Review

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

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Close-up of Elvis

Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert. A marketing award to whichever genius came up with that title for this epic rebrand of old product done with such polish and dash that it casts Elvis Presley anew – all over again. Baz Luhrmann is credited as the director but here he’s more an editor. Having come across tons of never-seen material in the vaults while researching his Elvis biopic a few years back, he decided to take a closer look at what he’d found, the raw footage to the Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and the Elvis on Tour movies. Undoubtedly this was prompted by the realisation that the celluloid itself was in astonishingly good … Read more

Broadway Melody of 1940

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Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell

If it’s not quite the big deal it maybe ought to be, Broadway Melody of 1940 does do one great service to posterity: it brings together for the only time on screen Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, whose ferocious tap skills Astaire admired and even feared. The story is the corny Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers one of mistaken identities, with Powell as a successful Broadway star and Astaire as one half of a struggling song and dance act. Seeking to freshen up her act with some new blood, Clare Bennett (Powell) gets her agent to contact talented, committed Johnny Brett (Astaire), but instead winds up with his deadweight song-and-dance partner, King Shaw (George Murphy). … Read more

The Last One for the Road

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Carlobianchi and Doriano and a table full of beer bottles

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Don Quixote, Lost in Translation, Waiting for Godot, The Last One for the Road (aka Le città di pianura) contains elements of all, without obviously borrowing from them. A “state of Europe/Italy” comedy of sorts, it follows two drunken has-beens – smalltime criminals who are waiting for their boss Genio to show up and in the meantime are drinking themselves to a standstill. It’s funny, amused, cock-eyed, nostalgic, a little bit 1990s, a touch Tarantino, and rests entirely on the performances of Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla as Carlobiancho and Doriano. Strange, old-fashioned names for a pair of fiftysomething archetypes who we meet utterly drunk and … Read more

Berlin Express

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Robert Ryan and Merle Oberon

First of the so-called “Trümmerfilme”, after the German word for rubble, films shot in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when Germany lay in ruins. Berlin Express was directed by Jacques Tourneur and features a high-tone cast including Merle Oberon and Robert Ryan, with much of the action set on a train sweeping through Germany – Frankfurt a heap of bricks apart from the IG Farben building – and on to the eventual destination of Berlin. No one uses the word Nazi, which sets the tone of the piece, which is all about recovery rather than recrimination. On board the train representatives of the victorious powers – American Robert Lindley (Ryan), Brit … Read more

Midwinter Break

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Gerry and Stella consult a map

Unfashionable and not particularly worried about it, Midwinter Break is a showcase for the acting talents of Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds, who play a long-married couple taking a city break in Amsterdam. She bought them both the trip for Christmas and if he’s being honest he probably didn’t want to go but is not saying so. Because? That’s your film. A bit of infill. Stella and Gerry are originally from Northern Ireland but relocated years before to Scotland, after she got caught by a bullet during the Troubles. She was pregnant at the time. The child survived, but her ability to have more kids was taken from her. Now, Stella’s daughter is … Read more

Where Danger Lives

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Close-up of Robert Mitchum

The film equivalent of being sent to sit on the naughty step, Where Danger Lives is where Robert Mitchum was put to cool off after a marijuana bust put him in the newspapers for all the wrong reasons. It is low-level, cheese-paring noir well below his pay grade and with not really enough plot to get it to the finish line. But the finish is spectacularly good and Mitchum puts his back into the role of the decent humanitarian doctor who falls for a bad girl and ends up on the run with her after her husband dies. Dr Jeff Cameron (Mitchum) is introduced reading a bedtime story to a girl in an … Read more

Two Prosecutors

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Aleksandr Kuznetsov as Kornev

What happens when a state goes mad and its leader starts to behave like a king, ruling by whim? Two Prosecutors (aka Zwei Staatsanwälte) is asking that big question right from its opening frame, in which state prosecutor Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov) arrives at a 1930s Soviet gulag and asks to see a prisoner. Other countries/regimes are also available. As the film goes on we’ll learn something about Kornev but Ukrainian writer/director Sergei Loznitsa, working off Georgi Demidov’s novel, holds back vital information and to an extent leaves us in the dark about him and about what’s going on. Two Prosecutors, the title says. Here’s Kornev, he’s one, but who’s the other one? All … Read more

The Hit

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Terence Stamp as Willie

A US remake has long been mooted but has never happened, but would it be any better than the original 1984 The Hit, Stephen Frears’s second non-TV movie? I doubt the casting could be any better – Terence Stamp as Willie Parker, a lag who squealed years before who’s now been tracked down to Spain by guys paid to bring him in for payback. John Hurt as Braddock, the taciturn leader of the abduction op. Tim Roth as Myron, Braddock’s hotheaded young assistant. And Laura del Sol as Maggie, a sexy young woman caught up in the midst of things. First the background – Willie ten years before singing like a bird in court. Then … Read more

Hokum

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Florence Ordesh as hotel worker Fiona

The success of the TV show Severance seems to have woken up the weird in Adam Scott, who used to make more films like Damian McCarthy’s Hokum back in the day. Which is to say – small-scale, offbeat, the path less trodden, relying on mood and atmosphere to do the storytelling. He plays a writer called Ohm Bauman who goes to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes in the place where they honeymooned and winds up in a nightmare, possibly of his own making. There’s a bit of Stephen King in here – the blocked writer invaded by his own dark imagination – but also Tarkovsky in the poetics of the film’s assemblage. … Read more

Welcome Mr Marshall!

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Singer Carmen, agent Manolo and deaf mayor Don Pablo

How should the world respond to the fact of America? Welcome Mr Marshall! (aka Bienvenido Mister Marshall!) is often rated as one of the best Spanish films ever made and retains its relevance – even though it was made in 1953 – because the fundamentals remain unaltered. America is still a mighty power, Spain relatively subordinate. So how should one small village respond when it hears that a delegation is arriving from the USA, to distribute money from the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild Europe after the destruction of the Second World War? Open arms or more guardedly? Treating them as liberators or invaders? A good thing or a bad thing? Stir into the … Read more