OLDIES!

Older films seen in 2026, continued from the 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 editions. Most of these are really quick comments - typically scribbled down in 10-15 minutes without benefit of notes - and any resulting wit or insight should be viewed as an accidental by-product. Slightly more thoughtful capsules may be found on the now-defunct old reviews page.

All films, both from this year and the 23 previous ones, can be accessed alphabetically. Most can be viewed ranked by rating as well, though I'm still not sure what that's all about.

[Addendum, February 2009: I've now stopped doing reviews of new movies, but I'll continue to update this page; however, this is purely for my own benefit - since I can't always remember when I watched an oldie, so it's handy being able to find them here - and I won't be going any deeper or writing any more than I used to (probably the opposite). I am not reinventing this as a classic-movie site, nor do I set myself up as an expert on oldies. Or anything, really...]

THE SPY IN BLACK (71) (Michael Powell, 1939): "We are at war. Perhaps you forget that, as I did for a while. You are English, I am German. We are enemies." "I like that better." "And I. It simplifies everything!" Not much simplifying going on in this rich, knotty movie, probably more Pressburger than Powell (though the eye for British pastoral from THE EDGE OF THE WORLD is still there), cramming so much into its breakneck-paced 80 minutes - action and romance, Hitchcockian tension and deception, U-boat battles, Ealing-style rustic comedy, but also spies reciting poetry as a password (that bit, at least, is very Powell) and the moral ambivalence of e.g. WENT THE DAY WELL? (where you naturally identify with the mission but also know it mustn't succeed) pushed even further, Conrad Veidt as our Nazi hero downright sympathetic. The Brits' moment of triumph - when they reveal that depth charges are being deployed - is instantly deflated by a screen-filling close-up of Veidt's eyes shutting in horror at the fate of his U-boat comrades; even at his most Nazi-like, when he tells the passengers that anyone making noise will be shot, the script supplies him with a crying baby so he can softly add "... with one exception". BLIMP was perhaps a bolder gambit, adding nuance at the height of the war, but 1939 is already pretty bold. All that said, if US distributors thought 'The Spy in Black' too generic as a title, replacing it with 'U-Boat 29' isn't really an improvement.

SQUIRM (52) (Jeff Lieberman, 1976): Objective rating - and this does turn into all-out Bad Movie in the second half, both technically (mismatched cuts, day/night continuity errors) and because the plotting is haphazard and the 'horror' un-scary. Subjective rating would be higher, though, because the first half is delightful Deep South drollery with a nerdy city boy - played by 70s Matt Damon - and a pair of teenage scamps (both sisters are meant to be much younger than the actresses playing them); opening crawl suggests TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE but the end result is closer to hillbilly hi-jinks like THE GREAT SPIDER INVASION. Worms appear randomly - in a soda, in a shower head - anticipating the all-out randomness of the second half, though only the opening credits (mixing an electrical storm, a child's tuneless song, and extreme close-ups of slimy critters) find a way to make them remotely alarming. "It's too late! The worms are halfway up the stairs!"

THE WELL-DIGGER'S DAUGHTER (64) (Marcel Pagnol, 1940): Hadn't seen a Pagnol in 20 years (note to self: watch THE BAKER'S WIFE again, you've surely underrated it), but he's clearly riffing on the plot of the Marius Trilogy - the young girl seduced and abandoned by the handsome young man (not a deadbeat, just called away by higher forces), the less-attractive suitor who steps in to take care of the baby. The main difference is the addition of the war, which - though apparently it was a last-minute addition - makes for an interesting echo, Petain's speech to the nation framed (by Pagnol) not as what it was, a capitulation, but a tribute of sorts to the brave soldiers who died in battle, just as the social norms governing the plot (especially re: unmarried mothers) are framed as a question of honour and 'good name' - literally 'name', as in the baby's surname - when they actually seem quite irrational. The irrationality isn't (just) a case of viewing through modern eyes, the whole film draws its power from the way characters mechanically follow rules they obviously don't believe in while striving to maintain their dignity (notably Raimu as the dad forced to disown the errant daughter) or the way e.g. the minor character of the aunt - disowned in the past for a previous transgression - is painted as defiant and obstreperous, or indeed the way Fernandel as the full-of-love, less-attractive suitor isn't allowed (unlike Panisse in the Marius Trilogy) to be swept along the irrational path, the script contriving an unlikely happy ending. Might be misunderstanding the whole thing but it seemed productively muddled, clinging to familiar dynamics (even knowing they're irrational) amid new realities - though it's still very theatrical, not just the talkiness but also e.g. the way the plot progresses by ellipses (action mostly elided, as in a play); French critics raving about Pagnol and Sacha Guitry are mostly just enjoying their witty use of the French language imo. Actors are predictably great, from Raimu's wounded speech about his honourable intentions to the way Fernandel enunciates "un mensonge de politesse".

