Reviews
An astute move sideways by Aubrey Plaza, Emily the Criminal gives her fans a bit of what they want alongside a good whack of something new. She’s a producer of the film so it’s fair to say this is deliberate. Playing the sexy snark can’t go on for ever, and she’s been working this territory … Read more
OK, deep breath for the title alone. Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (or Zítra vstanu a oparím se cajem in the original Czech) is also conceptually the sort of film that requires a super-oxygenation session before diving in. It’s made in the 1970s but set in the 1990s, where time travel … Read more
Master of the kitsch gimmick William Castle’s 1965 shocker I Saw What You Did is a cautionary tale about the terrible things that happen to nice teenage girls who make prank phone calls. It’s also notable for being the last appearance in an American film by Joan Crawford. Though not her last film – 1967’s … Read more
A cop falls disastrously for the woman he is certain killed her own husband in Park Chan-wook’s first film since 2016’s The Handmaiden. Decision to Leave is an erotic noir mixing elements of the “useless cops” comedy of Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder with the romantic obsession of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and adding byzantine, … Read more
While shooting 1970s-porn-pastiche-horror movie X in New Zealand, and caught up in a bit of a covid quarantine hiatus, writer/director Ti West realised he might have the makings of a franchise on his hands. So he pitched the idea to production company A24 of extending his single movie into something more. They said yes, and … Read more
It’s “Wuthering Heights”, in scare quotes, rather than just the plain old Wuthering Heights of Emily Brontë’s imagination. Adapter/director Emerald Fennell wants us to know she’s messing about with the text a bit and having fun. Either that or she’s hiding out behind a bit of punctuation. Good luck with that. Actually, the story remains … Read more
Ashley Walters first became well known as Asher D in the London garage/grime outfit So Solid Crew. Since it was a gigantic collective of competing egos two things were on the cards – the band was unlikely to produce enough revenue to support all 19+ members, or it was going to fall apart spectacularly. Either … Read more
Stories of Somali pirates hijacking ships and holding people hostage for months regularly make the news bulletins but rarely seem to make it to the big screen. Which is odd considering that foreigners waving guns about in front of frightened innocents’ faces is a staple of cinema. Enter A Hijacking (original title: Kapringen), a Danish … Read more
The revisionist western par excellence, Devil’s Doorway is the story of the despicable white man stealing the land off the noble American Indian and then getting nasty when the Indian objects. It stars Robert Taylor as Broken Lance, a Shoshone Indian known as Lance Powell while serving in the US Army, where he won a … Read more
More than just a miserable face, arthouse darling Carl Theodor Dreyer could also churn out the hits. Master of the House is one such, a counter to the suggestion that he was just an austere Dane interested only in the beauty of human suffering – see The Passion of Joan of Arc or, much later, Ordet, … 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
Tarantino’s proposed remake starring Bridget Fonda never happened and so we have only Lucio Fulci’s 1977 original of The Psychic (aka The Psychic, Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes aka Sette note in nero) to scare us, though in all honesty it’s not so much scary as an exercise in Italian gothic … Read more