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Sans Lendemain
When the name Max Ophüls comes up, Sans Lendemain isn’t the first film most people think of. That would probably be Lola Montès, or La Ronde, or Letters from an Unknown Woman. But this 1939 outlier is distinctively Ophüls, a superb if small film, knotty in theme, beautiful in look and with a great performance by its female star, Edwige Feuillère. Ophüls was born Maximillian Oppenheimer and was a German Jew who fled the Nazis in 1933, made a few films in France, before fleeing the Nazis again in 1941, to America, where he never got quite the platform he deserved. Fellow directors like Preston Sturges championed him – partly because his lavish … Read more
Ferrari
The first obvious thing about Ferrari, a film from 2023, is that it was written by Troy Kennedy Martin, writer of 1969’s The Italian Job. Martin died in 2009! It’s taken a long time to get this film made. Michael Mann has been talking about it since the early years of the new millennium. Back then he was going to produce and Sydney Pollack was going to direct. In the end, after much to and fro, and with Pollack also dead en route, Mann wound up directing it himself. The second thing to say is that for a film about sexy cars, beautiful women, danger, speed, the thrill of the race and so … Read more
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
A cult Spanish zombie film shot mostly in England’s Peak District in 1974 – those filters must surely narrow things down to Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, which also goes by the name of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, the slightly more anaemic Don’t Open the Window and the original Spanish title, No Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos. The Living Dead bit nods us towards George Romero. But Jorge Grau’s film is full of his own little touches, and has fantastic mood and chilling music to offset some of the madder moments of bad acting (though a lot of those can be laid at the door of bad dubbing). Plotwise, a man … Read more
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
Blade Runner, City of God, Charles Dickens? Funny the things that sprang to mind watching Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, a self-conscious attempt to replicate the Hong Kong urban crime movie of yore. It’s a dystopian actioner set in a shantytown and focused on a central character who you might characterise as a 21st century Oliver Twist. This recent arrival in Hong Kong is a refugee who gave all his money to a Mr Big (Sammo Hung) hoping for some decent forged papers, got fleeced and then wound up seeking sanctuary from the authorities in the Citadel, a vast, multi-storey warren of crime. From here Chan Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam) attempts, Oliver style, … Read more
Ms .45
All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, so the old saying goes. Ms .45 takes it literally and concisely, squeezing both into the title of Abel Ferrara’s unglamourised, low-budget 1981 exploitationer, making much of the New York streets of the era and the face of its star, 18-year-old Zoë Tamerlis. Face not voice. Tamerlis plays a mute, a seamstress in the Garment District who is driven to psychotic acts of revenge after being raped twice in the same day, first in an alley on the way home (Ferrara plays the rapist) and then again once she’s arrived back at the safe haven of her apartment. Second time … Read more
The Nature of Love
A cliche sits at the centre of The Nature of Love, caught by its original French title, Simple Comme Sylvain (which translates as Simple Like Sylvain). Namely, that what a nice middle class woman with a white-collar job really wants is a no-nonsense big-handed guy who knows his way around a toolbox and a woman’s body. After putting up the shelves he’ll take her roughly from behind, or from any other direction he fancies. Writer/director Monia Chokri introduces us to nice middle-class Sophia (Magalie Lépine Blondeau) at a dinner party, where she and her partner Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume) are having a lovely evening with old friends, chatting about things in a conceptual, liberal … Read more
China Girl
1987’s China Girl is usually described as a reworking of the Romeo and Juliet plot, or as a song-free update on West Side Story (which is a reworking of the Romeo and Juliet plot). But that’s to fall for the elaborate feint of director Abel Ferrara and writer/frequent collaborator Nicholas St John. Yes, there are star-crossed lovers meeting across an unbreachable divide – ethnicity in 1980s New York – but Ferrara and St John are not that interested in handsome Tony (Richard Panebianco) and sweet Tye (Sari Chang), the Romeo update from Little Italy and the reconditioned Juliet from Chinatown. Instead, flipping the dynamic, their focus is on the modern-day Montagues and Capulets, … Read more
Hundreds of Beavers
Like the main character in it, Hundreds of Beavers just keeps going, throwing gag after gag after gag at an audience you suspect it suspects will only yield if buried. It works. It’s a semi-cartoon – its looks and its approach to the laws of physics – about a 19th-century applejack (hooch made from apples) salesman who destroys his career to the accompaniment of a cheerful song in the film’s opening moments. Applejack factory exploded, apple orchards all in flames thanks to a freak accident, Jean Kayak is left alone in the snowy wastes of North America – no food, no gear, no prospects. But instead of laying down and dying he sets … Read more
A Touch of Zen
Sex, death and people flying about in the air fighting each other, A Touch of Zen is the Taiwanese martial-arts movie that reminded Hong Kong directors how to do it properly, with space used intelligently, fluid cameras, energetic edits, restrained performances, humour that isn’t just about falling flat on your face and stuntwork that’s extravagant but not ridiculous. It’s rightly acclaimed as one of the best examples of the genre and was released in 1971 when martial arts was generally a B or even C movie affair, by King Hu, the director who changed all that. Ang Lee borrowed heavily from it for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and there’s enough Star Wars-y feeling … Read more
Coherence
A dinner-party-from-hell movie, a multiverse movie, Coherence deftly manages to be both, as if one of Luis Buñuel’s torture-the-bourgeoisie dramas from the 1960s had teleported to 50 years in the future. Coherence was released in 2013 to the odd handclap from festivals specialising in the left-field but it’s only now over a decade later that it seems to be getting more namechecks. And with films like Parallel Forest, or Parallel, its remake, in its thrall to an extent, that’s understandable. So, James Ward Byrkit wanted to make a feature but had no money to speak of. But thanks to a career in the movie biz (he wrote the story to Rango, for instance) … Read more
Yeelen
Like an Afro-futurist Arabian Nights or Homer’s Odyssey, 1987’s Yeelen tells in simple episodes the story of a young man on the run from his father. It’s often referred to as the greatest film ever to come out of Africa (no, Black Panther does not count) but even if you don’t buy that you’ll surely agree that it’s a beautiful film with an otherworldly atmosphere all its own. Director Soulemayne Cissé set out to make a film about Africa that rejected the usual colonial views of the continent – backward, savage etc – and largely succeeds, giving us a mysterious place steeped in tradition and running on old hierarchies and a rigid sense … Read more
Radical
Radical is a good thing but there is a lot of it. An inspirational-teacher drama, it’s a dramatisation of events that took place in 2012. Those events became the basis of a 2013 Wired article written by Joshua Davis, this film’s producer. And from there ten years ago to this film in 2023. Meanwhile, the teacher at the centre of the whole thing, Sergio Juárez Correa, works in the José Urbina López Primary School to this day. Co-writer/director Christopher Zalla makes sure we know where we are and who we’re dealing with. A poor Mexican border town where guns, gangs and poverty grind out any aspiration parents might have for their children. A … Read more
