Latest Posts
Party Girl
Party Girl reminds us that director Nicholas Ray wasn’t just a master of noir. Alongside the stark monochrome of great dramas like In a Lonely Place and They Live by Night, there’s this insanely lush, ridiculously colourful offering, often bracketed with Ray’s other colour movies of the era – Johnny Guitar or Rebel without a Cause, for instance – but quite apart from them in tone. It’s still very noirish, a gangster movie in colour, really, with Cyd Charisse the titular star but the movie very much focused on the character Robert Taylor plays, Tommy Farrell. They’re both not-quite people: she’s a fan dancer (which really means stripper at the very least) at … Read more
Silver Haze
I saw Vicky Knight being interviewed around the time Silver Haze came out in 2023. She is its star, as she was in Sacha Polak’s previous film, Dirty God, and is once again hellishly good as a woman in search of a better life being tripped up by her circumstances. The jaw-to-the-floor moment of the interview came when the quietly spoken and very unactorly Knight revealed that she still had a day job, working in Britain’s National Health Service as a health support worker. Everyone in the room took a breath. The scarring she sustained after being trapped in a fire in her grandfather’s pub aged eight must be some of the reason … Read more
Crossfire
In 1947’s swift noirish crime drama Crossfire a bunch of Army guys in the process of being demobbed meet a guy in a bar. By the end of the evening the guy is dead. But who did it and why? Director Edward Dmytryk opens with the death happening in shadowplay against a wall, as the unfortunate Samuels (Sam Levene) is worked over in a room by two assailants we never see. Samuels goes down, the men flee, the cops arrive. The questioning starts, and it’s a strange affair, with no names being asked for by the cop, and the guy he’s questioning not surrendering any either, it’s just “this man”, “this fella”, “two … Read more
Abigail
How to describe Abigail without ruining it? It starts out looking very much like a heist thriller, except it’s not money the gang in question is trying to lift, but a young girl called Abigail, the daughter of a very rich man, we later learn, who is expected to pay out $50 million to get her back. The gang all have aliases – Frank, Sammy, Joey, Peter, Dean and Rickles, the Rat Pack in other words, which gives everything a Tarantino-esque flavour. And Reservoir Dogs slight return is seemingly what’s on the cards once the gang successfully kidnap Abigail and wind up back at the big old mansion. Here it looks like they … Read more
The Seventh Victim
A prequel of sorts to Cat People, 1943’s The Seventh Victim is also something of a warm up for Rosemary’s Baby – Satanists in New York! – as well as the debut of Kim Hunter, who plays the little girl lost in the big city. It’s a bit of a mad film and doesn’t quite add up but it’s stoked with atmosphere, all kicking off with young Mary (Hunter) being called into the principal’s office at her school because her older sister, Jacqueline, has not been keeping up with the payments on the fees. She’s gone missing, it seems. So Mary heads to New York to find her, and there tangles with one … Read more
Conclave
Conclave is not so much a case of who done it as who won it, a thriller set in the Vatican as the cardinals gather to elect a new pope. Being an adaptation of a Robert Harris novel, like Enigma (which became a film of the same name) and The Ghost (which became The Ghost Writer), it’s a closely researched thing, its potentially deadening attention to detail kept spiky by the addition of some suspense, intrigue, cloak and dagger and some lively thumbnail performances by a lot of mostly old white guys as the cardinals. Following custom, when an old pope dies, the men in scarlet come together from the four corners of … Read more
Our Last Tango aka Un Tango Más
“There will never again be another tango couple like us,” says María Nieves, best known for her long-standing partnership with Juan Carlos Copes. You’ll never have heard of the pair of them if you’re not interested in tango, but Our Last Tango (aka Un Tango Más), German Kral’s film about them, works just fine whether you’re a newbie or an aficionado of these Argentinian dancing giants, largely thanks to its emotional core. “If I could do it all again, I’d do it all the same. Everything… except being with Juan,” says María at one point. At just shy of 80 when this was made in 2015, she’s about to hang up her shoes and … Read more
The Dead Don’t Hurt
How much of The Dead Don’t Hurt could you cut out without hurting it? Quite a bit, I’m guessing. It’s a slow and steady western, and that’s at least partly the point of it, an exercise in style and genre that could be quite a bit shorter but also a fair bit longer without changing its complexion. The story it tells is archetypal as are the characters in it. But the focus is on the woman, unusually, which brackets this alongside Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, another distinct and handsome movie with a female focus. It’s directed by Viggo Mortensen, who also takes a key role (he stepped in at the last second, apparently, … Read more
The Blue Gardenia
A young woman whose soldier boyfriend has just dumped her goes out for a drink with a known “wolf”. Drunk and vulnerable, she then heads back to his place, where, he tells her, there’s a party going down, only to discover that the party consists of just her and him. The next morning the very handsy Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr) is dead, beaten to death with a poker. Did sweet Norah (Anne Baxter) do it? Of course she didn’t – we know how these things go. But for the rest of this underwhelming thriller’s 85-minute running time we watch and wait for energetic journalist Casey Mayo and lacklustre cop Sam Haynes to arrive … Read more
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Having paused for 38 years to catch its breath, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reminds us what we loved about the original 1988 movie… and what we found slightly less than satisfying. 1988 was when some of today’s biggest actors were born – Emma Stone and Glenn Powell for instance. It was the year of Seoul Olympics. And it was around then that Tim Berners-Lee started messing about with a concept that would become the World Wide Web. So, yes, a while ago. Clicking right through back to the present, there’s no sign of Alec Baldwin or Geena Davis in this sequel but a lot of the cast and crew are back – most crucially Michael Keaton … Read more
Key Largo
If you liked Humphrey Bogart’s cynical romantic Rick in Casablanca, Key Largo gives you another go around the track with him. And if you liked the dynamite pairing of Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep or Dark Passage, they get another outing too, in the last of the films they’d make together. He plays a major back from the war and in the sweltering Florida Keys on a courtesy visit to the father of one of his men, who died in the Italian campaign. But when Major Frank McCloud gets to the hotel owned by James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), he discovers that it’s been taken over by … Read more
The Outrun
The Outrun is the latest from director Nora Fingscheidt, whose edgy, urgent System Crasher opened doors in 2019 that she largely closed again with her follow-up, 2021’s The Unforgivable, which many critics indeed found unforgivable, even though it starred Sandra Bullock. She’s on the upswing again here, with the jumbled-up story of a young woman from the Orkneys who goes to London, becomes a terrible alcoholic and then returns to the wild islands off the coast of Scotland to seek balm for the soul and a new start in life. The arc is not unlike the one for Wild, the brilliant Jean-Marc Vallée film starring Reese Witherspoon as a wild child recapturing her … Read more
