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Nobody
“Who the fuck are you?” two cops ask the bloody guy they’ve got sitting over the table from them, in some sort of interview situation. “I’m, er…” he says. And boom, up on the screen comes the single word in giant letters, NOBODY, and this head-clearing mix of extreme violence and dry comedy gets underway. The nobody is feeding a kitten from a tin of tuna, by the way. A movie-length flashback answers the cops’ question. The guy is called Hutch Mansell. Director Ilya Naishuller and writer Derek Kolstad quick-cut-montage a picture of his humdrum existence. A suburban husband and father who does the routine things that dads with two school-age kids do, … Read more
The Matrix Resurrections
Dull rather than dim,The Matrix Resurrections reanimates the corpse of the original and best of the previous three Matrix movies and sets off in the right direction before bogging down in the sort of world-building, lore-laden plotting that hobbled numbers two and three. Some years have passed and Thomas Anderson (aka Neo aka The One but really Keanu Reeves) is now the world-famous designer of The Matrix, a trio of games that once took the world by storm. The games are still out there, though these days more in a legacy rock band kind of way. Resting on his laurels, Mr Anderson lives the gilded life of the successful and feted game designer. … Read more
Night Moves
Arthur Penn’s 1975 movie Night Moves sits snugly alongside two other films made about the same time – Polanski’s Chinatown (which went into production in the same month in 1973) and Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which had opened earlier that year. All three are neo-noirs recalling the era of Raymond Chandler, Sam Spade and Humphrey Bogart. Of the bunch only Chinatown was a proper box office and critical hit, and even then some critics were a bit sniffy (the New York Times didn’t go a bundle). Since then, The Long Goodbye has been rerated upwards to join Chinatown in the pantheon, and now it looks like Night Moves is also in the process … Read more
The Hitch-Hiker
1953’s The Hitch-Hiker opens with an on-screen declaration: “This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours – or that couple across the aisle. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual.” A gun, a man, a car, those staccato sentences, the threat of death – it’s film noir, and an unusual one not because of its length (a lot of noirs were short B movies), but because it was directed by Ida Lupino, a rare female voice in among the big swinging dicks of … Read more
Eternals
Like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, Eternals is a Marvel superhero movie that’s sketchy, thin, never fully fleshed out. Not bad, exactly, just hard to get a bead on. Is stuff missing or was it never meant to be there? Perhaps its problems lie in the origins of the source material, an iteration of an iteration etc etc. The first of the superhero gangs was 1960’s Justice League (itself a revival of the 1940s Justice Society of America), a greatest-hits compilation of DC Comics’ big hitters – Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash and more. In 1963 Marvel responded to the success of the Justice League with its own version, … Read more
Daisy Kenyon
Let’s just get this out of the way. Daisy Kenyon isn’t a film noir, even though it features on many noir “best of” lists. It’s a romantic melodrama of a very peculiar sort – “High powered melodrama surefire for the femme market” is how Variety described it on its release in 1947, in their odd, truncated way of communicating. More up-to-the-minute viewpoints can be found on Amazon – “NOT a true example of film noir”… “certainly not a film noir”… “DEFINITELY NOT FILM NOIR” – three of many. However, the tagging persists. It’s in the Fox Film Noir series of movies, its Amazon page pegs it as “Mystery & Suspense/Film Noir”, which is doubly, … Read more
Respect
It would easy to go all hatey on Respect, a biopic of the life of Aretha Franklin, but instead let’s take it for what it is – the authorised version, the Stations of the Cross of a towering talent who even old, sick and with her voice in ruins could yank a tear, if not sobs, from the coldest of hearts. As we can see at the end of the film in actual footage from Aretha’s performance at the 2015 Kennedy Center tribute to Carole King which, perhaps unwisely, is shown over the end credits. Jennifer Hudson never quite manages anything similar, brilliant though she is. Choose your biblical metaphor – she’s Daniel … Read more
Point Blank
Midway between Philip Marlowe and John Wick, Walker, the hero of 1967’s Point Blank is a stylish hero in a film so stylish and influential that its original impact can now only be guessed at, so relentlessly has it been plundered in the ensuing decades. Soderbergh is a fan, as is Tarantino, and so, of course, is Chad Stahelski (of John Wick fame). Mel Gibson and director Brian Helgeland remade it in 1999 as Payback (go for 2006’s Payback: Straight Up, the dirtier director’s cut, if you’re heading that way) but it’s Boorman’s framing and his use of locations, space and sound that have made Point Blank such a moodboard/sourcebook, as well as … Read more
The Man Who Sold His Skin
“Sometimes I think I”m Mephistopheles,” guyliner-wearing conceputal artist Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw) tells Sam (Yahya Mahayni) near the beginning of The Man Who Sold His Skin. Sam is the Syrian refugee Godefroi is about to sign up to be a living art work, and Godefroi’s declaration is as clear a reference as you need that this is an update on the Faust legend, albeit with a clever retooling for a more secular age – men no longer sell their souls, it’s their ass or, more decorously, their skin that’s in this game. The Arabic original title – translated as The Man Who Sold His Back – gets things a touch closer to … Read more
Le Samouraï
Jean-Pierre Melville’s stylish 1967 hitman flick Le Samouraï has danced down the decades, leaving its mark on everything from William Friedkin’s The French Connection, to Walter Hill’s The Driver (and, by extension, Nicolas Winding Refn’s homage, Drive), Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, Anton Corbijn’s The American and the Coens’ No Country for Old Men. Even John Wick can trace its ancestry back to Le Samouraï, Keanu Reeves being a 21st century update on the lone wolf operator going into battle against forces known and unknown. The opening shot alone makes Le Samouraï noteworthy. A darkened room, a man lying on a bed. The camera does one of those perspective-altering Vertigo zooms, gets about halfway into … Read more
The Many Saints of Newark
The pre-publicity for The Many Saints of Newark made much – all, actually – of the fact that this was the origin story of Tony Soprano, fictional mob boss and kingpin of the TV show The Sopranos. Take a quick look at the IMDb page and there, at the very top, the blurb says – “Witness the making of Tony Soprano.” The casting of Michael Gandolfini, son of James (who played Tony Soprano in the TV series), reinforced the idea – here’s how Tony Soprano became Tony Soprano. But. But. But. Whatever The Many Saints of Newark is, what it certainly isn’t is a film about Tony Soprano. He’s at best peripheral to … Read more
The Woman in the Window
Not to be confused with the 2021 movie of the same name, 1944’s The Woman in the Window is the second of three film noirs Fritz Lang made with Joan Bennett and the first of two he’d make with Edward G Robinson. It’s a queer beast – noir with a plot trick picked up from The Wizard of Oz, a trick used so brilliantly it rescues what looks like a film that’s gone weirdly off the rails. Robinson plays the tweedy psychology professor called Richard, Dick to his friends – Sigmund Freud bubbles around beneath the surface of this plot and that name is no accident – who, while admiring a portrait of a … Read more
