Reviews
If film noir is about men in the thrall of women being tossed about by cruel fate, Criss Cross is prime noir. Made in 1949, in black and white, and starring Burt Lancaster in his first, noirish iteration, it’s directed by Robert Siodmak, a dab hand at punchy, pitiless drama. The story is told in … Read more
The Ipcress File is one of the great 1960s Cold War spy thrillers and its follow-up, Funeral in Berlin, attempts to do the whole thing again. Popular opinion puts the sequel as second best to Ipcress – something its star Michael Caine seems to agree with in various interviews (like this one) – with the … Read more
Superb and quite mad, Possessed gives us Joan Crawford at full hatstand, eyes boggling, jaw tight, fists clenched, a portrait of an unhinged woman, a stalker before the term was coined. This melodrama from 1947 comes from a time when they knew how to do this sort of thing unapologetically. It opens calmly but oddly … Read more
Melodramas don’t start much better than 1940’s The Letter. A man fleeing from a bungalow on a balmy evening in Malaya. A woman fires at gun at him. He falls to the ground, obviously dead. She continues firing, not stopping until all the chambers are empty. “He tried to make love to me and I … Read more
As madly vainglorious as the expedition it tracks, Aguirre, Wrath of God follows a raggle-taggle band of 16th-century conquistadors into uncharted South America, where they hope to find incalculable riches in the fabled city of El Dorado. It was the first of five uneasy collaborations director Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski made together. Herzog opens … Read more
There are issues in Memory, and memory itself has something to do with what’s going on. But it’s the small things rather than the big ones that give the film its grip and punch. The many social-realist auteurs pushing our faces into the raw meat of life could learn a lot from Michel Franco’s remarkable … Read more
Yikes, Birdeater, the sort of movie I don’t like watching, but I did watch it. And in the end… liked? Not quite. Admired…? Again, not quite. But there is something special going on in Jack Clark and Jim Weir’s debut feature, a kind of Festen among the Aussies. Unpleasant secrets surfacing at a social gathering, … Read more
It’s not often that you get to see a former prime minister in an acting role. Or a great classical pianist, for that matter. In 1937’s Moonlight Sonata you get both, and in the shape of a single person – Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish pianist who gave up his music career to serve his … Read more
A shipwrecked robot adopts an orphaned gosling and learns to be a mother in The Wild Robot, a perky and poignant animation produced by DreamWorks and directed by Chris Sanders of How to Train Your Dragon fame. The bumf says Miyazaki and old Disney informed the look of the finished product, but the DreamWorks hit … Read more
The Tenth Victim is a textbook case of a cult film that’s actually no good. Released in 1965 and billed as sci-fi (it barely is), it’s a camp Italian spectacle combining the unique talents of Ursula Andress and Marcello Mastroianni, and just that cocktail – 1965, Italy, sci-fi (ish), Andress and Mastroianni – is plenty of … Read more
Not a remake, say the team behind 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front, referring to the legendary 1930 movie anyone would be a fool to try and remake. More another adaptation of the book it was based on, they say, Erich Maria Remarque’s serialised novel from 1928 about the grim reality of the First … Read more
Here’s Maren Ade’s first feature, The Forest for the Trees (Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen in the original German), made in 2003. Though low in budget – it was a film-school project – it instantly established her as one to watch. The remarkable thing is that in the two decades since, Ade has made only … Read more