Reviews
So how about a horror movie featuring sexy mermaids who become disco singers in 1980s Poland? The Lure (Córki dancingu) is the film you’re after, so grabby as a concept that it went straight into the Criterion Collection after its release in 2015, which isn’t bad considering that’s where Kurosawa, Truffaut, Bergman and Claire Denis … Read more
So, an Undine. It’s a mythical water nymph, mentioned by Paracelsus, the Renaissance physician, but you won’t learn that directly from Christian Petzold’s latest drama, an increasingly bizarre and dislocated story of love suffused with magical realist moments that make no sense at all… unless you realise that the titular Undine (Paula Beer) is a … Read more
Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher is surely the best version of the Edgar Allan Poe story ever. Loved by director Kurosawa, revered by critic Roger Ebert, it perversely only seems to exist in streaming and hard-copy versions that don’t do it justice. This is one of the best gothic chillers ever … Read more
In the Earth is Ben Wheatley’s most overtly horror of horror films since he did the U is for Unearthed section of the portmanteau The ABCs of Death, though in films like Sightseers, High Rise and last year’s Rebecca horror has always lurked at the edges of his work. Made during the covid pandemic, and … Read more
The Man in the White Van slots into the mini-1970s horror revival that’s been going on for a while now. See the abduction horror of The Black Phone, or the folk horror of Midsommar, or the slightly Exorcist-y vibe of The Dark and the Wicked, or the Hammer-esque The Reckoning, just a few among many. … Read more
Structured like a dream, or a nightmare, Staying Vertical (Rester Vertical in the original French) is populated with character types – the writer, the young man, the grandfather, the doctor, the farmer, the farmer’s daughter. And it has wolves in it too, which feature almost as a threat or an element from a fairytale until … Read more
Europe is finished! Lars Von Trier’s finale to his Europa trilogy – Europa – makes summaries and predictions about life on a continent dragging a long, dark history behind it. All three films – The Element of Crime, Epidemic and now Europa – work in the same way, as grim anti-pantomimes of studied awfulness, presented in … Read more
Whoosh, Patrick Dickinson’s film Cottontail rushes into the territory generally occupied by Hirokazu Kore-eda. That is, the deceptively simple, beautifully crafted, sensitively acted, tender human drama. He’s even given it a Japanese top coat, since it’s the story of an emotionally inert Tokyo dad whose wife has just died heading to Lake Windermere in the … Read more
Intended as a 90-minute episode designed to introduce Tara King and originally called Invitation to a Killing, what became the 12th episode of the final series of The Avengers instead ran the usual 50-ish minutes, wound up being called Have Guns – Will Haggle and features not one but two iterations of King. The first … Read more
Small Axe: Mangrove is the first of a series of five standalone films made for the BBC by Steve McQueen. The umbrella title takes its name from the reggae song by Bob Marley (or Lee Perry, depending on who you ask) and though it was originally aimed at the big-name Jamaican music producers muscling everyone … Read more
At first, Splendid Isolation, Urszula Atoniak’s latest film, looks like it’s going to be a retread of 2009’s Nothing Personal, her first one. Nothing Personal might even have been called Splendid Isolation and its MO was the same – a couple of people, a female focus, a remote location, self-sufficiency, personal histories mired in mystery, … Read more
When Knighthood Was in Flower answers the question posed by Citizen Kane – just how much of a chump was media magnate William Randolph Hearst over actress Marion Davies? Here is how much – a massive movie conceived on the grandest scale, produced by a company Hearst set up expressly to make Davies a star, … Read more