Popular Reviews
Blonde Venus
The fifth collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich, Blonde Venus is a film that’s been strangled at birth, hacked at, mutilated, and then dressed up nicely and put out there as if all was still well. It’s a strange and unsettling story, if you can pick its story out from what’s left after the censors got at it, of a woman whose husband needs a lot of money for a life-saving medical procedure and sells her body to raise it. The four-square Herbert Marshall plays the husband, a chemist who’s been hurt through exposure to radium and needs to leave the USA and go to Germany for an experimental … Read more
The Barnabáš Kos Case
Prime Czech New Wave, The Barnabáš Kos Case (Prípad Barnabáš Kos) is a satire about a system that cannot recognise it’s gone wrong and cannot autocorrect because there are no mechanisms – a free press, for instance – to point out failure. Instead of fixing things, in its paranoia it doubles down on its decision. This, the detailing of the unhealthy doubling down, is one of the key reasons why director Peter Solan’s film deserves to be seen. Flying beneath the political radar, its story is superficially about a lowly triangle player who is quite by accident made into the musical director of the orchestra he plays in. At first the pathologically meek … Read more
Challengers
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 that will not deliver a victor. And that’s your lot for tennis metaphors. It starts at the end, where once-friends and now-rivals Art Donaldson (the solid plugger) and Patrick Zweig (the naturally talented bad boy) are at a tournament playing the game of their lives, though how important that game is won’t become apparent until the film reaches … Read more
100 Years of… The Eagle
Rudolph Valentino made The Eagle in 1925 and while it wasn’t a smash along the lines of Blood and Sand or The Sheik, it did better than his previous four films – it was a comeback of sorts, and came not long before Valentino was whisked to the place from which no comeback is possible, after contracting peritonitis and dying. Death is on the cards in The Eagle too, an adaptation of a Pushkin story about a young hussar who is spotted by the libidinous Czarina Catherine II and offered a place in her bed. But young, handsome and proud Vladimir Doubrovsky (the name is spelt a number of ways on screen) doesn’t … Read more
The Best Man
It’s 2023 and Dolph Lundgren is still knocking out the action movies. The Best Man is the latest of a long line going back to his debut in a small role in the Bond movie A View to a Kill (he was Grace Jones’s bodyguard/boyfriend at the time) and it’s a notch above the sort of thing you once found at checkouts in service stations or in revolving racks in local mini-marts. It’s Die Hard, in all but name, except Dolph gets an assist by Luke Wilson and Brendan Fehr – the three horsemen of the apocalypse who will spring (lumber in Dolph’s case – he’s 65) into action when the wedding party … Read more
Jigsaw
Organised race hate is a grift, the unusually prescient 1949 film Jigsaw points out, and is just another way of separating the poor and gullible from what little money they have. Donations, uniforms, other paraphernalia, it all adds up. Franchot Tone plays an assistant district attorney investigating the death of a printer. Who, it turns out, used to do off-the-books work for a far-right hate gang. The dead man’s wife insists that a journalist is involved in her husband’s death. Though she also insists that her husband killed himself, so who knows. DA Howard Malloy believes that the woman is scared out of her wits and is only telling him what she’s been … Read more
Killer’s Kiss
“Her soft mouth was the road to sin-smeared violence,” runs the blurb on the poster for Killer’s Kiss. Well, yes and no. The title of Stanley Kubrick’s second feature’s isn’t really that accurate either – which killer? which kiss? – but we get the idea. Film noir. The lone individual dwarfed by circumstance and environment became an abiding concern of Kubrick’s in later films and you can see it here in his story of atomised individuals trying to make a go of it in the big city. On one side Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a fighter who’s seen better days. On the other Gloria Price (Irene Kane), a taxi dancer wondering how it came … Read more
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
It’s taken a long time but maybe that’s as it should be. As Spinal Tap II: The End Continues opens, the cultural landscape is awash with ancient rockers back on the road cranking out their greatest hits one last time. In that context the four decade gap since the original movie isn’t all that inappropriate. The reason for the wait is prosaic. A legal wrangle over the rights to the Tap name, which were only concluded favourably (if you’re the band) in 2020, paving the way for the reunion. In the intervening years rock as a vital musical form has died. In fact it was already dead in 1984, which is one of … Read more
Turning Red
In Turning Red, a hyperactive 13-year-old Toronto schoolgirl turns into a giant red panda one day – looks like a cat, but panda is what we’re told – and Pixar’s latest animated adventure swings into motion, as do thoughts about what this can all possibly mean. The girl is called Mei, she is the bookish daughter of an immigrant Chinese family and her condition comes on suddenly after Mei has been humiliated by her mother over a crush on a dopey guy who works in a local shop. Mei is becoming an adult. It’s a metaphor for a girl having her first period and becoming a woman, you’d think. Pixar seem to knock that … Read more
Carnival of Souls
Shot in three weeks by a guy on a break from his real job, 1962’s Carnival of Souls is a spooky thriller about a woman who somehow survives a fatal car accident then drifts around for the rest of the movie like a restless spirit in a too-concrete world. It’s been described as something like an extended episode of the Twilight Zone – something like the Black Mirror of its day – which is largely down to the spectral, evocative organ score by Gene Moore, as well as the gotcha reveal at the finish, which won’t gotcha anyone who’s consuming as much media product as 21st-century audiences do. Director Herk Harvey said he … Read more
The Descendants
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 August Hawaii becomes 50th US state, 1959 Today marks the day when, in 1959, Hawaii became a part of the United States. It came about as a result of revolution which unseated the local Republican party, which had been in power in an almost unbroken run since the country had become a constitutional monarchy in 1887 (though that didn’t last long – it was shortly after annexed by the US in 1898 and became a Territory). The Republicans had close ties to a number of companies known as the Big Five, originally sugar plantation owners and processors, whose oligarchic power … Read more
Five Films about Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher, Mrs T, The Iron Lady, is dead. 31 years ago she was the most unpopular UK Prime Minister in history. Then, after winning the Falklands War she was re-elected in 1983. She was elected again in 1987 before being defenestrated by her party in 1990, a defeat she never quite came to terms with. Politically she was deeply divisive but on one point everyone is agreed – she recast British politics, and to a certain extent global politics, with her doctrine of open markets, privatisation, financial deregulation and tax cuts. Thatcher made the world we live in now. To some she was the greatest prime minister who ever lived, to others … Read more
