Popular Reviews
See You Then
See You Then pulls a neat “did not see that coming” switcheroo early on, though a glance at any of the blurbs about the film will reveal what it is. It doesn’t matter much – it comes scant minutes in, so won’t ruin the fun. Two women meet up. They were evidently once lovers. Both seem nervous. It’s been a long time, at least ten years, since they saw each other. Kris (Pooya Mohseni) seems keen, nervous, Naomi (Lynn Chen) less sure, wary. Having got the “look at you”, “it’s been so long” niceties out of the way, the two of them head for a friendly restaurant, where Kris reveals that her changed … Read more
Obsession aka The Hidden Room
In 1948 brilliant director Edward Dmytryk left the United States in a hurry. He’d just been sentenced to prison time for failing to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. One of the so-called Hollywood Ten, Dmytryk fled to the UK, where he made a couple of films before his passport ran out and he returned to the US to face the music, and jail. The first of those films was Obsession, released in the US as The Hidden Room. Dmytryk is best remembered for all-American movies like the Philip Marlowe mystery Murder, My Sweet (also known as Farewell My Lovely). Obsession isn’t as noirish as that in any sense but it is … Read more
Restore Point
A decent sci-fi movie almost drowns in police procedural cliché in Restore Point (Bod Obnovy), a Czech movie owing something to Blade Runner – but then so much sci-fi does. The year is 2041 and in a world of driverless cars, dizzy buildings and swooshy screen tech, cop Emma Trochinowska (Andrea Mohylová) is assigned to investigate the death of the head of research at the Restore Institute, a creepy megacorps whose USP is selling people another crack at life if theirs ends “unnaturally”. As long – and much of the plot hangs on this detail – as they have a recent back-up from which to restore. The backup on standby is the way everyone … Read more
Storm Warning
Doris Day and Ginger Rogers meet the Ku Klux Klan in 1951’s Storm Warning, a noirish crime drama strangely silent on the most salient aspects of Klan activity but with things to say about the mob mindset and liberal American values nonetheless. It rattles along at around 93 minutes, with the focus mainly on Rogers, who plays a travelling clothes model arriving in the town where her sister (Day) lives and looking forward to seeing her sister for the first time since little sis got married. She arrives late and immediately something is off in this dark town, where everything curiously quiet. The lights are going off in shops. A cab driver refuses … Read more
The Shrouds
The Shrouds looks like the filmic equivalent of David Bowie’s final album, Dark Star, a requiem revisiting old ideas in an up-to-the-minute way. David Cronenberg has not announced that he is dying. But aren’t we all? All the time? It’s the sort of thing Cronenberg has been saying, with a macabre chuckle, since he first announced himself with Shivers 50 years ago. Cronenberg’s own wife died in 2017 and it would be crass to suggest that The Shrouds is really all about that. But let’s be crass for a minute and point out that Vincent Cassel, who plays this film’s dubious hero, has hair like Cronenberg’s. His character dresses like him and works … Read more
Branded to Kill
Branded to Kill is a crime thriller with so much style it’s absurd. Clearly aiming for the ridiculous it is deliberately style over content. Hashed out on the hoof by eight different writers who were clearly egging each other on, it’s a mad tumble of French New Wave crash edits and film noir poses, all held together – if it is held together at all – by a jazzy, jerky, atonal score. Nikkatsu, the Japanese studio that made it, thought it was a mess and wouldn’t release it. Its director, Seijun Suzuki, thought they just didn’t understand what they’d been given and sued them. And won. The film got its release but Suzuki’s … Read more
The Glass Key
Watching The Glass Key you wouldn’t think it was the inspiration behind Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which itself inspired Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. But they’re in there if you peel back the 1942 fashions and noirish looks and swap out Alan Ladd for Toshirô Mifune or Clint Eastwood. Ladd plays the cool, smart, tough loner caught between various interacting groups of crooks, politicians, the police and the media, all in various ways in cahoots but falling out as an election swings into view and existing power dynamics are threatened. Ed Beaumont (Ladd) is a fixer for Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy), a man who is himself a fixer, a shady operator trying to swing the … Read more
Drive My Car
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi delivered two chunky movies in 2021. The three hour Drive My Car followed hot on the heels of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Both movies are interested in identity and the way humans sometimes make use of lies in order to access truth. It’s a case of the theatre director, his driver, his wife and her lover, with the slightly hangdog Hidetoshi Nishijima playing Yûsuke, the grieving actor-turned-director trying to put on a production of Uncle Vanya with a cast using his celebrated avant-garde methods – different people talking in different languages (including one actor using Korean sign language). It’s a metaphor for the gulf between speech and meaning – language … Read more
Murder at the Gallop
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 September Birth of Agatha Christie, 1890 On this day in 1890, one of the greatest writers of detective fiction was born. Agatha Christie’s two most famous creations are fastidious Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the prim but indomitable Miss Marple. Christie is the best selling novelist of all time and has the longest running play of all time – The Mousetrap – still playing to full houses in London’s West End after more than 60 years. Her stories were being adapted into films already by the end of the 1920s, and continue to this day – Crooked House is just … Read more
I Saw the TV Glow
Not so much neo-noir as neon-noir, I Saw the TV Glow is Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and continues in much the same vein, interrogating identity and authenticity in psychic landscapes constructed from online memes. Pink and orange are the key colours, though it’s shot dark like a noir, often at night, and has problematical sexuality lurking beneath the surface, as noir so often does. Its story is about a smaltown girl too mixed up for these tame streets and the white-knight male who rides to her rescue and is entirely out of his depth – see almost every noir female/male coupling for more details. It’s the … Read more
I Married a Witch
The 1942 comedy I Married a Witch had all the makings of a flop but it turned out to be OK – it’s a classic if looked at from the right angle. People kept coming and going for a start. Dalton Trumbo was hired to write but then left before he was finished. Preston Sturges was meant to produce it but never actually did. Joel McCrea had been signed up to star but bowed out when he realised he’d be working opposite Veronica Lake. He’d done a stint with her already on Sullivan’s Travels and, according to him, “Life’s too short for two films with Veronica Lake”. Then there was the pre-shooting falling-out … Read more
Yolanda and the Thief
There’s not much wrong with Yolanda and the Thief that a lot more dancing wouldn’t fix. It’s a 1945 Fred Astaire musical, and the first in a run of Technicolor movies that would prove director Vincente Minnelli to be a master of colour and motion. Though it was a flop, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Minnelli’s direction or his eye, or with Astaire, when he’s given the chance. There’s not even that much askew with Lucille Bremer, at whose door most of the blame was laid for the film’s failure. She was producer Arthur Freed’s girlfriend, and he insisted on casting her as the female lead, in spite of the fact that she … Read more
