Review

Blood In, Blood Out

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Miklo, Cruz and Paco in front of an old station wagon

Clearly intending to do for Chicanos what Scorsese and Coppola did for Italian Americans, 1993’s Blood In, Blood Out cannot be accused of a lack of ambition. A big, long, zeitgeist-tasting tale of life in and around the gangs inside and outside prison, it follows three East Los Angeles guys on a journey from callow youth to some sort of maturity, each winding up in a place he might not have expected. Miklo, Cruz and Paco are three streetwise Chicanos. Spanish peppers their streetspeak as they swagger around their rough neighbourhood in cartoon exaggerations of masculinity. Cruz is a street artist with ambitions to be something more. Half-brother Paco is a cock of … Read more

Double Blind

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Claire looking frightened in a corridor

Irish horror movies have a tendency to be inventive, ingenious and out there, and Double Blind ticks all those boxes. I told a mate I was watching an Irish horror movie and he wondered what categorised a horror movie as Irish. “Is it,” he ventured, “killer potatoes?” No, Mark, no. Like 2012’s massively underrated Stitches, or The Canal, or (for the more comedically inclined) Grabbers, this is a horror movie made in Ireland, written and directed by Irish talent, with a few Irish actors in the cast, though the lead role in this case (as in Stitches and The Canal) goes to a Brit, Millie Brady, who plays a young woman called Claire … Read more

Happy End

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The condemned man has a last cigarette

If you’ve never heard of Oldrich Lipský before, here’s your chance to get to know him. Second Run, purveyors of overlooked European movies, are re-releasing Happy End, Lipský’s 1967 comedy. Alongside other Lipský titles – The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians, I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen and Adele Has Not Had Her Supper Yet – Happy End sounds almost commonplace. Do not be taken in. Lipský lived from 1924 to 1986 in Czechoslovakia (now Czechia or the Czech Republic) and made comedies suffused with Dada, the surreal and magical realism, the sort of weird stuff that’s often the refuge of the scoundrel. But like fellow Czech (though ten years younger) Jan Švankmajer, Lipský does weird … Read more

The Promised Land

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Ludvig stands on a blazing heath

Mads Mikkelsen is a reassuring presence in any movie and is the making of The Promised Land (Bastarden in the original Danish), a movie that promises much and eventually delivers too much, but stylishly, always stylishly. He plays Ludvig Kahlen, an 18th-century ex-soldier who petitions the Danish king to allow him to cultivate the Jutland Heath, a vast expanse of the country on which nothing, a preamble tells us, will grow. His petition is accepted by the courtiers who act as an intermediary between the Kahlen and the monarch. It’s one of the drunken king’s crazy schemes, this turning of the wilderness into farmland, and the courtiers reason that by agreeing to Kahlen’s … Read more

The Manchurian Candidate

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A sweaty, brainwashed Raymond Shaw

Thrillers generally work backwards, towards who done it or why. The Manchurian Candidate doesn’t do it that way at all. We know that something’s wrong from the opening scenes of John Frankenheimer’s superbly chilly Cold War thriller, but we’ve no idea where everything is headed. And Frankenheimer keeps it that way until the film’s dying (literally) moments. The Day of the Jackal borrowed quite a bit of The Manchurian Candidate’s cold deliberate approach, but we always knew that the hitman in that movie was aiming to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle. Here we know next to nothing, though early scenes make clear that a platoon of US soldiers in Korea has been … Read more

Marmalade

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Marmalade in a car

A clever one-two of a movie, Marmalade starts out looking like one thing, then turns into something else, but saves its best moves for the finale, when revelations come tumbling out at a rate of knots. What it looks like is one of those dweeby, comic coming-of-agers of the early 2000s, movies like Elizabethtown or Garden State, in which uptight milquetoast guys are given an injection of va-va-voom by a force-of-nature free-spirit female. The creation of the passive, sex-starved male writer, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl – one dimensional, a catalyst in someone else’s story rather than a hero in her own and just incidentally as hot as lava – was so ubiquitous … Read more

Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America

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A skeleton lies in a hospital bed

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

Trenque Lauquen

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Laura Paredes as Laura

Long films are often thought to have something profound to say. I’m not sure Trenque Lauquen does, unless you’re counting what it has to say about the act or art of cinema itself. Philosophically there might not be too much going on here but artistically this is a remarkable film. Cahiers du Cinéma named this as their best film of 2023. It’s four hours and 22 minutes long, before we go any further, and a detective thriller kind of thing, opening with two men searching for a woman, then flashing back to tell the story of the missing woman and one of the men, all the while alluding even further back, to a … Read more

Ghost in the Shell

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Lead cop Kusanagi

1995’s Ghost in the Shell was meant to be the Japanese anime that cracked the world market wide open. It didn’t work, but that’s not to say it wasn’t successful in its own way. A slew of sequels, TV shows and eventually a highly contested Hollywood remake followed (on account of Scarlett Johansson playing its lead character), and it was also influential on James Cameron, who namechecked it as a reference for Avatar. But most of all it was the Wachowskis who came and saw Mamoru Oshii’s movie, then conquered the world with The Matrix, which so obviously lifts from Ghost in the Shell that you can tick off the ideas as they … Read more

American Fiction

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"Monk" Ellison standing out in the street

Can you be black in America and not live in the hood? What would the Great American Novel look like if it turned on the life and thoughts of a black man, rather than some old white dude like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow? American Fiction tackles those questions and a few more, in the process handing a great role to Jeffrey Wright, already one of the greats, but bolstered here by a fantastic cast who lift him to greater heights. Wright plays American college professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, whose career is put on hold after his latest burst of “inappropriate” behaviour with one of his snowflake students. This throws him back on … Read more