Reviews
The Seduction of Inga is a direct sequel to its soft-porn predecessor from three years before, 1968’s Inga. Its main claim to fame these days is that it contains music by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, aka the two guys from Abba. It’s rumoured that Björn was also offered a role in the film, but … Read more
War dramas are often held to a higher standard than other movies, and it’s a rare one that doesn’t bring generals – active, retired and armchair status – out into the open to condemn some appalling misrepresentation of the facts or other. A fate The Forgotten Battle largely dodged when it debuted in 2020. That’s … Read more
Beasts Clawing at Straws also goes by the English-language title of Beasts That Cling to the Straw but Rats in a Sack would also be a useful way of translating its original Korean title. It’s a story about different sets of people, all connected by a Louis Vuitton holdall full of cash, which we first … Read more
A Man Escaped is probably the best jailbreak movie ever made. Who said Shawshank? What’s more it was made almost as an “anti-movie” movie by a director so disdainful of cinema trickery and excess that he turned out one film after another to demonstrate that you don’t need it all, and that when it comes … Read more
Better Days is a Chinese film about love, bullying, suicide, rape and murder… but mostly love. Adapted from a Young Adult novel (by Xi Jiuyue), it uses the relationship between a prim high school girl and a thug from the wrong side of the tracks as its skeleton key to access other, more off-limits areas … Read more
Writing poetry doesn’t pay very well and so in the 1930s Cecil Day Lewis, father of Daniel, started writing detective fiction on the side. The Beast Must Die was his fourth crime novel. Translated literally into the French, it gave Claude Chabrol the title of his unusual 1969 thriller, Que la Bête Meure, which in … Read more
The success of the TV show Severance seems to have woken up the weird in Adam Scott, who used to make more films like Damian McCarthy’s Hokum back in the day. Which is to say – small-scale, offbeat, the path less trodden, relying on mood and atmosphere to do the storytelling. He plays a writer … Read more
Rudolph Valentino made The Eagle in 1925 and while it wasn’t a smash along the lines of Blood and Sand or The Sheik, it did better than his previous four films – it was a comeback of sorts, and came not long before Valentino was whisked to the place from which no comeback is possible, … Read more
Symmetrics. Opulence. Screwball comedy pacing. Whimsy. Deadpan. A nostalgic evocation of old Hollywood. The Phoenician Scheme must be a Wes Anderson movie and if nothing else it finally does with Bill Murray what should have been done long ago. It casts him as God. Wes Anderson. By now about 50 per cent of his potential … Read more
Tragedy destroys but maybe it can also heal. Paris Memories kicks off with a terrible terrorist attack in a Paris restaurant. A man, school-shooting style, wandering through the place and putting a bullet into everything that moves. It’s a grim and powerful opener directed with an eye for maximum shock by Alice Winocour, whose films … Read more
Watching a conman grift himself into a corner is always fun. In 1945’s Fallen Angel Otto Preminger gives us just that while Dana Andrews delivers another of the flat-faced, almost featureless performances he was so good at. He plays the shyster arriving in a small town with barely a cent in his pocket, who sets … Read more
Hell is someone else’s pubic hair in your bath. WM Weikart’s feature debut hits us with this and other observations – some grimly funny others just bizarre – in Soul to Squeeze, a psychological moshpit of a drama about a guy on a trip into his own unconscious mind. There’s a Red Hot Chili Peppers song … Read more