Latest Posts
Bottoms
How do you follow Shiva Baby, a breakthrough comedy of exquisite embarrassment? Bottoms is the answer. Put another way – you don’t follow Shiva Baby, you head off in a different direction. So Emma Seligman, who wrote and directed Shiva Baby, has made a high-school comedy this time around, with Rachel Sennott now as a co-writer and again as her star and Ayo Edebiri drafted in, who you might know from the TV show The Bear. All three were friends together in their New York University days. Sennott and Edebiri play PJ and Josie, a pair of lesbian best friends who also happen to be very unpopular at school. Not because they’re gay … Read more
They Made Me a Fugitive
Exactly why the 1947 crime drama They Made Me a Fugitive was renamed I Became a Criminal for its US release is something of a mystery. One is more passive, the other more active, yup, understood. But the original title is better, punchier and asks a question – who made who a criminal? Whereas the US title is kind of flappy – so you became a criminal, so what? The irony is that this British movie really wants to be an American one. It’s soaked in the stylings, characters and logic of film noir, with mean streets, a femme fatale and a slightly off-centre Mr Big at the centre of it. Though, this … Read more
Saltburn
The music in Saltburn tells you a lot of what you need to know about the movie. Starting with Zadok the Priest and ending with Sophie Ellis Bextor singing Murder on the Dancefloor, this is a big, gaudy, fun switchback that surely would have been made in Technicolor if the process was still about. A superheated noirish romp is what you get either way. The plot is simple but it plays with expectations about who exactly is zooming who. Poor little rich boy Felix (Jacob Elordi) befriends poor little poor boy Oliver (Barry Keoghan) at Oxford University, where Felix is a student as if by right and scholarship boy Oliver is there on … Read more
It Always Rains on Sunday
There aren’t many straight arrows in the British thriller It Always Rains on Sunday. Most of its characters are schemers or chisellers, people on the make or on the take, they’re liars, crooks or worse. When the film debuted in 1947, the people of Bethnal Green, where it’s set, objected strongly to the way it depicted their community. Unconcerned, the British public went to see it in droves. Later, when it got re-released in the early 2000s, having been given a digital wash and brush-up by the British Film Institute, American critics also raved – “a masterpiece of dead-ends and might-have-beens,” said The Village Voice. “Artful and iconoclastic,” said The New Yorker. It … Read more
The Eternal Daughter
You get a double dose of Tilda Swinton in The Eternal Daughter, writer/director Joanna Hogg’s “lockdown movie”, shot with a skeleton cast in a secluded Welsh hotel and making the most of the pared-down vibe. Swinton plays both Julie and Rosalind, a daughter/mother duo who have come to Moel Famau Hall (as Soughton Hall has been renamed) because it used to be Rosalind’s family home decades before. There they get a not unfamiliar reception – there’s no food because it’s late and the kitchen is shut, the rooms they have booked are not free, the wi-fi is wonky and the receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies) is cool to the point of hostility. It’s all a … Read more
Petla aka Noose
So bleak that it eventually feels like director Wojciech Has might be having a laugh, 1958’s Petla (Noose, or The Noose in English) is a desperate story of a terrible alcoholic trying to give up drink after the latest in a line of humiliations. It’s as if Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend had been rewritten by Samuel Beckett and then turned into a movie by Béla Tarr. This was Has’s debut feature and it’s as much a career mission statement as story in itself. Between Petla and his farewell, 1988’s Niezwykla Podróz Baltazara Kobera, Has made films that were often bleak, surreal and characterised by the blurring of fantasy and reality, chief among … Read more
I Have Electric Dreams aka Tengo Sueños Eléctricos
Simple yet subtle and complex, I Have Electric Dreams (Tengo Sueños Eléctricos) is a Costa Rican coming-of-ager and the debut feature by Valentina Maurel, who has said she wanted to make a movie exploring the ambiguities of adolescence. Mission accomplished. Maurel drops us straight into the world of her “heroine”, Eva (Daniela Marín Navarro) and leaves us to figure out what’s going on. We meet Eva and her little sister being driven home by her seething father, who, by the end of this introduction, has lost his tempter entirely and is banging his head against the garage door until he’s drawn blood. The central relationship of the movie is Eva and father Martin … Read more
Brighton Rock
Not many British films make the “Best Film Noir” lists but Brighton Rock regularly does. And unlike many a key “British” noir, this one was directed by a Brit, John Boulting rather than an American fleeing McCarthyism (Jules Dassin and Night and the City or Cy Endfield and Hell Drivers), a visiting Frenchman (Edmond Gréville’s Noose) or an expat Brazilian (Alberto Cavalcanti’s They Made Me a Fugitive). It’s also unusual because of the role it gives Richard Attenborough. Nice, cuddly Dickie later of Jurassic Park fame here plays a smalltime 17-year-old psychopathic mobster in the town of Brighton, a seaside resort with a reputation for kiss-me-quick hats and extramarital affairs conducted by people … Read more
Past Lives
Past Lives is a woozy but cool romance where much is suggested but little given. The will they/won’t they is endlessly deferred and if not very much happens, what does happen is properly intense. Right to the last second writer/director Celine Song leaves us dangling. Bracket this one with In the Mood for Love, Casablanca and Brief Encounter. Boy meets girl, loses girl, remeets girl and… But the story starts in South Korea, where young schoolkids Hae Sung and Na have a relationship so intense that their parents arrange a mock “date” for them. More as a joke than anything else – Na’s family is about to emigrate to Canada and her mother … Read more
Body and Soul
A lightly fictionalised account of the life of boxer Barney Ross, 1947’s Body and Soul is often described as the best boxing movie ever made. While that’s highly contestable – there’s not much actual boxing in it, compared to The Set-Up or Raging Bull, for instance – it is undoubtedly one of the best movies set in the world of boxing (not quite the same thing). The original intention was to tell Ross’s story as a straight biography, but that was dropped when Ross’s heroin habit became common knowledge. And so John Garfield here plays Charley Davis, a boxer reflecting on his life – a spectacular rise from the mean streets and gifted amateurdom … Read more
Earth Mama
A remarkable feature debut by Savanah Leaf, Earth Mama is the grim social drama that’s had a magic wand waved over it. Not the story, though. That remains grim. Young single mum Gia has lost her children to social services. She is a recovering drug user and is heavily pregnant. She loves her kids and realises she has made a mess of things. So she is trying to do whatever it takes to get her life back on track. But the system seems gamed against young black single women like her. How can she take on more work and earn enough money to satisfy the authorities’ stipulation that she be financially OK if … Read more
Score
Score is another of those porn crossover movies from the “Golden Age of Pornography”, when the marginal moved into the mainstream and, for a while, it looked like attitudes to sex loosened by the cultural changes of the 1960s were about to be consolidated. Of course they did change – there’s more sex on the screen today, and more various sex, than there ever was before – and yet in mainstream movies (look at last year’s Barbie and Oppenheimer, or the big movies from any year) it’s like the Golden Age never really happened. Which makes the likes of Score doubly fascinating. Watching it now it’s obvious throughout that there’s a tension in … Read more
