Review | MovieSteve

Devotion

2023-07-23 by Steve

Three stories fight for space in Devotion. Most obviously the Korean War, which turns up so infrequently it’s almost as if film-makers have taken a vow of silence on the subject (Robert Altman’s Mash, while set in the Korean War, was really about Vietnam – and it was 50 years ago). Second up, the trials and tribulations of a black naval flyer in a largely white American fighting force after the Second World War. And third, a story of platonic love between two men. It’s a true story, about white preppy academy guy Lieutenant Tom Hudner (Glen Powell, who’s also the producer) and black up-by-his-bootstraps Ensign Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors, so hissably good … Read more

The Big Sleep

2023-07-22 by Steve

The older it gets, the better 1946’s The Big Sleep looks. When it was new, Howard Hawks’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s famously unfathomable story was rooted in reality – the clothes, the cars, the language, the streets of LA. Since then, as it’s become detached from the everyday, it has risen unimpeded into the mythic. The opening scene sets the tone. A detective, Philip Marlowe, arriving at the mansion of General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), where the sick old man lives in an orchid house, staying alive on the heat, while his daughters run wild with his money. One of them, the general informs Marlowe, has got into some trouble. Can Marlowe fix it? That’s … Read more

Peppermint Candy

2023-07-21 by Steve

What makes a person commit suicide – is it bad genes, bad luck or a bad attitude? Peppermint Candy doesn’t answer the question but it has a good hard look at it. One man, an extreme case when we meet him, angry, disoriented, drugged-up maybe, crashing a 20-year school reunion in the town where he grew up. The other members of the group try to calm him down but this one’s not for placating and, after disruping the party with his aggressive manner, Kim Yong-ho has soon climbed onto the elevated railway line nearby. And soon after that he’s dead, having disappeared under the front of an oncoming locomotive while screaming “I’m going … Read more

Paris Memories aka Revoir Paris

2023-07-20 by Steve

Tragedy destroys but maybe it can also heal. Paris Memories kicks off with a terrible terrorist attack in a Paris restaurant. A man, school-shooting style, wandering through the place and putting a bullet into everything that moves. It’s a grim and powerful opener directed with an eye for maximum shock by Alice Winocour, whose films usually focus on intangible emotion rather than concrete deed. You get both in these opening moments. But once she’s made her opening statement, Winocour reverts to type. The film is about the aftermath rather than the event, with Virginie Efira playing one survivor who, amnesiac since that night, only returns to the scene of the atrocity by accident … Read more

Kiss Me Deadly

2023-07-19 by Steve

Here’s Kiss Me Deadly, the American film that gave birth to the French New Wave, or so said both Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, so that’s a claim made with some authority. It starts with a terrified woman flagging down a car containing private eye Mike Hammer and ends with another woman who opens a box containing nuclear material and bursts instantly into flames. In between one of the most abjectly nihilistic of the noirs, with not a smidgeon of light relief, not a smile, very little in the way of social nicety, and a detective who takes on a case not because he’s crusading for justice but rather, we sense, because there’s … Read more

Nude Area

2024-01-102023-07-18 by Steve

Films about falling in love have been done so often that the way the characters in them declare their love has become incredibly important. How does “I love you. You complete me” compare to “Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches…” or “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her”? Top marks for spotting Jerry Maguire, The Princess Bride and Notting Hill. Love stories depend for success on a lot of things – but emotional plausibility and the romantic stars aligning need good writing and chemistry to take things over the line. … Read more

Night at the Crossroads aka La Nuit du Carrefour

2023-07-17 by Steve

There are three competing theses for what went wrong with Jean Renoir’s Night at the Crossroads (aka La Nuit du Carrefour), a 1932 whodunit of the old school but with some very strange jumps, bumps, gaps, leaps of logic and filmic equivalents of handbrake turns. Number one is that Renoir was depressed while making it and so was often drunk. He simply made a mess of it. Another is that he ran out of money and so never really finished it. The third is that somewhere in the process a reel of film got lost, the one that would have gone a long way towards tying everything together. Whatever the reason, the film … Read more

Fast X

2023-07-16 by Steve

The word “family” is uttered 56 times in Fast X, number ten (there’s a clue in the title somewhere) in the series whose focus on interpersonal relations threatens to scupper it. And yet it keeps on going. The latest outing is not so fast, not so furious, maybe, but in a jimjams-and-pizza-and-beer kind of way, it’s a decent enough piece of entertainment – 1950s-melodrama acting with obsessively planned Buster Keaton-style stunts. There is a plot, there really is, of a disavowed, Mission: Impossible flavour, with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and gang being accused of some dreadful atrocity and then being pursued by the Agency it used to work for. The atrocity – a bouncing … Read more

100 Years of… Coeur Fidèle

2023-07-15 by Steve

The first thing to say about Coeur Fidèle (aka The Faithful Heart) is how brilliantly good the image is on this 100-year-old movie. I watched the Eureka Masters of Cinema version and it’s excellent. It’s important that it’s good because this is a highly visual movie. It certainly won’t win awards for storytelling. Wikipedia says it was written in a day, to which the response is surely “you don’t say”. Marie is an orphan girl who skivvies at the bar of her foster parents. She is in love with Jean, a local docker, but is being courted by Petit Paul, a brutish drunkard. After her adoptive parents give her to Paul, Jean and … Read more

The Forgotten Battle

2023-07-14 by Steve

War dramas are often held to a higher standard than other movies, and it’s a rare one that doesn’t bring generals – active, retired and armchair status – out into the open to condemn some appalling misrepresentation of the facts or other. A fate The Forgotten Battle largely dodged when it debuted in 2020. That’s mayb ebecause for the most part it kept its background (the facts) and its foreground (the fiction) separate. The facts: after the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944, the Allies started pushing the Germans back out of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, eastward, ever eastward. But progress eventually started to be held back by overstretched supply lines. Cherbourg, … Read more