Film Reviews by KW

This 3 film collection gives you famous 'Freaks' from 1930, a tale of the hard and dangerous lives of 'freakshow' performers which could be read as a film championing the equality of disabled people but the memorably shocking ending does undermine that to an extent. Also in the collection is a very entertaining silent film 'The Unknown', in which a circus performer who is considered harmless because he is armless, turns out to be anything but harmless or armless. Thrilling melodrama ensues in a way that could only possibly make sense in a silent movie. Finally, the least of the three films is 'The Mystic,' which is still an interesting story about a seancing scam gone wrong. In this edition, it has an imaginative and moody soundtrack added that mixes music and effects well.

All the films in the box set look magnificent so if you are a fan of this era, this is well worth seeing.

They Live by Night is the impressive directorial debut of Nicholas Ray and, like so much of what was to follow, it engages with themes of alienation, youth and social injustice, in this instance through a hybrid film noir/romance. Cathy O' Donnel and Farley Granger are the young people who don't have a chance from the start - she because she has come of age looking after a gangster parent in a hideout, he because circumstances have led him to spend his adolescence in prison. They are both innocents on the run and that innocence is perhaps best exemplified in a sequence in which they have a date in the daytime like normal people and find that everyday world mysteriously, intoxicatingly beautiful. Much of the film takes place at night in a depression era world of victims on every corner. They get married at 2 a.m. in an all night budget wedding chapel that offers 20 dollar basic weddings, 30 dollars including a phonograph recording, and wedding rings for sale at 5 dollars or to rent for 1 dollar. The proprietor of that establishment also offers them a car to drive away from trouble and justifies his behaviour as being about selling hope.

They Live by Night is ultimately a romantic tragedy, a tale of people not being able to escape the shackles of the past. It is, for the time it was made, technically innovative with good use of more natural sound and what might be Hollywood's first action sequence shot from a helicopter.

A fascinating slice of rural romantic noir.

Criterion collection bluray looks great and has good extras.

Eloise, an eighteen-year-old student, moves from rural Cornwall to London to study fashion, and whilst the opportunity is exciting, she really wishes she had been there in the 1960s, that time of Carnaby Street fashion, creativity and glamour. After suffering the kind of horrific freshers' experience that her grandmother was worried about, Eloise moves into a bedsit in Soho, away from the bullying glare of her contemporaries on the course. She unpacks her 60s records, dreams of the 60s, and then goes downstairs into the streets of Soho, where it is now the 1960s and a very Technicolor 60s at that, reminiscent of 'Peeping Tom.' In the 1960s Eloise partly follows and partly embodies Sandie, a wannabe singer hoping to be the next Cilla Black, who is routinely exploited by the seedy men who lurk in every dark corner of Soho. As the film progresses, past and present get very muddled, and Eloise must not allow the past to catch up with her.

Last Night in Soho is a magnificent, bold piece of cinema. I thought the early scenes where Eloise and Sandie have to mirror each other benefited from really clever visual effects and performances with fantastic attention to detail. To pull off a film this mad, I suppose you have to commit and everyone does, from the woman who played Mrs Doyle in Father Ted kindly offering Eloise a job (but not a cup of tea) to Terence Stamp oozing something sinister and creepily 1960s whilst nursing a drink at the bar, to Matt Smith being much, much meaner than we've ever seen him before, to the music soundtrack that accents glamour, sleaze and ghostly presences all at the same time.

The last scene felt like a bit of a tagged on Hollywood ending, but I can forgive this because what precedes is so eye poppingly mad.

Last Night in Soho is not a scary film but it is quite eerie. Top tip to freak your partner out - watch it with them late at night, then set Alexa or similar to come on at 2 a.m. playing the song, 'Last Night in Soho.' They will forgive you in the end. Maybe.

This film is part of the interesting John Ford at Columbia box set, in that it is a collection of films by John Ford that you would not think were John Ford films (another is Gideon's Day which follows a day in the life of a London policeman and is a curiosity worth seeing).

