Review

All the King’s Men

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Willie Stark sprawling in a chair

All the King’s Men is, give or take, a potted history of the rise and fall of Huey Long, the populist, Depression-era senator and governor of Louisiana. The names have been changed to protect the innocent/guilty (delete according to political preference), party particulars have been redacted and so have references to any specific state or region. But the ambitious public-works, education and health programmes launched by the stand-in for Long, Willie Stark, give us a flavour of Long that’s undeniable. Long thought the big state spending of Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t go anywhere near far enough and wasn’t shy about saying so. Audiences back in 1949 would have known exactly who the film … Read more

The Coffee Table

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Jésus with blood all over his hands

The Coffee Table (La mesita del comedor in the original Spanish) is a gonzo bad taste very black comedy that’s sat down and wracked its brains as to what could be the very worst situation that could befall a couple with a new baby, and then gone there, stayed there and started sending posts back to the rest of us. “My guess is you have never… seen a movie as black as this one,” no less than Stephen King opined after having seen it. It’s now been picked up by Screambox, who with films as bleak and out there as this might be on the verge of starting to give Shudder a run … Read more

3 Women

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Millie and Pinkie

3 Women, or Robert Altman’s 3 Women as the screen title has it, is Altman’s attempt to go one better than Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which was a peculiar story about two women whose identities become melded, switched, lumped together. Bergman did it as sci-fi, of sorts, whereas Altman’s crack at the same idea leans harder on horror. It’s Gerald Busby’s relentlessly spiky and spooky score that most obviously alerts us that this is a horror movie, again of sorts. Though this is an almost relentlessly bright and clean movie, here and there Altman reminds us what he’s about with temporary dives into gothic Hammer-style visuals. Sissy Spacek plays the naive young blow-in from … Read more

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

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Porky and Daffy

Where’s Bugs Bunny? There are many ways this film’s makers could have made a bold statement. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie has decided to do it by presenting an animated whackadoodle comic adventure featuring Looney Tunes characters but minus the most famous one. There’s not even the tip of a wabbitty ear to be seen in what’s claimed to be the first feature-length fully-animated Tunes to be released theatrically – the terms doing the work there are “fully-animated” (there have been a couple of feature-length Looney Tunes movies with live-action input) and “theatrically” (many straight-to-video features). Instead of Bugs it’s Daffy Duck and Porky the Pig, who eventually team … Read more

Les bas-fonds aka The Lower Depths

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Natacha and Pépel

Beautiful but basic, Jean Renoir’s 1936 movie Les bas-fonds (aka The Lower Depths) isn’t the only adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s stage play. Among many, many other people, Kurosawa did a version in 1957, sticking closer to Gorky’s 1902 original, something Renoir himself later acknowledged he himself should have done. Kurosawa’s is the better version, he reckoned. Renoir’s reason for fiddling with the story was, he said, to get around the casting of the actresss Jany Holt – who he thought was “terrible” but was forced to accept – rewriting around her to diminish her role. There is room for the experiment. Gorky’s original plot is full of people, very Russian, but it constellates … Read more

Mickey 17

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Mickey floating in a spacesuit

Well Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer didn’t quite work, and nor does his Mickey 17, and for pretty much the same reasons. Small stuff – great; world building – great; political satire – gruesome. It’s Robert Pattinson in the lead, vaguely back in the sort of fantasy territory that made his name (I mean Harry Potter and Twilight), as an “expendable” in a dystopian future where humanity is fleeing Earth, heading out towards the brave new world of Niflheim on board a spaceship. He’s the living equivalent of a crash-test dummy, the one sent in to check things out whenever a new situation arises. Is it poisonous, will it eat us, will it cause our flesh … Read more

The Cremator aka Spalovač mrtvol

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Kopfrkingl seen on a wide angle lens from above

Spooky at first, then chilling and eventually utterly grim, Juraj Herz’s remarkable The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol in Czech) entirely lives up to its billing as the pre-eminent film of the Czech New Wave. Here’s where advocates for Closely Observed Trains, The Firemen’s Ball, Daisies and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders pitch in. And on another day one of those might have topped this fictitious list. But I watched The Cremator last night and I can report that after all these decades it remains powerful and seems timeless. The theme is the corruptibility of the human soul and the subject is a man who is running a crematorium in Czechoslovakia as the Nazis … Read more

Popeye the Slayer Man

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Popeye

Let’s hear it for Popeye the Slayer Man, a title so brilliant and obvious you might wonder why it’s never been used before. The reason is quite simple: Popeye fell out of copyright in 2025 and so the intellectual property became easy pickings. Hot on the case, two movies have already appeared this year (I’m writing this in March 2025 so there could yet be more). Popeye’s Revenge got there first, in February, followed by this. Both are slasher horrors. What’s going on there then? I’ll admit that I watched this partly out of badness, prompted by my brother, who asked me if I’d seen it and then warned me not to “go … Read more

All Through the Night

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Jane Darwell with Humphrey Bogart

An entertaining fruit cocktail, All Through the Night was one of a raft of propaganda movies Hollywood made to try and turn isolationist American public opinion in favour of entering the Second World War. In the end it didn’t matter. By the time the film came out in early 1942, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, Hitler had declared war on the United States and President Roosevelt had decisively taken his fellow Americans into the fray. It’s a Warner Bros movie, full of Warner players, with Humphrey Bogart leading the pack as Gloves Donahue, a wiseguy gambler with a heart of gold, the sort of guy who makes a lot of money but is … Read more

The Invitation

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Evie all dressed up for the ball

Paced like a TV show with a writers room on autopilot, The Invitation behaves as if it has all the time in the world. It’s about vampires, so taking it slow, there not being any real rush, entire centuries of time to kill and all that are obviously part of the idea. But even so… couldn’t it just get a move on! It’s another case of Nathalie Emmanuel having all the gifts except the one of choosing her next project wisely. She plays the modern American miss – democratically inclined, nose-ring-sporting, open, self-reliant, struggling – who is whisked away to England to meet a long-lost branch of the family she never knew she … Read more