Review

Hollow Triumph

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Müller posing as Bartok with Evelyn looking on

Paul Henreid got sick of playing bland heroes like Casablanca‘s Victor Laszlo and in Hollow Triumph set out to prove he could be just as convincingly bad. Having optioned the novel this crime drama was based on, he produced the film himself and, according to legend, directed most of it too, once original director Steve Sekely had been fired by the studio. The result is either a triumph or a hollow triumph, depending on your approach to the movie and your attitude towards implausibility. If you’re taking things very seriously, then problems over likelihood and credibility entirely undermine everything. If not, they’re all part of the fun. But on to the plot, which … Read more

28 Years Later

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Spike and Jamie running from zombies

Danny Boyle has at least gone for it in 28 Years Later, a not always exciting but relentlessly interesting capstone on the 28 trilogy. After 28 Days and Weeks Later, logically it should have been Months, but 18 years have passed since 2007 and 18 Years Later would have broken the poetics. So Years it is. So many years, in fact, that none of the cast from the first or second film have made it this far, though Danny Boyle returns to the franchise (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directed number two) bringing a lot of behind-the-camera talent from the 2002 original with him. That includes writer Alex Garland, who reportedly borrowed the shape of … Read more

Repulsion

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Catherine Deneuve near naked on the floor

1965’s Repulsion is one of the greatest hits of the “apartment horror” genre. Expressionistic, claustrophobic and intense, it’s part try-out for Rosemary’s Baby, part grab for commercial success, so Roman Polanski could make enough money to finance Cul-de-Sac, his next film. He succeeded. Repulsion was a box office and critical hit, and is now considered one of Polanski’s finest. Polanski himself doesn’t seem quite so enamoured. On the commentary track he describes some of his more florid moments as “artsy fartsy”. A touch too overwrought, maybe. But then it was the mid 1960s. Psycho and Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath had teed audiences up for a certain kind of theatricality, which Polanski gives them … Read more

Gazer

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Frankie in front of a TV showing a woman aiming a gun

Straight out of the box – other viewing options are available – Gazer is a remarkable movie. How remarkable becomes clear once you know a bit of its backstory. But for starters let’s say what it’s about and who’s in it etc. It’s a neo-noir, more old-school noir than most, and stars Ariella Mastroianni as a young woman with a neurological condition called dyschronometria, which is an inability to measure time or relate to it. Frankie (Mastroianni) is adrift in the world without reference points. She struggles to keep her show on the road. As we meet her she’s being fired from (another) McJob, for being distracted by something going on in an upstairs … Read more

Rotation

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Hans and brother-in-law Kurt

German film-makers of the post-Second World War era weren’t exactly falling over each other examining the country’s recent history. Which makes Rotation special. In episodic scenes it attempts a cool and not-too-political examination of what had possessed Germans to sign up to the Nazi project, and what Hitler had cost them in return. Significantly, it was made in Communist-controlled East Germany rather than the West. Shot in the DEFA studio, the famous UFA of Lang, Murnau and Wiene rebadged, it was directed by Wolfgang Staudte, who had been responsible for Murderers Among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns), the first Trümmerfilm (“rubble film”) of the post War era. If you’ve seen David Lean’s … Read more

The Prosecutor

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Donnie Yen with a gun

Genres collide! Actually, in The Prosecutor, they don’t. Two distinct species of movie live separate lives in this odd courtroom drama with martial arts action bolted on. Strangely, it works, because Donnie Yen, who stars and directs, has decided to keep them as separate entities – he gives us a bit of this and then a bit of that and doesn’t try too hard to make the two genres cohabit. Even so, those gear changes are awesomely noisy. The story is based on the real case of Ma Ka-kin, a Hong Kong kid who took delivery of a parcel of cocaine at his house, not knowing what it was, and wound up – … Read more

Angels Hard as They Come

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Scott Glenn as Long John

Hippies! Bikers! Bikers! Hippies! They’re not really the same thing but 1971’s Angels Hard as They Come (aka Angel Warriors) doesn’t care. Get the women to take their clothes off now and again, add in some yowling rock boogie. Long hair! Marijuana! Yay – we got ourselves an exploitationer. Of course it’s a Roger Corman movie, since he specialised in vibe-adjacent movies designed to squeeze a dollar from the latest fad. Here he’s working off the back of Easy Rider and, as was Corman’s trick, he’s got some good people in to assist. This was the first movie Jonathan Demme wrote, along with his mate from advertising Joe Viola, who took on directing … Read more

Materialists

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Lucy and Harry dance

Celine Song’s follow-up to 2023’s Past Lives is disappointing if you’re expecting Materialists to be more of the same – exquisite slow-burn romance done with a sadist’s sense of deferred gratification. Instead Materialists is… a satire? An attempt at a takedown of When Harry Met Sally soppiness? A reckoning with Clueless, Bridget Jones or Jane Austen’s Emma, as if to atone for having, in Past Lives, made some sort of modern classic? I don’t know. Ask Song’s therapist. What, ladies – this film takes aim at women – do eligible young women want? A financially sorted guy who has his own hair and a status job (finance), it seems. Tall, tall is mentioned several … Read more

Bitter Rice

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Silvana Mangano and Raf Vallone

Italian neorealism meets the crime drama in 1949’s Bitter Rice (Ris Amaro), Giuseppe De Santis’s gritty fable about a pair of petty thieves joining a horde of itinerant workers to plant and harvest rice. If drama is life minus the boring bits, De Santis is aware that neorealism at its worst can be a bit like life plus extra boring bits. So he brightens things up with crime thrills and a cast full of good-looking young things. In case we’re still not feeling it, more often than is absolutely necessary he’ll poke his camera into the cleavage of a few of his female stars as well. The thieves are played by Vittorio Gassman … Read more

The Christmas Break

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Uncle Jack with the nephews

You know what you’re getting with a Christmas movie – after a trudge out in the cold comes the good cheer. Whether it’s the Santa Claus no one believes is really Santa (A Miracle on 34th Street), the old grouch abandoning his curmudgeonly ways (A Christmas Carol), or the malevolent Father Christmas threatening peace on earth who is eventually dehorned (Rare Exports), the Christmas movie maps out its obstacles early on and then sets about clambering over them. There are quite a few in The Christmas Break but the biggie is whether nice Chicago couple Caroline (India Mullen) and Jack (Justin Long) are going to have children or not. He’s dead keen and … Read more