockets at all, though it is about street criminals. When we meet Benny (Dick Haymes) the smooth, Matthew (Roland Young) the plausible and Monk (Lionel Stander) the operator, they are midway through a gambling sting, trying to bilk a high roller, when the police … Read more

Millennium Actress

2026-06-18 by Steve

There are two big Japanese animes from 2001. Millennium Actress is the other one, the one that isn’t Spirited Away. A Citizen Kane-style drama, it’s a sweet and poignant film about a documentarian and his cameraman tracking down a legendary actress who stepped away from the limelight decades before. With the studio where she spent her glory years now being demolished and the end of an era physically apparent, they decide this is the hook they need for a film about a studio and its most famous star. But will Chiyoko Fujiwara even still be alive? Given this lead-in – and the Kane-like air of mystery which writer/director Satoshi Kon builds around his … Read more

The Cranes Are Flying

2026-06-17 by Steve

The Cranes Are Flying is remarkable in so many ways. The only film from the USSR to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, it is also a reminder that an epic doesn’t need epic length to tell its story. A simple story at that. Two people very much in love. Slightly diffident Boris (Aleksey Batalov) and feisty, beautiful Veronica (Tatyana Samoylova). He’s slightly punching above his weight, and knows it, and it’s this that probably tips Boris’s hand when he is weighing up whether to volunteer to go to the front, as the Nazis advance on Moscow. This in spite of the fact that composer Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin), Boris’s handsome cousin, has designs … Read more

The Christophers

2026-06-16 by Steve

The story goes that Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon wrote The Christophers for Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel without having any idea if they’d do it or not. According to the IMDb trivia on this film, Soderbergh and Solomon didn’t even know McKellen and Coel, which is plausible in Coel’s case – she’s only been around a relatively short time – but surely not in McKellen’s. It’s the sort of film that Soderbergh knocks out between big projects. For every Ocean’s 13 a Kimi, for every Magic Mike a Presence – that is to say: tiny cast and crew, controlled location, films that could almost be stage plays. Here, McKellen is a fruity … Read more

Random Harvest

2026-06-15 by Steve

Random Harvest takes the amnesiac plot used and abused by mid-20th-century moviemakers and pushes it into and beyond the realm of the absurd. Audiences at the time loved it, the film was multi-Oscar nominated and even though it ascends into madness fairly early on, it’s a fabulous madness, confected by MGM with all the lush plushness the studio could engineer. Ronald Colman is too old by a stretch but let’s put that to one side as we watch him playing a soldier who is back from the First World War and languishing in an asylum with PTSD and amnesia. In short order he accidentally gets free, meets a showgirl and strikes up a … Read more

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