Review

Railroaded!

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Duke meets cop Sgt Ferguson on the stairs

There are two decent films based on the Majczek and Marcinkiewicz case, Railroaded! and the better known Call Northside 777. The real-life case revolved around a miscarriage of justice resulting in two young men being sentenced to 99 years in jail for the murder of a cop. The Majczek and Marcinkiewicz case scandalised the mid-1940s and shook the public’s faith in the justice system. But the fact that the two men got 99 years rather than the electric chair – the normal tariff for cop killers – suggests the trial judge knew something wasn’t right about the men’s conviction. It took 11 years, a lot of digging by a Chicago Times reporter and a … Read more

No Other Choice

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Man-su with a heavy plant pot he's ready to drop on someone's head

Park Chan-wook probably hit peak cultural clout with 2003’s Oldboy. No Other Choice reminds us yet again that he’s still here, and has been knocking out good films ever since. If The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave and a clutch of others don’t quite get the coverage that Oldboy and the other two films of the “Vengeance” trilogy did, that’s more our problem than his. In fact Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance would better be described as the “Sympathy” trilogy, since that’s their currency. But in the crazy-busy world of the attention economy Vengeance sells and Sympathy comes across as a bit wafty, so Vengeance it is. Which brings us … Read more

Drunken Angel

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Matsunaga and Sanada almost come to blows

Apparently Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio were discussing a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel. It never happened, but we do at least have the 1948 original, a study of two flawed men in the Japanese equivalent of a film noir setting. On the one side a gangster played by Toshirô Mifune. On the other an alcoholic doctor played by Takashi Shimura. Kurosawa wastes no time throwing them together. In the film’s opening scene Mifune’s Matsunaga is already at the drunken doctor’s surgery with a bullet in his hand. The doctor gives him short shrift while tending to the wound – he doesn’t like gangsters and isn’t shy about saying so. Matsunaga takes … Read more

Hi-Five

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Religious leader Yeong-chun before the de-ageing

Marvel you probably know, Misfits possibly not. Hi-Five is a bit of both – the superhero powers go to a bunch of high school kids in this soaraway South Korean actioner that’s obviously good from its opening moments. And it pretty much stays that way to the end. Pacy, witty, with likeable characters and a story arc you can see from space – it’s all going to end up in a fisty showdown. The magical blah at the beginning sets up the story neatly. Opening scene of an ambulance rushing through the streets. At the hospital it’s bad news for whoever was in the back of that vehicle. They’re dead. But their organs … Read more

100 Years of… Flesh and the Devil

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Close up of Garbo and John Gilbert

Flesh and the Devil was Greta Garbo’s third Hollywood movie after arriving from Europe aged 20 in 1925, and it’s the one where everything suddenly clicks. She has the right director (Clarence Brown), the right director of photography (William H Daniels) and the right co-star (top-billed John Gilbert aka The Great Lover). Originally it was meant to be Lillian Gish in the lead, but Garbo got the job because she was cheaper. The massive success of Flesh and the Devil made Garbo bigger than Gish, Swanson and all of the rest of them, bigger even than any studio. From this moment on she could write her own ticket. With total total control she … Read more

The Ugly Stepsister

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A pair of bloody dancing shoes

The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren) started life as a film about a woman with a talking vulva. Then writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt decided to come at the same idea – the onerous demands put on young women – by taking a second run at the Cinderella fairy tale. The resulting debut feature introduces a really gifted director to a wider audience, though the film itself could learn a lesson from Cinderella herself – it’s the dainty foot that gets into the glass slipper, not the galumphing one. It’s the same story, just slanted so we see it from the point of view of the loser – in this case Elvira (Lea Myren), the … Read more

All the Colors of the Dark

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Jane menaced by an axe

The plot’s terrible but the mood is tasty in All the Colors of the Dark (Tutti I colori del buio), an Italian/Spanish giallo from 1972 that does its best – and breast – work early on. The opening sequence is formidably unsettling. A lurid montage of nudity, distortion, doubled imagery, a hideous pregnant woman in a fright wig on a gurney, a man dressed as Bo Peep, the camera pulsing in and out as if on psychedelics while children sing tunelessly on the unnerving soundtrack. After that, waking from the horrendous nightmare reliving the night her child died, Jane Harrison (Edwige Fenech) hops out of bed and into the shower in her skimpy nightdress, for … Read more

Wicked: For Good

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Striking a pose: Glinda and Elphaba

We’re off to see the wizard – again – in Wicked: For Good, part two of the origin story of the bad and good witch, Elphaba and Glinda, from The Wizard of Oz. It remains fascinating politically – Glinda the Good is actually Glinda the Horribly Compromised. And the Wicked Witch turns out to be a creature of some backbone. Together Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo remain magnificent, the massiveness of Grande’s voice (out of such a wee body) matched by Erivo’s ability to project at the highest level. But, all in all, it’s just good, OK, fine, all the way through. If you’ve seen part one then you probably have to see … Read more

Oh, Hi!

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Isaac and Iris in bed

When is a good time to tell your girlfriend that you’re just not that into her? Oh, Hi! suggests it probably isn’t when you’re in the middle of a light bondage session and you’re handcuffed to a bed. Yup. Stoopid. That’s the scenario that director Sophie Brooks and star Molly Gordon dreamt up while they were also in something of a handcuff situation – locked down during Covid – and they work it for all its worth in this larky, darkish dramedy at its best when it takes risks. Gordon you may know from being the on/off girlfriend of main man Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) in TV show The Bear. She’s playing a … Read more

The House on 92nd Street

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William Eythe and Signe Hasso

The House on 92nd Street is the sort of earnest propaganda movie Hollywood liked to pump out once in a while in the 1940s. It was made during wartime, so the justification is there, and it deals with a real case – the fifth column of Nazi-sympathising Americans working to overthrow their own government and install Hitler. And it’s based on a real case, the Duquesne spy ring. Director Henry Hathaway and his writers give us about ten minutes of sonorous scene-setting in a “ripped from the headlines” newsreel-voiceover style before introducing the hero – William Eythe’s Bill Dietrich, a second-generation German American who is recruited as a double agent by the FBI … Read more