Latest Posts
The Girl with the Needle
Imagine reading Oliver Twist and suddenly Jack the Ripper turns up in it. The Girl with the Needle (Pigen med nålen in the original Danish) is a bit like that. A bracingly miserablist trek through the life of one of the urban poor in post-First World War Denmark, its Dickensian traipse from one grim situation to the next is interrupted towards the end with the dawning realisation that its heroine, poor benighted Karoline, has somehow wandered into the orbit of Dagmar Overby, Denmark’s most prolific serial killer. The film never tells us that the Dagmar on screen is Overby but the woman portrayed is presented as a serial murderer of infant children, which … Read more
100 Years of… Lady Windermere’s Fan
Mary Pickford once described the director Ernst Lubitsch as a “director of doors”. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play, you can see what she means. She meant it dismissively, though the door, and what’s behind it – or not – is key to Lubitsch’s work generally, and specifically here. This is a story all about secrets – as Wilde’s so often were – a tale of mistaken identity with ironic distance between what the people on the screen imagine themselves to be and how the audience sees them. To thumbnail-sketch a delicately intertwined plot, it centres on Lady Windermere, who is in love with her husband but being pressed … Read more
A Complete Unknown
James Mangold gave Johnny Cash Walk the Line. Now he gives Bob Dylan A Complete Unknown, a biopic and instruction manual on how to do this sort of thing. If you’re being picky, it doesn’t say much that hasn’t already been said about Dylan. And its criticisms are ones Dylan has made about himself. But if you’re happy to watch as Mangold and a brilliant cast burnish the legend, this is the film for you. It tracks Dylan from being “a complete unknown” in New York in 1961, where he visits his idol, folk superstar Woody Guthrie in his hospital bed, before being taken under the wing of fellow folkie Pete Seeger. And … Read more
D.O.A.
The opening scene of D.O.A. is so punchy and dramatic that it has to be up there on any best-ever list. A man walks into a police station, finds the homicide department and announces that there’s been a murder. “Who was murdered,” asks the homicide captain. “I was,” Frank Bigelow replies. The film ends on a humdinger, too, which in the circumstances is almost unnecessarily generous. In between, in flashback, we get the back story to that odd opening remark, one that doesn’t seem to have surprised the cops at all. Fate often deals bad cards to the leading characters in film noir. It’s particularly undeserved here, a tale of a small guy … Read more
The End
Here’s a pitch. A film about an oligarch family living in a bunker for 25 years… done as a musical! The End is Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to his two documentaries about the genocidal regime in Indonesia, and should at least win awards for audacious change of direction. Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence both marked him out as a special talent, but those were both now ten-plus years ago and in the decade since he’s directed a couple of episodes of TV and nothing else. The End is both a return to film-making as well as a shift into fiction. According to the man himself, what he wanted to do … Read more
Champion
So here I am coincidentally writing about Champion on the day the death of the remarkable George Foreman is announced. A gent and a plugger, who came back after 20 years away to win the world boxing title for the second time, Foreman was everything the focus of Champion is not. The film made a star of Kirk Douglas, and was his eighth film in three years. In many ways the typical boxing drama – scrappy kid, rags to riches, it all goes to his head, a fight to be thrown, the against-the-odds finale etc – it’s also a portrait of a psychopath, or at least a sociopath, who has no use for … Read more
Wicked
Can you believe there are still people out there who don’t know that all-conquering smash musical Wicked is the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. I know this because I met one of them just the other night. Relief: he did know what The Wizard of Oz was. That way true madness lies. So to this much feted, hated, memed and debated movie, which won Oscars for production design and costumes only. Precisely what that guy didn’t know but now does – the back story of Elphaba, who died at the end of the 1939 movie – Wicked picks up the story right there, before dissolving … Read more
Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street
Directed by Sam Fuller, Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße) is something of an outlier, both for Fuller and for the German TV show Tatort. Tatort, still running after more than 50 years, translates as Crime Scene, and is a Sunday-night landmark on the German TV landscape. It offers feature-length policiers set in various different parts of the German-speaking world and is populated with a huge cast of characters, some who recur and others who don’t. Part of its formula for success is this lack of a rigid formula – it’s highly adaptable. It’s also a proving ground for rising talent. Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot), Edward Berger (Conclave) and … Read more
Anora
A fable, a thriller, a subdued comedy and a cryptic love story, Anora is also the winner of five Oscars and confirmed the arrival of Sean Baker at the top of the film-making tree. This appeared to have started with his breakthrough, 2015’s Tangerine – the one shot on an iPhone – but in fact got going 15 years, four features, a couple of shorts and several episodes of TV earlier. Note to self, having seen all the post-Tangerine stuff (The Florida Project, Red Rocket and now Anora) isn’t it time to have a look at Baker’s earlier work? One of those Oscars went to Mikey Madison, a firecracker as a lapdancer with … Read more
Criss Cross
If film noir is about men in the thrall of women being tossed about by cruel fate, Criss Cross is prime noir. Made in 1949, in black and white, and starring Burt Lancaster in his first, noirish iteration, it’s directed by Robert Siodmak, a dab hand at punchy, pitiless drama. The story is told in a strange semi-flashback style. Half of it in the present, where Steve (Lancaster) is a driver of an armoured car working as an inside man for a weaselly criminal about to pull a big heist. The other half back in the past, where we discover why the suburban, mother-loving Steve ended up on the wrong side of the … Read more
Memory
There are issues in Memory, and memory itself has something to do with what’s going on. But it’s the small things rather than the big ones that give the film its grip and punch. The many social-realist auteurs pushing our faces into the raw meat of life could learn a lot from Michel Franco’s remarkable film. It starts out like many a kitchen sinker – at an AA meeting where Sylvia, its hero, is just one of many unfortunates trying to put life back together after getting too friendly with the bottle. Then it follows her to her workplace. A day centre for adults with learning difficulties, a job that seems to be … Read more
Don’t Torture a Duckling
Which witch? That seems to be the question behind Don’t Torture a Duckling (Non Sevizia un Paperino in the original Italian), the film that made Lucio Fulci something of a name in his home country – the sex, the gore. It’s essentially a police procedural and sets off in a very familiar direction. A child is killed and a man has soon been arrested for the crime. But this arrest is too easy, too quick, and when another child is killed while the suspect is behind bars, it is suddenly clear that it cannot be Barra, the town simpleton and peeping tom. It must be someone else and Barra’s story about having buried … Read more
