Reviews
Ride the Pink Horse? Strange title. A gay slur, perhaps? Like “playing the pink oboe”, maybe? But as the title music comes up, all clippity cloppity, this unusual movie from 1947 sends us off in yet another direction. Because this isn’t a cowboy movie either, or even something more esoteric, it’s an unusual slice of … Read more
Exactly why the 1947 crime drama They Made Me a Fugitive was renamed I Became a Criminal for its US release is something of a mystery. One is more passive, the other more active, yup, understood. But the original title is better, punchier and asks a question – who made who a criminal? Whereas the … Read more
Just when it looked like Quentin Dupieux had hit a creative wall, out comes Yannick, a swerve from his more surreal outings towards something a touch more political. If it’s not entirely plausible, it mostly is, and for Dupieux – the man who gave us a sentient truck tyre in Rubber and a chase comedy … Read more
Add Blue Giant to that big long list of Japanese animes about jazz. Yes, precisely. It’s a “how we got the band together” story of good-looking Japanese dudes meeting and becoming a tight jazz outfit, but mostly it’s concerned with Dai Miyamoto, a passionate saxophone player who outgrows his small town and so heads for … Read more
Hell is someone else’s pubic hair in your bath. WM Weikart’s feature debut hits us with this and other observations – some grimly funny others just bizarre – in Soul to Squeeze, a psychological moshpit of a drama about a guy on a trip into his own unconscious mind. There’s a Red Hot Chili Peppers song … Read more
When it’s remembered at all, 1981’s Cutter’s Way is often lumped in with All the President’s Men, The Parallax View and conspiracy dramas from the 1970s. But it’s much more at home in the company of 1970s noirish murder thrillers like Chinatown, or, most obviously, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Apart from mis-categorisation its other … Read more
Of course The Big Steal is a noir. With a title like that what else could it be? And yet it’s also an undeclared screwball comedy. The IMDb might say crime, film noir and romance, but screwball is the real dynamic, and that’s how Don Siegel directs it and stars Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer … Read more
Second of the trilogy, We Still Steal the Old Way arrived two years after 2014’s We Still Kill the Old Way and three years before We Still Die the Old Way. Aged gangsters is the idea. Geezer gangsters, this being a London-set caper. If you watched the first movie, you might have been amused to … Read more
Three’s a trend, so they say, and with Beau Is Afraid writer/director Ari Aster does just what his previous two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, did – he gets everyone talking. Terrible, some said. Brilliant, said others. Maybe it can be both at the same time, you could conclude, sitting right on the fence. And, fence-sitting … Read more
A baroque apocalypse thriller and, in case it’s getting too existential for you, Before the Fall (originally Tres Diás) also adds a dab of serial-killer angst for good measure. This feature debut by director F Javier Gutiérrez made a big splash when it came out in 2008 and then quietly disappeared. Arriving three years before … Read more
An unusual “buddy movie” focusing on two young women conscripted into the Israeli army, where they spend their time either checking bags for bombs or asking anyone suspicious – Arabs, let’s be honest – for their ID. Shot on handheld cameras on the streets of Jerusalem, Close to Home is in most other respects firmly within … Read more
If you like Rear Window you might like The Window, a thriller from 1949 running on the same fuel – impotent voyeurism. Both films are based on short stories by Cornell Woolrich. This one from a “boy who cried wolf” tale called The Boy Who Cried Murder, about a doughty kid who, on a hot … Read more