Edward G. Robinson plays the dual roles of a mild-mannered ordinary guy who works in an office and has fallen in love with the sparky modern gal played with great energy by Jean Arthur, but he is also the ruthless murdering gangster who is an unlikely double. Drama and comedy combine as the two men get mistaken for each other, in a movie that succeeds largely because Edward G. Robinson absolutely nails the distinctly different mannerisms of the two characters he is playing, to the extent that as an audience we need no dialogue to figure out who's who.

This is a wildly entertaining film, and audiences of the time must have been dazzled by the visual effects. To a modern audience, the back projection looks a bit obvious, but in one of the extras on the disc Leonard Maltin claims there is a scene where two Edward G. Robinsons are talking to each other within the frame: one is smoking and as he exhales, the smoke wanders in front of the other Edward G. Robinson. It's difficult to figure out how that was done with the technology of the 1930s.

If you enjoy Hollywood movies of this period, this one should suck you in within the first three minutes - quality popcorn fare from the golden age.

'Deep Cover' is a neo-noir crime thriller in which Laurence Fishburne (at this point still Larry) plays a cop who moves from being in uniform to going undercover as a drugs dealer to try to take down the hierarchy of fellow dealers from within.

Plotwise this has more holes than an English packet of polos or American lifesavers (I'm not going to win noir fiction prizes with lines like that). Why does the cop take the assignment when it makes absolutely no sense for him to do so? Really the only plausible answer is that it is the predestination of a noir set-up that makes it so. Why can a city's entire police force not manage to stop a limousine fleeing the scene of a crime and why is it okay to stay in that limousine for a chat when the chase is over? How come 1990s policing is so devoid of ethics that drug-dealing and murder by officers barely raises an eyebrow?

In a sense to raise such questions is to miss the point, as this is one of those noir films that to me seems to exist in a parallel kind of reality, where neon lights reflect brightly on a rainswept street in a city that doesn't sleep but whose dark corners emit moody voiceovers that provide plot exposition to paper over underwritten cracks (I'm still not getting that noir writing gig).

Taken as a straightforward thriller then, 'Deep Cover' has some unresolved issues, but this is not a straightforward thriller and unresolved issues are the bread and butter of its characters. Casual racism and both conscious and unconscious bias underscore the interactions of many of the central characters in a way that may be more shocking to a contemporary audience than it was in 1992. The film doesn't get preachy but we are left in no doubt where it is coming from.

Laurence Fishburne is good and is ably supported by Jeff Goldblum, whose hair gets more slicked back as he gets more greedy and evil. That tends to happen in films of this era. It's like the villains blow all the money they spend on Brylcreem and then apply it to their heads all in one go.

In fact, Jeff Goldblum is, at the start of the film anyway, fairly low in the pecking order of villainous villains. His immediate superior is a very nasty and murderous piece of work, though I found his resemblance to Groucho Marx a little off-putting.

I rented the Masters of Cinema blu-ray edition of this film and I found the transfer to have really vibrant, clear colours and the sound was great. It seems to have been remixed to surround sound, which really allows the impressive soundtrack of the film to do its work, perhaps as never before.

An exciting, significant and slightly unusual film, that is well worth checking out.

Ammonite is slow cinema. Not so slow that you’re watching a fossilisation process in real time but slow, taking its time less to tell a story than to explore characters. It is evidence, should anyone need it, that slow cinema dies not mean dull. I found the film riveting throughout, largely because of the performances, particularly from Kate Winslet, who plays fossil hunter Mary Anning as a person who is so self-restrained she can barely move.  

In the last 10 minutes the film moves to London and is no longer slow cinema. I could have lived without the dramatisation which changed the tone of the film unnecessarily but this is still worth a watch and gave me a peculiar hankering for a hard boiled egg.  

