Reviews
The Virginian’s ambitions aren’t that great. It wants to be a normal, everyday western like they used to make, in which man’s-gotta-do men negotiate morality in a lawless world, a baddie wore a black hat and a fair lady was open to a bit of courting as long as it was respectful. Can such a … Read more
Starve Acre starts out looking like it’s going to be a folk-horror reworking of The Amityville Horror, spooky house and all that. Then changes tack and appears to be attempting a folk-horror reworking of The Exorcist, possessed child and all that. Before finally settling down to tell a story about different ways of coping with … 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
It doesn’t take much exposure to TV talent shows to realise that success with the voting audience or expert panel isn’t so much about the performance and talent as about the story the contestant tells. Teen Spirit takes that idea, the story, and turns it into a story of its own. In what could almost … Read more
A film about a daughter helping her father to kill himself doesn’t sound like appointment viewing – unless you work at Dignitas (or some other physician-assisted-suicide organisation) – but in the hands of director François Ozon it is just that. There’s an “all human life is here” aspect to Everything Went Fine (Tout S’est Bien … Read more
Madness indeed. A Page of Madness was made in 1926 on next to no budget, by a talented director aided by a group of demented avant-garde writers called the Shinkankakuha, who were determined to break free from the shackles of naturalism. For many years it was considered lost, until its director, Teinosuke Kinugasa, found a … Read more
Full of guys with nicknames like Mutt, Shivvy and Whitey, 1948’s The Street with No Name is your tough, streetwise crime drama making many claims to authentiticity. It was one of a run of “semi-documentary” movies made around this time, often by Twentieth Century-Fox, and shot out on the streets, in the bars and at … Read more
She can’t. Run, that is, one of the little jokes that director/co-writer Aneesh Chaganty has with the audience in this two-hander about a mother, her wheelchair-using daughter and the young woman’s impending flight from the family home to university. Another joke is what a great mother Diane (Sarah Paulson) is. She’s home-schooled her daughter Chloe … Read more
A live action adaptation of the 1973 Japanese anime with a plot that is Godzilla in essence, except this time man’s interference with nature has produced a race of Neo-Sapiens – a deadly spawn out to kill the human race. Which can be saved by only one man – Casshern – a mortal reincarnated with an invincible … Read more
So who wants to see Mickey Rourke playing St Francis of Assisi? Not many people is the answer. Liliana Cavani’s Francesco wasn’t a box office hit when it debuted in 1989, didn’t rake in awards at the festivals and has largely disappeared without trace. But Mickey Rourke dressed in a simple brown habit as the … Read more
I mean, a film called Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands, how could you not? And then I learned this 1967 Japanese “pink” movie also goes by the name of Dutch Wife in the Desert, and was originally released as Horror Doll – and was even more intrigued. Having now watched it, as an exercise … Read more
Brian Tyree Henry goes from second string actor to star in The Outside Story. He’s probably best known from the TV series Atlanta, which has acted as a finishing school for talents including LaKeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz. More recently you might have seen Henry’s face in Godzilla vs. Kong, as a nerdy conspiracy theorist. … Read more
