Latest Posts
EO
The Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s heyday was about 50 years, in the 1970s, a fact that make EO all the more remarkable. Here Skolimowski is, in his mid 80s, knocking it out of the park with a film that’s warm and tender, dramatically intense and also put together with a master’s touch. The even more remarkable thing is that at one point Skolimowski turned his back on film. For 17 years Skolimowski he was content to spend his time in his LA home painting. There were odd appearances in front of the camera – you might remember him interrogating Black Widow in The Avengers – but no cinema product bearing his name. But … Read more
The Day of the Beast
A Christmas movie for Satanists, The Day of the Beast (El Día de la Bestia) is one of the key movies of a very 1990s style of grindhouse film-making. It’s the gonzo wild ride in which pump-action shotguns and breasty women compete for screen space with demons and SWAT teams, while rock music and satanic ritual drive the soundtrack. This genre is probably best exemplified by Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, from 1996. But Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia got there first in 1995, and he got there best. This is a very funny movie, probably at its best in early scenes introducing its hero, Father Ángel Berriartúa, a Catholic priest … Read more
The Burial
A movie called The Burial that buries its main story – it sounds like some kind of meta-joke. But it isn’t. Whether the strategy works is the real question though. The story was first told in the New Yorker and relayed what happened to a real-life Mississippi guy called O’Keefe whose struggling funeral-home business was offered a buyout in the mid-1990s by the Loewen company, a megacorp specialising in burials and, more importantly (it turns out), burial insurance. O’Keefe and Loewen agreed a deal in principle but then the trail went cold. Eventually, convinced that Loewen were sitting on their hands until he went bust, so it could buy him out for cents … Read more
It’s a Wonderful Knife
A squeezing of yet more blood from a very well squeezed stone, It’s a Wonderful Knife takes the 1980s/90s slasher movie and gives it a multiverse tweak by way of that 1946 Christmas classic starring James Stewart. The slasher movie and the Christmas movie often have similar starting points – peace and goodwill to all men – before disruption rears its head. Director Tyler MacIntyre and writer Michael Kennedy situate us right in a familiar, cosy world of snow, warm winter clothing and a white-picket small town preparing for Christmas then deliver a twist we can see coming, followed by another one we won’t see coming if the reference in the title to It’s … Read more
Orders to Kill
A spy movie written by people who’d been actual on-the-ground spies, Orders to Kill is a gripping thriller with an unusual focus on psychology rather than action. It’s set during wartime, in occupied France, where a member of the Resistance is suspected of selling agents down the river to the Nazis. Back in Boston, a war hero’s mother, played by silent movie legend Lilian Gish in scenes that could all be removed, is waiting for her son to return for some R&R. But her son is still in England, where he has been seconded at the last minute to go to France and assassinate the double agent. Paul Massie plays young, naive Gene … Read more
See How They Run
A kind of meta-The Mousetrap, See How They Run plonks itself down on the sofa alongside the other representatives of the whodunit revival – the likes of Knives Out and Kenneth Branagh’s adaptations of Agatha Christie. In essence it’s Agatha Christie’s venerable long-running play subjected to mock trial by a thousand in-jokes, some knowing, others oblique. If a slightly more cerebral Sunday afternoon movie is what you’re looking for, this could be for you. The film comes at The Mousetrap sideways because the Agatha Christie estate will not sanction any film version of the play until its London West End run is over (it’s been running since 1952 and shows no sign of … Read more
Underworld
1927’s Underworld is often described as the first gangster movie, or the first film noir. It’s neither really, but it’s easy to see why the tags stick. It is undeniably the movie that kicked off the gangster craze in the late 1920s and early 1930s and there’s enough moody lighting in it to tick any number of noir boxes. But really it’s a tale of doomed romance, the story of a gangster’s moll caught between not two but three men – her original guy, who she wants to do right by, a psychopathic rival, and the guy she falls for. For a silent movie it has a lot of psychological nuance, though the … Read more
Baahubuli: The Beginning
If you’ve ever wondered where RRR came from, or how come Tollywood became bigger than Bollywood, Baahubali: The Beginning is the answer to both questions. RRR was the crossover all-action spectacular that forced the rest of the world to take notice of Tollywood in 2022, and finally pushed it to the number one position in terms of Indian movie-making. In 2022 Tollywood (Telugu-language, centred in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana) produced 219 feature films against just 42 from Bollywood (Hindi-language, out of Mumbai, formerly Bombay) – the numbers do not lie. Nor does the box office. Baahubali: The Beginning had the best box offfice of any Indian film ever when it debuted in 2015, … Read more
Secret Ceremony
At first sight bizarre, and at second sight even weirder, 1968’s Secret Ceremony is the sort of arthouse thriller that Elizabeth Taylor apparently never made. For Mia Farrow, her co-star, it looks like a warm-up for the following year’s Rosemary’s Baby. Robert Mitchum, yes Robert Mitchum, makes up the third leg of this very wonky stool. Forget Mitchum for the moment. Who are these women, it asks and eventually answers, wrongfooting us most of the way with its story of needy co-dependence in which Taylor plays a woman called Leonora and Farrow plays Cenci (pronounced Chenchee). The women, both dressed in black, meet on the top deck of a London double-decker bus. Cenci … Read more
Une Jeune Fille Qui Va Bien aka A Radiant Girl
For her debut feature as a director, French actor Sandrine Kiberlain has decided not to take the easy route and instead go for something a bit bolder. Une Jeune Fille Qui Va Bien (A Radiant Girl) is a familiar story told in an unfamiliar way. Kiberlain returns to the grim history of the Jews of Paris under the Nazi occupation but filters it all – well, mostly all – through the eyes of a young drama student whose entire focus is on an upcoming audition to gain entry to the conservatory. As the film opens Irène (Rebecca Marder) is rehearsing Marivaux’s L’Épreuve with a fellow drama student. She faints. It might be part … Read more
A Dandy in Aspic
The film that killed the great director Anthony Mann, A Dandy in Aspic didn’t get killer reviews when it debuted in 1968. “Completely devoid of suspense” and “bland,” said the New York Times. Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide declared it “wooden”. Mann died of a heart attack towards the end of shooting and the movie’s star, Laurence Harvey, took over directing, which isn’t the reason the film bombed. Harvey actually takes some pains to ape the claustrophobic, slick style of Mann. There just isn’t a whole lot going on in Derek Marlowe’s original story (which he adapted for the screen). But what looked like a failure back then looks more like a calculation all … Read more
The Trouble with Being Born
The Melbourne International Film Festival wouldn’t screen The Trouble with Being Born when it came out in 2020. Likely to be “used as a source of arousal for men interested in child abuse material,” said the two forensic psychologists who informed its decision. Director Sandra Wollner’s German-language film ran into trouble at the Berlin Film Festival too, though it also won a special jury prize, just one of many from countless international film festivals. Not that awards and bans are usually much to go on, but in this case the various responses do say something. This is a tough film but a good one. Tough not because of the suggestions of paedophilia but … Read more
