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Alias Nick Beal
Also known as The Contact Man, Alias Nick Beal is the much better title of this unusual political allegory meets supernatural drama. The Nick is Old Nick and the Beal is short for Beelzebub. Got it? A retelling of the Faust story is the idea, with Ray Milland as the Mephistopheles stand-in and Thomas Mitchell as Joseph Foster (Foster/Faust, see?), a principled and upstanding district attorney determined to nail a career criminal who has been outsmarting him for years. I’d give my soul to get that guy, says Foster in so many words at one point. And that’s it – unbeknown even to himself the deal is done. So when he meets the … Read more
Splitsville
Fans of the prosthetic penis will like Splitsville. For the rest of us there’s smart writing and a farcical plot aiming at… I have no idea… modern relationships? Is this really how people behave? I doubt it. Shorthand – it’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice meets The Break-Up (the one starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston as an estranged couple sharing an apartment). The basic set-up is that Carey (Kyle Marvin) and Ashley (Adria Arjona) are a married couple who split up suddenly when she decides she can do better than this deadbeat. She’s also hotter than him by an order of magnitude – Arjona is hotter than almost everybody – so … Read more
The Woman on Pier 13
Imagine that, the man who directed Mary Poppins also directed 1948’s Cold War thriller I Married a Communist aka The Woman on Pier 13. Though, when all is said and done, both are about infiltration and indoctrination when you come to think of it. One, of course, was madly successful and the other was such a clanger that they had to change its title (which is where Pier 13 came in). Whereupon it flopped all over again. It’s not hard to see why. This is anti-communist propaganda so flagrant it’s hard to swallow, in which the capitalists are the good guys – how they strive to improve the lot of the working man! … Read more
Lola
Back to the Future meets It Happened Here in Andrew Legge’s bold and original debut feature, Lola. What did you do during lockdown? Legge got out some pre-war wind-up cameras, threaded them with black and white film and shot a Nazi-inflected found-footage time-travel epic. Mad scientists are usually male and old but Legge’s heroes (if that’s what they are) are young and female, long-limbed aristo types fashioned after the Mitford sisters and played by Stefanie Martini, as Martha, and Emma Appleton as Thomasina. In a little preamble we’re given the found-footage set-up – reels of film found in the cellar of a country house in Sussex in 2021 – before we’re supposedly presented … Read more
Holiday in Spain aka Scent of Mystery
The odd thing about Holiday in Spain is that it was originally released in Smell-O-Vision under another title, Scent of Mystery. It flopped, even with the gimmick of various aromas being piped into cinemas as audiences watched. With another smelly film, Dead Lover, currently doing the rounds (writing this in March 2026) – it’s in Stink-O-Vision, a scratch-and-sniff take on the same idea – I thought I’d go back to this 1960 oddity and give it a spin. Which, of course, I can’t. Not the original Scent of Mystery at any rate. I don’t have the Smell-O-Vision technology and can’t find a copy of the film. Holiday on Spain, on the other hand, is … Read more
Resurrection
Absolutely one for the buffs, Resurrection is Bi Gan’s love letter and farewell to cinema. It’s dead is the overall message, but didn’t we have a lot of good times while it was here? A five-part compendium, each chunk different in terms of tone, look and genre, it’s a remarkable technical achievement, if nothing else. I’m saying “if nothing else” because I’m not convinced the non-buffs are going to walk away with much. Bi starts off with an intertitle card. It introduces the first section and also acts as an overall summation of the movie’s theme. In a world where dreaming has been eliminated, it says, there are still those “deliriants” who continue … Read more
The Man Who Cheated Himself
The Man Who Cheated Himself is a prime example of a good movie ruined by bad casting. Lee J Cobb’s in this case, who’s meant to be playing a cop blinded by love and winding up on the wrong side of everything. If Cobb’s Lieutenant Ed Cullen is a poor sap being driven by his dick, it doesn’t come across. Jane Wyatt also isn’t quite right as Lois, the object of Ed’s affection. It’s hard to locate her as a woman who could drive a man to mess his life up totally. No heat, no spark, no nothing. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The plot revolves around a little lie that turns … Read more
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
28 Years and a Bit Years Later, as 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was never going to be called. It’s the 2026 sequel to 2025’s 28 Years Later, which came 18 years after 28 Weeks Later, and it started shooting as soon as Danny Boyle had handed over to his replacement and handed the keys to the director’s mobile cabin to new arrival Nia DaCosta. It’s the second of three, so there’s one more to come, with Boyle back in charge. Be warned, this second one won’t work as a standalone, or barely. Do yourself a favour and watch 28 Years Later first – you can skip Days and Weeks, if all … Read more
Redux Redux
Redux Redux retools the high concept of Edge of Tomorrow, but instead of Tom Cruise being endlessly regenerated as an ever better fighting machine, it’s Michaela McManus as an endlessly vengeful mother repeatedly killing the man who killed her daughter, and visiting all the trillions of parallel universes to do so. Actually, Irene is hoping to find her daughter still alive and in the rude health in one of them. When she doesn’t, killing the man who stole her daughter’s life acts as consolation. It also means she gets to hone her slaughtering skills – tying the perp to a chair and setting fire to him in one universe, shooting him in another, … Read more
Hit Man
Hit Man is not really about a hit man. It’s about a guy who pretends to be one to lure potential perps into showing their hand. He’s whatever the male version of the honey trap is, and in this fictionalised retelling of the story of real-life dude Gary Johnson he is played by Glen Powell. The film is based on an article in Texas Monthly by Skip Hollandsworth. This is a good thing, since a Texas Monthly article by Hollandsworth also provided the basis of Bernie, a weird comedy of sorts starring Jack Black as a much-loved member of a smalltown community who also happened to be a real-life serial killer. Both films … Read more
They Won’t Believe Me
Robert Young forever played a good guy and wound up on TV as nice doctor Marcus Welby MD. In They Won’t Believe Me he doesn’t and the film really benefits from the against-type casting. As we meet his character, Larry Ballantine, he’s in the dock in court, where his own lawyer is describing him as “heartless, shameful, sordid and cruel”. Larry is a relentlessly womanising male of the first water and he’s now in court accused of murdering his girlfriend, or is it his wife? This incredibly twisted, brilliantly dovetailing plot is about a bad man being caught out by fate, which seems to have stepped in to intervene because Larry has simply … Read more
Caught by the Tides
Things change and things stay the same in Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhang-ke’s experimental movie inspired by the Covid pandemic. Locked down at home with nothing to do, Jia wondered if he could put something together using unused footage shot over the years – rehearsals for movies, location scouting, technical try-outs to see how equipment worked and so on. Also in there are excerpts from three of the nine films Jia has made with his wife, and star, Zhao Tao, over the years. Unknown Pleasures (2002), Still Life (2006) and Ash Is Purest White (2018). So what we’re seeing here is a montage of stuff that was never really intended to go … Read more
