Lifeboat (1944)

There's a terrific scene early on where the lifeboat swings around and our attention moves from Tallulah Bankhead's character, who falls out of focus and becomes slightly muted, to a group of other characters towards the front of the boat, who come into focus and become audible, revealing how cleverly Alfred Hitchcock manages and keeps interesting his adaptation of John Steinbeck's story, a confined-space war drama set almost start to finish on a lifeboat.

★★★★☆

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Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas) (2021)

Orchestral swells and tremulous strings help turn kitchen-table drama into grand operatic melodrama in Pedro Almodóvar's story of two new mothers sharing their experiences of childbirth, but the link between this melodrama and the broader politics Almodóvar bookends the movie with feels pretty tenuous - living without knowing, living with a secret, and correcting past wrongs seem to be the vague thematic bridge.

★★★☆☆

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The Idea of You (2024)

A romance ignites between a woman and a man, and standing in the way of their being in love forevermore are their considerable age gap (she is a 40-year-old single mother of a grown child and an art dealer; he is twenty-four) and his life in the spotlight as a boy-band idol, but both issues result in only two brief blips of conflict over the course of this breezy, thin rom-slight-com, padded out with not very rewarding Backstreet Boys-style song-and-dance routines.  

★★★☆☆

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The Goldfinch (2019)

I can't imagine many people enjoying this if they haven't read Donna Tartt's 780-page brick, and I can just as easily imagine many who have read it resenting the way the film glosses over all those pages and withholds the emotional keystone of the whole until the very final frame - but with expectations low from scathing reviews, I ended up thoroughly enjoying this adaptation, which, like the book, is a bewildering mass of underdeveloped themes, impossible coincidence, and meaningless allusions to the Harry Potter universe, yet still a strangely loveable, unwieldy, flawed beast that just is - who knows how or why Donna Tartt wrote it.

★★★★☆

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Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Werner Herzog takes as his inspiration the story of Carlos Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber trader in the 1800s who transported a disassembled ship over a mountain, and turns this audacious business endeavour into a tragi-comic misadventure of epic proportions, rendered with his usual metered storytelling and cinematic visuals, but there's also rich thought-provoking analogy in the fact his own film-making famously became an undertaking as audacious, dismaying, and mad as Fitzcarrald's.

★★★★★

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Long Dark Hall (1951)

We know from the outset Rex Harrison's Arthur Groome, a married man, didn't kill his 'bit on the side' - one of those disorganised serial killers, a starey laneway night dweller, did - so this isn't a mystery and instead thrills are supposed to come from the court case that makes up most of the movie (filmed in London's Old Bailey) where everything is stacked against our "wrong man", but the movie also wants to be a character study of Groome's spurned but devoted wife - interesting, well-acted, but hardly thrilling - and the movie ends quite abruptly, almost as if everyone involved - the serial killer, the judge, the journalists, the actors,the audience - all simply got fed up with the dreary situation and suddenly wants it over.

★★☆☆☆

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Saturday Night (2024)

It was an ugly time in comedy when SNL first aired, really, when comedians were smirking smug white men being loud, woofing at women, humping legs, and plastering schoolboy notes on everything (all seen here), but SNL fans will love this behind-the-scenes look at the hours leading up to the very first episode of what is now a 50-year-old comedy institution and anyone into, say, The Muppets or 30 Rock will be interested in the madcapped goings-on behind the scenes of another live production.

★★★☆☆

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Lara (2019)

All sorts of ideas about what is going on will run through your head watching this intense and drily funny character study of Lara (Lara Jenkins, the ubermother of a concert pianist) who, on her sixtieth birthday, buys up the remaining tickets for her son's premiere concert recital and spends the hours leading up to the event handing them out to her acquaintances, and exactly who she is and what she is doing and what drives her, and how and why she drives so many around her away, not just old coworkers who hate her but also her son who appears not to welcome her to his concert, isn't perfectly clear until the film ends with the formidable lead Corianne Harfouch's casting one last long deliciously ice-blue stare down the camera...and then you'll know.

★★★★★

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The Nest (2020)

The title, from the start, is a clever way to keep audiences guessing, hinting as it does at slimey masses of eggs of some sort of weird alien family, while the initial set-up is horror-home stuff - an entrepreneur moves his family from the US to London, into an old country manor a la Amityville Horror; halfway through, I stopped to google whether I was watching an adaptation of Agatha Christie's 'Endless Night', and along the way was reminded of 'Arbitrage', 'The Devil's Advocate', that awful 'Saltburn'...but this not knowing exactly what you are getting with 'The Nest' is what keeps the exceptionally well-acted, handsomely produced Canadian thriller razorwire sharp, taut.

★★★★☆

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怪物 (かいふつ) (Monster) (2023)

Hirokazu Kore-eda's drama, again just a smidge too twee, is about people, very young or old, who either throw themselves outside Japan's strict parameters of social propriety or else find themselves pushed outside those lines by circumstance or by others, and billed as a thriller, Kore-eda's movie will keep you guessing who - an arsonist, a drunk, a bully, a domestic abuser, a liar, or a strange elvin sociopath - the real kaibutsu (monster) of the title is, and it could be any number of dead-in-the-eye non-humans who are, the story shows by changing perspectives round and round, so misunderstood and sadly beautiful.

