MogwaiMovieReviews Reviews

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

the archetypal, genre-defining seventies conspiracy thriller

[7/10 · 24 May 2024]

A low-level CIA researcher comes back from lunch one day to find his whole department murdered, and realizes that he is to be next.

I apparently saw at least some of this archetypal, genre-defining seventies conspiracy thriller many years back, but have no memories of it. I thought I would give it another try, and this time round found it to be a very well-made and continually gripping piece of entertainment, if a little far-fetched at times.

It's genuinely hard for me to tell these days whether the characters, writing and direction in some older films are really as good as they now seem, or whether only slightly-above-average films from the past seem better than they actually are because even Oscar-winning films today are so calamitously bad that they cannot manage even the simplest task of making likeable characters you care about go on an adventure that intrigues you and makes you want to find out what will happen.

Either way, this one does all it is supposed to, and Robert Redford plays his proto-Brad Pitt role with great star quality, and Max Von Sydow is splendid as one of the killers after him, breathing life into what could just be a generic bad guy, and making every line and action believable and memorable, the way every actor should.

7.3/10.

Little Murders (1971)

Little Murders, Every Day

[7/10 · 19 May 2024]

Black comedy about an emotionally vacant New York photographer falling in love with an optimistic girl amidst the violence and madness of the city.

I tried watching this once, years ago, and it just didn't grab me at the time, so I moved along and filed it away in the back of my mind as one of those quirky-but-dated turn-of-the-seventies hippie-era things, like "Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?" or "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice".

I took another look at it today and found it to have a lot more depth and originality than I'd registered the first time round. It might be the most interesting and lifelike Elliot Gould performance, and this elevates the film to something more comparable to "The Graduate" or "Harold & Maude".

It's patchy, and often playfully amateurish, but there are some brilliant stretches, and a lot of the stuff about alienation, numbness and anxiety in the big city feels startlingly up-to-date and beautifully observed.

6.7/10.

The Visit (1964)

Hell Really Does Have No Fury

[7/10 · 14 May 2024]

A now-fantastically-wealthy widow (Ingrid Bergman) returns to the impoverished town she was cast out of as a teenage girl to get revenge on the lover who got her pregnant and then abandoned her.

This unusual and little-seen revenge tale feels more like a nightmarish allegory in the same vein as High Noon, The Trial or High Plains Drifter than other English-language films of the time, with the whole town slowly turning against Anthony Quinn as the promise of riches eats away the morality and social fabric of his community.

A little far-fetched and heavy-handed, it doesn't entirely work but it's powerful and memorable all the same, and definitely worth a watch. Interesting to see Bergman as a villain for a change, and Quinn is particularly good as the everyman paying a terrible price for a youthful mistake.

6.8 / 10.

Knox Goes Away (2023)

Fitfully Forgettable

[6/10 · 7 May 2024]

Decent-enough little movie from Michael Keaton about a hitman with a form of fast-acting dementia, trying to put his life in order before he shuffles off this mortal coil, as well as avoid the police looking for him for a botched murder.

Keaton is good, but the script is patchy and the rest of the parts are underwritten. The actress playing the lead detective on his trail is noticeably amateurish, with a limited range of expressions and emotions. There seems no rhyme or reason to the onset and bouts of the dementia: it barely affects Keaton's plans or hinders his interactions with others, except in the mildest ways, and so what the character is experiencing is not communicated at all believably, and the condition ends up just being a gimmicky and almost completely unexplored MacGuffin.

The film doesn't really have a lot more going for it than what anyone would come up with from the prompt "Breaking Bad meets Memento", but it's still worth a watch, if only the once.

The Last Warning (1928)

A Passable Mystery, But Peak Silent Cinema

[7/10 · 30 April 2024]

This dazzling example of late silent cinema was available only in shoddy, awful looking prints for 80 years or more, until it was restored in 2016 and finally released on home video in 2019, and now for the most part looks fantastic. It was the final film made by the great Paul Leni, whose magnificent "The Man Who Laughs" is one of the absolutely essential silent works everyone needs to see at least once before they die.

