To Sleep So As To Dream (Yumemiru yôni nemuritai) first published by Little White Lies, as entry 150 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Watching Kaizō Hayashi’s To Sleep So As To Dream (Yumemiru yôni nemuritai) involves also watching The Eternal Mystery, a silent melodramatic chanbara in which the ‘Black Mask’ strives to rescue the beautiful…
“Where is she?” asks a bald, moustachioed man who has pursued another through a warehouse basement and pinned him to the wall. The bald man then threatens to shoot his captive in the heart if he will not tell, and this is no idle threat – for within seconds, he has fired a single bullet,…
The Man From London (A Londoni Férfi) first published by Film4 Summary: Hungarian auteurist couple Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky fill their spare waterfront noir with the shadowy morality of crime and punishment. Review: “Don’t follow me too soon… Wait a good two minutes.” These are the first words heard in Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s…
American Badger first published by VODzilla.co The badger, we are told at the beginning of Kirk Caouette’s sort-of sequel to his Promiseland (2019), is a solitary, anti-social creature that will fight viciously when backed into a corner – the American variety more than its European counterpart. The hitman Dean (Caouette) gets his nom de guerre…
House of Bamboo first published by Little White Lies, as the 118th entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Location is everything. In 1948, William Keighley made the monochrome The Street With No Name, a film noir full of infiltration and imposture, and set it on the Skid Row of a fictional ‘Center City’ (in fact…
From the outset, The Woman With Leopard Shoes (La Femme aux Chaussures Leopard) both does and does not let us know what kind of film it is going to be. As an unseen woman recruits a burglar who is wearing a hood over his head to prevent him identifying her, the scene unfolds not only…
Immortal (aka Immortel (ad Vitam)) first published by Film4 Summary: Enki Bilal brings the mannered universe of his own comic books to life, in a hybrid mix of real and virtual action. Review: New York, 2095. On the eve of an election, a giant stone pyramid has appeared, hovering over the cityscape, while Central Park has transformed…
Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Diqiu zuihou de yewan) first published by VODzilla.co “Any time I saw her, I knew I was in a dream again. And once you know you’re dreaming, it’s an out-of-body experience. Sometimes you float upwards. In my dreams I would always wonder if my body were made of hydrogen. If…
Le Cercle Rouge first published by Movie Gazette The French auteur Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-73) specialised in ‘policiers’, or crime films, tapping into a dark vein of pessimism which has always lain buried deep within classic American film noir, and refining it into an existentialist vision of the world and man’s place in it. Perhaps best…
Trouble Is My Business takes its name from a 1950 collection of four short stories written by Raymond Chandler about the private eye Philip Marlowe. This is to say that, from the outset, the film advertises its status as hard-boiled detective pulp fiction, which, in its cinematic versions, means film noir: movies featuring Marlowe like…
A Bluebird in My Heart first published by SciFiNow The feature debut of writer/director Jérémie Guez (who also co-wrote Dominique Rocher’s The Night Eats The World, 2018), A Bluebird In My Heart (Tu ne tueras point) is adapted from ex-con Dannie M. Martin’s hard-boiled novel The Dishwasher (1995). Its English title, however, is a refrain…