Review | MovieSteve

2073

2025-12-07 by Steve

The year is 2073 and in a post-apocalyptic world a survivor of a climate catastrophe ekes out a meagre existence in New SanFrancisco, a colony of survivors in a world divided into the billionaire class and the rest. Cities are shattered, settlements are flooded. Unlucky non-billionaires like Ghost (Samantha Morton) scurry about in the wreckage, like something out of I Am Legend. Living in the shoe section of an old department store, she makes daily forays into the dangerous outside world to scavenge canned goods while trying to avoid being pounced on by gangs of marauding law enforcement officers. How did we get here? In cracked voiceover, the otherwise mute Ghost explains as … Read more

The Mother and the Whore

2025-12-06 by Steve

If the supposedly highly autobiographical The Mother and the Whore (La maman et la putain) is anything to go by, its writer/director Jean Eustache was a cock, a pseud and the sort of blowhard who could dish it out but not take it. A flattering portrait it is not but what’s usually considered Eustache’s best work (the Cahiers du Cinéma called it the best movie of the 1970s) is at least bracingly honest. Or maybe not – Eustache might have been even more appalling than the smug, self-centred creature he is portrayed as here, in the astonishing performance by Jean-Pierre Léaud, on screen for every minute of three hours 35 minutes of running … Read more

The Naked Gun

2025-12-05 by Steve

Drebin Jr with Beth's many hands all over him

Manslaughter mispronounced as “man’s laughter” – by a cop! I laughed, so shoot me with a service pistol. The Naked Gun, back after nearly 30 years and with Liam Neeson now playing Frank Drebin Jr, son of the cop originally played by Leslie Nielsen, is funny. Not, perhaps, as funny as the original, but it made me chortle a few times, groan quite a few more, plus there was a reference to that beaver joke originally cranked out by Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in one of the earlier films. Can any more be necessary? A plot, for instance? No, it’s entirely unnecessary, and the writers – Akiva Schaffer (who directs), Doug Mand and … Read more

The Valley of the Bees

2025-12-04 by Steve

The "mother", Ondrej and Armin eating together

František Vláčil’s The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel) got a fairly cool reception when it came out in 1968, even though his previous film, Marketa Lazarová, had been a success. Maybe they followed too hard on each other – Bees came only four months after Lazarová. Maybe the same 13th-century setting failed to hit the spot second time around – that itch had already been scratched. Maybe it was just too subtle, and its allegory whooshed over audience’s heads. Zeal is what it’s about, religious zeal in this telling, though the political allegory is clear, in its story about a young man who tries to escape a severe religious order and return … Read more

Evil Does Not Exist

2025-12-03 by Steve

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi originally intended Evil Does Not Exist to be a 30-minute short but realised somewhere along the way that he had the makings of a bigger film on his hands, one that’s part thriller, part meditation on (and manipulation of) audience sympathies. In a variation on the WB Yeats line “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met” – beloved of expat Irish bars – Hamaguchi seems to be saying that in the movies there are no bad guys, just characters we haven’t been introduced to properly. Get close and evil does not exist, just complexity. See also Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy for more on this. First up, in what’s … Read more

Four Nights of a Dreamer

2025-12-02 by Steve

Often pitched as Robert Bresson’s most accessible film, Four Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d’un rêveur) is, for him, a wild ride. Not exactly pulsing with vivid event, perhaps, but by Bressonian standards highly unusual. The people in it, for example, actually act, rather than read out the words with as little emotion as possible. There is music, it’s in colour. There’s nudity… sex… heartbreak. Wind the expectations in a touch for the actual film, which follows two young people over four nights. Jacques is a whimsical poetic type who falls in love with women – women on the street – too easily. As we meet him he’s gazing longingly at one … Read more

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

2025-12-01 by Steve

It’s taken a long time but maybe that’s as it should be. As Spinal Tap II: The End Continues opens, the cultural landscape is awash with ancient rockers back on the road cranking out their greatest hits one last time. In that context the four decade gap since the original movie isn’t all that inappropriate. The reason for the wait is prosaic. A legal wrangle over the rights to the Tap name, which were only concluded favourably (if you’re the band) in 2020, paving the way for the reunion. In the intervening years rock as a vital musical form has died. In fact it was already dead in 1984, which is one of … Read more

Fudoh: The New Generation

2025-11-30 by Steve

The title Fudoh: The New Generation begs the question: was there a Fudoh: The Old Generation? There wasn’t, strictly speaking, though there was a manga series called Fudô, which Takashi Miike based this film on. And there were some subsequent regenerations, with Fudoh 2 and 3, neither of which were directed by Miike. Miike was largely an unknown quantity outside Japan when this film debuted in 1996. It made his name, which isn’t bad for something originally slated for home-release only. It also started Miike’s golden run – see Audition (still brilliantly yuk after all these years), Ichi the Killer or The Happiness of the Katakuris for examples of that. What impressed audiences … Read more

The Ice Tower

2025-11-29 by Steve

Lucile Hadžihalilović has been making films like The Ice Tower ever since her feature debut, 2004’s Innocence, an allegorical semi-fairytale in which a young Marion Cotillard played a pivotal role in a story that wasn’t about her character at all. Same here – Cotillard pivotal, playing Cristina, an actress in a very non-specific 1970s whose latest role, as Hans Christian Andersen’s Ice Queen, gets her caught up with a young runaway hiding out in the studio where the film is being shot. Mistaken for an extra, Jeanne (Clara Pacini) is gradually wound into the movie itself, into the life of Cristina and into the world of the Ice Queen. Hadžihalilović slides about between … Read more

A Bittersweet Life

2025-11-28 by Steve

Tragic, ironic, thoughtful, romantic and bloodthirsty, A Bittersweet Life is a dramatic change of direction by writer director Kim Jee-woon, and a demonstration that he’s as good at action and martial arts as he was at horror and comedy in films like A Tale of Two Sisters and The Quiet Family. Kim’s cool, Alain Delon-esque “hero” is an enforcer called Seon-woo (Lee Byung-hun). And in a cool opening sequence we learn all we need to know about him as he goes at three badass gangsters with a spectacular display of martial arts bravado – here is a man who’s ruthless, efficient, unemotional and loyal to his boss. Seon-woo is more carapace than character, a … Read more

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