★★★★☆

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Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos) (2009)

I think it was the laugh-out-loud melodrama I enjoyed most watching Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, an overwrought carry-on about a blind film writer's affair with an actress, but everything else left me a little cold, including the rush to tie all the nonsense up sensibly in the end.

★★★☆☆

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Last Year in Marienbad (L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad) (1961)

 

This French New Wave cinema from 1961, about a man and woman in a hotel trying to sync their memories of their meeting (or not) a year earlier, will either infuriate or mesmerise you depending on whether you are someone who might appreciate floating dream-like through the austere and quiet Marienbad hotel with its endless corridors with carpets so thick that all sound escapes the ear and its endless corridors with carpets so thick that all sound escapes the ear and its endless corridors with carpets so thick that all sound escapes the ear...or if you are someone who prefers Arnold Schwarzenegger action and care less about sublime cinematics and poetry, give "Last Year in Marienbad" a miss. 

★★★★☆

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My Salinger Year (aka 'My New York Year') (2020)

In this uneven The Devil Wears Prada set in the publishing, not the fashion, industry of the 1990s, wannabe writer Joanna Ratkoff (a real person upon whose experiences her book - and then this adapatation - are based) scores a dream entry-level job at the Harold Orr publishing agency in New York, which is the agency that really did count notoriously reclusive writer J D Salinger among its author-clients, and it is there that Ratkoff develops a working relationship with Salinger while labouring under Sigourney Weaver's Phyllis Westberg, not a savage Anna Wintour powerhouse but a more falliable Luddite whose wariness towards the office's first computer provides good humour throughout the movie.

★★★☆☆

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Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles (2005)

This melodrama, a Chinese production, has an older Japanese man, an emotionally detached fisherman, travelling to China with a hare-brained scheme to reunite with his dying son - his misguided and really only completely self-serving actions cause enormous trouble to everyone he encounters including Japanese-speaking tour guides, Chinese village leaders and townsfolk, Government officials, prison wardens and staff and prisoners, and they in return go to so much trouble for him - ridiculous amounts of trouble - that you have to wonder in the end if this infuriating, humorous, and emotional story from director Zhang Yimou really means to pull your heartstrings or comment on a cultural difference.

★★★★☆

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The Longest Yard (2005)

Winding up in jail after a drunken car crash, an ex-football player and man-generally-making-a-giant-mess-of-his-life Paul Crewe (Sandler) is coerced by the prison warden to coach a football team made up of prisoners, but things become complicated in this remake of the 1974 original when this reluctant coach becomes torn between wanting his ragtag team of prisoners to win an upcoming game versus prison guards (and so redeeming himself after so much failure) and succumbing to pressure from the prison warden to let the prison staff win.

★★★☆☆

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Masquerade (Fr: 'Mascarade') (2022)

W Somerset Maughan described the French Riviera as a sunny place for shady individuals; in this movie, the shady individuals - grifters of the Parasite kind who inveigle their way into the lives of the French Riviera's rich and glamorous - are themselves gorgeous, and so it isn't hard at all to watch these beautiful creatures, like Pierre Nimey's listless toyboy Adrien or Marine Vacth's desperate single mum Margot (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels operating their grifts off yachts and from opulent mansions), even if their loooong game becomes tired and increasingly hard to believe over the movie's two and a bit long hours. 

★★★★☆

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Ramen Teh (情牽拉麵茶) (aka 'Ramen Shop') (2018)

A Japanese kid, the son of a ramen shop owner, heads to Singapore to investigate his mother's estrangement from her Singaporean-Chinese mother (his grandmother) and in the process, embarks on a culinary tour that equips him with the skills to bridge not just culinary but also familial divides and historically entrenched cultural rifts.

★★★☆☆

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Triangle of Sadness (2022)

We meet a male model and his model girlfriend having dinner at a swanky restaurant and an argument starts between them over paying the bill; from there this dry comedy moves aboard a ship offering cruises to the rich and famous and hell breaks loose there, too, offering more sharp commentary about privilege and control in a modern world of poor freeloaders, rich hoarders, those in service and those who wantonly wield power.

★★★★☆

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The China Syndrome (1979)

A morning news presenter of puff pieces (Jane Fonda) with aspirations for harder-hitting investigative stuff hits the jackpot when an incident occurs at the nuclear power plant that she and her cameraman (Michael Douglas) happen to be visiting, but how critical was the event, how can they get their story to air on a corrupt news network, and how can the slow-burn thrills end without the movie simply snapping suddenly to black, are the questions that ratchet up the tension to meltdown-levels in this solid thriller.

★★★☆☆

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The Father (2020)

This multi-Oscar-Award-winning film is no-one's idea of a good time but it is so rivetting on account of its being so well-acted and filmed and told, you are not able to take your eyes off it and the sting in the tail of course is that while delivered with thrills of a distinctly Hitchcockian style, these thriller elements are just the trappings of a very real, commonplace, and oh-so-heart-breaking aged-care conundrum and the film cleverly makes you guilty of assuming wrong things about the cantankerous old man Anthony Hopkins plays.

★★★★☆

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