Franck Khalfoun directs Rachel Nichols, Wes Bentley and Simon Reynolds in this horror where a business woman is kidnapped by a psycho in an underground car park.
Slick and histrionic, this has some nice bursts of gore and mania. It doesn’t build its tension well though. Often when a neat set piece is set-up the heroine escapes death by some unseen fortune. It is fine for the monster to have supernatural elements but the final girl shouldn’t be able to disappear into thin air to save the script from forward planning solutions. By the second half the director seems more interested in soaking a bratty Rachel Nichols cleavage than delivering a convincing showdown.
John Carpenter directs Kurt Russell, Harry Dean Stanton and Lee Van Cleef in this sci-fi thriller where a convict has 24 hours to rescue the President from Manhattan… the problem is New York has been walled off and turned into a maximum security prison.
Not my favourite Carpenter / Russell collaboration. It is a little bit too caught up in world building so doesn’t deliver enough action. The mood though is oppressive and convincing. The scene where Snake Plissken and a girl wait out the sewer dwelling troglodytes is squirming with unease… when terror strikes and the chase begin your pulse raises exponentially. As with a lot of moments here it is more horror than action that fuels Escape From New York. The abandoned city design is derelict chaos. Carpenter’s score a hummable driver. Russell plays the anti-hero with a minimalist cool. There’s a brilliant cast of grizzled support faces. Their careers and non-Hollywood looks fill in their untold backstories far better than any forced line of dialogue. I always really like Escape From New York, but I’m not sure why I don’t love it?
Billy Wilder directs William Holden, Marthe Keller and Michael York in this mystery where a struggling movie producer tries to get his latest script to a reclusive Golden Age movie star who seemingly never ages.
Stodgy and predictable – the pleasure of an old movie is sometimes you want to see it run its rail. This is the last “old movie” ever made, twenty years too late, self consciously not New Hollywood. “It’s a whole different business now. The kids with beards have taken over. They don’t need scripts, just give ’em a hand-held camera with a zoom lens.” There are no shocks in Fedora, we are permanently a mile ahead of the storytelling… to the point where at the midway mark you might feel like there is no more plot to unravel. Yet it still unspools its tale, treating foregone conclusions like twists, tragic inevitabilities as surprises. Yet there’s something comforting in the funereal formality. Watching the old mode be dusted off one last time has pleasures. A flashback to flashbacks. It is bittersweet tribute about ageing, exploiting fame and female beauty. A Hooray for Hollywood that knows we have read Anger’s Hollywood Babylon and reserved Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest on pre-order. This depicts the scandal and urban legends as mythical curses, what happens to the addicted survivors of the Dream Factory. Watching an icon as she is turned to offal and immortal simultaneously. Wilder evokes the hits his fictional Fedora might have starred in. His own Sunset Boulevard is an obvious touchstone but the opening rips-off Citizen Kane, The Barefoot Contessa is pilfered liberally throughout and a dozen gothic romances are overexposed to the continental sun. It is such a faithful poison pen love letter, such an unfeigned footnote that you can’t help be a little seduced by all its sincere staleness. I was caught out by how much I enjoyed this creaky out of time relic.
Jackie Chan directs himself, Maggie Cheung and Brigitte Lin in this Hong Kong action comedy where a heroic cop tries to protect a witness from the gangster he wants to bring down.
Amazing stunts, hilarious destruction. A very curious blend of OTT action, heartfelt drama and childish farce. Jackie mixes it all wonderfully… you care when he overacts, swoon when he goofs and marvel when he barely survives the spectacular death traps he slaloms himself through for our edification. A gifted stuntman and warm entertainer Jackie is the tits. Police Story somehow sates the Drunken Master fanbase, the uninitiated who want an exotic Lethal Weapon and any cineaste who want to to witness exactly what a living Buster Keaton looks like. I feel like all three. Watching a A-list star hang off speeding double deckers, throw his co-star off roofs or survive multiple trips through plate glass makes for a wonderfully physical night on the beers. Super fun!
Céline Sciamma directs Pauline Acquart, Louise Blachère and Adèle Haenel in this teen romance where a French girl become obsessed with the statuesque beauty on the local synchronised swimming team.
Pretty basic calling card debut – looks good with a nice mix of yearning, warmth and goofiness. Not world changing but probably means a lot to young lesbians now attaching themselves to it. I guess we can all appreciate the slightly deranged lengths teens go to engineer interactions and intimacy with those they fancy, some neat humour comes from this.
Robert Altman directs Susannah York, René Auberjonois and Cathryn Harrison in this psychological horror where a children’s author at her country retreat loses all sense of reality as people and events blur into each other.
