Popular Reviews
I Wake Up Screaming
Twentieth Century-Fox didn’t do much in the way of noir. Betty Grable wasn’t much of a one for straight roles. So 1941’s I Wake Up Screaming is unusual for two reasons, not to mention a title making no sense at all. It’s a whodunit about people who are off their turf, so those deviations from the norm chime with what’s happening on screen, a murder mystery with a few wayward contenders for the killer of Vicky Lyn (Carole Landis), a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. The man who obviously didn’t do it is Frankie Christopher (Victor Mature), who we meet being sweated by the cops for the young woman’s murder. … Read more
The Traitor
The Corleones weren’t fictional. There really was a crime family called the Corleonesi, after the town in Sicily where they came from. In The Traitor (Il traditore in the original Italian) we learn what happened when the Corleonesi fell out with a fellow mob family, in a dramatisation of the true story of Tommaso Buscetta, the crime boss who went “pentito” and sang like a canary to the authorities. Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino) wasn’t a Corleonesi, he was from the other mob, and as Marco Bellocchio’s film opens Buscetta is in Brazil, where he’s living in happy early retirement, having divined that war between rival mobs was imminent, that it was going to be … Read more
King of New York
I used to work at a magazine and would get a lot of DVDs in for review purposes. King of New York was the one that really got all my co-workers misty eyed. They started quoting lines from the script, remembering the best bit of the film, asking me if I could have the disc after I’d finished with it. No wonder. It’s a hugely influential piece of work and you can see its impact on almost every mob drama since. It was made when Christopher Walken was in his pomp, here he plays the self-styled King, a classically ruthless gang boss with a strangely benevolent streak, a man who tries, in his … Read more
Szindbád
“One of the unsung masters of Hungarian cinema,” says the press blurb about Zoltán Huszárik, director of Szindbád. Full disclosure: I’d never heard of him before a review copy of the Blu-ray boxset fell onto my doormat. It contains Huszárik’s entire collected output, two films and a handful of shorts. Hungary is quite a source of “masters” of cinema, from Alexander Korda and Bela Lugosi to Michael Curtiz, Vilmos Zsigmond, Béla Tarr and György Fehér. Having now watched Szindbád (with Csontváry and the shorts still to come), I’d happily add Huszárik to that list. He’s clearly a remarkable talent, with a visual style all his own and a confidence to match. His film … Read more
100 Years of… Battleship Potemkin
Imagine that, one of the best movies ever made is only 75 minutes long. All those epics striving for significance with buttock-flattening running times outdone by Battleship Potemkin, a century-old silent movie lasting only one hour and 15 minutes. Sight and Sound in their latest poll of the all-time greats currently have Potemkin in joint 54th place (alongside Blade Runner, Le Mépris, The Apartment and Sherlock Jr). Cahiers du Cinéma rate it highly. It’s one of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. At breakneck speed it tells the story of a failed revolution, the one in 1905 when the Russian navy mutinied and, for a brief moment, the possibility of … Read more
L’argent
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 28 October Black Monday, 1929 On this day in 1929, the Dow Jones index fell by 13% in a day. After nine years of an exuberantly rising market, during which time the index had risen tenfold, some economists had started predicting an end to boom and bust – “stock prices have risen to what looks like a permanently high plateau” said Yale’s Irving Fisher at the time. Theoretical neoclassical economists notwithstanding, the New York market tumbled on 18 September 1929. Two days later in London the flamboyant entrepreneur Clarence Hatry confessed to fraud and forgery, having propped up his underfinanced companies … Read more
26 September 2016-09-26
Out This Week Love & Friendship (Curzon, cert U) Sly arch social observer Whit Stillman meets a very similar property in Jane Austen, in his adaptation of her novella Lady Susan – about a dangerous sexbomb widow trying to get both herself and her daughter married off to money. As with all Stillman films it is immensely talky, and Kate Beckinsale is in it too, as she was in 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, and is rather excellent as a younger, sexier weaponised version of Austen’s Mrs Bennet, mouth always on the go, eyes all over the room as she jockeys for social position. It’s a fiendishly plotted thing, all stratetic plays by … Read more
3 February 2014-02-03
Out in the UK This Week Kiss of the Damned (Eureka, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) There’s a scene early on in Xan (daughter of John) Cassavetes’s vampire film in which a man (Milo Ventimiglia) with the hots for a woman he’s just met (Joséphine de la Baume) is pawing at her passionately through the centimetres-wide gap in her intruder-chained door. What Paolo doesn’t yet know is that Djuna is a vampire who’s struggling with her vow to stay off human blood, which is why she’s reluctant to unchain the door and let him in. Cassavetes shoots the encounter from above – their arms snaking through the gap, his head thrusting forward, their mouths meeting … Read more
Paris-Manhattan
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 24 May Peter Minuit buys Manhattan, 1626 On this day in 1626, the German-born Peter Minuit bought the island of Manhattan off native Americans for 60 guilders (somewhere around $1,000 at 2013 prices). He had been sent to the New World the previous year by the Dutch West India Company to research possible new products to trade, and had taken over as governor general of the New Netherland colony. The tribe he bought the island off had little concept of anyone having a right to ownership of water or air and, being nomadic, their notion of the territorial right to land … Read more
The Last Movie
When it came out the critical consensus on Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie was that it was a mess, the result of giving a druggie with questionable talent full creative control of a movie. Nowadays it’s more often seen as a lost cult classic, a bold experiment and an attempt to push the boundaries of what a movie can be. Neither is really true. It’s not a mess, nor is it really that experimental. From this distance it looks like what it is: Hopper’s homage to Godard, with borrowings from Alejandro Jodorowsky and Robert Altman. It does not help the movie – then or now – that it arrives panting from carrying so … Read more
The German Lesson
Why did the Germans in the 1930s fall prey to the Nazi ideology? 2019’s The German Lesson (Deutschstunde) is a bracing story both about the Germans and for the Germans, who might not relish what writer Siegfried Lenz has served up, though director Christian Schwochow sugars the pill with images of austere beauty. Told in flashback from a jail cell where the barely adult Siggi is now a problem prisoner in post-War Germany, the story follows Siggi into his own past, growing up on the windswept Baltic coast with a father whose devotion to his policeman’s job came before else. It looks like an everyday German dedication to duty – “Pflicht”, to borrow … Read more
Before the Fall
A baroque apocalypse thriller and, in case it’s getting too existential for you, Before the Fall (originally Tres Diás) also adds a dab of serial-killer angst for good measure. This feature debut by director F Javier Gutiérrez made a big splash when it came out in 2008 and then quietly disappeared. Arriving three years before Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, it seems at first to ask the same question: how would you react to the news of an impending apocalypse? Alejandro (Victor Clavijo), living with his mother, is a disgruntled handyman who learns one day via TV bulletin that the world will end in three days. A gigantic meteor will eradicate any possibility of … Read more
