Review

Golem

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Pernat with newspaper stuffed in his mouth

Golem is the first of Polish director Piotr Szulkin’s Apocalypse Tetralogy – as it’s sometimes called – and is also often credited as being one of the inspirations for Blade Runner. Before Ridley Scott fans start rubbing their hands together with glee, Szulkin is far less interested in entertainment than Scott. His film is bleaker, more paranoid and more obviously Kafkaesque than Blade Runner. Think Rainer Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz meets Terry Gilliam’s Brazil rubbed all over with an oily rag heavy with swarf. It’s political too, in a coded sort of way and though set ostensibly in a destroyed society decades after an apocalyptic nuclear event, it’s clear that Szulkin has Communist Poland in … Read more

Every Little Thing

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A hummingbird caught mid flight

Every Little Thing is a documentary about a hummingbird sanctuary. A funny sort of documentary if you’re interested in the birds themselves and want to know how much they weigh, or how long they live, what they feed on or how big their eggs are – tiny, presumably, since the birds are only as big as your thumb. Based on the book Fastest Thing on Wings, by its subject, Terry Masear, it’s an emotional rather than informational portrait of the woman who runs this animal hospital, seemingly on her own. Masear is the woman to call in California – where hummingbirds flourish – if you’ve found an injured or orphaned bird and don’t … Read more

High Sierra

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Roy and a bruised Marie eye each other

1941’s High Sierra was the last time Humphrey Bogart took second billing to anybody. It’s clearly his film yet Ida Lupino got top billing, playing a gangster’s moll. Neither the star nor the moll has very much to do and it’s pretty clear that Lupino’s part has been pumped up a bit to justify her position on the credits. As said, Bogart’s film, and it’s his character’s story too, the noirish, fatalistic tale of a life-serving criminal who is pardoned in the film’s opening moments. Which seems remarkable until we learn that a very big Mr Big in the criminal underworld wants Roy Earle (Bogart) on the outside so he can supervise a … Read more

My Old Ass

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Younger Elliott meets Older Elliott on a log

Aubrey Plaza in a film called My Old Ass looks like a case of someone getting their defence in early, but is in fact a canny repositioning of Plaza – more mouth, less sex – and another demonstration of her ability to light up a film with dark snark in a supporting role. The film actually belongs to Maisy Stella, in her first time out, playing a young Canadian woman – bit snarky, bit dark – who meets her older self after going on a mushroom trip with her friends, in a last hurrah before they all leave their home town for the next phase of their lives. Shrooms ingested, all three sit … Read more

Three Wishes for Cinderella

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Cinderella on a horse talks to the prince

If you already know Václav Vorlíček’s Three Wishes for Cinderella it’ll most likey be because you grew up on it. It’s a tradition in some European countries to watch it at Christmas. A Czech/East German co-production made in the days of the Iron Curtain, its appeal is obvious as soon as it gets going. It gives it to us straight – a good, old-fashioned fairy tale so traditional it could be half-timbered, with virtuous maidens and hissable villains, noble rulers and stout yeoman. All is in its place and all is right in the world. That said, there is no fairy godmother, no pumpkin coach and no glass slipper. Instead the nearest we … Read more

Omni Loop

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Zoya and Paula in the lab

Sci-fi or is it? Omni Loop certainly doesn’t look or feel like a sci-fi movie. In fact it’s all about human foibles, regrets, the life lived rather than the life that could have been lived. But its ostensible story – a woman reliving the last week of her life over and over again thanks to a magic time-travelling pill – has sci-fi written all over it. Groundhog Week, you could call it. The action sets out from the point where Mary-Louise Parker’s Zoya Lowe is given a terminal diagnosis. Heading home from the hospital to die with the family, instead of breathing her last with them at the decisive moment she takes one of … Read more

I Want to Live!

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Close up of Susan Hayward looking frantic

I Want to Live! won Susan Hayward a Best Actress Oscar and yet the film, like Hayward herself, is barely remembered today. The story of a woman who is convicted of murder and is then executed in a gas chamber, it is an emotional and fairly gruelling drama which leaves one question entirely open – did she deserve it? – to focus on the unsavoury mechanics of the execution itself. But first a couple of prologues, one by the writer Albert Camus, billed as the Nobel Prize winner, enjoining us not to look away, the other from the Pulitzer-winning journalist Ed Montgomery, who covered the case, and vouches that what you are about … Read more

Meanwhile on Earth aka Pendant ce temps sur Terre

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Elsa in the dark with a flashlight

Advancing on greatness by stealth, writer/director Jérémy Clapin’s Meanwhile on Earth (Pendant ce temps sur Terre) isn’t all the way there, and he throws away a lot of goodwill towards the end, but the great stuff really is great, and his movie is bold and unusual too. It also features a star with one of those strikingly watchable face. There’s a savage beauty to the features of Megan Northam, who plays a young woman whose astronaut brother went missing in space three years before, an event that has torn her psychologically to shreds. Gone is the intention to forge a career in the arts, though Elsa still fervently sketches all the time. Instead … Read more

No Way Out

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Linda Darnell, Sidney Poitier and Richard Widmark

Issue-driven but dramatic enough and making political points that still resonate, No Way Out is a film about racism and stars Sidney Poitier in his first major role. He’s 22 and his self-assurance is both remarkable and one of the key selling points of director Joseph L Mankiewicz’s film. Poitier plays Dr Luther Brooks, a black doctor in a very white hospital where – as Mankiewicz and co-writers Lesser Samuels and Philip Yordan’s go to great pains to show – Brooks is treated as an absolute equal by his fellow doctors. In particular Dr Dan Wharton (Stephen McNally) and hospital administrator Dr Sam Moreland (Stanley Ridges). Don’t be fooled, black lift operator and … Read more

The People’s Joker

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Vera Drew in full Joker garb

The People’s Joker started life as a re-edit of the original Joker movie, then that idea was junked in favour of shooting something that was all new, though leaning heavily on the intellectual property of Batman and his DC adversaries. So much did it lean, in fact, that it got as far as one screening at the Toronto International Film Festival before a shot across its bows from Warner Bros. got it yanked it from the festival. There were no further screenings, and nor were there any clear explanations from either director/star Vera Drew or from Warners whether a full-blown cease-and-desist letter had been sent, or whether something else had gone on in … Read more