Reviews
Another tale of female self-actualisation from William Oldroyd, who follows Lady Macbeth with Eileen, a low-key melodramatic adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s best-seller. Lady Macbeth made a star of Florence Pugh, who had been a star-in-waiting since her debut in Carol Morley’s The Falling, in 2014. The transformation isn’t quite so marked here, since Thomasin McKenzie … Read more
So we come to the end of The Avengers journey with Bizarre, 33rd episode of the final season. The show started in January 1961 and was literally about an Avenger, Ian Hendry playing David Keel, a doctor going on a restorative-justice rampage after his wife was killed by drug smugglers. And it ends here in … Read more
Meg 2: the Trench, in which a studio tries to turn a good, fun one-off into a franchise and winds up on the beach face down, gasping for air and with gravel in its shorts. Quick recap: a massive prehistoric shark, a Megalodon, escapes the depths where it generally operates and starts menacing the upper … Read more
A tale of American white-picket suburbia, disturbia perhaps, from director Todd Field, opening out a touch from In the Bedroom, whose focus was all there in the title. Our heroine, a Madame Bovary figure called Sarah (Kate Winslet), scandalises the harpies at the school gate by striking up a relationship with the only hot male … Read more
If you love beige and taupe, can’t get enough fawn, dun and khaki, you’ll have an extra affection for Tobruk, the 2008 Czech movie written and directed by Václav Marhoul. It’s his second, after the Philip Marlowe-spoofing Smart Philip (Mazany Filip) of 2003, and has little in common with the 1967 film of the same … Read more
Because Marcel Carné made Les Visiteurs du Soir in Nazi-occupied France, and because it’s about a realm invaded by the The Devil’s Envoys (the English title), it’s often seen as allegorical. Carné denied it to the end of his life. But his film works perfectly well as an allegory as long as you stop there … Read more
On Saturday 5 October 1963, a day after the US Joint Chiefs of Staff had updated their plan to invade Cuba the following July (President Kennedy’s assassination would intervene), and while JFK’s wife Jackie was enjoying the company of shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in Greece (she would later marry him), TV audiences in the UK … Read more
The Undertaker has a novel suggestion for gangsters needing to dispose of dead bodies in a hurry. Instead of going to all the fuss of running a waste disposal business, why not just bury the bodies in a the ground, beneath the coffins of legitimate new arrivals at their final resting place? Who’s going to … Read more
In typical fashion, Luis Buñuel turns the crime drama on its head in The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (originally Ensayo de un crimen), a story about a killer who isn’t a killer admitting to crimes he didn’t commit because he’s convinced he somehow perpetrated them. Being a Buñuel film there’s also a … Read more
Nothing wrong with a nepo baby if they’re actually any good. La fille de l’eau (aka The Whirlpool of Fate, sometimes known as The Girl of the Water) is Jean Renoir’s first feature film, shot when he was 31, using Paul Cezanne’s property as a location and financial assistance from the estate of his own … Read more
Peter Sallis hasn’t yet developed the voice that would make him the ideal Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit fame) in his outing as an amnesiac spook on the run in The Wringer, an episode in which a string of spies have been killed and Steed has been brought in to find out why, which prompts … Read more
Western isn’t set out West but out East, in Bulgaria, where a gang of Germans have just arrived to build a hydro-electric system close to a remote village near the Greek border which could probably do with the infrastructure upgrade. Beware, Indians! There have been Germans here before, one of the locals tells the new … Read more
