Reviews
A kind of meta-The Mousetrap, See How They Run plonks itself down on the sofa alongside the other representatives of the whodunit revival – the likes of Knives Out and Kenneth Branagh’s adaptations of Agatha Christie. In essence it’s Agatha Christie’s venerable long-running play subjected to mock trial by a thousand in-jokes, some knowing, others … Read more
Timothée Chalamet spent five years in training for Marty Supreme, dragging a table-tennis table from one film to the next, so he could hone his skills by banging out a few games between takes. There’s lots of spare time on film sets, especially on the sort of big productions Chalamet has got used to appearing … Read more
Irish horror movies have a tendency to be inventive, ingenious and out there, and Double Blind ticks all those boxes. I told a mate I was watching an Irish horror movie and he wondered what categorised a horror movie as Irish. “Is it,” he ventured, “killer potatoes?” No, Mark, no. Like 2012’s massively underrated Stitches, … Read more
The Lightship should be a great film but isn’t. It goes wrong somewhere, particularly towards the end, when there’s a mad rush for the exit (or, the filmic equivalent, a mad rush to get everything said that needs saying before the big finish). It was released in 1985 and stars Robert Duvall and Klaus Maria … Read more
The story behind the success of a stuffed-toy phenomenon, The Beanie Bubble is in many ways a template World 2.0 tale of one man, a vision, plus a lot of help from other people, most of whom get left in the dust when it is time to bask in the glory. It could be Jobs, … Read more
Mark Cousins’s documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock steers a careful course between low and high culture, the crass, “did you know” approach to the great director and the earnest film studies route. Hitchcock understood the importance of fun. The result is an engaging, interesting, entertaining and enlightening 120 minutes, not the last word in … Read more
A remarkable feature debut by Savanah Leaf, Earth Mama is the grim social drama that’s had a magic wand waved over it. Not the story, though. That remains grim. Young single mum Gia has lost her children to social services. She is a recovering drug user and is heavily pregnant. She loves her kids and … Read more
Rosemary’s Baby: The Prequel would have been a more obvious title for Apartment 7A, for that is what it is, a straightforward precursor movie imagining that Rosemary wasn’t the first sweet young thing to become the broodmare of Satan. If you can remember Rosemary’s Baby we were told as much in that film. And if … 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
Paul Henreid got sick of playing bland heroes like Casablanca‘s Victor Laszlo and in Hollow Triumph set out to prove he could be just as convincingly bad. Having optioned the novel this crime drama was based on, he produced the film himself and, according to legend, directed most of it too, once original director Steve … Read more
The casting is crucial to the success of Don’t Bother to Knock as a taut psychological drama. On one side two actors – Richard Widmark and Elisha Cook Jr – known for playing weirdos, psychos, oddballs or generally damaged individuals. And on the other is Marilyn Monroe. In her first lead role, after a series … Read more
Writer/director Tatiana Huezo drops us straight in to Prayers for the Stolen (Noche de Fuego). As a dark screen accompanied by rapid breathing yields to a daytime scene of two females digging what looks like a shallow grave, the internal interrogation starts – Who are these people? Where are they? Is it a grave? Why … Read more