APRIL 1, 2026

THE GAUCHO (60) (F. Richard Jones, 1927): "Yesterday was yesterday. Today is today. There is no tomorrow until it's today." The Gaucho's carefree philosophy is the best part here, incidentally free of machismo and even sex - he's more playmate than patriarch with the young heroine (Lupe Velez, shuttling between girlish adoration and fits of temper); she bites him, he bites her back - making his hysterical reaction to the diseased plague victim even more shocking. A limber-but-ageing Douglas Fairbanks (who also wrote the script) may himself be thinking of mortality, and skimps on the stunts in any case - just some Tarzan-style swinging though he has a certain elegance, catching a cancer stick with his mouth and levering himself over a wall with one hand - adding a mystical vision in the first 10 minutes and later diluting the Gaucho with some heavy religiosity ("Teach me to pray!") and an honest-to-God holy girl. The character arc is intriguing, but the action never really gets going. Redeems itself with a spectacular cattle stampede at the very end, except (a) it's clear that the cows have been co-opted because Fairbanks is too old for a big action climax, and (b) where did all those cows even come from?

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW (60) (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)

THE HIRELING (63) (Alan Bridges, 1973): Starts like literal DRIVING MISS DAISY, then Robert Shaw's eternal air of incipient violence slowly takes over - which is thrilling but also a shame, since Sarah Miles is initially doing powerful work as the pale, shy aristo with self-esteem issues, unable to make eye contact and insisting she's "very ordinary". (In the end she really is very ordinary, happy to get over her depression and resume her conventional life opening fetes and throwing dinner parties.) Our hero is a sergeant-major type, ambitious but limited, leaving culture to the eggheads and "romance to the ladies and gentlemen who invented it", knowing his place but undone by love - or not even love but a glimpse of something more, the kind of world where the lady of the manor can ride in front with the chauffeur. Darker than expected, the score surprisingly shrill in places, Miles' face distended in pain, the English countryside drab and unpretty. Still just the usual tale of the pernicious class system, but it does have some sharp edges.

MARCH 1, 2026

VENGEANCE! (56) (Chang Cheh, 1970): Bare-bones plot - one-by-one hierarchical revenge, a la POINT BLANK - done with style but not necessarily flair. Vivid colours, copious bloody violence (one guy is killed with his own pipe, rammed down his throat!), an iconic cream-white suit for our hero to wear in the action climax, progressively drenched with splashes of blood. Even some bolder strokes, a silhouetted kiss, fights intercut with bits of Chinese theatre, cut from a death to a curtain falling - we open on a theatre performance, the better to convey how stylised the whole movie is - but nothing truly memorable. Feels like an advanced-level fan classic for those already in the tank for Shaw Brothers action; I'm still looking for a gateway, though 36th CHAMBER came close.

DROWNING BY NUMBERS (49) (Peter Greenaway, 1988): Second viewing, first in about 35 years. Hated it last time, fully assumed I'd love it this time, both because I've seen and loved THE FALLS in the interim and because it's hilariously obvious that Greenaway was just Too Much for me as a young cinephile - but no, the ribald comedy seemed arch and the visuals (surprisingly) a mixed bag, in fact there's a dank, oppressive quality to many of the interiors I found downright unpleasant. (Could have something to do with late-80s/early-90s film stock; I have that reaction to several films from that period, esp. those with arty/muddy lighting.) Sounds good on paper, the three wicked women (J. Rosenbaum found "misogyny", unsurprisingly) and amusingly autistic onscreen series of numbers commenting on the action (a cosmic pattern? like the skipping-rope girl counting stars, or repeated mention of everything in the world constantly dying?). But it took me three sittings to finish, and that has to count for something.

