Reviews
Playing the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M bought Peter Lorre his ticket to Hollywood, where he soon tired of playing exotics and weirdos. He was already Hollywood’s go-to creep when he made The Face behind the Mask in 1941. It follows a naive watchmaker who arrives in New York off the boat from old … Read more
Suspiria, the original 1977 one not the 2018 remake (a treat for another day), pulls a version of the same trick on its audience that Orson Welles pulled on his crew while making Citizen Kane. “It’s a dream sequence,” Welles would sometimes shout, when he ran into resistance against whatever novelty he was trying out … Read more
The Dig re-imagines the events around a discovery so fabulous it needs no re-imagining – the excavation of the Sutton Hoo hoard. First unearthed in the 1930s, and originally thought to be Viking, the hoard turned out to be much older, Anglo Saxon, and eventually yielded up remarkable treasures made of gold, plus examples of everyday … 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
Mona Fastvold’s second film, The World to Come, continues her tick-tocking exploration of timebomb relationships, much as did her first one, 2014’s The Sleepwalker. And like The Sleepwalker, this also toys with the viewer, delaying the explosive payoff until its moment has started to recede over the hill. Has Fastvold been watching Hungarian master miserablist … Read more
When William Jacobs wrote the short story The Monkey’s Paw in 1902, could he have realised what sort of afterlife it would have? It’s been adapted dozens of times, even more if you count productions that don’t use its original title. This 1948 version is a short and atmospheric rendition of Jacobs’s story, changing the … Read more
A heist movie done as slow cinema, The Delinquents (aka Los Delincuentes) sets up genre expectations then delivers them with a twist. But mostly doesn’t deliver them at all. What a strange, big beast of a film Rodrigo Moreno has given us. Moreno gets straight into the meat of his story – Morán (Daniel Elías), … Read more
If The Magic Roundabout is a psychedelic trip for kids, its spin-off, Dougal and the Blue Cat, is a wild ride on some pretty bad acid. Skip this paragraph if you know the backstory, but The Magic Roundabout, a mainstay of UK children’s TV in the 1960s and 1970s, was originally a French cartoon, Le … Read more
My Thoughts Are Silent (Moyi dumky tykhi, in the original Ukrainian) is one of a small clutch of films about or featuring a sound recordist, sitting alongside the likes of Silence (from Ireland), Upstream Color (USA) and Berberian Sound Studio (UK). All are odd and left-field in different ways, with My Thoughts Are Silent the … Read more
One of the big films of 2006 in Germany, Summer in Berlin (Sommer vorm Balkon) caused barely a ripple anywhere else. Which is a pity, because it’s a great example of a precisely acted, brilliantly crafted film telling a good story without histrionics. In a world dominated by superhereos, subtlety sometimes struggles to get a … Read more
A good place to start if you’ve never seen one of the “poliziotteschi” films popular in Italy in the 1970s, The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist (Il Cinico, l’Infame, il Violento) is one of a series of movies actor Maurizio Merli made with director Umberto Lenzi, both leading lights of the genre that took … Read more
War is hell but also kind of fun in Confirm or Deny, one of a series of movies made by Hollywood when America was still a neutral power using emotional blackmail to counter isolationism and persuade the country to join the fray. Eventually Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s insane decision to declare war on the USA … Read more