Reviews
Jean-Pierre Melville is slightly off his turf in 1969’s Army of Shadows (aka L’Armée des Ombres). No trenchcoat-wearing criminals driving American cars. Instead he gives us a slice through the activities of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Like all his late-era film, from 1966’s Le Deuxième Souffle to 1972’s Un Flic, Army … Read more
Fritz Lang more or less invented the spy thriller with Spies (Spione in German) in 1928, but it didn’t take long before everyone wanted to be a secret agent. Here’s Marlene Dietrich’s tilt, in only her second US movie, playing a streetwalker recruited by the head of the Austrian Secret Service himself, set a little … Read more
Ambitious sci-fi from Lithuania – but in English, before you switch off – Vesper is all about the world-building and the genre-tasting. One minute a coming-of-ager, another a love story, yet another a quest movie, its overriding vibe is the eco-apocalyptic thriller, set in a doomy world after the collapse of civilisation, where humans fight … Read more
The penultimate Avengers episode actually goes right back to the early days of this series’ production run. There was over a year between the completion of Get-A-Way! in February 1968 and its transmission in May 1969. It’s one of the ones produced (or started, at any rate) by John Bryce, whose short-lived attempt to take … Read more
The Man in the Hat is a weird whimsical hybrid: a homage to Jacques Tati and a semi-musical travelogue in a fantasy version of France. In The Man in a Hat‘s France there is no fast food, no Japanese cars, no smartphones. The car The Man drives is a Fiat 500, the original, tiny, tin-boxy … Read more
If it’s highly controlled yet mad gothic you’re after – plus a wackadoodle title – Horrors of Malformed Men, a Japanese cult item from 1969, should do it for you. Director Teruo Ishii wastes no time setting out his stall. The opening shot is of a woman’s bare breast, followed half a second later by … Read more
An Unquiet Grave is a remarkably simple but remarkably effective horror film. Two people, one camera, a handful of sets, kicking off with a scene at a graveside where grieving husband Jamie (Jacob Ware) meets Ava (Christine Nyland), the twin sister of his dead wife, Julia, and together they set off to resurrect the dead … Read more
Love Possibly is a riff on Love Actually, obviously, a romantic comedy about the hopelessly mismatched being manoeuvred together by fate and circumstance. If only it weren’t done in the mock documentary style. If only. It was made in 2018 when the mock-doc genre was even more overcooked than it is now (writing this in … Read more
One of the most cultish of Hollywood directors, Nicholas Ray, made his directorial debut in 1949. 1951’s On Dangerous Ground was his seventh film in two years (eighth, if you count Roseanna McCoy, where he replaced director Irving Reiss). If this maverick made films in a hurry, he also made films that moved at speed. … Read more
Google Translate suggests The Overtaking as a translation of Il Sorpasso. It’s not perfect – the less elegant “overtaking manoeuvre” is more precise – but it knocks the English-language title of the film, The Easy Life, out of the park. Maybe, in 1962, when the film came out, international distributors were trying to cash in on … Read more
Dead Man’s Treasure takes that old staple of the country house weekend – the treasure hunt – and turns it into a reasonably thrilling car-chase adventure unsure quite how jokey it wants to be. My hunch is that the thrills come courtesy of writer Michel Winder, the jokes from showrunner Brian Clemens, since camping it up … Read more
No prizes for guessing that What the Waters Left Behind: Scars is a follow-up, to 2017’s What the Waters Left Behind. Or for guessing that it’s going to feature another gang of good-looking young people being given a maximally bad time in the same bleak, blasted evacuated city by some gnarly old guys. Torture porn … Read more