Popular Reviews
In the House
If you’ve seen 5X2, you’ll already know that François Ozon makes immensely clever and highly entertaining films, and that there’s a point to the cleverness; he’s not just showing off. In the House, aka Dans La Maison, is Ozon to the bone, another very clever piece of work. This time, however, the point he’s making is far less immediately obvious. 5X2 was a love story played out backwards, the point being that, “forearmed” as we were with the knowledge that the relationship would crumble, we saw the couple in question’s first stirrings of love, courtship, marriage, honeymoon and so on through entirely different eyes. Here Ozon plays a similar trick, taking a Cuckoo … Read more
The Virginian
The Virginian’s ambitions aren’t that great. It wants to be a normal, everyday western like they used to make, in which man’s-gotta-do men negotiate morality in a lawless world, a baddie wore a black hat and a fair lady was open to a bit of courting as long as it was respectful. Can such a western be made? Is there an audience for it? The TV show The Virginian, which this isn’t, was one of several long-running series with high production values and fine actors. It ran for 249 shows over nine years, a way behind Bonanza (430 episodes between 1959 and 1973) and Gunsmoke (635 episodes between 1955 and 1975). Together, with … Read more
Harbin
The national myths of one country don’t necessarily click with a foreign audience. Harbin, about Korean freedom fighters battling to throw off the Japanese yoke, makes the point abundantly. If you’re Korean it’ll almost certainly mean more to you than it did to me, a Brit, who without the added zing of patriotic feeling and background knowledge had to rely solely on old-fashioned stuff like drama, characters and world-building to get his scant cinematic jollies. Director Woo Min-ho puts up a brief written explanation of the situation at the beginning of the film. The 1905 Treaty of Eulsa effectively turned Korea into a colony of Japan, it says, but also had the effect … Read more
Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion
The twang of a jew’s harp is the first sound you hear in 1970’s Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion. “BOING,” it goes, slightly ridiculously, the soundtrack of Ennio Morricone (who else?) instantly setting the tone for the entire film, an uneasy mix of the absurd and the satirical. Meanwhile, on screen, a handsome man’s man (Gian Maria Volontè) in a smart cream suit is arriving at the apartment of a beautiful woman (Florinda Bolkan) who is clad in a kaftan and little else. “How are you going to kill me this time?” she purrs. Clearly this “killing” is all part of some sex game they play, he the killer, she the victim. … Read more
Shorts
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 13 June Kat Dennings born, 1986 On this day in 1986, Katherine Litwack was born in Philadelphia to a scientist father and a speech therapist/poet mother. Home-schooled, she graduated high school aged 14, four years after her first acting role in a commercial. By age 13 she’d turned up in an episode of Sex and the City, then had supporting roles in films of increasing weight until she got her own starring role in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, alongside Michael Cera. Bright and feisty, since then she’s specialised in the sort of girl who can go from geek to goddess … Read more
Decision to Leave
A cop falls disastrously for the woman he is certain killed her own husband in Park Chan-wook’s first film since 2016’s The Handmaiden. Decision to Leave is an erotic noir mixing elements of the “useless cops” comedy of Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder with the romantic obsession of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and adding byzantine, gothic plotting that’s all Park’s own. It wouldn’t work as well as it does without the presence of Tang Wei, playing a femme fatale of a noirish stripe – slinky, possibly dangerous, magnetically attractive – and the grieving widow of a much older husband who’s died in a bizarre rock climbing accident. Is Seo-rae grieving enough though? Or even … Read more
100 Years of… Lady Windermere’s Fan
Mary Pickford once described the director Ernst Lubitsch as a “director of doors”. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play, you can see what she means. She meant it dismissively, though the door, and what’s behind it – or not – is key to Lubitsch’s work generally, and specifically here. This is a story all about secrets – as Wilde’s so often were – a tale of mistaken identity with ironic distance between what the people on the screen imagine themselves to be and how the audience sees them. To thumbnail-sketch a delicately intertwined plot, it centres on Lady Windermere, who is in love with her husband but being pressed … Read more
What War May Bring
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 December President Truman declares the Second World War over, 1946 On this day in 1946, the US President declared that hostilities had come to an end in the Second World War. Whether this means that the war itself ended on that day depends on your terms. The war in Europe ended on VE day (8 May 1945). Some suggest that the war ended with the defeat of Japan and the signing of an armistice, with VJ day (14 August 1945). Still others reckon the war can’t be termed over until the signing of the peace treaty with Japan (1951). And … Read more
Operation Diplomat
A neat example of the brisk storytelling of writer Frances Durbridge – a British crime eminence in 1953 – Operation Diplomat is also a prime example of the skilful directing of John Guillermin, who tells that story at speed. He’d later go on to direct successes like The Towering Inferno and 1978’s Death on the Nile, where an ability to keep the story moving while giving each of a vast array of stars their moment in the spotlight would turn out to be vital. Here, Guillermin is in the British B-movie phase of his career. And though he doesn’t have to corral herds of actors and swing his cameras around exotic locations and impressive … Read more
Claire’s Knee
In many ways the perfect French movie, French-movie cliché even, 1970’s Claire’s Knee (Le genou de Claire) is one of Éric Rohmer’s most celebrated works and is a good place to start if you want to dig into his back catalogue. One of the key voices of the French New Wave, Rohmer regularly banged out films from the mid 1950s until, in 2007, old age forced him to step back. Unlike other old dogs of the New Wave (Godard springs to mind), right to the end Rohmer’s newest offerings were still consistently putting bums on seats. It’s the perfect and cliched – archetypal, if you like – French film because it has the elements … Read more
The Whale
The Whale did something that films these days hardly ever do. When it was released in 2022 it opened small, in “limited release” in a handful of cinemas. It had done well at Cannes and at the festivals but no one really expected a film by Darren Aronofsky and starring Brendan Fraser – neither of them hot any more – to keep on growing, week on week. But it did, opening in more and more cinemas, until it was in 1,500 theatres on its sixth week, up from six on its opening weekend. Word of mouth is what did it, and the word was that Fraser was exceptional as Charlie, a morbidly obese … Read more
Detour
While scrolling through a list of “100 Best Film Noirs of All Time” I was struck by Detour. Number 10 on a list that kicked off with In a Lonely Place, Out of the Past, The Big Sleep and The Third Man (so, not one of those mad lists), it stood out because I’d not heard of it before, even though it was the first B movie (and film noir) to be chosen by the US Library of Congress for its National Film Registry. I’d only barely heard of its director, Edgar G Ulmer, and its stars, Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake and Edmund MacDonald, were hardly A listers, even in 1945. … Read more
