Reviews
So here’s the set-up for Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Gail (Zoey Deutch) is a hairdresser in smalltown Kansas who’s been having a conversation with fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) about which celebrity each of them would like to have as their celebrity sex partner – a free pass, all just a fun fantasy. Tom … Read more
Around about the time Miss Juneteenth came out in 2020, President Donald Trump was announcing that he was going to have a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth Day (19 June) – the day commemorating the end of slavery. In the end Trump, for whatever reason, moved the rally to the following day. By the following … Read more
La Llorona is a figure in Mexican folklore, a tragic ghostly beauty dressed in white clothes who haunts the world she once lived in, having drowned first her own children and then herself. You can find a faint echo of La Llorona in the Wilkie Collins novel The Woman in White, but though The Woman … Read more
What is it Tarantino says, about all movies being interesting even if they’re not all good? I Eat Your Skin is a case in point. Not great but absolutely fascinating, it started life in 1964, when it went by the title Zombies, gaining the name it’s now stuck with when a distributor was looking for … Read more
At last, in American Star, someone has given Ian McShane a lead role in a movie that he can get properly stuck into. Not a fine co-starring role (Sexy Beast) or fine supporting role (John Wick and its sequels) or as a fine co-lead in a spin-off from a TV show (Deadwood) but a bona-fide … Read more
Daniel Auteuil, Jean Reno, Gerard Depardieu. Where are the barrel-chested Brit equivalents to these beefy action men of the French cinema? But then, Brits are all gay, aren’t we? Take this fine, roistering spectacle, a dashingly charming entertainment in which Auteuil plays a D’Artagnan-like figure, all flashing swords and teeth. The story has been made … Read more
The Last Stop in Yuma County is a reminder of the sort of film there used to be a lot of in the late 1990s. In that first post-Tarantino wave, low-budget film-makers would head to the desert, find a diner somewhere, load it up with gonzos and dimwits, add guns and fruity dialogue and then … Read more
1936’s Desire is the sort of film Hollywood has always excelled at. A bit of this, that and the other – some fun, some jeopardy, some romance – parcelled up beautifully and sold by attractive people who are looking their best. Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in this case. The best bit actually comes at … Read more
Stirringly democratic and winningly romantic, The Clock is one of Judy Garland’s best films. She sings not a note, you may be surprised to learn, but brings a tear to the eye with her portrayal of a sweet young miss having a whirlwind romance in surely the most New York New York ever committed to … Read more
One of three 2014 Kristen Stewart films that seemed designed to shift her image out of Twilight territory and into something with a bit more actorly grunt, Camp X Ray works better as brand realignment than as drama. The other two were Clouds of Sils Maria and Still Alice, the first a Juliette Binoche arthouse … Read more
Jean-Paul Salomé, director and co-writer of Female Agents (Les Femmes de l’Ombre in the original French), got the idea for his 2008 film from an obituary. While in London in 2004 he read about Lise Villameur, who’d just died aged 98. During the Second World War she’d been an agent for the French Section of … Read more
1923 is the year when Buster Keaton’s run of classic feature-length comedies gets out of the blocks with Our Hospitality, which signals its intention to be different even in its opening credits, which linger on the screen far longer than those of most films of the era. Here, they say, is something to be savoured. … Read more
