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Bill Paxton as Dale Dixon

One False Move

One False Move is the result of Carl Franklin’s realisation, aged 37, that acting wasn’t enough for him and that what he really wanted to be was a director. In 1986 he went back to college to study directing, then worked for two years knocking out pile-em-high product for Roger Corman. He got given his head with this 1991 movie. In terms of plot it’s something like a road movie. Three drugs desperadoes steal a load of money and cocaine in LA, then head to Arkansas, where at least two of them grew up. En route they kill more people, dodge cops and swap one hot car for another. On they press towards … Read more
Nicolas Cage

The Retirement Plan

It’s Nicolas Cage’s turn to have a go with the very particular set of skills, in The Retirement Plan, a gonzo action comedy that’ll be familiar if you’ve seen any of the Liam Neeson outings as an all-action seeker of payback, or any of the Keanu Reeves’s incarnations as John Wick. That, apparently, was writer/director Tim Brown’s original idea – imagine John Wick finally, eventually, retired, 20 years older and living on a sunny island and being called back into action by some untoward event. The event that does it here isn’t the killing of a pet dog but the arrival on the Cayman Islands, where Matt Robbins (Cage) has been retired for … Read more
Dougal and Zebedee

Dougal and the Blue Cat

If The Magic Roundabout is a psychedelic trip for kids, its spin-off, Dougal and the Blue Cat, is a wild ride on some pretty bad acid. Skip this paragraph if you know the backstory, but The Magic Roundabout, a mainstay of UK children’s TV in the 1960s and 1970s, was originally a French cartoon, Le Manège Enchanté, created by Serge Danot. Successful at home, it also got exported around the world, where it went under different names – in Italy La Giostra Incantata, in Germany Das Zauberkarussell and in the USA The Magic Carousel. However, in the UK, unlike most other territories, Le Manège Enchanté didn’t simply get translated into the local language, it … Read more
Thomas hiding behind Jessie

My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To

Talking of movies that got lost down the back of the Covid sofa, how about My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, the debut feature by Jonathan Cuartas and as good a modern take on the vampire genre as you’ll see. A homeless man is picked up by a guy with a beard. Where are we going, says the vagrant. To a hostel, says the bearded guy. This isn’t a hostel, says the homeless guy when they pull up outside a family home. Next second he’s been clubbed about the head by a baseball bat he (ironically) only minutes before had been pulling out of a dumpster bin. Another few seconds … Read more
Alain Delon, Vanessa Paradis and Jean-Paul Belmondo

1 Chance Sur 2 aka Half a Chance

1 Chance Sur 2 (renamed Half a Chance for English speakers) is almost a thought experiment. When France’s biggest stars of the 1960s, Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo, were being courted by Hollywood, imagine that instead of deciding “non”, they’d accepted the offers and moved Stateside. What sort of films would they have made? Decades later, director Patrice Leconte answers the hypothetical with a big, fun, explosion-filled action movie full of flamboyant bad guys, helicopters, car chases, sexy women and “we’re getting too old for this shit” repartee. And to catch another quadrant there’s a fluffy plot driving it all, about tearaway car thief Alice (Vanessa Paradis) being pursued by the Russian mafia … Read more
Sebastian and Salvo

About My Father

So you thought that Killers of the Flower Moon signalled that Robert De Niro had maybe packed it in with all the crazy grandpa roles. About My Father is proof he hasn’t. And whatever you might think of De Niro’s comedy chops in War With Grandpa, Dirty Grandpa and an intermittent run of others going back to 2000’s Meet the Parents (he was just a crazy father back then), he’s the best thing in this comedy written by and (sort of) starring stand-up comedian Sebastian Maniscalco. Maniscalco is the son of a Sicilian hairdresser father called Salvatore and here De Niro plays a Sicilian hairdresser father called Salvo – so join the dots … Read more
Eddie Constantine in hat and trenchcoat

Alphaville

The French New Wave, film noir and sci-fi all collide in Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard’s mad mash-up of all three genres. If it does nothing else it demonstrates that as long as you have imagination you don’t need any budget at all to make an impressive movie. Godard shot it all in Paris, with no sets, no gadgety props, no special effects. He didn’t even bother with a newly minted character. Instead he repurposed Lemmy Caution, a gumshoe created by British crime novelist Peter Cheyney who had already appeared in a string of French B movies by the time Alphaville came out in 1965. Then, as here, Caution is played by the American singer … Read more
Ben Mendelsohn as the marsh king

The Marsh King’s Daughter

Languid is a strange way to go for a psychological thriller, an even stranger way to go for an action thriller. But that’s how director Neil Burger plays it in The Marsh King’s Daughter, a misfire that looks like a bold experiment gone wrong. There are a a number of people in the cast, among them Brooklynn Prince, Gil Birmingham, Caren Pistorius and Garrett Hedlund, but the only two that really matter are Daisy Ridley and Ben Mendelsohn, who play to their strengths – plucky and menacing respectively. Helena is a girl (played at the point by Prince) being brought up brought up in the wilds and taught the ways of the woods … Read more
Major Cabot meets Joe Thanks at gunpoint

A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe

Supposedly the last western Sergio Leone worked on, 1975’s A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (aka Un genio, due compari, un pollo) has a ramshackle spaghetti western charm and an opening section which strongly recalls the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West – it’s operatic, dramatic, largely silent and at the end of it there’s a plot reversal designed to shock and delight. It’s this section that was supposedly directed by Leone himself. With spanking wide vistas of Monument Valley and close-ups so vivid you can see sweat droplets forming, that must almost certainly be true. Damiano Damiani did the rest of it, poor guy, and the story here … Read more
Jakub Gierszal as Michael

Beyond Words

The immigrant experience. Be honest, your heart just sank a little. Possibly because you’ve seen a few movies about it and you imagine you know what you’re about to be served when you hear that Beyond Words (Pomiędzy słowami, in the original Polish) is just such a thing. The tale of a sweet and blameless brown person having a hard time in a mostly white country. But that’s not what Urszula Antoniak’s fourth film is about at all. Instead it asks a rarely asked question – what of the not-so-sweet, not-so-blameless white person in another largely white country? Michael looks like a German but he isn’t one. He’s a Pole who immigrated to … Read more
Francesca Annis and Suzanna Leigh

The Pleasure Girls

Misrepresenting itself cheerfully, The Pleasure Girls is an early arrival at the Swinging Sixties party that’s only partly what the poptastic theme song and energetic trailer claim it to be. Youth! Girls! Fun! Sex! Yes, but… For a while the story sticks close to Swinging expectations – young, pretty Sally (Francesca Annis) arrives in London from the fusty provinces to become a model, takes up with a David Bailey-esque photographer called Keith (Ian McShane) and together they have a fun time, going to parties and hanging out with all the other beautiful people of mid-Sixties London. So far, so groovy. But writer/director Gerry O’Hara has other stories to tell. For one thing his … Read more
William Hale in a car and Ernest Burkhart listening to him

Killers of the Flower Moon

It turns out that one of the many uses of Killers of the Flower Moon is as a film for baby-friendly screenings. My daughter-in-law takes her new son to these on Tuesday mornings and recently reported back that the great thing about Martin Scorsese’s latest is that she could take the baby out of the auditorium to be changed or fed and then go back into the screening some time later and not really have missed much. There’s quite a lot of redundancy, in other words. It may be stylish redundancy delivered by a director fully confident of what he’s doing but you could easily cut half an hour from this film and … Read more

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