Popular Reviews
Moontide
One of the little joys of Moontide is trying to work out which bits of it were directed by Fritz Lang. His name isn’t on the screen credits but he was the original director, until he was fired after falling out with its star, Jean Gabin. Ironically, it was Gabin who had campaigned to get Lang attached to the film in the first place, which shows he had quite a lot of pull in Hollywood for someone who might have been France’s biggest star but was unknown in America when he arrived there to escape the Nazis. Archie Mayo gets the director credit but it’s surely Lang behind the camera for the opening … Read more
Who You Think I Am
One person stalks another person online in Who You Think I Am (Celle Que Vous Croyez). If it’s not quite as creepy as you might expect, it’s not quite as emotionally engaging as it might be either, which is deliberate. We’re held at arm’s length, while co-writer/director Safy Nebbou gets busy with the mechanics of a plot that reveals all towards the end, and then reveals all one more time. The plot seems quite straightforward. Claire (Juliette Binoche, great as ever) is a teacher of French literature who strikes up a relationship with much younger man Alex, a friend of an ex lover, on a social network we might as well call Facebook, … Read more
Sweet Smell of Success
Sweet Smell of Success flopped at the box office on its debut in 1957, much as its producer, Burt Lancaster, feared it might. A dirty-underbelly-of-showbiz tale, like Sunset Blvd. and In a Lonely Place, it’s been redeemed by posterity, which often marks it as one of the finest noirs ever made, even though it doesn’t tick all the genre boxes. One reason for the failure was the casting of its star. Not top-billed Lancaster, who put his name at the head of the credits not just out of ego, but also to deflect attention from the real star. Tony Curtis was best known at this point for playing a series of pretty boys … Read more
Alien
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 6 June Alexis St Martin shot in the stomach, 1822 On this day in the 1822, a 20-year-old Canadian called Alexis Bidagan St Martin was shot in the stomach at close range at a fur trading post on Mackinac Island, Canada. He survived the musket blast and the wound healed, leaving a hole, a fistula, in his side which led right into his stomach. The man treating him, US army sergeant William Beaumont, noticed that all the food that St Martin ate was re-appearing from the fistula. Matters improved, St Martin’s digestion returned to normal though the wound healed to form a … Read more
Gypo
Gypo is a Dogme film, the 37th made according to the strictures of the protocol dreamt up by a group of Scandinavian film-makers, including Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, in 1995. Naturalism is the stated idea, but Dogme could also be seen as an extension of Ikea flatpack design principles into film-making, or those of no-smells, no-bells Nordic Protestantism, or the “form follows function” of the Bauhaus, or fellow Scandinavian Carl Theodor Dreyer’s spare aesthetic. Take your pick. What’s unusual about Gypo is that it is a British film, a kitchen-sinker set in the bleak coastal town of Margate. It tells the story from three different angles of a mother/daughter pair of … Read more
An Inconvenient Truth
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 September Signing of the Montreal Protocol, 1987 On this day in 1987, the Montreal Protocol in Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer was signed. It was designed to eliminate from use substances, largely chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were deemed to be damaging the atmosphere, most particularly by destroying ozone, which absorbs large amounts of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. It is the most universally ratified treaty in world history, Kofi Annan has called it “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date”. Under the terms of the protocol, the use of CFCs – a propellant in aerosols, a coolant in fridges … Read more
Lad: A Yorkshire Story
When Dan Hartley was a lad, growing up in Yorkshire, he struck up a relationship, a friendship, with Al Boughen, a park ranger working for the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Lad: A Yorkshire Story, dedicated to Boughen, who died in 2010, is a tribute from the older Hartley, now a writer and director, to the man who mentored him at a crucial stage of his life. In Hartley’s film Dan is now called Tom and is played with real charm by Bretten Lord (bringing to mind another Yorkshire lad, David Bradley, in Ken Loach’s 1969 film Kes). Tom is a 13-year-old with a life on a familiar course – hanging with his older brother … Read more
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
What exactly is so strange about the love of Martha Ivers in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers? Unfortunate, maybe? Random, perhaps? Convenient, possibly? Strange – not so much. But then that is this noirish, gothic 1946 melodrama all over, promising much and not quite delivering. It’s largely remembered these days as the film debut of Kirk Douglas, who plays the husband of Barbara Stanwyck’s Martha Ivers, whose birth name was Smith, by the way, and whose married name is O’Neil, and so isn’t really an Ivers at all. But before all of that, first a preamble brilliantly setting the scene for what’s to follow. A young Martha (played winningly by Janis Wilson) is … Read more
Farewell Amor
Think of how many films there have been about the Irish immigrant experience in the USA. Or the Italian. Farewell Amor is a real rarity, because it’s looks at that fraught, hopeful new beginning through African eyes. Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is a refugee from Angola who went through the civil war there and is now living in New York, where he drives a cab. He’s been separated from his family for 17 years, but is now finally reunited with them. In fact that’s the first scene of Ekwa Msangi’s film: Walter, his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) meeting at JFK airport. The look on Sylvia’s face … Read more
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
There’s nothing wrong with Ghostbusters: Afterlife at all, apart from its strange reluctance to reference Ghostbusters, the 2016 reboot directed by Paul Feig. The one that exercised a lot of bedwetters with its “controversial” cast with a lot of women in it. It wasn’t very good, but not because it starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Patty Tolan and Kate McKinnon. It just wasn’t funny or scary. They never are, scary I mean, the Ghostbusters films. That’s not really the point. The idea is to deliver lots of likeable knockabout camaraderie and good vibes, which is what Afterlife does, liberally scattering easter eggs referring back to one of the original two movies, but not … Read more
Tension
If you’re buying Tension as a “physical”, it often comes packaged together on DVD or Blu-ray with Where Danger Lives, as if it were a makeweight. Strange, since it’s a cracking film in terms of plot and character. Ostensibly designed as a vehicle for Audrey Totter, it ended up with Richard Basehart’s name first in the billing – studio reasons – though in all honesty it’s Barry Sullivan who’s the standout here, excellent though Totter and Basehart are. She plays the femme fatale who’s somehow wound up married to sappy and dutiful drugstore manager Warren Quimby but who’s carrying on a not-so-secret affair with local tough guy Barney Deager (Lloyd Gough), a believer in … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 10 – Dial a Deadly Number
Set in the world of the well-to-do, the very satisfying Dial a Deadly Number first aired in the UK in the early days of December 1965 and returns to two regular Avengers fascinations – businessmen and undertakers. In what sounds like the setup to a joke, there are these three business magnates sitting in a bar, bemoaning movements on the stock market. One of them gets bleeped, by an early manifestation of a pager, and heads back to the office. There is no funny payoff, though, because en route to the boardroom, the bleeped man’s pager gets switched and he is soon dead of a sudden “heart attack” after being struck by some … Read more
