Reviews
The 1947 noirish thriller Lured stars Lucille Ball and is directed by Douglas Sirk, neither of them names you’d associate with this sort of thing. Ball was a comic actor, Sirk is now chiefly remembered for big, overheated and florid dramas like All That Heaven Allows, but both show their breadth of talent in this … Read more
The Dark Corner didn’t do too well when it debuted in 1946. There were too many other noirs around and it struggled to stand out from the pack. Now, though, it looks a lot better – its dark wit, snappy one liners and good cast help, plus the direction of Henry Hathaway, who knows how … Read more
What’s the best Fritz Lang film? The argument could go on all night, and there are so many to choose from – contenders include M, Fury, You Only Live Once, The Woman in the Window, or While the City Sleeps. Or how about Rancho Notorious, Metropolis, The Big Heat or Man Hunt? So how about … Read more
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr was the first psychological vampire movie, or so some of the books say. Cut to FW Murnau in the wings asking forlornly, “So what was Nosferatu?” made ten whole years earlier in 1922. How about Vampyr being the great Dreyer’s first sound movie? There is no doubt about that, even though … Read more
Looking on paper like something better than it actually turns out, Hollywoodland is one of those films purporting to lift the lid on Hollywood, LA Confidential style. It tells the lightly fictionalised story of George Reeves (Ben Affleck) the man who played Superman on 1950s US TV, and asks the simple question – who done … Read more
Lots of things do battle in Piggy, but most of all it’s a story about a teenager at war with herself. Or is it a slasher movie? Or a coming of ager with a visceral psychology at work? Bit of all three, and possibly a few more things besides. Writer/director Carlota Pereda welds all the … Read more
The US TV series Mission: Impossible was not quite a year old and hadn’t yet aired in the UK when the Avengers episode Mission… Highly Improbable debuted in the UK in November 1967, so Brits wouldn’t have got the joke/reference. It matters not – apart from the allusive title, there’s nothing else carrying over from … Read more
Free-running is the gimmick powering this actioner scripted and produced by French action powerhouse Luc Besson and also known as District B13 (B is for “Banlieue”). Set in a broken-down Paris in the near future, District 13 has an Escape from New York kind of vibe and follows a tough cop (Cyril Raffaelli) and a … Read more
There’s a hint of early Jim Jarmusch in I’m No Longer Here (Ya no estoy aqui originally), a spicy Mexican drama with an offbeat attitude and a strong sense of place. Early Jarmusch often featured distinctive characters floating around in a world outside their control. Stuff happens, but very little of it is at their … Read more
“This film is intentionally unsubtitled”, it says at the beginning of Days (aka Rizi), the latest feature from the amazingly productive Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang – 19 films of various lengths in the last decade. Fans will be delighted to hear it’s more of the same – a virtually wordless film composed of not much … Read more
The trailer does not lie. Why Don’t You Just Die! (Papa, sdokhni in the original Russian) is a camp melodrama awash with blood, gruesomeness, novel ways of hurting people and comic-book cruelty. It’s as if all the horrible things that ever happened to Wile E Coyote were bundled together and then brought to the screen … Read more
Compartment Number 6 has been described as a Finnish Before Sunrise but in fact it’s closer to It Happened One Night minus the jokes, since it’s a story about two people who really don’t get along suddenly finding they do get along, sort of. At the risk of banging on about a different subject for … Read more