Review

Birth

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Joseph and Anna in a happy moment

Birth doesn’t quite sit with Jonathan Glazer’s other films. As I write (February 2024), his latest, The Zone of Interest, is attracting awards like an MRI scanner attracts spoons. As did Glazer’s debut, Sexy Beast, in 2000, and the film that followed Birth, 2013’s Under the Skin. As for Birth, it was booed at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival and its current rating on Rotten Tomatoes puts it around 40% “fresh”. Rotten, in other words. People probably need to take another look. First thing: it’s brilliantly made. Second thing: it’s brilliantly acted, with a great cast all rising to the challenge. Third thing: the plot. This is where it does come … Read more

All of Us Strangers

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Adam with his father and mother

All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh’s first movie since the atypical Lean On Pete, sees him back in familiar Haigh territory – with a twist. “Familiar” means an intense, almost claustrophobic, relationship-focused drama, but the twist comes from the way Haigh tells his story. It’s a spooky, old-fashioned ghost story. Not, note, a haunted house story (though there is a haunted house in it). Nor is this a horror movie, though psychological horror lurks somewhere in the background. It’s a ghost story of MR James variety, a style of storytelling that’s having a bit of a moment in UK movies right now – see Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter for something on fairly … Read more

The Whisperers

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Close up of Edith Evans as Mrs Ross

As good a portrait of what it means to be old and lonely as any you’ll see, 1967’s The Whisperers is an atypical British movie for the Swinging mid-Sixties, almost a return to the kitchen-sinkers of the early part of the decade. Bryan Forbes, who wrote and directed and was a smart man, understands the risks of making this film at this time and so doubles down on the “grim up north” stereotype, starting his film with visuals strongly reminiscent of the TV show Coronation Street – back-to-back houses, empty streets, dogs in the alleys rather than people, chimney-tops and brick walls – before bringing his focus in on one elderly lady. He … Read more

Birth/Rebirth

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Lila the undead

James Whale would probably approve of Birth/Rebirth, a new take on the Frankenstein story which, like Whale’s 1931 movie, is creepy, dark and yet shot through with a touching humanity. Until it isn’t. It’s a female take, with the focus largely on women, plus a female director, who also co-wrote, and the cinematographer, composer, editors, production designers and so on are mostly women too. Plus two stars in Marin Ireland and Judy Reyes who play either side of a familiar stereotype. On one side the monstrous feminine of Rose Casper (Ireland), an emotionless pathologist in a hospital morgue who is secretly collecting genetic material to further experiments into the reanimation of dead people. … Read more

Dellamorte Dellamore aka Cemetery Man

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Francesco and the undead She

First, Dellamorte Dellamore is a much better title for a movie than Cemetery Man, which is how it went out in English speaking countries in 1994. Cemetery Man suggests something slasher-inspired, maybe. Dellamorte Dellamore, and its literal translation, Of Death, Of Love, something much more gothic and weird. And that’s exactly what this mad piece of super-cultish garage grindcore is. It’s Italian, who are good at weird, and is based on the novel Dellamorte Dellamore by Tiziano Sciavi. Sciavi had based his main character in an earlier work, the comicbook Dylan Dog, on the actor Rupert Everett (specifically the listlessly upper-class Rupert Everett character in Another Country) and so when it came time … Read more

Wonka

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Noodle and Wonka out walking

Wonka the origin story, with Timothée Chalamet the chocolatier of every child’s fantasy, in a movie aimed straight at those with a sweet tooth and a love of whimsy. Lacking edge, stakes, call them what you will, it’s one for lovers of the soft centre. So, right, yes, story – Wonka arrives in somewhereland (England?) in ye olden times on a boat, with a pocketful of sovereigns and A Hatful of Dreams (first of the Neil Hannon songs), loses all his money to various urchins and mountebanks, and winds up in the clutches of a Mrs Scrubitt (Olivia Colman) and right-hand man Bleacher (Tom Davis), trapped by a contract he too readily signs, … Read more

The Spy in Black

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Captain Hardt with gun in hand

Known in the USA as U-Boat 29, The Spy in Black is the better and the original title of the first film made by the powerhouse pairing of director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger. If that was all it had to offer it would be worth a look. But it is also a tight and thrilling spy caper bubbling with a typical Powell and Pressburger humanity. It was made when the Second World War looked obvious and opened in the UK in 1939 as war was breaking out. Its star is Berlin-born Nazi-hating Conrad Veidt, who plays Ernst Hardt, a German U-Boat captain who arrives under cover of the night on a … Read more

Under the Fig Trees

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Fidé at work

Under the Fig Trees (Taht alshajra) isn’t a documentary but it’s made by Erige Sehiri almost as if it were. She’s been a documentary-maker up till now, and brings that different quality of storytelling to a quietly brilliant film full of drama. In the realm of fiction stories are told, but in documentaries they emerge – broad generalisation I know – but that’s the way Sehiri does it here. Opening shot: dawn, a young woman somewhere in Tunisia making her way towards a road. Next shot: climbing onto the back of a truck with a bunch of other people, all of whom know each other. Everyone’s in the back, except Fidé (Fide Fdhili), … Read more

Brewster McCloud

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Suzanne (Shelley Duvall) and Brewster (Bud Cort)

Brewster McCloud, the Robert Altman film people rarely talk about, owes something to early Soviet pioneers like Eisenstein, but possibly a lot more to the ingestion of cannabinoids. It’s got experiment with form in mind, but it’s also sprawlingly formless, as if Altman was stoned while in the edit suite. We understand his point, but he will keep on making it. In high (take that any way you want) Altman style, it’s a scenes-from-a-montage affair, a collage of moments where Altman in effect says “This!… this!… this!… this!… and this!… are what it’s all about”. A snapshot of one world, then a snapshot of another, a movie reference, then a star from an old … Read more

Mutzenbacher

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Four men at the casting call sit on the sofa

Every year the arthouse-friendly movie portal Cineuropa hands out a rake of Best Of awards. At first glance Mutzenbacher looks like an odd inclusion on its list, sitting alongside Aftersun, The Quiet Girl (my favourite), Godland, Piggy, Rimini and Eo. They are all fabulous, but they’re fabulous fictional dramas. Mutzenbacher is a documentary. And yet there is also something slyly dramatic, and possibly a touch fictional, about Ruth Beckermann’s documentary. For all its dispassionate forensic surface, Mutzenbacher does have a dramatic throughline, one that rather amusingly mimics events in the book that inspired it. Published in 1906, the novel Mutzenbacher, or Josefine Mutzenbacher, or The History of a Viennese Whore, is the supposed … Read more