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Mummies
“It’s for kids, innit?” a guy muttered to me as we came out of the screening for Mummies. He didn’t say it like it was a good thing, summing up in a shrug the slightly throwaway nature of this Spanish animation redubbed into English. I have no idea how good the original voice cast were, but Joe Thomas (of the TV show Inbetweeners), Eleanor Tomlinson (Poldark) and Hugh Bonneville (everywhere all at once right now but best known for Downton Abbey) are excellent as the English-language replacements. Thomas voices Thut, the Ancient Egyptian charioteer who used to be a champion but now has post-chariot-stress-disorder, and Tomlinson is Princess Nefer, the daughter of Pharaoh … Read more
Caught
Revenge would be a better title but Caught it is, director Max Ophüls’s broadside against Howard Hughes, who’d fired him from Vendetta only days into shooting a film that was meant to launch the career of Faith Domergue, a Hughes “discovery” (booty division). Vendetta ended up with five directors’ names attached to it so clearly the launch needed more grease on the slipway than anticipated. Hughes’s treatment of women, it turns out, is what Caught is all about, a reworking of the Libbie Block novel Wild Calendar also incorporating the stories Ophüls and screenwriter Arthur Laurents had heard about the infamously philandering studio boss. Naive and nice young thing Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes) … Read more
Inherit the Viper
So near yet so far, Inherit the Viper could almost be a Paul Schrader-esque tale of pitiless redemption, à la Taxi Driver or First Reformed. We get both of those things – little pity and a lot of redemption – but who it’s meant to be directed at is never quite clear. There are two leads. Margarita Levieva as Josie Conley, who we meet selling a pill to a local woman in the out-of-the-way town where her family are the go-to people for drugs. Opioids like “Oxy” are their current hot seller. Next thing we or Josie knows is that the woman is dead in the toilet of the bar – she’s OD’d. … Read more
Leave Her to Heaven
Psycho wife alert, Leave Her to Heaven is melodrama of the first order, dressed to the hilt, played to the max and with Technicolor looks so lush that they border on the histrionic. If there’s an award for the best-looking film ever made, this has to be a contender. It’s a Darryl F Zanuck production and it looks like he’s taking aim at rival David O Selznick’s Gone with the Wind in terms of production values and storyline – an unhinged woman whose psychosis is so destructive it leaves a trail of broken people in its wake. Poor unwitting writer Richard Harland (Cornell Wilde) glimpses beautiful Ellen (Gene Tierney) on a train and is … Read more
The Death of Dick Long
Subversive in a quiet way, The Death of Dick Long starts out conventionally enough, with three rock dudes practising in a garage and making a racket. Eventually the session comes to an end, various females peel off and go to bed and the guys decide to “get weird,” as Dick puts it. Director Daniel Scheinert (who also plays Dick) cuts to three old beer cans hastily being hacked into makeshift pipes. And cuts again to later that night when Dick’s friends, Zeke (Michael Abbott Jr) and Earl (Andre Hyland), are dumping a severely injured Dick outside the local hospital. They run away. A mystery – what the hell happened to Dick? This question is … Read more
Fitzcarraldo
The “conquistador of the useless” is how Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald – known by the Peruvian locals as Fitcarraldo – is described at one point in Werner Herzog’s fourth collaboration with actor Klaus Kinski. It helps, watching this mad epic conceived on the grandest of scales, to remember that Herzog often described himself that way too. The story is as big as the character of Fitzcarraldo, an obsessive opera-lover with a string of failures behind him, like the Trans-Andean railway that never went anywhere, or the ice-making business with not enough demand for ice locally to make success a possibility. As Herzog raises the curtain, Fitzcarraldo’s latest plan is to build an opera house … Read more
Tori and Lokita
Simple and powerful, Tori and Lokita is the latest example of a film by the Dardenne brothers, a film-making duo who these days have to clear a high bar to get real praise, one raised by their own string of good-shading-to-great films. Two Days One Night, The Kid with a Bike, Lorna’s Silence, pick a Dardennes movie and they’re all in essence the same story – fragile people at a moment of crisis. Here it’s mostly African migrant Lokita who’s in the firing line. As the film opens in a simple lock shot, she’s being asked a series of questions by an immigration official in Belgium, who want to know more about her relationship … Read more
Mystery of the Wax Museum
Screwball but not comedy, 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum is less well known than its remake, 1953’s House of Wax, but more fascinating in many respects, particularly in its portrayal of liberated young women making their way in the world. There’s sex and drugs too, though you wouldn’t bother with it for those. The Hays Code, which cleaned up American movies starting around 1934, wasn’t expressly designed to put women back in their box (discuss) but it did it anyway. The ostensible star of this pre-Code film is eminent stage actor Lionel Atwill, as the driven creator of wax effigies of great historical figures whose London museum burns down in the film’s … Read more
Rimini
Cheers aren’t what you get in an Ulrich Seidl movie but let’s give one anyway for his return to fiction after a ten-year absence, with Rimini, a glisteningly dark, drily amusing character study of a man who’d be funny if he wasn’t so pitiful. Actually, he’s quite funny too. Looking not a million miles away from Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, and sharing a few of his character traits, Michael Thomas plays Richie Bravo, a former pop singer in Austria who now lives in Rimini, where a shadowy vestige of his old life still plays out, albeit largely in Richie’s head. As Seidl’s film opens Richie is back home in Austria and re-connecting … Read more
100 Years of… Salomé
Salomé, a notorious enterprise for the Russian-born, now-forgotten Hollywood great Alla Nazimova, its star, co-writer, co-director and producer, is the film that ruined her financially and brought an end to her time as a Hollywood player. It needs to be bad to justify the damage it caused to such a glittering career. It is. The original story is from the Bible, as retold by Oscar Wilde, then retold again by adapter Nazimova and co-writer Natacha Rambova (Rudolph Valentino’s wife and possibly Nazimova’s lover). But in spite of the reworkings it’s still the story we all know, of the young and beautiful Salomé demanding that Herod bring her the head of John the Baptist. … Read more
Infinity Pool
What happens when the constraints of civilisation are loosened? It’s the sort of question Michael Haneke asks in a series of films, Funny Games and Time of the Wolf most obviously. In Infinity Pool Brandon Cronenberg attacks the same subject, except from a typically Cronenbergian direction, but comes to more or less the same grim and bloody conclusion as Haneke. Prepare, in other words, for a lack of laughs. Prepare also for another spectacular Mia Goth performance, current queen of letting it all hang out when it comes to horror. But first let’s meet James (Alexander Skarsgård) and wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman), a couple staying in a dangerous developing country where the wealthy … Read more
The American Friend
From the moment Alfred Hitchcock adapted Strangers on a Train in 1951, Patricia Highsmith was hotly pursued by film-makers. Her stories have a plot, thrills, seedy glamour, black humour and the suggestion of transgressive sex, any element of which can be dialled up and down. As I write there have been approaching 40 film and TV adaptations of Highsmith stories, quite a few of which are famous – Hitchcock’s, of course, Plein Soleil (starring Alain Delon), Carol (Cate Blanchett) and The Talented Mr Ripley (Matt Damon and Jude Law). The American Friend (aka Der amerikanishe Freund) not so much. In the mid 1970s director Wim Wenders wanted to do a Highsmith adaptation but … Read more