The story of this one is a cross between The Cat And The Canary and The Phantom of The Opera, but not really as good as either: an actor is killed onstage and everyone in the cast and crew becomes a suspect; the theatre closes for years until the play is revived, and the killer plans to kill all over again. There's secret passageways and cobwebs galore, and a decent enough mystery, but it's got to be said the plot's a little messy and hard to follow at times.

It's in the visuals that The Last Warning really shines, with the camera in every scene swooping and zooming in on every action taking place, and great use of depth of field to draw one's eyes to things happening in the background: the camera is always doing something, always telling us something about the story and the characters, purely through visual means. This is the very peak of what silent cinema was reaching for at the end of the 1920s, just before the talkies came in the following year and largely destroyed that artform and the box of tricks it used for everyone but Alfred Hitchcock, at least until Citizen Kane came along. I always like to imagine what might have happened if sound had not been introduced for another 15 or twenty years; what visual magic and ways of imparting story through image might have been achieved.

In summation, then: not the most compelling or meaningful story but one full of energy, movement and endless inventiveness. A great delight for the eyes.

7½/10.

The Unknown (1927)

A Lost Masterpiece Still In Dire Need Of An Editor Today

[8/10 · 22 April 2024]

This Tod Browning film has a legendary status that always baffled me in the past, because it was often referred to as some sort of half-lost classic, whereas the truncated and poor quality versions of the film I had been able to see before, while an obvious cult contender because of the bizarre premise (a criminal hiding in a circus pretends to have no arms, only to chop his real ones off in hopes of winning the neurotic woman he loves) often seemed just too silly to convince, at least as a whole. At no point does Lon Chaney ever convincingly look like an arm-less man, and the shots of him dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief obviously held by someone else's foot at times teeter much too close to comedy and so continually break the spell.

The new Criterion Blu-Ray restoration is visually far better than any that came before it, and about a quarter of an hour longer, too, but the desire to restore the film to as much of its original runtime as possible means they have included every scrap of negative they've been able to lay their hands on, and so practically every shot begins and ends with damaged or excess frames, making the whole thing feel like a glitchy, unfinished workprint. On top of this, all the title cards are on screen for more than twice as long as they need be, and a few of them are needlessly repetitive (all the "hands! Hands! I hate men's hands!" stuff) and overly-melodramatic. These two aspects alone affect the flow and forward motion of the film terribly.

In addition, the new score is generic and forgettable piano music, of the kind I strongly dislike: it would have been much better to have commissioned something like that which accompanies the other newly restored Browning film, 'The Mystic', with its thick, eerie atmosphere and precisely-added sound effects, or the John Cale score from 1999.

All these issues frustrated me so much when I watched it that I actually spent a couple of days making my own edit, fixing all the issues I listed above and a few more, and I can say that spending so much time poring over each frame has made my respect for the film and its maker go up enormously, and I now see the rich, deep and thoughtful work of art that lies within it. Chaney's performance is more impressive when pared back a little: trimming some of the continual over-the-top reaction shots makes one focus upon and treasure the smaller details he puts in.

There are some fantastic moments from Chaney - the point he realizes his self-mutilation was for nothing is the high point of the whole film, and one of the most powerful scenes in all cinema - but Joan Crawford is excellent too: clearly a star in the making, and more beautiful than she would ever be again. And repeated viewings made me really appreciate Norman Kerry, as the handsome circus strongman also devoted to Crawford: at first he seems simply light relief, but his subtle waves of hurt and longing and confusion provide the loving heart of the film. He plays a character so simple, physical and passionate that he simply cannot understand a woman with past trauma who shrinks from any man's touch. The scenes in which they eventually overcome this are deeply moving.

So that's my take on the pic: yes, a lost masterpiece, but still in dire need of a editor even today.

