Reviews
It was The End We Start From‘s misfortune to come out not long after The Last of Us, the TV show starring Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal. Mahalia Bello’s film arrived a few months after The Last of Us had finished and covers much of the same ground, though here the focus is really on … Read more
If you’ve never seen a screen version of Jean Cocteau’s short one-hander The Human Voice before, this one, starring Tilda Swinton and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, is a good place to start. There are plenty of others. Shelby Satterthwaite appeared in a Canadian version in 2019, Rosamund Pike in an adaptation by Patrick Kennedy in … Read more
Selling the sizzle rather than the sausage, How to Have Sex is loud and garish on the outside but gooey and emotional on the inside, a story of three teenagers on a post-exam drunken holiday in Crete, having fun like they invented partying and determined to lose their virginity at the first opportunity. This is … Read more
Having written the entirely acceptable Erin Brockovich and the entirely terrible 28 Days, Susannah Grant makes her directorial debut with a dog of a rom-com starring Jennifer Garner as the girl mourning the death of her fiancé, learning that he wasn’t as perfect as she had thought, and turning to his friend (Timothy Olyphant) for … Read more
Hitchcock’s last movie before he decamped from Britain to the USA is a nearly great adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Jamaica Inn, set in Cornwall where smuggler gangs lure ships onto the rocks, loot their cargos and kill their crews. The towering presence in it is Charles Laughton as local lord Sir Humphrey Pengallan, … Read more
In spite of its attempts to sabotage itself with comedy, Lady in the Fog (also known as Scotland Yard Inspector) is a successful noirish British thriller from 1952. An adaptation of the debut story in what would become a long-running BBC radio series, it takes a while to get going – two thirds of its … Read more
So here’s Number Seventeen, a Hitchcock film that’s almost never mentioned when Hitchcock is up for discussion. “A disaster,” is how the man himself described it, having been forced into directing it by his studio. But then who remembers Rich and Strange (great title) which came before, or Waltzes from Vienna, which came after? In … Read more
A Useful Ghost reminds us that the ghost story and the horror movie can be different things entirely. Haunting doesn’t necessarily mean mayhem and death. This film in some respects takes us back to a time when films like I Married a Witch or The Halfway House provided mainstream entertainment of a spooky rather than … Read more
If you’ve seen 5X2, you’ll already know that François Ozon makes immensely clever and highly entertaining films, and that there’s a point to the cleverness; he’s not just showing off. In the House, aka Dans La Maison, is Ozon to the bone, another very clever piece of work. This time, however, the point he’s making … Read more
There’s a lot that’s good about Foto Háber (aka Haber’s Photo Shop), a pithy Hungarian spy thriller from 1963, but it does have one obstacle to surmount. Of which more later. One of the best things is Zoltán Latinovits as the cool, calm spy infiltrating an espionage ring that steals state secrets. Or secrets, let’s … Read more
The IMDb plot resumé for American Refugee says it’s a film about race in America. There is a black family and a white family in it, and they come into conflict, that’s true. Race, however, is not mentioned once. In fact class and cultural politics, plus masculinity – toxic and otherwise – seem to be more … Read more
In La Grazia (aka Grace) Paolo Sorrentino once again gives us what we expect – a lushly gorgeous movie about a man in an existential funk – except this time he’s turned the power down a couple of notches. We’re back (almost) in the realm of his breakthrough, The Consquences of Love. It’s a fugue of … Read more