It’s been a while since I last posted about a movie – I’ve still been watching, but sometimes the films are just too much fun to take the time to write about. I’m currently working through Hollywood movies, from screwball comedies to film noirs and westerns, filling in more gaps but this time Anglophone ones….
Chronicle of a Summer (1961) and David Holzman’s Diary (1967)
“Sometimes, when I leave home, I have things to do. But I don’t necessarily do them. I never know what I’ll do the next day. I live by the principle that tomorrow’s another day. For me, adventure is always just around the corner.” Two films, one a documentary, the other a mockumentary, give a sense…
Jimmy Cagney Double Bill (1931 and 1938)
“This very afternoon, I was approached with a sugarcoated proposition…a bribe offered me by this corrupt officialdom. $100,000 for the building and equipment of a recreation centre in my parish if I would agree to refrain from further attacks…if I would sabotage this campaign…if I would shut my eyes, stop my ears and hold my…
Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)
“The man who spits in Balzac’s “Physiology of Marriage” is less than nothing to me.” Directed by Jean Renoir, Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) is a satirical comedy starring Michel Simon as the title character, a tramp in Paris who, after being rescued from the river following a suicide attempt, insinuates himself into a bourgeois household….
The Five Obstructions (2003)
The Five Obstructions (2003) is a Danish documentary directed by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth. Inspired by Leth’s 1968 short movie The Perfect Human, von Trier decides to test his fellow director’s skills by setting a series of challenges. Leth is asked to remake The Perfect Human but with a series of imposed limitations or obstructions. Firstly,…
Judge Priest (1934)
“Hey, hey boy, wake up there. Sheriff, wake him up there. If anybody’s going to sleep in this court, it’ll be me.” Judge Priest (1934), directed by John Ford and starring Will Rogers as the titular character, is a pastoral comedy set in a small town Kentucky town decades after the American Civil War. Priest is…
Cairo Station (1958)
“Chahine fans out from a sweaty, realist base towards social observation, florid melodrama and dark suspense. It’s a strikingly controlled, confident, bitingly effective display, which leaves you wondering where this film has been all our lives.” Cairo Station (1958), directed by and starring Youssef Chahine, is a tense, noirish thriller set in the main train…
I Know Where I’m Going! (1945)
I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is a romantic comedy starring Wendy Hiller as Joan Webster, a focused and aspirational woman who heads from urban Manchester to the wild west coast islands of Scotland to marry a businessman. She becomes stranded on the island of Isle of Mull,…
To Be or Not to Be (1942)
“Joseph Tura: [disguised as Colonel Ehrhardt] I can’t tell you how delighted we are to have you here. Siletsky: May I say, my dear Colonel, that it’s good to breathe the air of the Gestapo again. You know, you’re quite famous in London, Colonel. They call you Concentration Camp Ehrhardt. Joseph Tura: Haha. Yes, yes……
The Dr. Mabuse Trilogy (1922, 1933 and 1960)
“When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven insane by fear and horror and when chaos has become supreme law, then the time will have come for the empire of crime.” Three years ago I watched the final film directed by Fritz Lang, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). Here’s my…
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
“It’s like I’m out in a big boat, and I see one fellow in a rowboat who’s tired of rowing and wants a free ride, and another fellow who’s drowning. Who would you expect me to rescue? Mr. Cedar – who’s just tired of rowing and wants a free ride? Or those men out there…
Le Trou (1960)
Le Trou (1960), directed by Jacques Becker, is a French prison break drama based on a novel by José Giovanni. Four prisoners share the same cell. They all face long sentences so they dig a tunnel and gain access to storerooms under the cell and then to the sewer system. It’s a simple but highly…
Karel Zeman Triple Bill
Before the nightmarish taxidermy and Jungian symbolism of Jan Švankmajer and the irreverent surrealism of Terry Gilliam came Czech film director, artist, production designer and animator Karel Zeman. Over the course of thirty years, Zeman produced a series of accessible, witty and imaginative fantasies. Zeman had a preoccupation with the stories of Jules Verne and Rudolf…
Autumn Sonata (1978)
“There’s no dividing line, no insurmountable wall. I know it can’t be described. It’s a world of liberated feelings. Do you know what I mean? To me, man is a tremendous creation, an inconceivable thought. In man is everything, from the highest to lowest. Everything exists side by side. Realities, not only the reality we…
Shoah (1985)
“We were taken to a barracks. The whole place stank. Piled about five feet high in a jumbled mass, were all the things people could conceivably have brought. Clothes, suitcases, everything stacked in a solid mass. On top of it, jumping around like demons, people were making bundles and carrying them outside. It was turned…
Fanny and Alexander (1982)
“Everything can happen. Everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On a flimsy framework of reality, the imagination spins weaving new patterns” I put this film off for so long. After watching Ingmar Bergman’s austere and meditative films of the 1960s (notably Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Winter Light (1963)) and…
The Woman in the Dunes (1964)
“This is futile. If it wanted to, the sand could swallow up cities and even entire countries. Did you know that? A Roman town called Sabrata and the one in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, both completely buried under particles an eighth of a millimeter wide. You can’t fight it! It’s hopeless!” Directed by Hiroshi…
Věra Chytilová Double Bill
Czech director Věra Chytilová’s most famous film Daisies (1966) is a classic of avant-garde cinema. Seemingly childish and playful but with a searing undercurrent of transgressive politics, it is short but packs a punch above it’s weight. But the arrival of Daisies had been heralded by Chytilová’s earlier films: notably A Bagful of Fleas (1962) and Something Different (1963)….