The Mystic (1925)

Spooks & Swindlers

[7/10 · 19 April 2024]

This fantastic film I'd never even heard of until today, made by the creator of the immortal Freaks (1932) and Dracula (1931), Tod Browning. It's never even been released on any home video format before, but the recent blu-ray has been lovingly restored, and now, almost a hundred years later, looks the best it ever has, with one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard accompany a silent, care of the long-time David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley, who adds a woozy, warped, disorientating atmosphere you can cut with a knife, along with painstakingly-added sound effects, all of which enhance the experience enormously. Every silent film should be accompanied in this way.

Like Freaks, Mystic is the story of carnival folk with a moral code of their own, this time a phony psychic act that travels from Hungary to New York to try get rich by fleecing the wealthy before falling foul of the law. It loses steam a little towards the end, but the early parts put me in mind of Nightmare Alley (1947) and Varieté (released the same year, 1925), and it's not far off being as good as them both, which is quite the complement. A splendid discovery.

7.5/10.

Niagara (1953)

Marilyn Could Be Better, But Otherwise An Enjoyable Hitchcock-Like Suspenser

[7/10 · 10 April 2024]

I just watched this film for the first time a few days ago: all I really knew about it beforehand was it had Marilyn act more than she usually did. And she *does* act against type, being more of a femme fatale than the sexy comic relief, but she's not the best thing in the film at all, which doesn't play to her strengths.

It's mostly an above-average Hitchcock-like suspenser, too bright, colorful and linear to be film noir, but the last half hour especially is very good at using images to build tension, and there's some creative twists along the way. It would have benefited from a more firm and memorable final scene, but it's generally a compelling and enjoyable watch.

6.7/10.

American Gigolo (1980)

The First Eighties Movie

[6/10 · 30 March 2024]

It had been many years since I saw this film, which I'd filed away in my memory as decent enough but rather shallow before. This time round, it seems a much more solidly-made work about loneliness in a cold, transactional world, with memorable characters and situations, for the most part very well-crafted and told, and of the films he directed, it might actually be Paul Schrader's best. It's certainly his most iconic.

The basic premise, of a male prostitute being wrongly charged with a murder, could easily have become silly, sordid or embarrassing, but Richard Gere, at his most impeccably beautiful, makes it all seem rather glamorous, although because of that the film lacks true feeling and realism, often resembling the cover of a fashion magazine more than anyone's lived experience.

Historically, it's of interest in that it straddles two eras perfectly: it's at once a paranoid, downbeat seventies thriller and an MTV music video. It really feels as though the 80s aesthetic begins here, and the Giorgio Moroder synthesizer soundtrack sounds like it could have accompanied 90% of all American films and TV shows made the next ten years. Without American Gigolo, it's very hard to imagine there ever being, say, a Miami Vice or Drive.

On the other hand, the ending feels disjointed and weak, concluding with a series of short and uninteresting scenes that briefly begin and then fade to black. I can't help but think this could have been handled much more compellingly, and it would have been nice if there had been some kind of a twist to the mystery of who was trying to destroy Gere's life. Instead, there's just a bunch of dull formalities and then a somewhat unrealistic happy ending. Which again, is very eighties, and another sign of the changing of the guard.

6.8/10.

You'll Never Find Me (2023)

A Weak Ending Lets Down An Otherwise Excellent Indie Horror

[6/10 · 23 March 2024]

In the middle of a cold, dark, rainy night, a lonely man, living an isolated life in a trailer park, gives shelter to a woman who knocks at his door.

This new Australian horror gets an enormous amount of tension and atmosphere out of what is essentially a two-person story, set entirely in a mobile home. The camerawork is very high quality, wringing as much mood and texture out of the set's limited space as is possible, and the dialogue between the two leads is nuanced and constantly shifting, piquing one's attention and curiosity throughout. Brendan Rock, as the creepy man with the big, sad eyes, puts in a tremendous performance that will stay with you a long time.

The last third of the film is weaker, and more predictable, once the reveal happens, and it becomes kinda what you expected the film to be all along, which is a disappointment. And the final conclusion is not clear enough to satisfy the investment in the story: have we been watching some kind of purgatory all this time? Are these ghosts? Is any of this real?

