Review

In a Violent Nature

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Johnny wielding an axe

Have you ever wanted to see a man being fed into a log-splitting machine? Yes? Then In a Violent Nature is for you. No? There’s still something for you, if you enjoy (wrong word) well crafted films with an innovative approach to sound and a sharp eye for a visual. Imagine The Texas Chain Saw Massacre entirely from Leatherface’s point of view and that’s more or less what you have here. Except this monster makes Leatherface look like an articulate sophisticate he’s so lumpen, monomaniacal, unstoppable. This update on the Golem is a killing machine who’s been buried underground for at least ten years, but now he’s been reactivated by a bunch of … Read more

They Drive by Night

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Cassie and Joe in a car together

A film about truckers that doesn’t quite deliver – bum tish – They Drive by Night is also very much a story heading off up one road only to take a sharp turn onto another. George Raft (top billed) and Humphrey Bogart (fourth billed) play Joe and Paul Fabrini, brothers who drive as a team of “wildcat” drivers. They don’t work for the man, like many truckers do. Instead they’re entrepreneurial go-getters financing their own rig, buying up loads of farm produce and then shipping it to market where they sell it. Or that’s the idea. In fact they don’t own their own rig but they are working their way towards it inch … Read more

Red Rooms

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Close-up of Kelly-Anne's face as she watches the snuff movie

Red Rooms (Les Chambres Rouges) started life as a drama about the sort of women who befriend or become romantically attached to men accused of terrible, heinous crimes, but ended up being about something else entirely. That initial idea is still in there, though, in the character of Clementine, a short, nervous young woman who has hitch-hiked and travelled by bus to Montreal to sit in on the trial of a man, Ludovic Chevalier, accused of kidnapping, torturing and dismembering three girls. Chevalier, adding insult to mortal injury, then sold the films shot in his “red room” on the dark web. Alongside Clementine in the audience at the trial another woman, Kelly-Anne, a … Read more

Dark Passage

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Vincent Parry with his hands up

“Completely preposterous,” is how the Chicago Tribune described Dark Passage in its 1947 review. No argument here. But did Delmer Daves, who wrote the screenplay and directed this bizarre noir, simply make a bad film, or was he saying something about the latent absurdities of the genre, in particular the way fate operates in it? Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, an innocent man doing time in San Quentin for murdering his wife, who we first meet breaking out by stowing away in a garbage truck. He’s soon been picked up by a man who quickly works out who he is. Ructions follow, but Parry wins out, and is then picked up by the … Read more

Ghostbusters: Afterlife

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Phoobe fires the Ecto-1 gun

There’s nothing wrong with Ghostbusters: Afterlife at all, apart from its strange reluctance to reference Ghostbusters, the 2016 reboot directed by Paul Feig. The one that exercised a lot of bedwetters with its “controversial” cast with a lot of women in it. It wasn’t very good, but not because it starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Patty Tolan and Kate McKinnon. It just wasn’t funny or scary. They never are, scary I mean, the Ghostbusters films. That’s not really the point. The idea is to deliver lots of likeable knockabout camaraderie and good vibes, which is what Afterlife does, liberally scattering easter eggs referring back to one of the original two movies, but not … Read more

The Ghost Breakers

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Publicity still of Paulette Goddard and Bob Hope with a knife in the wall to one side

1940’s The Ghost Breakers is one of the most successful comedy-horror movies ever made. Critically and at the box office it did well and it’s still regularly on the all-time-best shortlists when they’re being drawn up. It’s a haunted house/ghost/zombie movie with some random bad humans in the mix and stars Paulette Goddard as Mary Carter, a woman who as the movie opens is learning that she has inherited the Castle Maldito on Black Island, somewhere off the coast of Cuba. Rejecting offers from various parties keen to take it off her hands, she heads off to take possession of it, becoming entangled en route with Bob Hope’s Larry Lawrence, a radio gossip … Read more

Lake George

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Phyllis and Don

Neo noir of a particularly minimal sort, Lake George gets better the longer it’s up there on the screen, and by the time it’s hitting its closing scenes it’s almost in a zen state. It’s largely a two-hander centred on two actors who are generally more support players than leads. Shea Whigham, brilliant in any number of other films (Eileen, Fast & Furious 9, Joker) and Carrie Coon (The Nest, Widows and a couple of Avengers movies, as Proxima Midnight). He’s the jailbird just out after a ten-year stretch. An accidental jailbird, it transpires, who made a complete mess of a job for a Mr Big called Armen and yet still wants to … Read more

Party Girl

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Robert Taylor as crooked lawyer Tommy Farrell

Party Girl reminds us that director Nicholas Ray wasn’t just a master of noir. Alongside the stark monochrome of great dramas like In a Lonely Place and They Live by Night, there’s this insanely lush, ridiculously colourful offering, often bracketed with Ray’s other colour movies of the era – Johnny Guitar or Rebel without a Cause, for instance – but quite apart from them in tone. It’s still very noirish, a gangster movie in colour, really, with Cyd Charisse the titular star but the movie very much focused on the character Robert Taylor plays, Tommy Farrell. They’re both not-quite people: she’s a fan dancer (which really means stripper at the very least) at … Read more

Silver Haze

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Florence and Franky kiss

I saw Vicky Knight being interviewed around the time Silver Haze came out in 2023. She is its star, as she was in Sacha Polak’s previous film, Dirty God, and is once again hellishly good as a woman in search of a better life being tripped up by her circumstances. The jaw-to-the-floor moment of the interview came when the quietly spoken and very unactorly Knight revealed that she still had a day job, working in Britain’s National Health Service as a health support worker. Everyone in the room took a breath. The scarring she sustained after being trapped in a fire in her grandfather’s pub aged eight must be some of the reason … Read more

Crossfire

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Robert Mitchum in army uniform

In 1947’s swift noirish crime drama Crossfire a bunch of Army guys in the process of being demobbed meet a guy in a bar. By the end of the evening the guy is dead. But who did it and why? Director Edward Dmytryk opens with the death happening in shadowplay against a wall, as the unfortunate Samuels (Sam Levene) is worked over in a room by two assailants we never see. Samuels goes down, the men flee, the cops arrive. The questioning starts, and it’s a strange affair, with no names being asked for by the cop, and the guy he’s questioning not surrendering any either, it’s just “this man”, “this fella”, “two … Read more