Reviews
1936’s Desire is the sort of film Hollywood has always excelled at. A bit of this, that and the other – some fun, some jeopardy, some romance – parcelled up beautifully and sold by attractive people who are looking their best. Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in this case. The best bit actually comes at … Read more
Fritz Lang more or less invented the spy thriller with Spies (Spione in German) in 1928, but it didn’t take long before everyone wanted to be a secret agent. Here’s Marlene Dietrich’s tilt, in only her second US movie, playing a streetwalker recruited by the head of the Austrian Secret Service himself, set a little … Read more
1946’s O.S.S. makes a strong case for Alan Ladd as the first James Bond, sort of, ish, in prototype. A new sort of spy thriller about a new sort of spy agency – the Office of Strategic Services was the forerunner to the CIA and had only been set up four years before – it … Read more
Alexa Vega – the girl component of Spy Kids – gets her own teenage vehicle, and it’s the sort of film it’s very easy to be snarky about, especially if you’re not the target audience. It’s the usual teen/tween fare, in fact, about girls who are obsessed with friends, boyfriends and status and focusing on … Read more
Head is many things. The Monkees’ declaration of independence, a psychedelic beanfeast, a wackadoo retread of Help by the Prefab Four, director Bob Rafelson’s big screen debut and one of Jack Nicholson’s rare writerly contributions to the movies to list just a few. What it isn’t is a good film. Tiresome in the extreme, it … Read more
Almost a commentary on Hollywood’s transition from Pre-Code licence to Post-Code moralising, 1936’s Theodora Goes Wild is a breezy screwball comedy that straddles the decades with its opposition of conservative smalltown standards and liberal big-city values. Irene Dunne is the go-between, playing Theodora Lynn, a compliant daughter of the founding family of the small burgh … Read more
Oh dear. There were tears before bedtime watching The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin), an Irish-language film set in the 1980s and all about a girl whose parents send her off to live with a distant cousin on a remote farm. Mother (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) is overburdened with kids. Dad (Michael Patric) is a feckless … Read more
Margate on the south coast of England is one of many British seaside towns that’s seen better days. So has its cinema, Wonderland, here renamed by Sam Mendes and his team as the Empire, for a story set in 1980 about people who’ve seen better days, a country too, perhaps. Britain once had an empire … Read more
Gory but not too scary, 2021’s Candyman is a direct sequel to 1992’s Candyman, which means it builds on the narrative and the lore of the first film rather than the 1995 and 1999 sequels. It also builds on the lore and narrative of Tony Todd’s Candyman, the first mainstream black horror whacko, someone to … Read more
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy isn’t really meant to be a trilogy and is, in any case, in the wrong order. Take 1981’s Lola. Second of the “trilogy” to be released, it’s marked as BRD3 quite clearly in the opening titles. Veronika Voss, last of the three, was marked BRD2. Only the first one, The … Read more
More of the same, that’s what Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse delivers. The follow-up to Into the Spider-Verse is another blistering, migraine- and epilepsy-inducing collision of animation styles, the sort of thing which, if it had been done in the 20th century, would have taken the entire 20th century to do. And if you like it, … Read more
The odd Indian eventuality of a cop’s wife taking his job if he dies in service is the driver of Santosh, documentarian Sandhya Suri’s feature debut, a fascinating and thrilling Serpico-style story of corruption, discrimination and the outsider/insider dynamic. Suri does it largely in documentary style. After a fly-on-the-wall introduction to Santosh, a widow threatened … Read more