Popular Reviews
Lady in the Fog
In spite of its attempts to sabotage itself with comedy, Lady in the Fog (also known as Scotland Yard Inspector) is a successful noirish British thriller from 1952. An adaptation of the debut story in what would become a long-running BBC radio series, it takes a while to get going – two thirds of its running time in fact – but as it enters the home straight it finally gets its act together and finishes grippingly, satisfyingly and at speed. Being British and being made by Hammer – before the studio shifted into horror – it features a second-string American star in a lead role. Here Cesar Romero plays Phil O’Dell, an American … Read more
Miss Juneteenth
Around about the time Miss Juneteenth came out in 2020, President Donald Trump was announcing that he was going to have a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth Day (19 June) – the day commemorating the end of slavery. In the end Trump, for whatever reason, moved the rally to the following day. By the following year, President Biden had made the day a national holiday – Juneteenth Day won out… twice. Given its title, you might expect Miss Juneteenth to be a film about slavery or injustice or civil rights, but actually, superficially at least, it’s about a former beauty queen hoping her daughter will follow in her footsteps and become Miss Juneteenth in … Read more
Joyless Street
There’s a lot going on in Joyless Street (Die freudlose Gasse), GW Pabst’s epic “Straßenfilm” about the Weimar era in Germany, made during the Weimer era in Germany. Greta Garbo is in it, which tends to draw a lot of attention, and because the film survives only in a print with a good half hour missing, it’s often described as her film. It certainly looks that way from the 150 or so minutes now available. But Asta Nielsen was top-billed when it came out and she thought she was the star. So spare a thought for poor old Asta as you watch a tale of two impoverished young women doing what they have … Read more
Petla aka Noose
So bleak that it eventually feels like director Wojciech Has might be having a laugh, 1958’s Petla (Noose, or The Noose in English) is a desperate story of a terrible alcoholic trying to give up drink after the latest in a line of humiliations. It’s as if Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend had been rewritten by Samuel Beckett and then turned into a movie by Béla Tarr. This was Has’s debut feature and it’s as much a career mission statement as story in itself. Between Petla and his farewell, 1988’s Niezwykla Podróz Baltazara Kobera, Has made films that were often bleak, surreal and characterised by the blurring of fantasy and reality, chief among … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 11 – Epic
When writers run out of ideas, they either start cannibalising their own old ones (see the episode from two weeks’ prior – The Correct Way to Kill), they duck into comedy (no refuge for a series that already has its tongue boring a hole through its cheek) or they reach for genre parody. Epic dips its toe in the water of the third option in an episode that parodies old-school Hollywood excess. Kenneth J Warren, Isa Miranda and Peter Wyngarde are the guest actors drafted into play a trio of archetypes, arch types, even – Warren is an Erich Von Stroheim stripe of director, all monocle, bullet head and high-flown notions of the importance … Read more
Bitter Rice
Italian neorealism meets the crime drama in 1949’s Bitter Rice (Ris Amaro), Giuseppe De Santis’s gritty fable about a pair of petty thieves joining a horde of itinerant workers to plant and harvest rice. If drama is life minus the boring bits, De Santis is aware that neorealism at its worst can be a bit like life plus extra boring bits. So he brightens things up with crime thrills and a cast full of good-looking young things. In case we’re still not feeling it, more often than is absolutely necessary he’ll poke his camera into the cleavage of a few of his female stars as well. The thieves are played by Vittorio Gassman … Read more
Byzantium
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 November Vlad the Impaler becomes ruler of Wallachia for third time, 1476 On this day in 1476, Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia became ruler of Wallachia for the third time. His father, Vlad II, had become a member of the chivalric Order of the Dragon (Drache in German, Dracul in Romanian) in 1431. As the son, Vlad III carried the patronymic Dracula, son of Dracul (he signed himself Wladislaus Dragwlya). Vlad III spent a good deal of his life asserting his claim on Wallachia. He was first installed as a ruler by the Ottomans – Vlad III had been brought … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 23 – Murdersville
Murdersville feels like a very loose rewrite of a Cathy Gale-era Avengers episode, though having wracked my brains, I don’t believe it can be. The hallmarks are there though – old school English village, locals, a pub – real life, in other words, which the Emma Peel-era Avengers (Cybernauts, invisible men, an extra-terrestrial) so far has kept as far away from as possible. There’s human warmth, too, which is also odd. In The Avengers, when someone dies it’s the opportunity for a quick gag, James Bond style. Not so here, but that’s because Mrs Peel has no one to quip with, against or at, since Steed is back at the ranch, and this … Read more
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
The film that put the Italian giallo genre on the international map, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo) is Dario Argento’s directing debut and the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s first film in colour. It’s archetypal giallo in many ways. Archetypal Argento, too, you could say, for bad and good. Formless plotting but a good twist, abrupt psychological transitions but beautifully sustained mood, a schoolboy approach to sexuality (ooh, look, a nipple) but a heightened sense of threat. Argento wrote it in five days and came up with a story he’d re-use multiple times, of an artist of some sort (a writer, in this case), a foreigner (American here) … Read more
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Self-important, windy, drowning in lore, full of flat characters and just plain old dull, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is everything it shouldn’t be, a spectacular own goal from Marvel. It looked like an open goal, too. Moving the Marvel Cinematic Universe to China is a great idea – a civilisation with millenia of history, superheroes aplenty and enough dragons and lion-headed creatures to stock a whole other pantheon of characters and an entire alternative bestiary. Plus, not to be forgotten, a massive population waiting to be sold stuff. The film is based on Marvel’s 1973 creation Shang-Chi, who was originally the virtuous son of the villainous Fu Manchu (Marvel … Read more
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 November Genie the feral child found, 1970 On this day in 1970, the child known as Genie was discovered in Los Angeles, California, USA. Aged around 13, she had spent her life tied to a child’s toilet or tied up in a crib, unable to move except her hands and feet. Brought up by a progressively blind mother in thrall to a mentally ill and violent husband, Genie had been fed on nothing but soft or baby food since birth. Genie was the fourth child born to the couple. The first two had died – one of pneumonia from being … Read more
65
“Adam Driver fights dinosaurs” seems to be the social media consensus on 65, in which Adam Driver does indeed fight dinosaurs, but also fear itself, in a surprisingly good and tense thriller directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the guys who wrote A Quiet Place. The buzz was not good before it opened, so the studio kept this film away from the press, allowing only one screening right before it premiered, to minimise negative publicity. Clearly, they felt, something had gone wrong. Which is odd because Driver is a proven quantity. Sci-fi – also a winner. Dinosaurs – who doesn’t love a dinosaur? And yet… The studio was right to be nervous but … Read more
