Latest Posts
Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon tends to get summed up in one of two ways. It’s either Stanley Kubrick’s visually sensational magnum opus and a triumph of film-making at every level, or it’s a bit of a bore, a “one thing after another” drama with not much actual drama in it. Both are true. Adapting William Makepeace Thackeray’s story about a young Irish chancer’s escapades, it follows young Barry, original name Raymond Barry, from his first shy encounter with his sexy, cock-teasting cousin Nora (Gay Hamilton), through a series of adventures criss-crossing wartorn 18th-century Europe. To survive in the world Barry signs up for whichever army will have him – no scruples – and plugs away … Read more
Misericordia
So here’s France’s best film of 2024, in the esteemed Cahiers du Cinéma’s estimation at any rate. Which may come as a surprise to many in the anglosphere, where Misericordia came and went without making much of a stir, as Alain Guiraudie’s films so often do. It’s a slight return to Guiraudie’s most well received film (a finger in the air poll only), 2013’s Stranger by the Lake, which set a “cosy” murder mystery at a secluded countryside spot where gay men convene to have sex with each other. Guiraudie opened that film with shots of penises in mid frame and continued in much the same vein, the Poirot-esque murder investigation regularly taking … Read more
Darkest Miriam
An enigmatic title for an enigmatic film, Darkest Miriam is a puzzling almost 1990s-style drama. It’s a showcase for Britt Lower, star of Severance on TV, who carries the entire movie with a cryptic and compelling performance. And it grew out of a short, Miriam’s World, conceived as an art installation, so there’s a touch of arthouse aridity. That said, director Naomi Jaye isn’t rolling around in it. There is the sense that she’s keeping the weird in check. Lower plays a competent but withdrawn librarian whose daily life of almost eccentric normality is disrupted when she spots a guy, who turns out to be a Slovenian called Janko (Tom Mercier), on a … Read more
Exorcist II: The Heretic
Exorcist II: The Heretic aka The Heretic aka The Worst Film Ever Made gets people excited for all the wrong reasons. The sequel to a film that didn’t need one, it was a fool’s errand by John Boorman, who directed it, then cut it about a fair bit after audiences started laughing at it in previews. Today there are three versions. The original amusing version, the shorter theatrical cut Boorman delivered (and which still didn’t work) and then a re-edited version for European markets, which didn’t work all over again. Poor Boorman never quite recovered from the drubbing it got. William Friedkin, who directed the original, said it was “as bad as seeing … Read more
Beating Hearts
Beating Hearts is a French gangster-origin story, a noirish Goodfellas with more preamble. Let’s just cut through the flim-flam and say that it’s got some serious problems, yet the actors are so good. The concept isn’t bad either – Scorsese with some West Side Story ambitions, plus a bit of Tarantino stirred in, or that’s what director Gilles Lellouche says. It splits pretty neatly down the middle into two halves, with the first half meant to set us up for the second, which it doesn’t. In part one, 1980s bad boy Clotaire meets swotty, smart and attractive Jackie, and is instantly smitten. Doubly smitten when he tries to flirt with her with a lippy … Read more
In Harm’s Way
Did the world need Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way in 1965? Does it need it now? After all if you’re in the market for a big, formless war movie shot in expensive-looking black and white and starring John Wayne, there is and was 1962’s The Longest Day. But Day was Europe and Way is the Pacific, the thinking obviously went. And so here we are. The action kicks off in Pearl Harbor on the evening before it’s bombed by the Japanese. By the end of the attack the film’s two main characters, heroic Captain Rock Torrey (John Wayne) and his no-less-courageous first officer Commander Paul Eddington (Kirk Douglas), have both been busted down … Read more
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Almost three hours of Tom Cruise running around and hanging off things, doing stunts a man in his mid-60s probably shouldn’t do. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is madly over-indulgent and yet, after playing a blinder in seven straight movies, can’t we allow Cruise and co a victory lap? It is a greatest-hits package in many respects, a Dad Rock arena tour of the highlights. As Cruise’s Ethan Hunt (though aren’t they really the same person?) and his M:I team embark on a mission to stop AI taking over the whole world, we are fed reminders of past glories in little “previously on M:I” flashbacks. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jon Voight and Léa Seydoux … Read more
The Gangster
There aren’t that many films called The Gangster, which is odd considering how many gangster movies there are. But here he is, this singular malefactor, in a film noir from 1947, a strange one with a weird, distorting-mirror quality. Too arty for its own good seems to have been the general consensus at the time. I have no idea what any of those complaints are about. The odd art deco clock and building frontage to one side, there’s not much artiness going on here at all – director Gordon Wiles isn’t messing about overly with the narrative. DP Paul Ivano gives it to us fairly straight in terms of lenses and lighting. Dalton … Read more
Zombies of the Third Reich
Zombies of the Third Reich lives in a critic-proof zone along with all the other Nazi Zombie movies. How do you approach something that’s designed to be ridiculous? A collision of genres, a mixed chow mein of excess, these movies come from the land that taste forgot. And that’s exactly as it should be. Good taste is the enemy of great art, as Marcel Duchamp once said. In a funny preamble we meet a twittish British officer (Ellis J Wells) briefing Craftman (Zach Devereux), a plucky Brit, about a Nazi experiment into the creation of a supersoldier somewhere in Second World War France. On what’s clearly something of a suicide mission, Craftman is … Read more
La Strada
The simple Italian led astray by an egotistical monster. Who could Federico Fellini have had in mind when he was making La Strada in 1954? This, according to all the books, is where Fellini the neorealist ends and Fellini the fantastical begins, in a movie about a strong man “buying” a halfwit daughter off a poor woman and then touring Italy with her as part of his act. It was Pope Francis’s favourite movie and directors as diverse as Peckinpah, Kurosawa, Konchalovsky and David Cronenberg have all sung its praises. Fascinatingly, both Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson have claimed it as an influence on key songs – on Hey, Mr Tambourine Man and … Read more
Hot Milk
In a hot European beach resort a woman in a wheelchair seeks a crank cure for her condition with her resentful daughter along in tow. Hot Milk is a hothouse drama, a sketch of a nasty little co-dependent relationship. Will the worm turn, and if so, when? Is mother really crippled, or is this part of her way of controlling her adult daughter? Does daughter realise her mother is possibly putting it all on? As mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), with sulking Sofia (Emma Mackey) perpetually on call, consults a dubious doctor on one of the Spanish Costas, something appears to be brewing but debut director Rebecca Lenkiewicz isn’t telling us what. “What do … Read more
Stray Dog
Subtle, understated Japanese film noir, 1949’s Stray Dog appears to be Akira Kurosawa’s embrace of the post-War reconstruction of Japan in the image of the American conqueror. It may be something else as well. But before all that, is the “stray dog” we see panting in the opening titles meant to be Japan itself? That dog does not otherwise feature in the film. No dog does. Instead of canines, Kurosawa beetles away at a Maguffin leading us from one end of his movie to the other. The story of a diligent young cop, Detective Murakami (Toshirō Mifune), who one sweltering day on a crowded bus has his police revolver lifted from his jacket … Read more
