Latest Posts
A Blonde in Love
One of the key movies of the Czech New Wave of the 1960s, Miloš Forman’s A Blonde in Love (original title: Lásky jedné plavovlásky) was also the director’s international breakout. Through a long career, individual freedom was Forman’s abiding concern. The oppressive force of totalising regimes and the stultifying power of received wisdom on individual liberty always played a powerful role in his movies, whether it was Jack Nicholson trying to get the inmates’ voices heard in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Mozart trying to find an audience for his music in Amadeus or Larry Flynt banging the drum for free speech in The People vs. Larry Flynt. It’s the same here, … Read more
Totally Killer
As a capsule description Totally Killer sounds totally familiar. A nice white-picket American town in 1987. Three 16-year-old females murdered, stabbed 16 times by the same masked mystery assailant. The murderer never caught. Now, 35 years later, on Halloween, it’s happening again. A Nightmare on Elm Street? Friday the 13th? Most obviously Halloween – the date, the mask, the teenagers, the burbs and all that. Yes. But no. Because to that heady bestiary of 1980s horror, writers David Matalon and Sasha Perl-Raver add another mid-1980s staple – the time-travel movie, à la Back to the Future (1985) or Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). Kiernan Shipka plays Jamie Hughes, the Peggy Sue/Marty McFly avatar … Read more
The Wrong Box
Lovely wallpaper. It’s not the highest praise you could give to a film, but The Wrong Box is one of those British films of the 1960s that’s so fundamentally terrible that you are left scrabbling to find something good to say about it. It’s a bad picture but isn’t the frame lovely? It’s one of those sub-Agatha Christie comic capers set in the Victorian era, where two ancient brothers are the last survivors of an elaborate tontine pact set up decades before – everyone pays in but only the last surviving member benefits from the payout – with John Mills and Ralph Richardson as Masterman and Joseph Finsbury, the two old duffers trying … Read more
Passages
Writer/director Ira Sachs’s fascination with asymmetric power relations and love of French film-maker Éric Rohmer come together in Passages, a very French, oblique and bohemian tale full of characters who have space to breathe and yet somehow manage to box themselves in. People stuck in passages. It’s a frustrating film full of great scenes, connected up with Rohermesque fannying about – people standing around not saying very much, moodily. But what a cast. Franz Rogowski as Tomas, a young film director who we first meet directing extras to come downstairs into a club in one of the final scenes of the movie he’s shooting. They will not do it his way. Or cannot … Read more
Ku! Kin-dza-dza
Let’s hear it for animated sci-fi comedy from the Russia. Anyone? Ku! Kin-dza-dza is a strange film whichever way you slice it, starting with its title, and the fact that it’s a remake of a live-action movie from 1986, also made by Georgiy Daneliya (here directing alongside Tatyana Ilina), who decided in 2013 that he needed to take a second tour of the territory, what with the Iron Curtain having fallen in the interim. Out went a good chunk of the satire and the darkness, though the kookiness remains in his story of a snobbish cellist and his streetwise nephew who are accidentally transported from wintry Russia to an alien world where status … Read more
The Adults
The Adults will resonate with anyone who’s ever left home – to go to college, take a job, whatever – flown the parental nest, and then started returning periodically on visits that are more duty than pleasure. Eric, played by Michael Cera at a level of diffidence that’s very Michael Cera, is the guy back in town and trying to duck obligations to old friends and family by playing one off against the other. He’d love to come and see the new baby of one set of friends but he’s seeing his sisters that night. To the sisters he hands out the same bullshit excuse but flipped – he’s seeing the baby so … Read more
High and Low
Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low – one of a run of successful movies from him in the late 1950s and early 1960s – is something of a surprise. It sets off in one direction, with a moral dilemma, only to wind up in a different place entirely, as a police procedural the likes of which you can catch on TV any night of the week. This comes as a bit of a relief, because for its first third the tension is so exquisitely pitched it’s hard to look at the screen. It’s based on an Ed McBain thriller and tells the story of a businessman locked in the middle of a struggle for control … Read more
The Storms of Jeremy Thomas
The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is a documentary for people who enjoy the sort of films that Jeremy Thomas gets involved with. The likes of The Sheltering Sky, Sexy Beast, Crash, High-Rise, 13 Assassins or The Dreamers. Smart, good-looking, slightly offbeat stuff, not arthouse exactly – his films are too starry for that. But not your Pixars, or Disneys, or Marvels or Foxes. Thomas is the producer or executive producer behind all of those movies, plus a long run of critical and box office successes going back to the 1970s. A “searingly bright” man of “great taste”, “totally playful” who can be “very serious”, says Debra Winger. “The dream producer… the enabler… so rock’n’roll,” … Read more
Femme Fatale
Brian De Palma’s films are a treat for people who watch a lot of movies, and Femme Fatale is no exception. Starting with an excerpt from Double Indemnity – the bit where Barbara Stanwyck is telling Fred MacMurray that she’s “rotten to the heart” – it then replays a similar scenario, with a tweak, in the modern (2002) era, with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (as she was at the time) in the “femme fatale” role and Antonio Banderas as the guy trying to hang on to his testicles. Romijn-Stamos plays a very bad woman indeed, and in typically playful, relentlessly referential De Palma style the action starts at the Cannes film festival where her badass Laure is … Read more
Lust Life Love
Not to be confused with a 2010 film by feminist pornographer Erika Lust with a very similar title, 2021’s Lust Life Love (NOT, I repeat NOT, Life Love Lust) has its own hold on raunch, being a grungey tale of a polyamorous New York woman whose hitherto free-and-easy glide through various sexual relationships in the sex clubs of New York hits a bump when romance rears its head. Veronica is a bisexual woman we first meet on the dark streets of nighttime New York as she heads to an assignation with a couple she has never met before. Wearing an animal print coat and stockings with seams up the back, she’s the image … Read more
Because That Road Is Trodden
Because That Road Is Trodden is included as a bonus item on the BFI’s release of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. It’s a strange extra, not thematically linked, no personnel in common. Both were shot in the UK towards the end of the 1960s, this at Bryanston School, a fee-paying private school in Dorset, Mulberry Bush in working class Stevenage New Town. By British standards these places are not even geographically close. It’s a strange and short film, moody and woozy, about a day in the life of someone called only The Boy (Sebastian Tombs) from waking up in the morning onwards (though minute to minute this is not). It was … Read more
Slotherhouse
“It all started,” Slotherhouse co-writer Brad Fowler said in an interview, “when a little old man in Florida asked, ‘What is the dumbest idea you can come up with?’ ” After about five minutes of “joking around”, Slotherhouse had emerged – a concept and a title in one fell swoop. Sloths. The least predatory creature in the jungle, an animal that spends most of its time apparently asleep. Furry. Small. Cute. Not an anaconda, or a shark or a tyrannosaur. How about taking sloths and using them to menace a sorority house where a Mean Girls vibe separates out queen bitch Brianna (Sydney Craven – a Wes Craven-adjacent name to conjure with) from all … Read more