If the filmmakers had come up with a great and unexpected ending, this could have been a cult film for the ages, but without a first-rate payoff, the best I can give it is a 6.66/10.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)

Excellently made in almost every department, but sluggish and underwritten

[6/10 · 17 March 2024]

A young widow moves to the seaside and into a cottage haunted by the ghost of a cantankerous sailor.

Lovely premise, acting, sets, photography and direction, but the script is noticeably quite a bit below par and doesn't live up to its potential. Rex Harrison and the devastatingly beautiful Gene Tierney are splendid in the lead roles, but attempts at evoking some kind of immortal romance between the two of them are entirely unconvincing, and there's practically no substance to the story at all past the outline stated above.

Still a nice place to go but it's quite a slog getting there.

6½ stars out of 10.

Next (2007)

Better Now Than Then

[6/10 · 19 February 2024]

One of the few upsides of the catastrophic collapse of cinema the past 6 or 7 years is I've been going back to watch films that passed me by the first time around. This is one of those; a sci-fi-esque action thriller with Nicolas Cage as a man who can see two minutes into his own future, and Julianne Moore as the FBI agent trying to bring him in to prevent a terrorist attack.

Preposterous stuff, of course, and full to the brim with plot-holes; it's apparently based very, VERY loosely on a Philip K. Dick short story, but it doesn't ponder any of the implications of the themes it raises with any depth or make even the slightest attempt at realism, and none of it ever feels like it makes much sense.

So it's really nothing more than a big, dumb, fast-moving action flick, but it's exciting and enjoyable all the same, in an effortlessly fun way that would actually seem impossible for anyone working in Hollywood to achieve today. So I like it much more now than I would have then.

5.9/10.

The Palace (2023)

Patchy but Fun, and Polanski's Best Comedy

[6/10 · 12 February 2024]

It is New Year's Eve 1999, at a luxury hotel in Switzerland. A grotesque gallery of the filthy rich gather to see in the new year, with many afraid the Y2K bug is imminently about to destroy western civilization...

-------------

Roman Polanski's latest film flopped at the box office and got awful reviews, but of course that's mostly because of the present political climate and the line the mainstream media have taken to "cancel" its creator. The film IS indubitably erratic, especially early on: full use is not made of the majority of story-lines, and most don't conclude in any satisfactory way. It also feels a little rushed and uncertain and as though several corners (and scenes) were cut. But there are a bunch of funny and ludicrous moments along the way, and the overall freak-show tone of it - the nightmarish way it depicts humanity, especially the very rich - feels much like something out of Gulliver's Travels. It doesn't more than half-succeed at any point, but at least it's reaching for something.

The cast has a variety of slightly over the hill famous faces, like Mickey Rourke, Fanny Ardant, and John Cleese as a nonagenarian oil tycoon celebrating his one year wedding anniversary with his dumpy young bride. But the best performance is probably by Hansueli Kopf, as the hotel director tirelessly trying to please them all and hold the show together.

Polanski has always been terrible at comedy; much too broad and heavy-handed, and it's clear some of the things that make him laugh don't translate into tickling most other people. But the truth is, I definitely enjoyed this one more than any of his other ones, like "The Fearless Vampire Killers", "What?" and "Pirates". I could be wrong, but the impression I get is that he just wanted one time to make a decent comedy before he dies, and if this does turn out to be the last film he ever makes, he really didn't do as bad as we're being told.

All of Us Strangers (2023)

A gay "Truly, Madly, Deeply" meets "Jacob's Ladder"

[5/10 · 10 February 2024]

Very hard to know how to rate this, as the damned thing's sluggish and repetitive and takes far too much time getting basically nowhere. But it is also flawlessly acted by the speaking cast of four, and made with palpable care and feeling. It succeeds in creating a hauntingly nightmarish atmosphere that grips one's attention and makes one want to keep on watching, but the second half goes nowhere, very slowly, and there is never, at any point, anything real to hold onto, which eventually just becomes frustrating and then annoying.

