Latest Posts
The Big Heat
The Big Heat is one of the big movies of film noir – see The Big Sleep, The Big Clock, The Big Combo from the classic era, or The Big Easy, The Big Blue and The Big Lebowski from later on. Weak joke aside, it’s big in the other sense too, being important, pivotal, epochal even. Here you get director Fritz Lang at the top of his game and a screenplay that works like a ratchet, almost every scene advancing the story a notch while flinty characters are pushed hither and yon by a cruel and ironic fate. It’s the film that famously starts with the image of a gun on a desk. … Read more
Tuesday
Films about pretty young people dying miserably of some terrible but usually not disfiguring condition can be a bit of a drag. Tuesday writer/director Daina Oniunas-Pusić has found a way of injecting a bit of zip – adding a bit of the weird supernatural. We’re told from all the publicity that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the star, but in fact Lola Petticrew more than capably holds the whole thing together as Tuesday, a teenager with not long to live, who is visited one day by a talking macaw that can change size at will. She intuits instantly that this is Death itself (we already knew that because an early montage sequence has shown us … Read more
Bride of Frankenstein
Modern film-makers could learn a lot from Bride of Frankenstein and its illustrious predecessor, 1931’s original Frankenstein, not least how to tell a story at speed. And the amazing thing is that director James Whale took the finished cut of his sequel, a tight 90 minutes, and took a further 15 minutes out of it after a few test screenings. The result is a brilliant and furiously paced 75 minutes of entertainment. Whale hadn’t wanted to make this sequel at all, but Universal persuaded him with a promise of total artistic control. And so he set to work, opening his film with an introductory sequence set in Switzerland, where a ridiculously la-di-dah Lord … Read more
Longlegs
A young FBI agent investigates a serial killer who cackles, dresses creepily and likes to leave cryptic clues at the scene of the crime. Longlegs is another belt of 1990s horror for those who can’t get enough Seven, It or The Silence of the Lambs. It’s derivative and yet it’s also its own beast, involving, excellently crafted and stonkingly acted. And Nicolas Cage is in it – as mad as a bat and every second he’s on the screen wildly entertaining, and freaky. Director Osgood Perkins’s decision to shoot it all like an Edward Hopper painting – still, flat, empty, so many brown hues – is the masterstroke, and Maika Monroe plays along … Read more
Suspicion
Anxiety was the fashionable diagnosis if you went to see a shrink in the 1940s. Suspicion is the anxiety movie, the story of a prim spinster swept off her feet by a handsome chap who then starts wondering what he saw in her. Her money is the obvious answer, though Joan Fontaine looks like a prize worth having in Alfred Hitchcock’s fraught little melodrama halfway stranded between the gothic of Wilkie Collins and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalyst’s couch. Cary Grant plays the raffish Johnnie, the bounder who whirls into the life of wealthy wallflower Lina (Fontaine), quickly marries her and then reveals that he hasn’t a penny to his name. He’ll work, he says, … Read more
The Substance
Youth is wasted on the young in The Substance, writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s long, exciting and technically brilliant sci-fi fable swaggering like a 1980s action movie. Demi Moore plays Judith Sparkle, the ageing actress who takes “the substance” after being nudged in the direction of the age-reversing serum by a doctor with too-blue eyes, too-tight skin and too-perfect hair. With a wave of a magic syringe she has soon budded, allowing a younger version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) to go out and play in Hollywood, leaving the aged and inert husk back at the ranch. The wrinkle is that it’s a week on, a week off. Every seven days Young Judith has … Read more
Bad Seed
Billy Wilder directed 1934’s Bad Seed (Mauvaise Graine) more out of necessity than desire. He’d never directed a film before, in spite of having been quite a big wheel as a writer in the German film industry (the Nazis put paid to that). But he was in a tight spot and so had to add a string to his bow. He wouldn’t direct another film for eight years, in Hollywood, where 1942’s The Major and the Minor became the first of a remarkable run lasting nearly 40 years. Alexander Esway also gets a director’s credit, but he was little more than a gracious front man whose name helped Wilder’s movie get financed. What’s … Read more
Luz
So was Tilman Singer’s first feature, 2018’s Luz, as inventive as Cuckoo, his most recent one (starring Hunter Schafer)? Yes, is the answer, though Luz is inventive in an entirely different way. It plays about with time in ways that are unusual – Singer doesn’t do flashbacks and flashforwards so much as infect the here and now with snatches of what’s happened and what’s about to come. It sounds like it’s hard to follow and at first it is, but by the end Singer has given us enough plot for us to have a grasp of what’s been going on. This seems to be, in as much as we can tell, the story … Read more
The Thirteenth Chair
A classic country-house whodunit from 1937, The Thirteenth Chair gets the whole thing done and dusted in just over an hour, which is more than you can say for a lot of these things. And it can boast May Whitty – billed as “the Distinguished English Actress Dame May Whitty” – in the lead role as a clairvoyant. Set in India during the Raj, it opens with Scotland Yard inspector Marney (Lewis Stone) and local man Commissioner Grimshaw (Matthew Boulton) discussing the recent murder of a man not universally loved by the expat community who lord it about in Calcutta. The dead man’s best friend, John Wales – “fanatical”, says Grimshaw, so obviously not … Read more
The Crime Is Mine aka Mon Crime
Mixing it up is writer/director François Ozon’s way. Mon Crime (aka The Crime Is Mine) sees him back on the comedic territory of 8 Femmes, Potiche and In the House, leaving his more serious, more recent movies, like Peter von Kant (a remake of a fraught Fassbinder film), Summer of 85 (a veiled autobiography) and Everything Went Fine (a drama about assisted dying) looking a little like aberrations. Farce and old-school screwball is the idea. The style borrowed from Lubitsch and Capra, the story looking like it’s borrowed from the 1926 play Chicago. Actually, it’s based on the 1934 play Mon Crime, which, it’s possible, might have leant on the same real-life source … Read more
Don’t Bother to Knock
The casting is crucial to the success of Don’t Bother to Knock as a taut psychological drama. On one side two actors – Richard Widmark and Elisha Cook Jr – known for playing weirdos, psychos, oddballs or generally damaged individuals. And on the other is Marilyn Monroe. In her first lead role, after a series of minor cheesecake roles and light comedies, it’s actually Monroe who’s the proper whacko in this strange story centred on Nell Forbes (Monroe), a disturbed young woman who is babysitting a little girl for one night when by rights Nell should probably be in an asylum. As for Cook and Widmark, the former plays Nell’s decent uncle Eddie, … Read more
Sweet Dreams
If Knives Out weren’t a lark it would look something like Sweet Dreams (Zoete Dromen), a thriller from the Netherlands where the usual murder mystery is sharpened by a hit of oppression mixed with anti-colonial hatred. It’s a lovely-looking, lushly colourful movie set around 1900 in the Dutch East Indies where the white colonists are running a sugar-factory concern and living the high life indoors – dressing entirely in white for dinner, dining on sucking pig – while the brown folk do all the work outdoors. Unlike the usual Agatha Christie-style whodunit, all the sublimated stuff gets given its moment in the sun. There are servants who they simmer with resentment. There are natives … Read more
