Review

The Magician

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Ray grins while smoking

It’s only while watching The Magician, a cult Australian movie from 2005, that it really hits home how prissy other mockumentaries are. Scott Ryan’s film goes in with both feet and by getting it wrong – wrong lens, bad lighting, framing all over the place – he gets that on-the-fly feeling just right. It’s the pretend-real story of a hitman called Ray, played by Ryan himself, a wiry and wired gun for hire with a bullet head and a bullet ready for a victim in the film’s opening moments, all very indistinct, though we do manage to glean that the hit has been accomplished and Ray will be paid. The rest of the film … Read more

Hangmen Also Die!

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Dr Franticek Svoboda

The screamer hanging off the end of Hangmen Also Die! kind of says it all. As if “hangmen” and “die” in the same sentence weren’t enough, the title of Fritz Lang’s 1943 film adds extra emphasis, just in case we hadn’t got it. The scrolling opening prologue continues in much the same vein, informing us that the “thousand year flaming tradition” burning in the hearts of the people of Czechoslovakia was in danger of being extinguished by the Nazis. Czechoslovakia was in fact about 25 years old at the time, having been cobbled together at the end of the First World War (it is now two separate countries again). This insistence is all … Read more

Sleep

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Soo-jin with the new baby and the back of husband Hyun-su's head

A woman wakes up in the night to find her husband bolt upright in bed talking in his sleep. “Someone is inside,” he says, before sparking back out again. The next day she asks him about what he said the night before. It was a line from a script I’ve been reading, her actor-husband tells her dismissively. The next night something a bit different. The husband starts scratching at his face uncontrollably while apparently asleep. The wife wakes him up and quietens him down, then she goes back to sleep and so does her husband. But in the morning his face is a mass of bloody red scratches so bad that make-up will … Read more

Western Union

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Randolph Scott in hat

A nice 95-minute advertisement for a company still with us, 1941’s Western Union is appropriately both a western and about the Union, being an adaptation of a Zane Grey story about how the west was won, or at least connected up to the rest of the United States, by telegraph wire. In linking coast to coast, telegraph company Western Union helped forge the country into a more solid political entity. Three men dominate the action – Randolph Scott as Vance Shaw, a loner former outlaw and fixer persuaded to join the drive to lay cable across terrain good and bad. Robert Young plays rich man’s son Richard Blake, an engineer who is also … Read more

Made in England: the Films of Powell and Pressburger

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Martin Scorsese

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger is another of those Michael Scorsese Does… affairs (see My Voyage to Italy), which is to say a hot letter from a fan to the object of his adoration, this time the British duo behind movies like A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus. So, no criticisms are to be found of the work, nor much in the way of examination of character or psyche, except where it touches the film-making. Instead, a wholesome, honest, thorough, well-researched, expertly assembled chronological run-through of what the two men did together, fronted and narrated throughout by an admiring and generous Scorsese, who regularly cross-references what P&P … Read more

The Return of Frank James

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A dignified Henry Fonda as Frank James

So The Return of Frank James it had to be, what with Frank’s brother Jesse James having died at the end of his eponymous 1939 movie. No sequel featuring hotshot outlaw Jesse being possible, how about one all about his more grounded older brother, the big sell being that Henry Fonda had been persuaded to return to the role? Boring Frank to sexy Jesse, on the face of it that’s not much of a proposition. And yet director Fritz Lang squeezes a good movie out of it, by focusing on the film’s looks. This is one of the handsomest westerns ever made. Shot in Technicolor and using locations Lang had scouted while prepping … Read more

Touch

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Miko and Kristófer in the 1960s

Gentle and beguiling, Touch is a change of gear for director Baltasar Kormákur, the Icelander who made his name with a series of genre movies, like the homegrown thriller 101 Reykjavík, before heading to Hollywood where 2 Guns (with Denzel Washington) and Everest (Sam Worthington, Keira Knightley) showed he could handle big stars and big productions. That’s all dialled back here in a very human and quiet drama about a lone, ageing Icelander who, towards the end of his life and with a wife now dead, tries to find the young woman he fell in love with 50 years before. Kormákur chops between the eras. In the here and now Kristófer a grizzled … Read more

I, the Executioner

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A victim watches as the executioner smokes a cigarette

First things first. I, the Executioner, the 1968 one I mean, has nothing to do with the 2024 film. They share a snappy title and both trade in violence but it doesn’t go much further than that. The new movie is a police-focused South Korean action sequel (to Veteran) full of martial-arts sequences. The 1968 iteration is a Japanese revenge thriller, the story of a pitiless incarnation of natural justice – “divine punishment” he calls himself – raping and slaughtering his way towards cosmic retribution. I have not seen the newer film but doubt it can match the original for style. Because the 1968 movie is surely one of the most grippingly stylish … Read more

Anyone But You

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Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney get up close

Since Reality Sydney Sweeney has nothing left to prove. A standout performance that didn’t rely on her usual standout performers, it was sober and pitiless and one of the best films of 2023. And now? Anyone But You, the sort of thing you might have thought she’d have left behind, a boy meets girl, loses girl, etc romcom with the 90s in its rearview, with sexy jokes, some whoops-nudity, side characters who are funny and/or supportive confidants, plus parents who push too hard or are gross-out buffoons, all the trappings really. It’s a strange Frankenstein creation welding together bits from two Australian directors. From PJ Hogan the vibe and drive of Muriel’s Wedding … Read more

Tale of Ordinary Madness

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Ben Gazzara in stained white T shirt

Tales of Ordinary Madness is a snappier title than the book it’s based on. Charles Bukowski’s Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness is the source of Marco Ferreri’s semi-doomed attempt to get the beat poet for guys (always guys) too young for Kerouac et al onto the screen. It doesn’t work and it can’t work – Bukowski is all about the voice, the words – but Ferreri at least gives it the college try in his second American movie. Oddly, like the first, Bye Bye Monkey, it’s a bitty affair with not much in the way of plot to hang onto. But that’s what you get when you adapt a … Read more