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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
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
What exactly is so strange about the love of Martha Ivers in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers? Unfortunate, maybe? Random, perhaps? Convenient, possibly? Strange – not so much. But then that is this noirish, gothic 1946 melodrama all over, promising much and not quite delivering. It’s largely remembered these days as the film debut of Kirk Douglas, who plays the husband of Barbara Stanwyck’s Martha Ivers, whose birth name was Smith, by the way, and whose married name is O’Neil, and so isn’t really an Ivers at all. But before all of that, first a preamble brilliantly setting the scene for what’s to follow. A young Martha (played winningly by Janis Wilson) is … Read more
Cuckoo
Allusional rather than visceral, Cuckoo is a stew of horror sub-genres served with a big side order of Grimm, and is pretty fabulous if you are used to drinking deeply at the well of the macabre. If you are not a horror nut, it’s probably a bit less necessary though fascinating all the same. It’s the story of a young woman who has been uprooted from her old life in the USA after the death of her mother and taken to Germany, where Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) is now expected to fit in with her estranged dad’s family without making a fuss. Dad Luis (Marton Csokas) is now married to Beth (Jessica Henwick, so … Read more
My Name Is Julia Ross
There is some spectacularly bad acting in 1945’s My Name Is Julia Ross but it’s worth a look in spite of that. And at only 65 minutes, it’s not exactly an investment. To sell it a bit harder, it hums with weirdness, is very nicely directed by Joseph H Lewis, who was renowned for spinning straw into gold (or at least gold plate), and it also has some very good acting in it, too, mostly by Dame May Whitty (most famous for being the titular lady in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes). George Macready, who plays her son, is pretty good too. The set-up is this: Whitty and Macready play a pair of fruitloops … Read more
MadS
MadS is good. Not sure about the big S in MadS. Or even what “MadS” is meant to mean (on screen it’s MADS, by the way). Typography to one side, surely it’s one of the best one-shot movies of all time, in the pantheon alongside the likes of Russian Ark and Victoria, with director David Moreau really using the immediate you-are-right-there-ness of the one-shot movie to its full effect. There are three lead actors, each busting their nuts with hyper-committed performances, and as Moreau daisy-chains from one character to the next – elegant segues starkly contrasting with the rest of the film – he takes a film that starts at cocaine frenzy and … Read more
What About Bob?
Bill Murray made What About Bob? in 1991, two years after Ghostbusters II and two years before Groundhog Day. Richard Dreyfus, his co-star, was one year on from Postcards from the Edge and on a run including Lost in Yonkers (1993) and Mr Holland’s Opus (1995). Director Frank Oz’s previous two movies had been Little Shop of Horrors and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. They’re not all classics but they’re at least all decent movies. And yet What About Bob? didn’t quite get the attention it deserved. A comedy with these names attached might have expected a review in the New York Times, for example. There wasn’t one. Nor did Roger Ebert, the US’s most … Read more
The Wild Robot
A shipwrecked robot adopts an orphaned gosling and learns to be a mother in The Wild Robot, a perky and poignant animation produced by DreamWorks and directed by Chris Sanders of How to Train Your Dragon fame. The bumf says Miyazaki and old Disney informed the look of the finished product, but the DreamWorks hit Ice Age is the dominant vibe – smart, anthropomorphised animals say the darnedest things, which seems to have been enough for most critics to give it the hearty thumbs up. I liked it a lot less, I have to say, though it does get itself together towards the end, when the quips are given a rest and Sanders and … Read more
The Tango Lesson
Sally Potter took quite a chance with her 1997 movie The Tango Lesson, by casting herself as herself in a lightly fictionalised version of her relationship with tango dancer Pablo Verón. Potter does like taking risks, though. Her previous film, Orlando, was an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s story about a character (Tilda Swinton) who travels through history changing gender as he/she goes, and cast a man, Quentin Crisp (the self-confessed “stately homo of England”), as Queen Elizabeth I. After The Tango Lesson came Yes, in which all the dialogue was in iambic pentameter. In comparison The Tango Lesson is a restrained affair, about a film director between projects who is entranced by a … Read more
Things Will Be Different
Michael Felker’s debut movie, Things Will Be Different, is billed as “A Felker Film”, which is ominously grandiose. But things are indeed different here and Felker emerges as a writer/director you might term an auteur, which is what the whole Felker Film thing is suggesting, right? Most movies don’t operate like Felker’s film. They set out a proposition and then work their way through it for us. Here, Felker drops us into something and makes us do the mental lifting for ourselves. After introducing us to two people at a remote diner, both with rifles, both looking hunted, he essentially asks us to ask a whole bunch of questions. Who are these people … Read more
Ecstasy
1933’s Ecstasy is famous for a couple of reasons. It was the first non-porn movie to show a woman having an orgasm, or so its reputation insists. And it was the film that introduced Hedy Lamarr to the world. Ironically, the actress so shockingly beautiful that other Hollywood screen goddesses were wary of being seen with her doesn’t actually look that hot in this infamous but rarely seen Czech drama. Or not always. From certain angles she’s devastating. From others fairly plain. In some she even appears to have the shadow of a moustache. The same thing happened to Marlene Dietrich. On home turf in Germany she looked like a hausfrau, but once … Read more
Immaculate
Sydney Sweeney plays a nun – how about that for an elevator pitch? Immaculate is a film that Sweeney really wanted to play, having first auditioned to play the lead role aged 17. Now, ten years on, with money in the bank and acting as a producer on the movie, she finally gets the project aloft, a touch of a rewrite here, a fave director there and casting herself as a sweet novitiate nun who become the brood mare of… well it must be Satan, though no one ever utters the name. A “devil’s dick” movie then, joining the likes of Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, with the plot remarkably close to The … Read more