Andrew Kötting Double Bill
As I’ve already indicated in my consideration of By Our Selves (2015), Andrew Kötting’s films are masterpieces of the connection between personal nostalgia, landscape and family, matched only (for me) by Patrick Keiller’s Robinson films. Through his career, he has explored Great Britain from a variety of angles, usually journeying in an unusual fashion, and…
Peter Greenaway Double Bill
“Your innocence, Mr. Neville, is always sinister.” Given his background as an artist, it’s no surprise that director Peter Greenaway would focus on the subject as a source for his movies. Twenty five years apart, The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and Nightwatching (2007) are mirror images of each other, each focusing on an artist who smuggles…
Rififi (1955)
Rififi is one of those films that is so accessible and so engaging that it’s a wonder it’s not become one of those Christmas action staples like The Great Escape (1963) or Where Eagles Dare (1968). It has everything that the American popcorn movies have and more: tension, action, even a (somewhat incongruous) song, but because it is…
They Caught the Ferry (1948)
In the 1940s and 1950s, legendary Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Vampyr (1932)) directed a series of short documentaries focusing on national institutions such as the church and on safety warnings. Of these, They Caught the Ferry (1948) stands out. Ostensibly a film warning of the dangers of speeding, Dreyer’s direction…
One of the Missing (1968)
Tony Scott’s first short movie bears few similarities to his later glossy thrillers (Top Gun (1986) and Days of Thunder (1990), for example), but as an example of an efficient and punchy, folk-horror tinged drama, One of the Missing is exceptional. An adaptation of an Ambrose Bierce short story, the film follows an American civil war soldier on…
Floating Weeds (1959)
“Let me part tonight as his uncle, as before. Next time I come back here I’ll be a good actor” There is something fundamentally human about Yasujirō Ozu‘s films. Low-key, underplayed and melancholic, both Floating Weeds and the more famous Tokyo Story (1953) drill down into the personal nature of the protagonists but in such a subtle way that…
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
“I know what gold does to men’s souls.” Directed by John Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a psychological action thriller set in Mexico in 1925. Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt and Walter Huston (John’s father) play Fred, Bob and Howard, three grizzled prospectors who are thrown together and head to the hills in search…
The Favourite (2019)
“As it turns out, I’m capable of much unpleasantness.” Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite is a darkly comic, camp and cynical historical drama. Set in 1708, Britain is at war with France (again). Olivia Colman plays Queen Anne, a remote, childlike monarch who relies on her close advisers. The closest is Sarah Churchill, played by…
The Act of Killing (2012)
This 2012 Indonesian documentary, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, about the people who participated in the mass killings of the 1960s is strange and shocking. The film follows the killers, now revered by right wing politic groups, interviewing them about their memories of their acts and, distinctively, handing over the filming of the documentary to them, allowing…
Seven Chances (1925) and It’s a Gift (1934)
Ten years apart these two movies epitomise the careers to two comedy legends. The first, directed by and staring Buster Keaton, is a silent film containing all the stunts and physical excess you’d expect after seeing Sherlock Jr. (1924) and The General (1926). The second is a talkie, directed by Norman Z. McLeod and staring W. C. Fields….
A Throw of Dice (1929)
There is something magical about this silent movie, the third directed by Franz Osten. Simultaneously intimate and spectacular, telling the story of two royal rivals for the heart of a peasant girl and embedding this in the vistas and splendour of Rajasthan, the film moves between personal and emotional and expansive without sacrificing the sharpness of…
Wake in Fright (1971)
“I cannot accept your premise, Socrates. Affectability… progress… are vanities spawned by fear. A vanity spawned by fear. The aim of what you call civilisation is a man in a smokin’ jacket, whiskey and soda, pressing a bottom… button, to destroy a planet a billion miles away, kill a billion people he’s never seen.” There…
Film Ark 