Latest Posts
The Forest for the Trees
Here’s Maren Ade’s first feature, The Forest for the Trees (Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen in the original German), made in 2003. Though low in budget – it was a film-school project – it instantly established her as one to watch. The remarkable thing is that in the two decades since, Ade has made only two more films, 2009’s Everyone Else and 2016’s Toni Erdmann, the one that made her name internationally and won her an Oscar nomination (she lost out to Asgar Farhadi, who isn’t a bad name to lose out to). So what’s she been up to all this time? Producing, is the answer. Ade’s name turns up all over the … Read more
Blood for Dust
Sometimes you like something and you’re not entirely sure why. Case in point: Blood for Dust, a 1990s style “who’s zooming who?” thriller in which people die in hails of bullets, bad guys abound and cases of money are swapped for white powder in remote locations while stiff-legged men with guns stand about ready to shoot. It is very familiar. And yet. The two central performances help a lot. First up, Scoot McNairy, who I’ve enjoyed watching ever since he starred in Gareth Edwards’s feature debut, 2010’s Monsters, a smart reworking of 1930s screwball comedy It Happened One Night as sci-fi. Underused almost ever since, he proves himself again here, his dustbowl-lean features … Read more
Ivy
Sick of “sad sack” roles, Joan Fontaine struck out for the border with 1947’s Ivy, a pivot away from the passive wallflowers of Rebecca and Suspicion, roles that had made her Hollywood’s biggest star and won her an Oscar, and towards something much ballsier. She plays Ivy (as in Poison Ivy), a woman in Edwardian Britain who sets her cap at a rich bachelor and decides to make him her husband no matter what’s in her way. Problem one: wealthy Miles Rushworth (Herbert Marshall) is in a long-standing relationship with young Bella Crail (Molly Lamont), and everyone knows they will soon be engaged. Two: Ivy is already married, to Jervis (Richard Ney), a … Read more
Cadejo Blanco
A naive young woman searches for her missing sister in Cadejo Blanco, a bloody coming-of-age thriller featuring a fabulous performance by Karen Martínez. If you’re wondering what the title translates as, the cadejo blanco is a mythical white dog – a spirit animal of Central America folklore. And once you know that you might also start wondering what it has to do with Guatemalan gangs and the sentimental education of an innocent young woman. You might still be asking that question as the film winds to a close and director/writer Justin Lerner is teasing us with a shot of a white dog roaming in the forests of Guatemala, where Sarita (Martínez) has finally … Read more
Our Mother’s House
Our Mother’s House didn’t get the acclaim of Jack Clayton’s previous film about spooky kids, The Innocents, when it debuted. Partly because The Innocents is one of the all-time greats. But also because Our Mother’s House appeared in 1967, and with its message of children going to the bad because of a lack of parental supervision it was out of step with the letting-it-all-hang-out ethos of the age. Lovers of Victoriana, feast your eyes on the interiors of the huge house where seven children and their rabidly religious but mortally ill mother live, with only a daily help in the shape of Mrs Quayle (Yootha Joyce) to keep the show on the road. … Read more
Firebrand
Unusually for a film concerning King Henry VIII of England, Firebrand is not interested in wife one (Catherine of Aragon) or wife two (Anne Boleyn). Instead focus is on the last of Henry’s six wives, Katherine Parr. And, no bones about it, she is the focus of this film, not the king. A history lesson. At the time this film is set Henry has broken politically but not entirely religiously with Rome. The Church of England has been established and Henry is its head. But because he’s relied so heavily on Protestants to support his break, Henry’s brand of Catholicism is on the defensive and the Protestants are on the prowl. It’s against … Read more
Cripple Creek
Cripple Creek takes place against the backdrop of the Colorado gold rush of 1892 and is a genre movie with an unusual slant, a western with a secret sauce. It’s introduced by a stern voiceover giving us chapter and verse on gold reserves in the USA, and how smugglers are undermining the American economy by spiriting bullion out of the country. Patriotic essentials duly established, the voice retreats after we’ve been introduced to Bret Ivers (George Montgomery) and Larry Galland (Jerome Courtland), a pair of secret service agents posing as gold thieves. Ivers and Galland arrive in a one horse town they reckon is at the centre of a smuggling operation and have … Read more
Uproar
There are a lot of reasons why Uproar works so well, but its star, Julian Dennison, is a major one. This is a warm and likeable underdog drama slash coming of ager, and Dennison is a warm and likeable lead. Another is that every time writer/directors Paul Middleditch and Hamish Bennett sail close to mawkishness, they are rescued by a strong New Zealand sense that, no matter what happens, it is absolutely essential that they stay this side of the ick. It’s 1981 and in New Zealand the country is about to welcome the South African rugby team, the Springboks, for a tour that is highly contested. Apartheid means that wherever they go … Read more
Sans Lendemain
When the name Max Ophüls comes up, Sans Lendemain isn’t the first film most people think of. That would probably be Lola Montès, or La Ronde, or Letters from an Unknown Woman. But this 1939 outlier is distinctively Ophüls, a superb if small film, knotty in theme, beautiful in look and with a great performance by its female star, Edwige Feuillère. Ophüls was born Maximillian Oppenheimer and was a German Jew who fled the Nazis in 1933, made a few films in France, before fleeing the Nazis again in 1941, to America, where he never got quite the platform he deserved. Fellow directors like Preston Sturges championed him – partly because his lavish … Read more
Ferrari
The first obvious thing about Ferrari, a film from 2023, is that it was written by Troy Kennedy Martin, writer of 1969’s The Italian Job. Martin died in 2009! It’s taken a long time to get this film made. Michael Mann has been talking about it since the early years of the new millennium. Back then he was going to produce and Sydney Pollack was going to direct. In the end, after much to and fro, and with Pollack also dead en route, Mann wound up directing it himself. The second thing to say is that for a film about sexy cars, beautiful women, danger, speed, the thrill of the race and so … Read more
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
A cult Spanish zombie film shot mostly in England’s Peak District in 1974 – those filters must surely narrow things down to Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, which also goes by the name of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, the slightly more anaemic Don’t Open the Window and the original Spanish title, No Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos. The Living Dead bit nods us towards George Romero. But Jorge Grau’s film is full of his own little touches, and has fantastic mood and chilling music to offset some of the madder moments of bad acting (though a lot of those can be laid at the door of bad dubbing). Plotwise, a man … Read more
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
Blade Runner, City of God, Charles Dickens? Funny the things that sprang to mind watching Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, a self-conscious attempt to replicate the Hong Kong urban crime movie of yore. It’s a dystopian actioner set in a shantytown and focused on a central character who you might characterise as a 21st century Oliver Twist. This recent arrival in Hong Kong is a refugee who gave all his money to a Mr Big (Sammo Hung) hoping for some decent forged papers, got fleeced and then wound up seeking sanctuary from the authorities in the Citadel, a vast, multi-storey warren of crime. From here Chan Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam) attempts, Oliver style, … Read more
