Reviews
Brian De Palma’s films are a treat for people who watch a lot of movies, and Femme Fatale is no exception. Starting with an excerpt from Double Indemnity – the bit where Barbara Stanwyck is telling Fred MacMurray that she’s “rotten to the heart” – it then replays a similar scenario, with a tweak, in the modern … Read more
Whether The Avengers is or isn’t a spy series depends very much on the episode you watch. In The Outside-In Man we’re very much in spy mode, right from the opening scene, in which Steed is seen walking into a butcher’s shop. Then, Man from Uncle style (which was in development when this episode aired … Read more
Talk about the love that dare not speak its name (to quote Oscar Wilde), Great Freedom (Große Freiheit in the original German) has a monumental love story at its centre but isn’t quite sure about expressing it. The whole film operates like this, sideways, backwards, though it starts straightforwardly enough with some footage from a … Read more
Broadcast Signal Intrusion is a horror film set in ye olden tymes when VHS was still standard-issue home-entertainment tech and people stood outside to smoke cigarettes. Before then they smoked inside; after then, they’d mostly given up. So it’s the 1990s. But the film reaches further back, into the mists of the 1980s where, it … Read more
At the Raindance film festival, London, UK, 27 October–6 November 2021 When is she going to crack? It’s the question asked by Tonia Mishiali’s feature debut, Pause (aka Paúse), and then answered in a series of gotchas. Pause as in Menopause, the film’s working title, and in an opening scene that’s more amusing to watch … Read more
Using ice hockey as the prism through which to view Russia in the immediate post-Soviet era, that’s the USP of Red Penguins, a documentary made by Gabe Polsky, the son of Russian emigrés and a former hockey player himself, so he knows whereof he speaks. Polsky takes us back to the 1990s, after the fall … Read more
Winston Churchill made his “iron curtain” speech on 5 March 1946. In late 1947, 20th Century-Fox went into production with The Iron Curtain, one of a rake of movies designed to prove to the House Un-American Activities Committee that its assertion – “subversive” Hollywood doesn’t make anti-communist films – was baseless. The fact that filming started … Read more
By the time the Coen brothers made Miller’s Crossing, their third movie, it had become obvious that their films weren’t really set in the real world. Like Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing is set in an adjacent reality constructed entirely from moviescapes and populated with characters we seem to have met before. That … Read more
The Falcon Takes Over could be the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. First appearance of a Raymond Chandler story on screen? – this is it, a version of his Farewell, My Lovely, which would get a bigger-budget workthrough two years later as Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell in the lead. Here, it’s 1942, … Read more
The Big Combo has a big reputation. A regular on the “best film noir” lists, it can’t quite match its rep and is more a solid crime thriller that’s been polished to a stygian gleam by excellent technicians, well chosen actors and some careful snaffles from other sources. The most obvious lift is from 1944’s … Read more
A superhero origin story of sorts, A Boy Called Christmas is vague about the costumed crusader it has in mind. Is it Saint Nicholas, aka Santa Claus? Or his pagan predecessor, Father Christmas, the white-bearded giftbringer who “flew” through the winter night on his fleet-footed steed possibly with aerial assist from hallucinogenic mushrooms? Slight quibble … Read more
Should a serial killer movie sympathise with its killer? The Golden Glove (Der Goldene Handschuh) comes perilously close to going all-in with real-life killer Fritz Honka (Jonas Dassler), who killed four women in Hamburg between 1970 and 1974 and then hid their body parts in his attic. Grim, seedy, sleazy, disgusting, vile, the negative adjectives … Read more