Reviews
Flesh and the Devil was Greta Garbo’s third Hollywood movie after arriving from Europe aged 20 in 1925, and it’s the one where everything suddenly clicks. She has the right director (Clarence Brown), the right director of photography (William H Daniels) and the right co-star (top-billed John Gilbert aka The Great Lover). Originally it was … Read more
Abel Ferrara’s 2019 film Siberia wasn’t shot in Siberia, unlike the 2018 film of the same name starring Keanu Reeves, which was. Ferrara now lives in Rome and so, needing snowy wastes to tell a story about a remote bar-owner’s journey into his own psyche, he starts and ends his film in the Italian Tyrol, … Read more
Support the Girls is an Andrew Bujalski film and so comes loaded with expectation. He’s often cited as the “inventor of mumblecore”, the go-to genre for white hipsters of a certain age, the cultural late arrival at a party already full of shoegazey indie bands. Since breaking into the scene with 2002’s Funny Ha Ha … Read more
If you’ve never seen a screen version of Jean Cocteau’s short one-hander The Human Voice before, this one, starring Tilda Swinton and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, is a good place to start. There are plenty of others. Shelby Satterthwaite appeared in a Canadian version in 2019, Rosamund Pike in an adaptation by Patrick Kennedy in … Read more
The Duke is a great example of the sort of film that Brits make for domestic consumption and which often do pretty well internationally as well. Playing up to harmless stereotypes, they’re full of silly sausages with funny voices and odd, eccentric behaviours. Here for the most part it’s Northerners being earthy and honest and … Read more
In many ways the perfect French movie, French-movie cliché even, 1970’s Claire’s Knee (Le genou de Claire) is one of Éric Rohmer’s most celebrated works and is a good place to start if you want to dig into his back catalogue. One of the key voices of the French New Wave, Rohmer regularly banged out … Read more
Lush and lovely and slightly empty, The Forgiven is the clockwork toy that fails to march. And it all looks so promising to start with. The opening moments alone really get the hopes up – that saturated colour red of the scrolling credits seems to be offering a vast 1960s-style epic à la Lawrence of … Read more
Not the best Otto Preminger film but a very good example of what he was about, Where the Sidewalk Ends is a film noir directed with maximum economy that re-teams Laura‘s golden pairing of Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, he again impassive as you like, she almost unbearably long-suffering. It’s not much of a role … Read more
Requiem sounds like it should be the title for the last-ever episode of The Avengers, now only weeks away. That it’s not is a typical piece of perversity by showrunner Brian Clemens. Another is Clemens’s ongoing attempt to sideline Linda Thorson, which he’s still engaged in even this late in the day. Perhaps a further … Read more
What’s that, you say, Cronenberg? Surely not a relation of David? Indeedy, this is the son, Brandon, and, apples not falling far from tree, chips tending to fly from old blocks, he serves us up a rather lipsmacking portion of body-horror just like dad used to make. And the lips, as you might have guessed, … Read more
Because That Road Is Trodden is included as a bonus item on the BFI’s release of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. It’s a strange extra, not thematically linked, no personnel in common. Both were shot in the UK towards the end of the 1960s, this at Bryanston School, a fee-paying private school in … Read more
Meg 2: the Trench, in which a studio tries to turn a good, fun one-off into a franchise and winds up on the beach face down, gasping for air and with gravel in its shorts. Quick recap: a massive prehistoric shark, a Megalodon, escapes the depths where it generally operates and starts menacing the upper … Read more