Thriller

Description: Based on a true story. The story is set on the sweeping French countryside where Serge Duval, a veterinarian, lives with his wife, Elisabeth and their two young children. One day, their beloved son Olivier vanishes mystically, without a trace. Unable to accept the loss of her favourite child, the mother, Elizabeth, redirects her anguish and guilt at everyone. Little by little the fragile family falls apart. Six years later Olivier suddenly appears again, now as a teenage boy living on the streets of Paris, but is he really their missing son?Read More »

Review
One of Hitchcock’s most discussed films. Retired police detective Stewart, who has a fear of heights, is hired by old school chum in San Francisco to keep an eye on his wife (Novak), eventually falls in love with his quarry and that’s just the beginning; to reveal more would be unthinkable. Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor scripted, from the novel D’entre les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Haunting, dream-like thriller, with riveting Bernard Herrmann score to match; a genuinely great motion picture that demands multiple viewings.Read More »

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Ann Lake has recently settled in England with her daughter, Bunny. When she goes to retrieve her daughter after the girl’s first day at school, no one has any record of Bunny having been registered. When even the police can find no trace that the girl ever existed, they wonder if the child was only a fantasy of Ann’s. When Ann’s brother backs up the police’s suspicions, she appears to be a mentally-disturbed individual. Are they right?Read More »

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Otto Preminger was not spared the brunt of bad reviews and publicity towards the end of his career. At times, the critics were quite savage in their analysis of his latter films. In my opinion, this was a time where he shined the most, and was in top form. He tackled new ground and continued to break taboo without audiences knowing. From TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME JUNIE MOON to SUCH GOOD FRIENDS to ROSEBUD and finally to THE HUMAN FACTOR, this was another renaissance for Preminger. Agreed, ROSEBUD was not a masterpiece. Elements such as Cliff Gorman’s atrocious acting, loose ends and implausibility hold it back from reaching its ultimate goal, but it was not the turkey that Leonard Maltin (et al.) made it out to be. Read More »

Tom Ricks, an American novelist in his forties, moves to Paris in the hope of patching things up with his estranged daughter. But nothing goes quite as planned. His resources depleted, he must stay at a shabby hotel and work as a night watchman. Just when he thinks he has touched rock bottom, a mysterious and sensual woman named Margit suddenly enters his life. Together they embark on a passionate love affair which gives rise to a series of inexplicable events. It is as if a strange force has taken control of Tom’s life…Read More »

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Carrying a gun

If there were awards for great titles then Bullet Ballet would surely be up for a gong or two. At once suggesting both violence and elegance, it sounds like the perfect Hong Kong era John Woo film, an all-action but balletic explosion of slow-motion gunplay that became the director’s trademark. But this isn’t John Woo, this is Shinya Tsukamoto, a director whose deeply personal style is a million miles from Woo’s slickly filmed action works. Tsukamoto’s concerns are far more localised, to the city in which he lives, to his neighbourhood, to his own body, and his cinematic style is far edgier and more dangerous. Which is not to knock Woo in any way, but nowadays when Woo is making the vacuous Paycheck, Tsukamoto is making the extraordinary A Snake of June. He is one of those rare directors who has never sold out and never compromised his vision. Tsukamoto is the very personification of a great outsider film-maker.Read More »

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” A mesmerizing meditation on the mysterious nature of identity, Lost Highway, David Lynch’s seventh feature film, is one of the filmmaker’s most potent cinematic dreamscapes. Starring Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman, the film expands the horizons of the medium, taking its audience on a journey through the unknown and the unknowable. As this postmodern noir detours into the realm of science fiction, it becomes apparent that the only certainty is uncertainty.Read More »

From Channel 4 Film:
Early British Hitchcock which has the future master of suspense trying to make a living with this faithful adaptation of O’Casey’s classic play, chronicling the ups and downs of an Irish family in the Dublin of the 1920s. Most of it is a straight filming of the play – and was acknowledged as such by Hitchcock – even though handsomely photographed and acted. When the action opens up towards the end, Hitch gets a chance to flex his cinematic muscle with a predictably dramatic ending.Read More »

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One of Hitchcock’s finest films of the ’40s, using its espionage plot about Nazis hiding out in South America as a mere MacGuffin, in order to focus on a perverse, cruel love affair between US agent Grant and alcoholic Bergman, whom he blackmails into providing sexual favours for the German Rains as a means of getting information. Suspense there is, but what really distinguishes the film is the way its smooth, polished surface illuminates a sickening tangle of self-sacrifice, exploitation, suspicion, and emotional dependence. Grant, in fact, is the least sympathetic character in the dark, ever-shifting relationships on view, while Rains, oppressed by a cigar-chewing, possessive mother and deceived by all around him, is treated with great generosity. Less war thriller than black romance, it in fact looks forward to the misanthropic portrait of manipulation in Vertigo. — GA, Time Out Film Guide 13Read More »