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Man's Castle https://tinyurl.com/27rtn9pg There’s something a bit mad and a bit magical about Man’s Castle, one of the lesser known of director Frank Borzage’s movies. Expert at delivering dramas with complicated romantic relationships at their core, Borzage's 1933 movie fits snug...

[moviesteve]

Pacifiction https://tinyurl.com/2aoflp9x You'll probably enjoy Pacifiction if you go for Graham Greene stories about shady white guys in white suits hitting the moral buffers in some sweaty colonial sump. It’s a familiar screen sub-genre. Most obviously there’s The Quiet Ameri...

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100 Years of… The Thief of Bagdad https://tinyurl.com/2bkzw2nu Douglas Fairbanks was the Tom Cruise of a century ago and in 1924’s The Thief of Bagdad, Fairbanks’s favourite of his own films, you get to see him at his very best, in the peak of physical condition, in a film that’s one remarkable action...

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Yannick https://tinyurl.com/29suneu2 Just when it looked like Quentin Dupieux had hit a creative wall, out comes Yannick, a swerve from his more surreal outings towards something a touch more political. If it’s not entirely plausible, it mostly is, and for Dupieux – the man w...

[moviesteve]

The Cat and the Canary https://tinyurl.com/2dn4eh5s The director Paul Leni died just as the talkies were coming in, but even so his name still has clout 100+ years on. 1927’s The Cat and the Canary reminds us why. It’s not only a cracking whodunit, and a demonstration of technical wizardry ...

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The Origin of Evil https://tinyurl.com/252mvnmv Farce played as a thriller, The Origin of Evil (L’Origine du Mal) stars the brilliant Laure Calamy. If you enjoyed her style of paranoid ditziness in the worldwide TV hit Call My Agent (Dix Pour Cent), there’s plenty more of the same on of...

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The Burmese Harp https://tinyurl.com/247khcsg After a career banging out one makeweight movie after another, on the 27th go director Kon Ichikawa hit paydirt with The Burmese Harp. A box-office smash and critical hit at home in Japan and abroad, it propelled Ichikawa into the ranks of...

[moviesteve]

I.S.S. https://tinyurl.com/223zjvo7 I.S.S. is a thriller set on the International Space Station where Russians and Americans are co-operating happily until a nuclear war breaks out down below. First up, why haven’t more films been set on the ISS? What a golden opportunity...

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Hanky Panky https://tinyurl.com/24ay58wc Sam and Diane? Dr Crane and Lilith? Why is everyone in Hanky Panky named after characters in Cheers? The answer would appear to be that writer Nick Roth and his co-director/wife Lindsey Haun thought it was funny. Nothing deep, nothing meta...

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Monster https://tinyurl.com/2b7d8obu Second-rate Hirokazu Kore-eda is still first-rate moviemaking. Here’s Monster, the first film he hasn’t written himself for nearly 30 years, a mix of familiar Kore-eda themes and explorations of new fields. Yûji Sakamoto is the TV write...

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Cobra Woman https://tinyurl.com/2bg4g8qn She couldn’t act, couldn’t sing and danced like a wardrobe but for a while Maria Montez was quite the thing. Cobra Woman is probably the best example of a string of successful movies she made in the 1940s, often with the likeable, four-squ...

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You'll Never Find Me https://tinyurl.com/2by6drwe Streaming channel Shudder picked up You’ll Never Find Me at the Tribeca Festival, proving yet again that whoever does the buying over there has an eye for a good horror movie. It’s an “it was a dark and stormy night” affair. A man sitti...

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Niagara https://tinyurl.com/28x3mrgs Shot of Niagara, anyone? As a film it's famous for all sorts of reasons – a film noir in Technicolor, Marilyn Monroe’s first star billing, the use of Niagara Falls as a set backdrop. On the other hand it isn't famous for being a good film....

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Nobody Is Crazy https://tinyurl.com/26cpg733 Sci-fi as self-help, Federico Arioni’s second feature film, Nobody Is Crazy (Nadie Está Loco), does away with most of the trappings, scratch that, all of the trappings of the sci-fi movie and focuses instead on the mental well-being of Raf...

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Amarcord https://tinyurl.com/2comhjzo A film wandering between fantasy, comedy and tender reminiscence, Federico Fellini’s Amarcord sets out to be autobiographical, from its title (Amarcord is "I Remember" in his native dialect), though Fellini always denied it was directly, e...

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Manticore aka Mantícora https://tinyurl.com/29hmuvo3 Manticore takes its name from the mythical beast with the head of a man, the body of a lion and the tail of a scorpion. But writer/director Carlos Vermut has another beast in mind – two, in fact – in this Spanish film giving us a flash of ...

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The River https://tinyurl.com/2bstdqm7 Is 1951's The River a look in search of a story? It's regularly described – often by people who haven’t seen it – as one of the greatest films ever made. Dig one layer deeper and the praise heaped on Jean Renoir’s “masterpiece” starts to l...