Latest Posts
The 100 Candles Game
Compendium horror – who’s it for? That question formed in my mind as The 100 Candles Game told its seven different stories, plus another one that links them all together, Arabian Nights style. Are audiences hungry for this sort of thing? I don’t think so. Film-makers love the portmanteau horror film, though, because it gives directors a chance to hawk their wares, in affordable chunks, often supported by a producer who knows his way around the business. But on the whole they are patchy affairs, usually a mix of the OK, the pretty skanky and, rarely, a magnificent outlier. There is no true magnificence here, though the film-makers on display are a lot … Read more
Brute Force
Time has diluted the impact of Brute Force, but this prison drama from 1947 remains a good film, largely because it doesn’t live up to the title. There is brutishness, but not too much. For much of its length, in fact, it’s a study of character, of how men who are all packed together in an overcrowded prison get along together, or don’t. Richard Brooks wrote the screenplay and Jules Dassin directs. This was the first of Dassin’s run of great movies – The Naked City, Thieves’ Highway, Night and the City and Rififi would follow. Burt Lancaster is the star, in his first film since his breakout in The Killers, and slots … Read more
Limbo
Old wine in new bottles, Limbo is a case – a jeroboam? – of the familiar served up in a starkly different way. A desert noir, an Outback noir more specifically, it’s the latest from Ivan Sen, whose Mystery Road about ten years ago opened up this territory. Now he exploits it, with a savage, scorched-earth aesthetic, in a story about a troubled cop – wrecked marriage, bit of a drug problem – rocking up in a remote Outback town to open the books on the unsolved murder of a local aborigine girl, though the nearest you get to the word “aborigine” in this film is “black fella”. Mystery Road had more or less … Read more
Possessed
Superb and quite mad, Possessed gives us Joan Crawford at full hatstand, eyes boggling, jaw tight, fists clenched, a portrait of an unhinged woman, a stalker before the term was coined. This melodrama from 1947 comes from a time when they knew how to do this sort of thing unapologetically. It opens calmly but oddly enough. After big, blaring, noirish opening credits we’re on city streets at dawn, where a discombobulated lone woman (Crawford) is stumbling about looking for someone called David. She’s clearly in the midst of some kind of breakdown and winds up in hospital, in the Psychopathic Ward, in a catatonic state. The doctor, after opining that there’s a lot … Read more
My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock
Mark Cousins’s documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock steers a careful course between low and high culture, the crass, “did you know” approach to the great director and the earnest film studies route. Hitchcock understood the importance of fun. The result is an engaging, interesting, entertaining and enlightening 120 minutes, not the last word in Hitchcock, but a lively addition to a library which, in my view, could not get full enough. “A showman, a daredevil, a fun fair,” says Hitch in a film entirely written and narrated by him, or so it’s claimed at the outset. In fact that’s all a bit of a lie. Cousins wrote the script that impressionist Alistair … Read more
Dracula
“Listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make.” Hollywood horror starts here, with 1931’s Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning, it made an international star of the man who uttered those words, Bela Lugosi. He’d already become a huge Broadway star off the back of a stage adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. This film would propel him onto the global stage, and into posterity. The film sticks fairly close to the play, which sticks fairly close to the book. There have been trims in characters and settings but most of the original plot is intact as Browning’s version of it follows Dracula from his ancestral home in Transylvania, on to … Read more
The Killer
John Woo never feels fully in control of The Killer, the remake of his own film from 1989, an accusation you could never have levelled at the original. Flipping the gender of the assassin, and switching from Hong Kong to Paris both seem like sound ideas, not least because in some quarters the increasingly tight relationship between the assassin and his cop pursuer in the original seemed a bit too close to homosexual. No chance of that now. Omar Sy is in the cop role, and of all the many actors in this strangely off thriller, Sy probably comes out of it least shortchanged. There are two familiar tales here. First the “a … Read more
Ghosts
Ghosts (Gespenster in the German original) is the film Christian Petzold made between Wolfsburg and the one that bounced him more into the international spotlight, Yella. It’s the second of his Ghosts trilogy – Die innere Sicherheit (aka The State I’m In) and Yella are the other two – and like Die innere Sicherheit stars Julia Hummer as a bit of a waif trying to shore up her personality against a hostile world. Here she’s a teenage girl who lives in a home, a shy kid who one day meets her exact opposite, a tough street rat who lives on her wits, largely by shoplifting, and who knows what else. Nina (Hummer) is … Read more
Queer
An adaptation of a self-flagellating William Burroughs novel, Queer sets out to explore identity politics in a refreshing way, tacitly asking a question about the nature of people. Does doing homosexual things make you a homosexual? In the red corner Bill Lee (Daniel Craig), a dyed-in-the-wool ageing queer hiding out in Mexico City in 1950, where he lives the life of the dissolute bohemian expat on his American dollars, and flits from one seedy gay bar to another, to chitchat and drink, but mostly drink, and then weave home where a spoon and a syringe await. In the blue corner Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), recently out of US military service, female friend always … Read more
Wonder Man
Yes, Wonder Man, not Wonder Woman, a 1945 musical comedy with a dash of crime thriller starring Danny Kaye as Danny Kaye, or sailing so close to his public persona as makes no difference. As happened quite often in Kaye’s career, he plays two roles, twin brothers, one of whom is a light, facetious, musical theatre type, the other a bookish stiff. After big, brash, brassy musical opening credits with the word Technicolor prominent, a musical number right at the beginning showcases most of the Kaye skillset – corny songs delivered with a wink, tongue-twisting wordplay, goofing about, awful puns (dad jokes), silly dances and so on. It looks like this version of … Read more
Eliminators
It’s easy to get sniffy about films like Eliminators, spam-fisted actioners featuring one lunk or another kicking the life out of some meathead, delivering the coup de grace with a quip that’s meant to be James Bond but is more often than not Steven Seagal. Even Seagal has been known to make good films, so let’s park the prejudices and get down to action. Scott Adkins, a British actor, plays a federal agent hiding out in London on some witness protection program, whose life is upended when three local desparadoes looking for a stash of cocaine break in to his house waving guns about. They threaten his daughter, bad mistake, and are soon … Read more
Panic in the Streets
Steve Soderbergh’s Contagion seemed to be required viewing during Covid, Panic in the Streets not so much. But Elia Kazan’s film from 1950 has much to say about epidemics, why nipping them in the bud is important, how government can be a force for good and why scepticism needs to be countered not with shrillness but facts, reason and the force of argument. All this wrapped up in a tense, noirish thriller starring Richard Widmark and handing Jack Palance the first of a long string of “mad dog” roles, which he was uniquely suited to playing. As Soderbergh, so Kazan – realism and immediacy are the key concerns. Panic in the Streets is … Read more
