Popular Reviews
I Married a Witch
The 1942 comedy I Married a Witch had all the makings of a flop but it turned out to be OK – it’s a classic if looked at from the right angle. People kept coming and going for a start. Dalton Trumbo was hired to write but then left before he was finished. Preston Sturges was meant to produce it but never actually did. Joel McCrea had been signed up to star but bowed out when he realised he’d be working opposite Veronica Lake. He’d done a stint with her already on Sullivan’s Travels and, according to him, “Life’s too short for two films with Veronica Lake”. Then there was the pre-shooting falling-out … Read more
Oxygen
The amazingly up-down career of director Alexandre Aja hits a peak with Oxygen, a brilliantly conceived and executed piece of high-concept sci-fi calling on all Aja’s skills as a manipulator of tension, a master of genre, a technical whizz. Whether it’s his breakthrough, Switchblade Romance, or his deliberately schlocky Piranha 3D (featuring the memorable line “They took my penis”), Aja’s at his best working from a good screenplay. Oxygen’s is by first-timer Christie LeBlanc and is very strong – structurally taut, plausible and building gradually in pace. Paragraph three and I haven’t said what it’s about yet. It’s very simple. A woman wakes up in a dark box. When the lights come up … Read more
The Forgiven
Lush and lovely and slightly empty, The Forgiven is the clockwork toy that fails to march. And it all looks so promising to start with. The opening moments alone really get the hopes up – that saturated colour red of the scrolling credits seems to be offering a vast 1960s-style epic à la Lawrence of Arabia, the North African settings suggest maybe Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky and the presence of Ralph Fiennes hints at another The English Patient maybe. Fiennes and Jessica Chastain play the bickering married couple who knock down and kill a young Moroccan fossil seller one night while en route to a party out at some huge swish villa in … Read more
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Spider-Man spun? Spider-Man: No Way Home is another gargantuan Marvel movie full of action, great power/great responsibility moments and the sort of emotion you’d expect in stories about a highly strung teenage superhero. Jon Watts is back as the director, and the writers are again Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers – all three have been behind the other webslinging adventures with “home” somewhere in the title, (2019’s Far from Home and 2017’s Homecoming, if you’re not up to speed). Fine craftsmen all. But. But. But. The suspicion lingers that this creative team knows what Marvel also obviously does – that these Spidey stories are done and don’t need doing any more, and that … Read more
Deception
The last of the Great American Novelists of the 20th century, Philip Roth died in 2018, leaving behind a substantial body of work. Deception (Tromperie in the original French) adapts yet another of his novels for the screen, becoming yet another brave attempt at making a movie out of something that doesn’t really want to go there. In episodic instalments the plot tracks the on-off relationship between a smart, ageing but horny American novelist called Philip and a much younger English woman, called simply the English Lover. He’s played by Denis Podalydès, who makes Philip a confection of suaveté and savoir-faire plus a crucial dollop of self-doubt (otherwise too smug). She is played … Read more
100 Years of… Safety Last!
Here’s an image so iconic that it’s recognised by people who have no idea what film it’s from, or who the geezer hanging off the clock is. Wikipedia calls it one of the most famous images from the silent-film era but it’s surely more than that – this is one of the most famous images from any era, in any medium, and ranks alongside the Mona Lisa or the mask of Tutankhamoun, right? Maybe I’m hyperventilating a bit there, but to change tack slightly, the added brilliance of this remarkable image is that it perfectly sums up in one frame what Safety Last!, Harold Lloyd’s 1923 masterpiece, is all about – hanging on for grim … Read more
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a film about a middle aged woman hiring a young stud for impersonal hotel sex. Things get talky rather than saucy (that stuff is going on off-screen). So much so that you can almost imagine watching it with your mother. Your Mother May Vary. It’s a stage piece, really, a two-hander that feels expressly written for that clever, dithery, diffident, endlessly self-unpromoting British character Emma Thompson has been playing for what seems like aeons. Nanny McPhee gets her bits out. Nancy, not Nanny, since Thompson plays Nancy Stokes (possibly not her real name), a recently widowed ex-teacher whose blameless life of service to her husband, children … Read more
The Spy in Black
Known in the USA as U-Boat 29, The Spy in Black is the better and the original title of the first film made by the powerhouse pairing of director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger. If that was all it had to offer it would be worth a look. But it is also a tight and thrilling spy caper bubbling with a typical Powell and Pressburger humanity. It was made when the Second World War looked obvious and opened in the UK in 1939 as war was breaking out. Its star is Berlin-born Nazi-hating Conrad Veidt, who plays Ernst Hardt, a German U-Boat captain who arrives under cover of the night on a … Read more
Enys Men
How the hell do you follow Bait? A movie made for nothing shot on 16mm on a wind-up Bolex, an experiment, more or less, which somehow got off Dr Frankenstein’s table and made it into the big wide world. If you don’t know what I’m talking about… shakes head. Enys Men is the answer, writer/director Mark Jenkin’s bold sideways move into colour but using the same basic equipment – wind-up camera, 16mm film (later digitised and then massively colour graded) – and with the sound post-dubbed. A tiny crew, a handful of actors, with the vast bulk of the action focusing on Mary Woodvine, who plays The Volunteer, a woman on a remote … Read more
Talk to Me
Talk to Me announces Danny and Michael Philippou as gifted new arrivals on the Australian indie scene. With a feature debut this strong, how long the twins remain indie and in Australia is anyone’s guess. Apparently they turned down a directing gig on one of the DC Extended Universe movies to do this, so they clearly felt they had something special to offer. And it’s horror, too. With the horror market particularly crowded right now, this makes their determination to go it alone (if two people can be said to go it alone) all the more admirable. So what’s it about? A séance that goes wrong, in short, leading to demonic possession and … Read more
The Head Hunter
The Head Hunter is three quarters of the way to greatness as a high-concept fantasy horror movie. Fans of all things runic will love the beards and dirt, though they may balk at the length – it’s only 72 minutes long. If you’re in the market for a doorstop, there’s always Game of Thrones to rewatch. Also, here be no dragons whatsoever, so be warned. But in the shape of Christopher Rygh as its Nordic warrior hero it has an excellent star. Rygh is stout of limb, bright of eye and splendid of beard. It’s hard to tell whether he’s a great actor since there’s so little dialogue, but he passes muster in … Read more
One Minute of Darkness
At first glance One Minute of Darkness, last of the Dreileben trilogy, seems to be the most straightforward of the lot. A honest-to-goodness cat-and-mouser. On the one hand the escaped murderer Molesch, who has been little more than a bad smell in the first two films. On the other a cop on a mission to bring Molesch in, in spite of the fact that he’s ill and on leave. It’s deceptive, though, and the deception starts with the opening shots, of Molesch in custody being driven to a police station. This, it seems obvious, is a continuation of the previous instalment of the series, Don’t Follow Me Around (Komm Mir Nicht Nach), the … Read more
