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Dying
How’s this for an opening shot. An old woman in distress on the floor in her nightie, shit down one of her legs; behind her an old guy jigging dementedly, naked beneath his open blue shirt, genitals flapping in the breeze. Dying (Sterben in its original German) is billed in some quarters as a black comedy. Brown might be closer to the mark. It’s a very, very dark colour either way. Find your jollies where you can with this one. A companion piece to Michael Haneke’s Amour, maybe, it paints a bleak picture of old age, and follows the two oldsters, Lissy and Gerd – she still just about keeping up appearances, he … Read more
Stranger on the Third Floor
Peter Lorre is top-billed but he’s really just the seasoning in Stranger on the Third Floor, often described as the first film noir. Lorre owed RKO a couple of days on his contract and so got shoe-horned into Boris Ingster’s directorial debut, bumping John McGuire from poll position. The film doesn’t need Lorre to work, but he adds off-whack flavour to the portrayal of an escaped lunatic – a scant handful of scenes, not that much to get excited about. In 64 tight minutes, Ingster, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca and writer Frank Partos do two remarkable things. First, they make a thematic break with the crime movies that came before to deliver an indictment … Read more
Wish You Were Here
So you’re Julia Stiles and you decide to have a crack at directing a feature film. Wish You Were Here is the result, and, well well, if it isn’t a mash-up of precisely the sort of films Stiles used to star in when she was starting out, rom-com, girl-next-door, travails-of-the-teen-spirit-y kind of stuff – Ten Things I Hate about You most notably. She also wrote Wish You Were Here so this choice is clearly deliberate. Possibly Stiles is laying ghosts to rest or laughing at herself, it’s hard to say. What is clear is that her film is a mess until it properly works out which of the various early-Stiles-adjacent genres it really … Read more
Dekalog
Ten shortish films loosely working their way through the Ten Commandments, director Krzysztof Kieslowśki and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s epic Dekalog made its TV debut in December 1989, as Poland was shaking off its Soviet overlords, and was instantly hailed as a masterpiece. Time has polished its legend and it’s still regularly cited as one of the greatest… TV shows or movie collections, take your pick. The whole ten-parter is set in and around one bleak Warsaw tower block, where people come and go, lives are lived and little moral dilemmas play out. In the first one, which lays out the stall, a prescient story about transcendental spirituality and the consciousness (or otherwise) of … Read more
The Lost Bus
Paul Greengrass’s first film for five years is about a bus you definitely wouldn’t want to catch. The Lost Bus transports him and us back to the quasi-disaster-movie style of United 93, his 9/11 movie. It’s about a real-life disaster – 85 people dead, 50,000 evacuated in the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the deadliest in California’s history. In disaster-movie fashion we get to know our hero, the driver of a yellow school bus, on a fairly typical day. Kevin is nearing the end of his tether – can’t seem to get on the right side of bus company management, struggling with a sick mother at home, an estranged wife who hates him, a … Read more
Lacombe Lucien
En route to winning the Nobel prize for literature in 2014, Patrick Modiano co-wrote Lacombe Lucien with Louis Malle, not only a pitiless study of sociopathic human behaviour but a rebuttal of the dearly held notion in France that amost everyone during the Second World War was in the Resistance. It did not go down well with French critics when it came out in 1974, who saw Modiano and Malle’s portrait of young Lucien Lacombe for what it was – a barely coded indictment of the motherland. It’s massively immersive, as no one ever said back then, and invites audiences to slip into its world as if into a great novel. Against a … Read more
Harbin
The national myths of one country don’t necessarily click with a foreign audience. Harbin, about Korean freedom fighters battling to throw off the Japanese yoke, makes the point abundantly. If you’re Korean it’ll almost certainly mean more to you than it did to me, a Brit, who without the added zing of patriotic feeling and background knowledge had to rely solely on old-fashioned stuff like drama, characters and world-building to get his scant cinematic jollies. Director Woo Min-ho puts up a brief written explanation of the situation at the beginning of the film. The 1905 Treaty of Eulsa effectively turned Korea into a colony of Japan, it says, but also had the effect … Read more
A Colt Is My Passport
It’s either a western that looks like a hard-boiled yakuza movie or vice versa, but whatever it is 1967’s A Colt Is My Passport is a fantastically stylish affair. In pin-sharp monochrome it borrows from manga, Sergio Leone, Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville and it made enough of a mark on the young Denis Villeneuve for him borrow chunks of its look for his debut, August 32nd on Earth. As it opens the western and the crime thriller are already in contention. To a Morricone-esque score of whistles and twangy guitar we follow a hitman on a precise, methodical loner-hitman job – the high vantage point, the weapon screwed together from parts, a … Read more
I Want to Eat Your Pancreas
Horror? You might expect something with the title of I Want to Eat Your Pancreas to be about the eating of body parts. Instead it’s an animated terminal-illness weepie, along the lines of The Fault in Our Stars, and though it suffers from the big problem most of these things have – implausibly fragrant decline – it’s cute, well animated, and interesting in its portioning out of agency. She pushes, he resists, which flips the usual dynamic of jousting knights and shrinking maidens. It wastes no time getting going. A meet-cute in a library where a young woman, Sakura, accidentally drops a book and gallant swain Haruki picks it up to return it … Read more
The Face behind the Mask
Playing the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M bought Peter Lorre his ticket to Hollywood, where he soon tired of playing exotics and weirdos. He was already Hollywood’s go-to creep when he made The Face behind the Mask in 1941. It follows a naive watchmaker who arrives in New York off the boat from old Europe, gets horrifically burned in a hotel fire, then, unable to get work on account of his looks, embarks on a life of crime to pay for reconstructive surgery. Both a wild gothic-crime story and an an invitation to overact, Lorre gives it both barrels. The story gets wilder once Janos discovers that surgery will be impossible. Instead, … Read more
Nickel Boys
The bold experiment ultimately doesn’t quite pay off in Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel struggling to find a way of dealing with Whitehead’s fancy plot reveal towards its end – someone isn’t who we thought they were. Whitehead’s book tells the story of a poor black youth in 1960s America whose application and natural academic gifts suggest he’s going to have more life choices than the general run of his peers. And then, a complete chance puts him in the wrong place at the wrong time and instead of going off to college, Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp as a young boy, Ethan Herisse when older) winds up in the Nickel Academy, … Read more
I Eat Your Skin
What is it Tarantino says, about all movies being interesting even if they’re not all good? I Eat Your Skin is a case in point. Not great but absolutely fascinating, it started life in 1964, when it went by the title Zombies, gaining the name it’s now stuck with when a distributor was looking for a companion movie to make up a double bill in 1971. Director/writer/producer Del Tenney had just the film to go with I Drink Your Blood, he said. And so, taking Zombies (aka Zombie Bloodbath aka Voodoo Blood Bath) off the shelf where it had sat for seven years, he gave it yet another new name and some refreshed … Read more
