Popular Reviews
Reflection in a Dead Diamond
Arthouse discovers the rigours of genre in Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Reflet dans un diamant mort), a vogue-ing pastiche of Bond movies with a bit of Death in Venice. If you like the work of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, who have been doing this sort of thing for over 20 years, in films like Amer, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears and Let the Corpses Tan, this will be catnip. Personally, I thought this latest feature – brilliantly assembled though it is – exposed a weak flank. They can make the richest, lushest and most referential movies possibly ever. But can they tell a good story? They would probably argue … Read more
The Opening of Misty Beethoven
The openings are both figurative and literal in The Opening of Misty Beethoven, the pornified Pygmalion that’s a key movie from the so-called Golden Age of Porn. The real Pygmalion, you’ll recall, is about two la-di-dah gentlemen betting on whether they can get a Cockney flower girl to pass as a duchess. Here, Henry Higgins, Colonel Pickering and Eliza Dolittle are replaced by Dr Seymour Love (Jamie Gillis), his occasional lover Geraldine Rich (Jacqueline Bedaunt) and Misty Beethoven (Constance Money), a low-rent sex worker Dr Love picks up in a grindhouse cinema pleasuring a guy dressed as Napoleon. In a plot following Pygmalion’s major beats, aficionados of erotica Dr Love and Ms Rich … Read more
The Axe
What is a man in capitalism if not his job? Costa-Gavras asked the question in The Axe (Le couperet) in 2005 in much the same way that Park Chan-wook did in 2025’s No Other Choice. Both are working from the same source material – Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax. Both come to pretty much the same conclusion – shorn of his job and his title, a male in this situation loses his status and becomes dangerously unmoored. This, both conclude, is not a good thing. The stories are similar right down to the little details. A man who works as an executive for a paper company gets made redundant and cannot find other … Read more
Class Action Park
Class Action Park is a punning title for a reasonably even-handed documentary about Action Park, Vernon, New Jersey, a trailblazing theme park when it opened in the 1970s, which later became infamous on account of the number of accidents and deaths that happened there. It was the brainchild of Gene Mulvihill, a disgraced Wall Street trader who realised there was money to be made from a park that varied its offer with the seasons – by winter a ski resort, a water park in summer. “Uncle Gene” is what the teenagers in his employ affectionately called him, and it’s their testimony that forms the bulk of Seth Porges and Chris Charles Scott’s film. … Read more
The Pleasure Girls
Misrepresenting itself cheerfully, The Pleasure Girls is an early arrival at the Swinging Sixties party that’s only partly what the poptastic theme song and energetic trailer claim it to be. Youth! Girls! Fun! Sex! Yes, but… For a while the story sticks close to Swinging expectations – young, pretty Sally (Francesca Annis) arrives in London from the fusty provinces to become a model, takes up with a David Bailey-esque photographer called Keith (Ian McShane) and together they have a fun time, going to parties and hanging out with all the other beautiful people of mid-Sixties London. So far, so groovy. But writer/director Gerry O’Hara has other stories to tell. For one thing his … Read more
El Topo
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 movie is considered to be one of a handful that changed the way films were watched… and made. Signalling the shift into, and legitimisation of the hitherto critically rarely considered genre movie, El Topo simultaneously satirises and adds to its chosen area of operations. Which is the western, the spaghetti western to be more specific. Though Sergio Leone, or even Sergio Corbucci, never cranked out anything this sensationalist. El Topo is the spaghetti western as travelling circus. It’s populated with cruel, cackling banditos, pinheads, armless and legless freaks, bare-breasted women, fly-covered corpses and even, at one point, spontaneously combusting rabbits. And all of the above are sewn into a plot … Read more
Siberia
Abel Ferrara’s 2019 film Siberia wasn’t shot in Siberia, unlike the 2018 film of the same name starring Keanu Reeves, which was. Ferrara now lives in Rome and so, needing snowy wastes to tell a story about a remote bar-owner’s journey into his own psyche, he starts and ends his film in the Italian Tyrol, where the white drifts of winter snow pass muster. The film is based on Carl Jung’s Red Book, which was a full-blown surrender to his own unconscious mind in the wake of his split with fellow psychoanlyst Sigmund Freud. Though he worked by day, gave lectures and saw patients, by night Jung just let it all go, letting … Read more
From Hilde, with Love aka In Liebe, Eure Hilde
Hitler without the histrionics, From Hilde, with Love (In Liebe, Eure Hilde in German) sets out to do something unusual for a film set during the Nazi era – to lay it all out for us, the everyday normality of it all, the “banality of evil”, to misuse Hannah Arendt’s phrase. But can you make a film about the commonplace without it becoming just a bit commonplace itself? It’s the true story of a resistance group, a handful of young people who spend their nights sticking up bill posters denouncing the regime, and focuses on a young woman, Hilde, who joins it almost by accident – she has typing skills and understands carbon … Read more
Sweet Thing
Writer/director Alexandre Rockwell’s Sweet Thing is his 11th film in about 40 years and is a small-scale affair, as you might expect from an indie mainstay, crewed largely by students on the NYU film course he teaches and starring his own family and long-time collaborators. It’s the story of bright teenage girl Billie (Rockwell’s daughter Lana) and her brother Nico (his son Nico) living a ramshackle life with their drunken dad (regular Rockwell presence Will Patton). Somewhere in the wings is their neglectful mother Eve (Karyn Parsons, the kids’ real mother) and her current boyfriend, the bragadocious Beaux (ML Josepher), onto whose mercies Billie and Nico are thrown when dad ends up in … Read more
Shoot to Kill
1947’s Shoot to Kill (aka Police Reporter) opens with a car crash. Two people dead. One is Lawrence Dale, the district attorney, the other a known gangster, Dixie Logan. The DA’s wife has somehow survived. But what were she and her husband doing in a car with Logan in the first place? From her hospital bed, and with a shimmer of flashback, injured Marian explains all to pushy reporter George “Mitch” Mitchell. Back, back we go, to when the DA was just an ambitious assistant district attorney, and Marian was starting out in his office. Soon, having proven herself to be more than a capable secretary, she is practically running Larry’s office. She … Read more
Zootopia
Talking about runaway successes, Zootopia 2. Though you might not fully credit it, this movie made its $150 million budget back in 48 hours and, on the day I saw it, had already become the ninth-highest grossing movie of all time. It’s clearly made even more money since then. Not bad for a sequel, an animated sequel at that, though the Chinese animation Ne Zha 2 is also both of those and it’s currently sitting at number five. Note to self: check it out. But back to Zootopia 2, which continues the adventures of Hopps and Wilde, the bunny/fox cop duo, in a world where animals live in uneasy harmony. Could a fox … Read more
Luz
So was Tilman Singer’s first feature, 2018’s Luz, as inventive as Cuckoo, his most recent one (starring Hunter Schafer)? Yes, is the answer, though Luz is inventive in an entirely different way. It plays about with time in ways that are unusual – Singer doesn’t do flashbacks and flashforwards so much as infect the here and now with snatches of what’s happened and what’s about to come. It sounds like it’s hard to follow and at first it is, but by the end Singer has given us enough plot for us to have a grasp of what’s been going on. This seems to be, in as much as we can tell, the story … Read more