Splendid British b-thriller in which an army deserter pawns his service revolver with spectacularly bad timing and is mistaken for a member of a gang who not only hold up the shop he is in, but kill a policeman in the process. The film has a really interesting focus on the plight of the thousands of army deserters who presumably in 1949 were still keeping themselves scarce, with our leading man arguing that it’s a missed opportunity, as these men have something useful to contribute to society. Both leads are great, particularly in a romantic seaside interlude that works more convincingly than romantic subplots usually do in films of this genre and era, and there’s a pretty good turn by Edward Underdown as one of the baddies - his Australian accent wanders so much that the a line appears to have been added to the script to say that his character is not actually from Australia but has visited lots. Fun fact - he was Ian Fleming’s choice to play a movie version of James Bond (but no one else’s). Extras on the Network blu ray are slim - an alternative, happier German ending and a stills gallery, but the movie is engaging, undemanding entertainment.

To create a movie like this in the deep south in 1961 was a remarkable, daring and dangerous achievement.  Whilst schools in the United States were theoretically desegregated following Brown vs Board of Education in 1954, implementation took many years to be, in many cases, reluctantly completed. Here William Shatner brilliantly plays a racist in a white suit trying to undo the progress of integration who is willing to sink very low to fulfil his aim and boost his ego. It’s a terrific, nuanced performance and for all the scratches, pops and occasionally imperfect reaction shots from a crowd of local extras working from a different script, this is edge of the seat stuff, and its age and historical specificity make it a fascinating insight into the time.

I will admit to starting this film with a certain amount of dread. It seemed to me to be one of those films that you want to have seen but never quite feel like watching, a drama that plays out over several generations, but with a length that suggests it might be in real time. The first few minutes were not encouraging, not helped by a bluray transfer that maddeningly alternates between being in pristine focus and blurry all the way through. The ratio might be correct, but I'm not sure that George Stevens' son is entirely correct when he introduces the film on the disc by promising that this is the movie as it was meant to be seen.

Nevertheless, I stuck with this tale of a Texan rancher overly tied to traditional values of the past, and was pleasantly surprised to find a 1956 movie that tackles racism, sexism and poverty in what surely must have been groundbreaking for the time. True, if you were making it now, you would develop the Mexican characters, but this is brave stuff and the altercation in a diner that won't serve non-whites was very on-the-nose for the era.

Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean are all splendid and the decision to hire young actors and then age them (rather than have older characters play young, which was the normal convention of the time) really works. The movie has some really modern flourishes, including a memorable scene of drunken despair in which James Dean is shown in longshot muttering into a microphone that happens to have fallen in front of him, his depression bouncing off the walls to shame him.

You couldn't get a movie like this anymore because television has taken over this kind of epic storytelling. The running time is challenging but well-filled; after the first forty minutes or so it never drags, though I wouldn't want to sit through the whole thing without a break. I did wonder how a couple of scenes of small children crying (in one case comically) were pulled off, but perhaps it's best that this remains a movie-making secret.

It took me decades to get around to watching Giant, but it was worth the wait. If a better bluray transfer became available, I would not wait so long to watch it again.

A group of really loud and annoying teenagers who live by the sea improbably discover a treasure map in the attic of their soon-to-be-demolished home and set off in search of lost loot pursued through oddly well-lit underground caverns by the Fratelli family of gangsters.

I was 17 when this came out and I stayed away because it seemed too loud and brash. It really is too, and the temptation to turn off in the first few minutes bordered on overpowering, largely because Corey Feldman and Jeff Cohen seem to be locked in a game of trying to out-funny each other. The trouble for me was that they played their roles as funny. They might as well have looked into the camera and said "Aren't I hilarious?" and I could have answered back that I have seen funnier performances on the ten o'clock news. A brief dip into the blu-ray commentary in which all 7 principal actors appear, reveals that actually they were playing themselves. I managed 3 minutes of commentary before I could stand no more.