HARDLY A CRIMINAL (60) (Hugo Fregonese, 1949): Hardly a criminal, "just a regular guy tempted by money" - except that the script is also trying to paint him alternately as a wannabe ubermensch (a "strong" man, he calls himself, unlike his virtuous but "weak" brother who plays by the rules), a class warrior, a victim of "city sickness", viz. impatience and greed, or just an ambitious go-getter with no cause ("My cause is me!") and a tendency to dream big. The first half is terrific nonetheless, Fregonese showing great style - a city montage, tilted angles, striking shots, mobile camera - and building tension in our hero's increasingly desperate plight, gradually forced into embezzlement. Then comes the twist - which is clever but a bit deflating - then prison life, the brother (whom we barely know) starts getting flashbacks and inner monologues, then a jailbreak, and it's all just too scattershot. Still worthy, not least as the model for Moreno's (superior) THE DELINQUENTS - which I didn't know, or I might've had different expectations.

BLACK ORPHEUS (57) (Marcel Camus, 1959): So much energy onscreen - samba dancing, Carnival, cops arresting loose women, vivid colours and other shenanigans - not much energy in the filmmaking though, mostly just a static camera taking in the excitement. "I'm not interested in these old stories," says a girl, speaking of Orpheus and Eurydice - the opening smash-cuts from a (very European) marble frieze to frenzied Brazilian dancing, incidentally making a post-colonial point - and the Orpheus story is indeed barely there, Hades another party (or religious ceremony?), Death a masked reveller. Works in the vein of CARMEN JONES or WEST SIDE STORY, classical works re-imagined with exotic trappings, though it plays more like NEVER ON SUNDAY, a foreign tourist (Camus is French) inadvertently infantilising a 'foreign' culture by dwelling on its raw animal energy and pre-capitalist purity (money is no issue, the - white middle-aged - grocer gives the girls free stuff in exchange for a chaste kiss). Never boring, but an odd Palme d'Or choice in the year of 400 BLOWS, NAZARIN and HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR; mostly felt bad for Mina the unsuspecting fiancee, discarded by the myth-making narrative.

DAMES (72) (Ray Enright, 1934)

A BOY AND HIS DOG (59) (L.Q. Jones, 1975): Something unexpected and a bit disastrous happens here, when we abruptly leave the MAD MAX dystopian desert and go 'Down Under' to a clownish, pancake-makeup pageant/parody of small-town America that plays like amateur dramatics - a reminder that 70s sci-fi (like e.g. LOGAN'S RUN) was often plagued by a kitschy, incongruously wholesome visual sense which - unlike the punk-inflected MAD MAX - was closer to Broadway and Disney. It's even worse here because the whole amazing point is the blend of dystopia and Disney, a savage, nihilistic post-nuclear world overseen by a talking dog in the vein of THE SHAGGY DOG, upbraiding his horny, feral 'Boy' in a well-spoken tone that recalls Tony Randall. The survivors suckle on pop culture, like in GLEN AND RANDA, and Jones adds deranged visual touches like the repeated shot of a trouser leg (which then moves to reveal two more trouser legs) - but that weird juxtaposition is the main event, at least till we lose the dog and descend into lameness. Movie in a nutshell: the awesome opening shots of psychedelic mushroom clouds - nuclear apocalypse as stark abstraction - immediately followed by a dumb joke about how politicians had "finally solved the problem of urban blight".

THE BIRDS, THE BEES AND THE ITALIANS (68) (Pietro Germi, 1966): Tremendous comic verve, though (as in Monicell's MY FRIENDS) the spectacle of a group of middle-aged men behaving badly is a bit distasteful, especially given the political angle - though Germi is entirely aware of the political angle. The Church clamps down on our hero's bid for (extra-marital) happiness in the second story, positing the guys as rebels against conventional morality, but then the Church comes to their rescue in the third story, the true Italian hierarchy placing the peasants on the bottom rung; our guys - doctors and accountants - are middle-class cogs in the system, allowed to get away with passing an underage girl around as long as they "deny, deny, deny" (meanwhile the girl and her illiterate-farmer dad get charged with defamation), which is probably astute but still a bit distasteful. By the time we get to an actual pedo joke - one guy checking out a couple of girls who can't be more than 12, and gently steered away by his pal - the film can only be viewed as 'of its time', then again the gleeful machismo has already made that clear, the Rodney Dangerfield clone in the first story unable to stop laughing uproariously at his friend being impotent ("not a man anymore"), the emasculated husband finally rebelling against his shrewish wife. Great fun despite all the caveats, the woman scorned answering all phone calls with "No, my husband has run off with a whore!", Gustavo D'Arpe hilarious as the dorky bore who talks too much. Joyously pro-sex but wearily cynical about love, a striking combination.

