moviesteve

Cairo Station https://tinyurl.com/24ve5mdz Now considered a beacon of the nation's cinema, Cairo Station got a hugely negative reaction in Egypt when it came out in 1958. Audiences raised on a diet of stylised melodrama just weren’t ready for something so raw. Mostly in the Ita...

Köln 75 https://tinyurl.com/2785tsux Corny in a good way, Köln 75 (aka Cologne 75) tells the strange but true story behind the story of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, to this day the biggest selling solo jazz album of all time. The album is just Jarrett improvising on a piano ...

Cecile Is Dead https://tinyurl.com/23a4a8zm Anyone for Maigret? Cécile est morte aka Cecile Is Dead reveals what the French detective was up to in Nazi-occupied France in a film made in 1944 and directed by Maurice Tourneur, father of the now more famous Jacques. The detective fi...

The President's Cake https://tinyurl.com/24fbdt3w A lyrical but punchy debut by writer/director Hasan Hadi, The President's Cake is a near-fairytale story about a poor little girl who is “chosen” by her class teacher to bake a cake to celebrate the birthday of the president, and then has ...

Fuze https://tinyurl.com/2a2bj2p6 Fuze adds another little gem of a film to under-regarded director David Mackenzie’s list, joining Starred Up, Perfect Sense, Relay, Spread and Hell and High Water as unusual takes on genre, often with a heavily procedural slant. Things cli...

Jamaica Inn https://tinyurl.com/23ec5l7d Hitchcock’s last movie before he decamped from Britain to the USA is a nearly great adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's novel Jamaica Inn, set in Cornwall where smuggler gangs lure ships onto the rocks, loot their cargos and kill their crews...

Normal https://tinyurl.com/27dbxowk After John Wick, Nobody and after Nobody, Normal, all films written by Derek Kolstad and all telling essentially the same story – mess with this seemingly placid dude at your peril. Normal is Bob Odenkirk going around the block one more...

Big Wednesday https://tinyurl.com/295uknlv Expectations were high for John Milius’s Big Wednesday when it debuted in 1978. Based on Milius and co-writer Dennis Aaberg’s own experiences growing up as California surfers, it tracks three dudes from callow youth to maturity, dropping i...

Enzo https://tinyurl.com/29bxlaox If it’s gay versus queer then gay wins out in Enzo, a coming-of-age/coming-out drama of the old school, where the homosexuality is the subject under discussion, the problem to be solved, rather than window-dressing to something else. En...

The Wrecking Crew https://tinyurl.com/237euyf5 1968’s The Wrecking Crew was the last of the Matt Helm movies. A series of chintzy James Bond knock-offs – Faux Faux Seven? Junk Bond? – starring Dean Martin as a spy laidback to the point of requiring resuscitation, it had pretty much exh...

Nuremberg https://tinyurl.com/2anqfemt Would you have guessed, when Russell Crowe was appearing in Australian TV soaps like Young Doctors and Neighbours that one day he’d be playing the lead in Nuremberg? And that he’d have gone from being a slim, handsome chap with tousled hai...

St Benny the Dip https://tinyurl.com/23htlws9 I didn’t know, going into St Benny the Dip, that a "dip" is a pickpocket. In these circles the dip is the one who goes in for the goods, the "stall" having provided a distraction, while the "mule" is the one to whom the hot item is swiftly...

Millennium Actress https://tinyurl.com/23xerlzo There are two big Japanese animes from 2001. Millennium Actress is the other one, the one that isn’t Spirited Away. A Citizen Kane-style drama, it’s a sweet and poignant film about a documentarian and his cameraman tracking down a legendar...

The Cranes Are Flying https://tinyurl.com/29eudoju The Cranes Are Flying is remarkable in so many ways. The only film from the USSR to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, it is also a reminder that an epic doesn’t need epic length to tell its story. A simple story at that. Two people very muc...

The Christophers https://tinyurl.com/26q7o69t The story goes that Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon wrote The Christophers for Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel without having any idea if they’d do it or not. According to the IMDb trivia on this film, Soderbergh and Solomon didn’t even kn...

Random Harvest https://tinyurl.com/292awwmw Random Harvest takes the amnesiac plot used and abused by mid-20th-century moviemakers and pushes it into and beyond the realm of the absurd. Audiences at the time loved it, the film was multi-Oscar nominated and even though it ascends int...

Project Hail Mary https://tinyurl.com/23ccvre8 Dry and wry and suited to the talents of all involved, Project Hail Mary’s gets a serious attack of the cutes midway through. That apart, it’s a rip-roaring space adventure of the old school whose good bits are so good that its tweeness ca...