Samantha Morton completism. This one was on the pile since forever, mostly because I've struggled to get started with all of Lynne Ramsay's movies; this was the first I managed to get all the way through. She directed a screenplay she co-wrote with Liana Dignini based on Alan Warner's book with the same title (1995). Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's mention of a a new book by Anwen Crawford on this movie.
It's Christmastime in or near Glasgow and some people have seen enough of those. Morton responds to her boyfriend's departure by going out partying with her bestie Kathleen McDermott. After recovering she decides to pirate his novel and spend his money on a jaunt to Andalucía, Spain but not before slicing up his mortal remains. Finally, a use for the great Scottish outdoors! The packaged tour encourages industrialised hedonistic bad behaviour; McDermott takes to it like a thawed-out fish but Morton seems mostly disconnected until she encounters a boy who has also lost someone. There's a scene that I took to be a homage to Manuel from Fawlty Towers (~ 1975). Morton drags McDermott up the coast a bit where they're sort-of running the bulls. A publisher comes through with more money than Morton could ever dream of but the bestie cannot imagine leaving Glasgow. Morton departs, alone.
Morton's character is deliberately underexplained, which would have been fine if she exhibited a bit more of the quiet/internalised desperation about her Scottish situation that came out in one line about how many years she has until she can draw a pension. Mike Leigh did a better job on that front in All or Nothing (2002); perhaps I was insufficiently sympathetic to track the subtleties here. McDermott mostly just giggled all the time, a good time girl who also lacked character development. She's more rusted on to Glasgow but we're not shown why; her excitement at the prospect of an Englishman coming to visit her suggests she should also be eyeing the exits. One thread is how money cleaves people from their situations and generally decreases social adhesion.
The camerawork is often very jittery, trying to evoke some urgency from outside the frame when there is or could be enough going on within it. At other times it superbly captured some messy and/or sublime imagery. There is a lot of unselfconscious nudity. I missed a fair chunk of the dialogue, at least sometimes due to the sound mix. I didn't find it all that emotionally involving, which was perhaps the point.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars and an inaccurate review. A Critic's Pick by Elvis Mitchell. The source novel "felt like an answer to Irvine Welsh's book Trainspotting (1993)". (Women are from the west, men the east?) "A nihilist road movie." And some hefty caveats. Stephanie Zacharek at length. That shot of Morton on a balcony against this expanse of Spanish hotel is very striking. All claim the boyfriend's suicide is selfish but it did provide Morton with the means to escape and start her own life.
Kindle. More mid-century hardboiled pulp noir. Short punchy sentences. Third person. Little humour. The action starts in Chicago but doesn't loiter. The author implies that the University of Chicago is close to Division (where I used to live) but it isn't. Riding the rails, like Scarecrow (1973) to some small-town shenanigans in Ohio, near the border with Michigan, where all the ladies would be rich if only someone let them. (This jag made little sense as the protagonist claimed to be aiming for Mexico.) The main thread is essentially Lolita (1955). It is emphasised that the bloke's cognition is failing due to lust and a lack of sustenance which is just to say that the plot got weaker. The mystery parts mostly consisted of withheld information that is not very imaginative. I couldn't believe this guy was the brains behind the prison break at Joliet.
Goodreads. Apparently (re-)published alongside Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel (1953).
Eventually inevitable Deborah Kerr completism. She's very young here, playing a Sister who would be superior in an Anglican order of working nuns, sent from Kolkata to her own semi-private Kafiristan to enlighten the natives. We're shown in flashback that she was abandoned by a brainless Irishman set on making money in America. This appears to have inoculated her against the charms of males, incarnated in the valley by David Farrar who looked like the 1980s matinee idol Richard Chamberlain (The Thorn Birds (1983)) with tonsils to match. Sabu (The Thief of Bagdad (1940)) as The Young General may also have been expected to have interested the Sisters but he of course goes for the lowborn, apparently-mute Jean Simmons (in brownface and cheap jewellery).
All the nuns looked the same to me (all wearing a fair bit of makeup) which made it a relief when fruity Kathleen Byron (Sister Ruth) got out of her habit and did the Brides of Christ (1991) thing. All are histrionic and overwrought to some extent which is exacerbated by the film barely showing their quotidian existence. At times it dons the camp motifs of classic horror (obtrusive music, insufficiently-motivated histrionic cackling laughter, shadows, ...) to bewildering effect. I didn't really grasp what the point of it all was.
