Reviews
Tragedy destroys but maybe it can also heal. Paris Memories kicks off with a terrible terrorist attack in a Paris restaurant. A man, school-shooting style, wandering through the place and putting a bullet into everything that moves. It’s a grim and powerful opener directed with an eye for maximum shock by Alice Winocour, whose films … Read more
Three’s a trend, so they say, and with Beau Is Afraid writer/director Ari Aster does just what his previous two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, did – he gets everyone talking. Terrible, some said. Brilliant, said others. Maybe it can be both at the same time, you could conclude, sitting right on the fence. And, fence-sitting … Read more
Structured like a game of tennis, pinging back and forth over a chronological net, Challengers tells the story of three people locked together in an unsavoury menage. A big, panting melodrama of the sort Douglas Sirk would recognise, it’s thrillingly conceived, ingeniously constructed and plays out impressively but overstays its welcome like a tie break … Read more
Samurai swords in Scotland in the 1700s. Like his debut, Slow West, John Maclean’s follow-up Tornado is a grand chase movie held together by not much at all. In this case a simple plot about a young Japanese woman on the run from some vagabonds who want their gold back. Simple stuff. Akira Kurosawa is … Read more
Like a Butch and Sundance but with no glory days in the rearview, On the Count of Three is the story of two desperadoes riding towards their moment of reckoning, and opens with Val (Jerrod Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott) taking aim at each other’s heads, in a moment of pre-planned mutual annihilation. They don’t … Read more
A Rank Organisation B movie coming in at only 47 minutes, Penny and the Pownall Case is interesting for all sorts of ancillary reasons, but interesting in its own right too. The ancillaries. An early role for Christopher Lee. An early role for Diana Dors, still brunette and not yet in “British Marilyn Monroe” mode … Read more
Adam Morse’s feature debut, Lucid, is an ideas-driven supernatural drama that could almost double as an instructional video for shy boys who’d like to meet girls. In The Matrix style, it’s got a nerdy guy, Zel (Laurie Calvert) at its centre, an incel gamer whose mother (Sadie Frost) still hovers, concerned that her son isn’t … Read more
A day in the life of a Las Vegas bar, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is also a portrait of the lifestyle of the professional barfly. It’s actually the last day in the life of this bar, because the Roaring 20s is about to shut up shop for good. So there’s perhaps more of a celebratory … Read more
If you ran The 39 Steps through a photocopier a few times, you might end up with Man on the Run, a British noir from 1949 that yokes a couple together and watches as they fall in love. Which they do the moment they meet, on the evidence of what’s on the screen. But… in … Read more
Moody horror from Jacques Tourneur, Night of the Demon battles all the way against a studio that wanted to make the director’s psychological approach more literal. Hence the Demon itself, shown early on and right at the end, against Tourneur’s wishes. From this distance Tourneur was obviously right. There’s nothing remotely convincing in what looks … Read more
Bad Bones has good bones. Which is handy because microbudget movies have hurdles to get over, and a good story really helps. No prizes for guessing it’s a horror movie, what with a title like that. It’s also director/writer Stephen Eggleston’s feature debut and he teases to deceive in the opening setups – a pre-credits … Read more
As far as the work of director Alan Clarke goes, Penda’s Fen is an outlier. A strange take on folk horror, it’s become something of a cult in the decades since it was first broadcast in 1974 in the BBC’s long-running Play for Today strand. Pre HBO and streaming, TV was predominantly a writer’s medium … Read more
