Review

The Man in the White Van

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Annie in the back of her parents' car

The Man in the White Van slots into the mini-1970s horror revival that’s been going on for a while now. See the abduction horror of The Black Phone, or the folk horror of Midsommar, or the slightly Exorcist-y vibe of The Dark and the Wicked, or the Hammer-esque The Reckoning, just a few among many. That said, this movie is for people who don’t remember the 1970s and don’t particularly want to. Who find it all a bit long ago and perhaps a bit lank and unclean. Maybe that’s writer/director Warren Skeels’s take on the decade. It’s definitely how his movie comes across. Loosely based on the real life case of Florida serial … Read more

Night of the Demon

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Holden at Stonehenge

Moody horror from Jacques Tourneur, Night of the Demon battles all the way against a studio that wanted to make the director’s psychological approach more literal. Hence the Demon itself, shown early on and right at the end, against Tourneur’s wishes. From this distance Tourneur was obviously right. There’s nothing remotely convincing in what looks like a toy dinosaur being shaken about by a props man. But on to the plot, which is adapted from an MR James story – usually a good sign. Dana Andrews plays John Holden, an American man of science who’s been invited to England by fellow scientist Professor Harrington to speak at a conference debunking ghosties and ghoulies, … Read more

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

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The Thing, Mr Fantastic, Invisible Woman and the Human Torch

The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The title is a joke, a reference to Marvel history and also an announcement – this, fanfare please, is the opening film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s glorious Phase Six. The joke. The Fantastic Four has taken many first steps before. It’s the failed-to-launch superhero franchise par excellence, with three damp squibs – two with Ioan Gruffudd and Jessica Alba and one with Miles Teller and Kate Mara plus assorted unremarkable FF walk-ons in other MCU movies. “Damp” may be overdoing it, but those three movies did not sweep all before them, let’s say. And then there was Roger Corman’s run at the material, with a movie in … Read more

The Murderer Lives at Number 21

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Suzy Delair and Pierre Fresnay

Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock and (using a time machine) the Knives Out franchise jostle along chummily in The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (L’assassin habite… au 21), the 1942 feature debut by Henri-Georges Clouzot and a confident beginning by a film-maker who knows exactly what he’s about. Winking all the while at the audience, Clouzot gives us a murder right up front – a drunk in a bar who’s just won the lottery – done with a camera that slides between third-person omniscience to killer to victim, Clouzot as good as announcing himself as hugely talented before the film’s even got going, in the same way as the killer announces himself, with a … Read more

Next Sohee

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Kim Si-Eun as Sohee

Life in a call centre is the focus of Next Sohee, July Jung’s belated follow-up to 2014’s A Girl at My Door. But it’s more than the story of grim days in a headset and on the clock. Based on the true case of a young woman who committed suicide while doing work experience in a South Korean call centre, it asks broader questions about the corporate capture of almost every aspect of modern life. It breaks down into two neat halves. In part one we meet Sohee (Kim Si-Eun), a bright, feisty young woman who is lucky enough to get a prized work-placement at a major internet provider. Her job is familiar … Read more

The Price of Wisdom

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Mary Newland close-up

Often billed as a drama but obviously a farce, The Price of Wisdom is a British “quota quickie”, one of many films churned out in the 1930s to shore up domestic production. “Quota quickie” is usually a useful synonym for “pile of crap” but this is an exception and if you’re on the lookout for a delightfully eccentric, highly tweedy, very British old-school light comedy, your train has just pulled in. There’s enough plot to power a two-hour movie and the only real argument you could mount against this 66-minute film is that it has to move too fast to get everything in. The actors are literally gabbling their lines to keep up … Read more

Psycho Therapy

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Steve Buscemi as Kollmick

One of the great benefits of the whole 1990s revival thing has been a run of movies inspired by the early Coens. Psycho Therapy does a bit of a number on Barton Fink, not the Coens’ funniest or weirdest film, and is a re-assessment of their re-assessment of Hollywood output in its golden age. Screwball and crime, for the most part. It’s an “only in Hollywood” caper, about a stalled writer whose latest book set in Slovenia in the Neanderthal era is never going to be world shaking, if it ever gets finished at all. Keane’s friends laugh at him, wife Suzie pities him and his agent won’t answer his calls. Then one … Read more

City Streets

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Sylvia Sidney and Gary Cooper look into each other's eyes

Gary Cooper was a long way from his craggy, motionless Mount Rushmore phase when he made City Streets in 1931. In fact he still looked boyish enough to play a character called Kid, a fairground worker who gets caught up with some gangsters, finds he has a taste for it and then lives to regret it. It’s a Dashiell Hammett story and it is typically Hammett – complex – with two interwoven fields of play, the romantic and the criminal, each providing the obstacle to the smooth progress of the other, before the two eventually switch about. So Cooper and co-star Sylvia Sidney are required to cover a lot of emotional ground. He’s the … Read more

Companion

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Close up of Sophie Thatcher

The bots are coming for us. Companion is the latest in a line of more or less scary looks into the near future, when even the most crucially human aspects of our existence will be outsourced to machines. Am I even writing this? After Robot & Frank, Ex Machina, The Trouble with Being Born and I’m Your Man – excellent all – writer/director Drew Hancock gives us another vastly entertaining and thought-provoking look at the subject, wrapped up in a “cabin in the woods” story about a guy called Josh (Jack Quaid) taking his new girl, Iris (Sophie Thatcher) to meet his friends at a remote weekend retreat. There, the bitchy and appropriately … Read more

Blind Alley

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Mary Shelby and her doctor husband

A film about the all-conquering power of Freudian psychoanalysis, Blind Alley lasts just a bit longer than a session with a shrink and in its 69 minutes attempts to convince us that the root of all evil lies in our relationship with our parents. It’s a bit mad but highly entertainingly done, and in the background there’s something lurking for any would-be psychoanalyst, in the relationship between an incidental couple, Mr and Mrs Curtis, and the “constant companion” Mrs C calls Dick. Parse that one. But neither Dick nor the Curtises is who the film is about. It’s about a professor of psychoanalysis whose weekend cottage is invaded mid-soiree by a dangerous criminal … Read more