Review

Army of Shadows

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Lino Ventura as Philippe Gerbier

Jean-Pierre Melville is slightly off his turf in 1969’s Army of Shadows (aka L’Armée des Ombres). No trenchcoat-wearing criminals driving American cars. Instead he gives us a slice through the activities of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Like all his late-era film, from 1966’s Le Deuxième Souffle to 1972’s Un Flic, Army of Shadows is an absolute must-see. Joseph Kessel, who wrote the original book, had been in the Resistance himself and based it on his own experiences. Melville, too, had been a member and is keen to present a nuts-and-bolts, warts-and-all portrait of the men and women who risked everything to help rid their country of the Nazi invader. … Read more

The Hole aka Il Buco

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Cavers on an underground lake

The latest stop on MichelAngelo Frammartino’s quest to redeem the much-abused drama-documentary, The Hole (aka Il Buco) relates in god’s-eye-view fashion how cavers discovered the 700-metre deep Bifurto Abyss in Pollino, South Italy, in 1961. If you’re familiar with Frammartino’s work, in films like Le Quattro Volte, you’ll know to expect a quiet and meditative journey, with reveals coming orgainically, always with Frammartino’s camera appearing as if it was just lucky enough to be there when something happened – when in fact everything has been carefully staged, artfully lit and framed for maximum picturesqueness. The effect is a bit like Slow Cinema, though the hallmark of all those films of fires flickering, or … Read more

100 Years of… Safety Last!

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Harold hangs from the clock

Here’s an image so iconic that it’s recognised by people who have no idea what film it’s from, or who the geezer hanging off the clock is. Wikipedia calls it one of the most famous images from the silent-film era but it’s surely more than that – this is one of the most famous images from any era, in any medium, and ranks alongside the Mona Lisa or the mask of Tutankhamoun, right? Maybe I’m hyperventilating a bit there, but to change tack slightly, the added brilliance of this remarkable image is that it perfectly sums up in one frame what Safety Last!, Harold Lloyd’s 1923 masterpiece, is all about – hanging on for grim … Read more

Italian Studies

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Vanessa Kirby as Alina

The (mis)adventures of a writer who suddenly loses her memory in New York City, Italian Studies boldly tries something original with the old “movie amnesiac” formula and swerves the usual mechanics: loss and recovery. Instead, writer/director Adam Leon sets out to explore what it actually feels like to suddenly have no idea of who or what you are. Vanessa Kirby plays the amnesiac author in search of character, a Brit in New York who wanders into a hardware store to buy something, having first tied her dog up outside. Nothing obvious happens while she’s in there, but on leaving, this pretty blonde walks away from the store, leaving the dog behind. She has … Read more

100 Years of… The Hunchback of Notre Dame

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Esmeralda is carried to safety by Quasimodo

Mention The Hunchback of Notre Dame to someone and the response is often a shuffling crouch, accompanied by a moaning “the bells… the bells”, in vague homage to Charles Laughton. Here’s where Laughton got it all from, 1923’s Hunchback, starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo, the mostly deaf, half-blind unfortunate who falls for a gypsy dancer called Esmeralda, as does nearly every other man in the film. What’s notable watching this version for the first time is how Esmeralda-centric it is. This is her story, not Quasimodo’s. The title of Victor Hugo’s original novel was Notre-Dame de Paris (Our Lady of Paris), and it’s tempting to imagine the title nods towards Esmeralda – she … Read more

The Apology

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Darlene and Jack

The list of dark Christmas movies grows one longer with The Apology, an atmospheric female-centric thriller with interesting psychology revealed when the crunch comes. Distributed by Shudder, The Apology was produced by Company X Productions, the all-female outfit behind films like Bitch (2017), Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss (2018) and No Man of God (2021), and starts off in the warm domestic setting of a cosy but remote house on a dark and stormy winter’s night. Inside, two old friends are putting the final stages of Christmas prep together. For Darlene (Anna Gunn) it’s the first time she’s hosted the celebration since her daughter disappeared 20 years before. She’s nervous, and in … Read more

Touki Bouki

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Mory salutes the world

Often described as Africa’s first avant-garde film, 1973’s Touki Bouki sits at number 66 on Sight & Sound magazine’s most recent Best of All Time list, had its restoration funded by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation and was even referenced by Jay Z and Beyoncé in the promo material for their 2018 tour (which led to an interesting discussion about cultural appropriation, especially as their tour took in not one African country). Is it any good though? Films end up on lists for all sorts of the wrong reasons – tokenism, lobbying and groupthink to name but three. The good news is that it’s as great as its reputation, a genuinely refreshing, technically … Read more

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

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Casey in make-up

Horror movie, or love story, neither or both? We’re All Going to the World’s Fair exists in a category of its own, in the new territory opened up by online spaces where lives can be lived in atomised seclusion. In a nice cosy attic room, with stars projected on the ceiling, Casey (Anna Cobb) is talking to her laptop, looking straight into the lens as she declares that she’s decided she’s going to take the “World’s Fair challenge”. She’s talking to her followers on her channel, but from Casey’s downbeat attitude, the number of viewers is probably close to zero. The “World’s Fair challenge” is something like the Candyman incantation – kind of a … Read more

Electric Dragon 80.000 V

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Dragon Eye Morrison

Eisenstein, Frankenstein and Tetsuo walk into a bar… Not quite, but Electric Dragon 80.000 V gets most of the way towards a bizarre blend of effects and styles in Gakuryû Ishii’s superhero mash-up, 55 minutes of entirely wordless stark black-and-white imagery with all the action set to a relentless punk thrash. How’s this for an origin story, dealt with in the opening minutes – young boy climbs up a pylon and receives a massive electric shock, recovers but grows up as a problem kid being given repeated doses of electro-shock therapy. Eventually, Dragon Eye Morrison, as the IMDb tells us he’s called (there are no on-screen clues), throws off his shackles, gives himself a few … Read more

Don’t Worry Darling

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Jack and Alice in bed

Talking about films that crashed on the rocks of high expectations, here’s Don’t Worry Darling, a Stepford Wives/Total Recall hybrid hotly anticipated because it was a) the directorial follow-up to Booksmart for Olivia Wilde, b) because it starred Florence Pugh, whose career since debuting in Carol Morley’s Falling in 2014 has been a series of triumphs and c) because it gave a meaty role to Harry Styles, he of swoonsome pop-starriness. It’s the film that crashed twice, in fact, the second calamity coming as stories started to circulate about bad blood on set – over Shia Labeouf (fired), between Wilde and Pugh (over Styles), and most notoriously over Chris Pine and Styles and … Read more