Popular Reviews
Dracula
“Listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make.” Hollywood horror starts here, with 1931’s Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning, it made an international star of the man who uttered those words, Bela Lugosi. He’d already become a huge Broadway star off the back of a stage adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. This film would propel him onto the global stage, and into posterity. The film sticks fairly close to the play, which sticks fairly close to the book. There have been trims in characters and settings but most of the original plot is intact as Browning’s version of it follows Dracula from his ancestral home in Transylvania, on to … Read more
Arthur the King
If it’s nothing else, Arthur the King is a solid introduction to adventure racing, an arduous mix of running, climbing, biking and kayaking in inhospitable climates over hundreds of miles. One race takes days. It’s not for the faint hearted. Unlike this movie, which is pre-chewed meat for the softest of constitutions, a fictional retelling of the story of Swedish adventure racer Mikael Lindnord, his mid-race encounter with a street dog and their mutual stagger together towards some kind of salvation. The original story took place in Ecuador, but Simon Cellan Jones’s film relocates the action to the Dominican Republic, where Mikael, now renamed Michael and played by Mark Wahlberg in another doughty-plugger … Read more
The History of Sound
Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in a film together? Sold to that salivating wreck at the back of the room. The History of Sound has pulled off a casting coup, that’s for sure. Two of the hotmost of actors right now in the same movie. If you were to take a guess as to what sort of movie that might be – given their CVs of sexy and queer-adjacent stuff – you might go for something like a Brokeback Mountain remake. And that’s just what this is, dressed up in a different era’s clothes and with the two men committing themselves to the roles as a pair of students who meet at Boston … Read more
Pig
“John Wick with a Pig” is how Pig, starring Nicolas Cage, is often described. Fair enough, even if that only really works as a shorthand if you’ve got a big bag of “buts” handy. Admittedly, the plot is strangely similiar – loner loses favourite animal and goes on a payback jag. But though Cage and Keanu Reeves are both boomers from 1964, the similarities end there – Cage is a “big” actor embracing the extra texture that age brings, Reeves is more minimalist and doing his best to ignore it. Either way, this is a vastly entertaining odd-couple comedy served straight. And that’s another thing – this is a buddy movie, whereas the … Read more
Christmas Holiday
Imagine calling a film Christmas Holiday and then filling it with desperation, prositution, twisted mother love and murder. They knew how to have fun in 1944. Ignore all the opening flimflam about a lieutenant being dumped by his girl on Christmas Eve, the day before his wedding. The film only really takes wing once we get to the backstory of Jackie (Deanna Durbin), the prostitute that heartsore Lieutenant Charles Mason (Dean Harens) hooks up with after accidentally landing in New Orleans en route back to San Francisco for the furlough he now no longer wants or needs. He winds up taking not to bed but to… midnight mass. Charlie is a nothing in … Read more
Ivy
Sick of “sad sack” roles, Joan Fontaine struck out for the border with 1947’s Ivy, a pivot away from the passive wallflowers of Rebecca and Suspicion, roles that had made her Hollywood’s biggest star and won her an Oscar, and towards something much ballsier. She plays Ivy (as in Poison Ivy), a woman in Edwardian Britain who sets her cap at a rich bachelor and decides to make him her husband no matter what’s in her way. Problem one: wealthy Miles Rushworth (Herbert Marshall) is in a long-standing relationship with young Bella Crail (Molly Lamont), and everyone knows they will soon be engaged. Two: Ivy is already married, to Jervis (Richard Ney), a … Read more
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Hayao Miyazaki’s career as an animator in charge of his own destiny starts here, with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, two hours of typical Miyazaki, from 1984, which more or less set the benchmark for what was to come. There had been one full feature before, 1979’s The Castle of Cagliostro, but that was part of an ongoing series dedicated to Lupin III, supposedly the grandson of the French master thief Arsène Lupin. In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, we are introduced to Nausicaä, a pure Miyazaki character, a tough, brave, kind, thoughtful and resourceful young woman separated from her parents and adrift in a world that’s a mash-up … Read more
Zero: An Investigation Into 9/11
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 10 March Osama bin Laden born, 1957 On this day in 1957, Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to the construction billionaire Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden and his tenth wife, Hamida Alia Ghanem. Osama’s father disposed of wife number ten and her child to an associate, and Osama ended up growing up in the household of Mohammed al-Attas, with his three half brothers and one half sister. A devout Wahhabi Muslim, Osama was educated at Al-Thager Model School, the model it was based on being the British educational one, this being a school … Read more
When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to Be Dead
Japanese screwball meets cute self-help in When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to Be Dead, a film announcing what it’s about in its title. Every night, when salaryman Jun (Ken Yasuda) gets home from work, he finds his wife dead on the floor – killed by a knife, a bullet, an arrow, a stake through the heart. Chie (Nana Eikura) isn’t really dead, she’s pretending, and she absolutely expects her husband to play along and put on a fully convincing performance of finding her and falling to bits emotionally before he reaches for the phone to call the emergency services, at which point she will squeak open an eye, jump up, … Read more
The Mask of Dimitrios
Writer Eric Ambler was the British spy guy in the mid 20th century and The Mask of Dimitrios is a good example of what he was about – sinister people in exotic locations doing dastardly things. Ambler followed John Buchan’s lead in that respect – don’t trust a foreigner. It took until John LeCarré – who’d actually been a spy – for portrayals of fictional foreign spies to come in human shape, though Graham Greene was a useful warm-up act. The oddballs and gooks are out in their droves in this not entirely gripping but highly flavoured meta-fiction about crime writer Cornelius Leyden, played by Peter Lorre, chasing across Europe in search of … Read more
Contact
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 March World Contact Day Today is World Contact Day. It was declared as such by the International Flying Saucer Bureau in 1953. Since then it has used annually as an opportunity for all those interested in doing so to send a message telepathically to any extraterrestrial alien in space who might be interested in visiting earth. Not to be confused with World UFO Day (24 June or 2 July depending on who you talk to), it was originally intended by “contactees” as a way of establishing not just that entities from other worlds existed, but that they were friendly. The … Read more
Liliom
“I almost like Liliom best of all,” Fritz Lang said in 1974 about the film he’d directed 40 years earlier. This from a director who invented whole genres (like the spy thriller), directed massive epics (Metropolis) and went on to dominate the crime drama with films like The Big Heat. Lang’s entirely atypical film about the poetic side of wife-beating is quite a surprise. It is a film full of surprises though. The story for one – sweet young Julie falls for rapscallion carnival barker Liliom, a man who loves her but is violent, lazy, feckless and eventually meets an ugly end after taking part in a heist. He then ascends to purgatory, … Read more
