Review

Fort Ti

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Fortune Mallory and Captain Jed Horn

Fort Ti is a 3D western and it really wants you to know it. Everything that can come the audience’s way does – a tomahawk, an Indian, a cannonball, more Indians, more cannonballs, bats, bullets, yet more Indians. In the action sequences at least it keeps coming. It’s the first 3D western and shot in Technicolor just to make the whole thing stick out in more ways than one and stars good old dependable George Montgomery as a captain in the Rogers Rangers getting caught up in a conflict with Indians and then the French. There are not just two enemies but two potential love interests too – Joan Vohs as Fortune Mallory, … Read more

Dead Mail

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A pair of bound hands holding a piece of paper begging for help

Horror-flecked crime thriller Dead Mail suffers from the death early on of one of its main characters and it never really quite recovers from it. But it’s good anyway, just not as good as it might have been if xxxxxx (no spoilers) hadn’t bitten the dust. It’s the second feature by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy and it’s all set in the 1980s, where, in a mail room in Nowheresville, USA, various members of the postal team try to reconnect lost letters with their intended recipients. The really discombobulating ones get sent up to Jasper (Tomas Boykin), a strange man who, when not at work, lives in a flophouse. A recovered down and … Read more

Angst

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K in close up with a knife

Angst is director Gerald Kargl’s only film. But what a film! Grim, depressing, formidably unsettling, it is the psychopath-killer movie the others want to be. Gaspar Noë watched it repeatedly before borrowing bits for his Irreversible, Kargl’s fellow Austrian Michael Haneke surely studied it before he embarked on Funny Games. There’s clear evidence of it in Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove. More recently, Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature – another disturbing shocker – openly acknowledged the debt. Angst is the full-strength hit, though, so full-strength in fact that the film got banned outright in some places when it came out in 1983, and where it wasn’t banned it was barely shown. Perhaps most … Read more

Black Bag

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George Woodhouse in his kitchen

What does all that spying do to spies? That’s Black Bag in a neat explicatory parcel, a Steven Soderbergh movie that mixes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with the Michael Caine Harry Palmer films – or so say Soderbergh and writer David Koepp. But there’s John Le Carré in there as well. And as this densely packed, forensic examination of the spy psyche eases onto its queasy final straight, the comparisons with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy become unavoidable. Soderbergh opens with a long, glam tracking shot following Michael Fassbender’s George Woodhouse into a bar and then down and back up some stairs where, in wham-bam plotting, Koepp lays out the whole film in … Read more

Broken Flowers

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Don in his car with a bunch of pink flowers

If you’re looking for peak Bill Murray, 2005’s Broken Flowers is a strong contender. Murray himself recently said, “that was a perfect movie… it really did happen”, (while eating spicy chicken wings on a YouTube show called First We Feast, in case you want to check that out too). It’s peak Murray because it’s a Jim Jarmusch movie, and Murray and Jarmusch are both masters of cool deadpan. But also because this is a Murray vehicle in a way even Groundhog Day cannot match. He is in every scene, the story is all about his character and though there’s obviously a gulf between the Murray we see on screen and the real one, what … Read more

Captain America: Brave New World

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Captain America head shot

A bit Sixties, a bit Eighties and a bit all over the place, Captain America: Brave New World is a strange mishmash of a movie. According to Variety, it wiped the floor with Kraven the Hunter at the box office. Which says more about that movie than this one, having seen both of them. First up, it’s a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie (Kraven was Marvel but not canonical MCU, if these theological niceties mean anything to you). Second up, Chris Evans has been replaced by Anthony Mackie as Captain America, least interesting of the Marvel superheroes. Third up, the story harks back to The Incredible Hulk of 2008, which heavily featured General “Thunderbolt” … Read more

Crossing Delancey

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Izzi with Sam in the background

Very New York, very Jewish, very of its time, 1988’s Crossing Delancey seems to divide opinion sharply. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus is largely in favour, though back in the day Roger Ebert wasn’t so keen (“not good enough,” said the usually fair-minded Ebert). It’s often billed as a rom-com, which is like calling Hamlet a comedy because it has the gravedigger in it. No, it’s a romance, a romantic drama, plain and simple, a genre that often has to fly under a flag of convenience. Plot: pretty but no longer quite so young Izzi works at New York’s most bookstore bookstore, where she’s in charge of looking after the writers who turn up … Read more

Kraven the Hunter

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Kraven in leather jerkin

A colossally charmless superhero movie, Kraven the Hunter got pummelled by the critics and didn’t do well at the box office. But never mind all that, who should we blame? Partly an origin story, it heavily features Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the lead role, though Levi Miller plays the youthful Kraven, the Russian oligarch’s son who is mauled by a lion and acquires some of its powers after a drop of its blood mingles with his own. Or was it the spooky vial of something administered to the near-dead Sergei (aka Kraven) by Calypso Ezili (Dianna Babnicova when young, Ariana DeBose when older)? You see, even there, in the birth event of this superhero, … Read more

Oil Lamps (Petrolejové lampy)

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Pavel cups Štěpa's breast as he teaches her to shoot

Czech master film-maker Juraj Herz’s 1971 follow-up to The Cremator is a complete change of gears, pace, look, intent, the whole kit and caboodle, as if Herz wanted to say to the Communist authorities – look, I can do it straight too. Oil Lamps (Petrolejové lampy) is in colour, for a start, whereas The Cremator was a more serious black and white, and there’s nothing fancy in the lens choices, no unsettling edits, no barbed message hiding in the undergrowth. The story it tells is pretty straightforward too, about a woman desperate to be married who plumps for entirely the wrong man and then repents at leisure. It’s clearly informed by John Schlesinger’s … Read more

Stupid Games

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Celeste in profile

“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” an on-screen snippet tells us at the beginning of Stupid Games. It’s a phrase that’s been attributed to any number of people – Tom Clancy to Taylor Swift – but probably predates them all. “Stupid is as stupid does,” is another one, and is particularly apt in the case of Jaxon and Rex, a pair of horny young men heading to an apartment for a night with three young women and their “games with boys”. “Boys” is not exactly how Jaxon and Rex would describe themselves, but it’s probably OK with Stanley, the speccy guy they pick up en route to make up the numbers. Jaxon, Rex … Read more