Popular Reviews
Crime Wave
This heist-gone-wrong movie starts with a heist going wrong. 1953’s Crime Wave (aka The City Is Dark) is a B movie and wastes no time hanging around. The setup is classic – within scant minutes of opening a cop is dead, one of the bad guys is in urgent need of a doctor and the heisters are on the run with the law on their tail. Meanwhile, across town another classic ingredient, the ex-con trying to go straight but being dragged back towards crime, first by the wounded man arriving at his door, then by the bent doctor who arrives to patch him up, and finally by the fugitive bad guys themselves. Studio … Read more
One Minute of Darkness
At first glance One Minute of Darkness, last of the Dreileben trilogy, seems to be the most straightforward of the lot. A honest-to-goodness cat-and-mouser. On the one hand the escaped murderer Molesch, who has been little more than a bad smell in the first two films. On the other a cop on a mission to bring Molesch in, in spite of the fact that he’s ill and on leave. It’s deceptive, though, and the deception starts with the opening shots, of Molesch in custody being driven to a police station. This, it seems obvious, is a continuation of the previous instalment of the series, Don’t Follow Me Around (Komm Mir Nicht Nach), the … Read more
The Full Monty
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 24 October World’s first football club formed, 1857 On this day in 1857, Sheffield Football Club was founded, in Yorkshire, UK, as an offshoot of a local cricket club. It is now considered to be the oldest still existing football club in the world. Over the years there have been competing claims from different clubs and from different forms of football – though we’re talking here about a football club not the game itself (American football goes back to the 1860s though rugby, on which it is based, goes back centuries before that; Australian rules football goes back to the 1860s). … Read more
The Duellists
The Duellists is Ridley Scott’s feature debut and premiered in 1977, four years after his famous advert for Hovis bread (voted the UK’s favourite TV advert in a 2006 poll). Both are picturesque evocations of a world long gone – pre-War England, in the 45-second advert’s case, the world of post-Revolutionary France in the case of the solid 100 minutes of The Duellists. The story is a true one – about two men in Napoleon’s army who fought a series of around 30 grudge duels over 19 years. Joseph Conrad had used the facts as the basis for a novella, and Scott’s screenwriter, Gerald Vaughan-Hughes, adapts them further with his screenplay, reducing the … Read more
Sleep, My Love
The 1948 thriller Sleep, My Love has a Chandler-esque title reminiscent of Farewell, My Lovely, and opens in strong Freudian style with a train in the night screaming towards the camera. It’s a solid piece of work directed by Douglas Sirk with style and pace but he can’t do much with Leo Rosten’s too-familiar story. Also screaming is wealthy New Yorker Alison Courtland (Claudette Colbert), who wakes up on a train bound for Boston with no idea how she got there. In her bag is her husband’s gun. He (Don Ameche), meanwhile, is back in New York nursing a bullet wound and filling in Detective Strake (Raymond Burr) on details about his missing … Read more
15 July 2013-07-15
Out in the UK this week Robot & Frank (Entertainment One, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) Telling the story of an old guy who is losing his marbles and his will to live, this smallscale film drops us into the action at just about the point when his family have had enough of him and have sourced him a helper robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard). It’s the future, it seems, though it’s not a future that dissimilar to our own. The old guy, played with all the colours in the palette by Frank Langella, turns out to have been a career criminal, a bad dad, a poor husband. Where his mind is at is where … Read more
Diabolik
What sort of a supervillain has his secret lair in his girlfriend’s back garden? Why not his own turf? While we’re about it, why does Diabolik – the title of the film and the name of its antihero – lift so much of its plot from Fantomas, another European masked villain? If those are the sort of questions you’re asking while watching this film then it probably isn’t working for you. A stew, a pastiche, Diabolik is bits of Bond stirred together with a sliver of The Pink Panther and then spritzed with Italian glamour. We are not here for originality, but for cars and girls, mid-century modernism and split screens, hot women … Read more
Next Sohee
Life in a call centre is the focus of Next Sohee, July Jung’s belated follow-up to 2014’s A Girl at My Door. But it’s more than the story of grim days in a headset and on the clock. Based on the true case of a young woman who committed suicide while doing work experience in a South Korean call centre, it asks broader questions about the corporate capture of almost every aspect of modern life. It breaks down into two neat halves. In part one we meet Sohee (Kim Si-Eun), a bright, feisty young woman who is lucky enough to get a prized work-placement at a major internet provider. Her job is familiar … Read more
A Special Day
Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni appeared in many films together, but in 1977’s A Special Day they both play against type – she’s the dowdy housewife rather than the glamour bomb, he’s a gay man rather than the straight Italian lover, two characters thrown together after pretty much everyone else in their apartment block has rushed out into the streets hoping to catch sight of the Führer or Il Duce on the day that Hitler visited Mussolini in 1938. They may live in the same block but Antonietta and Gabriele have never met. She’s always too busy looking after her six kids and husband (John Vernon), and he’s always at work. Or always … Read more
15 April 2013-04-15
Out in the UK This Week She Monkeys (Peccadillo, cert 12, DVD) Vaguely marketed as a lesbian drama, this is in fact an instant classic of the twisted coming-of-age genre, a superbly taut story of a teenager called Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser) who meets a similarly blonde, similarly athletic girl (Linda Molin) while learning equestrian vaulting. Meanwhile, at home, Emma’s five-year-old sister is making her first advances into the world of sexual strategy. Friendship and rivalry, sex and power duke it out for supremacy in this superbly photographed, coolly understated Swedish drama recalling Let the Right One In in look, tone, ambition and effect. A gripper. She Monkeys – at Amazon The Spirit of … Read more
Flee
Towards the end of 2021 Flee found itself in the curious position of being eligible for Oscar nomination in three different categories. Which way to jump? It eventually submitted itself as a contender in the Best International Feature category. Best Animated Feature was also an option. As was Best Documentary – though spotting that Summer of Soul was in that category would make anyone think twice. Flee ticks all three boxes because it is a documentary telling the true story of a young man called Amin and his long and perilous flight from wartorn Afghanistan up to the moment, where he is about to marry his partner, Kaspar. It’s from Denmark (box two) … Read more
9 March 2015-03-09
Out in the UK This Week The Imitation Game (StudioCanal, cert 12) Benedict Cumberbatch plays code-breaking genius Alan Turing as an Asperger’s Kenneth More in this superior biopic set in the era of stiff upper lips and laws against homosexual deeds. This drama returns to those laws several times, when it’s not busying itself with the actual big stuff – defeating the Germans. Of course, as everyone in the world knows but the UK’s cultural gatekeepers don’t acknowledge, the Americans and the Russians won the Second World War, with Britain luckily on the winning side but making useful contributions. The cracking of the Enigma code, which allowed the Germans to communicate with each other … Read more
