Reviews
Fans of plotless movies will love The Appointment, an increasingly cultish British horror from 1982. The only feature by Lindsey C Vickers, it was regularly described as lost until the British Film Institute got themselves together and released it as part of their Flipside series of under-appreciated left-fielders. As to plot, it’s the title. There … Read more
A film of two halves, two time periods and, in fact, two films, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World also tells two stories. In one the everyday travails of a production assistant driving around Bucharest auditioning injured people to appear in a public information film about workplace safety. In the … Read more
Closer co-operation between European countries is a good thing, right? That’s the idea driving Death’s Door, an episode with a mind-control theme and a jaunty spy-fi approach to what is essentially an espionage thriller plot. But before the Europhobes get all steamed up, the co-operation, though never quite spelled out, appears to be more military … Read more
Robert DeNiro turned it down and so Richard Gere wound up with another decent role, in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, a cool look at “heroic” types who have done little more than hitch a ride on a wave. Gere plays a crusading documentarian who, stricken with terminal cancer at the end of his life, is … Read more
Möbius, not Morbius. The Marvel supervillain was still in the uncertain future in 2013 when Eric Rochant wrote and directed this spy thriller set in the chi-chi world of high finance. Also in the future was Rochant’s magnum opus, the brilliant TV series The Bureau (aka Le Bureau des Legendes), for which Möbius can be … Read more
Johnnie To’s baffling Throw Down, from 2004, is a hell of a good-looking film. It’s a homage to Akira Kurosawa a dedication at the end tells us – “the greatest film-maker”. And though you might find influences from the great Japanese director, who had died only six years before, you’ll search in vain for coherent storytelling, … Read more
A perfect farce from 1937, Easy Living catches Jean Arthur at the peak of her career and is so devilishly constructed that explaining the plot would be a fool’s game. But the gist of it is that a normal young woman on the top deck of an open-top bus suddenly finds herself draped in a … Read more
In plain language Rebuilding doesn’t sound like much of a proposition. A guy whose farm has been burnt out by a devastating fire tries to put his life back together while taking shelter in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer. That’s it. But give it a bit of space, as director/writer Max Walker-Silverman gives his … Read more
At the Raindance film festival, London, UK, 27 October–6 November 2021 Swerving the woe-is-me of the issue-driven drama, Sami, Joe and I (Sami, Joe und Ich) takes on the sort of problems teenage girls encounter without becoming a hostage to them and also celebrates the vital force of female friendships without becoming sappy. Quite a … Read more
The Body Vanished is so old school you half expect it to be Vanishéd, Regency drama style. In fact it’s a 1939 British whodunit, a “quota quickie” intended as a programme filler and running only 46 minutes. It covers plenty of ground in that time and that is its main claim to your time – … Read more
It Be an Evil Moon does not declare itself immediately, but debut feature director Ben Etchells offers snacks to keep us going with a pre-credits sequence – a guy driving on a forest road at night finds something blocking the way. Gets out. Moves it. Gets back in the car. The audience at this point … Read more
Wow, God Is a Bullet is violent. Teeth-kicked-out violent. And it’s Maika Monroe, slender, fragile Maika Monroe having her teeth kicked out. She also has her nose broken twice (at least) during the course of this long and almost relentlessly brutal film. Not her, of course, but her character, Case. She’s known as “Headcase” to … Read more