Popular Reviews
Letty Lynton
Letty Lynton tells the story of Madeleine Smith, who wanted to move on from a lover who didn’t want to move on from her. And so she killed him. The same story was also told in David Lean’s Madeleine in 1950 (good too) and in Dishonored Lady, starring Hedy Lamarr in 1947 (not seen it). Here it’s Joan Crawford who plays the deadly female, a rich flibbertigibbet first encountered in Montevideo dancing the night away with hot Latin lover Emile Renaul (Nils Asther). It’s obvious from the film’s opening moments that Letty has had enough of Emile, who’s a bit clingy for her liking. And so, instructing her maid Miranda (Louise Closser Hale) … Read more
Wasteland
In Wasteland (it also goes by the name Undercliffe) a young man wakes up with amnesia, having been badly beaten up on some old waste ground in Bradford, gets taken in a by a kind Muslim family and then, as bits of his memory start to reappear, starts to put together a picture of his old life. What he finds he doesn’t like. Though Stevie (Laurie Kynaston) is kind to Meeba (Mariam Haque) and her brood, and forms a bond of sorts with Khalid (Akhbar Kurtha), whose taxi ferries him all over town in the hope that Stevie will spot somewhere familiar, wherever it takes him Stevie keeps bumping into people who find … Read more
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz aka Ensayo de un crimen
In typical fashion, Luis Buñuel turns the crime drama on its head in The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (originally Ensayo de un crimen), a story about a killer who isn’t a killer admitting to crimes he didn’t commit because he’s convinced he somehow perpetrated them. Being a Buñuel film there’s also a reckoning with the bourgeoisie, and how they tend to get things assbackwards. Here, the wellspring of Archibaldo’s misery is becoming hardwired to confuse sex and death at an early age when, as a spoilt little rich boy, he sees his governess killed by a stray bullet fired by revolutionaries running amok outside the palatial family home. It’s as … Read more
The Girl without Hands aka La Jeune Fille sans Mains
A miller down on his luck meets a man in the woods. The man is the Devil, though the miller doesn’t know it, and after a bit of smalltalk he’s soon offered the miller a deal. Give me what you have behind your mill and I’ll make you rich, offers the Devil. Behind the mill, thinks the man, that’s an apple tree. An apple tree for a crock of gold sounds fair enough to me, he reasons. Obviously never having read any fairy tales, he agrees to the bargain. It turns out that the miller’s daughter was also behind the mill and the miller has now signed her over to the Devil himself. … Read more
Beyond Words
The immigrant experience. Be honest, your heart just sank a little. Possibly because you’ve seen a few movies about it and you imagine you know what you’re about to be served when you hear that Beyond Words (Pomiędzy słowami, in the original Polish) is just such a thing. The tale of a sweet and blameless brown person having a hard time in a mostly white country. But that’s not what Urszula Antoniak’s fourth film is about at all. Instead it asks a rarely asked question – what of the not-so-sweet, not-so-blameless white person in another largely white country? Michael looks like a German but he isn’t one. He’s a Pole who immigrated to … Read more
Minamata
From its title right through to its last gasp, Minamata, a drama based on real events, insists that it isn’t about the photographer W Eugene Smith. But it is. Smith was a photographer who’d distinguished himself in the Second World War and then returned to lay down many of the ground rules of photojournalism at Life magazine, he and it in a creative lockstep from the 1940s till the 1970s, when it ceased weekly publication and he went on to the great darkroom in the sky. The film picks up Smith at the end of his career in 1971: old, drunk, broke, selling off his gear to pay his rent and barely able … Read more
He Walked by Night
There were two big “ripped from the headlines” movies in 1948, one from the East Coast of the USA, the other from the West. Both The Naked City and He Walked by Night made big claims to authenticity. The Naked City made much of the fact that a lot of its footage was shot out on the streets of New York. He Walked by Night also makes use of real locations, most notably LA’s underground storm drain system for a finale The Third Man would borrow a year later. But its bigger pitch is that it’s a non-Hollywoodised movie about actual events. And how it asserts that. “This is a TRUE STORY”, the … Read more
High Fidelity
A film that caught a moment rather well. One of the moments it caught was the high point of Nick Hornby – the chronicler of a generation that was slightly more conservative, slightly more sentimental than the preceeding one, and had come to accept it. Director Stephen Frears’s version of Hornby’s novel about men and their bloody lists also caught hold of the then current notion that men were all, to some extent, on the autistic spectrum. Giving that idea flesh is John Cusack as the obsessive, nerdy, list-driven owner of a second-rate record shop. The action has been moved from London to Chicago but vinyl geeks are a global trope and Cusack’s … Read more
Cadejo Blanco
A naive young woman searches for her missing sister in Cadejo Blanco, a bloody coming-of-age thriller featuring a fabulous performance by Karen Martínez. If you’re wondering what the title translates as, the cadejo blanco is a mythical white dog – a spirit animal of Central America folklore. And once you know that you might also start wondering what it has to do with Guatemalan gangs and the sentimental education of an innocent young woman. You might still be asking that question as the film winds to a close and director/writer Justin Lerner is teasing us with a shot of a white dog roaming in the forests of Guatemala, where Sarita (Martínez) has finally … Read more
Loving Vincent
It’s likely that nothing is ever going to knock Loving Vincent off the top spot when it comes to films about the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. Whether it relegates 1956’s Lust for Life – which starred Kirk Douglas as the tortured artist – into second place as a biopic is another mattter entirely. It’s a Polish movie with British/Irish actors in most of the key roles and an unashamed Citizen Kane structure. Douglas Booth takes the investigative role as Armand Roulin, the rough postmaster’s son trying to return a letter sent by Vincent to his brother Theo, and in the process going from one person to another, talking out of each details … Read more
Watch on the Rhine
Remember Victor Laszlo, the most boring character in Casablanca? If you’ve ever wondered what Victor did next when he flew off into the night with his wife Ilsa, leaving Humphrey Bogart and Claude Reins to play bromantic footsie on the airport tarmac, Watch on the Rhine is as near as you’re going to get to an answer. Paul Heinried, who played Laszlo, was offered the role of the noble anti-fascist activist hero of Watch on the Rhine but turned it down, claiming he didn’t want to be typecast, leaving Paul Lukas to pick up the work (and a Best Actor Oscar) as the Laszlo near-duplicate, Kurt Muller, a German whose tireless agitating in … Read more
Angels Hard as They Come
Hippies! Bikers! Bikers! Hippies! They’re not really the same thing but 1971’s Angels Hard as They Come (aka Angel Warriors) doesn’t care. Get the women to take their clothes off now and again, add in some yowling rock boogie. Long hair! Marijuana! Yay – we got ourselves an exploitationer. Of course it’s a Roger Corman movie, since he specialised in vibe-adjacent movies designed to squeeze a dollar from the latest fad. Here he’s working off the back of Easy Rider and, as was Corman’s trick, he’s got some good people in to assist. This was the first movie Jonathan Demme wrote, along with his mate from advertising Joe Viola, who took on directing … Read more
