The movie opens with the flat, confiding voice of Tommy Lee Jones. He describes a teenage killer he once sent to the chair. The boy had killed his 14-year-old girlfriend. The papers described it as a crime of passion, “but he tolt me there weren’t nothin’ passionate about it. Said he’d been fixin’ to kill someone…

A suspense film that can run two hours without the audience getting restless must be pretty good. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, screenplayed by John Michael Hayes from a story by Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, meets this test.  Hitchcock fans have reached the “show-me” point where they practically challenge him to bring…

“Marnie” is the film in which Hitchcock’s method reaches the breaking point—in which Hitchcock, the master of control, loses control. When I first saw the movie, decades ago, I was still unaware of the horrifying backstory to its creation—Hitchcock’s sexual harassment of its star, Tippi Hedren. The drama itself is a story of sexual violence, which is…

Has there ever been a film where the music more perfectly suited the action than in Carol Reed’s “The Third Man”? The score was performed on a zither by Anton Karas, who was playing in a Vienna beerhouse one night when Reed heard him. The sound is jaunty but without joy, like whistling in the dark. It…

Director John Sturges found in the traditional Western the perfect vessel for Kurosawa’s honourable warrior codes, outlaw versus drifter themes, and suitably tense action set-pieces. Thus, “The Magnificent Seven” emerges as not only ludicrously enjoyable entertainment but also a superior and thoughtful character study. The story – oppressed villagers beg mysterious loner to round up some…

Steven Soderbergh returns with a phenomenal genre exercise, an old-fashioned film with one of the sharpest ensembles he’s ever assembled (which is really saying something). Once again, he is interrogating power structures—a theme of films like “High Flying Bird,” “Traffic,” “The Girlfriend Experience,” and so many other greats—embedding sharp social commentary in a story of men…

The phone rings, one of those telephones from my childhood, with a curly wire connecting the receiver. A stripy-shirted arm reaches for it tentatively. “Hello?” says a voice – deep, aristocratic, lugubrious and woozy, but unmistakably Benedict Cumberbatch (confirmed when the camera eventually looks higher). There is a delay and an echo on the line…

Now seems like an excellent time for a six-part miniseries adaptation of The Singapore Grip, J.G. Farrell’s satirical novel of British colonialists at the tip of the Malaya peninsula during World War II. The timeliness for the series, despite its 1941 setting, taps into the wider conversations about the still-present effects of centuries of colonialism…

As the blues singer, Day is magnetic in Lee Daniels’s often chaotic biopic, built around a speculative romance between Holiday and a government agent. “It was called ‘the United States of America versus Billie Holiday,’” wrote the jazz legend in her 1956 autobiography, “and that’s just the way it felt.” Holiday’s 1947 conviction, when she…

Fans of the regional, character-driven mysteries of Dennis Lehane such as “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone” should make time for HBO’s excellent “Mare of Easttown” as it shares a similar tone regarding the ripple effect of crime on a small town. Fans of HBO literary mystery adaptations like “Sharp Objects,” “Big Little Lies,” and “The Undoing”…

The first of Sergio Leone’s masterful Spaghetti Westerns is by definition a landmark — it invented a whole damn sub-genre, set Clint Eastwood upon the road to superstardom, and managed something impossible: it rejuvenated the ailing Western. In short, it was like the arrival of punk rock. By 1964, the genre was creaking in its…

Built around a tornado-strength performance by Sarah Parish as a sort of Wicked Witch of regional policing, series one back-flipped from silly to hysterical and was never less than compelling. The second series, it is a pleasure to report, is even more barking. Two loose ends are immediately tied off by writer Kate Brooke as we reconnect…

Clint Eastwood has by now become an actor whose moods and silences are so well known that the slightest suggestion will do to convey an emotion. No actor is more aware of his own instruments, and Eastwood demonstrates that in “Pale Rider,” a film he dominates so completely that only later do we realize how little…

CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS is the classic 1937 movie based on Rudyard Kipling’s famous book. It tells the story of Harvey Cheyne, a spoiled 10-year-old used to getting his own way. When he tries to bribe a teacher, he’s suspended from school. The head of the school tells Harvey’s father, a captain of industry, he needs to…

First of all – look at the stars.  Morgan Freeman is a near guarantee that a movie will be interesting, even if it is not necessarily great, and he has an Oscar to prove it.  John Cusack is one of the bigger, more interesting actors in the Hollywood scene – granted his star has been…

Every since Richard Widmark brought a fresh breath of poison to the role of a viciously psychopathic gangster in last year’s “Kiss of Death,” the gun-film cognoscenti have been waiting to catch this boy as another modern desperado with that wicked gleam in his eye. Twentieth Century-Fox is most considerate, and now, in “The Street…

Emma Stone’s Cruella de Vil is a supervillain with a believable backstory – born Estella, bullied by boys at school and established as a maverick who’s always refused to “follow the pattern” (as her single mother puts it) in both dressmaking and in life. Set in 1970s London against a backdrop of the emerging punk…

Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar” (1954) is surely one of the most blatant psychosexual melodramas ever to disguise itself in that most commodious of genres, the Western. One of the boldest and most stylized films of its time, quirky, political, twisted. Crawford bought the rights to the original novel, Nicholas Ray signed on to direct, and…

The “real” case files of paranormal investigator couple Ed and Lorraine Warren (viewed as either magical samaritans or publicity-hungry charlatans, depending on who you believe) have inspired two direct dramatisations thus far (one in Rhode Island and one in Enfield) and provided the jump-off for three films about their devious doll Annabelle (the last of…

Vittorio De Sica’s wartime drama La ciociara (Two Women, 1960) had a decidedly peculiar genesis. Adapted from a 1957 novel by Alberto Moravia, with a script by De Sica’s long-time collaborator Cesare Zavattini, the film was based on real-life events that took place in Italy in 1943 – later dubbed the Marocchinate – in which Moroccan troops…

The charismatic stars of “The Hitman’s Bodyguard”—Ryan Reynolds shifting into lovable-loser gear as a down-graded protection agent for hire, Samuel L. Jackson in macho-and-mouthy mode as a profanely proficient deadly assassin and Salma Hayek as the sexy spitfire of a spouse who is devoted to him—all combust with masterful comic chemistry as they play off their well-established cinematic personas. As…

Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, said once, “If the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” I thought of that quote often while watching David Oyelowo’s very moving directorial debut. “The Water Man,” with screenplay by Emily A. Needell, is about tough subjects, subjects even adults find hard to…

“Godzilla vs. Kong” is a crowd-pleasing, smash-’em-up monster flick and a straight-up action picture par excellence. It is a fairy tale and a science-fiction exploration film, a Western, a pro wrestling extravaganza, a conspiracy thriller, a Frankenstein movie, a heartwarming drama about animals and their human pals. It has rainstorms and explosions and into-the-wormhole light shows, giant mammals and…

Bob Odenkirk takes an unexpected turn in Ilya Naishuller’s “Nobody,” a clever action flick that repositions the star of “Better Call Saul” as someone closer to Liam Neeson’s action heroes. While imagining one of the brilliant minds behind “Mr. Show” as an action hero may seem like a stretch, it turns out to be a stroke of genius as…

“Godzilla Versus Bambi” is Steven Spielberg’s high concept encapsulation for Duel. Tapping into the hidden terrors on the open road, this originally made for TV opus is consummate storytelling in pictures. Like most early efforts, it overflows with a delight in the potential of movies, but matches it with directorial proficiency and unflagging excitement to…

Hondo Lane : I got a bad habit of tellin’ the truth, but being pretty isn’t much. I know a lot of pretty people I wouldn’t trust with a busted nickle-plated watch. But some others, somethin’ comes outa the inside of ’em and you know you can trust ’em. Destarti had that. And you’ve got it…

Nicole Riegel’s debut feature “Holler” is a film to treasure—an intimate drama about family and work, steeped in details that can only have been captured by a storyteller who lived them. It follows a resilient, resourceful high school senior named Ruth whose family struggles to survive in a dying industrial community in Ohio. Ruth is torn between leaving town to take her chances…

“The Comancheros,” is so studiously wild and woolly it turns out to be good fun.There’s not a moment of seriousness in it, not a detail that isn’t performed with a surge of exaggeration, not a character that is credible. When John Wayne, a rugged Texas Ranger, picks the gambling Stuart Whitman off a boat in…

Who has a why to live, can bear with almost any how. When you have a great passion, it dramatically changes your willingness to spend energy and take risk.  When the stakes are a large sum of money people don’t take great risks. When the stakes are love and life and that which has incalculable…

A strong cast of familiar faces provides much-needed gravitas to Timothy Woodward Jr.’s Western drama delivering cinematic comfort food to fans of the venerable genre. Starring Michael Pare (displaying a weathered but still formidable charisma that moviegoers will recall from the likes of Streets of Fire and Eddie and the Cruisers), Traded features nary an original element but nonetheless registers as a…

Bad Day at Black Rock marked MGM’s first release shot in Cinemascope, and Sturges, nominated for an Academy Award for the film, transforms the expansive emptiness of his frame into an omnipresent character. After an opening credit sequence in which a train hurtles through the empty desert (an aggressive image of contemporary 1945 culture intruding into…

Based on the life of Fernande Grudet, more commonly known as “Madame Claude”, Sylvie Verheyde’s biopic follows the brothel-keeper’s life through a period of excessive success to her eventual fall from grace. Claude (Karole Rocher) is at the centre of the Paris underworld in the late 60s, managing over 300 sex workers whose clients (or…

