Reviews
I thought I spotted hints of conspiracy thriller The Parallax View in Tarik Saleh’s Eagles of the Republic, last of his so-called Cairo trilogy. So I asked AI – yes, it replied, Saleh has acknowledged the debt to Alan Pakula’s 1974 film. So satisfying when that happens… Which is to say this is a political … Read more
1953’s The Hitch-Hiker opens with an on-screen declaration: “This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours – or that couple across the aisle. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. … Read more
A neat example of the brisk storytelling of writer Frances Durbridge – a British crime eminence in 1953 – Operation Diplomat is also a prime example of the skilful directing of John Guillermin, who tells that story at speed. He’d later go on to direct successes like The Towering Inferno and 1978’s Death on the Nile, … Read more
Have you ever wanted to see Malcolm McDowell’s cock? Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is at least one place to find it, the movie released in 1979 marking the high water mark of the arthouse/porn crossover. The story behind the making of the film threatens to overshadow the plot of the film itself, which can be … Read more
In one of the first scenes in About Endlessness, a waiter brings a diner a bottle of wine, opens it, sniffs the cork to check the wine is OK, then walks over to the right hand side of the diner to fill his glass. Holding the bottle near the bottom, the way a practised waiter … Read more
Whether you call it Woman in the Dunes, Woman OF the Dunes, or go with the original Japanese title, Suna No Onna, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s wildfire success from 1964 (arthouse wildfire – it’s relative) is surely unique in being the only absurdist erotic Japanese drama. Tarkovsky rated it as one of his top ten films, and you … Read more
Wow, God Is a Bullet is violent. Teeth-kicked-out violent. And it’s Maika Monroe, slender, fragile Maika Monroe having her teeth kicked out. She also has her nose broken twice (at least) during the course of this long and almost relentlessly brutal film. Not her, of course, but her character, Case. She’s known as “Headcase” to … Read more
So masculine it could reverse a vasectomy, Michael Mann’s feature length Miami Vice actually tells the same story that eventually ground down the TV series – Crockett (now Colin Farrell, then Don Johnson) and Tubbs (now Jamie Foxx, then Philip Michael Thomas) go undercover with a drugs gang, get so deep they’re not sure which … Read more
The thing about those murder mysteries full of celebrity names, where Faye Dunaway or Lauren Bacall swan about among fellow stars until they either wind up dead or are revealed as the killer, is that everyone on the train or in the country house deserves what’s coming to them. There’s an uber-entitlement payback thing going … Read more
Were showrunner Brian Clemens, fellow producer Albert Fennell and the rest of the production team trying to get rid of Linda Thorson? She had been introduced during his brief interregnum by producer John Bryce and when Clemens and Fennell returned, they were stuck with her. Killer is an episode bursting with agents – who die … Read more
“I’m gonna go home and wank over your Instagram pictures, but not the ones with your mouth open,” Pete says to Mandy early on in Rare Beasts, Billie Piper’s patchily brilliant excursion into the ongoing joust that is male/female relations. Mandy (Piper, who also wrote and directs) has “big teeth”, big cartoon features generally, something … Read more
A duvet-day rom-com in the Four Weddings mould but with a pair of lesbians doing the canoodling. As seems to be de rigueur these days, the plucky Brit babe is played by an American. And Piper Perabo makes a decent stab at an English accent, playing the newlywed falling for the girl (Lena Headey) who … Read more