Popular Reviews
The Bride!
Frankenstein’s unfortunate monster was put together out of offcuts and so is director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a furiously eclectic assemblage of body parts. Motivating breath, alas, is there none and so the film remains on the table, lifeless, a glorious mess of gorgeous odds and sods, twitching but refusing to draw breath. To summarise the main thrust of the plot, after a century alone Frankenstein’s monster – Frank here – decides he needs a wife, and arrives at the office of Dr Euphronious, renowned for her re-animation research. After some niceties, Frank makes his pitch to Euphronious and she flat-out refuses to build him a bride, on ethical grounds. He responds with … Read more
The Shrouds
The Shrouds looks like the filmic equivalent of David Bowie’s final album, Dark Star, a requiem revisiting old ideas in an up-to-the-minute way. David Cronenberg has not announced that he is dying. But aren’t we all? All the time? It’s the sort of thing Cronenberg has been saying, with a macabre chuckle, since he first announced himself with Shivers 50 years ago. Cronenberg’s own wife died in 2017 and it would be crass to suggest that The Shrouds is really all about that. But let’s be crass for a minute and point out that Vincent Cassel, who plays this film’s dubious hero, has hair like Cronenberg’s. His character dresses like him and works … Read more
The Witches
1966’s The Witches (aka The Devil’s Own) is another great opportunity to indulge the guilty pleasure of watching a once-glam Hollywood goddess at the tail end of her career being relentlessly monstered in a down-market movie. Think Joan Crawford in Trog or Bette Davis in Burnt Offerings. Here it’s Joan Fontaine getting the treatment, the one-time star of Rebecca, and Oscar-winner for Suspicion, returning to the land of her British parents to play a teacher recruited to run a primary school in a picture-postcard English village. In Wicker Man style, Miss Mayfield does not realise that almost everyone in the village is involved in something untoward, and that one of her charges has … Read more
Space Is the Place
Without Space Is the Place no Black Panther? Afrofuturism on screen pretty much starts with this cosmic freak-out from Sun Ra. Made in 1972, released in 1974, Space Is the Place sets out an alternative agenda for black Americans, suggesting an imaginative future of sci-fi possibility unconstrained by the daily grind of the street hustle. The film builds theoretically out from Ra’s series of Berkeley lectures titled The Black Man in the Cosmos. With sci-fi and white guys inevitable bedfellows at the time, Ra’s lectures about the place of black people in modernity had seemed like missives from an alternate reality (actually, the future, it turned out). His film sets out with the … Read more
Quai des Orfèvres
“Quai des Orfèvres” means “the cops” in France in the same way that “Scotland Yard” does in the UK. So it’s no surprise that this classic from 1947 is a crime thriller. It’s a peculiarly knotty one, directed by the masterly Henri-Georges Clouzot, who also did the adaptation, from Stanislas-André Steeman’s original novel Légitime Défense. Clouzot did not have the novel in front of him as he worked, and had not read it for years, but he took Steeman’s basic idea and fleshed it out using his own characters, getting all sorts of plot details “wrong” as he worked. The result appalled Steeman, who discovered that Clouzot and writing collaborator Jean Ferry had … Read more
The Tall Target
A director on his way up meets a star on his way down in The Tall Target, a 1951 B movie about a plot to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861, the year the American Civil War broke out. Anthony Mann directs, one year on from his breakthrough into the big time with the western Winchester ’73, and Dick Powell stars as the New York cop who’s uncovered the plot and is finding the world reluctant to hear him out. Bizarrely, the cop is called John Kennedy, and the plot consists of shooting the president from an upstairs window using a rifle with a telescopic sight. Work that into one of the many … Read more
Dekalog
Ten shortish films loosely working their way through the Ten Commandments, director Krzysztof Kieslowśki and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s epic Dekalog made its TV debut in December 1989, as Poland was shaking off its Soviet overlords, and was instantly hailed as a masterpiece. Time has polished its legend and it’s still regularly cited as one of the greatest… TV shows or movie collections, take your pick. The whole ten-parter is set in and around one bleak Warsaw tower block, where people come and go, lives are lived and little moral dilemmas play out. In the first one, which lays out the stall, a prescient story about transcendental spirituality and the consciousness (or otherwise) of … Read more
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 7 – The Gilded Cage
Shown on 9 November 1963, just one day after five thieves had almost nabbed a king’s ransom of jewels and gold on the streets of Manhattan –they were thwarted because the getaway driver couldn’t work the manual gears of the heisted station wagon – The Gilded Cage is all about vast amounts of gold, which, it appears, Steed and Gale are trying to steal. With a passing mention of Bretton Woods – the post-War economic order which pegged international currencies to the dollar, itself pegged to gold (hence the US Bullion Depository at Fort Knox as a common trope in this era) – it’s made clear that this isn’t just about the loot, … Read more
The Wing or the Thigh
So here’s the best performing domestic film at the French box office in 1976. The Wing or the Thigh (L’aile ou la cuisse) also did well against foreign competition, coming in second overall to Les Dents de la mer (Teeth of the Sea, literally), as Jaws was called in France. It’s a lively farce set in the world of the restaurant, more specifically the world of the restaurant guide, with Louis de Funès playing Charles Duchemin, the big noise behind the Guide Duchemin, the bible that hands out stars to the aspiring and the established and can make or break a reputation. The Michelin is the obvious idea – the colours and the … Read more
Hidden aka Caché
Everyone loves a form/content double whammy, when a film’s story and its method of telling correspond. It’s why Memento succeeds so well, for example, a tale about an amnesiac told in partial and unreliable flashback. How much craftier is Michael Haneke’s psychological thriller Hidden. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are media professionals, members of the Parisian chattering classes, liberal right down in their DNA. What could people of such good intent have to do with the rising tide of Islamism, anti-westernism, terrorism? Why are they being blackmailed by an increasingly incriminating series of videotapes? Are they guilty of something, or innocent, as the film seems to proclaim? Haneke’s double whammy is … Read more
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America
I’m not sure why there aren’t more movies like Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America. To make one all you need is some found footge – real found footage, not stuff you faked – an edit suite and a voiceover. Plus ideas. This strange movie from 1992 is a collage of bits and pieces that writer/director Craig Baldwin got his hands on when, according to Wikipedia, lots of film works were being “discarded by institutions changing to VHS” (who would discard film for VHS, makes no sense at all). Baldwin snapped up bits of pieces of celluloid heading for the dumpster and headed off to make his film with them, picking up Sean Kilkoyne … Read more
Dellamorte Dellamore aka Cemetery Man
First, Dellamorte Dellamore is a much better title for a movie than Cemetery Man, which is how it went out in English speaking countries in 1994. Cemetery Man suggests something slasher-inspired, maybe. Dellamorte Dellamore, and its literal translation, Of Death, Of Love, something much more gothic and weird. And that’s exactly what this mad piece of super-cultish garage grindcore is. It’s Italian, who are good at weird, and is based on the novel Dellamorte Dellamore by Tiziano Sciavi. Sciavi had based his main character in an earlier work, the comicbook Dylan Dog, on the actor Rupert Everett (specifically the listlessly upper-class Rupert Everett character in Another Country) and so when it came time … Read more