Basically, the story is; a lonely homosexual writer living in an oddly deserted London tower block starts a relationship with one of his neighbors and also occasionally visits his parents in the country, all of whom turn out to be dead. That's it. The End.

The only interpretation of this heavily foreshadowed turn of events that feels worthwhile and not a waste of time is that EVERYBODY'S dead, including the protagonist, and that the whole thing has been set in some form of purgatory, in which we all work through all the unresolved traumas and sparks of love of our lives, long after death.

But that isn't made even a little bit clear, and in fact the film presents no hints that the lead is himself dearly departed, so the end result is just a kind of meandering, self-indulgent wallow in muddled feelings. Because of that, I can't really in good conscience give the movie more than 5½ stars.

I will add, though, that it makes fitting and first-rate use of one of humanity's greatest-ever love songs, Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "The Power of Love", which did not go unnoticed or unappreciated by this reviewer.

Perfect Days (2023)

Komorebi

[6/10 · 4 February 2024]

The new film from Wim Wenders actually feels more like an obscure indie Jim Jarmusch flick than Wings of Desire or Until The End Of The World: a very quiet film about a very quiet man living in Japan and working cleaning public toilets while driving around listening to cassettes of Lou Reed and Patti Smith.

Aside from some very mild drama in the last half hour, that's about it for the story: it's the kind of film you can easily watch at double speed and feel confident you're not missing anything, but it's also a touching tribute to the goodness in people, of those still conscientiously carrying out the work that holds civilization together, living just as hard a life as anyone else, all while finding pleasure in the smallest of moments, and in this way it creeps up on you as an unexpectedly heartwarming, feel-good film.

Thursday (1998)

A Quarter Century On, It's Dated But Still Fun

[7/10 · 31 January 2024]

It must be 15 years since I've seen this film, but I remember liking it a lot, and I've always been puzzled that I've never met anyone else who's seen it. Coming back to it today I find it has dated more than I would have thought, with the nineties big suits, rubber dresses and Beverly Hills 90210 skin tones. It's also rather more obvious now how much a calculated and somewhat artificial rip-off of early Tarantino this was, but, considering everyone else was doing the same at the time, it remains, along with Get Shorty and Go, one of the best of its kind in this regard.

Overall, the film is clunky and cheap, close to feeling straight-to-video, and there's nothing imaginative or memorable about any of the images within it. But there's some absolutely hilarious scenes, and the twists and turns work very well, making it a likeable and fun companion to hang out with for an hour and a half.

Death Takes a Holiday (1934)

A Dark, Romantic Myth in B&W

[8/10 · 21 January 2024]

A startlingly original film: eerie, mythic, poetic and cosmos-sized. A bit like 'A Matter Of Life And Death' (1946), if you've seen that, but more deeply mystical and philosophical, really peering beyond life and celebrating love and the nobility of human aspiration in a way that would seem too much if made today, like watching a Romantic poet from the 1800s make an Instagram video.

It was remade later on as the much more conventional sappy romance Meet Joe Black in 1998, but that was a lot more dumbed down than this and massively overlong at more than twice the length.

Being an early and somewhat stagey sound-film, Death Takes A Holiday *does* show its age, and will likely seem a little creaky to many, but it really works at what it sets out to do and there are stretches of Death's monologues that are on a deeper level of profundity than just about anything I can remember being heard said in a movie before. So I'm giving this an only slightly over-generous 8 stars.

Such a Pretty Little Beach (1949)

Wonderful atmosphere, but the story is slight and the second half drags terribly

[6/10 · 15 January 2024]

The film begins splendidly, with Gerard Philipe arriving by bus to an out-of-the-way and out-of-season seaside town where it always rains and the beach is always empty. He checks into the little inn there claiming to be a student looking for some peace and quiet for his nerves, but clearly he has a big secret he is hiding, and an elderly resident of the inn seems to recognize him, too.

