Latest Posts
Only the River Flows
Imagine a crime thriller where the guy who looks guilty from the outset is the killer… or is he? Or where the police achieve their aims not through diligent hard work but by sheer fluke. Where every cliché of the genre gets an outing and most of them left entirely unmauled… but some of them are given a left-handed spin. But which ones? That’s Only the River Flows, a strangely ironic neo-noir from Wei Shujun, whose films often offer meta-comment on film-making and the workings of genre. This time around Wei gets into all that straight away, installing his cop, Captain Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) in the shell of an old cinema (klaxon), where he’s … Read more
Die Frau meiner Träume
Die Frau meiner Träume (The Woman of My Dreams) was just what the doctor ordered in 1944, if the name of the doctor in question was Goebbels and you were a happy member of Germany’s Thousand Year Reich. Light, frothy entertainment in the Hollywood style was what propaganda chief Goebbels had commanded Germany’s UFA studio to make and that’s what this is. It couldn’t have come at a better time. On the day it opened, 25 August 1944, the Allies were in the process of liberating Paris, the Warsaw Uprising was underway and the Germans were being rapidly pushed back out of the USSR. But never mind all that, here’s Marika Rökk to keep … Read more
The Brutalist
The Brutalist did well at the Oscars, winning three (Best Actor, Music, Cinematography) from a total of ten nominations. It is the sort of film the Academy likes – it’s got class written all over it, from the fancy opening credits and the high-end VistaVision process (not used for more than 60 years), to its built-in intermission and tackling of a pertinent issue. To wit: immigrants get the job done, as Lin-Manuel Miranda put it in Hamilton. One immigrant, in this case, an architect who survives the death camps of Europe, arrives in proud and confident America as it’s enjoying its finest flowering and then, through a series of adventures with a moneyed American … Read more
Finis Terrae
Beautifully made and beautifully restored, Jean Epstein’s 1929 drama about kelp gatherers on a remote Breton island is also quite simply a beautiful film, picturesque enough to charm even the most unwavering hater of silent movies. Having discovered some islands off the coast of Brittany, Epstein decided to shoot a film there using local people as his actors. His two “stars” are Ambroise Rouzic and Jean-Marie Laot, the former playing Ambroise, a young kelp gatherer working on the remote island of Bannec who cuts his thumb on a piece of broken glass. Laot, meanwhile, plays Jean-Marie, Ambroise’s colleague in kelp who realises after a few days that Ambroise is properly sick and sets … Read more
Sharp Corner
Beta-male-goes-mad time with Sharp Corner, borrowing the arc of The Shining and starring Ben Foster as a Jack Nicholson stand-in. There is no Overlook Hotel or supernatural stuff. Instead the action takes place in a “mansion” outside the city where Foster’s Josh McCall has moved his family, not once wondering why this great big house in the middle of nowhere could be bought at a price they could afford. The reason becomes obvious on their first night in the place when, as Josh and wife Rachel (Cobie Smulders) christen their new home by having sex on living room floor, they are rudely interrupted by a car wheel flying through their picture window. Sharp … Read more
Contraband
Powell and Pressburger’s second collaboration, 1940’s Contraband (aka Blackout) is a knockabout knock-off of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps – two people yoked together against their will, a Nazi cell and so on – which also goes large on Hitchcock’s light-hearted energy and his fondness for a set piece. Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson had both been in P&P’s first collaboration, the previous year’s The Spy in Black, and this time around play a couple charging around London under blackout conditions. She’s a spy who stole the shore passes issued to Veidt’s Captain Andersen, a Danish sea captain whose freighter has been impounded by the British authorities. He’s keen to get them back and … Read more
The Ballad of Wallis Island
Looking like an instant classic, The Ballad of Wallis Island is that rare thing: a beautifully crafted feelgood Britcom with no Richard Curtis involvement whatsoever. Though, while we’re about it, Curtis himself has called it “one of the greatest British films of all time.” On the face of it, it could not have come from a more unlikely corner. Writers/stars Tom Basden and Tim Key are probably best known (if at all) for their collaboration on Tim Key’s Late Night Poetry Programme, a BBC Radio 4 show mixing larky verse (Key), quirky music (Basden), and painful/funny interaction between the pair in linking material that has a loose, Larry David meta-ness to it. They … Read more
Trouble Every Day
The vampire genre gets reinvented every few years. Trouble Every Day is Claire Denis doing it definitively in 2001, a few years before Tomas Alfredson gave it the IKEA flatpack refit with Let the Right One In and Ana Lily Amanpour boldly put an Iranian spin on the whole thing with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night in 2014. In a sense Denis’s film is the motherlode, because it shows how this most verbose and ornate of genres can be approached from an entirely new angle. Watch Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) and tell me he hadn’t watched Trouble Every Day. He’s even repurposed plot elements. Quiet, slow, moody and lacking … Read more
Emilia Pérez
First feted then hated, Emilia Pérez got a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize. By the time the Oscars came around the tide had started running the other way, with its 13 nominations resulting in only two wins – Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldaña, plus Best Song (El Mal). What had happened in the interim is a textbook case of a social media pile-on, some of it justifiable some of it not, which resulted in all sorts of apologies being given to the faceless blob for crimes against trans people, misrepresentation, the lack of actual Mexicans in the key roles in a film largely set … Read more
Ishanou
Manipuri cinema, from the state of Manipur in northwest India, only got going in 1972 and it’s pretty fair to say that Ishanou (The Chosen One) is either the most famous film ever to come from there or a contender for the title. Made in 1990 by Aribam Syam Sharma it’s a beautiful and deceptively simple drama shot on 16mm stock, which makes the whole thing gauzy and impressionistic and offsets an ethnographic element as fascinating as the story it tells. A preamble gives us a structure for what’s to follow and fills us in on the background on the Maibis of Manipur, a religious order of sorts, whose female members are said … Read more
Juror No. 2
Juror No. 2 is a rare thing these days: a good old-fashioned courtroom thriller. Director Clint Eastwood, 93 when he made it, does it old-style, the way his mentor Don Siegel might have done it, and the result is a streamlined drama revolving around a central dilemma, just the sort of lean and fast second feature Siegel might have cranked out in the 1950s. It is a very neat plot, which I’m not going to ruin by explaining. What I can say is that Nicholas Hoult is the titular juror, a man who suddenly realises mid-trial that he can free the man accused of murdering his girlfriend at a stroke, but only if … Read more
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
The “miracle” of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is that audiences in 1943 bought Preston Sturges’s film as a proposition. The story makes no sense and Sturges knew it didn’t. Hence the framing device added to distance the “facts” of what we see on screen from their telling. The film begins with a state governor being told a wildly implausible story in a telephone call from an excited journalist, and ends back in the governor’s office, where the final tawdry details are being received. Sturges obviously intends that we understand we’re getting the facts at one remove and that there’s been a bit of journalist licence used in the story’s reporting. Here’s the … Read more
