Reviews
Mock-serious bad times in New York City. Scorsese did it memorably in After Hours, and 40 years later Darren Aronofsky has a go with Caught Stealing, a gonzo nightmare missing a certain something. Comedy, I think, or the right comedic tone at any rate. Anyway, on the upside there’s Austin Butler as a dude in … Read more
The word “family” is uttered 56 times in Fast X, number ten (there’s a clue in the title somewhere) in the series whose focus on interpersonal relations threatens to scupper it. And yet it keeps on going. The latest outing is not so fast, not so furious, maybe, but in a jimjams-and-pizza-and-beer kind of way, … Read more
In Iceland, on a dark and stormy night near Christmas… if that sounds like the beginning of a fairytale or nativity play, prepare for Lamb, which mixes fairytale fantasticality with a bit of Christian iconography to dark Nordic effect… eventually. It’s all a bit weird and primeval, in other words, but things get off to a rather … Read more
The remarkable thing about Sylvie’s Love is actually how unremarkable it is in many ways. It’s a white-sliced, white-picket-fence melodrama of a sort that once might have starred a Joan Crawford. Except it’s black rather than white people playing all the parts. That shouldn’t be remarkable, nor should stories about the black middle classes, but … Read more
Why is House of Hummingbird called House of Hummingbird? I’ve got no idea, and watching this South Korean coming-of-ager hasn’t enlightened me. Can anyone help? Answers below if you can. Maybe I missed something. Odd in a way, because the film itself is as clear as day and is told in a bright, clear manner, … Read more
A woman wakes up in the night to find her husband bolt upright in bed talking in his sleep. “Someone is inside,” he says, before sparking back out again. The next day she asks him about what he said the night before. It was a line from a script I’ve been reading, her actor-husband tells … Read more
There was a real-life person called Pyotr Kropotkin, he isn’t a fantasy creation of writer/director Cyril Schäublin, who is also excavating his own family’s connection to the Swiss watch industry in Unrest (Unrueh), a film as quiet and precise as a high-end timepiece. Schäublin’s film follows the bearded Russian political radical (played here by Alexei … Read more
A Hitchcock film that Hitchcock didn’t make, Ministry of Fear has the innocent man on the run, the dangerous/vulnerable blonde and a shadowy organisation pulling the levers in the background. Fritz Lang directed it, in mid 1943, but it took until mid 1944 before it was shown in cinemas (and even then it only happened … Read more
The Arriflex 35BL camera is the most important ingredient in Across 110th Street. It drives the look, the location, the acting style, the intimate mood, in fact almost every aspect of this strange hybrid of blaxploitation and noirish crime thriller. Silent, lightweight and released in time for the Munich Olympics, the new 35BL (the BL … 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
100 Nights of Hero re-invents the One Thousand and One Nights, aka The Arabian Nights, aka the story of Scheherazade, making sex and gender dynamics more explicit even than they were in the original stories and packaging everything up like a gift of Turkish delight wrapped in gossamer, drenched in perfume, and then swaddled in … Read more
You can run but you cannot hide is the sentiment driving Out of the Past, Jacques Tourneur’s bleak film noir masterclass from 1947. Just when you think you’ve got clear of something, so the story goes, up it comes from your history and bites you in the ass. Robert Mitchum plays Jeff, a private detective … Read more