Reviews
The film that ruined a lot of careers, Showgirls has a reputation it only partially deserves (though there is that sex scene in the swimming pool). Since it debuted in 1995 it’s been a soft target for any prurient soul looking for an easy win. Look – naked women! Its actual failings are far less regularly … Read more
London theatre director Sam Mendes’s debut as a movie director has been treated by some critics as if it were a missive from the gods. Perhaps it was the opening scene which showed Kevin Spacey jerking off in the shower which did it for them – so bold, so adult. The film locks straight in … Read more
I don’t remember there being an immigration angle to The Pied Piper of Hamelin, at least in the story I heard as a child, but it’s clearly there in this otherwise very traditional version of the fairy tale from 1957. The plot otherwise remains as I recall it. The town of Hamelin is plagued by … Read more
Done a bit faster and with less attention to detail, Vermiglio would be a soap opera. Its story is pure soap – secret assignation, love, betrayal, jealousy, closely guarded secrets and the warm embrace/stultifying smother of the family environment. Maura Delpero’s film is set in northern Italy in 1944 where a deserter from the army … Read more
Two types of nobility do battle in Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, a 1977 movie out of time in the Star Wars era and too subtle and ambiguous to count back then as mass entertainment. Starting with the opening credits – German schoolchildren sing nursery rhymes one second, German soldiers bellow military anthems the next, while … Read more
One of the great French “poetic realist” movies of the 1930s, Pépé le Moko is also a chance to see Jean Gabin at Peak Gabin, as the much-admired, much-feared man all men want to be and all women want to be with – as the saying goes. He’s a good bad guy, a kind of … Read more
The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren) started life as a film about a woman with a talking vulva. Then writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt decided to come at the same idea – the onerous demands put on young women – by taking a second run at the Cinderella fairy tale. The resulting debut feature introduces a really … Read more
Die Frau meiner Träume (The Woman of My Dreams) was just what the doctor ordered in 1944, if the doctor in question was Goebbels and you were a happy member of Germany’s Thousand Year Reich. Light, frothy entertainment in the Hollywood style was what propaganda chief Goebbels had commanded Germany’s UFA studio to make and … Read more
In Crumb Catcher a doorstep salesman makes his big pitch in a revenge-of-the-nerd thriller with a comic edge, served straight-up with no messing about. Bloody and funny, it’s not bad for a debut at all, though director Chris Skotchdopole did co-write the story with Larry Fessenden (who’s also a producer), one of the stalwarts of … Read more
Suddenly is apparently the movie that Lee Harvey Oswald watched before setting out to kill President John F Kennedy. God knows why Oswald was looking to it for inspiration because things don’t end triumphantly at all for the guys on screen trying to assassinate their own US president. It is triumphant as a movie though, … Read more
There aren’t many films called El Cochecito. That’s the Spanish title. In English it goes by the title The Wheelchair. There aren’t many films with that title either. A wheelchair is not aspirational, it’s not something people covet. (As for The Little Coach, which the film sometimes flies by, no one even knows what that … Read more
An entertaining fruit cocktail, All Through the Night was one of a raft of propaganda movies Hollywood made to try and turn isolationist American public opinion in favour of entering the Second World War. In the end it didn’t matter. By the time the film came out in early 1942, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, … Read more