Latest Posts
The Eternal Daughter
You get a double dose of Tilda Swinton in The Eternal Daughter, writer/director Joanna Hogg’s “lockdown movie”, shot with a skeleton cast in a secluded Welsh hotel and making the most of the pared-down vibe. Swinton plays both Julie and Rosalind, a daughter/mother duo who have come to Moel Famau Hall (as Soughton Hall has been renamed) because it used to be Rosalind’s family home decades before. There they get a not unfamiliar reception – there’s no food because it’s late and the kitchen is shut, the rooms they have booked are not free, the wi-fi is wonky and the receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies) is cool to the point of hostility. It’s all a … Read more
Petla aka Noose
So bleak that it eventually feels like director Wojciech Has might be having a laugh, 1958’s Petla (Noose, or The Noose in English) is a desperate story of a terrible alcoholic trying to give up drink after the latest in a line of humiliations. It’s as if Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend had been rewritten by Samuel Beckett and then turned into a movie by Béla Tarr. This was Has’s debut feature and it’s as much a career mission statement as story in itself. Between Petla and his farewell, 1988’s Niezwykla Podróz Baltazara Kobera, Has made films that were often bleak, surreal and characterised by the blurring of fantasy and reality, chief among … Read more
I Have Electric Dreams aka Tengo Sueños Eléctricos
Simple yet subtle and complex, I Have Electric Dreams (Tengo Sueños Eléctricos) is a Costa Rican coming-of-ager and the debut feature by Valentina Maurel, who has said she wanted to make a movie exploring the ambiguities of adolescence. Mission accomplished. Maurel drops us straight into the world of her “heroine”, Eva (Daniela Marín Navarro) and leaves us to figure out what’s going on. We meet Eva and her little sister being driven home by her seething father, who, by the end of this introduction, has lost his tempter entirely and is banging his head against the garage door until he’s drawn blood. The central relationship of the movie is Eva and father Martin … Read more
Brighton Rock
Not many British films make the “Best Film Noir” lists but Brighton Rock regularly does. And unlike many a key “British” noir, this one was directed by a Brit, John Boulting rather than an American fleeing McCarthyism (Jules Dassin and Night and the City or Cy Endfield and Hell Drivers), a visiting Frenchman (Edmond Gréville’s Noose) or an expat Brazilian (Alberto Cavalcanti’s They Made Me a Fugitive). It’s also unusual because of the role it gives Richard Attenborough. Nice, cuddly Dickie later of Jurassic Park fame here plays a smalltime 17-year-old psychopathic mobster in the town of Brighton, a seaside resort with a reputation for kiss-me-quick hats and extramarital affairs conducted by people … Read more
Past Lives
Past Lives is a woozy but cool romance where much is suggested but little given. The will they/won’t they is endlessly deferred and if not very much happens, what does happen is properly intense. Right to the last second writer/director Celine Song leaves us dangling. Bracket this one with In the Mood for Love, Casablanca and Brief Encounter. Boy meets girl, loses girl, remeets girl and… But the story starts in South Korea, where young schoolkids Hae Sung and Na have a relationship so intense that their parents arrange a mock “date” for them. More as a joke than anything else – Na’s family is about to emigrate to Canada and her mother … Read more
Body and Soul
A lightly fictionalised account of the life of boxer Barney Ross, 1947’s Body and Soul is often described as the best boxing movie ever made. While that’s highly contestable – there’s not much actual boxing in it, compared to The Set-Up or Raging Bull, for instance – it is undoubtedly one of the best movies set in the world of boxing (not quite the same thing). The original intention was to tell Ross’s story as a straight biography, but that was dropped when Ross’s heroin habit became common knowledge. And so John Garfield here plays Charley Davis, a boxer reflecting on his life – a spectacular rise from the mean streets and gifted amateurdom … Read more
Earth Mama
A remarkable feature debut by Savanah Leaf, Earth Mama is the grim social drama that’s had a magic wand waved over it. Not the story, though. That remains grim. Young single mum Gia has lost her children to social services. She is a recovering drug user and is heavily pregnant. She loves her kids and realises she has made a mess of things. So she is trying to do whatever it takes to get her life back on track. But the system seems gamed against young black single women like her. How can she take on more work and earn enough money to satisfy the authorities’ stipulation that she be financially OK if … Read more
Score
Score is another of those porn crossover movies from the “Golden Age of Pornography”, when the marginal moved into the mainstream and, for a while, it looked like attitudes to sex loosened by the cultural changes of the 1960s were about to be consolidated. Of course they did change – there’s more sex on the screen today, and more various sex, than there ever was before – and yet in mainstream movies (look at last year’s Barbie and Oppenheimer, or the big movies from any year) it’s like the Golden Age never really happened. Which makes the likes of Score doubly fascinating. Watching it now it’s obvious throughout that there’s a tension in … Read more
Leto aka Summer
Edited at home in Moscow by a director under house arrest, Leto is a 2018 movie about life in the Soviet era made by a director living in “democratic” Russia. Any read-across is obviously entirely accidental. Leto means Summer in Russian but this is a spring/autumn tale of a USSR rock star called Mike, his pretty partner Natasha and new kid on the block Viktor. It’s the early 1980s, the New Wave is making inroads into the tightly patrolled Soviet music scene and Mike is adapting to the new sounds/era with a nip here, a tuck there – really he’s an old school long-haired rock guy in the mould of Ian Hunter from … Read more
Deep End
Jerzy Skolimowski, en route to America from his native Poland, stopped off in the UK in 1969 to make Deep End, a strange blend of farce with something much darker, a tale of stalking done almost as a sex comedy. It’s the story of an impressionable 15-year-old lad, Mike, who gets a job at a public baths – the sort that has both swimming and bathing, in “slipper baths” – and falls very hard for co-worker Susan, a young woman a few years older than him but way ahead of him in all the things that matter, most obviously sex. Mike is played by the pretty John Moulder-Brown, Susan by Jane Asher at her … Read more
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
One of the big surprises of late 2023 was Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves making it onto so many “Best of…” lists for the year. Even more surprising, it actually deserves to be there (usual caveats apply). It’s a big sword-and-sorcery quest movie, with all the stuff you’d expect – spells, elves, shapeshifters, a medieval setting, capes, subterranean realms, undead creatures and, yes, dungeons and dragons. “Wizards and shit”, as one critic once termed it (I suspect it might have been Nathan Rabin, who also gave us the Manic Pixie Dream Girl as a concept). What you might not expect is the tone. It’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the medieval … Read more
Mr Vampire
The first in a successful franchise and cornerstone of an entire genre – jiangshi – 1985’s Mr Vampire is a highly entertaining and madly inventive movie, particularly if you like high-level buffoonery and vampires who hop. It wasn’t the first jiangshi movie. That honour probably goes to Sammo Hung’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind in 1980, the film that shifted Hong Kong vampires decisively away from the Nosferatu-like template and towards a more culturally Chinese vision of the undead. In jiangshi movies the vampires tend to come dressed in traditional changshan clothing. They are restless spirits or dead people whose burial has not been carried out according to the correct rituals. Drinking blood isn’t … Read more
