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...]

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