Reviews
1964’s Marnie is Alfred Hitchcock on the comeback trail. True, the previous year’s The Birds had been a big hit, with barely any critics openly saying what a lot of them must have thought – that it’s not top-flight (ouch) Hitchcock. It had made a stack of cash for the director and Paramount. But Hitchcock … Read more
Like all the Beatles anthologies attempting to squeeze new juice out of old fruit, One to One: John & Yoko digs through the archives to document two years in the lives of the famous couple, when they lived in Greenwich Village and went about their lives almost like normal people did. The seclusion of the … Read more
1953’s Tokyo Story is based on a film its director, Yasujirô Ozu, hadn’t actually seen. But his writer, Kôgo Noda, had. And so the 1937 movie Make Way for Tomorrow was adapted into what is regularly described as one of the best movies ever made – 2012’s Directors Poll by Sight and Sound magazine put … Read more
The IMDb plot resumé for American Refugee says it’s a film about race in America. There is a black family and a white family in it, and they come into conflict, that’s true. Race, however, is not mentioned once. In fact class and cultural politics, plus masculinity – toxic and otherwise – seem to be more … Read more
Going only off the title, I thought Daughters of Darkness was going to be a typical early 1970s vampire movie, featuring breasty young goths with prosthetic teeth wafting around in chiffon. My prejudices. I was partly right – it is from the early 1970s, and it is about vampires of a sort. There are breasts … Read more
Languid is a strange way to go for a psychological thriller, an even stranger way to go for an action thriller. But that’s how director Neil Burger plays it in The Marsh King’s Daughter, a misfire that looks like a bold experiment gone wrong. There are a wedge of people in the cast, among them … Read more
The Man Who Cheated Himself is a prime example of a good movie ruined by bad casting. Lee J Cobb’s in this case, who’s meant to be playing a cop blinded by love and winding up on the wrong side of everything. If Cobb’s Lieutenant Ed Cullen is a poor sap being driven by his … Read more
When not co-creating, -writing and -directing the glorious Babylon Berlin TV series, Henk Handloegten likes to make films like Summer Window (Fenster zum Sommer), dramas that come front-loaded with a chunk of fantasy. The fantasy isn’t what his films are about, it’s more of a come-on, luring in the sceptical, who might find that they’ve … Read more
What We Wanted (Was Wir Wollten in the original German) is the story of a late-30s Austrian couple who signed up to be together, have kids, the whole kit and caboodle, trying to renegotiate their relationship after their fourth round of failed IVF treatment. We meet them just as they’re getting the bad news in … Read more
There’s a lot of misdirection in The Lost Daughter, starting with the title, but to go into exactly where the misdirection lies and what it consists of is to ruin the entire film. It’s an adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel, which is a bit of an unusual departure in itself, because for all the … Read more
Yes, Madam! isn’t in any way like a fine wine. It has not aged well and looks far worse now than it did when it came out in 1985. A Hong Kong comedy actioner that knows its audience and its times, it was made quickly for a market that wanted it. Posterity could sort itself … Read more
Let It Snow looks like a thought experiment: could we remake The Revenant, shift the action to Georgia (the country, not the US state), swap out Leo for a relatively unknown female, and bring home the whole thing on a fraction of the budget The Revenant might have spent on turmeric tea? The answer is … Read more
