Reviews
Play nice is the ultimate message of Mārama, which the IMDb describes as “a Maori gothic revenge horror set in Victorian England, 1859”. You won’t find me disagreeing. The “revenge horror” takes a while to come, but there’s plenty of Maori gothic in the interim. Or plain old gothic, served up with a Maori central … Read more
The Hidden Fortress is a film by Akira Kurosawa and just that fact alone – “a film by Akira Kurosawa” – is enough to get it bracketed as an arthouse movie. Which is entirely ridiculous if you watch it, because there’s nothing difficult or abstruse going on here, no philosophical musing, no challenging style experiments to … Read more
One of the big films of 2006 in Germany, Summer in Berlin (Sommer vorm Balkon) caused barely a ripple anywhere else. Which is a pity, because it’s a great example of a precisely acted, brilliantly crafted film telling a good story without histrionics. In a world dominated by superhereos, subtlety sometimes struggles to get a … Read more
At a certain point words won’t do. So it is with Labyrinth of Cinema, a wild kaleidoscopic three hours designed as a farewell by an old man to an art and craft he has loved, and to the world he’s been living in for around 80 years. The man is called Nobuhiko Ôbayashi and he’d … Read more
Rob Zombie’s The Munsters is a reboot of the 1960s TV show borrowing heavily from the original and dredging it all in a tooth-rotting production design. Rarely if ever has a black-and-white TV show been re-imagined so gaudily. The end product, like Herman Munster himself, is a bag of bits. That’s maybe intentional. Herman Munster … Read more
Looking on paper like something better than it actually turns out, Hollywoodland is one of those films purporting to lift the lid on Hollywood, LA Confidential style. It tells the lightly fictionalised story of George Reeves (Ben Affleck) the man who played Superman on 1950s US TV, and asks the simple question – who done … Read more
The year is 2073 and in a post-apocalyptic world a survivor of a climate catastrophe ekes out a meagre existence in New SanFrancisco, a colony of survivors in a world divided into the billionaire class and the rest. Cities are shattered, settlements are flooded. Unlucky non-billionaires like Ghost (Samantha Morton) scurry about in the wreckage, … Read more
Dodsworth is a reminder what a great actor Walter Huston was. The father of John, grandfather of Danny, great-grandfather of Jack trumps them all with a superbly relaxed and natural performance as an America car magnate being given the runaround by his silly wife. Ruth Chatterton in the thankless role as wife Fran is pretty … Read more
What the Butler Saw is an episode about what the butler did rather than saw, though it does kick off with John Le Mesurier – tongue doing at least half of his acting as usual – handing his employer a gun and looking on as a minion asking for too large a cut of an … Read more
As far as the work of director Alan Clarke goes, Penda’s Fen is an outlier. A strange take on folk horror, it’s become something of a cult in the decades since it was first broadcast in 1974 in the BBC’s long-running Play for Today strand. Pre HBO and streaming, TV was predominantly a writer’s medium … Read more
Host is the perfect pandemic horror movie. Shot entirely on Zoom, it features a menacing presence that’s out there… somewhere… and a bunch of mates who are communicating with each other lockdown-style via laptop/phone/tablet. Expanding a short that went viral and gave director/co-writer Rob Savage an in with Shudder, who financed the film, it takes the glitches … Read more
Cripple Creek takes place against the backdrop of the Colorado gold rush of 1892 and is a genre movie with an unusual slant, a western with a secret sauce. It’s introduced by a stern voiceover giving us chapter and verse on gold reserves in the USA, and how smugglers are undermining the American economy by … Read more