Fortunately, the action soon hots up and the irritating hysterics are easier to take in the land of pirates and buried treasure to which we are headed. As a film, this sits somewhere between cinema and theme park ride - none of these characters are anything but types and we are not really being asked to care about them as people but simply go along for the ride. It's like watching an episode of Scooby Doo but without the close attention to character development (sidebar - Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated, the series that ran for two seasons from 2010 is genius).

Perhaps the appearance of the rubber-faced Sloth character helped me a long because despte everything, I enjoyed The Goonies. I don't like people talking whilst movies is on, but if you're watching at home that might actually help with the first half hour, after which the Goonies is a fairly enjoyable, entirely derivative romp.

Mickey Rooney is Eddie Shannon, shy and mild-mannered car mechanic and wannabe racing driver. Eddie is no hit with the ladies until Barbara Matthews turns up to make his heart go faster than a Grand Prix winner. She's setting him up though, for she has friends planning a bank robbery and they need a fast driver. Whether he likes it or not, Eddie is taking a trip down the fast lane....

Mickey Rooney gives a tremendous, understated performance in this movie, which is in Volume 1 of Indicator's Columbia Noir box set series. The film is well-written by Blake Edwards with none of the jokes that featured in his later movies but plenty of the Malibu locations that did. The slow burn allows the audience to get to know Eddie - his life is simple, he deserves more but it's a dark night of fast cars and gunplay and this is a film noir so don't count on a jolly song and dance routine with Judy Garland type of ending. Those days were over!

Extras on the blu-ray disc include an introduction by Martin Scorsese, audio interview with Mickey Rooney, film commentary, a bizarre showbiz featrette with Mickey Rooney and an even more bizarre Three Stooges short in which they play airforce car mechanics who inadvertently become spies after accidentally hiding in a bomb which is then dropped on Nazi Germany. In other words, the main feature is the real draw.

Gregory Peck is Johnny Ringo, the fastest draw in the land, an outlaw who wants to settle down to a life more ordinary, but he is chased down by his own mythology, a man destined to pay not just for the deeds he has done, but the stories told about him.

This is a classic western, with a brilliant central performance by Gregory Peck’s moustache, and excellent supporting performances by Gregory Peck, Karl Malden, Millard Mitchell and Peggy Westcroft. Indeed, everyone is good in this and there’s not a wasted frame in the whole thing - it is perfect, characterful, lean storytelling.

 The theme is serious and the outcome inevitable, but I was surprised at the amount of humour in the film. I particularly enjoyed the moment where a fight breaks out in the street and it may be the least energetic fight in screen history. It has nothing to do with the main plot but it does prompt an observer to comment that ‘I seen better fights at a prayer meeting.’ Excellent! 

I rented the DVD - transfer okay but not amazing and no extras. There has been a Criterion Collection release in the US so maybe a UK version will follow here.

There is a sense in which all of us play different versions of ourselves in different situations - the me at home is not the same as the one in a job interview, speaking to friends, or on hold to the phone company facing the impossible challenge of querying a bill. At a certain stage, many of us leave home and live in a different place, a process that changes us into different versions of ourselves that can make return visits home a time of tension. Interacting with parents we have cause to wonder which version of ourselves is the most authentic.

These identity issues are writ particularly large in this profoundly moving film about a man who has moved from the claustrophobic conservatism of life in an evangelical family in Texas to the relative liberation of life as a gay man in New York City in 1985. I say 'relative liberation' because this is the era of the AIDS epidemic, and this man does not have long to live. After four years he has come home but for what? To come out, say farewell, find salvation, escape the horror of the death all around him or all of the above?

Shot in black and white and on film, 1985 at times looks like a student film from several decades ago. There's a scene of singing in a church where the soundtrack is very clearly not the congregation singing, which is the kind of trick you pull when you can't afford to properly set up the sound in the church. In this scene it works really well though. This is a film with a soundtrack that really underlines the feel of the film without making the audience feel manipulated.

A very moving, heartfelt movie that impressed me enormously.