All this is established admirably, and the mystery and atmosphere it generates is first rate. Unfortunately, once we start to learn more of his story, the mystery falls away and the rest of the film is just interminable shots of Philipe wandering around in the rain and occasionally crying for no reason we can see. None of the other characters have any depth or believability to them, and many of their actions don't seem to make sense. Random generic statements about orphans throughout bog the story down and never add up to anything clear or meaningful. One gets the feeling the creators didn't get any further than the premise before starting making the film and then just gave up putting any more work into keeping the ball rolling.

So the second half of the film is undeniably a failure, but up till that point it's really very good indeed, and a great example of the kind of film noir that only the French could make.

No One Will Save You (2023)

When A Zombie Apocalypse Would Be An Improvement In Your Circumstances

[6/10 · 31 December 2023]

Very much enjoyed this low-profile alien home invasion movie that entirely passed me by until today. It can probably be best described as a "Spielbergian Horror" - not hugely scary but very well made and with a very similar feel to parts of Close Encounters and Poltergeist (along with a dash of Halloween).

All good stuff, obviously, and more than that, it's the most purely cinematic experience I've had with a new film for awhile, since there are pretty much two lines of dialogue spoken in the whole thing, with everything being communicated through the acting, sound and moving pictures. Most of the time you don't notice this at all, but it actually helps to build tension considerably, and it grips and connects a lot more because of it.

It was made on a relatively small ($22 million) budget but looks great, though the CGI aliens can sometimes appear a little generic and unfinished. Kaitlyn Dever, in the main and almost sole role, is splendid: she carries the whole film on her shoulders, being in just about every shot, and it's a near-flawless performance.

Apparently some folk don't like the ending - and I would agree it could have been pulled off more clearly and engagingly - but it's still an interesting and less predictable note to leave the story on, and it's solid in just about every regard up until then.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

A clumsy, overlong and frustratingly insubstantial film with good performances

[6/10 · 16 December 2023]

Watched this recent French film last night; the winner of this year's Palme d'Or, which says something about the level of competition in the world of film today.

It's an excellently acted and well-shot story of a wife on trial for the possible murder of her husband, who is found fallen from the highest window of their alpine home, but at 2½ hours, it's a good 40 or 50 minutes too long for such a small and relatively simple tale. There are endless courtroom scenes that don't progress the narrative or lead to any shocking twists, which could have easily been compressed or pared down in more competent hands.

It's an extremely - and frustratingly - female film, in its wallowing in subjectivity and its repeated assertion that what one feels is actual reality, rather than the facts of the matter, and as a result, there is no clear ending to the film, the message being that you can choose to believe whatever the hell you like. But of course this is silly nonsense: either one human being pushed another human being out of a window or they didn't, and in a murder trial, that should be all that matters.

So yes, it's a strange thing to rate: on a moment-by-moment basis, it's well-observed and often engrossing, but the substance of the story itself is flimsy and, in the final analysis, almost non-existent, so the most I can generously give it is 6/10.

The Driver's Seat (1974)

Madness, Macrobiotics and Murder

[7/10 · 28 November 2023]

Quite mesmerizing film of a Muriel Spark novel, a grippingly nightmarish journey of a deranged woman travelling to Rome in search of her own death. The film has a fairly unique and dreamlike atmosphere all it's own, with every event heightened and irrational, filtered through the fevered consciousness of a frizzy-haired and panda-eyed Elizabeth Taylor. You can't, at any time, ever be sure what is supposed to be real and what isn't: every person she encounters is presented how *she* sees or imagines them, rather than how they objectively *are*, and as a result the film is so strange that even a couple of appearances by a white-suited Andy Warhol, as an English lord(!) seem perfectly reasonable and unsurprising.

Taylor is splendid in this highly unexpected and out-of-character arthouse role - her last great one: a madwoman striding around a world of her own making in a truly awful dress. It must have taken some courage for such a glamorous Hollywood icon to present herself in this unflattering a light, for she was still at the time a strikingly attractive woman, just slightly over the hill and going to seed, which she plays up and accentuates throughout.

