Latest Posts
A Life at Stake
Angela Lansbury Sex Kitten is the offer in A Life at Stake, a short and atmospheric noir from 1955 with a looser attitude to sex than was usual at the time. But before we meet Angela’s minxy Doris (not the sexiest name in the world, but hey), we get an eyeful of our star, Keith Andes, stripped to the waist and showing off the physique that got him movie work in the 1950s. He’s playing Edward Shaw, a down-on-his-luck property developer introduced to rich, married and bored Doris Hillman by a go-between lawyer. In scenes thick with flirtatiousness, all set by a swimming pool where Doris is sunning herself in a skimpy swimsuit, … Read more
MaXXXine
A collection of great scenes in search of a movie, MaXXXine opens with a quote from Bette Davis – “In this business, until you’re known as a monster you’re not a star” – and ends with the song Bette Davis Eyes. Between those bookends, the story of a porn actress (Mia Goth) trying to go legit in the 1980s United States, where Ronald Reagan is promising “morning in America”, Christians are campaigning against satanism in rock music and filth on the screens, and a serial killer is on a spree butchering young women like Maxine. We first met Maxine in X, this trilogy’s opener, when she was a 1970s burlesque dancer with ambitions … Read more
Captain Pirate
Captain Pirate? Pirate Captain, surely? This swashbuckler from 1952 went by the much more obvious title of Captain Blood, Fugitive in some regions, which makes more sense all round, since this is a sequel to Fortunes of Captain Blood from two years earlier. Fortunes had done pretty good business and so this revisit gets an upgrade, black and white to Technicolor, and keeps its two key cast members, Louis Hayward and Patricia Medina, he the dashing pirate hero, she his hispanic lady love and bounteous fount of virtue. It also keeps the earlier film’s structure, which was essentially a detective plot with a wash of piratical timber-shivering over the top. Here, it opens … Read more
Close Your Eyes
Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los Ojos in the original Spanish) makes it four full films in 50 years for writer/director Victor Erice. Hardly a punishing workrate. But then when your debut was The Spirit of the Beehive – often touted as the best Spanish film ever made – you can pretty much go at your own pace. Close Your Eyes does too, moving at a speed that would be considered glacial if it were almost any other director, but is a delicious, tantalising linger in the hands of Erice. A thriller, believe it or not, though a fairly existential one, about a famous actor who disappears off the face of the earth just … Read more
Man on the Run
If you ran The 39 Steps through a photocopier a few times, you might end up with Man on the Run, a British noir from 1949 that yokes a couple together and watches as they fall in love. Which they do the moment they meet, on the evidence of what’s on the screen. But… in opening scenes that turn out to be as good as the film will get until it reaches its closing moments, we meet Peter Burdon (Derek Farr), an army deserter passing himself off as Peter Brown and working in a very British pub in a village far away from where anyone will find him. Until he is discovered, by … Read more
Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan
A Vietnam war movie released in 2019, Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan has a couple of other potential strikes against it. It’s Australian, for one, and who even remembers that Australia lined up alongside the USA for that epic? For another, it’s not even vaguely interested in setting Vietnam in the wider political context. All good reasons to watch it, then. Long Tan was a real battle, in which 108 Australian and New Zealand troops somehow managed to hold off an enemy Vietcong force of 2,000 in a battle that took place in a rubber plantation, at a huge cost in lives on both sides. Not that this movie is really … Read more
Drive-In Massacre
If you’re looking for a drive-in movie set at a drive-in… Drive-In Massacre is the short, sharp schlock you’re looking for, a cult item shot in four days, without permits and with all the actors using pseudonyms because they were on a non-union production. It’s a cult movie, which is a way of rationalising its low score on the IMDb – 3.7 out of 10 at the time of writing – but it’s better than its rating and has the sort of breezy, trashy quality you’d expect from a director with titles like Teenage Sex Therapy, Let’s Play Doctor and Teeny Buns on his CV. Stu Segall is the name. The premise is simple. … Read more
The Bikeriders
Since Shotgun Stories, his 2007 debut, there hasn’t been a bad Jeff Nichols film. But The Bikeriders comes close, a downbeat affair quietly putting the glamorous image of the motorbike gang to the test, if not to the sword. The film is based on a 1960s photo-book by Danny Lyon, which followed the Outlaws (here renamed the Vandals) motorbike club for several years, photographing the guys and girls and talking to them about their lives. Constructed as a series of flashbacks, it is strung together by interviews Lyon (played here by Mike Faist, of Challengers fame) conducts over the years with a young woman called Kathy (Jodie Comer), who fell badly for a … Read more
Frau im Mond aka Woman in the Moon
Fritz Lang’s scorching run of the late silent era continues with Frau im Mond. Translated variously as Woman in the Moon, Girl in the Moon and By Rocket to the Moon, it’s Lang’s second go at sci-fi. He’d made Metropolis only two years before, nearly bankrupting the Ufa studio in the process. And yet, for some reason, Ufa gave Lang his head again. The fact that Spione (aka Spies), Lang’s creation of the modern spy caper the year before, had been a massive success might have had something to do with Ufa’s readiness to be so generous. Frau im Mond is the realistic, plausible sci-fi to Metropolis‘s poetical, fantastical one, an attempt, using … Read more
Twisters
No one was exactly clamouring for it but Twisters, the imaginatively titled sequel to Twister, turned out alright in the end anyway. The original, complete with flying cow, came out in 1996, 24 years ago. At that point the director of this sequel, Lee Isaac Chung, was a fresh faced 18 years old, star Glen Powell was eight and co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones was minus two. To the film’s credit it leaves Twister where it was, not referring back to it at all, and with no cameos to remind us when Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton were the plucky duo chasing tornadoes around the mid-West and trying to heal a broken relationship as they … Read more
The Witches
1966’s The Witches (aka The Devil’s Own) is another great opportunity to indulge the guilty pleasure of watching a once-glam Hollywood goddess at the tail end of her career being relentlessly monstered in a down-market movie. Think Joan Crawford in Trog or Bette Davis in Burnt Offerings. Here it’s Joan Fontaine getting the treatment, the one-time star of Rebecca, and Oscar-winner for Suspicion, returning to the land of her British parents to play a teacher recruited to run a primary school in a picture-postcard English village. In Wicker Man style, Miss Mayfield does not realise that almost everyone in the village is involved in something untoward, and that one of her charges has … Read more
Perfect Days
We have Covid to thank for Perfect Days, the best film from Wim Wenders in some time. The original idea was to get Wenders to Tokyo to make a documentary about the toilets built for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (a gig is a gig). But the Olympics first got postponed to 2021 and then eventually took place behind closed doors without any spectators. The toilets barely got used. Wenders, however, did get to make his film. But instead of a documentary, Wenders pushed to make a feature film, incorporating those 17 toilets designed by leading architects, with the action focused not on the toilets themselves – though they do feature prominently – but on … Read more