The Technicolor cinematography is sometimes amazing, especially given that it was shot on sets in England and Ireland; it got Jack Cardiff an Oscar. Written and directed by Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger. Based on a novel by Rumer Godden.
Someone at the New York Times. IMDB trivia: indeed the valley is populated by people from all over Asia.
So improbably connected to Ninotchka (1939) that I had to watch it. Also some misguided Arnie completism. Directed and co-written by Walter Hill (The Driver (1978), The Warriors (1979)). Harry Kleiner and Troy Kennedy Martin helped with the screenplay.
This movie is mostly boring. Arnie plays a Russian cop with Garbo-esque rigidity in what was one of his least amusing performances. He's paired with Chicago cop James Belushi who continually runs at the mouth. Peter Boyle can't do this straight stuff (a police chief) too well. Larry Fishburne with the shit-eating grin, not yet large. Richard Bright. Notionally they're on the trail of cocaine-importing Russian (Ed O'Ross) via his wife Gina Gershon and some black power cats run by Brent Jennings from his prison workout set. Brion James, informant, copped the usual abuse.
So, many strong players but not well cast. The minor characters were more interesting.
Roger Ebert: three stars, probably inflated by the Chicago setting. Vincent Canby: should've gone straight to video. It would probably be deemed a second-screen effort these days.
Kindle. Prompted by James Walton's review of Nathaniel Rich's Cloudthief (2026) in the New York Review of Books, and curiosity about mid-century hard-boiled noir. And to break up the interminable slog through Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams (2001).
Much is made early on of the song If You've Got the Money, Honey, I've Got the Time (1950) which more-or-less summarises the dynamic between the leading man (who recounts in the first person) and his lady-love. They meet in proximity to a bathtub in the South (Louisiana, Mississippi) and head West (Colorado) where their heist goes off like clockwork. She's an NYC moll and takes to affluence in New Orleans like an Australian but he's more of an outdoorsy bloke who is soon weighed down by the ashy proceeds of crime. The ending was a bit lame. Some of it functions as a time capsule (the wilds of Colorado before it became an enclave) with a fair bit that's generic (the timeless demimonde of New Orleans).
I guess it could be read as a commentary on post-war drifting, the failure of stuff to palliate, satiate or otherwise make the time pass agreeably. He wasn't born bad (this is a bit Natural Born Killers (1994)) but went wonky due to the irremovable shrapnel in his head or perhaps thirty-four months in a Japanese PoW camp on Luzon; there's still the need to fend off the childhood sweetheart, to give her a good enough reason to finally, totally lose heart. Much of the doing was committed but the undoing seemed more accidental or perhaps was a matter of decreased concern. Most of the good lines are mostly in poor (or at least non-PC) taste.
And even more Ernst Lubistch completism with a dash of curiosity about Jimmy Stewart's early career. Samson Raphaelson derived his screenplay from the play by Miklós László.
Quite tame by Lubitsch's standards. Stewart is a clerk in a gift shop in Budapest with better taste than his boss or coworkers. Spunky Margaret Sullavan comes in, looking for a job, impresses with her mad skills in unloading a tacky music-box-ish cigarette receptacle on a susceptible woman and is hired on the spot. Both keep up a correspondence with a mysterious, sophisticated other. We do not get to see much of the letters. The boss, Frank Morgan (The Wizard of Oz (1939)), has some domestic difficulties. Things go predictably for the most part.
The identity shenanigans struck me as Shakespearean. The scenario wants us to believe the characters are somehow not materialistic despite their privation and work as salespeople. The women are all hysterical to varying degrees, and Sullavan's self-reflection pointed to the later psychologicals. Jimmy Stewart got to spin a yarn, much like in Rope (1948).
Frank S. Nugent at the time: genial and tender.
And still more Ernst Lubitsch completism. He directed a screenplay from the very strong team of Charles Brackett (The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950)), Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch, based on an original story by Melchior Lengyel (To Be or Not to Be (1942)). It seems this was the first thing I'd seen Greta Garbo in and it's coincidentally her highest-rated feature at IMDB. Over several nights.
Three Soviet comrade-stooges are sent to Paris to flog some jewels expropriated from an Russian aristocrat (Ina Claire, reminding me a bit of no-fuss Piper Laurie in Twin Peaks) who just happens to reside there. She finds out about this in the usual screwy/small world way and her not-as-rusted-on-as-she-thought paramour Melvyn Douglas offers to help her lay claim to them. Garbo is sent to close the transaction (so the people don't starve) and of course she and Douglas meet cute and so forth. The romance is heavy-handed and the entirety is all very predictable but is made bearable by some very funny dialogue.
