Latest Posts
Divine Love aka Divino Amor
There’s an opaque quality to Divine Love (Divino Amor), as there was with Gabriel Mascaro’s last film, Neon Bull. But, subject matter to one side, the big difference between them is that Neon Bull didn’t explain itself, whereas Divino Amor does, only in the film’s last third revealing that it hasn’t really been explaining itself at all. It’s all been a bit of a feint. The genre, for instance. Sci-fi, or so it claims, with the action set in Brazil in 2027 (barely into the future at all then) where Joana and Danilo, a loving couple are members of a charismatic evangelical church. When not dancing like dervishes at church raves – the … Read more
Devil’s Doorway
The revisionist western par excellence, Devil’s Doorway is the story of the despicable white man stealing the land off the noble American Indian and then getting nasty when the Indian objects. It stars Robert Taylor as Broken Lance, a Shoshone Indian known as Lance Powell while serving in the US Army, where he won a Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in the Civil War. Now the war is over Lane is back in the Medicine Bow area where he grew up, to raise cattle on land that’s been in his family for generations. In an early speech in the local saloon Lance expresses the hope that, now the hostilities are over, everyone … Read more
The Surfer
The Surfer looks like it’s going to be a wet and sandy version of John Wick or Nobody, since it starts off with a dad and his son being chased off the beach where they want to catch a wave by a group of surf bums who insist this public beach is closed to outsiders. Since the dad, billed as “the Surfer”, is played by Nicolas Cage, there is an expectation that at some point this meek, suburban father is going to lose the plot most epically, since that is one of Cage’s skills. And in the end he does lose it, just not in the way we anticipate. That’s the really clever … Read more
The Nomi Song
A balding freak in white scare make-up who wore a geometric tuxedo and sang in a six-octave voice that ranged from a yelp to a bellow, Klaus Nomi’s strange, eccentric, short life is celebrated in The Nomi Song, a hymn to the artist rather than the man, though the man does keep peeping out from behind the make-up. To non-fans, Nomi may only have been seen once, providing backing vocals to David Bowie on Saturday Night Live. Others may have caught the odd moment here and there, a rendering of Purcell, or maybe some throwaway high-camp Eurotrash, or a cheesy 1960s ballad, with Nomi swooping and yowling over whatever he was tackling, shifting … Read more
Deep Cover
Dumb fun, but definitely fun, Deep Cover is written by Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow, of Safety Not Guaranteed (love that film), plus Ben Ashenden, who presumably injected the British sensibility here and there. Knockabout entertainment, it takes most of its inspiration from 1990s action comedies about inadequate characters in hazardous situations. Who knew Orlando Bloom could do comedy? In my darker, more misanthropic moments I have wondered just what exactly Bloom was for after he outgrew elfhood (Legolas, son of Thranduil etc). He’s genuinely funny here, as Marlon, one of three useless would-be improv comedians recruited by an undercover cop (Sean Bean, in full Northern British, “Go on, fuck off” mode). Joining … Read more
Le Vampire de Düsseldorf aka The Vampire of Dusseldorf
A weirdly lugubrious serial-killer movie, 1965’s Le Vampire de Düsseldorf tells the story of Peter Kürten, a real-life killer who operated in the Düsseldorf area in the late 1920s before being caught, tried and executed in 1931. Look him up in Wikipedia, if have the stomach for it, and you’ll realise that director/writer/star Robert Hossein has left most of the gruesomeness out of the picture. Kürten tended to kill his female victims with a pair of scissors. Hossein leaves that in. The rest of it, the sexual kick Kürten got from watching women in their death throes, he only suggests. Better that way. Hossein finesses Kürten’s timeline a touch, to make him align … Read more
Mountainhead
Mountainhead is the movie for people who want more Succession but accept that Brian Cox’s Logan Roy and his vile but irresistible family are not coming back. Written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the Succession guy, it takes a similarly vile bunch of tech bros, deposits them in a swish mountaintop mansion and follows them over a weekend of escalating mayhem as the platforms and apps that made them rich wreak havoc in the outside world. Armstrong has been telling this story – awful people being awful – for quite a while now, either comedically in TV shows like Peep Show, The Thick of It and Veep and more darkly in Succession. A … Read more
One-Eyed Jacks
There is a legendary aspect to One-Eyed Jacks. The only film Marlon Brando ever directed, it became notorious because of Brando’s extravagant shooting style – miles of expensive film run through VistaVision cameras to catch the right wave, days waited for the light to be just right and so on. The results were mixed. Brando has undeniably made a fantastic-looking film, and it features the man himself in a lead role when he was still beautiful and pumping pheromones. But it flopped badly on its 1961 debut and never really got another look-in, until the Film Foundation, with Spielberg and Scorsese backing, stumped up the money for a restoration. I watched the Criterion … Read more
Only the River Flows
Imagine a crime thriller where the guy who looks guilty from the outset is the killer… or is he? Or where the police achieve their aims not through diligent hard work but by sheer fluke. Where every cliché of the genre gets an outing and most of them left entirely unmauled… but some of them are given a left-handed spin. But which ones? That’s Only the River Flows, a strangely ironic neo-noir from Wei Shujun, whose films often offer meta-comment on film-making and the workings of genre. This time around Wei gets into all that straight away, installing his cop, Captain Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) in the shell of an old cinema (klaxon), where he’s … Read more
Die Frau meiner Träume
Die Frau meiner Träume (The Woman of My Dreams) was just what the doctor ordered in 1944, if the doctor in question was Goebbels and you were a happy member of Germany’s Thousand Year Reich. Light, frothy entertainment in the Hollywood style was what propaganda chief Goebbels had commanded Germany’s UFA studio to make and that’s what this is. It couldn’t have come at a better time. On the day it opened, 25 August 1944, the Allies were in the process of liberating Paris, the Warsaw Uprising was underway and the Germans were being rapidly pushed back out of the USSR. But never mind all that, here’s Marika Rökk to keep spirits high with … Read more
The Brutalist
The Brutalist did well at the Oscars, winning three (Best Actor, Music, Cinematography) from a total of ten nominations. It is the sort of film the Academy likes – it’s got class written all over it, from the fancy opening credits and the high-end VistaVision process (not used for more than 60 years), to its built-in intermission and tackling of a pertinent issue. To wit: immigrants get the job done, as Lin-Manuel Miranda put it in Hamilton. One immigrant, in this case, an architect who survives the death camps of Europe, arrives in proud and confident America as it’s enjoying its finest flowering and then, through a series of adventures with a moneyed American … Read more
Finis Terrae
Beautifully made and beautifully restored, Jean Epstein’s 1929 drama about kelp gatherers on a remote Breton island is also quite simply a beautiful film, picturesque enough to charm even the most unwavering hater of silent movies. Having discovered some islands off the coast of Brittany, Epstein decided to shoot a film there using local people as his actors. His two “stars” are Ambroise Rouzic and Jean-Marie Laot, the former playing Ambroise, a young kelp gatherer working on the remote island of Bannec who cuts his thumb on a piece of broken glass. Laot, meanwhile, plays Jean-Marie, Ambroise’s colleague in kelp who realises after a few days that Ambroise is properly sick and sets … Read more
