Popular Reviews
They Nest
We’ve had them all – alligators, piranhas, anacondas, killer bees and most famously birds and sharks. So what’s left? Insects, of course. In 2000’s They Nest (aka Creepy Crawlers), the time is the present, the scene is the island of Maine off America’s east coast, and the action kicks off when a swarm of cliched, unbelievable and laughable B-list actors assemble and draw lots to see who’s going to suffer the first low-budget extermination at the hands, mandibles, whatever, of crazed crawling creatures. Meanwhile a brave, resourceful, wise and intelligent doctor (Thomas Calabro) is battling to get it through the skulls of the locals that they’re in more peril than they can possibly … Read more
CODA
CODA is the acronym for Children of Deaf Adults and the name of a movie whose subject matter might make many people pause before watching. Too worthy maybe. Sign language all over the place. Triumph over adversity mawkishness. Though it won an Oscar for Best Picture, this can be not so much a gong, more a warning bell – see Crash, Driving Miss Daisy and Around the World in 80 Days. So it’s a surprise to find what a sweet, straightforward film it is. An underdog movie that piles it on with an earth mover, it stars Emilia Jones as Ruby Rossi, the teenage fully-hearing daughter of two deaf parents, sister to a … Read more
The Turin Horse
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 October Friedrich Nietzsche born, 1844 On this day in 1844, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Röcken, near Leipzig, Germany. A philologist initially, Nietzsche was a university professor at the age of 24, in Basel, where he counted Richard Wagner as one of his friends. Within ten years, because of a variety of illnesses, both mental and physical (one of which was possibly syphilis) Nietzsche resigned from Basel and took up life as an independent philosopher, choosing to spend his winters in warm southern European towns, such as Genoa, Nice and Turin. It was during this time that he … Read more
Sunlight
You think you’ve seen all the variations on the road movie and then along comes Sunlight, about a suicidal man on a road trip with a woman in a monkey suit. With a giant monkey, in effect. Strange. Funny. It’s written by its two leads, stand-up comedian Shenoah Allen, and Nina Conti, whose comedic ventriloquism act often involves a little monkey sitting on her arm and saying rude things to hapless members of the audience she’s dragged on stage. That’s more or less what we have here, that naughtly little chappie but at Conti size rather than miniature, sitting next to Allen’s Roy and saying frank, awful, rude and disgusting things to him … Read more
Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter
There’s a bat stuck “splat!” on to someone’s face at a certain point in Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, which just about sums up this film made in 1972 (released in 1974), an attempt by writer/director Brian Clemens and his crew to breathe new life into the vampire genre and the Hammer Studio’s output. Clemens was the moving spirit behind the British TV spy-fi series The Avengers, which had ceased production in 1969 after an eight-year run. Never one to let the grass grow under his feet, in the interim he’d created the comedy series My Wife Next Door, and written for TV shows The Champions and The Protectors, and also penned the screenplay … Read more
Marie Antoinette
It’s tempting to look at writer/director Sofia Coppola’s biopic about Marie Antoinette as a coded self-portrait – young woman born into immense privilege, continuing in the family business, expected to have an understanding of the hoi polloi though with no experience thereof, allowed to indulge her whims, and so on. Perhaps it’s a better film seen that way, because as a straightforward biopic it’s full of problems, chief of those being the inertia at the centre, where Kirsten Dunst’s Marie – the Austrian princess bought in by the French to produce an heir – and her spouse the Dauphin (Jason Schwartzman) sit like a pair of bland puddings while around them wheel a menagerie of exotic … Read more
Captain America: Brave New World
A bit Sixties, a bit Eighties and a bit all over the place, Captain America: Brave New World is a strange mishmash of a movie. According to Variety, it wiped the floor with Kraven the Hunter at the box office. Which says more about that movie than this one, having seen both of them. First up, it’s a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie (Kraven was Marvel but not canonical MCU, if these theological niceties mean anything to you). Second up, Chris Evans has been replaced by Anthony Mackie as Captain America, least interesting of the Marvel superheroes. Third up, the story harks back to The Incredible Hulk of 2008, which heavily featured General “Thunderbolt” … Read more
Wild Mountain Thyme
From the very first shot of Wild Mountain Thyme I was thinking “Good god, surely people aren’t still making films like this!” The opening shot being an overhead of the lush slopes of rural Ireland while the soundtrack twiddled away in madly shamrocky fashion. It got worse. A beejaysus-Irish voiceover announces “I’m dead”, by way of an introduction. The whimsy-ometer starts climbing into the red zone. And then I realised it’s Christopher Walken doing the bad Irish accent. The letters W, T and F start to appear in the air. What the actual, it actually gets even worse, as we’re introduced to one Oirish character after another. Enter Walken as old farmer Tony … Read more
The Devil Is a Woman
Marlene Dietrich’s favourite of all the films she appeared in was The Devil Is a Woman. Maybe because she’s playing an independent woman beholden to no man. Maybe because she laughs quite a lot in it. The two might not be unrelated. It’s set in Spain, and Dietrich plays Concha Perez, a beauty spotted first on a float at the carnival by dashing gay blade Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero), who falls for her instantly and badly. Woe betide any man who messes with Concha, Galvan is told by older, wiser Captain Pasqual Costelar (Lionel Atwill), a soldier and stuffed shirt who has already thrown himself on those rocks. And in a protracted flashback … Read more
Holiday in Spain aka Scent of Mystery
The odd thing about Holiday in Spain is that it was originally released in Smell-O-Vision under another title, Scent of Mystery. It flopped, even with the gimmick of various aromas being piped into cinemas as audiences watched. With another smelly film, Dead Lover, currently doing the rounds (writing this in March 2026) – it’s in Stink-O-Vision, a scratch-and-sniff take on the same idea – I thought I’d go back to this 1960 oddity and give it a spin. Which, of course, I can’t. Not the original Scent of Mystery at any rate. I don’t have the Smell-O-Vision technology and can’t find a copy of the film. Holiday on Spain, on the other hand, is … Read more
The Tango Lesson
Sally Potter took quite a chance with her 1997 movie The Tango Lesson, by casting herself as herself in a lightly fictionalised version of her relationship with tango dancer Pablo Verón. Potter does like taking risks, though. Her previous film, Orlando, was an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s story about a character (Tilda Swinton) who travels through history changing gender as he/she goes, and cast a man, Quentin Crisp (the self-confessed “stately homo of England”), as Queen Elizabeth I. After The Tango Lesson came Yes, in which all the dialogue was in iambic pentameter. In comparison The Tango Lesson is a restrained affair, about a film director between projects who is entranced by a … Read more
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 13 February The 500,000-year-old rock containing a spark plug On this day in 1961, the Coso artefact was found by three people out hunting for geodes. It appeared to be a spark plug inside a rock. A geode is a hollow stone, rock or boulder formed either by bubbles forming in volcanic rock, or by the action of water dissolving away a space in a sedimentary formation, which then fills with different minerals – quartz crystals being particularly common. Either way there was little chance that a Champion spark plug from the 1920s, as used extensively in Ford Model T and … Read more