Garbo started out as robotic as Arnie as a fake human Soviet apparatchik but softened into dreaminess on return to privation in dreary Moscow. I was so envious of her ability to ignore irrelevant bullshit all the way along. Her performance got her an Oscar nom. Bela Lugosi appeared late-on as a commissar.
Frank S. Nugent: "gay and impertinent and malicious." This was in the time when Stalin wasn't yet beyond the pale. IMDB trivia: are we really to believe that Arnie studied Garbo's performances?
At the 14.30 session Reading Cinemas West Lakes (Adelaide), cinema 6, for 13 AUD on their cheap-ish Tuesday. I was aiming to be the last person in Australia to see Christoper Nolan's latest on a big screen, as I may have been with Tenet (2020), but I had to share that honour with at least one other bloke. The house lights did not come up at the end.
Nolan maladapted Homer and directed. Ludwig Göransson's score is bombastic, obtrusive and often unnecessary. The cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema is sometimes effective but often jittery and uncertain of what it wants us to see; I can't imagine David Lean going for this. The length was excessive. Sepia, murky, grim. The third movement was witless after Uberto Pasolini's The Return (2024) and similarly suffered from a poorly cast Telemachus (here Tom Holland). Anne Hathaway did what she could as Penelope but never got to stick it to her man like Juliette Binoche did. (Throughout she sounded much like Catwoman to me, without that prosthetic motorcycle.) And similarly for Odyssean Matt Damon against Ralph Fiennes, all John Brolin wannabe. (His performance was a long way from Cillian Murphy's triumphant effort in Oppenheimer (2023) and so the blame lay with him.) Robert Pattinson did what he could, camping it up. Benny Safdie as an Agamemnon we hardly got to see. John Leguizamo, effective, so long since Romeo + Juliet (1996). Himesh Patel!
So much for the sausagefest, another generation of Hollywood blokes going to war just like their elders did in The Thin Red Line (1998). Amongst the women was Charlize Theron in nothing more than a perfume ad, making me wonder why there wasn't room for Sharlto Copley too. Lupita Nyong'o, strong and underused. Zendaya as Athena, not persuasive, not great. Samantha Morton got an inspired scene as Circe which actually laid bare the problem with the whole thing: too much important material was dealt with only in cursory exposition. It made me wish that she was the focus of the whole show, that it was less All Our Tragic (2014).
The multitrack mashup was not hard to follow for the most part, or perhaps it just didn't matter. It's sexless; the Sirens were in longshot, the two matrimonial scenes all angst. I felt the trip to Hades was a bust. A wooden horse dragged up the sand, unheroically. The same horse, burning. An outro like the distended ending of Lord of the Rings: loads of not-very-convincing exposition, exit west, as if nobody saw 25th Hour (2002). "Zeus's Law", of hospitality for the stranger, totally bogus; the Greek gods themselves were capricious and not lawful. As everyone knows.
Before watching this I only read Emily Wilson's fine essay and listened to Jason Di Rosso's take which I interpreted as a pan. He did not interview anyone. Of course reviews are legion. Peter Sobczynski was emotionally unmoved; O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) makes for the better rewatch. Dana Stevens: matinee swords-and-sandals at all scales. Too much too shallowly drawn. Christos Tsiolkas: debts to Terrence Malick. Humourless. Too many strands. Damon showed "range and quiet strength as an actor" in the scene where he is tied to the mast so he can listen to the Sirens. (I wasn't as entranced.) Many ineptly-staged scenes such as the sacking of Troy. Daniel Mendelsohn had expectations that Nolan could finesse the material but of course there's more Nolan than Homer in the result. Pedestrian dialogue throughout. And so on and on.
Ernst Lubitsch completism. He directed a screenplay by Samson Raphaelson who had help from Grover Jones in adapting Aladár László's play.
Very funny screwball. The setup is similar to Read My Lips (2001): Miriam Hopkins thinks she has found her next mark in the form of Herbert Marshall (sporting hair like Robert S. McNamara's) as does he. Fortunately both realise that they have found something far more valuable in each other and things are halcyonic until they come across the very glamorous widow Kay Francis in Paris. She's disinterested in running her husband's family's perfume company or in her Thomson-and-Thompson suitors, making her easy prey for Marshall's suave shtick. They meet in a scene where purses stand in for Cinderella's clogs. Things proceed as true love must.
