Popular Reviews
Misericordia
So here’s France’s best film of 2024, in the esteemed Cahiers du Cinéma’s estimation at any rate. Which may come as a surprise to many in the anglosphere, where Misericordia came and went without making much of a stir, as Alain Guiraudie’s films so often do. It’s a slight return to Guiraudie’s most well received film (a finger in the air poll only), 2013’s Stranger by the Lake, which set a “cosy” murder mystery at a secluded countryside spot where gay men convene to have sex with each other. Guiraudie opened that film with shots of penises in mid frame and continued in much the same vein, the Poirot-esque murder investigation regularly taking … Read more
Hold Back the Night
One of the occasional forays behind the camera of Phil Davis, the hugely gifted actor whose face pops up in everything from a Dickens adaptation to a geezer gangster flick. Which is particularly of interest in this film because it’s neither of those. In fact it’s a genre Brits have a fairly low success rate in – the road movie. Upping the ante even further it’s a feelgood road movie. And heaping the improbable on the unusual, it’s set in a Scotland that’s actually sunny. It stars the enormously talented Christine Tremarco, as a teenager on the run from her abusive dad. Also on the hoof is Stuart Sinclair Blyth as her tree-hugging be-dreadlocked … Read more
Blind Alley
A film about the all-conquering power of Freudian psychoanalysis, Blind Alley lasts just a bit longer than a session with a shrink and in its 69 minutes attempts to convince us that the root of all evil lies in our relationship with our parents. It’s a bit mad but highly entertainingly done, and in the background there’s something lurking for any would-be psychoanalyst, in the relationship between an incidental couple, Mr and Mrs Curtis, and the “constant companion” Mrs C calls Dick. Parse that one. But neither Dick nor the Curtises is who the film is about. It’s about a professor of psychoanalysis whose weekend cottage is invaded mid-soiree by a dangerous criminal … Read more
The Assignment
Hardboiled graphic-novel pastiche is the big idea behind The Assignment, which stars Michelle Rodriguez as Frank Kitchen, a hitman who becomes a hitwoman after his enemies perform some non-elective gender re-assignment (Re-Assignment was a working title, as was Tomboy) on him/her. As you might expect, revenge is served hot and cold, warm and wet. Walter Hill directs. Yes, the same Walter Hill of 1980s hits like Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs and Brewster’s Millions, still in the game, still knocking out remarkably varied movies, still happy to get down and slum it, as he’s doing here – the film was made for very little money and Hill was well into his 70s when it … Read more
Let the Wrong One In
Comedy horror – no surprise there, surely – Let the Wrong One In takes the vampire movie and does a Shaun of the Dead number on it. Which is to say: arcane lore is exposed to the withering light of everyday life. Result: funny, and another contender for the Ireland’s Comic Horror Hall of Fame, alongside the likes of Shrooms and Grabbers. Conor McMahon gets his film going with lurid gothic titles and a bit of a Hammer horror parody. We’re in Transylvania where Sheila (Mary Murray) and her gal pals are on a hen weekend, getting drunk, carrying around giant inflatable penises and the like, when Mary is suddenly approached by a … Read more
100 Years of… The Loves of Pharaoh
Why this film from 1922 is called The Loves of Pharaoh in English is a bit of a mystery. It’s Das Weib des Pharao – Pharaoh’s Woman (or Wife) – in German and in every other language it was translated into (per the IMDb), the lady in question has been faithfully rendered as wife/woman/love singular. In fact the film was also much messed about with when it first debuted. In Russia Pharaoh was more of a tyrant, in the US there was more of a happy ending, whereas in its native Germany audiences got to see more or less what the director Ernst Lubitsch and writers Norbert Falk and Hanns Kräly had wanted … Read more
Defamation
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 25 June Anne Frank’s Diary published, 1947 On this day in 1947, a book originally called Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 (The Annex: Diary Notes 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944) was published by Contact publishing in Amsterdam. The annex being the place where the 13-year-old Jew Anne Frank and her family, along with another Jewish family called the Pels, hid in order to avoid arrest by the Nazis. The annex was in the upper, hidden rooms of Anne’s father’s business premises and the family hid there from 6 July 1942 until their discovery and … Read more
Scarlet Street
There’s a “strike while the iron is hot” aspect to 1945’s Scarlet Street, a quick follow-up to 1944’s The Woman in the Window which reunited the three key cast members – Joan Bennett, Edward G Robinson and Dan Duryea – with director Fritz Lang and the ace cinematographer Milton Krasner. That was noir and so is this, a remake of Jean Renoir’s 1931 film La Chienne (literally, The Bitch). Renoir didn’t like Lang’s remake and nor, later on, would he like Human Desire, Lang’s remake of his La Bête Humaine. Edward G Robinson was also in the Renoir camp. He didn’t like working on Scarlet Steet much, considering it too similar to The Woman … Read more
Oldboy
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 29 June iPhone launched, 2007 On this day in 2007, Apple launched the first version of the iPhone. Until then, mobile or cell phones had been phones first, with a range of other capabilities – camera, email, mp3 player, internet access – tagging along behind. Apple’s creative breakthrough was to design the iPhone as a very small computer which also had phone functionality. This might look like a “six and two threes” explanation but what the iPhone did, which no phone had done before, was deliver a more integrated service, so the phone became in effect a Swiss army knife of … Read more
Joker: Folie à Deux
Joker: Folie à Deux has madness in its title and in its conception – it’s a bold thought experiment that hasn’t translated into a good movie. If it had stopped at the half-hour mark I’d have said it was brilliant, a genius move, but it goes on and on with its attempt to weld the comicbook thriller to the musical and wears out its welcome, but still won’t leave. It opens more or less where the original Joker left off – no, hang on, there’s a short Looney Tunes-style cartoon first, also featuring Joker – before director Todd Phillips cuts to live-action footage of a broken Arthur Fleck (a shockingly emaciated and tortured … Read more
Sunshine
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 February Galileo Galilei born, 1564 On this day in 1564, the astronomer, mathematician and physicist Galileo Galilei was born. He was most famous for advocating the Copernican view of the solar system, which put the sun at the centre and had the planets orbiting about. This was in stark contradiction of the Church view, which had the earth at the centre, and also the Tychonic system (earth at centre, sun orbiting earth, other planets orbiting the sun). Galileo was an accomplished lutenist, like his father, and also considered the priesthood before choosing the life scientific. He had studied medicine before … Read more
The Epic of Everest
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 April Birkenhead Park opened, 1847 On this day in 1847, Birkenhead Park was opened in Birkenhead on the Wirral Peninsula, UK. It is the country’s first publicly funded civic park and was designed by Joseph Paxton, best known for designing the Crystal Palace exhibition space. A feat of engineering which required that the marshy site first be drained, before vistas could be built, avenues created, terraces and lakes built, it covers 226 acres and was financed by the selling of adjoining plots to local merchants, many of them from Liverpool. It was visited by American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted … Read more
