Latest Posts
Afire
The films of Christian Petzold often feature a man thunderstruck by a woman, and so it is with Afire (Roter Himmel), the second of Petzold’s “elements” movies and the second to star Paula Beer as the focus of enchantment. In Undine Beer played a water sprite in human form, though Petzold never explicitly said so. Here she might be a fire sprite in human form. Petzold never tells us that either. But she’s dressed in red throughout, which possibly is a clue, and for the duration of the film, which plays out on the Baltic Coast, there is a fire is raging through the nearby forests and it threatens to engulf the holiday … Read more
Liquid Sky
So it turns out that when the aliens do eventually land on earth they’ll not be making a beeline for military installations or centres of scientific research and they won’t be seeking out hayseeds in remote parts of the USA. They’ll be heading for the metropolis, where their flying saucer just the size of a dinner plate will touch down on top of a skyscraper. The aliens will then immediately start looking for party animals for whom opioids and stimulants are a major part of daily life. Not so much a case of take me to your leader as take me to your dealer. Bum tish. Liquid Sky was released in 1982 and … Read more
The German Lesson
Why did the Germans in the 1930s fall prey to the Nazi ideology? 2019’s The German Lesson (Deutschstunde) is a bracing story both about the Germans and for the Germans, who might not relish what writer Siegfried Lenz has served up, though director Christian Schwochow sugars the pill with images of austere beauty. Told in flashback from a jail cell where the barely adult Siggi is now a problem prisoner in post-War Germany, the story follows Siggi into his own past, growing up on the windswept Baltic coast with a father whose devotion to his policeman’s job came before else. It looks like an everyday German dedication to duty – “Pflicht”, to borrow … Read more
Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea
OK, deep breath for the title alone. Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (or Zítra vstanu a oparím se cajem in the original Czech) is also conceptually the sort of film that requires a super-oxygenation session before diving in. It’s made in the 1970s but set in the 1990s, where time travel is a leisure activity that’s part of everyday life. Here, a bunch of aged Nazis who have been kept relatively youthful by the regular swallowing of anti-ageing pills plan to return to 1944, taking with them a hydrogen bomb that will allow Hitler to win the war. Got that? To that concept another one. Of two twin brothers … Read more
Empire of Light
Margate on the south coast of England is one of many British seaside towns that’s seen better days. So has its cinema, Wonderland, here renamed by Sam Mendes and his team as the Empire, for a story set in 1980 about people who’ve seen better days, a country too, perhaps. Britain once had an empire of its own, of course. Metaphor and symbolism hang heavy in Empire of Light and affect every aspect of it. In the opening sequences cinematographer Roger Deakins’s camera mooches balefully about the interior of this palace of plush. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score weeps. This place isn’t in good shape. Bits are roped off, a whole floor … Read more
It Happened Tomorrow
A journalist is given a fast-track to glory when he starts getting tomorrow’s headlines today in It Happened Tomorrow, a bright and breezy fantasy from 1944. It’s easy to imagine Cary Grant in this movie. He was first choice to be its lead, and Frank Capra was meant to direct. It’s also incredibly easy to imagine Capra being involved too. The corny fantasy It’s a Wonderful Life was only two years in the future. However, both are ably substituted. Grant by Dick Powell, then still en route from being a matinee crooner to his reinvention as a hard-bitten private detective later in the year in Murder, My Sweet (aka Farewell, My Lovely). And … Read more
The Final Girls
Meta-slasher horror, the last refuge of the scoundrel – discuss. If you can’t make a decent straight-up slasher movie, why not put a frame around it and serve it up with an ironic wink, right? Prejudices laid out on the table, The Final Girls actually turns out to be a decent meta-slasher horror movie, with no scoundrels in sight, a good cast, sharp, smart direction and a high concept powerful enough to get it through a tight 90 minutes of jokes, shrieks, gruesomeness and a complete lack of bare breasts. You can’t have everything. Its premise: here in the early decades of the 21st century (the movie’s from 2015 so probably about there), … Read more
Dead Man’s Letters
If there’s a prize for the dourest sci-fi movie ever made, surely Dead Man’s Letters would win it. Sometimes the original Russian title, Pisma Myortvogo Cheloveka is translated as Letters from a Dead Man, which is hardly any jollier. While Blade Runner or Solaris or Dark City or Threads will all have their advocates, this strange, dark, almost entirely subterranean movie set in the bowels of a museum in the aftermath of a nuclear attack has to be a contender. The movie’s opening scene more or less says it all: a dark, stygian basement, lit in garish yellow/orange, where an old man is tending to a woman who appears to be dying, while … Read more
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
Two hours 43 minutes of pure entertainment is what Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One delivers. The only real question it’s raised by the end of its breathless 200-odd minutes is how is Part Two going to top it? There’s even a plot, the usual one of something that needs tracking down, Ethan Hunt and his team working in the shadowy “disavowed” realm, good bad guys ostensibly from their own side and bad bad guys keen to get their hands on the thing, which this time around is a key that will disarm a rogue AI superbrain with plans for world domination. Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt. Now looking decidedly middle aged … Read more
Paris Qui Dort
Paris Qui Dort, Paris Asleep, The Crazy Ray, The Invisible Ray and even At 3:25, this odd French silent movie from 1925 goes by many names and was the first feature by René Clair, a film-maker who got into movies because that’s where the girls were, or so he said, and stayed there because that’s where the money was, more than in journalism at any rate, his original career choice. It’s not a long film, a whisker under an hour in most of the versions you’ll find (At 3:25 tends to be a shortened version) but the one to go for is the 2018 restoration, a beautifully done work of wonder which presents … Read more
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
“Fear me, if you dare!” It’s a strange catchphrase but it is Puss in Boots’s and goes some way towards explaining his appeal – dangerous and ridiculous at the same time, as befits a vainglorious furball swashbuckler who’s Zorro in miniature, a legend in his own eyes more than anyone else’s, but a legend all the same. In Puss in Boots: The Last Wish two-time Zorro and four-time Puss Antonio Banderas returns to the role and remains a good part of the appeal of this character spun off from the Shrek franchise. Puss debuted in Shrek 2, returned in Shrek the Third and Shrek Forever After, then got his own show in 2011’s … Read more
Colossus: The Forbin Project
Often overlooked when it comes to discussion about dystopian sci-fi of the 1970s, Colossus: The Forbin Project looks a lot more chillingly prescient now than it did back when it was released in 1970, when it was seen as a sub-Strangelove addition to the genre of jokey sci-fi. It’s the story of the computer that takes over the world, enslaving all of humanity with it. And it starts with Dr Forbin, a boffin who has come up with the design for Colossus, a supercomputer that will assume control of the defence of the United States, and with it “the free world”. What Forbin, his team and the acutely involved US President don’t realise … Read more