ADORABLE LIAR (74) (Michel Deville, 1962): What a strange beast! The first half is whirlwind-paced, zany, Nouvelle Vague 'larking about' to the point of gleeful self-parody - two jokers go around calling everyone 'Gaston', our heroine types "Je m'emmerde" ('I'm so bored') with her foot while reclining on a chair, there's spontaneous dancing (of course there is) and some fun with hats - but it mostly works, (a) because it's so fast-paced, (b) because Marina Vlady and Macha Meril are anarchic sisters in the vein of the two Maries from DAISIES and (c) because Deville uses light-classical music as counterpoint, leading into the second half when - following an interlude where the film turns on a dime, slows down and becomes a kind of Nancy Drew mystery - it darkens into a destructive, not-so-adorable tale of amour fou. Deville's take is implicitly Catholic (lying is a moral lapse; the middle-aged man takes the liar to church, and admits he's a believer; "I don't think about it anymore," she replies, "I don't have time") but the film is above all about love, and whether being in love is ever - or always? - a lie. The sister and her beau are courting, so they strenuously pretend not to be in love but actually are - but Marina is the opposite, strenuously pretending to be in love when she actually isn't, Deville's pitiless plotting showing the process of the liar starting to believe her own lie and, more poignantly, the middle-aged man (the "old fox" who should - and does - know better) gradually getting sucked in, going through the stages of amusement, then annoyance, then playing along, then self-consciously knowing that it's silly (it's like being 18 again, he tells his worried fiancee - but don't worry, "soon enough I'll remember that I'm 40"), then succumbing, then the gloriously ambiguous final shot adding a perfect capper. Pretty bleak, for a film that also includes a bit where our scatter-brained heroine mistakes a rabbit for a kind of dog ("So that's what a rabbit looks like!"). Also, like other 60s Devilles, a case where it's just as well it was co-written by a woman, or it might seem misogynistic.

FEBRUARY 1, 2026

WILD STRAWBERRIES (68) (Ingmar Bergman, 1957): Probably second viewing, first in >25 years. One aspect here doesn't work at all, viz. the Scrooge aspect, the mean man softened by experience and understanding. Borg is supposed to be cold, stingy with money, a failure as a husband and father, but as played by Sjostrom he's actually likeable, a twinkly old man - and the film misses every opportunity to change our perception, e.g. when the girl tricks him into giving her friends a lift too (she doesn't reveal there are three of them) he'd have every right to get angry, or ask for money, but he's happy to go along with it. A transitional film, working with the lively, theatrical group staging of SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT but also looking forward to the bleakness and pessimism of the later movies; an argument about God is still young people messing about here, a married couple bickering is still fundamentally farcical - but the seeds are there. A mixed bag, but important enough to Bergman's art - and encapsulating enough of his personality - to be valuable.

SOLO (72) (Jean-Pierre Mocky, 1970): My first Mocky, a frenetic crime thriller made special by his counter-intuitive decision to commission a wistful, Morricone-ish musical theme from Georges Moustaki (of 'Le Métèque' fame) and play it about as often as 'California Dreamin'' in CHUNGKING EXPRESS, pushing the action to arm's-length and adding rueful detachment even as the cops-and-robbers stuff fizzes along frenetically. It makes sense, since - from the opening scene, a proto-Epstein orgy that turns into a massacre - the theme is revolution, and the post-'68 tweak is that our cynical, bon viveur, middle-aged hero (played by Mocky himself) is too old to share the young people's idealism, even as he increasingly bonds with them. "These kids can't stand us," sighs one cop; "When they get rich, they'll settle down," replies his colleague. The film, too, is cynical, but also the kind of Hitchcockian chase movie often resolved by ironic near-misses and cosmic jokes (like the ambulance coming for the wrong person); B-movie action, then it throws in a poignant close-up, or makes a shot of three people following each other weirdly poetic with a snatch of that musical theme. A surprise.

PARIS, TEXAS (65) (Wim Wenders, 1984)

JANUARY 1, 2026