Latest Posts
Les bas-fonds aka The Lower Depths
Beautiful but basic, Jean Renoir’s 1936 movie Les bas-fonds (aka The Lower Depths) isn’t the only adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s stage play. Among many, many other people, Kurosawa did a version in 1957, sticking closer to Gorky’s 1902 original, something Renoir himself later acknowledged he himself should have done. Kurosawa’s is the better version, he reckoned. Renoir’s reason for fiddling with the story was, he said, to get around the casting of the actresss Jany Holt – who he thought was “terrible” but was forced to accept – rewriting around her to diminish her role. There is room for the experiment. Gorky’s original plot is full of people, very Russian, but it constellates … Read more
Mickey 17
Well Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer didn’t quite work, and nor does his Mickey 17, and for pretty much the same reasons. Small stuff – great; world building – great; political satire – gruesome. It’s Robert Pattinson in the lead, vaguely back in the sort of fantasy territory that made his name (I mean Harry Potter and Twilight), as an “expendable” in a dystopian future where humanity is fleeing Earth, heading out towards the brave new world of Niflheim on board a spaceship. He’s the living equivalent of a crash-test dummy, the one sent in to check things out whenever a new situation arises. Is it poisonous, will it eat us, will it cause our flesh … Read more
The Cremator aka Spalovač mrtvol
Spooky at first, then chilling and eventually utterly grim, Juraj Herz’s remarkable The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol in Czech) entirely lives up to its billing as the pre-eminent film of the Czech New Wave. Here’s where advocates for Closely Observed Trains, The Firemen’s Ball, Daisies and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders pitch in. And on another day one of those might have topped this fictitious list. But I watched The Cremator last night and I can report that after all these decades it remains powerful and seems timeless. The theme is the corruptibility of the human soul and the subject is a man who is running a crematorium in Czechoslovakia as the Nazis … Read more
Popeye the Slayer Man
Let’s hear it for Popeye the Slayer Man, a title so brilliant and obvious you might wonder why it’s never been used before. The reason is quite simple: Popeye fell out of copyright in 2025 and so the intellectual property became easy pickings. Hot on the case, two movies have already appeared this year (I’m writing this in March 2025 so there could yet be more). Popeye’s Revenge got there first, in February, followed by this. Both are slasher horrors. What’s going on there then? I’ll admit that I watched this partly out of badness, prompted by my brother, who asked me if I’d seen it and then warned me not to “go … Read more
All Through the Night
An entertaining fruit cocktail, All Through the Night was one of a raft of propaganda movies Hollywood made to try and turn isolationist American public opinion in favour of entering the Second World War. In the end it didn’t matter. By the time the film came out in early 1942, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, Hitler had declared war on the United States and President Roosevelt had decisively taken his fellow Americans into the fray. It’s a Warner Bros movie, full of Warner players, with Humphrey Bogart leading the pack as Gloves Donahue, a wiseguy gambler with a heart of gold, the sort of guy who makes a lot of money but is … Read more
The Invitation
Paced like a TV show with a writers room on autopilot, The Invitation behaves as if it has all the time in the world. It’s about vampires, so taking it slow, there not being any real rush, entire centuries of time to kill and all that are obviously part of the idea. But even so… couldn’t it just get a move on! It’s another case of Nathalie Emmanuel having all the gifts except the one of choosing her next project wisely. She plays the modern American miss – democratically inclined, nose-ring-sporting, open, self-reliant, struggling – who is whisked away to England to meet a long-lost branch of the family she never knew she … Read more
The Barnabáš Kos Case
Prime Czech New Wave, The Barnabáš Kos Case (Prípad Barnabáš Kos) is a satire about a system that cannot recognise it’s gone wrong and cannot autocorrect because there are no mechanisms – a free press, for instance – to point out failure. Instead of fixing things, in its paranoia it doubles down on its decision. This, the detailing of the unhealthy doubling down, is one of the key reasons why director Peter Solan’s film deserves to be seen. Flying beneath the political radar, its story is superficially about a lowly triangle player who is quite by accident made into the musical director of the orchestra he plays in. At first the pathologically meek … Read more
The Doorman
There are good things and bad things in The Doorman, a Die Hard retread that hands the Bruce Willis role to Ruby Rose, the onetime model and TV presenter who made her name in Orange Is the New Black and has played Batwoman with some aplomb in TV shows Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and, unsurprisingly, Batwoman. She is one of the good things. The character she plays a bit less so. In a pre-credits sequence we see Rose’s Sergeant Ali trying and failing to protect an American diplomat and her daughter while on active duty in Romania. Both mother and daughter die in an armed ambush and Ali is traumatised as a result. … Read more
The Harder They Fall
The Harder They Fall is Humphrey Bogart’s farewell movie. He’d been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer not long before shooting started and knew he didn’t have long to live. Though he looks tired and ill, it doesn’t affect his performance. In fact it probably enhances it. Careworn individuals being something of a Bogart speciality. In a version of the character he’d been playing since The Maltese Falcon made him a superstar and Casablanca reinforced it, Bogart is a journalist down on his luck who is hired by a boxing promoter to puff his boy to the heavens and turn him into a champion. This in spite of the fact that the kid cannot fight, … Read more
The Return
As you will know from reading your Homer, after his victory at the battle of Troy, the warrior king Odysseus got waylaid on his journey home to Ithaca. Instead of taking weeks, Odysseus’s voyage lasted years. There was many a mythical adventure en route. Hence, yes, the word “odyssey”. The Return picks up the story as the last section of The Odyssey did, with Odysseus finally washed up half-dead on his troubled native island. Grizzled, battle-scarred and bewildered, he is taken in by a swineherd, where he licks his wounds and mentally regroups before eventually heading off towards his palace disguised as a beggar. Surely he will re-assert himself as king? Surely things … Read more
Cruising
When William Friedkin died in 2023, aged 87, the obituaries talked of the director of The Exorcist and the man who gave us The French Connection. The Boys in the Band, his groundbreaking film from 1970, which took dramas about gay men into the mainstream, got some bandwidth, as did Sorceror, his remake of Clouzot’s 1953 classic The Wages of Fear, which has gained in reputation ever since it was released in 1977. Cruising not so much. Or if it was mentioned it was usually in passing, as the controversial film that ended Friedkin’s time at the top. In fact Sorceror had already done that. The title had confused people thinking they were … Read more
Between Us aka Entre Nous
Lesbian ladies undone by dastardly male alert! Between Us (Entre Nous in the original French) is a strangely not-quite-there tale of two young women and one awful man, done as a mix of cautionary thriller and soft-edged erotica. As the action opens, fragrant, pretty and broke Elodie and Laetitia are realising that they need a third person in their apartment to cover the bills and so decide to advertise for someone. And along they come, the hopefuls, in the standard movie-montage process of interviewing the awfuls. The film proper starts at the point when the successful candidate, Simon, emerges as the best of the bunch and moves in. The ideal guy, on paper … Read more
