Peewee As Himself (2025)

My love of Pee-Wee Herman is inexplicable - I'm Australian, only learned of the existence of Paul Reubens' alter-ego as a university student, and never grew up on Pee-Wee's Playhouse or knew anything of the genesis of this character via Paul Reubens' time as a 'Groundling' and regular David Letterman guest, but having watched this gentle, mildly interesting two-part documentary, I can confirm there is something charismatic about Reubens - as Pee-wee or as himself, young or old - and I admire his not, to his death in 2023, talking about THAT...

★★★★☆

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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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Perfect Days (2023)

It is Groundhog Day but backwards, with this Japanese 'Phil', Hirayama, living what appears to be a perfectly contented day over and over, cleaning Tokyo toilets and pausing occasionally to admire light through trees, wood grain, or reflected colour, but upheaval eventually arrives as director Wim Wenders throws unexpected encounters at this toilet cleaner, highlighting the delicate balance between the uncomplaining endurance demanded by Japanese society and an individual's private contentment in the detail of a dazzling impermanence. 

★★★★☆

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Poison Pen (1939)

Tension ratchets up as more and more poison pen letters are received by inhabitants of a small village, with things ending up a murder mystery of sorts given death result from the villagers turning on each other, and we get a surprise in the gleefully grisly end, not so much from the "who" - though this is handled cleverly - but from the "why".

★★★☆☆

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Pearl (2022)

A monologue at the two-thirds mark finally gives this slasher (prequel to the underwhelming 'X') the depth that sets it apart - up to this point, Pearl, the eponymous crazy, was a mere sicko not much set apart from a Michael or Freddy or Jason except for her gender and age, but suddenly she has a more detailed than expected backstory and a tragicness that juxtaposes sensibly with the cheeky The Wizard of Oz stylings, the technicolour of a 50s melodrama,, and the cartoonish flourishes like irises-out and -in.

★★★☆☆

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Ten to sen (aka 'Points and Lines' or 'Point and Line') (点と線) (1958)

Seiichi Matsumoto's mystery, a mere slip of a book written in the spare style of Simenon, is in some ways the counter to Hitchcock's A Lady Vanishes - instead of disappearing from a train, here one character steadfastly appears on one while detectives suspect he was elsewhere - but to say more would ruin the surprise of both the book and this faithful 1958 adaptation that opens with a Vertigo-style animated journey across the points and lines of a train map set to a jaunty discordant thriller score, barrels like an express train through its mystery, and ends with a solution to an impossible crime as ingenious as it is simple, hinging on a trick that is uniquely Japanese - there'll never be a Western adaptation! 

★★★★★

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Poor Things (2023)

The saddest thing about Yorgos Lanthimos's icky Poor Things, a title that I think refers to audiences after two long hours, is that it takes an elaborate steampunk alternate fairytale-reality full of wonky actors playing wonky characters - including a Frankenstein sex doll-come-to-life with, perhaps don't think about it too hard, a child's brain - for the director  to elucidate so very little about the plight of women in today's world (or to be precise, the plight of women in fantasy realities of an alternate past) and there isn't much said of interest about sex or old-school gendered-rules about social propriety, either.

★☆☆☆☆

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Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (Felkészülés meghatározatlan ideig tartó együttlétre) (2021)

A neurosurgeon quits her job in New Jersey, USA, and heads to Budapest, Hungary for a romantic rendevous on the Pest side of the Liberty Bridge, but the object of her infatuation, a surgeon she met at a conference, doesn't show up and when she tracks him down, he doesn't know who she is, so is she mad, is he lying, or is there a Hitchcockian thriller afoot - it's suspenseful, intriguing, but you won't know until the very last frame precisely the nature of this slowburn but razor sharp film. 

★★★★☆

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Psycho II (1983)

Bringing Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates back to the screen twenty-three years after the original Hitchcock classic required an audaciousness you really have to admire - especially given this sequel sees him released from prison and getting a kitchenhand job (!) - and it is surprising, given this absurd setup, how strong it is at the outset, nostalgically recalling the original, with a short-haired heroine stumbling into the danger of a gothic hilltop home and neighbouring motel, taking showers and discovering peepholes while Californian cops in pilot-shades drain swamps, explore cellars, and tail suspects through town; yet bringing Bates back also sadly requires some clumsy writing in which grisly murder is committed with zero clean-up, bodies vanish, cops scoff and dismiss witness accounts of murder in a famed murder house, and lots of other highly unlikely behaviour occurs from characters maintaining an impossible flippancy about their close proximity to a famed serial killer - it is all the mess of writers desperately trying to perpetuate an unlikely series with, by the film's end, a complete cleaning of the slate and a reversion back to the beginning of Psycho to where it all started.  

★★★☆☆

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Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes (aka 'Death Tolls Seven Times', 'Seven Notes in Black', 'The Psychic') (1977)

When a skeleton is unearthed at her husband's countryside manor, it becomes apparent a woman's visions of murder are not simply her imagination, in this excellent murder mystery for giallo fans featuring ghastly body horror set-pieces, opulent interiors, dread accompanied by Hammond organ, intrigue, and lots of luridly coloured blood.

★★★★☆

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Piercing (2013)

Based on a Ryu Murakami book, this unedifying nonsense, inexplicably well-received by critics on Rotten Tomatoes, has a repulsive, low-affect man book himself into a hotel with a plan to stab a prostitute with an ice-pick, but things don't go as he plans as the plot unfolds in the manner of a Pulp Fiction vignette, but drearily, without the humour and flair).