This seamlessly woven thriller centers on the life and work of homicide detective William Wisting, a hero devoid of any trace of psychological darkness, internal demons, or singular passions of any kind—he’s not devoted to the opera either—characteristic of so many fictional detectives. For this, and all other aspects of Wisting’s heroically stolid presence (a…

I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between. Francois Truffaut Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” (1959) is one of the most intensely touching stories ever made about a young adolescent. Inspired by Truffaut’s own early…

“Together Together” is not just smart, it’s sneaky-smart. You go into it thinking you know what you’re getting into, and feeling impatient or dismissive as a result, because the movie conspicuously makes choices that seem intended to announce which boxes it’s about to check off. Then it keeps confounding you—in a way that’s understated rather than show-offy—until…

Break ups are never easy, but a break up right before a sibling’s wedding? That’s the pickle the couple finds themselves in Jeff Rosenberg’s romantic dramedy “We Broke Up.” Do they announce their big sad news before the wedding? Or, do they pretend to stay together so not to overshadow the couple getting married? That…

“Wrath of Man” is one of Guy Ritchie’s best-directed movies—and one of his most surprising, at least in terms of style and tone. Gone is the jumpy, busy, lighthearted, buzzed-bloke-in-a-pub-telling-you-a-tale vibe of film like “Snatch”. In its place is voluptuous darkness, so sinister that you may wonder if its main character is the devil himself.  This character…

The first two series of Follow the Money were spent in fancy offices and boardrooms of Energreen and Absalon Bank respectively. With the third and final series, we depart from the previous two and set off on what has been described as almost a spin-off. It is immediately signalled in the opening credits, where we literally follow…

“Halston” is an empathetic portrait of someone you wouldn’t want to work for, be in love with, or trust a great deal of money with. The American women’s fashion designer, an “artist who liked to spend money,” was audacious to put it lightly, and so too is this compelling epic about ego that embeds you…

Some movies tell you where their story is going. There’s little surprise left when the viewer can predict a turn or even guess the dialogue. The other side of that is the kind of movie that’s so unlike anything you’ve seen before, you can’t possibly fathom what’s next. Many good-to-fine movies exist within those two…

“The Dry,” the film adaptation of Jane Harper’s 2016 international bestseller of the same name, opens with aerial shots of the parched land in Kiewarra, a farming community somewhere outside Melbourne. But there’s clearly no farming going on in the arid expanse below, with its lifeless stretches of dried brown fields. These shots continue throughout…

The phrase “they don’t make ’em like that anymore” could well have been coined to describe this classic screwball comedy. It’s more that they can’t make ’em like this anymore. Imagine a comedy with a script more twisty than Inception and has the two of the most popular “serious” actors around make fools of themselves….

She’s a haughty and demanding Philadelphia heiress; he’s an arrogant playboy. The Katharine Hepburn-Cary Grant pairing in The Philadelphia Story pits these two forces against one another. Those scenes highlight their effortless charisma and singular uniqueness. One could see the film as the story of a free-spirited woman deliberately placing herself within a cage, stuck with a…

The classic film Roman Holiday starring the angelic Audrey Hepburn and the stern yet charming Gregory Peck is the romance film that set the precedent for all romantic comedies that have occurred for the past 50 years. Every romance film that is presented at the box office today is reminiscent of the perfect love story between Ann…

Charles is “stuck.” That’s the word more than one person uses to describe him. He spends most of his time in the second floor apartment of his Brooklyn walk-up, as oblivious to the world outside as it is to him. When his very pregnant neighbor from the building next door says she’s never seen him…

“- Helen St. James: There must be a reason why you drink, Don? The right doctor could find it.– Don Birnam: Look, I’m way ahead of the right doctor. I know the reason. The reason is me – what I am. Or, rather, what I’m not. What I wanted to become and didn’t.” You’d be forgiven…

If you want to be engaged—to be sucked into a story completely, enveloped by another time and place—then the BBC’s epic World War II series might be just the ticket.  Peter Bowker’s “World On Fire” does one thing that seems especially appropriate right now: It focuses on the lives of people far from the podiums…

Part personal essay, part investigation, the docuseries “Exterminate All the Brutes” is a striking piece of nonfiction work that has the intellectual rigor of an advanced history course, and asks that viewers keep up with its many ideas and horrors over the course of its four hours. Raoul Peck picks and pulls at every connecting…

“Hey girlfriendI got a proposition goes something like this:Dare ya to do what you wantDare ya to be who you willDare ya to cry right out loud.” — Bikini Kill, “Hey Girlfriend” Those “dares” sound so simple, but they’re not, particularly in high school. High school is difficult for girls, but it’s difficult for boys, too…

At a party, somewhere in Stockholm, a young man called Christian is selling drugs, to a woman called Inez, with a Z. Uh, oh, Christian’s mum, Hanna, a cop, suddenly shows up, with a couple of uniformed colleagues. Empty your pockets, son. “Happy?” he asks her, when they find a load of guilty little plastic…