Latest Posts
The Iron Claw
The family is a cult and the cult a family in the films of Sean Durkin. After Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest, The Iron Claw continues Durkin’s excavations with a biopic of the Von Erichs, a famous wrestling clan whittled away by a tragic curse. After a quick black-and-white preamble sketching paterfamilias Fritz’s own career as a fighter who failed to win the big prizes, Durkin goes curtain-up on the era of the retired fighter’s sons, the sun-kissed 1970s and beyond. Fritz, now a ballsy uncompromising martinet of the old school, is in charge of training his boys and of the wrestling franchise they fight in. By this point the family … Read more
Europa ’51
Often described as a neorealist film, Roberto Rossellini’s second collaboration with Ingrid Bergman, Europa ’51, is actually more a Hollywood melodrama with one breakaway neorealist moment. But more than that it’s a vehicle designed to rehabilitate Bergman by getting her to do what she was best at on screen – suffer. It’s the story of a high society woman who’s too busy drinking cocktails and exchanging chintzy chit-chat with her friends to notice that her son is in need of some love and affection. At a drinks party one night, son Michele attempts suicide by throwing himself down the stairs. He survives, only to die later of a complication. Irene (Bergman) is thrown … Read more
Restore Point
A decent sci-fi movie almost drowns in police procedural cliché in Restore Point (Bod Obnovy), a Czech movie owing something to Blade Runner – but then so much sci-fi does. The year is 2041 and in a world of driverless cars, dizzy buildings and swooshy screen tech, cop Emma Trochinowska (Andrea Mohylová) is assigned to investigate the death of the head of research at the Restore Institute, a creepy megacorps whose USP is selling people another crack at life if theirs ends “unnaturally”. As long – and much of the plot hangs on this detail – as they have a recent back-up from which to restore. The backup on standby is the way everyone … Read more
Shock Treatment aka Traitement de Choc
The weird thing about Traitement de Choc, usually shown in English-speaking areas as Shock Treatment, is that it went by the title Doctor in the Nude in the UK when it was released in the early 1970s. Nothing to do with the comic novel Doctor in the Nude by Richard Gordon, the latest in his larky series about young doctors, and more to do with the fact that for one very brief moment you got to see star Alain Delon’s penis. So that’s how it got sold to British audiences, with the vaguely saucy title as some sort of come-on, because selling it any other way would have been, in the distributors’ eyes … Read more
Talk to Me
Talk to Me announces Danny and Michael Philippou as gifted new arrivals on the Australian indie scene. With a feature debut this strong, how long the twins remain indie and in Australia is anyone’s guess. Apparently they turned down a directing gig on one of the DC Extended Universe movies to do this, so they clearly felt they had something special to offer. And it’s horror, too. With the horror market particularly crowded right now, this makes their determination to go it alone (if two people can be said to go it alone) all the more admirable. So what’s it about? A séance that goes wrong, in short, leading to demonic possession and … Read more
Old Men in New Cars
Two things impelled me towards 2002’s Old Men in New Cars (Gamle Mænd i Nye Biler in the original Danish). The first was the quirky title, which has no real connection with anything that happens in the film. The second was the name Kim Bodnia at the top of the credits. You might know him as the Danish half of the Danish/Swedish investigative duo in the original The Bridge. Or, maybe, as the Russian control of assassin Villanelle in Killing Eve. In both he brought a dry, subtle wit to characters it would be easy to overplay and he does something similar here, though hold the “subtle”. There is nothing at all understated … Read more
The Zone of Interest
The Zone of Interest is a film set in the house that’s right next door to Auschwitz, so it has a mountain to climb. Which is this – against the brute fact of exterminating people en masse, pictorial representation of the same is always going to look a bit kitsch. Jonathan Glazer, who directs and reworks Martin Amis’s novel, aims to get round the problem by simply not showing the grim goings-on next door. Instead he focuses exclusively on the life that camp commandant Rudolf Höss (not to be confused with Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess) lived with his wife, Hedwig, and children. What a picture Glazer paints, of life in this prim, neat, … Read more
The Ascent
Voskhozhdenie, the USSR movie from 1977, usually goes by the English title The Ascent, though The Ascension would be semantically and tonally closer to the mark, since this is a war movie done as an allegory for the passion of Jesus Christ. It’s a “lost patrol” movie. Or, to be strict, a lost patrol of a lost patrol. Larisa Shepitko’s movie starts off among a group of partisans, old folks, sick people and children out in the snow with nothing to eat except the handful of grain they are sharing out among themselves. They are forlorn, adrift, and will soon be dead, unless the two scouts sent out from the group come back … Read more
The Beekeeper
Jason Statham enters the territory of John Wick, Taken and The Equalizer (feel free to add your own) with The Beekeeper, a midweight actioner marked out by spectacular fight sequences and violence that’s ingenious and gloriously brutal. He plays one of those retired guys who used to be something in the secret service. They’re never regular CIA or anything so crass, these ex-operatives, but onetime members of elite squads who can eat whole SWAT teams for breakfast, even though they’re now retired, out of shape and don’t really want to swing into action. But swing into action they must once they’ve been triggered by the death of a dog, in John Wick’s case, … Read more
The Heroic Trio
Too fast and furious, maybe, Johnnie To’s 1993 superhero actioner The Heroic Trio nevertheless has energy and style to spare, and as much of that strange Hong Kong martial-arts weirdness – all leaping and spinning but no contact – as you could want. The plot gets kind of lost in the excess but it’s about a mad scheme to ensure that China has a new emperor by kidnapping a whole series of babies who are born on auspicious days. Eighteen have disappeared so far but it’s when the chief of police’s newborn becomes the 19th that a line is crossed. Behind the kidnappings is a mad cackling supervillain called Evil Master (Yen Shi-Kwan) … Read more
The Delinquents
A heist movie done as slow cinema, The Delinquents (aka Los Delincuentes) sets up genre expectations then delivers them with a twist. But mostly doesn’t deliver them at all. What a strange, big beast of a film Rodrigo Moreno has given us. Moreno gets straight into the meat of his story – Morán (Daniel Elías), a bank employee, realises that in one swift heist he can bag as much money as he’d make if he stayed in his job until retirement, 20-odd years in the future. Enough money, in fact, that he could split it with a fellow worker, Román (Esteban Bigliardi) and still be ahead. The plan: Morán will steal the money, … Read more
The Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter
Brigitte Bardot turns 90 in 2024 so this is a good time to have a look at her first starring role, in The Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter. It wasn’t her first film. That was Le Trou Normand, which also came out in 1952. It isn’t really her first starring role either, since Bardot herself doesn’t appear until 40 minutes in. The opening credits have her top-billed, but they might possibly have been reshot or recut for the US release, which didn’t happen until 1958, by which time Bardot was a phenomenon. You can see why that happened in this movie, which makes much of the physicality of the teenage BB – the original French title … Read more
