Review

Hit Man

by
Adria Arjona and Glen Powell facing each other

Hit Man is not really about a hit man. It’s about a guy who pretends to be one to lure potential perps into showing their hand. He’s whatever the male version of the honey trap is, and in this fictionalised retelling of the story of real-life dude Gary Johnson he is played by Glen Powell. The film is based on an article in Texas Monthly by Skip Hollandsworth. This is a good thing, since a Texas Monthly article by Hollandsworth also provided the basis of Bernie, a weird comedy of sorts starring Jack Black as a much-loved member of a smalltown community who also happened to be a real-life serial killer. Both films … Read more

They Won’t Believe Me

by
Larry and Verna

Robert Young forever played a good guy and wound up on TV as nice doctor Marcus Welby MD. In They Won’t Believe Me he doesn’t and the film really benefits from the against-type casting. As we meet his character, Larry Ballantine, he’s in the dock in court, where his own lawyer is describing him as “heartless, shameful, sordid and cruel”. Larry is a relentlessly womanising male of the first water and he’s now in court accused of murdering his girlfriend, or is it his wife? This incredibly twisted, brilliantly dovetailing plot is about a bad man being caught out by fate, which seems to have stepped in to intervene because Larry has simply … Read more

Caught by the Tides

by
Young Qiaoqiao models clothes

Things change and things stay the same in Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhang-ke’s experimental movie inspired by the Covid pandemic. Locked down at home with nothing to do, Jia wondered if he could put something together using unused footage shot over the years – rehearsals for movies, location scouting, technical try-outs to see how equipment worked and so on. Also in there are excerpts from three of the nine films Jia has made with his wife, and star, Zhao Tao, over the years. Unknown Pleasures (2002), Still Life (2006) and Ash Is Purest White (2018). So what we’re seeing here is a montage of stuff that was never really intended to go … Read more

Reflections in a Golden Eye

by
Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor

Like a yard sale of the junk in Tennessee Williams’s mind, Reflections in a Golden Eye is a trawl of pre-loved Southern gothic artefacts in various states of disrepair. Directed by John Huston in 1967, it was adapted from a novel by Carson McCullers – a Williams protégé. Brace yourselves. What might you expect to find at that yard sale? Elizabeth Taylor for one. A range of variable Southern accents for another. Quite possibly a manly man who is secretly gay. Excesses of booze and other narcotics. Lonely people. The repressed. People who are victims of themselves. Self-harm. Sexual transgression. Broken patriarchy. A love of animals and a disdain for humanity. In beautiful, … Read more

Zootopia

by
Wilde and Hopps standing side by side

Talking about runaway successes, Zootopia 2. Though you might not fully credit it, this movie made its $150 million budget back in 48 hours and, on the day I saw it, had already become the ninth-highest grossing movie of all time. It’s clearly made even more money since then. Not bad for a sequel, an animated sequel at that, though the Chinese animation Ne Zha 2 is also both of those and it’s currently sitting at number five. Note to self: check it out. But back to Zootopia 2, which continues the adventures of Hopps and Wilde, the bunny/fox cop duo, in a world where animals live in uneasy harmony. Could a fox … Read more

Cry of the City

by
Debra Paget, Richard Conte and Victor Mature

Threaded with religious sentiment like a 1970s Martin Scorsese or Abel Ferrara movie, 1948’s Cry of the City stars Richard Conte and Victor Mature as two Italian-Americans who knew each other as kids. Now grown up they’ve wound up on opposite sides of the law – Martin Rome (Conte) is a criminal languishing in a prison hospital after a heist gone wrong. Vittorio Candella (Mature) is the cop trying to chase down what happened. A cop also died at the scene of the heist so Martin Rome is heading for Death Row, if he survives. Aiming to use this to his shadowy client’s advantage, slippery lawyer WA Niles (Berry Kroeger) is also buzzing about … Read more

Haunters of the Silence

by
An animal skull and K face to face

I got sent a link to Haunters of the Silence by its director, Tatu Heikkinen, with a nice note attached. Would I like to review it? Yes, of course, though my heart sank slightly. Not because I have anything against indie Finnish directors who have made a film for nothing ($2,000!) with friends and family taking on most of the duties (his wife, Veleda, is co-director, co-writer, co-star and cinematographer). The worry was that I wouldn’t like it and would feel obliged, out of a misplaced sense of personal integrity, to say so. Who wants to kick a struggling artist who’s just getting going? Well so much for that. I liked it! And … Read more

Moon Rainbow

by
Moon Dave in space helmet

Soviet sci-fi from 1983, the year after Blade Runner, Moon Rainbow is as good an indicator as any of the gulf between the communist and capitalist blocs when it came to this sort of thing. The special effects are rudimentary and much of the actual sci-fi action takes place off screen! Bizarre. But if shots of cosmonauts walking moodily about a space ship tickle your curiosity, this might be for you. After a calamitous mission to one of the satellites of Uranus, during which most of the cosmonauts were killed, the survivors return to Earth, where they are soon confounding scientists with their newfound ability to influence electrical and electronic equipment. Attention first … Read more

A Little Prayer

by
Bill and Tammy sit on a bench together

Writer/director Angus MacLachlan has built a career mapping the dynamics of functional and dysfunctional families. A Little Prayer slots neatly in alongside earlier films such as 2014’s Goodbye to All That and 2017’s Abundant Acreage Available. You could add his stage play The Dead Eye Boy to the list. I’ve not seen any of them but having now seen A Little Prayer I’d be interested in having a look, because MacLachlan has made an interesting drama in a genre I don’t generally have much time for. We’re in smalltown America where the tightly knit family of Bill (David Strathairn) and Venida (Celia Weston) is having a moment. Their son, David (Will Pullen) and … Read more

I Walk Alone

by
Burt Lancaster as Frankie

Big acting is the offer in I Walk Alone, the first of many teamings for Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and the first directorial effort by Byron Haskin, up till this point an effects guy. Haskin delivers nuanced, psychologically attuned drama while Lancaster and Douglas go at it like fighting dogs. The whole thing is great to watch and it’s easy to see why Scorsese is such a big fan (it marks a transition from one type of film-making to another, he says). The critics of the day were less enthusiastic. “Low grade of melodrama,” said the New York Times. “Dreary,” said the Chicago Tribune. Variety liked it, though. So let’s side with … Read more