The Art Deco modernism is spectacular. Hopkins got the best lines but is unfortunately onscreen for the least time. IMDB trivia suggests it was a long way from complying with the Hays code. Clock faces indicating hours spent in passion!
Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 1998. Mordaunt Hall for the New York Times at the time.
Jean Renoir directed and co-wrote with Charles Spaak. Set during World War I but almost entirely disregards the violent aspects to instead focus on the decay in class solidarity amongst the European gentry. Erich von Stroheim (Sunset Boulevard (1950)) played the German side of that, Pierre Fresnay the French. Lead Jean Gabin represented the working class who demonstrated their own enduring comradery across racial (and some national) lines in the full knowledge that they were getting stiffed; revolution was in the air but the upper classes did not seem to know that things had to change.
Most of the action occurs in several officers' camps where English and French are detained by Germans. There's a staged performance, something like what's in Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942). The French have sex on the brain, as in Costa-Gavras's Shock Troops (1967). The English cross-dress. There's a great scene where the Russians receive a crate of books from their caring Empress and a touching romance at the end.
In two sittings. Jean Gabin struck me as a French Robert Mitchum (in affable mode).
Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 1999. The Great Escape (1963). Casablanca (1942). Frank S. Nugent at the time.
A smoogery of footage and audio from the Apollo manned moon missions, some of it great, much of it overly familiar. Too often I wanted to know who was speaking and that got increasingly frustrating, as did the authentically hokey bits and fatuous narration. Despite that it could've gone much longer. Brian Eno's incidental music is too obtrusive, worse than Vangelis's for Cosmos (1980), or perhaps it was Carl Sagan's tonsils that made the difference; these space cowboys declaimed like schoolboys. Over two nights.
Caryn James for the New York Times at the time: "It's not a bad idea to ignore the narration ... the better to appreciate its astonishing visual spectacle." Terrence Rafferty in 2009 (?): "At first ... you wonder whose voice it is, but after a while you stop wondering." Or maybe you don't. Achieved essentially Soviet collectivism through elision of individuality.
Al Pacino's first role in a feature film. He has a very brief scene as a cocky/sleazy Fonz-like character in a Brooklyn dance hall, reinforcing lead Patty Duke's lack of self esteem as she comes of age. She moves to "the Village" (apparently Greenwich Village) to get away from her stodgy parents and their vintage fashion. There she encounters and gets involved with a man, an architect down from Connecticut who is also trying to rediscover or reinvent himself through painting female nudes. She undergoes some of the requisite personal development but of course hasn't thought most of it through. The ending was a bust.
The majority of the runtime is colour and as such it sort-of works as an NYC time capsule, at least of making movies in that city. Could you really ride a Honda scooter in the pedestrian lanes in those days? And rent that enormous apartment on 10 USD an hour? A. Martin Zweiback's screenplay cleaves overly closely to the source material (due to him and Stanley Shapiro). Fred Coe directed. It reminded me of Adrienne Shelly's work with Hal Hartley (The Unbelievable Truth (1989), Trust (1990)) but without (enough of) the artifice.
Roger Ebert: three stars. His art is terrible. Vincent Canby. Knives out and fair enough.
On the pile since it was released and probably eventually inevitable despite my abiding dislike of Darren Aronofsky's efforts (with the singular exception of The Wrestler (2008)). Likely prompted by the confected conflict around Rachel Cusk's portrait of Natalie Portman. Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin were responsible for the screenplay. It's a breaking-bad fever dream made like these blokes saw Mulholland Drive (2001) and thought they could do it better on the East Coast.
For reasons unexplained and unexplored white, virginal, uptight, perfectionist Portman wants the lead role in a contemporary/modernised production of the ballet Swan Lake (1875) in NYC. Vincent Cassel, in a huge climb down from his efforts in (for instance) Read My Lips (2001), plays the genius, womanising auteur who only has one thing to say: she needs to get more black. He encourages west-coast dancer Mila Kunis to help out with that through insinuation and competition while the film's auteurs deployed faded star Winona Ryder and mother Barbara Hershey as exemplars of failure. It is earnest and utterly humourless, mostly an entirely stock bitchkrieg.
