Reviews
Ordinary Angels is a very ordinary film in many ways. It’s familiar and comforting and goes exactly where you probably expect it to go. The fact that it’s based on a true story and features representations of real people is almost immaterial. These are screen archetypes doing what screen archetypes do. On one side a … Read more
An overwrought civics lesson done as film noir, Side Street sees Farley Granger’s humble postman making one tiny mistake and finding himself in deep trouble. One minute he’s trading small talk with a cop in the bright daylight, the next he’s mixing with murderers, femmes fatales and other unsavoury sorts and has become a creature … Read more
The Seduction of Inga is a direct sequel to its soft-porn predecessor from three years before, 1968’s Inga. Its main claim to fame these days is that it contains music by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, aka the two guys from Abba. It’s rumoured that Björn was also offered a role in the film, but … Read more
Going in to 1970’s Count Yorga, Vampire, the thing to remember – and the reason why it sometimes flies under an alternative title, The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire – is that it was originally destined to be a vampire movie of a softcore persuasion, at least as much about tits as teeth. It explains … Read more
The very trad meets meets the very not in And Then We Danced, a pungently flavoured drama about a wild love affair between two men who dance with the Georgian national troupe. Black Swan and Flashdance are the two most obvious points of reference, as punishing regimes take thir physical toll and rivalries for the … Read more
It’s a good moment for whacked-out horror. Heart Eyes joins Crumb Catcher, The Rule of Jenny Pen, Bring Her Back, Together, Gazer and The Monkey, to name just the ones I’ve seen in the last few weeks. Heart Eyes is less icky than some, more larky than others – it’s Whedon-esque, Buffy-like, horror done with … Read more
Made in 1964, in America’s Deep South – Alabama, to be precise – Nothing But a Man is, if nothing else, a remarkable document giving us an insight into the everyday lives of people on the wrong side of the racial divide at precisely the moment when the civil rights struggle was coming to some sort … Read more
Barely ever really funny, The Money Pit is something of a slapstick classic all the same, a triumph of a kind of Hollywood film-making and playing that’s so precise that you have to admire it… even though you’ll probably not laugh. The scenario is lifted wholesale from the 1948 comedy Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, … Read more
You can run but you cannot hide is the sentiment driving Out of the Past, Jacques Tourneur’s bleak film noir masterclass from 1947. Just when you think you’ve got clear of something, so the story goes, up it comes from your history and bites you in the ass. Robert Mitchum plays Jeff, a private detective … Read more
It’s something of a minor industry to make fun of Andrew Lloyd Webber. But with this film version of his stage phenomenon (billions of dollars at box offices worldwide, and counting) it looks like the musical lord is once more going to be having the last laugh. It’s a story we all know – a … Read more
1960’s Mill of the Stone Women was the first Italian horror film to be shot in colour – Technicolor, no less – and is a landmark film which opened the door to the lurid looks and titillating scenarios of the giallo genre. Also known as Drops of Blood (or Il mulino delle donne di pietra, in … Read more
The Souvenir: Part II makes sense of Part I, which seems like an obvious thing to say. But some sequels genuinely are sequels (The Godfather: Part II), fleshing out and adding to the original. Others are merely retellings of a story that’s already been told (The Matrix Reloaded). Joanna Hogg’s film fits into a third … Read more
