Reviews
“Do not underestimate the British” is the message of Went the Day Well?, a tea-and-crumpets piece of wartime propaganda from Ealing Studios. It begins with a unit of Germans – disguised as British Tommies – arriving in the village of Bramley End and ends with the villagers uniting to give Fritz a bloody nose. Actually, much … Read more
Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 drama Broken Lullaby was originally called The Man I Killed, like the Maurice Rostand play it was based on (L’homme que j’ai tué). It turned out to be a title too hard-hitting for the box office and so it was decided to change it. To The Fifth Commandment. Until some bright spark … Read more
The sixth of the Diana Rigg episodes to be made, though the third to be shown, The Cybernauts looks vaguely back to the Honor Blackman era – Mrs Peel still in leather and a bit helmet-haired – but in other respects it’s the most forward-looking episode we’ve yet seen. Perhaps that’s what you’d expect with … Read more
Problematical movies Exhibit A – The Night Porter. The story of a former guard at a concentration camp who meets up with an erstwhile prisoner some years later and starts a sexual relationship with her. Roger Ebert thought it “nasty”, Pauline Kael considered it “offensive” while Vincent Canby of the New York Times went for … Read more
1932’s Arsène Lupin wasn’t the first movie about the gentleman thief by a long stretch but it is one of the best, thanks to canny casting and a pace that never slackens. The canny casting comes in the shape of the Barrymore brothers, Lionel and John, on screen together in starring roles for the first … Read more
There’s a silent movie quality to Lucky Grandma, the story of a Chinese grandmother in New York’s Chinatown who gets tangled up with the Triads and somehow (OK, improbably) comes out on top. But first let’s meet Grandma, played superbly by Tsai Chin (86 when this was made, though she could easily be 15 years … Read more
Nineteen years after the assassination of US President Tim Kegan in 1961, his brother learns from the lips of a dying bandaged man that the official report into who really fired the gun was wrong. I know that, says the dying man, because I was number two rifle that day, and what’s more I’ll tell … Read more
Made in Italy feels like it’s based on one of the books by Peter Mayle, the British advertising executive who tired of the life and lit out for France, where he set about writing lighthearted sun-dredged reports on his new life. A Year in Provence was the first and it sold very well. That became … Read more
Look at the talent in Cut Bank – John Malkovich, Bruce Dern, Michael Stuhlbarg, Oliver Platt, Liam Hemsworth, Teresa Palmer. And Billy Bob Thornton. Clearly great things were intended. But maybe 2014 was just too early for a revival of the gonzo Tarantino movie of yore. Ten years later movies like Cut Bank were all … Read more
The sixth episode of the series (numbers two to five having vanished) and we’re edging into what would later be familiar Avengers territory. There are devious foreigners, a complex plot and a surprising amount of agency for the female sidekick. Dennis Spooner’s screenplay concerns a woman throwing herself off a London bridge into the Thames, … Read more
Often overlooked when it comes to discussion about dystopian sci-fi of the 1970s, Colossus: The Forbin Project looks a lot more chillingly prescient now than it did back when it was released in 1970, when it was seen as a sub-Strangelove addition to the genre of jokey sci-fi. It’s the story of the computer that … Read more
François Ozon’s Peter von Kant is both a remake and a restoration of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. A remake because it takes exactly the same story and retells it in pretty much the same way, except with the genders flipped. A restoration because it peels away a layer of … Read more