Latest Posts
St Benny the Dip
I didn’t know, going into St Benny the Dip, that a “dip” is a pickpocket. In these circles the dip is the one who goes in for the goods, the “stall” having provided a distraction, while the “mule” is the one to whom the hot item is swiftly transferred, in case the dip is caught in the act. That established, into the film, which doesn’t seem to be about pickpockets at all, though it is about street criminals. When we meet Benny (Dick Haymes) the smooth, Matthew (Roland Young) the plausible and Monk (Lionel Stander) the operator, they are midway through a gambling sting, trying to bilk a high roller, when the police … Read more
Millennium Actress
There are two big Japanese animes from 2001. Millennium Actress is the other one, the one that isn’t Spirited Away. A Citizen Kane-style drama, it’s a sweet and poignant film about a documentarian and his cameraman tracking down a legendary actress who stepped away from the limelight decades before. With the studio where she spent her glory years now being demolished and the end of an era physically apparent, they decide this is the hook they need for a film about a studio and its most famous star. But will Chiyoko Fujiwara even still be alive? Given this lead-in – and the Kane-like air of mystery which writer/director Satoshi Kon builds around his … Read more
The Cranes Are Flying
The Cranes Are Flying is remarkable in so many ways. The only film from the USSR to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, it is also a reminder that an epic doesn’t need epic length to tell its story. A simple story at that. Two people very much in love. Slightly diffident Boris (Aleksey Batalov) and feisty, beautiful Veronica (Tatyana Samoylova). He’s slightly punching above his weight, and knows it, and it’s this that probably tips Boris’s hand when he is weighing up whether to volunteer to go to the front, as the Nazis advance on Moscow. This in spite of the fact that composer Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin), Boris’s handsome cousin, has designs … Read more
The Christophers
The story goes that Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon wrote The Christophers for Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel without having any idea if they’d do it or not. According to the IMDb trivia on this film, Soderbergh and Solomon didn’t even know McKellen and Coel, which is plausible in Coel’s case – she’s only been around a relatively short time – but surely not in McKellen’s. It’s the sort of film that Soderbergh knocks out between big projects. For every Ocean’s 13 a Kimi, for every Magic Mike a Presence – that is to say: tiny cast and crew, controlled location, films that could almost be stage plays. Here, McKellen is a fruity … Read more
Random Harvest
Random Harvest takes the amnesiac plot used and abused by mid-20th-century moviemakers and pushes it into and beyond the realm of the absurd. Audiences at the time loved it, the film was multi-Oscar nominated and even though it ascends into madness fairly early on, it’s a fabulous madness, confected by MGM with all the lush plushness the studio could engineer. Ronald Colman is too old by a stretch but let’s put that to one side as we watch him playing a soldier who is back from the First World War and languishing in an asylum with PTSD and amnesia. In short order he accidentally gets free, meets a showgirl and strikes up a … Read more
Project Hail Mary
Dry and wry and suited to the talents of all involved, Project Hail Mary’s gets a serious attack of the cutes midway through. That apart, it’s a rip-roaring space adventure of the old school whose good bits are so good that its tweeness can be overlooked. I think. It’s an adaptation of an Andy Weir book, the guy who did The Martian, and is again deeply procedural. This time, instead of Matt Damon growing potatoes in human shit after being accidentally left behind on Mars, we have Ryan Gosling waking up on board a space ship light years away from Earth. His job is not to save his own skin but to work … Read more
Operation Diplomat
A neat example of the brisk storytelling of writer Frances Durbridge – a British crime eminence in 1953 – Operation Diplomat is also a prime example of the skilful directing of John Guillermin, who tells that story at speed. He’d later go on to direct successes like The Towering Inferno and 1978’s Death on the Nile, where an ability to keep the story moving while giving each of a vast array of stars their moment in the spotlight would turn out to be vital. Here, Guillermin is in the British B-movie phase of his career. And though he doesn’t have to corral herds of actors and swing his cameras around exotic locations and impressive … Read more
Late Shift
There’s a crusading aspect to Late Shift, made explicit in an on-screen endnote about the shortage of nurses worldwide. Focus on a particular to create the universal is the idea, Petra Volpe’s film following a single nurse for a single night as she deals with patients in an understaffed Swiss hospital. The writer/director is lucky to have Leonie Benesch as her star. She’s particularly skilled at playing woman out of their depth, both in the public sector (as in 2023’s The Teachers’ Lounge) but more generally too – see 2024’s September 5, or the early episodes of German TV show Babylon Berlin, which lost a lot of heft when she left. Here, it’s … Read more
Incubus
OK, so, films in Esperanto starring William Shatner… Anybody? The answer is Incubus, a true oddity from 1966 made just before Shatner started work on Star Trek. It’s one of only two films made in the world’s most widely spoken “constructed auxiliary language” (made up, in other words) in the 1960s. The other being 1964’s Angoroj. Wikipedia says there are two more from the noughties – 2006’s Gerda malaperis! and 2007’s La Patro, which is only 40 minutes long and about which not much is known. Incubus is undoubtedly the most famous of all of them, partly because of Shatner, partly because it’s directed by Lesley Stevens, the producer of The Outer Limits, who … Read more
Agon
As a title Agon is a bit esoteric. The root word from which English gets “agonist”, “protagonist” and so on, it’s also the source of the word “agony”. But to the Ancient Greeks the Agon was also an athletics competition. Director Giulio Bertelli’s choice of titles may be abstruse but it is apt – his film is about the struggles of three female athletes as they compete in the entirely fictional 2024 Olympic Games at Ludoj. While we’re in the realm of etymology, “Ludoj”, the linguists will know, is the Esperanto word for “Games”. The three leads are almost fictional too. Two of them, Yile Yara Vianello and Sofija Zobina, are professional actors … Read more
Twenty Six Days in the Life of Dostoevsky
A bit too neat and tidy, maybe, but Twenty Six Days in the Life of Dostoevsky is serious and sincere and has two canny performances at its centre: Anatoliy Solonitsyn as the Russian writer and Evgeniya Simonova as the woman who saved him. The neatness and tidiness is exemplified by the opening scene, where two friends discuss Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky’s terrible financial position. He’s broke, it seems, and if he doesn’t deliver his latest novel to the publisher by the end of the month, he’ll lose the right to all the royalties on all his books for the next nine years. Maybe what Dostoevsky needs, one of the friends suggests to the other, … Read more
Greenland 2: Migration
Greenland 2: Migration follows hot on the heels… no, hang on… comes six years after the first Greenland, which was a thoughtful apocalyptic thriller which somehow seemed to anticipate the Covid outbreak. The second movie has decided to aim for relevance more deliberately. The “Migration” in the title – what could be more of the moment? Starting off in the sanctuary in Greenland where John Garrity (Gerard Butler) and family were heading in the first instalment, it plays a “see how you like it” plot flip on our heroes. First it asks the Garritys if they’d like to share their cramped space with a batch of 50 new arrivals. They’re reluctant. Shortly afterwards the Garritys … Read more
