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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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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Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux sans visage) (1960)

It doesn't add up to anything terribly important, but Georges Janu's prefunctory 1960 horror is a visual pleasure and obvious inspiration for myriad horror movies to come - Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shut, Halloween, Get Out, and The Silence of the Lambs are some of the horror movies I was reminded of watching many memorable scenes: a hard-to-watch face transplant, for example, and the haunting sight of a masked Ědith Scobe as Christiane picking her way through a mansion, its gardens, and dog kennels, like a bizarre marionette.

★★★★☆

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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 Teacher's Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) (2023)

I love movies about school - school is such a perfect hotbed of issues - and this German film is a ripper with Leonie Benesch perfect as the fresh-faced and idealistic teacher who sees all her hard work creating a harmonious classroom environment undone when speculation runs rife through the school campus that one of their own is a thief.

★★★★☆

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Last Christmas (2019)

Kate, a Bridget Jones type - read, 'annoying' - portrayed by Emilia Clarke, makes a mess of everything - love, work, and relationships including the relationship she has with her boss (Michelle Yeoh in her now perpetual role as a cantankerous Asian Tiger mom), so it makes sense Kate falls for Henry Golding's character - he's a messily conceived part-Willy Wonka pixie-saviour, part-Mr Darcy romantic stalwart slogging-around-on-a-bicycle - who inspires Kate to fix up her messes before the movie reaches an unlikely Christmas magic fantasy ending - a bit like if Bridget Jones suddenly visited Santa's North Pole workshop - but it's an ending that somehow, through all the mess, manages to be touching.

★★☆☆☆

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Last Suspect (2023)

A laughable cliche of a high-powered, ultra-successful criminal lawyer - she never loses a case - and a laughable cliche of a loose-wire cop - the sort who shoots first and shows no respect to the station chief - team up in a watchable but patently absurd thriller that grows increasingly ridiculous as it goes on - the lawyer's daughter is kidnapped for an unusual ransom, with the lawyer coerced into reinvestigating and solving a murder before the young man found guilty of the crime is sentenced.

★★☆☆☆

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Late Night With The Devil (2023)

If this indie horror about a late-night talk show that supernaturally derails had been a real talk show that I stumbled across on TV, I'd have turned off quickly given the show's ugly 70s colour palette, uncharismatic performances, and the fact its supernatural happenings are tediously expounded - the very concept of the movie being to expound, in talk show format, supernatural events - but by far the worst thing about this movie, inexplicably lauded in universally good reviews, is it features its own frequent, deadly-boring ad breaks! 

★★☆☆☆

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Longlegs (2023)

The thing Longlegs most reminded me of were the cutscenes of the original Silent Hill computer game on PS1 (they also strung together to make a monotonous, logic-free jumble of satanic goings-on set to a jangly soundtrack of ringing noises and clanks and clangs), but Longlegs includes in its garble Nicolas Cage doing a Jennifer Coolidge impersonation and a this-is-a-bit-right? Silence of the Lambs routine that insults most only after the "we don't even care anymore" abrupt final cut-to-credits when, woken by the return of cinema lights, audience members realise they've been tricked into seeing, I wouldn't be surprised, another prequel-series of the Annabel franchise.

★☆☆☆☆ 

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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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The Vourdalak (French: 'La Famille du Vourdalak') (2023)

This French fantasy — at times horrible but never really horror; more ghastly, like a Grimms' fairytale — is based on a 1839 Russian novella about an aristocrat, lost in a Serbian forest, who encounters a strange family, and it's this story rather than the movie that is interesting — the monstrous patriarch predates Bram Stoker's Dracula — but the ghastly monster-like character is a weird overacting claymation or puppet, which detracts from rather than enhances your engagement with the gothic goings-on. 

★★★☆☆

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The Lesson (2023)

Employed to tutor a teen hoping to enter a prestigious university, a tutor takes up residence in the mansion of a famous writer, finds himself thrust deep into family tensions, and at night is subjected to absurd and untitillating sexual voyeurism in a thriller that grows sillier and sillier as it goes on, featuring Richard E Grant (who I suspect never went home between filming this and Saltburn) and, by far the worst element of the whole silly enterprise, Julie Delpy as the author's wife, who receives good news, bad news, and oral sex, all with the same deadpan expression.

★★☆☆☆

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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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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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Leave The World Behind (2023)

A family's vacation is interrupted when the man who owns their holiday rental shows up with his daughter in the middle of the night and asks to stay, the set-up of this very M. Night Shyamalan-style slow-burn thriller in which characters are cut-off from the world and from information and left with only their imaginations to grapple with a seemingly absurd new reality, and it is just a shame the solid and intriguing drama concludes with a distinctly American notion that zoning-out in front of the telly beats wrestling critically with world news.

★★★★☆

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Larry Crowne (2011)

Had the title been Late to Class, this movie would clearly have been a romantic comedy about a newly-unemployed boomer who heads back to school in order to give his life new direction, but with the austere title Larry Crowne and a screenplay written by director Tom Hanks that keeps the romantic leads at a remove, held apart by educator-student propriety, the movie, drily funny, not hilarious, remains an oddity, not a Sleepless In Seattle or You've Got Mail romcom great.

★★★☆☆

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The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

The joys of The Little Shop of Horrors, which as a musical continues to lure to theatres crowds that raucously sing along and guffaw, elude me and watching this 1960 movie which started it all - not a musical but a camp scifi with a wet sense of humour and a cult following, made on a budget of $30,000 - I am nonethewiser, mystified as to why people so enjoy the story of a plant named Audrey Two which has an insatiable appetite for human blood..

★★☆☆☆

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Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Taika Waititi's Thor episode dresses up the same old same old 'superhero battles a supervillain' plot in an 80s rock opera skin and fills it with big-name cameos, Taika Waititi's trademark kooky humour, and schoolkid-pleasing nonsense, but it is like this particular Marvel franchise is a hammer of God and try as he might Taika Waititi simply isn't able to lift it.

★★☆☆☆

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Into The Labyrith (L'uomo del labirinto) (2019)

Author Donato Carrisi directs for a second time an adaptation of one of his own books and like the first effort (The Girl In The Fog) this is again an unrestrained nonsense, a murder mystery that plays out like a garish fairytale, so over-the-top with its allusions to witches and dungeons and masked killers, none of it ends up mattering or even making sense, least of all the grandiose twists that you'd have to be a real dummy not to see coming.

★★☆☆☆

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Appearances (Les Apparences) (2020)

I've never heard of the Swedish crime author Karin Alvtegena but here one of her books, Betrayal, is adapted for the screen and it is a mostly compelling psychological drama (although one messily over-plotted with a crime hurried in at the end) with a terrific lead performance by Karin Viard as the wife of an orchestra conductor, who 'keeps up appearances' after she discovers her husband has betrayed her. 

★★★☆☆

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