Sabotage

Sabotage

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Oscar Homolka as the saboteur

Graham Greene didn’t like the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but he did like Sabotage. The novelist was a film critic in his early years and was regularly on Hitchcock’s case for what he described as “inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities.” Tough room. But, as I say, Sabotage got the Greene seal of approval. Which is odd because it’s not top-flight Hitchcock, though it is worth staying around for the film’s famous sequence towards the end, when Hitchcock sacrifices a character in scenes audiences in 1936 found shocking and Hitchcock himself was uneasy about. It’s based on the Conrad novel The Secret Agent, but since Hitchcock’s previous film had been Secret Agent, the original … Read more

15 September 2014-09-15

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Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive

Out in the UK This Week Only Lovers Left Alive (Soda, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Jim Jarmusch arrives in genre territory with this achingly hipsterish take on the vampire movie – finally, one for the grown-ups – full of arch jokes about eternal bloodsuckers. I went into it thinking that surely the Lou Reed of cinema, with the perfectly cast Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as Adam and Eve, a pair of centuries-old vampires, is going to make the film that 1983’s The Hunger should have been. And he has. Keats, Iggy Pop, Franz Kafka and Buster Keaton are all name-checked approvingly in a dry, drole story about Tangier-domiciled Eve responding to an emergency call from … Read more