Film
emma.simmonds
Flanked by the wonderfully weird tagline, “If this picture doesn’t make your skin crawl…it’s on TOO TIGHT”, 1974’s Black Christmas is amongst the first fully formed slasher pics. Based on a series of murders that took place in Quebec, this Canadian contribution to the festive canon is dripping with seasonal cynicism. From director Bob Clark, Black Christmas sees a psychotic prank caller offing the residents of a sorority house during the Christmas period, and is most famous for the chilling line, “The call is coming from inside the house”.Black Christmas boasts a seriously impressive cast: Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Here’s a rancid little hors d’oeuvre for the holiday season. The deliciously loathsome Gothic horror film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 50 years old and back in cinemas, never ceases to amaze as director Robert Aldrich’s strychnine-laced missive to Hollywood – his second, following 1955’s The Big Knife – and as a psychodrama of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis’s unfeigned hatred for each other.The movie opens in 1917. The junior vaudeville star Baby Jane Hudson simpers through her vomitous song-and-dance numbers onstage and, enabled by her unctuous accompanist father, rules her family with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Scandinavian countries can duke it out amongst themselves as to which of them Santa Claus is from, but this Finnish claim for being the whiskery fellow’s true home neither makes you want to enter his grotto or sit on his knee. A bizarre and wonderful fantasy, Rare Exports nods to old northern Europe’s Saint Nicholas, the mythical figure meting out punishment to children rather than doling out presents. This is a Santa Claus to be avoided at all costs. And unlike the traditional Saint Nicholas, he’s after all children not just the naughty ones.Set in the far north-east of Finland in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"There is a town in north Ontario," sang Neil Young in 1970's "Helpless", and in this third collaboration between Young and film-maker Jonathan Demme, we get to go there. It's the little rural outpost of Omemee, where, as Young tells the camera, he used to catch turtles and fish and look after his chickens. Young's casual asides and remembered fragments as he drives from Omemee to Toronto, to play a concert at Massey Hall, form the somewhat flimsy spine of Demme's film.Back in the Eighties, Young sparked outrage when he loudly announced his support for Ronald Reagan's flag-waving Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Zombie Flesh Eaters was at the heart of the early Eighties’ video nasty furore. Pilloried without being seen, it was cast as revolting and shocking, and subsequently banned from release. This pin-sharp, definitive restoration of Lucio Fulci’s 1979 over-the-top zombie fest isn’t going to suddenly elevate it to classic status, but it does show it to be good, workmanlike exploitation cinema of the highest calibre. Nothing in it is unwatchable, even if a few scenes are mildly disgusting.Fulci, a journeyman working in Italian cinema since the late 1940s as a writer and director, was commissioned Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s A Wonderful Life disappointed studio bosses at the box office. Five Oscar chances came to nothing. Gongs and money, however, don’t guarantee a classic and that is what It’s a Wonderful Life is - a film that can restore one's sense of joy within minutes. Set at Christmas (but filmed in the boiling summer of California), this is the film to which audiences return again and again for relief from the woes of life.George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart, fresh from the World War Two) wants to travel but gets sucked up into family and money worries, so much so he thinks the world would be a better place Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Made in 1992, this was the first Muppets project after the death of creator Jim Henson, and was helmed by his son, Brian. It's been given a 20th-anniversary re-release by Disney, which now owns the Muppet franchise, appropriately enough in the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth.There's the usual mix of puppet and human action, realised in designer Val Strazovec's foggy, filthy Dickensian London, all narrow alleyways and candelit indoor gloom. Michael Caine does a nice turn as Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser millionaire who is given the chance of redemption after being visited on Christmas Eve Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Why do you want to go to Greece?” After watching the numbing Dead Europe and the journey of its protagonist Isaac the question asked might, more pertinently, have been “do you know the Greece you’re going to visit?” This relentlessly dark film paints Greece – in common with the other countries seen – as a place of barely hidden agonies, characterised by shadows. No wonder Isaac’s mother gives him a talisman to ward off the evil eye before he sets off from Australia.Isaac (Ewen Leslie) is a photographer of Greek heritage, born in Australia. His father commits suicide by crashing his car so, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit has always been the answer to those who rail at the self-consciously epic scale and bombast of The Lord of the Rings; it is the perfect Tolkien primer, an introduction to Middle Earth that is humorous and boisterous, doesn’t take its heroes too seriously, moves along at a good clip and is no less a glorious adventure for its levity.It is also a modest single volume. How ironic, then, that director Peter Jackson should take that very lightness away from it, ignore the fact that it was written for children, and impose his own grandiose design. The hubris is mind- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Thank heavens for Christmas, without which where would narrative be? Not that I'm sure Sarah Jessica Parker's uptight, brittle Meredith Morton has much to be thankful for in The Family Stone, as the Manhattan careerist braves her boyfriend's family gathering in New England for what seems destined to be the holiday from hell. Well, until such time as the laws of Tinseltown work their drearily inevitable "magic", and everyone is paired up faster than you can say Manolo Blahnik. In fact, writer-director Thomas Bezucha's 2005 film was intended as a star vehicle for Parker fresh off the phenomenon Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
White Christmas is named so you know that gorgeous song is inside it somewhere. Yes, this is the 12-year-younger and lesser remake of Holiday Inn that also stars Bing Crosby and also features the cry-your-guts-out, I-regret-everything holiday tune by Irving Berlin. The big difference is that in White Christmas, Bing sings along to a music box.The plot centres on Danny Kaye and Bing as a duo of WWII entertainers who find success a decade after the war. Wildly popular, they’re on TV, on Broadway, wherever there’s an audience, that’s where they’ll be. One’s a lady’s man, the other isn’t. Both Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Although Anthony Mann is best known for the five James Stewart Westerns (and one apiece starring Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper) he directed during the 1950s, it was the dour film noirs he made during the previous decade that made his name. Like Mann’s T-Men, Raw Deal, He Walked by Night, and Border Incident, Railroaded! (1947) was written by John C Higgins, whose pacey, violent stories owe much to the pulps.The opening is particularly impressive for being low key. A heist on a beauty parlour that’s a front for a gambling racket goes wrong when a cop is murdered by the masked robber (John Read more ...