No idea what was happening half the time but this seemed to have a better grasp on the enigmas about female identity and gender politics it wants to warp and unpick than Romero’s Season of the Witch or Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. Certainly the tricks it plays on the audience keep you unsettled but curious throughout.
John Huston directs Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston and Tim Holt in this adventure where three bums risk their lives and last dollars prospecting for gold in Mexico.
There is a delightful dichotomy when watching The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In one respect you are watching a classic Hollywood production… a culmination of five decades of technical expertise and a miracle of studio innovations. The storytelling is so solid yet artful, so unpretentious yet impactful that you can only marvel at the craftsmanship on display. In that respect Treasure is like The Great Escape or Sleepless in Seattle. A faultless product that elevates and improves on all the cinematic entertainments that came before them, distils and celebrates their finest features and becomes a showcase for genre perfection.
But in that other respect, the second aspect of Treasure, is that you are watching something not just classical but a beast that feels way ahead of its own time. Sure, the misanthropy of the world created here is akin to the mood and attitude of contemporaneous Film Noirs but they were never in the service of such a humanistic and philosophical film. The sophistication of the characters here, the intelligence put in to detailing their ethical shifts is more a piece with far later mature masterpieces like Sweet Smell of Success, The Godfather or Network. Bogart’s lead is not just corrupted by his lust to protect his wealth but we see the psychological knots he ties himself in to justify his misdeeds. He is neither criminal nor hero here. Worse or better than both, he is a true human. You can read his actions as a gold madness… or maybe you are familiar with those who alters events and reinterpret the actions of others to warrant their own violence, betrayals and paranoia? Sociopaths. All of us in our weakest, most exposed moments. It is a brave and complex lead turn – one that retains our attention if not our sympathies as bandits descend and action interrupts his unearthed bastard instincts. Treasure is one of the few films where shoot outs actually delay the tensions that have been reaching boiling point rather than resolve or vent them.
Walter Huston is a wonderful saintly counterweight to Bogart’s mammonistic protagonist. Wise, warm, willing to see a problem from all sides, even if it is a problem created by one man’s greed. He has resigned himself that men cannot help the evil that they do or give in to the fear that drives them. The fact Howard accepts it as a non-negotiable factor to be considered when surviving this rough terrain is maybe the most pessimistic statement on humanity made, more damning a judgement than any of Dobb’s moral contorting to permit himself to murder, steal and abandon his own word. Man is craven to the point of self destruction… when prospecting you need to accept that as part of the deal as much as hard work or external threats.
Sam Hargrave directs Chris Hemsworth, Randeep Hooda and Golshifteh Farahani in this violent action thriller where a merc rescues a kidnapped teen from a Bangladeshi drug lord.
Action-wise this is very difficult to fault. Once all the person-shaped pieces are in play on the board we get an epic one-shot evade and fight sequence through a bustling city – it is positively brimming with location stunts, near misses and brutal kills. The intensity seems to threaten to carry on for the entire runtime. So it is almost a shame we have a forced second act timeout for limp bonding and betrayals. The human interactions that don’t involve snapped necks or shot heads are very formulaic. They don’t even find time to exploit Hemsworth’s penchant for goofy humour. The plotting and dialogue is glaringly sparse and predictable. If it stuck purely to being a breathless chase you might forgive this weakness. Still the ending involving snipers jousting over a last chance bridge melee is hectic enough that this ultimately makes for a fine Saturday Night one-watcher.
George A Romero directs Jan White, Raymond Laine and Anne Muffly in this low budget supernatural drama where a put-upon housewife explores witchcraft and sex during a moment of crisis.
Boring. A few trippy dream sequences aside, this takes an age to get going and then only offers queasy rolling around on the carpet with zero nudity and the occasional reference to Wiccan practices. If you rocked up to your local grindhouse fleapit expecting sleaze, violence or even magicking then you’d be very, very disappointed. Can be approached as a feminist drama but one so dated and outmoded there proves little value there either.
Alejandro González Iñárritu directs Javier Bardem, Maricel Álvarez and Taishen Cheng in the awards bait, tragedy porn where a despicable exploiter of immigrants in Barcelona deals with his terminal cancer, police bribes, his father corpse, his bi-polar ex and his angelic but bratty kids.
Misery Guts The Movie… showcasing a committed lead performance by Bardem at the expense of all others and a couple of squalor glory shots. Otherwise, it is a voyeuristic defence from a “poor me” scumbag which grates and devalues as it vomits out at length. Who is this overlong pap for apart from the tourist luvvies who made it?
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 