Latest Posts
Eagles of the Republic
I thought I spotted hints of conspiracy thriller The Parallax View in Tarik Saleh’s Eagles of the Republic, last of his so-called Cairo trilogy. So I asked AI – yes, it replied, Saleh has acknowledged the debt to Alan Pakula’s 1974 film. So satisfying when that happens… Which is to say this is a political conspiracy thriller about a man wading further and further into murky waters and losing all grip on agency and, to an increasing extent, reality. Fares Fares is again Saleh’s main man, this time around playing a fading Egyptian movie star who is asked to play Egypt’s president Abel Fattah el-Sisi in a biopic that will be produced more … Read more
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz aka Ensayo de un crimen
In typical fashion, Luis Buñuel turns the crime drama on its head in The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (originally Ensayo de un crimen), a story about a killer who isn’t a killer admitting to crimes he didn’t commit because he’s convinced he somehow perpetrated them. Being a Buñuel film there’s also a reckoning with the bourgeoisie, and how they tend to get things assbackwards. Here, the wellspring of Archibaldo’s misery is becoming hardwired to confuse sex and death at an early age when, as a spoilt little rich boy, he sees his governess killed by a stray bullet fired by revolutionaries running amok outside the palatial family home. It’s as … Read more
Nino
The weepy illness movie is a potentially irksome beast. It’s just too easy to stick a sick person on screen and ask us to pity them. Nino doesn’t play it that way. The film follows a diffident young man from the moment he receives a diagnosis of throat cancer over the long weekend leading up to his first dose of (emergency) chemo. And then leaves him. Should we pity Nino (Théodore Pellerin)? Does he somehow deserve what’s happened to him? Director and co-writer Pauline Loquès sets us a challenge as she challenges her subject – a closed-off dude who receives the bad news on his 29th birthday (tellingly, he doesn’t correct the doctor … Read more
Cairo Station
Now considered a beacon of the nation’s cinema, Cairo Station got a hugely negative reaction in Egypt when it came out in 1958. Audiences raised on a diet of stylised melodrama just weren’t ready for something so raw. Mostly in the Italian neorealist tradition, it ducks back into melodrama towards the end of its very brief running time (77 minutes), when the logic of what’s been building comes to an abrupt climax. After just over an hour of director Youssef Chahine soberly building narrative and atmosphere, in the last stretch suddenly everything switches – knives are brandished, blood is shed, a straitjacket appears and a man is carried off frothing into the lunatic … Read more
Köln 75
Corny in a good way, Köln 75 (aka Cologne 75) tells the strange but true story behind the story of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, to this day the biggest selling solo jazz album of all time. The album is just Jarrett improvising on a piano in a cavernous concert hall. Unlike the film, which is a winning mix of two familiar tropes as the triumph over adversity drama meets the can-do of the let’s-do-the-show-right-here musical. Mala Emde plays the young woman who made it all happen, German jazz enthusiast Vera Brandes. We meet Vera aged 16 forcing herself on British jazzer Ronnie Scott after a gig. Impressed by her chutzpah, and possibly also … Read more
Cecile Is Dead
Anyone for Maigret? Cécile est morte aka Cecile Is Dead reveals what the French detective was up to in Nazi-occupied France in a film made in 1944 and directed by Maurice Tourneur, father of the now more famous Jacques. The detective first appeared in print in 1930 and on screen in Jean Renoir’s atmospheric Night at the Crossroads in 1932. There’s a trace of Renoir’s poetic realism in Tourneur’s altogether more bluff take on the great detective. Though he is to all intents and purposes the iconic cop as we know him: gruff, pipe-smoking, unsentimental, cool and famous for going against the grain. He’s a big one for “le hunch” (as no one … Read more
The President’s Cake
A lyrical but punchy debut by writer/director Hasan Hadi, The President’s Cake is a near-fairytale story about a poor little girl who is “chosen” by her class teacher to bake a cake to celebrate the birthday of the president, and then has to move heaven and earth to find the ingredients. Because the president is Saddam Hussein and because the little girl is a Marsh Arab – focus of Hussein’s genocidal wrath – the baking of the cake has a special importance. Get it wrong and it’ll be seen as an insult. Who knows where that could lead? And so Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) heads into Baghdad with aged grandma Bibi (Waheed Thabet … Read more
Merrily We Go to Hell
Merrily We Go to Hell ran into trouble when it came out in 1932. The use of the word Hell in the title gave some distributors an attack of the vapours. To get round potential objections, in the UK the problem word was simply removed and the film went by Merrily We Go to __, which was also the case in certain states in the US. The film itself is often described as a comedy, but it isn’t really funny. But then that is often the way with the comedy of manners, which this is. This is a big one in the feminist canon, not least because it was directed by Dorothy Arzner, … Read more
Fuze
Fuze adds another little gem of a film to under-regarded director David Mackenzie’s list, joining Starred Up, Perfect Sense, Relay, Spread and Hell and High Water as unusual takes on genre, often with a heavily procedural slant. Things click, click, click into place in Mackenzie films, though often the tumblers line up in unexpected ways. Here, what looks like one sort of film quickly becomes another and then another. But things starts off in familiar territory, in the Paddington area of London, where a huge unexploded bomb has been exposed during the preparatory work for a new development. In come the bomb disposal guys, an army team led by the bluff, sweary Major … Read more
Jamaica Inn
Hitchcock’s last movie before he decamped from Britain to the USA is a nearly great adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Jamaica Inn, set in Cornwall where smuggler gangs lure ships onto the rocks, loot their cargos and kill their crews. The towering presence in it is Charles Laughton as local lord Sir Humphrey Pengallan, a charming psychopath who runs the notorious gang through his trusty lieutenant Joss Merlyn (Leslie Banks), landlord of the Jamaica Inn, from which the gang operates, a place so feared that coaches will not stop there. Arriving one dark and stormy night – poor orphaned Irish colleen Mary Yellan (Maureen O’Hara), looking up her aunt after the death … Read more
Normal
After John Wick, Nobody and after Nobody, Normal, all films written by Derek Kolstad and all telling essentially the same story – mess with this seemingly placid dude at your peril. Normal is Bob Odenkirk going around the block one more time with Kolstad – Nobody one and two did good business so why not? But this time Kolstad has Coen brothers ambitions in his broadening out of the landscape and deepening of the characterisation. Though for the most part it is another example of Kolstad as the consummate Hollywood writer – everything has its place and everything has its pace, and a detail dropped in now is surely going to pay off later, … Read more
Big Wednesday
Expectations were high for John Milius’s Big Wednesday when it debuted in 1978. Based on Milius and co-writer Dennis Aaberg’s own experiences growing up as California surfers, it tracks three dudes from callow youth to maturity, dropping in periodically as they also surf the waves of life. So high, in fact, that Milius kindly swapped profit points with his old friends, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Which is how he ended up owning a tiny piece of Close Encounters and Star Wars and they ended up with a little bit of Big Wednesday. Which worked out better for Milius than for Lucas and Spielberg. He became rich on his end of the deal … Read more
