Reviews
Let’s do a refugee drama, which no one wants to watch, as a haunted house movie, which everyone does. That’s the thinking behind His House, a canny mix of genres from writer/director Remi Weekes in his feature debut, which adds a further layer of originality by adding all sorts of weird African supernatural juju to … Read more
The title is a bit of a giveaway but The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain does not end well for Kenneth Chamberlain, a 70-year-old former Marine with heart problems and mental health issues who, shortly after 5am one November morning in 2011 accidentally set off his medical alert pendant while he slept. Within two hours he … Read more
And so we come to A Touch of Brimstone, an episode that didn’t make it onto US TV screens in 1966, thanks to the bondage gear that Mrs Peel eventually gets into in the final scene. How we get there is pretty interesting too. The whole thing opens very cinematically with a lovely shot of … Read more
Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt) is a breezy high-school comedy about the will they/won’t they romance between two gay schoolkids. Set in the here and now but also in the there and then, it tries to square a circle and gets most of the way there. Gay kids? Once upon a not so … Read more
An alien from the fifth dimension lands in Hollywood (with a camera, handily) and takes a fact-finding tour with a skanky seller of psychedelic mushrooms. Mondo Hollywoodland is the result, a weird survey of the territory that makes half-hearted claims towards being a documentary. Bizarre points to note before the tour gets underway: it’s exec-produced … Read more
If youth is a party weekend, what happens when the fun stops? The answer is Monday – Argyris Papadimitropoulos’s glum follow-up to Suntan, another detailing of the goings-on in a “fun” place where not much fun was happening. I warn you, this is a slog, but it’s an instructive one, reminding one and all that … Read more
There’s a lot going on in Joyless Street (Die freudlose Gasse), GW Pabst’s epic “Straßenfilm” about the Weimar era in Germany, made during the Weimer era in Germany. Greta Garbo is in it, which tends to draw a lot of attention, and because the film survives only in a print with a good half hour … Read more
Nerds win the war in Pressure, which entertainingly tells the story about the meteorological johnnies who made the D-Day landings possible. How, when you’re launching the biggest seaborne invading force in human history, do you make sure the weather isn’t going to destroy your armada on the high seas? Whether the gap between England and … Read more
Charlie Chaplin started making his film City Lights in one era and released it in another. In the three years the picture was in production, an epochal shift occurred as Hollywood abandoned the silent movie and went wholesale over to talkies. When Chaplin started shooting what was intended to be his biggest picture to date … Read more
Memory, fantasy and the Second World War make surprisingly comfy bedfellows in Long Live the Republic! (Ať žije republika), Karel Kachyňa’s lyrical and lovely coming-of-ager from 1965. A Czech movie set in Moravia as the German army pulls out and the Soviet army readies itself to take over, it’s far less critical of the communist … Read more
Unsettling, spooky, nasty, demonic and icky, Bring Her Back is a modern horror classic demonstrating brothers Danny and Michael Philippou’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre, spun their own way. Their feature debut, 2022’s Talk to Me, was no flash in the pan. It takes a while to work out what’s going on but the brothers … Read more
How angry would you be if your life partner suddenly died and your son sent an employee along to help with the funeral, rather than turning up himself? That is the opening position of Miss You, Love You, an unusual two-hander running largely on bile. One of life’s great joys is watching Allison Janney playing … Read more