Latest Posts
Red Rooms
Red Rooms (Les Chambres Rouges) started life as a drama about the sort of women who befriend or become romantically attached to men accused of terrible, heinous crimes, but ended up being about something else entirely. That initial idea is still in there, though, in the character of Clementine, a short, nervous young woman who has hitch-hiked and travelled by bus to Montreal to sit in on the trial of a man, Ludovic Chevalier, accused of kidnapping, torturing and dismembering three girls. Chevalier, adding insult to mortal injury, then sold the films shot in his “red room” on the dark web. Alongside Clementine in the audience at the trial another woman, Kelly-Anne, a … Read more
Dark Passage
“Completely preposterous,” is how the Chicago Tribune described Dark Passage in its 1947 review. No argument here. But did Delmer Daves, who wrote the screenplay and directed this bizarre noir, simply make a bad film, or was he saying something about the latent absurdities of the genre, in particular the way fate operates? Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, an innocent man doing time in San Quentin for murdering his wife, who we first meet breaking out by stowing away in a garbage truck. He’s soon been picked up by a man who quickly works out who he is. Ructions follow, but Parry wins out, and is then picked up by the very woman … Read more
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
There’s nothing wrong with Ghostbusters: Afterlife at all, apart from its strange reluctance to reference Ghostbusters, the 2016 reboot directed by Paul Feig. The one that exercised a lot of bedwetters with its “controversial” cast with a lot of women in it. It wasn’t very good, but not because it starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Patty Tolan and Kate McKinnon. It just wasn’t funny or scary. They never are, scary I mean, the Ghostbusters films. That’s not really the point. The idea is to deliver lots of likeable knockabout camaraderie and good vibes, which is what Afterlife does, liberally scattering easter eggs referring back to one of the original two movies, but not … Read more
The Ghost Breakers
1940’s The Ghost Breakers is one of the most successful comedy-horror movies ever made. Critically and at the box office it did well and it’s still regularly on the all-time-best shortlists when they’re being drawn up. It’s a haunted house/ghost/zombie movie with some random bad humans in the mix and stars Paulette Goddard as Mary Carter, a woman who as the movie opens is learning that she has inherited the Castle Maldito on Black Island, somewhere off the coast of Cuba. Rejecting offers from various parties keen to take it off her hands, she heads off to take possession of it, becoming entangled en route with Bob Hope’s Larry Lawrence, a radio gossip … Read more
Lake George
Neo noir of a particularly minimal sort, Lake George gets better the longer it’s up there on the screen, and by the time it’s hitting its closing scenes it’s almost in a zen state. It’s largely a two-hander centred on two actors who are generally more support players than leads. Shea Whigham, brilliant in any number of other films (Eileen, Fast & Furious 9, Joker) and Carrie Coon (The Nest, Widows and a couple of Avengers movies, as Proxima Midnight). He’s the jailbird just out after a ten-year stretch. An accidental jailbird, it transpires, who made a complete mess of a job for a Mr Big called Armen and yet still wants to … Read more
Party Girl
Party Girl reminds us that director Nicholas Ray wasn’t just a master of noir. Alongside the stark monochrome of great dramas like In a Lonely Place and They Live by Night, there’s this insanely lush, ridiculously colourful offering, often bracketed with Ray’s other colour movies of the era – Johnny Guitar or Rebel without a Cause, for instance – but quite apart from them in tone. It’s still very noirish, a gangster movie in colour, really, with Cyd Charisse the titular star but the movie very much focused on the character Robert Taylor plays, Tommy Farrell. They’re both not-quite people: she’s a fan dancer (which really means stripper at the very least) at … Read more
Silver Haze
I saw Vicky Knight being interviewed around the time Silver Haze came out in 2023. She is its star, as she was in Sacha Polak’s previous film, Dirty God, and is once again hellishly good as a woman in search of a better life being tripped up by her circumstances. The jaw-to-the-floor moment of the interview came when the quietly spoken and very unactorly Knight revealed that she still had a day job, working in Britain’s National Health Service as a health support worker. Everyone in the room took a breath. The scarring she sustained after being trapped in a fire in her grandfather’s pub aged eight must be some of the reason … Read more
Crossfire
In 1947’s swift noirish crime drama Crossfire a bunch of Army guys in the process of being demobbed meet a guy in a bar. By the end of the evening the guy is dead. But who did it and why? Director Edward Dmytryk opens with the death happening in shadowplay against a wall, as the unfortunate Samuels (Sam Levene) is worked over in a room by two assailants we never see. Samuels goes down, the men flee, the cops arrive. The questioning starts, and it’s a strange affair, with no names being asked for by the cop, and the guy he’s questioning not surrendering any either, it’s just “this man”, “this fella”, “two … Read more
Abigail
How to describe Abigail without ruining it? It starts out looking very much like a heist thriller, except it’s not money the gang in question is trying to lift, but a young girl called Abigail, the daughter of a very rich man, we later learn, who is expected to pay out $50 million to get her back. The gang all have aliases – Frank, Sammy, Joey, Peter, Dean and Rickles, the Rat Pack in other words, which gives everything a Tarantino-esque flavour. And Reservoir Dogs slight return is seemingly what’s on the cards once the gang successfully kidnap Abigail and wind up back at the big old mansion. Here it looks like they … Read more
The Seventh Victim
A prequel of sorts to Cat People, 1943’s The Seventh Victim is also something of a warm up for Rosemary’s Baby – Satanists in New York! – and the debut of Kim Hunter, who plays the little girl lost in the big city. It’s a bit of a mad film, not quite all adding up but stoked with atmosphere, all kicking off with schoolgirl Mary (Hunter) being called into the principal’s office at her school because her older sister, Jacqueline, has not been keeping up with the payments on the fees. She’s gone missing, it seems. So Mary heads to New York to find her, and there tangles with one New York type … Read more
Conclave
Conclave is not so much a case of who done it as who won it, a thriller set in the Vatican as the cardinals gather to elect a new pope. Being an adaptation of a Robert Harris novel, like Enigma (which became a film of the same name) and The Ghost (which became The Ghost Writer), it’s a closely researched thing, its potentially deadening attention to detail kept spiky by the addition of some suspense, intrigue, cloak and dagger and some lively thumbnail performances by a lot of mostly old white guys as the cardinals. Following custom, when an old pope dies, the men in scarlet come together from the four corners of … Read more
Our Last Tango aka Un Tango Más
“There will never again be another tango couple like us,” says María Nieves, best known for her long-standing partnership with Juan Carlos Copes. You’ll never have heard of the pair of them if you’re not interested in tango, but Our Last Tango (aka Un Tango Más), German Kral’s film about them, works just fine whether you’re a newbie or an aficionado of these Argentinian dancing giants, largely thanks to its emotional core. “If I could do it all again, I’d do it all the same. Everything… except being with Juan,” says María at one point. At just shy of 80 when this was made in 2015, she’s about to hang up her shoes and … Read more
