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Secret Agent
Anyone for the fifth best British film of 1936, as voted for by the readers of the defunct Film Weekly? Secret Agent is one of a run of spy thrillers Alfred Hitchcock made in the 1930s. Sandwiched between The 39 Steps and Sabotage it’s the least compelling of the three, a misfire in many ways. There are two reasons for that, both Hitchcock’s fault. But let’s get to that later. First, you need to know that it stars John Gielgud as Edgar Brodie, a successful novelist recruited by the British secret service, given the spy moniker Ashenden (the title of the Somerset Maugham book on which the film’s based) and sent to Switzerland. … Read more
Sisu: Road to Revenge
Old Guys R Us: Part Two – Sisu: Road to Revenge repeats the formula of the first movie, of the iron-hard old Finnish dude taking on unimaginable numbers of bad guys… and prevailing, in a vastly entertaining way. He’s John Wick in a beard, transposed back to the 1940s. First time around the enemy was the Nazis. But time has moved on for Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), the war is over and the Nazis have been defeated. For Finns the result has not been entirely good. In a voiceover prologue that’s almost the entire movie’s spoken-word spend, we learn that the Soviet Union has advanced into Finland, taken a good chunk of territory … Read more
Decoy
Decoy is a tightly wound, plot-driven noir from producer/director Jack Bernhard, who made it in an attempt to turn his British wife, “Miss Jean Gillie” as she’s billed, into a Hollywood star. It didn’t work, though Gillie is actually very good as Bernhard’s female lead. Anticipating the femme fatale character of Gloria Grahame to some extent, complete with overpainted top lipline, Gillie plays Margot Shelby, the girlfriend of condemned murderer Frankie Olins (Robert Armstrong), who comes up with a plan to spring him from death row – by injecting an antidote to the lethal toxin administered in the gas chamber, thus bringing Frankie back to life after his execution. Do not try this … Read more
2000 Meters to Andriivka
The war in Ukraine cannot end well if 2000 Meters to Andriivka is anything to go by. A bulletin from the frontline during Ukraine’s counter-offensive in 2023, it paints a bleak picture of two countries at war, one of them fighting for its life, the other kicking sand in its face. (As I type in late December 2025 a lousy peace settlement is being hashed out, with the USA apparently urging Ukraine to hand chunks of the country to Russia while Ukraine’s fellow Europeans look on impotently.) The magic in this movie happens mostly in the edit suite, where all the (mostly bodycam) footage from a mission to liberate the Ukrainian village of … Read more
Night Editor
Night Editor started life as a popular radio show supposedly telling stories inspired by listeners’ letters. This 1946 movie spin-off, based on the episode titled Inside Story, was meant to be the first of a series. But that never came to be, and so we have only this as a suggestion of what might have been. Tales from the deep memories of old newspaper hands is the big idea. And after some scene-setting in the offices of the New York Star, where the night editor and other unfortunates working the graveyard shift play cards, drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, director Henry Levin’s film starts properly. It tells the story of Tony Cochrane (William … Read more
Eternity
A supernatural comedy just like Hollywood used to make – that’s the big idea behind Eternity, Irish indie film-maker David Freyne’s arrival in the bigtime, a knowing nod to Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch with a touch of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death thrown in for fun. To be fair to Freyne and co-writer Pat Cunnane, they don’t overdo the allusions, possibly to strangle compare-and-contrast criticism at birth. Though the plot – a recently dead woman is asked which of two men she wants to spend eternity with: her first love or her husband of many years – feels like it’s straight from the era of The Ghost Goes West and … Read more
Cornered
“This is the new Dick Powell,” the trailer insists. “Rougher. Tougher than in Murder, My Sweet.” Cornered is indeed the “new Dick Powell”. Audiences in the late 1930s and early 1940s knew him best as a crooner. But 1944’s Murder, My Sweet changed all that, when Powell became the first screen iteration of Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s dog-eared, quippy detective. In an adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, Powell delivered Chandler’s dialogue with great style – “She was a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud. I gave her a drink. She was a gal who’d take a drink, if she had to knock you down to get the bottle.” … Read more
10 Best Films of 2025
In a year packed with 1990s revivalism, noir resuscitation and franchise exhaustion, these are the films I liked the most in 2025. I’ve attempted to avoid the obvious but not be wilfully obscure and have probably succeeded at neither. Without further ado, with links to full reviews, here goes – in 1-10 order. Dying (dir: Matthias Glasner) A German black comedy so bleak you might laugh out of desperation, following a pair of oldsters as they reach the end of the road, and their two appalling adult children. Superbly underplayed by a top-notch cast, it’s a novelistic, dense, all-enveloping wallow in human misery, three hours long and worth every minute of the grief. … Read more
High Wall
One for lovers of noirish movies with twisty plots, High Wall doesn’t in the end quite add up emotionally, but its serpentine bends make it an enjoyable crime thriller asking us to reconsider an open-and-shut case once any number of impediments have been thrown in the way. The opening scene – a man is driving his car with his wife in the passenger seat. She’s dead, it seems, and in a few seconds he’ll be dead too, if his plan to crash his car off a bridge succeeds. That seems to be the story anyway. His plan doesn’t quite succeed. He survives the crash and has soon been arrested. He admits to killing … Read more
The Universal Theory
If Alfred Hitchcock, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka made a multiverse movie it might look like The Universal Theory, a fabulous and madly forensic undertaking by Timm Kröger, who gets just about all of it right and tells a really good story. You don’t need to be well versed in the works of any of the above to be well entertained but it really adds to the enjoyment. Kröger opens his story in a TV studio in the 1970s, where an author is bristling at his interviewer’s description of his book as fiction. It’s true, all true, the author says, causing the interviewer and fellow guests to smirk and titter. As Johannes Leinert … Read more
100 Years of… Battleship Potemkin
Imagine that, one of the best movies ever made is only 75 minutes long. All those epics striving for significance with buttock-flattening running times outdone by Battleship Potemkin, a century-old silent movie lasting only one hour and 15 minutes. Sight and Sound in their latest poll of the all-time greats currently have Potemkin in joint 54th place (alongside Blade Runner, Le Mépris, The Apartment and Sherlock Jr). Cahiers du Cinéma rate it highly. It’s one of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. At breakneck speed it tells the story of a failed revolution, the one in 1905 when the Russian navy mutinied and, for a brief moment, the possibility of … Read more
Blue Moon
The crappier sort of biopic tries to get the whole life into a couple of hours’ running time. The better ones seize on a moment or a few moments in the life of Famous Person X and make it/them emblematic. That’s what Blue Moon does, in spades. This is the story of the life and, in a way, the death of Lorenz Hart, the lyricist known for his sad, sad songs – My Funny Valentine is one of his. So is Glad to Be Unhappy. Blue Moon too. Difficult to work with, Hart had had a fruitful relationship with Richard Rodgers until Rodgers broke it off and went off to work with another … Read more