Whether this pressure-cooker approach (also seen in Whiplash (2014)) actually yields better performances or just lawsuits is not the point. (At least here not all is technique.) Prolific cinematographer Matthew Libatique's camerawork is tight and jittery, often occluding the performance failures by, for instance, only showing the top half of Portman's dancing. CGI covered up a bit more. The body horror soon became trying. Generally tedious and completely ridiculous.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Like Dana Stevens I struggle to engage with Portman; she's my model of Deb Olin Unferth's fake human robot. Apparently the choreography was conventional; clearly Aronofsky had no interest in ballet as an art form and many other activities (such as selling ice cream) would have functioned just as well. Unlike Stephanie Zacharek I only started laughing in the last ten minutes or so. Dennis Lim: it's a (camp?) comedy, "a schizoid piece of high-minded trash". Showgirls (1995)-adjacent. "Aronofsky ... just loves a freak show."
Likely only the second time around with David Lynch's masterwork. Prompted by Christos Tsiolkas's 25th anniversary take, and also for the Kenneth Anger-ish double/triple/... exposures. Lynch mostly gave us time to appreciate his images.
Wikipedia says this is an assembly (and extension) of a television pilot. I do wish they'd made it at Twin Peaks length as there are perhaps too many teasing, promising fragments: the two blokes at the diner, the hitman at the office, Melissa George, Robert Forster. (Some of this put me in mind of Pulp Fiction (1994).) The main thread, involving Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, is an identity masala that showcased the former's range. The Justin Theroux line is far more banal, mostly ignored by reviewers, and really, who even dreams of keeping tins of fluorescent pink paint in their house? Lynch filled the minor roles with great actors. It is never less than engrossing.
Roger Ebert: four stars in 2001 and another four stars in 2012 as a "great movie". Stephanie Zacharek.
Prompted by Pamela Hutchinson's recent review which mentioned that it drew from the same well as David Lean's Madeleine (1950) albeit bent to an affluent East Coast of the Western Hemisphere milieu. Directed by Clarence Brown from an adaptation by John Meehan and Wanda Tuchock of Marie Belloc Lowndes's novel of the same name, or as the lawyers had it, a plagiarisation of a stage play. Joan Crawford (Mildred Pierce (1945)) led. Not great.
Scandinavian Nils Asther (cast as a Latino Lover) shows clothes horse Crawford a good time in Montevideo until she's had enough and it's time to head home. Aboard ship she meets keeper Robert Montgomery but the previous bloke knows she's the only eligible woman in this movie and won't give up without a fight. Stuff happens back in NYC and the situation is adjudicated by cadaverous District Attorney Lewis Stone who knows how these things have to go. Louise Closser Hale as Miranda (Crawford's maid) is perhaps the most fun with a fruity performance.
Mourdant Hall at the New York Times at the time. Wikipedia.
Ernest and Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia (Ernest et Célestine: Le voyage en Charabie) (2022)
Thu, Aug 20, 2026./noise/movies | LinkInevitable after accidentally watching Ernest and Celestine (2012) at the Music Box Theatre back in 2014. I hadn't realised (but am not surprised to find) that it's based on a book series, like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). It was a lot more fun than Toy Story 5 (2026). I saw the version with French voices.
Being French the movie goes its own way: it did not pretend to grapple with present day tech, instead going all-in on the eternal French concerns of comradery, liberty, architecture, mechanism, music and absurdism. And, of course, the law being a necessary/necessarily an ass that can be reformed. I'm not going to claim it all hang together flawlessly but there are many fun images beautifully rendered. Somewhat amazingly Celestine's unyielding positivity doesn't grate, perhaps because she's selfless and takes immense pleasure in Ernest's music.
Three stars from Shiela O'Malley at Roger Ebert's venue. A Critic's Pick by Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times.
Inevitable despite Lightyear (2022) and Toy Story 4 (2019). Co-written and co-directed by (Mc)Kenna Harris and Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo (2003), Wall-E (2008), Finding Dory (2016)). No more John Lasseter! — but still plenty of retro nostalgia.
This one is yet another ode to consumption, of loving stuff and needing to escape from even the most halcyon suburban family. Girls are foregrounded which I guess makes sense as present-day tech has had the most pernicious effect on them, though the most malevolent thing here is an under-analysed group of mean girls. (Surely they need liberation from their screens too.) Just maybe it functions as a bit of a mental health PSA but overall it is accepting of technology, exactly as you'd expect from a company (Pixar) whose movies used to showcase the state of computer animation art. Now that anything can be CGI and/or deep fake the aesthetic becomes more important (which they acknowledge by shifting styles for the girls' imaginative play) but this is not Studio Gibli or The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021). The emotional manipulation remains masterful however.
