Review | MovieSteve

The Amazing Mr. X

2026-02-22 by Steve

The only really normal person in The Amazing Mr. X, Richard Carlson’s Martin Abbott, is presented as a complete dope. It’s that sort of film – exotics, psychotics, psychics, camp conmen and vamps circle each other while boring old Martin sits stupidly at the centre. The two real reasons to watch are Cathy O’Donnell, again effortlessly sexy as she was in They Live by Night. She plays the concerned sister trying to get her widowed sibling Christine (Lynn Bari) to marry again. To… you guessed it… chump and dullard Martin. Christine is understandably hesitant. Martin clearly a mistake. But Christine is also reluctant to let go of the hope that husband Paul (Donald Curtis) … Read more

The Secret Agent

2026-02-21 by Steve

It’s never entirely clear what’s going on in The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto), a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller from Brazil with lots of good hair and tasty roles for old dudes. Director/writer Kleber Mendonça Filho doesn’t even make clear until right near the end that it’s all taking place in flashback, yet another veil between the audience and his protagonist, Wagner Moura’s secret agent – of sorts. There’s a lot of good things to say about this film but the plot is not easy to talk about. There just isn’t that much to it – Moura’s Marcelo/Armando/Fernando (depending on who he’s talking to) returns to his native Recife at carnival time, possibly on … Read more

The Long Night

2026-02-20 by Steve

The Long Night is a remake of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Lève hoping to do for American audiences what Carné’s film had done for the French – wow them. It was a flop, in spite of having a good cast, a fine director and top flight technical team. In case anyone wanted to make a direct comparison, before it came out RKO took the precaution of buying up all the prints of Carné’s film and destroying them. Luckily, not absolutely all of them, so now we can enjoy the Carné original and watch it alongside the remake to work out what went wrong. I’ll just say it here – timidity is the … Read more

Hard Truths

2026-02-19 by Steve

Pansy has her hair done by sister Chantelle

Hard Truths must be Mike Leigh’s most straightforwardly enjoyable movie since Topsy Turvy. Which is probably all kinds of wrong, since it’s about a woman in the grip of a depression so profound and persistent that she’s almost learned how to live with it. Leigh likes these pithy titles – High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Naked – and Topsy Turvy is an outlier in his work, being a quasi-musical about the partnership of British operetta powerhouses Gilbert and Sullivan. Hard Truths is more the Leigh we expect – working class, a bit dour, a kernel of something tasty in there, fabulous performances. For all the genuinely great acting on display here, it’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste … Read more

Jigsaw

2026-02-18 by Steve

Organised race hate is a grift, the unusually prescient 1949 film Jigsaw points out, and is just another way of separating the poor and gullible from what little money they have. Donations, uniforms, other paraphernalia, it all adds up. Franchot Tone plays an assistant district attorney investigating the death of a printer. Who, it turns out, used to do off-the-books work for a far-right hate gang. The dead man’s wife insists that a journalist is involved in her husband’s death. Though she also insists that her husband killed himself, so who knows. DA Howard Malloy believes that the woman is scared out of her wits and is only telling him what she’s been … Read more

It Was Just an Accident

2026-02-17 by Steve

It Was Just an Accident is the latest in a string of films from a director who officially does not make them. Iranian Jafar Panahi was sentenced to a 20 year ban on making films in his homeland in 2010. Since then he’s made six features, all in Iran. Among them, This Is Not a Film, a pointed “fuck you” to the authorities shot in his apartment under house arrest. And the equally ingenious Taxi Tehran, in which Panahi drove about Tehran in a taxi, filming his interactions with people he picked up. His latest film continues the trend. Shot on the hoof, with a tiny cast and crew, using a van as … Read more

Desperate

2026-02-16 by Steve

Anthony Mann called Desperate his first proper movie, the one where he got to do what he wanted to do. Mann, now so famous for his westerns, had previously proved himself a master of film noir, as Desperate proves. This was the first of seven he’d crank out in 1947 and 1948. It’s a good work rate, but then these were made hot and fast. If it was me I’d have put director George Diskant’s name on the movie as its star. His cinematography is majestic. He was known for deep focus and his mastery of contrast – plenty of both here. But things being how they are it’s Steve Brodie’s name at … Read more

Happyend

2026-02-15 by Steve

Billed as sci-fi, Happyend is actually closer to films like Dazed and Confused or The Last Picture Show. It catches a bunch of Japanese youngsters just as they start the transition away from high school and on to the next thing. If there are the end of times coming down the track, they are not the impending annihilation of the planet after alien invasion but approaching adulthood. There is a sci-fi element, though it seems to be there as a cover rather than as an integral part of the plot. We’re in an authoritarian world where ethno-nationalism has its feet in the zeitgeist’s stirrups. In the high school where our two main guys, … Read more

The Devil Thumbs a Ride

2026-02-14 by Steve

Lawrence Tierney in a publicity shot thumbing a lift

It’s only in B movies that the bad guy gets top billing. That’s the case with The Devil Thumbs a Ride, a showcase for Lawrence Tierney, playing a villain who looks like he’s been lifted out of the 1930s and dropped into this 1947 noir. Cold and deadly, side-of-the-mouth diction. He fits in perfectly with this mix of the ugly and the quaint, the terse and the acidic. The whole thing is a cliché, but a cliché done with a considerable amount of flair. Tierney plays a hood, a murderer who shoots a man in cold blood and then flees the scene of the crime by picking up a lift with a drunk … Read more

Preparation for the Next Life

2026-02-13 by Steve

As a title Preparation for the Next Life sounds a bit sci-fi, spiritual maybe. But in fact it’s set in the very real world of the immigrant experience, as seen through the eyes of a young Uyghur woman who has arrived in New York on the back of a truck and is now trying to make a go of things without papers. As I type Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are rounding up people all over the USA, so this film, shot in late 2024 and early 2025, couldn’t be more timely. Director Bing Liu is best known for his documentaries, All These Sons and the Oscar-nominated Minding the Gap. He seems keen … Read more