Reviews
Briskly and directly, much like its heroine, Hemel gets straight down to business with an opening scene of two people naked and rolling around, the woman mocking the man’s penis – you’re no David and it’s hardly Goliath etc – as part of an extended bout of cockteasing foreplay. Hemel – it means Heaven in … Read more
Misconceived but full of good things, 11 Harrowhouse (sometimes called Fast Fortune) is also a classic example of a film that didn’t do incredibly well at test screenings and then did even less well with real audiences after it was “improved”. It’s a paranoid screwball heist caper starring Charles Grodin as a smalltime diamond trader … Read more
Tarot is a horror film for people who don’t like horror films. Or a horror film for people who like to shout at the screen, possibly after a couple of drinks. Or that’s the initial impression at any rate. It starts out in territory so familiar it feels like a large language model wrote it. … Read more
Sexy, sweaty, panting film noir goes splashily, vividly neon-hued in Motel Destino, a vague updating of The Postman Always Rings Twice done with all the Insta-filters selected. Very nice. As in Postman, it’s a threeway affair. Heraldo the minor criminal hiding out in the Motel Destino, a sex motel run by the slightly older Dayana … Read more
What is Footprints on the Moon (aka Footprints aka Le Orme), apart from an Italian movie from 1975? Genre categorisation isn’t easy but how about psychological sci-fi thriller meets love story meets giallo horror meets paranoid modernist dreamscape? Or, from a different direction, it’s DP Vittorio Storaro’s entry in the “world’s best cinematographer” competition. The … Read more
Dry and wry and suited to the talents of all involved, Project Hail Mary’s gets a serious attack of the cutes midway through. That apart, it’s a rip-roaring space adventure of the old school whose good bits are so good that its tweeness can be overlooked. I think. It’s an adaptation of an Andy Weir … Read more
Rob Zombie’s The Munsters is a reboot of the 1960s TV show borrowing heavily from the original and dredging it all in a tooth-rotting production design. Rarely if ever has a black-and-white TV show been re-imagined so gaudily. The end product, like Herman Munster himself, is a bag of bits. That’s maybe intentional. Herman Munster … Read more
The most significant point that the documentary The Real Charlie Chaplin makes is that Chaplin wasn’t just the most famous man in the world from an early stage in his career, he was also famous in a way that had never happened before – planet-wide recognition, mass hysteria, factories pumping out merchandise, fakes pirating his act … 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
A guy comes back from Vietnam and runs into a whole load of trouble in 1977’s Rolling Thunder, the sort of “guy comes back from Vietnam” movie they used to make around then. Except this one’s all messed up. William Devane plays the guy, Major Charles Rane, who returns from seven years in a Vietnam … Read more
Is it Secrets of a Soul or Secrets of the Soul? Both variations of the title seem to be in play. It was Geheimnisse einer Seele in the original German, which suggests it’s the indefinite article – do with that what you will. Either way this is a strange film from the silent era. Expressly designed … Read more
The Seduction of Inga is a direct sequel to its soft-porn predecessor from three years before, 1968’s Inga. Its main claim to fame these days is that it contains music by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, aka the two guys from Abba. It’s rumoured that Björn was also offered a role in the film, but … Read more