Perhaps realising that the well is running dry, the auteurs have loaded it up with references: Woody's poncho obviously evokes 1960s Clint Eastwood, the arc of the fleeing toys E.T. (1982), various aspects classic Star Wars (1980s), the fleet of Buzz Lightyears Iron Man 3 (2013), etc. The Lightyears replay Martin Sheen's big move at the end of Apocalypse Now (1979). And I'm sure a lot more. Other issues of the day, such as the environmental impact of plastic toys/packaging and lack of room to store all these toys or play outside, is completely ignored.
Peter Sobczynski: big thumbs up despite the major themes being respins of those of the first two Toy Storys. Dana Stevens: "the premise recalls that of the original movie." Manohla Dargis: "[T]he proceedings [..] never achieve liftoff. It's fine, pretty and amusing, but if no one's heart seems in it, perhaps it’s time to make way for other toys."
More Dick Powell (Murder, My Sweet (1944), Cry Danger (1951)). Directed by Anthony Mann from a screenplay that George Worthing Yates and Art Cohn developed from a story by the former and Daniel Mainwaring/Geoffrey Homes. Thoroughly mediocre with a misleadingly high rating at IMDB.
For murky reasons NYC policeman Powell boarded a train to Washington, intent on foiling a plot against Honest Abe's life before he can be installed as POTUS and kick off the Civil War. He mostly just went through the motions with a flimflam plot that makes little sense. (Did people really just leave guns lying around train carriages in 1861?) Militia Colonel Adolphe Menjou (Paths of Glory (1957)) helped and hindered as need be. A very young and radiant Ruby Dee (Do The Right Thing (1989)) played Paula Raymond's slave maid. They were tasked with breaking up the sausagefest and acting suitably shocked as the plot against the POTUS unravelled; a Trumpish manoeuvre ensured things ended well.
Most of the political rhetoric in this film is against Lincoln (stop the warmonger, etc.) perhaps reflecting the spirit of the early 1950s.
Bosley Crowther at the time. Wikipedia. It's not The Lady Vanishes (1938).
Prompted by a five-star review by Peter Bradshaw and a strong cast; Björk's first role in a feature film since Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) and Lars von Trier's traumatising Dancer in the Dark (2000). Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse (2019)) directed and co-wrote with Sjón. The script is an overly literal, fussy and witless adaptation of the Scandinavian legend of Amleth. Elements are familiar from Shakespeare's Hamlet (~ 1600), Braveheart (1995), Gladiator (2000) and Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005). Much of the plot is disjointed (the plan to instil terror in the uncle's household over many nights does not seem to occur) and/or nonsensical (why drag out the killings?). It's all fates and bloodlines and determinism. Never give a sucker an even break.
Alexander Skarsgård (The Little Drummer Girl (2018), etc.) led in the humourless-Arnie Conan the Barbarian (1982) role. Obviously he took the opportunity to extend his line with Anya Taylor-Joy's earth-witch. Nicole Kidman did OK as anybody's queen. (The matriarchal aspect was underexplored.) I was hoping for more from King Ethan Hawke; so much early gravitas simply evaporated with his expiry. Willem Dafoe as a fool. Graphically violent but did not linger on anything in particular for long.
Dana Stevens wanted more equal-opportunity/less tasteful nudity. A. O. Scott: no camp, no irony. IMDB trivia. And so on.
Orson Welles completism. Also a Peter van Eyck jag from a sneaky rewatch of The Wages of Fear (1953), and also Michael Redgrave from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). The latter is very fruity here as a post-war fence/purveyor of junk in Copenhagen.
Producer/writer/director Welles tried to rebottle the lightning of Citizen Kane (1941) but apparently the budget didn't stretch far enough to encompass his high-concept aspirations. Lead Robert Arden (far down the billing) was a lot weaker than all the other players. His thief, smuggler, etc. is tasked by billionaire Welles to find out what the world knows about Welles's life before 1927 as the man himself has lost it all due to a mysterious bout of amnesia. This leads to much traversal of Europe and a jaunt to Mexico. His sometime lady-friend Patricia Medina runs a parallel operation. That things don't make a tonne of sense does not occur to Arden. Notionally the two men are duking it out for the affections of Paola Mori who has flashes of independence and yet never goes looking for a better man.
Much of the dialogue was dubbed and the lips do not match the sounds. Jean Bourgoin's cinematography was adventurous. It's engaging but the production could've been a lot better.
Someone at the New York Times at the time. J. Hoberman at length for the Criterion Collection in 2006. IMDB trivia. Wikipedia.