Those looking for a simple and easily-digestible narrative may find it all very pretentious and frustrating, but I found I was thoroughly absorbed by every scene up until the very end, which looked good but I didn't feel resolved the story in a satisfactory-enough way.

It's definitely not for most, but if you're a fan of other classics in the 'Crumbling Female Psyche' genre, such as Mulholland Drive, Persona or Repulsion, there's a lot here to like.

7½/10.

Lovers of Paris (1957)

Lovers of Paris

[8/10 · 27 November 2023]

Wonderful film I'd never heard of before by the great French director Julien Duvivier, based on the Emile Zola novel Pot-Bouille, which I'd also never heard of.

A handsome young man comes to 19th Century Paris and begins seducing a broad cross-section of the womenfolk of his new neighborhood while scheming to succeed as a salesman in two rival fabric stores.

The film put me in mind of the great films of Max Ophuls - "Le Plaisir", "La Ronde" and "The Earrings of Madame de..." - and it has the same delight in, and acceptance of, the mysteries of love and romance.

The cast are all faultless, but Gérard Philipe in the lead (never better) and the magnificent Danielle Dumont, as the tightly-buttoned owner of one of said stores, easily outshine them all. They add depth and nuance to a story that could have been broad comedy in lesser hands, simply through glances and body language, their thoughts and feelings flickering across their faces. A treat.

Ház a sziklák alatt (1958)

People In The Grip Of Circumstances

[7/10 · 22 November 2023]

Hungarian story of Ferenc, a Soviet prisoner-of-war, returning to his village after World War II to find his wife dead and his son being raised by her hunchbacked sister Teri. She has long unrequited feelings for him but he falls for and marries the beautiful Zsuzsa, a woman with a past. When Teri seeks to continue living with, and coming between them, the tensions in the small house between the three of them build until they spill over into violence.

Well shot, delicately acted and intelligently made, "The House Under the Rocks" is a seemingly simple but darkly nuanced tale that deserves its high reputation within Hungarian cinema, built upon eternally-relevant realities of love and life.

Talk to Me (I) (2022)

Good Old Clothes In A New Style

[7/10 · 27 October 2023]

Surprisingly impressive new Australian horror, made for practically nothing but out of nowhere has become one of the biggest financial successes of the year, making its budget back 20 times over, so far.

The story is centered around a bunch of teens who have come into possession of what is said to be a dead fortune-teller's hand, and by holding it they get to commune with the dead. The fresh new take on this well-worn tale mostly revolves around the ways the teens treat the experience like a drug or content to be posted on their social media accounts, with little consideration of the weight or meaning or forces involved.

The young cast are all solid, better in most cases than the majority of actors the same age you'll see on TV or in big-budget movies, and the lead actress, Sophie Wilde, is particularly good. It speaks to the amount of loving care and attention that must have gone into the film's making that they could make something that looks and feels like such a real and genuinely engaging movie with so few funds, but regardless of the budget it's rare to see a film so tightly and competently made today.

Peter & the Wolf (2023)

A Fresh and Imaginative Take on Prokofiev's Tale

[6/10 · 20 October 2023]

At first glance a vanity project - written and originally illustrated by U2's Bono with music and narration from his best friend Gavin Friday - this actually ends up being the freshest take I've seen on this story, which has been done so many times before in the same, stale old schoolmasterly way.

This version bypasses all the introduction of the instruments, etc., and instead grounds the tale in personal feeling right from the start, with the boy Peter returning from his mother's funeral, straight away making an autobiographical connection to its creator's own mother's death as a child that succeeds in holding one's interest in the story and lending it emotional weight.

The musical instrumentation is similarly fresh and modern, but it's underused, and there's not much more to it than just the main theme repeated a bunch. The animation, too, is detailed and evocative, but feels somewhat generic and computerized, without anything to really make it stand out from every other cartoon today.

In conclusion, then, this new version of Peter and The Wolf is self-indulgent and slight, but short and enjoyable, with an immediacy the story hasn't had before, and it manages to make something very old and familiar feel like something new.

6/10.