Film and Steve Cramer

Deep Red (Profondo Rosso)

Stands alongside Suspiria as one of Dario Argento’s mid-career peak films

2 Feb 2011

(18) 121/100min (Arrow) Deep Red stands beside such work as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Suspiria as the most interesting of Dario Argento’s mid-career peak films. Its captivating visuals, all clean lines, whites and chromes contrasting…

Ving Rhames gives compelling performance as Sonny Liston in Phantom Punch

Poor supporting performances dog gangster movie by numbers

2 Feb 2011

(15) 100min (Metrodome) Perhaps the most duplicitous aspect of Robert Townsend’s account of the life of heavyweight champ Sonny Liston is the title itself. Liston’s rematch with Mohammed Ali ended early with a punch that simply didn’t look like a…

Amsterdamned

11 Sep 2009

(18) 105 min, Dick Maas’ 1988 Dutch thriller with elements of gory horror has the great merit of not taking itself too seriously as it bops along, and adds to that an admirable visual inventiveness about its striking locales. In it, a wetsuited…

Yellowbeard

11 Sep 2009

(12) 96min (Optimum DVD retail) On paper, Mel Damski’s 1983 comedy has everything going for it. With a cast that includes four of the Monty Python crew, as well as Marty Feldman, Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, Peter Boyle and a host of other comedy…

Ultra

9 Jul 2009

Ricky Tognazzi’s grim, but occasionally comical piece of social realism from 1990 might be seen as a fascinating insight into the kind of empty nihilism that has led to so many years of Berlusconi in Italy. In it, the lives of a group of Roma casuals…

Wild Geese II

9 Jul 2009

If you’re a man of a certain age, chances are The Wild Geese made a lamentably unPC impact on your youth. So too, it’s likely that you found your way to the sequel, seven years later in 1985, but you don’t remember much about it. Here’s why: Peter…

Max Manus: Man of War

9 Jul 2009

This fact-based drama follows, somewhat in the manner of Black Book, the wartime experiences of the title character, a Norwegian resistance hero. As genre films go, Max Manus doesn’t wander far from tracks laid down for half a century, yet there’s a…

The Canterbury Tales

25 Jun 2009

ADAPTATION Made in 1971, the second of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s noted trilogy, The Canterbury Tales has much to admire about it, but doesn’t quite reach the heights of his earlier adaptation of The Decameron. The answer as to why this might be is…

Zero: An Investigation Into 9/11

5 Feb 2009

(12) 105min (Joiningthedots.tv DVD retail) DOCUMENTARY However you might feel about conspiracy theories Franco Fracassi and Francesco Tre’s documentary does leave one with food for thought. In it, such notable figures as Dario Fo and Gore…

Black Watch

5 Feb 2009

(18) 154min (John Williams Productions DVD retail) FILMED THEATRE There can be little doubt about the power of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch, an international hit for Scottish theatre unparalleled for a decade. Its story of a…

Oasis of Fear

22 Jan 2009

THRILLER Umberto Lenzi’s 1971 cult thriller presents a hippy couple (Ray Lovelock and Ornella Muti) who are apparently amoral and beyond any of the usual social constraints, but being outmanoeuvred on the anti-social behaviour front by an ostensibly…

Sakuran

8 Jan 2009

MANGA ADAPTATION A bit like Edinburgh’s number 30 bus, Mika Ninagawa’s adaptation of this noted Manga comic series by Moyoco Anno travels an epic, seemingly endless journey, but goes nowhere interesting on the way. The scenery is better though, with…

I'm Not Rappaport

11 Dec 2008

(12) 129 min There’s a quiet, mirthful kind of charm to Herb Gardner’s Broadway hit of 1985, here transposed to the screen in this 1996 version directed by the writer. It tells the story of two old men who meet in Central Park on a daily basis, one…

Two-Minute Warning

30 Oct 2008

Larry Peerce’s part-thriller, part-disaster movie evokes a certain nostalgia for its period, while containing some of the flaws characteristic of its time. The 1976 epic sees an unhinged sniper with a high powered rifle secret himself into a tower…

Puffball

30 Oct 2008

An adaptation of a Fay Weldon novel by Nicolas Roeg seems to boast all kinds of potential. Yet somehow, even given a strong cast, the piece dissipates both its ideas and narrative tension with ham fisted symbolism and uneven performances. In it, a…

Feast

30 Oct 2008

John (son of Clu) Gulager’s horror comedy is a delight in minor key. Somewhat like the endearing Tremors of two decades ago, it never loses its playful spirit and sense of homage to earlier monster movies, though here the tone is somewhat darker and…

The Sick House

18 Sep 2008

HORROR (18) 104min (Showbox DVD retail) Young archaeologist (Gina Philips) finds her research into London’s great plague of 1665 barred when public health officials reveal that the former orphanage she is excavating still contains plague.

Jesus Camp

4 Sep 2008

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s fly-on-the-wall documentary might easily be classified as a kind of real life horror film. In it we follow one Pastor Becky as she gears up to, and runs a summer camp for born again Christian children and their families.

National Lampoon's Cattle Call

4 Sep 2008

It’s a shame that National Lampoon, long associated with tasteless but somehow crudely endearing comedy, should have lent its name to this effort by writer/director Martin Guigui (Swing, Changing Hearts). In it, we meet three young males who hatch a…

Botched

4 Sep 2008

An inept jewel thief (Stephen Dorff) is given one last chance by Russian Mafiosa with a heist from an apartment block. Our robber and his Russian cohorts inevitably screw up, and are the pursued, along with an eccentric group of hostages, through a…

Under the Bombs

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE This piece from former documentary maker Philippe Aractingi speaks loudly of his own artistic origins in reportage. In it, a mother returns to Lebanon at the end of the Lebanese-Israeli war of 2006 in order to find her son, who has…

The Producers

21 Aug 2008

COMEDY Mel Brooks’ classic and surely – with full respect to High Anxiety and Blazing Saddles – his greatest film still stands up brilliantly forty years on. For those unfamiliar with its plot, we meet a rapacious Broadway producer (Zero Mostel) and…

The Cellar Door

17 Jul 2008

THRILLER (18) 86min (Revolver DVD retail/rental) This is an interestingly shot, tense and to the point thriller, which belies its opening sequence in which a girl is sadistically tortured in the familiar tradition of Hostel or Saw to become a…

The Graveyard

17 Jul 2008

HORROR THE GRAVEYARD (18) 83min (Revolver DVD retail/rental) Michael Hurst’s horror film by numbers harks back very ineffectively to the three-decade-old genre conventions of Friday the 13th and Halloween. A prologue depicts a group of college…

The Graveyard

3 Jul 2008

HORROR (18) 83min (Revolver DVD rental/retail) Michael Hurst’s horror-by-numbers film harks back very ineffectively to the three decade old genre conventions of Friday The 13th and Halloween without evoking the slightest hint of the atmosphere. In…