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Materialists
Celine Song’s follow-up to 2023’s Past Lives is disappointing if you’re expecting Materialists to be more of the same – exquisite slow-burn romance done with a sadist’s sense of deferred gratification. Instead Materialists is… a satire? An attempt at a takedown of When Harry Met Sally soppiness? A reckoning with Clueless, Bridget Jones or Jane Austen’s Emma, as if to atone for having, in Past Lives, made some sort of modern classic? I don’t know. Ask Song’s therapist. What, ladies – this film takes aim at women – do eligible young women want? A financially sorted guy who has his own hair and a status job (finance), it seems. Tall, tall is mentioned several … Read more
Bitter Rice
Italian neorealism meets the crime drama in 1949’s Bitter Rice (Ris Amaro), Giuseppe De Santis’s gritty fable about a pair of petty thieves joining a horde of itinerant workers to plant and harvest rice. If drama is life minus the boring bits, De Santis is aware that neorealism at its worst can be a bit like life plus extra boring bits. So he brightens things up with crime thrills and a cast full of good-looking young things. In case we’re still not feeling it, more often than is absolutely necessary he’ll poke his camera into the cleavage of a few of his female stars as well. The thieves are played by Vittorio Gassman … Read more
The Christmas Break
You know what you’re getting with a Christmas movie – after a trudge out in the cold comes the good cheer. Whether it’s the Santa Claus no one believes is really Santa (A Miracle on 34th Street), the old grouch abandoning his curmudgeonly ways (A Christmas Carol), or the malevolent Father Christmas threatening peace on earth who is eventually dehorned (Rare Exports), the Christmas movie maps out its obstacles early on and then sets about clambering over them. There are quite a few in The Christmas Break but the biggie is whether nice Chicago couple Caroline (India Mullen) and Jack (Justin Long) are going to have children or not. He’s dead keen and … Read more
Gaslight
This Gaslight, the 1940 version, shouldn’t really exist. When MGM decided to remake the British original in 1944 as a star vehicle for Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, they tried to destroy the original prints, as if the 1940 film had never existed at all – a case of gaslighting Gaslight? Bergman and Boyer are good in the remake, and they have alliteration on their side. But so do (Anton) Walbrook and (Diana) Wynyard, in Thorold Dickinson’s excellently creepy original. The plot in a thumbnail. He’s gaslighting her into thinking she’s mentally unstable. Why? So she won’t ask too many questions about what’s going on under her roof. To the point where she … Read more
Together
Alison Brie and Dave Franco are a couple in real life and in excitable quarters this fact alone earns Together extra kudos. It’s a talking point, but the Brie/Franco connection doesn’t otherwise make any difference to this movie. They are fine, separately and together, as people whose too-close relationship shifts from the figurative to the literal in a dire and grisly way. We know this before it happens because a pre-credits sequence has told us so, in a tone-setting mini-drama in which two separate dogs have wound up fused together in a gruesomely icky way. Which is what’s coming down the pipe for Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco) once they head out into … Read more
The Fall of the House of Usher
Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher is surely the best version of the Edgar Allan Poe story ever. Loved by director Kurosawa, revered by critic Roger Ebert, it perversely only seems to exist in streaming and hard-copy versions that don’t do it justice. This is one of the best gothic chillers ever made – why doesn’t it look better than this? Possibly because it’s a silent movie, and they tend to get the silent treatment? Luis Buñuel worked on it too, so there’s another reason it should be more respectfully treated, though he did walk off halfway through, appalled at Epstein’s cavalier treatment of Poe’s story. But it remains true … Read more
On Swift Horses
On Swift Horses is giddy 1950s melodrama for the 21st century, with Will Poulter and Jacob Elordi as brothers charting separate courses through the great American post-War boom. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays the prize for one of them, or she would be if she weren’t also on a journey of her own, towards a sense of self-actualisation. The dynamic is good boy/bad boy, Poulter drawing the short straw as Lee, the hard-working, conformist brother married to wife Muriel (Edgar-Jones), while Elordi has the fun as Julius, the sexy gambler on the road less travelled. In the film’s opening moments Julius arrives back from the Korean War at the homestead of Lee and Muriel and … Read more
Journey into Fear
Is Journey into Fear an Orson Welles film sailing under a foreign flag? Norman Foster is the director name up on screen, but credits can be deceptive. The wartime thriller was co-written by Welles, though he has no screen credit. It was also produced by him, again uncredited. And we know for certain that Welles directed some bits of it – the opening sequence is pure Welles, inventive and with real narrative punch. But since Welles was never backward at coming forward, we have to assume that because he never laid claim to it – Welles was asked often enough if Journey into Fear was one of his – that Foster is the main … Read more
Mr Blake at Your Service! aka Well Done!
Some films aren’t that great but you like them anyway. That, for me, was Mr Blake at Your Service! (aka Well Done! aka Complètement Cramé), a cosy French comedy with, crucially, a starring role for John Malkovich. Deep breath for the plot. He plays a big something in London who gives it all up on a whim and heads off to France, to revisit the chateau where he first met his beloved but recently deceased wife 40 years before. Emotionally and spiritually exhausted, Andrew Blake is hoping for some balm for the soul by staying as a paying guest in the old place, which now does B&B, or so he mistakenly believes. Instead … Read more
Fruits of Passion
If you’ve ever wanted to see Klaus Kinski’s hairy anus, Fruits of Passion (Les fruits de la passion) is the movie for you. A sequel of sorts to the infamous/scandalous Story of O, it’s a “life inside the brothel” tale about the sentimental education of an impressionable young beauty at the hands – and other body parts – of a ripe old western roué. Directed and co-adapted from the Anne Declos novel Retour à Roissy by the multi-hyphenate Shūji Terayama, it is both orientalist and a critique of the same, with Kinski the absolute embodiment of the lordly patron. Dressed in white throughout, shock of blond hair, eyeliner, cadaverous as usual, he is … Read more
Birdeater
Yikes, Birdeater, the sort of movie I don’t like watching, but I did watch it. And in the end… liked? Not quite. Admired…? Again, not quite. But there is something special going on in Jack Clark and Jim Weir’s debut feature, a kind of Festen among the Aussies. Unpleasant secrets surfacing at a social gathering, sort of thing. Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, a seminal 1998 movie sometimes going by the English translation of The Celebration, is one of the movies that Clark and Weir got their cast and crew to watch before embarking on Birdeater, along with The American Friend, My Night at Maud’s, Nashville and A Brighter Summer’s Day. And one of the … Read more
Hôtel du Nord
It’s soap, it’s melodrama, have a go if you like, but if it’s absolutely nothing else, Marcel Carné’s 1938 hit Hôtel du Nord is an object lesson in how to use a hair light. Watch it for its looks rather than its plot, in other words, which slaloms about a touch preposterously, though its actors are beyond criticism. Carné preceded it with Port of Shadows, and followed up with Le Jour Se Lève, though it can’t match either for punch, coherence or consistent characterisation. Apart from one ridiculous digression to the south of France en route to Egypt, it all takes place in and around the Hôtel du Nord, a Paris flophouse where … Read more
