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Nada and Frank fight

They Live

“One of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left.” Slavoj Žižek’s verdict on They Live demonstrates that even philosophers have off days. Whether Žižek had been smoking genetically re-engineered skunk or not, one thing about John Carpenter’s 1988 film is indisputable: if you want an allegory for the notion of false consciousness, you’ve found your baby. It’s an allegorical tale of a decent, hard-working all-American dude struggling to find work in an economic downturn discovering that the country is actually run by a cabal of extra-terrestrials. Keeping the populace subdued through television, advertising and so on, enables the aliens to squeeze the juice out of the planet. And then one day our hero … Read more
Zita strips

My Sole Desire aka À Mon Seul Désir

A film about stripping worried about boundaries, My Sole Desire (À Mon Seul Désir) is a bit like that J-Lo movie Hustlers but with not as many clothes, a bit more honesty and a touch less Hollywood make-believe. Good though Hustlers was, it wasn’t always in touch with reality. But back to Lucie Borleteau’s movie, which like Hustlers sees the world of stripping from the point of view of a newbie. Shy, retiring student and part-time grocery-shop cashier Manon (Louise Chevillotte) pitches up at a strip club wondering how a fit young woman goes about getting a job like this. Within minutes she’s been renamed Aurore, has made a best friend in stripper/would-be-actor … Read more
Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr laughing

Gunga Din

There’s a lot going on in Gunga Din, the high point of a certain kind of Hollywood film-making. Released in the golden era’s “annus mirabilis” of 1939, it’s an exotic, oriental white-man’s-burden kind of adventure adapted from a Rudyard Kipling story, but locked away in there something is grumbling away. All is not as it first appears. There are two main storylines, connected together by a familiar trio of bromantic soldiers – the lover (Douglas Fairbanks Jr), the joker (Cary Grant) and the fighter (Victor McLaglen) – three sergeants in Queen Victoria’s army in India sent out from their base to find out why the vital telegraph system keeps going down. It turns … Read more
Ian McShane as Wilson

American Star

At last, in American Star, someone has given Ian McShane a lead role in a movie that he can get properly stuck into. Not a fine co-starring role (Sexy Beast) or fine supporting role (John Wick and its sequels) or as a fine co-lead in a spin-off from a TV show (Deadwood) but a bona-fide lead role in a movie that’s all his own. It’s a good movie too. It dips a bit in the last third but ends so powerfully you’ll forgive it. It opens powerfully too. In a stylised, wordless sequence, we follow McShane’s black-clad Wilson as he lands on the island of Fuerteventura, hires a car and drives out into … Read more
Heroine Nausicaä and companion fox squirrel

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Hayao Miyazaki’s career as an animator in charge of his own destiny starts here, with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, two hours of typical Miyazaki, from 1984, which more or less set the benchmark for what was to come. There had been one full feature before, 1979’s The Castle of Cagliostro, but that was part of an ongoing series dedicated to Lupin III, supposedly the grandson of the French master thief Arsène Lupin. In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, we are introduced to Nausicaä, a pure Miyazaki character, a tough, brave, kind, thoughtful and resourceful young woman separated from her parents and adrift in a world that’s a mash-up … Read more
Hanna and Liv on the road

The Royal Hotel

Writer/director Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel slots into the “people having a terrible time in the Outback” groove but her follow-up to The Assistant is also its own distinctive beast. It’s more Wake in Fright than Wolf Creek, with its subjects/victims being tested to their psychological limits rather than out-and-out monstered. It’s a “thriller” says the IMDb, and quite a few reviews say it is too. But it’s a funny sort of thriller, coming across more as a human drama with a lurking sense of threat unsettling enough almost for it to be counted as a horror movie. But on to the plot. Two young women backpacking their way around the world wind … Read more
Joe Morton as the Brother

The Brother from Another Planet

1984’s The Brother from Another Planet is a smart, funny, smallscale sci-fi movie about an alien who crashlands in New York. In some respects it’s a sibling movie to 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth – weird dude with special gifts has a mixed time of it on planet Earth. Because the alien resembles a black man, the movie is often seen as some gigantic metaphor for the black experience in the USA but beyond the fact of the dude’s alienness, it’s a reading that doesn’t yield much more than the movie on a surface level is already delivering. It goes about its business as a series of slice-of-life vignettes about daily … Read more
Lucas with his plate camera on his back

Godland

Godland reminds us yet again that when it comes to film-making there’s always something going on in Iceland. How can a population that small – roughly 380,000 – produce so many talented writer directors? Hlynur Pálmason sits alongside the likes of Valdimar Jóhannsson, Baltasar Kormákur, Benedikt Erlingsson, Grimu Hákonarson and Óskar Jónasson as a director whose films aren’t just good and popular but also distinctly Icelandic. Watching their movies there’s also a strong sense of the connection between Iceland and its Viking settlers. Godland is, to some extent, a case of the Extreme Nordic (see also Kormákur’s The Deep, Erlingsson’s Of Horses and Men or Hákonarson’s Rams for more of the same, with … Read more
Wolfgang Preiss as creepy clairvoyant Peter Cornelius

The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse

Reinventing a genre he had more or less invented in the first place, Fritz Lang’s 1960 movie The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (originally Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse) also revisits an established intellectual property. The character of Mabuse had already served Lang well, having taken centre stage as the arch-villain in Lang’s silent two-part behemoth Dr Mabuse the Gambler in 1922 and again in The Testament of Dr Mabuse in 1933. After which Lang exited Germany in a hurry, having been made an offer he couldn’t refuse by Dr Goebbels, an arch-villain to top them all. In the late 1950s, old and almost blind, Lang returned to Germany to make the … Read more
François Civil as D'Artagnan

The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan

As handsome as its star, François Civil, The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan was shot back-to-back with its bookend companion, The Three Musketeers: Milady, a pair of old-school spirited adventures full of flashing eyes and flashing blades. I read somewhere that it’s quite tonally different from other Musketeer movies. It didn’t seem so to me. I only recently watched its century-old predecessor, 1921’s The Three Musketeers, starring Douglas Fairbanks, and that is pretty much identical to this in storyline and feel. But then all Musketeer movies tell the same story – Alexandre Dumas’s original tale must be one of the least messed about with in moviedom. D’Artagnan, the cocksure whelp from Gascony, arrives in Paris and … Read more
McCabe in a massive fur coat

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

The superb McCabe and Mrs Miller (generally styled McCabe & Mrs. Miller) was sold as a revisionist western when it came out in 1971. Its director, Robert Altman, went so far as to call it an “anti-western”. Even though Anthony Mann in the 1950s and Sergio Leone in the 1960s had paved the way with “revisionist” westerns of their own, the first reviews of Altman’s version of the revisionist western were harsh. Rex Reed of the New York Daily News called it, “an incoherent, amateurish, simple-minded, boring and totally worthless piece of garbage”, which is nailing your colours to the mast if nothing else. Other critics liked, loved and raved over it. Pauline … Read more
Rebecca and Eileen dance

Eileen

Another tale of female self-actualisation from William Oldroyd, who follows Lady Macbeth with Eileen, a low-key melodramatic adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s best-seller. Lady Macbeth made a star of Florence Pugh, who had been a star-in-waiting since her debut in Carol Morley’s The Falling, in 2014. The transformation isn’t quite so marked here, since Thomasin McKenzie has been turning heads since she was 12 – you might have seen her in JoJo Rabbit, The Justice of Bunny King, The Power of the Dog and Last Night in Soho. Like Pugh, it seems to be written in stone that McKenzie will hold aloft an Oscar at some point in her career. We feel her pain … Read more

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