Reviews
Film noir on ice! Suspense is a bit of a mess and the critics didn’t like it much when it came out in 1946. But the years have added a touch of fairy dust and there’s enough in here to entertain and delight, plus some decent performances, fine noirish lighting and a sense of paranoia … Read more
Beautiful, exquisite, poetic – choose your adjective, but there’s no denying the extraordinary visual effect of A Story of Floating Weeds, Yasujirō Ozu’s silent glory from 1934. A box-office smash in his native Japan, it was also a critical hit worldwide, and is a good place to start if you’re interested in tracking the development … Read more
It’s often said that Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle) has no narrative throughline, that it’s freeform, experimental, avant-garde and so on. This is both true and not true. There is a story, though Godard does his best to hide it, of a … Read more
For anyone convinced post-apocalyptic movies are a recent phenomenon, here’s Deluge, a remarkable film from 1933. It’s got all the stuff you might expect from a big disaster movie and some thoughtful stuff you might not. Some of it you might even recognise – the makers of The Day After Tomorrow paid direct homage to … Read more
Just when you thought it was Steed and Gale, Macnee and Blackman, along pops Julie Stevens (later in the decade a regular on the children’s TV show Playaway) as a sidekick in the third episode of series two. What’s afoot? Clearly there were worries behind the scenes before the series got underway and, having lost … Read more
Constantly on the move, always trying new things, Sydney Sweeney’s advance on the Oscars probably won’t be helped by Echo Valley – she’s just not in it enough – but it won’t be hindered either. And she’s surrounded by the sort of actor the Academy loves. What is it though, this Echo Valley? Julianne Moore and … Read more
Stirringly democratic and winningly romantic, The Clock is one of Judy Garland’s best films. She sings not a note, you may be surprised to learn, but brings a tear to the eye with her portrayal of a sweet young miss having a whirlwind romance in surely the most New York New York ever committed to … Read more
Drive-Away Dolls is the first feature film that Ethan Coen has directed without brother Joel’s involvement at some stage. Playing it safe, he’s decided to go for a homage to the films he first made with Joel back in those Blood Simple/Raising Arizona years. While this isn’t a bad thing in itself, it does mean … Read more
In The Platform (El Hoyo, in the original Spanish) a man wakes up in a place that isn’t familiar, a place full of dread and fear located in a world that seems to operate by different rules. He may not know where he is, but we know where we are: in one of those high … Read more
Early on in The Lady from Shanghai there’s a key piece of dialogue explaining the title. Orson Welles’s Michael O’Hara, an Irish sailor between jobs, meets a woman (Rita Hayworth, Welles’s wife at the time) in New York. Michael is on foot, Elsa is in a horse-drawn carriage taking a turn around Central Park. In … Read more
Our Mother’s House didn’t get the acclaim of Jack Clayton’s previous film about spooky kids, The Innocents, when it debuted. Partly because The Innocents is one of the all-time greats. But also because Our Mother’s House appeared in 1967, and with its message of children going to the bad because of a lack of parental … Read more
It’s not every fantasy film that comes complete with a scene of a brutal fascist captain sewing his own face up, but that’s what you get in Guillermo Del Toro’s best film since The Devil’s Backbone (better, certainly, than Blade II and Hellboy). It’s a dark fantasy reminding us that the Grimm brothers’ original tales … Read more