★★☆☆☆

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The Paradine Case (1947)

Director Hitchcock and Producer Selznick's third collaboration, the rather conventional courtroom thriller The Paradine Case, based on a Robert H Hitchens book, may not soar to the heights that Rebecca and Spellbound did (their previous works together) but it is a grand and engrossing melodrama, so well-acted, directed, and staged that you can revel in it despite the ludicrousness of the central court case and despite the fact climactic scenes of Gregory Peck's lawyer's reckoning don't quite hit the nail on the head.

★★★★☆

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Parenthood (1989)

 

Steve Martin stars and is perfectly uptight as Gil Buckman, a family man trying not to freak out on the rollercoaster of parenthood, but there's a veritable Love Actually-sized ensemble here too: a single mother (Dianne Wiest) struggles to raise a teenage boy (a young Joaquin Phoenix) while trying to steer an older daughter (Martha Plimpton) away from no-hopers like Tod (Keanu Reeves playing Ted again), and more (Rick Moranis, Tom Hulce, Mary Steenburgen, and Jason Robards) all in Ron Howard's comedy smash hit about the trials and tribulations of the privileged white raising kids in traditional family units.

★★★☆☆

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Pet Sematary (2019)

This adaptation improves upon the wooden 1989 one but just can't overcome the silliness of Stephen King's plot about grown men, one a ER doctor for goodness sake, who - what, unable to face up to a pet cat's death? - trudge through a woods at night to make use of a magical burial ground which one of the men forgets to say only resurrects mangy demon-beasts and when the cat comes back as expected a raging, rabid monster, what do the men do but head back to the burial ground again and again to repeat the process of resurrecting as deranged murderous monsters things even more dear to them.

★★☆☆☆

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The Tip of the Iceberg (La Punta Del Iceberg) (2016)

 

This thriller about a woman, Sofia Cuevas who in her capacity as a company director is sent to investigate a series of suicides at a branch of her employer's megacorporation, has a tricky job trying to hit the right note because although you expect some moments of solemnity in a thriller about suicide, things become outright maudlin -  scarves flutter in slow motion in the wind and workers who have suicided reappear and look pained or at peace depending on the current status of Cuevas' investigation - making this a slick corporate thriller with jarring, emotionally overwrought moments, but it is always interesting, calling into question the line between work and life and control and subservience, and features a terrific performance from lead Maribel Verdú.

★★★☆☆

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The Power of the Dog (2021)

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Campion's solemn and unaffecting Western, an adaptation of a novel by Thomas Savage, reminds me of the movies of Paul Thomas Anderson — The Master and Phantom Thread, for example — in the way its gorgeous, elaborate evocation of a world — cattle ranching in (New Zealand standing in for) Montana — ends up being for nought, the grand staging in the end unwarranted by what turns out to be just a queer little episode of crime involving four characters all so deeply repressed that their motivations scene-to-scene — if they are not vanished completely in one of the choppy-changey tv-series-style chapters — remain a mystery — in lieu of personality is offered up homosexuality and alcoholism, as if this is all we need to know.

★★★☆☆

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Poseidon (2006)

The string of action setpieces that makes up Wolfgang Petersen's 2006 remake of The Poseidon Adventure, including high-up tightrope walks over flames, underwater traversal of long winding corridors, and crawls through air ducts and elevator shafts, keeps the adventure, um, buoyant, but it is hard to care much given the disaster movie's, um, lack of depth: the uncharismatic group of survivors we follow through the upturned cruise liner are nothing more than faces - a sad-duck daughter of a former New York mayor, the former New York mayor, a stowaway, and a grifter of some sort - and we get no bigger picture of them or of the disaster itself - how, for instance, does the group know which way to go; do any of them have anything they care about back on land; why do they only encounter a next and a next obstacle and not, say, other people, and what is happening at all anywhere beyond their confined-space sphere of action - in the ballroom or in a rescue operation team somewhere, say, or, say, anywhere else in the world?

★★★☆☆

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Prince of Darkness (1987)

The John Carpenter aesthetic, kicking in immediately with the black and white opening credits set against the director's own pulsing electronic music composition - not to mention Donald Pleasence turning up as a troubled priest - rises this horror above similar others which generally don't get away with such laughable plotting: a team of physicists (a feast of Carpenter regulars (and Susan, the radiologist...in blue? With glasses?)) are gathered together in a church to investigate a glass chamber full of swirling green that seems to be alive, sentient, communicative, ancient, able to possess the bodies of others, and somehow author to strange Coptic, Latin, and English texts that contain differential equations...and if that weren't enough to overload a 102-minute horror romp, each of the gathered scientists receives tachyon messages in their dreams from the future!

★★★★☆

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The Mystery Of The Mary Celeste (aka 'Phantom Ship') (1935)

The And Then There Were None explanation postulated in this 1935 horror thriller with Bela Lugosi is based, says an opening credit titlecard, on the findings of the Attorney-General in Gibraltar and though history has deemed him, Frederick Solly-Flood, an imbecile, the appeal of this movie is that Flood's account of the unexplained abandonment of The Mary Celeste in 1872, though certainly not presented here convincingly, came not far removed in time from the actual events, unlike so many other fanciful and outlandish theories that have sprung up and combined and morphed over the one hundred and fifty years since, blurring Mary Celeste fact and fiction.

★★★☆☆

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The Purge (2013)

The funny thing about The Purge, this original movie that gave rise to a series of sequels and a two-season tv series, is that the elaborate concept - that the US Government holds an annual event called "The Purge" in which a twelve-hour moratorium is placed upon all crimes (including the crime of hacking your neighbours to pieces) - has no great bearing on what is essentially a messy, repetitive b-grade home invasion thriller - like being told that in the world beyond the brownstone in David Fincher's Panic Room or outside the house in Haneke's Funny Games there is a politics.

★★☆☆☆

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