Latest Posts
Fail Safe
The dark twin of Dr Strangelove, Fail Safe came out the same year as Kubrick’s film and was sued by him over copyright infringement. There wasn’t any, but for a quiet life Kubrick’s studio, Columbia, played along and released his film first in January, then Sidney Lumet’s film later in the year. Both films are reactions to the Cuban Missile Crisis two years before, a point in history when events seemed to gain a traction all of their own and humans seemed powerless to prevent what looked like a slide towards nuclear war between the USA and USSR. Both Strangelove and Fail Safe ask the question: what if humans really hadn’t been able … Read more
Causeway
Welcome back, Jennifer Lawrence, who as recently as 2015/16 was the world’s highest paid actress and in Causeway reminds us why. And perhaps needed to – so many films she’s appeared in since her high-water mark have been just a touch underwhelming. And welcome to the big time for Brian Tyree Henry. Oscar-nominated for his role here, he’s been impressive in everything he’s been in for years, but it was 2020’s The Outside Story that proved he could carry an entire movie on his own. In what’s largely a two-hander – it could almost be a play in a studio theatre – Lawrence plays a soldier suffering post-traumatic physical and mental trauma after … Read more
Suddenly
Suddenly is apparently the movie that Lee Harvey Oswald watched before setting out to kill President John F Kennedy. God knows why Oswald was looking to it for inspiration because things don’t end triumphantly at all for the guys on screen trying to assassinate their own US president. It is triumphant as a movie though, a strange, small, short drama in many ways as odd as its title. Suddenly is the name of the town where the whole thing is set, a nowheresville with a railroad station that’s essentially just a halt on the line, where a telegraph operator receives a message over the wire – prepare to receive the US president this afternoon, … Read more
The Beanie Bubble
The story behind the success of a stuffed-toy phenomenon, The Beanie Bubble is in many ways a template World 2.0 tale of one man, a vision, plus a lot of help from other people, most of whom get left in the dust when it is time to bask in the glory. It could be Jobs, or Musk, or Thiel, or Bezos, but here it’s Ty Warner – in many ways he got there first, building up a company selling understuffed, very soft toys to children. The toys became a thing, a can’t-lose investment. Starting in the 1980s but accelerating to warp speed in the 1990s, Ty Inc. rose and rose on the back … Read more
Downhill Racer
Roman Polanski was meant to direct Downhill Racer but producer Robert Evans diverted him on to Rosemary’s Baby instead. So here’s Michael Ritchie’s pass at the same material. The former TV director does a good job, and let’s face it Rosemary’s Baby needed Polanski. Good jobs are done all round in fact. Mostly by Robert Redford, actually acting against type for once rather than just smiling and looking handsome, playing a skier who is part of the US effort to bust apart European dominance of winter sports. The thing about Redford’s Dave Chappellet, though, is that he’s not a team player. Nor, depending on how you look at it, is downhill skiing really … Read more
Lost in the Night
A thriller done without the genre defaults, Lost in the Night (Perdidos en la Noche) is a film by Amat Escalante, a director who likes it bright and wide, slow and considered – more or less the opposite of the usual dark, claustrophobic, rapid and kneejerk. Does it work? No, but it’s a near miss rather than a catastrophic fail, an ambitious film pushing the genre in an unusual direction, and at its centre a loner’s performance by Juan Daniel García Treviño, playing a Mexican teenager trying to find out what happened to his political activist mother three years earlier. His investigation takes him to the home of the Aldama family, a strange … Read more
Boomerang!
Boomerang! – what a great movie. Fully justifying that screamer, this movie from 1947 doesn’t get the love it deserves. For two reasons, of which more later. But first let’s clear away the baggage. It’s not a film noir, though it’s often described as one. Instead it’s one of those “ripped from the headlines” crime dramas that came along a bit later, relying on “you are there” levels of authenticity to bolster its dramatic credentials. In a written preamble we’re told that not only was the film shot on the same locations as the events it relates, but it uses some of the same people. The first is not true. The real-life incidents … Read more
Daaaaaalí!
Surrealist film-maker makes film about surrealist artist shock. Daaaaaalí! is the result, and you wonder why Quentin Dupieux, who’s only a semi-serious surrealist really, didn’t do it before. Dupieux starts off with a bit of comedy. Judith, a nervous young reporter played by Anaïs Demoustier, stands in a corridor with the great painter’s assistant, awaiting his arrival. Here he comes, says the right-hand woman, and indeed it is the legend himself, barrelling towards them down the corridor, his signature moustache pointing skyward, his mouth working at a mile a minute as this ball of self-regard and practised eccentricity approaches them. Except he never seems quite to arrive. In a scene familiar from an … Read more
Green for Danger
A tightly plotted and nicely played whodunit of the old school, Green for Danger is also British to the core. Set during the Second World War, it was made in 1946, when it was possible to look back at the darkest hour – the Blitz, doodlebugs (the weaponised drones of yore) and all that with half a smile. The plot centres on the death in hospital of a man whose minor operation shouldn’t have killed him at all. Did someone want this local postman dead? If so, why? The medical team who operated on him all look guilty as hell, but all also seem to have plausible alibis. Enter Alastair Sim as Inspector … Read more
Apartment 7A
Rosemary’s Baby: The Prequel would have been a more obvious title for Apartment 7A, for that is what it is, a straightforward precursor movie imagining that Rosemary wasn’t the first sweet young thing to become the broodmare of Satan. If you can remember Rosemary’s Baby we were told as much in that film. And if you really really know your Rosemary’s Baby, then Julia Garner playing someone called Terry is enough to alert you as to where everything is heading. Garner, an adept at playing wide-eyed young women in a lot of trouble, does it brilliantly again as the feisty girl from Nebraska who’s come to New York to follow her dream of … Read more
100 Years of… Dr. Mabuse the Gambler
An important film rather than a good one, at four and a half hours Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler) is simply too unwieldy to qualify as a quality movie and yet it regularly ranks up there with the best of them, bolstered by the reputation of its director, Fritz Lang, who, whisper it, could turn out some real rubbish when his mind wasn’t on his work. Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is not rubbish though. And in spite of the reservations about its length, this silent behemoth from 1922 is a remarkable document in many ways, though a heavy one, in which Lang lays down the template for all the bad … Read more
Lee
Before Lee we’d kind of already had a movie about Lee Miller. Kirsten Dunst’s character in Civil War, an old-school photojournalist, had been named Lee in honour of Lee Miller, so she said, and her character was clearly modelled on Miller’s. Now here’s the real thing, a representation at least, with Kate Winslet applying herself to the task of playing a woman whose life was so interesting that the movie can afford to pretty much toss away her first flush – life as a model and muse palling about with Man Ray, Picasso and the like in the 1920s. So, flapper not so much, snapper it is, this being Lee Miller the Sequel, … Read more
