Review

Veronika Voss aka Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss

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Veronika in hat

By a stretch the best of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s so-called BRD Trilogy, Veronika Voss stands out against The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola because Fassbinder had the great good sense to co-opt Billy Wilder’s brilliant Sunset Boulevard to help with the telling of the story of an ageing German actress and the young man who befriends her in the 1950s, much as he borrowed Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel with Lola. Rosel Zech plays Voss, a once-shining, now-diminished star who is lent an umbrella in a downpour by a young sports journalist (Hilmar Thate). He has no idea who she is, but, with a journalist’s nose for winkling out a story, works … Read more

Abrakadabra

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Lorenzo the troubled magician

2018’s Abrakadabra rides the giallo revival like an ace jockey, completing in one hour nine minutes what the likes of Amer, Berberian Sound Studio and Dario Argento’s Dark Glasses spent much more time over, packing it all in and then doling it all out atmospherically. For all its race-winning form, it never feels hurried. It’s a gory story about a magician, told like a magician’s trick, with plenty of misdirection – “What the eyes see and the ears hear the mind believes,” we’re warned in a written preamble, a quote from master magician Harry Houdini, apparently. And then we’re off into a story about a stage illusionist whose trick goes badly wrong, resulting in … Read more

Phffft

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Nina and Robert dance

The comedy of remarriage is really a creature of the 1930s but here it is alive and reasonably well in 1954 in Phffft, a screwbally kind of thing starring Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday as a married couple of eight years who decide wedlock isn’t for them, then try the alternatives only to eventually have a rethink about why they got divorced in the first place. Eight years, not seven. Columbia had actually wanted to make a version of George Axelrod’s hit play The Seven Year Itch but the rights were tied up (it would become a Twentieth Century Fox film directed by Billy Wilder the following year) and so Axelrod sold them … Read more

Reborn

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Tess gets angry

A horror movie coming at the genre from three different directions, Reborn starts off in distinct tits’n’gore territory, jumps quickly into the supernatural and then eventually morphs into something altogether more psychological. Key asset is Kayleigh Gilbert, who has a big-eyed face and long physique built for the gothic. She plays the teenager who was stillborn as a baby but then got resuscitated in the hospital by a freak burst of electricity. Raised in secret by morgue attendant Ken (Chaz Bono), a creep with a fascination for the breasts of dead women, she eventually escapes aged 16 to track down her mother, faded actress Lena O’Neill (Barbara Crampton), aided by an ability to … Read more

X, Y & Zee aka Zee and Co.

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Zee and Robert get close

Once Elizabeth Taylor realised she wasn’t going to be starring in Cleopatra, or anything like it, any more, she set off on a mad career jag that saw her playing a succession of weirdos, harpies, harridans, drunks and foul-mouthed vixens. If that sounds like something you’d like to see, X, Y & Zee, or Zee and Co., could be the thing for you. As an added bonus you get Michael Caine in one of his best “shouting” roles. It’s “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off” all the way through here. Made in 1972 but mainlining the back end of 1960s London, it’s Taylor and Caine as a married couple who’ve … Read more

Omen

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Koffi as the sorcerer

Belgian rapper Baloji’s feature debut Omen (Augure in French) starts with an image that might have come from a spaghetti western. To a whistled tune on the soundtrack a lone rider on horseback pitches up at a watering hole. Dismounting, the figure pulls one of her breasts from under her dark robes and squirts what looks like bloody milk into the water. It’s an arresting and unsettling start to a film that mixes stuff like this – African magical realism, you could call it – with a seemingly mundane story of a black African and his white European wife-to-be back in the Congo to sort out some family business. For Koffi (Marc Zinga) … Read more

Theodora Goes Wild

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Irene Dunne, Melvyn Douglas and Corky the dog

Almost a commentary on Hollywood’s transition from Pre-Code licence to Post-Code moralising, 1936’s Theodora Goes Wild is a breezy screwball comedy that straddles the decades with its opposition of conservative smalltown standards and liberal big-city values. Irene Dunne is the go-between, playing Theodora Lynn, a compliant daughter of the founding family of the small burgh of Lynnfield, but secretly also Caroline Adams, author of a work of racy fiction currently scandalising her staid puritanical aunts. Life for Theodora/Caroline continues on this twin track – dutiful mouse at home, sophisticated woman of the world on her visits to the city – until smoothie-chops New York book illustrator Michael Grant (Melvyn Douglas) takes a shine … Read more

They Shot the Piano Player

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Frank Sinatra sings bossa nova with Ténorio and band

A heartfelt attempt to save a bossa nova pianist’s name from oblivion as his peers die, They Shot the Piano also sees Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba collaborating again for the first time since 2009’s Chico & Rita. That was a bright, busy, noir-tinged animation aiming to lever Cuban and Latin musicians back into the history of jazz using a love story as a fulcrum. Here the project is focused on an individual, Ténorio Júnior. Though the style of animation remains the same, Mariscal and Trueba don’t need to rescue bossa nova – it’s a wave that’s continued breaking ever since 1959 rolled into 1960. The title is an allusion to Truffaut’s Shoot the … Read more

Love Crazy

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Myrna Loy and William Powell goof about for a publicity shot

Number ten of the 14 features Myrna Loy and William Powell made together, Love Crazy never quite achieves classic status, though all the elements are here – smart writing, brilliant playing, fantastic support players. All that’s needed is a plot that makes some sense. It’s a “remarriage comedy”, the genre that emerged once Hollywood’s production code took hold in the early 1930s and consigned straight-up sex comedies between non-marrieds to purgatory. Here, Powell and Loy play a married couple whose rock-solid marriage is shaken to the core by events which if anyone on screen had stopped for a minute to explain themselves would have elicited an “Oh, I see,” and brought the film … Read more

Infested

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Kaleb screams

Infested is Attack the Block with added spiders… and that’s a good thing. A homage to John Carpenter, in other words. Confined space, conflicted characters, churning synths, an invisible foe… until it suddenly isn’t, it’s (mostly) all here. It’s the feature debut of French director Sébastien Vaniček and impressed Sam Raimi enough to get Vaniček a gig directing the next Evil Dead movie – a franchise back from the, er, dead. You can see why Raimi signed him up. Raimi-like, Vaniček wastes no time getting his story going, and then prioritises forward momentum. In disaster-movie style we meet a bunch of characters before following them into a situation full of jeopardy. Some will survive, … Read more