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Gunga Din
There’s a lot going on in Gunga Din, the high point of a certain kind of Hollywood film-making. Released in the golden era’s “annus mirabilis” of 1939, it’s an exotic, oriental white-man’s-burden kind of adventure adapted from a Rudyard Kipling story, but locked away in there something is grumbling away. All is not as it first appears. There are two main storylines, connected together by a familiar trio of bromantic soldiers – the lover (Douglas Fairbanks Jr), the joker (Cary Grant) and the fighter (Victor McLaglen) – three sergeants in Queen Victoria’s army in India sent out from their base to find out why the vital telegraph system keeps going down. It turns … Read more
American Star
At last, in American Star, someone has given Ian McShane a lead role in a movie that he can get properly stuck into. Not a fine co-starring role (Sexy Beast) or fine supporting role (John Wick and its sequels) or as a fine co-lead in a spin-off from a TV show (Deadwood) but a bona-fide lead role in a movie that’s all his own. It’s a good movie too. It dips a bit in the last third but ends so powerfully you’ll forgive it. It opens powerfully too. In a stylised, wordless sequence, we follow McShane’s black-clad Wilson as he lands on the island of Fuerteventura, hires a car and drives out into … Read more
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Hayao Miyazaki’s career as an animator in charge of his own destiny starts here, with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, two hours of typical Miyazaki, from 1984, which more or less set the benchmark for what was to come. There had been one full feature before, 1979’s The Castle of Cagliostro, but that was part of an ongoing series dedicated to Lupin III, supposedly the grandson of the French master thief Arsène Lupin. In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, we are introduced to Nausicaä, a pure Miyazaki character, a tough, brave, kind, thoughtful and resourceful young woman separated from her parents and adrift in a world that’s a mash-up … Read more
The Royal Hotel
Writer/director Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel slots into the “people having a terrible time in the Outback” groove but her follow-up to The Assistant is also its own distinctive beast. It’s more Wake in Fright than Wolf Creek, with its subjects/victims being tested to their psychological limits rather than out-and-out monstered. It’s a “thriller” says the IMDb, and quite a few reviews say it is too. But it’s a funny sort of thriller, coming across more as a human drama with a lurking sense of threat unsettling enough almost for it to be counted as a horror movie. But on to the plot. Two young women backpacking their way around the world wind … Read more
The Brother from Another Planet
1984’s The Brother from Another Planet is a smart, funny, smallscale sci-fi movie about an alien who crashlands in New York. In some respects it’s a sibling movie to 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth – weird dude with special gifts has a mixed time of it on planet Earth. Because the alien resembles a black man, the movie is often seen as some gigantic metaphor for the black experience in the USA but beyond the fact of the dude’s alienness, it’s a reading that doesn’t yield much more than the movie on a surface level is already delivering. It goes about its business as a series of slice-of-life vignettes about daily … Read more
Godland
Godland reminds us yet again that when it comes to film-making there’s always something going on in Iceland. How can a population that small – roughly 380,000 – produce so many talented writer directors? Hlynur Pálmason sits alongside the likes of Valdimar Jóhannsson, Baltasar Kormákur, Benedikt Erlingsson, Grimu Hákonarson and Óskar Jónasson as a director whose films aren’t just good and popular but also distinctly Icelandic. Watching their movies there’s also a strong sense of the connection between Iceland and its Viking settlers. Godland is, to some extent, a case of the Extreme Nordic (see also Kormákur’s The Deep, Erlingsson’s Of Horses and Men or Hákonarson’s Rams for more of the same, with … Read more
The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse
Reinventing a genre he had more or less invented in the first place, Fritz Lang’s 1960 movie The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (originally Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse) also revisits an established intellectual property. The character of Mabuse had already served Lang well, having taken centre stage as the arch-villain in Lang’s silent two-part behemoth Dr Mabuse the Gambler in 1922 and again in The Testament of Dr Mabuse in 1933. After which Lang exited Germany in a hurry, having been made an offer he couldn’t refuse by Dr Goebbels, an arch-villain to top them all. In the late 1950s, old and almost blind, Lang returned to Germany to make the … Read more
The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan
As handsome as its star, François Civil, The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan was shot back-to-back with its bookend companion, The Three Musketeers: Milady, a pair of old-school spirited adventures full of flashing eyes and flashing blades. I read somewhere that it’s quite tonally different from other Musketeer movies. It didn’t seem so to me. I only recently watched its century-old predecessor, 1921’s The Three Musketeers, starring Douglas Fairbanks, and that is pretty much identical to this in storyline and feel. But then all Musketeer movies tell the same story – Alexandre Dumas’s original tale must be one of the least messed about with in moviedom. D’Artagnan, the cocksure whelp from Gascony, arrives in Paris and … Read more
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The superb McCabe and Mrs Miller (generally styled McCabe & Mrs. Miller) was sold as a revisionist western when it came out in 1971. Its director, Robert Altman, went so far as to call it an “anti-western”. Even though Anthony Mann in the 1950s and Sergio Leone in the 1960s had paved the way with “revisionist” westerns of their own, the first reviews of Altman’s version of the revisionist western were harsh. Rex Reed of the New York Daily News called it, “an incoherent, amateurish, simple-minded, boring and totally worthless piece of garbage”, which is nailing your colours to the mast if nothing else. Other critics liked, loved and raved over it. Pauline … Read more
Eileen
Another tale of female self-actualisation from William Oldroyd, who follows Lady Macbeth with Eileen, a low-key melodramatic adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s best-seller. Lady Macbeth made a star of Florence Pugh, who had been a star-in-waiting since her debut in Carol Morley’s The Falling, in 2014. The transformation isn’t quite so marked here, since Thomasin McKenzie has been turning heads since she was 12 – you might have seen her in JoJo Rabbit, The Justice of Bunny King, The Power of the Dog and Last Night in Soho. Like Pugh, it seems to be written in stone that McKenzie will hold aloft an Oscar at some point in her career. We feel her pain … Read more
Secret Beyond the Door
Largely bonkers, 1947’s Secret Beyond the Door is a great film if what you need is a laugh, but a joke as what it’s meant to be – a twisted psychological film noir. It’s the last of five collaborations between Joan Bennett and director Fritz Lang, and it’s produced by Bennett’s husband, Walter Wanger, who saw this film as a way of reheating the Rebecca pot, Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning first Hollywood movie of seven years earlier. It is the Rebecca story all over again, in fact – woman marries rich guy as his second wife and finds she can’t live up to the memory of the first – but with an addition of the … Read more
Piggy
Lots of things do battle in Piggy, but most of all it’s a story about a teenager at war with herself. Or is it a slasher movie? Or a coming of ager with a visceral psychology at work? Bit of all three, and possibly a few more things besides. Writer/director Carlota Pereda welds all the aspects together brilliantly and in her star, Laura Galán, she has an actor who can emote in any direction. This film gets better the longer it goes on and the more we see of Galán. There is quite a lot to see. Sara (Galán) is a big girl, the daughter of a pork butcher in a small Spanish … Read more
